Altering ‘the Colour of My Mind’: The Poetic Imagination in Wuthering Heights | Deborah Morse
Tue, Jan 28
|Online
Time & Location
Jan 28, 2025, 5:30 PM – 7:00 PM EST
Online
About the Event
‘I’ve dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they’ve gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the colour of my mind. And this is one—I’m going to tell it—but be careful not to smile at any part of it.’ —Cathy Earnshaw to Nelly Dean
In Emily Bronte’s *Wuthering Heights*, the brilliant visual image of wine swirling into water symbolizes the continuous, elemental merging of Cathy and Heathcliff in Emily Brontë’s dynamic vision of the sacred. The dream does not state that the wine is red, but that vivid color is implicitly understood because—as Cathy explains to Nelly—the wine-dream “altered the colourof my mind.” Although Charlotte and Branwell Brontë are often more celebrated for their visual art than their sister Emily, her elemental novel—riven with motifs of earth, air, fire, and water—represents the vigorous life of the poet’s mind—in dream, in imagination, in metamorphosis—through charismatic visual images that are as striking as her paintings of the tawny, erect hairs of her fierce bull mastiff Keeper’s massive neck and the shining…