Lecture Thirty-Four

Sutherland_Wuthering_Heights 1 Lecture Thirty-Four Wuthering Heights—Emily’s Masterwork

Scope: In the 19th century, women novelists began to break through the glass ceiling in the world of literature. Along with Jane Austen, two other writers in particular were dominant, Charlotte and Emily Bronte, whose fiction is deeply rooted in their family background and the district of Yorkshire where they grew up. More so than her sisters, Emily Bronte was influenced by the wild, harsh landscape of the Yorkshire region. We see this elemental influence in both her characters, such as Heathcliff, and her own tough, private personality. As we’ll see in this lecture, Emily’s Wuthering Heights is a masterwork of romance narratives, written in a sophisticated framework and showcasing characters of deep psychological complexity.

Outline

I. In the 19th century, women broke through the barriers that had been in place in literature for 1,000 years, specifically in the form that dominates creative expression in that century, the novel. Three names in particular stand out, Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, and the subject of this lecture, Emily Bronte (1818.1848). A. Emily Bronte’s reputation rests on just one novel, Wuthering Heights. We must ask, again, how did a woman in her 20s, who had seen virtually nothing of the world and had been largely educated at home, produce this work of towering genius? Further we might ask, what might Emily have produced had she lived longer than 29 years? B. To answer those questions, we must go back a generation. The Brontes’ fiction is deeply rooted in two sustaining soils: their family background and the region of England in which they grew up. Of all writers, they most need framing, that is, setting into their unique and tragic context. 1. The family name was originally Prunty, derived from the name of the village in Northern Ireland, Pronteaigh. Emily’s father, Patrick, was born into a poor farming family, but he showed remarkable intellectual abilities and, in 1802, began attending Cambridge University. 2. After the bloody uprising in Ireland in 1798, the English viewed the Irish with mistrust, so Patrick prudently changed his name to Bronte to distance himself from his Ulster origins. 3. The plan succeeded, and in 1820, the Reverend Patrick Bronte was appointed to the comfortable living of Haworth in the West Riding district of Yorkshire, a wild region of barren moors and savage winds. In the following year, Patrick’s wife, Anne, died, worn out by childbearing. 4. Two other reasons have been suggested for Patrick’s choice of Bronte for his new name: First, it is an Anglicization of the Greek word for “thunder,” and second, one of the titles of Lord Nelson was Duke of Bronte. C. The four surviving Bronte children were consciously or unconsciously influenced by their father’s and their own name change. 1. The children were clustered together in an eight-year bracket. Their father had a good library, and in the hours of their childhood, they composed long sagas around Sutherland_Wuthering_Heights 2 various superheroes, including Nelson, Wellington, Byron, and Napoleon. Both Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights and Rochester from Jane Eyre can be traced back to the strong men favored in these fantasies. 2. The connection of their surname to the word “thunder” also seems to have seeped into the daughters’ novels. Both Charlotte and Emily loved elemental names: Their characters include Jane Eyre, Helen Burns, Saint John Rivers, and of course, Heathcliff. 3. As we will see in this lecture, Wuthering Heights is dominated by Heathcliff, whose name alludes to the cruel world in which he is brought up. D. Wuthering Heights was published in 1847, and the narrative opens in 1801, a significant date for the Bronte family. This was the year in which Patrick Prunty made the long journey from the bogs of Ireland to the towers of Cambridge University. 1. Heathcliff is a foundling, discovered as an infant in the gutters of Liverpool. We never know where he came from. 2. Readers and critics have speculated that he might be of mixed race, a gypsy, or even an illegitimate child of someone in the narrative. II. Before we explore the novel, we should look briefly at its author and the region where she grew up, Yorkshire. A. Charlotte and Emily were the two eldest daughters. Branwell, the brother, also possessed literary talent, but he dissipated himself in drink and sexual delinquency. His character is seen in two classic depictions of alcoholism: Hindley in Wuthering Heights and Arthur Huntingdon in Anne Bronte’s novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. B. The Bronte sisters grew up in Haworth, Yorkshire. In 1824, they were enrolled at the Clergy Daughters’ School in nearby Cowan Bridge. Charlotte gives a venomous depiction of the school in Jane Eyre. C. The girls wrote poems, which they published privately under gender-neutral names: Ellis (Emily), Currer (Charlotte), and Acton (Anne) Bell. They also wrote realistic fiction with powerful romantic surges beneath the surface. D. Charlotte, still writing as Currer Bell, had her first novel published by one of the best publishers in London, George Smith. The other two Bronte/Bell authors were published by the most unreliable and dishonest publisher in London, Thomas Newby. Emily would die a few months after Wuthering Heights was wretchedly published, to few reviews, while Charlotte’s Jane Eyre became a bestseller. E. What we know of Emily’s life comes mainly from Mrs. Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Bronte. Like Charlotte and Anne, Emily spent a short period as a family governess and, like her sisters, hated the occupation. Together with Charlotte, she also spent a year teaching in Belgium. While Charlotte fell in love with the married principal of the school there, Emily seems to have had no sexual life whatsoever. F. Emily’s constitution had been weakened by the Clergy Daughters’ School and by the pulmonary illnesses that were epidemic at Haworth. She died of a chill; in line with other self-punitive aspects of her character, she refused any medical assistance. 1. Emily died as she’d lived, private and tough to the end. That toughness can be seen as an outgrowth of the wild Yorkshire where she had lived and that she seems to have loved. Sutherland_Wuthering_Heights 3 2. In The Life of Charlotte Bronte, Mrs. Gaskell gives a vivid description of the people of Yorkshire, who display a “peculiar force of character” and a “remarkable degree of self-sufficiency.” III. Let’s now turn to the plot of Wuthering Heights. A. A soft southerner named Lockwood has come to the north to nurse a broken heart. He’s something of a fop and wholly ignorant of Yorkshire. He has rented a large mansion, Thrushcross Grange, in which to spend a quiet winter. His landlord, Heathcliff, lives a few miles away in a large, forbidding farmhouse called Wuthering Heights. 1. Intending to be a good neighbor, Lockwood tramps across the freezing moors to call on Heathcliff, but the reception he receives at the Heights is colder than the moors. 2. Trapped by the snow, Lockwood spends the night at Wuthering Heights. In the bedroom, he finds some odd inscriptions in a book of sermons, referring to a young Catherine and Heathcliff. 3. Lockwood falls asleep and has a terrible nightmare. In his dream, he hears a knocking on the window pane and gets up to silence it. He puts his hand through the window, thinking that he will grasp a fir bough on the outside but instead wraps his fingers around the cold hand of a child. The child begs to be let in, but Lockwood, terrified, rubs its wrist along the broken glass. 4. The next day, having returned to Thrushcross Grange, Lockwood falls ill from a chill. He is nursed back to health by a housekeeper, Nelly Dean, who tells him the back story connecting the two houses, Thrushcross Grange and Wuthering Heights. B. Heathcliff was found, an abandoned babe, by the old master of the Heights, Earnshaw, who brought him back to be raised with his own two children, Hindley and Catherine. 1. Hindley hated the interloper, but Catherine became his spiritual mate. They roamed the moors together. 2. When Earnshaw died, his heir, Hindley, degraded Heathcliff to the condition of a farmhand. To make Heathcliff’s lot worse, Catherine fell in love with and agreed to marry Edgar Linton, a rich young gentleman then living in Thrushcross Grange. 3. In angry despair, Heathcliff ran away. Three years later, he returns and methodically plots his revenge. He wins ownership of Wuthering Heights from the now alcoholic Hindley by gambling. In fact, we suspect that he murders Hindley to take possession of the property and, further, that he seduces Catherine, now married. She dies of fever, self-starvation, and probably guilt. 4. As the final move in his campaign, Heathcliff forces Catherine and Edgar’s daughter, also called Catherine, to marry his sickly son. Earlier, he had seduced Linton’s sister into marrying him, then beat her so savagely that she ran away. 5. When Lockwood appears on the scene, Heathcliff owns both great houses. But he will never have the only thing he ever wanted, Catherine, because she is dead. 6. Towering over Nelly’s story of cruel revenge and frustrated love is the Byronic figure of Heathcliff, a man indifferent to the laws of man or of God. Lockwood realizes how out of place he is in the wilds of Yorkshire and goes back to where he belongs. C. A few months later, Lockwood returns to Wuthering Heights and finds that all is changed. Heathcliff has recently died, haunted to death by the same ghost Sutherland_Wuthering_Heights 4 whose little hand Lockwood sawed on the broken glass until it bled, the first Catherine. 1. Catherine and Heathcliff are now finally united. Heathcliff died at the window, reaching through it to try to touch a world beyond. 2. The novel ends with Nelly telling Lockwood about a little boy she encountered on the moors who had been frightened by the appearance of Heathcliff and a woman. 3. As Lockwood strolls home, he pauses at a churchyard and sees the graves of Edgar Linton, Heathcliff, and Catherine. Under the benign summer sky, he wonders “how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.” 4. The novel ends on a note of quivering uncertainty. Are Heathcliff and Catherine united in death? Are they still disturbed, haunting souls unable to leave the ground where they suffered? IV. As we said, the novel also leaves us with the question of how Emily learned to write in such a sophisticated way. A. The narrative within a narrative—Nelly’s story as told to Lockwood—is the most complex of techniques. Of course, it also has the effect of cooling the gothic aspects of Wuthering Heights. 1. Such expertise in storytelling is usually something that writers manifest much later in their careers. 2. Can we attribute Emily’s mastery to the tale-telling of the Brontes’ childhood? Or did she write and destroy an earlier trial work, as she is supposed to have burned her second novel after the poor reception received by Wuthering Heights? We’ll never know. B. The other great mystery of the novel is why we are so drawn to Heathcliff, a murderer, a wife beater, and an abuser of children. 1. One answer can be found in a passage in which Nelly overhears him talking to himself at the height of his ruthless campaign to become master of both houses. 2. Heathcliff says of himself: “I have no pity! I have no pity! The more the worms writhe, the more I yearn to crush out their entrails! It is a moral teething; and I grind with greater energy in proportion to the increase of pain.” 3. The word “teething” reminds us of a baby biting down on a teething ring to relieve its own pain. The same may be said of Heathcliff. Without Catherine, life is agony to him; we might even suppose that he suffers more than he makes others suffer. C. Generations of awed readers of Wuthering Heights, whether they forgive Heathcliff or not, have come together in their wonder and admiration for this greatest of romance narratives. Suggested Readings: Bronte, Wuthering Heights. Frank, A Chainless Soul: A Life of Emily Bronte. Questions to Consider: 1. Why do we have ambivalent (and even, perhaps, admiring) feelings toward the villain of the piece, Heathcliff? 2. How important is regional setting to Wuthering Heights?