A Chronology of Her Own

Space and borders in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights by Jan Albert Myburgh A dissertation submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree Master of Arts in English in the Department of English at the UNIVERSITY OF PRETORIA FACULTY OF HUMANITIES Supervisor: Professor David Medalie August 2013 © University of Pretoria I herewith declare that Space and borders in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is my own work and that all the sources I have used have been acknowledged by means of complete references. ____________________________ ____________________________ ii © University of Pretoria Acknowledgements I would like to thank Professor Medalie for his time, dedication, and prompt and very detailed feedback. I would also like to thank all my relatives, friends, and colleagues who supported me throughout this endeavour. iii © University of Pretoria Abstract Critics such as Elizabeth Napier and Lorraine Sim explore some aspects of space and borders in their discussions of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, presumably to demonstrate that the novel is a representative nineteenth-century text that depicts and comments on fundamentally nineteenth-century debates and concerns. However, the existing critical work on Brontë’s novel does not include analyses that incorporate spatial theories such as those of Henri Lefebvre, Edward Soja, Michel Foucault, and Henk van Houtum in their discussion of Brontë’s narrative as a seminal nineteenth-century work of fiction. These spatial theories maintain that those who occupy positions of power in society shape and remodel the spaces and borders in which society exists and of which it consists, and impose these constructs on the other members of society to ensure social order and to safeguard their own position of authority within the structure of society. In this dissertation, such theories have been used to emphasise the significance of the portrayal of space and borders as social constructs in the narrative, and to show that such an investigation presents alternative or more nuanced interpretations of some of the events and characters in the novel. Particular attention is paid to Brontë’s reworking of earlier literary traditions and tropes, such as the distinction between nature and civilisation, to depict and examine problems in the society of nineteenth-century Britain. The study also considers the relations between nineteenth-century Britain and the other communities within the British Empire, the three-tier structure of nineteenth-century British society, the male bodily ideal, the representation of socially acceptable behaviour, and the places assigned to those who do not conform to social norms. Lastly, ideas about death and the afterworld, as they are portrayed in the narrative, are examined, as well as the link between society and the shaping of locations of death such as heaven, hell, and purgatory. Key Terms: social space; borders; spatial differentiation; utopias; heterotopias; Lefebvre; Soja; Foucault; Van Houtum; nineteenth century; Emily Brontë; Wuthering Heights iv © University of Pretoria Table of Contents Introduction ................................................................................................................................. 1 Chapter 1: Nature, civilisation, and the battle for supremacy ...................................................... 34 Chapter 2: Power relations within the domestic sphere .............................................................. 74 Chapter 3: Death, burial practices, and the afterworld .............................................................. 115 Conclusion .............................................................................................................................. 140 Bibliography............................................................................................................................ 147 v © University of Pretoria Introduction Emily Jane Brontë’s Wuthering Heights has been a topic of much debate since its publication in December 1847: ‘[t]hough some of the early critics admired its power and originality, all found it strange, and many were disgusted by its scenes of cruelty and [by what they saw as its] rejection of conventional morality’ (Miller 2003:viii). When the novel was published, the identities of Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë, who wrote under the pseudonyms of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, respectively, were still unknown. In 1850, after the deaths of her sisters, Charlotte wrote a biographical notice to ‘explain briefly the origin and authorship of the books written by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell’ (Brontë 1850a:xliii), thereby revealing that the books were not the works of a single author, as many believed, but were, in fact, the works of three sisters. In the notice, she does not merely discuss the matter of authorship; she also comments on the critical reception of Emily’s Wuthering Heights and Anne’s Agnes Grey, which were first published in a single edition. She mentions that ‘[c]ritics failed to do [the novels] justice’, and indicates some critics’ response to Wuthering Heights in particular by stating that ‘[t]he immature but very real powers revealed in Wuthering Heights were scarcely recognized; its import and nature were misunderstood’ (xlvi). She thus recognises the ‘powers’ in the text, but undermines their significance by referring to them as ‘immature’. She, who appears to have felt obligated to defend her sisters’ novels against what she presumably saw as unfair criticism, also states that ‘[n]either Emily nor Anne was learned… [and that] they always wrote from the impulse of nature, the dictates of intuition, and from such stores of observation as their limited experience had enabled them to amass’ (xlix). By claiming that her sisters were not ‘learned’, and that they wrote from impulse, intuition, and limited observation, she presents them as unsophisticated, uninformed, uneducated, and largely unthinking. She therefore appears only to have managed to weaken their positions as accomplished authors. It may partially be because of Charlotte Brontë’s observations that it would be decades before critics would begin to recognise Wuthering Heights as an important nineteenth-century text. In her introduction to the novel, Pauline Nestor discusses its growing critical acclaim during the twentieth century; she mentions that the rise of New Criticism in the 1940s provided detailed close reading of the text, severing the tenacious biographical moorings of so much of the earlier criticism and making claims for the formal sophistication and accomplishment of the novel. Such studies focused on the 1 © University of Pretoria imagery, metaphysics and complex narrative structure of the novel. More recently, ideological readings by Marxist, feminist and psychoanalytic critics have concentrated on issues of class, gender and sexuality, and all have been inclined to highlight conflict and division in the novel (Nestor 2003:xxi). However, despite these studies’ role in the reappraisal and critical approval of the text, many recent critical works still fail to acknowledge Brontë’s status as an author who was more than capable of depicting and engaging with core nineteenth-century social debates and concerns. This failure is reflected in Nestor’s assertion that, [u]nlike the contemporaneous, industrial novels of Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Benjamin Disraeli and Charles Kingsley, Wuthering Heights shows no engagement with wider social issues; its environment is enormously detached… and even the life of the nearest village, Gimmerton, seems remote, unknown and only sketchily reported (xix). Her comments thus suggest that Brontë’s novel, unlike the works of authors such as Dickens, Gaskell, Disraeli, and Kingsley, does not reflect or engage with the ills and central concerns of nineteenth-century British society. She reinforces her claim by stating that [i]n some ways the whole world of the novel is dreamlike. Geographically remote, socially and temporally apart, it is a world operating as a law unto itself. Its transgressions of identity, sexuality and taboo are those of a dream state, which offers an uncensored realm, free from the strictures of logic, a space where boundaries do not hold…. The dream world is a place of multiplicity which does not demand the exclusions of choice (xxx). There may be some truth in these statements, since there are many examples in the text that illustrate clearly that ‘boundaries do not hold’: Hindley, for example, fails in his effort to keep Catherine1 and Heathcliff apart, and Joseph and Heathcliff cannot prevent Hareton and Cathy from forming an alliance. However, these claims are still problematic: the world of the novel certainly cannot be said ‘not [to] demand the exclusions of choice’, given Catherine’s having to choose between Edgar and Heathcliff, and the dire consequences of the choice she makes. It appears that many critics still maintain that the world of the novel is removed from society due to the extent to which it draws on earlier literary traditions, especially those often found in 1 Nelly states that Edgar and Catherine’s child ‘was named Catherine, but [Edgar] never called it the name in full, [just] as he had never called the first Catherine short…. The little one was always Cathy, it formed to him a distinction from the mother, and yet, a connection with her’ (Bronte 2003:184-185). Because of possible confusion between the Catherines in the novel, I will adopt Edgar’s method of distinction: as far as possible,

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