‘Vain are the thousand creeds’: Wuthering Heights, the Bible and Liberal Protestantism

摘要

This essay reconsiders Emily Brontë's place within the theological history of the early nineteenth century. I argue that there is a complex system of biblical hermeneutics embedded within the narrative of Wuthering Heights. In the first part of the essay, I locate Brontë within the key theological and denominational contexts of her family life. In the second part, I offer a comparative reading of Wuthering Heights and Friedrich Schleiermacher's The Christian Faith and argue that Brontë's use of the Bible is founded upon a liberal hermeneutics that privileges personal, intuitive experience of the divine over traditional canonical authority.