Are Introverts Mentally Ill? The Case of Emily Bronte
Was Emily Bronte, author of Wuthering Heights, psychologically abnormal? The reasons for such assessments still affect introverts today, more than 150 years later.
“Emily is in the parlour brushing the carpet,” records Charlotte in 1828. Unsociable even at home And unable to meet the eyes of strangers when she ventured out, Emily made her awkward way across days and years whose bareness appalls her biographers. This sad stunted life, says one. Uninteresting, unremarkable, wracked by disappointment and despair, says another. —Anne Carson
As you can see in this excerpt from Anne Carson’s poem “The Glass Essay,” Emily Bronte, the author of Wuthering Heights, has attracted more than her share of negative commentary. Reading this poem sent me on a hunt through several biographies of the Bronte family, which included Emily’s sister Charlotte, author of Jane Eyre, and sister Anne, author of Agnes Grey.
What I found points to certain unpopular introverted personality traits that often trigger psychological judgment and disdain. Let’s look at such factors in the disparagement of Emily Bronte and related opinions that still circulate in society today.
Emily Bronte (1818-1848), the second youngest daughter of a Yorkshire parson, left us the tempestuous novel Wuthering Heights, some poetry, and not much else. Without stacks of letters or detailed diaries and just a few observations about her from her contemporaries, we don’t have much to go on to understand the mind that spawned an unforgettable literary tale of thunderous love and bitter cruelty.
In that near-vacuum, speculations often take on a disapproving tone, painting Emily as a desolate, pitiable, pathological creature. Significantly, though, the tendencies that prompt such faultfinding often show up in the lives of prodigiously talented and quite ordinary introverts.
Here then are qualities that come up in judgmental discussions of Emily Bronte’s life:
Solitary and private: In Charlotte’s words, Emily was “not a person of demonstrative character, nor one, on the recesses of whose feelings, even those nearest and dearest to her could, with impunity, intrude unlicensed.” Emily kept her ideas and feelings largely to herself. Besides her sister Anne, she had no friends and loved to stride the moors just with her dog. When Charlotte discovered and read a sheaf of poems Emily had written, Emily erupted in fury at her sister’s invasion of her privacy. She also “shunned fame,” according to Charlotte, and would have preferred to remain shielded by the pseudonym under which Wuthering Heights was initially published, Ellis Bell. All of this is classic introversion. But it has played into judgments of her as “strange,” “no normal being” and even suffering from schizoid personality disorder.
“Elusive”: This adjective, frequently applied to Emily Bronte, partly reflects the skimpiness of the historical record regarding her. But it also expresses frustration that Emily made it damned difficult for anyone around her to know her. Elusiveness is almost never considered a positive characteristic, and it almost always gets applied to introverts rather than to extroverts. Those who have called Emily “the sphinx of English literature” did not mean it as a compliment.
Inability to adapt: Emily felt most comfortable at Haworth, her home. When away at school for several months, she suffered from extreme homesickness. To some, this has amounted to agoraphobia, even though she loved to roam outdoors in the vicinity of home. A good friend of Charlotte observed that Emily “threw aside her reserve and talked with freedom and vigor” out on the moors. So she was a nature-loving introvert, feeling most herself in that environment, somewhat like Henry David Thoreau. For one psychiatrist, though, her homebody leanings and zealous reserve indicate that Emily was lamentably “inflexible and resistant to change.”
Observant to a fault: According to Charlotte, “[Emily] knew [neighbors’] ways, their language, their family histories; she could hear of them with interest, and talk of them with detail, minute, graphic, and accurate; but with them she rarely exchanged a word.” Such close observation, characteristic also of other introverted authors like Marcel Proust, can make for especially vivid writing
Socially obtuse: Emily showed no interest in what others thought of her. She uncaringly wore unfashionable clothes, ignored the dictates of conventional ladylike manners and declined to engage in small talk – none of which is unusual for introverts. During a few months in Belgium with Charlotte, acquaintances teased Emily for her old-fashioned clothing choices, to which Emily retorted that she preferred to be “as God made me.” I interpret that as saying, “Take me as I am, not as you want me to be.”
Intensely imaginative: Together with her sister Anne, Emily invented a detailed fantasy world they called Gondal, complete with maps, heroes and villains and melodramatic events. Some commentators concede that this was appropriate for children, but the girls apparently play-acted goings-on in Gondal well into their twenties. That’s hardly normal, according to detractors. Some psychoanalysts consider such activities a noteworthy ingredient of schizoid personality disorder, but it fits with introverts’ common enjoyment of inner worlds.
Drawn to death: Both Wuthering Heights and Emily’s poems show preoccupation with death and the fate of souls in the afterlife. To some, this is a morbid fixation, made even more ghastly by Emily’s refusal of medical help throughout most of her final illness. Even if she didn’t have a “death wish” per se, surely this was pathological, according to this line of thinking.
Themes in Wuthering Heights: Nineteenth-century critics expressed unease or distaste for the wild passions, ferocious longings and untamed cruelties depicted in Emily’s novel. Some doubted that any woman could have written such a book and attributed its authorship – without evidence – to Emily’s alcoholic, druggie brother Branwell. Even now, some find the novel so disturbing that they feel the author must have been highly disturbed herself.
A majority of these points reflect discomfort with those at the introvert end of the personality spectrum who refused to conform to social expectations. Both then and now, keeping to oneself, speaking little and indulging one’s imaginative powers tend to put one beyond the bounds of acceptable normality.
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