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Paper short abstract

With reference to Emily Brontë’s (1818-48) writing about wind, this paper explores eco-possession as a permeability between human and non-human forms in light of Stacy Alaimo’s concept of ‘transcorporeality’ (2010) and Astrida Neimanis's (2017) notion of 'weathering' bodies.

Paper long abstract

What does it mean to be possessed by wind? With reference to Emily Brontë’s (1818-48) wind-swept poetry and to her novel, Wuthering Heights, this paper explores eco-possession not so much as a supernatural phenomenon as a permeability between human and non-human forms. Building on both Haraway’s naturecultures’ (2003) and Latour’s actor-network-theory (2005), it turns to Stacy Alaimo’s concept of ‘transcorporeality’ (2010) in order to explore how human embodiment is an effect of dynamic interchanges with the more-than-human world. But where Alaimo sees this permeability in terms of industrial pollution, Brontë’s writing, both in her narrative and lyric modes, imagines the transformative entanglements of bodies in nature, particularly with reference to ‘wuthering,’ that is to windy weather. For instance, in her poem, “I’m happiest when most away,” Brontë imagines eco-possession as an ecstatic dissolution of the subject: a transcorporeal body in a relation to forces of nature and especially the atmosphere: “I’m happiest when most away / I can bear my soul from its home of clay / On a windy night when the moon is bright / And the eye can wander through worlds of light – / / When I am not and none beside – / Nor earth nor sea nor cloudless sky – / But only spirit wandering wide / Through infinite immensity.” The paper turns, finally, to Astrida Neimanis’s (2017) notion of ‘weathering’ as a transcorporeal being-with nature: as an ecological ethics and aesthetics, as a way to weather the Anthropocene.