On Not Being Emily Brontë

Abstract The first of two chapters on Carson’s most famous poem-essays, Chapter 3 approaches the formal, citational, and affective bonds formed and performed in “The Glass Essay” around a reading of Emily Brontë. “The Glass Essay” introduces a form of transparency that surfaces in later works such as The Beauty of the Husband, Decreation, and Nox that reproduce the processes, sites, and emotions of their composition. Parsing Brontë’s biography and close-reading her oeuvre, the narrator’s strong critique of Brontë’s reception and editorial regularization doubles as a story of the narrator’s own, personal vindication. Brontë’s story of subjection and liberty serves as her confessional double; the reading and its emotional valence are seamless. Yet Coles argues that close-reading Brontë is also where the doubling comes to an end. Carson’s narrative inquiry into equivalences of literature and personal need is a study, too, of their stubborn non-equivalence.