Lecture Eight Bronte—Wuthering Heights Scope: Wuthering Heights is arguably the fiercest novel in this course, and it defies all the rules of the Bildungsroman by its view of feelings as primitive, anarchic, and deadly, at odds with society and with the notion of a bounded self. In the end, Bronte seeks (much needed) uplift via a generational fable of children undoing their parents’ damage, but the book’s power lies in its destructiveness. The book makes use of the seer/scribe dichotomy: Half-comprehending outsiders tell the story of the frenzied protagonists. That story centers on the life and experiences of Catherine and Heathcliff—daughter and orphan—growing up and fusing their lives together at the savage Wuthering Heights. Their passionate behavior is cut against the refined Lintons who live at Thrushcross Grange. In choosing Edgar Linton instead of Heathcliff (an echoing choice), Catherine triggers the ensuing plot of hurt pride and violent revenge; she also seals her own fate by acting against her deepest nature, for she and Heathcliff are one. Outline I. Rather than tackling Charlotte Bronte’s better known Jane Eyre, we choose younger sister Emily’s (1818.1848) astonishing Wuthering Heights (1847). A. Charlotte’s Jane Eyre is a book about maturation, a true Bildungsroman. In contrast, Emily’s Wuthering Heights seems to go out of its way to illuminate the dark and violent forces of both nature and the psyche that will not easily be corralled by education or the transition to adulthood. B. Emily’s book is fiercer than anything else we will read in this course. It depicts a world that is so primitive as to be primeval, thereby making everything we have read seem almost prim and proper by contrast. II. The familiar dyad of reason and passion goes bankrupt in this book, inasmuch as reason seems utterly absent, whereas passion has a ferocity and hunger that nothing can satisfy and that no social form can accommodate. A. Here, emotion is the wellspring of being, allied to the natural elements themselves. Indeed, the novel makes a mockery of our notion of civilization, which seems to bear little relation to the organic, fierce, dark forces that roil in both the world and the human subject. B. Wuthering Heights reminds us of the anthropologist Levi-Strauss’s theory of “the raw” versus “the cooked”: The elemental world of coursing feelings is raw, unamenable to form or control, and the project of culture is to domesticate these anarchic forces, to turn them into something “cooked.” C. The novel’s two places symbolize this conflict between the primitive and the civilized: Wuthering Heights, home to Catherine, Heathcliff, and Hindley, is the realm of the raw, whereas the elegant Thrushcross Grange, housing the more refined Linton family, represents the cooked. The solution proposed by the novel to resolve the conflict inherent in this dichotomy is generational: The children will—maybe—carry out the charge of culture via intermarriage and “softening.” III. Bronte’s native genius is to frame these primitive actors and acts by having us approach them from the outside through the reports of others. A. The initial narrator is the visitor Lockwood, an over-civilized, mannered fop, who comes from London to rent Thrushcross Grange after the central events of the novel have taken place. He is the least suited to understand what he sees and hears, but he is nonetheless initiated into the horrors via dream and hallucination. 1. Lockwood spends the night at Wuthering Heights and is disturbed in his sleep by something knocking against the window. Reaching out in a dream state, he puts his hand through the glass. 2. Lockwood’s hand is then gripped by the icy fingers of a child, Catherine Linton, who begs to be let in. When Lockwood can’t shake off the child, he rubs her wrist against the broken glass of the window pane. 3. This child, this ghost that wants to come in, is the ghost of the narrative in some sense. The scene is an inversion of the invocation to the muse from ancient literature; instead of the writer asking the muse to inspire him, this is the story itself, begging to be told. 4. This scene also gives us a glimpse of the sadism to come in the story. It’s possible to see this entire novel as a story of abused children, indeed, of childhood as a time of abuse. B. The major source of information for the story of Catherine and Heathcliff and the Lintons is Nelly Dean, a shrewd woman of common stock who has served these families and witnessed their story firsthand. 1. She seems to meet all the requirements for a reliable narrator, but is she capable of understanding the events or people at Wuthering Heights? 2. We might posit a narrative principle here of seer and scribe; that is, the seer’s experiences are elemental and inchoate, while the scribe’s job is to translate them for us, to bring them to language. We could even argue that this is the mediation of literature itself—it is the bridge between us and events at which we were not present. 3. This same model is at work in Moby-Dick, The Great Gatsby, and Absalom, Absalom! IV. Nelly’s story revolves around the events befalling the Earnshaw family “long ago,” before Lockwood’s arrival. A. Mr. Earnshaw, the father of Hindley and Catherine, goes on a mysterious visit to Liverpool. He returns with a still more mysterious item—the orphan child Heathcliff, whom he adopts into the family. 1. “Who is Heathcliff?” is a recurrent question for Bronte critics. Is he Earnshaw’s illegitimate son or, as the book seems to suggest in a flurry of possibilities, a gypsy, the child of a Lascar (a sailor from India), black, American, even exotic royalty? Some have said that he is the hated English “other”—the Irish. 2. Whatever his origins, he is despised by the older sibling Hindley, but he forms with the feisty Catherine a relationship that is among the most remarkable in literature: a fusion of souls, a kinship that seems to go beyond flesh. B. The plot moves into full gear only when the children Catherine and Heathcliff make their way to Thrushcross Grange, home of the refined Lintons. The conflict between nature and culture starts to resonate. 1. Catherine, injured, is taken in by the Lintons, but Heathcliff is rejected as a beggar boy. Catherine stays at Thrushcross Grange for five weeks, and when she returns home, she is en route to becoming a little lady. 2. Hindley is delighted with the transformation in Catherine, but Heathcliff cannot understand why she has been tempted by the wimpish Lintons and their civilized manners. His pride is injured, and of course, the story is complicated by the fact that the Lintons’ son Edgar has fallen in love with Catherine. C. The catalyzing event in the book is a crucial conversation between Catherine and Nelly that is overheard by Heathcliff. 1. Catherine shocks Nelly by saying that she would be miserable if she were in heaven. Nelly’s reaction is predictably moral: Catherine is a naughty girl and, like all sinners, would be unhappy in heaven. 2. Catherine replies that she had a dream in which she was in heaven, but it didn’t seem to be her home. In anger, the angels flung her back to the heath above Wuthering Heights, and she “awoke sobbing for joy.” 3. Traditional dogma is reversed here. Catherine doesn’t mourn her lost place in paradise. For her, heaven is foreign and alien, and she weeps for joy when she is sent back to the heath—to the natural world and, of course, to Heathcliff. 4. When Nelly questions Catherine about Edgar, she replies: I have no more business to marry Edgar Linton than I have to be in heaven. And if the wicked man in there [Hindley] had not brought Heathcliff so low, I shouldn’t have thought of it. It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now, so he shall never know how I love him, and that, not because he’s handsome, Nelly, but because he’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same. And Linton’s is as different as a moonbeam from lightning or frost from fire. 5. Heaven is rejected in this scene as a pious, inhospitable artifact, but the raw nature of Wuthering Heights is home. This is a fierce view of Eden and a fierce view of human connection because Heathcliff is, as Catherine says, “more myself than I am.” 6. As we said, Heathcliff overhears this exchange but only to the point where Catherine says, “It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now.” He immediately leaves. 7. The scene continues with Catherine’s question: “What were the use of my creation if I were entirely contained here?” But she is not contained only in herself because, as she tells Nelly, “I am Heathcliff.” 8. With this utterance, the contours of self are erased. What does it mean to believe deeply that you are also someone else? It is the end of agency and any sense of self-ownership and brings with it a horrible vulnerability. Essential Reading: Emily Bronte and Richard J. Dunn, Wuthering Heights: The 1847 Text, Backgrounds and Contexts, Criticism. Supplementary Reading: Maggie Berg, Wuthering Heights: The Writing in the Margin. Emily Bronte, The Poems of Emily Bronte. Edward Chitham, The Birth of Wuthering Heights: Emily Bronte at Work. Thomas John Winnifrith, ed., Critical Essays on Emily Bronte. Questions to Consider: 1. Wuthering Heights was poorly received by the English reading public in 1847. Even Emily’s sister Charlotte seems, in her two prefaces to the novel, embarrassed by the book’s “excesses,” wondering where the pious Emily could have learned or seen the things recounted in this story. Where indeed? 2. Catherine’s feelings for Heathcliff, and his for her, are what stay with us after we’ve read this novel. How would you go about analyzing this “relationship”? Is it sexual? Is it credible? Is it desirable? Is it inescapably fatal? Lecture Nine Bronte—Wuthering Heights, Part 2 Scope: Heathcliff, spurned, leaves; he returns later, to wreak his revenge. Things turn very dark: Catherine is dying of her feelings, and Heathcliff displays a (lifelong) mix of brutality and cruelty that stun us. These characters seem positively driven by ungovernable fury, by pathological forces. We realize that Wuthering Heights is a place of utter violence, uncontainable. Softness and kindness have no place here. Conventional values are cashiered. Bronte dives very deep. Criticism has focused on Heathcliff as the marginalized, mad, dark, Byronic male and on Catherine as an equally mad, self-assertive female; even death does not stop them. Their love is at once paradisal and demonic. The novel depicts both childhood’s lost bliss and childhood’s despotic feelings, including sadomasochism and outright torture. The book’s second half valiantly attempts to remedy the disorder by telling the story of the next generation, also injured and injuring but moving toward reconciliation and love. How to make sense of this war between dark and light? Outline I. Most people regard Wuthering Heights as romantic, but in this lecture, we’ll see its dark, almost pathological side. The text seems to focus on the poisonous consequences of both cruelty and love; such consequences live on, suggesting something of the cycles of revenge we find in The Oresteia. II. Catherine’s grand and unforgettable pronouncement, “I am Heathcliff,” strikes us initially as the epitome of romantic desire; it comes early in the novel, and few readers expect things to go as badly as they do. We increasingly understand what it means to be another, as well as oneself. A. With Heathcliff gone, Catherine marries the likable Edgar Linton, who is smitten with her. She moves into Thrushcross Grange. B. A few years later, Heathcliff, utterly altered, returns. Handsome, rich, exuding a sense of power, he pronounces an implacable judgment on the events that have taken place. 1. He indicts Edgar as an impossible love-object for someone of Catherine’s vital and generous nature. 2. His most withering and tragic indictment, however, is of Catherine. In betraying him, she has betrayed herself. This is not mere rhetoric: Catherine, faced with the return of Heathcliff and his insistence on the wreckage her marriage has wrought, becomes ill. C. The novel is merciless in its almost clinical account of Heathcliff bearing down on Catherine to remind her of the criminality of her actions. This isn’t a simple argument in which one person tells another that he thinks she has done something wrong; here, everything Catherine has done, she has done to Heathcliff, as well. 1. With Catherine on her deathbed, we might expect that Heathcliff would treat her kindly, but instead, he explodes: “Why did you betray your own heart, Cathy? I have not one word of comfort. You deserve this. You have killed yourself.” 2. Here, we see the boomerang logic of this book. Catherine and Heathcliff experience themselves as one, with no boundary between them. They are horribly vulnerable and interdependent; each of their gestures ricochets endlessly. When Catherine asks for Heathcliff’s forgiveness, he says that he can forgive his murderer, but not her murderer. 3. After her death, Heathcliff curses Catherine’s body, imploring her to haunt him. His desire for her to torment him after her death is proof for Heathcliff that their love is still alive. III. Wuthering Heights installs a view of human behavior that borders on the pathological. We realize that such notions as self-control and boundaries simply have no purchase here. Catherine and Heathcliff are among the most extreme creations in literature. A. The book treats us to a number of scenes in which we realize just how uncontrollable its characters are. Once we see this dimension of the novel, we know that it will not end well. B. Heathcliff’s return pushes Catherine over the edge. In one remarkable scene, she tries to set up a primitive mano a mano contest between Heathcliff and Edgar. The feeling is virtually Darwinian. 1. Catherine also tries to warn Edgar’s sister, Isabella, away from Heathcliff, telling her, “He’s a fierce, pitiless, wolfish man.” 2. Catherine sees clearly here. There is nothing soft about the romantic interactions in this novel; they are death-dealing. 3. Ultimately, the stress of Heathcliff’s presence is too much. We watch Catherine being invaded by tumult, coming apart, and moving toward collapse and death. C. If Catherine is mercurial, however, Heathcliff is volcanic. 1. He is possessed of and by a mix of fury, venom, violence, and cruelty that one does not easily forget. His haunting by Catherine will serve to nourish his rage. 2. Heathcliff marries Isabella and treats her with utmost brutality. 3. This behavior stamps him throughout his long life. After Catherine’s death, the plot moves to the next generation coming under Heathcliff’s tyrannical reign. D. The lack of gentleness or kindness in this book is frighteningly evident in the treatment of children. Heathcliff, for example, will beat Catherine’s daughter, also called Catherine. 1. Recall Lockwood’s dream about a tortured child at the beginning of the novel. Wuthering Heights is about torturing children. It is also about childhood as loss that cannot be redeemed. 2. It does not seem unreasonable to view the general spectrum of behavior in this novel as strangely infantile: the tortured antics and tantrums of creatures who cannot grow up or forget. E. But Catherine and Heathcliff are only the most visible mad people of the text. All the denizens of this book are capable of fury and violence. It seems to be a trademark. 1. When Heathcliff talks about hanging Isabella’s dog, he notes, “But no brutality disgusted her. I suppose she had an innate admiration for it.” 2. The line seems to suggest that cruelty is contagious, and killing animals and treating children with brutality certainly appear to be signature behaviors in this book. IV. With this in mind, we understand the generational imperative of Bronte’s novel. She is desperately trying to “clean up” the story she tells in the first half of the book. A. Catherine’s daughter is first married to Linton, the sickly but vicious son of Heathcliff and Isabella. After his death, she will probably marry Hareton, the “wild child” of Hindley. Young Catherine teaches Hareton to read, a classic example of turning “the raw” into “the cooked.” B. The novel seems sugared over by the end, with the second generation cleaning up most of the mess made by the first generation. Yet the last words of Nelly suggest that even in death, Catherine and Heathcliff find “unquiet slumbers.” Essential Reading: Emily Bronte and Richard J. Dunn, Wuthering Heights: The 1847 Text, Backgrounds and Contexts, Criticism. Supplementary Reading: Maggie Berg, Wuthering Heights: The Writing in the Margin. Emily Bronte, The Poems of Emily Bronte. Edward Chitham, The Birth of Wuthering Heights: Emily Bronte at Work. Thomas John Winnifrith, ed., Critical Essays on Emily Bronte. Questions to Consider: 1. Wuthering Heights is stamped by emotional violence of a rare stripe. Do you find its characters sadistic? Pathological? Infantile? Is maturation possible in such a scheme? 2. Given the generational structure and logic of the novel, it would seem that Bronte wanted to write a fable about the possibility of “civilized behavior.” Has she succeeded? What kind of future do you imagine for the denizens of Wuthering Heights after the last page of the novel?