Ungrievable Incest:: Ecology and Kinship in Michael Stewart's Ill Will

• Autores: María Teresa Escudero Alías
• Localización: The Poetics and Ethics of (Un-)Grievality in Contemporary Anglophone Fiction / coord. por Susana Onega Jaén, Jean-Michel Ganteau, 2023, ISBN 978-1-03-238976-9, págs. 119-134
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • The publication of Michael Stewart’s Ill Will. The Untold Story of Heathcliff, celebrating the bicentenary of Emily Brontë’s birth, evokes poignant questions on nature, vulnerability and kinship that have permeated our culture for centuries. In this paraquel, Heathcliff narrates his life story after his hasty departure from the Heights. Drawing upon Judith Butler’s research on kinship and the social and political conditions of vulnerability as potential sites for rage, violence and endless melancholy, I will attempt to demonstrate that Heathcliff’s untamed and tormented spirit is the result of the foreclosed and ungrievable status of the prohibition of his desire towards Cathy. While some critics have discussed Heathcliff and Cathy’s relationship as incestuous, I would argue that Ill Will confirms their incestuous blood link, foreclosing the possibility of imagining other structures of kinship, like marriage, despite their desire for one another. Thus, Heathcliff and Cathy are condemned to a living death that refuses the public recognition of their loss, thereby triggering feelings of violence, masochism and sadism and, in the case of Heathcliff’s narration, relegating him to an aberrant violation of the norm. Concomitantly, I will also explore how Heathcliff’s Romantic spirit, in his steady care for and attachment to the English moors, echoes a dialectical movement between melancholy and freedom that will recast his social position as a conscious act, acknowledging the internal conflict of a desire that cannot be properly grieved, and yet finds solace in nature.