Emily Brontë’s Shelleyan Poetics of Sexual Ambivalence

This essay affirms Emily Brontë’s status as a late Romantic and reconsiders Brontë’s poetics of sexual transgression, alterity and gender ambiguity. Responsive to scholarship on the underappreciated influence of Percy Bysshe Shelley on Brontë’s poetic identity, and the influence of Epipsychidion and ‘Ode to the West Wind’ in particular, it explores how Brontë’s imaginative engagement with Shelley in unpublished verses and in Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell (1846) builds upon Shelley’s poetic gender ambiguity. Contrary to Anne K. Mellor’s assertion that ‘Brontë’s works conform to a specifically masculine Romanticism’, which she had ‘absorbed from her enthusiastic reading of Percy Shelley’, the sexual ambiguity and ambivalence in Brontë’s poetry can be understood within the context of Romantic perversion explored by Richard C. Sha, where literary depictions of transgressive sexuality become loci of liberation, and where Romantic sexual difference ‘resists the near binary opposition between male and female’. Brontë forges a resistance to binary expressions of gender and sexuality, sharing Shelley’s affinity for non-binary pronouns and gender-fluid characteristics.