Peak Twins

In Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë has her intermittently cruel, hopelessly romantic, infinitely malleable anti-hero Heathcliff howl for the ghost of his deceased love, Catherine, in a wonderfully revealing way. “Be with me always,” Heathcliff implores, “take any form—drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you!” Madness, in Heathcliff’s (and perhaps Brontë’s) estimation, amounts to a kind of haunting: the possessing of one body by the animating spirit of another. Identities dissolve into one another in a paranormal play.

Elsewhere in Brontë’s novel, too, characters describe ghosts and spirits in similar terms: “I was sure she was with me,” Heathcliff says of Catherine’s soul; “I shall love mine yet; and take him with me: he’s in my soul,” pines Isabella Linton. Love itself is a co-constitutive concept: the lovers’ souls entwined, two spirits living within one another. More importantly, to the external observer, such a state of...