Ellen O’Connell Whittet at Lithub:
One of the novel’s quietly devastating moments comes when Branwell, in the middle of one of his cycles of resolve, tells Emily he is done with laudanum and alcohol. He is pale and hollow-eyed but composed, eating bread and butter at the kitchen table. Emily looks at him and thinks about the difference between his suffering and the suffering she has witnessed in others—illness that actually corrupts the body, pain that has no switch. His suffering is real, she does not doubt that. But he could, in theory, simply decide to stop. She knows this and also knows, from her own experience of a darkness that once swallowed her at school, that it is not so simple. She thinks of the bottomless black hole she’d poured herself into at Roe Head, and the argument she’s been building against him quietly dissolves. She goes downstairs to fetch her bonnet. She comes back. She keeps showing up.
I have thought about that passage more than any other in the novel, because I recognize that particular arithmetic—the one where you’re trying to assess someone’s suffering against a standard of what they could do differently, and the calculation keeps failing because suffering doesn’t work that way.
more here.
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.