72-t*552

LOXTERMAN, Alan Searing, 1937- THE GIANT'S FOOT: A READING OF WUTHERING HEIGHTS.

The Ohio State University, Ph.D., 1971 Language and Literature, modern

I, University Microfilms, A XEROX Company, Ann Arbor, Michigan

® Copyright by

Alan Searing Loxterman

1971

THIS DISSERTATION HAS BEEN MICROFILMED EXACTLY AS RECEIVED THE GIANT' S FOOTs

A READING OK WUTHERING HEIGHTS

DISSERTATION

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University!

!

By

Alan Searing Loxterman, A.B., H,A,

i * * * * w

i

The Ohio State University

1971

Approved by

AdJviser * Department of English PLEASE NOTE:

Some Pages have indistinct p rin t. Filmed as received.

UNIVERSITY MICROFILMS ” • . . there [Wutherlncj Heights! stands colossal, dark, and frowning, half statue, half rocks in the former sense, terrible and goblin-like; in the latter, almost beautiful, for its colouring is of mellow grey, and moorland moss clothes it; and heath, with its blooming bells and balmy fragrance, grows faithfully close to the giant's foot,"

CHARLOTTE BRONTE

Editor's Preface

To the New Edition (1850) of

Wutherinq Heights

ii In fond dedication to ray wife and ray parents for their support and encouragement

iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My greatest debt is to my adviser. Professor Arnold

Shapiro. His critical instincts were so unerring that, from him, praise was doubly welcome.

I would also like to thank Professors Daniel R. Barnes,

Ford T. Swetnam, Jr., and Charles W. Hoffmann for their valuable comments and useful suggestions for improvement.

iv VITA

May 21, 1937 • • ■ Born-Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

1959 «••••• • A, B. cum laude. Kenyon College, Gambler, Ohio

1960 ...... M. A., University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois

1960*61 • ■ • ■ • Graduate student, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey

1961-69 ...... Teaching Associate, Department of English, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio

1970-71 ...... Instructor, Department of English, Richmond College, University of Richmond, Richmond, Virginia

FIELDS OF STUDY

Major Fields English Literature

Studies in the Medieval Period. Professor Francis Lee Utley

Studies in Beowulf. Professor Robert M. Estrich

Studies in Donne and Other Metaphysical Poets. Professor John Harold Wilson

Studies in Eighteenth-Century Literature. Professor Howard S. Babb

Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature. Professors Richard D» Altick and Arnold Shapiro

Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature. Professor Claude M. Simpson

v TABLE OF CONTENTS

Pago ACKNOWLEDGMENTS...... iv

VITA ...... v

LIST OF FIGURES ...... vil

Chapter

I. INTRODUCTION...... 1

II* THE NARRATOR AS EGOIST: LOCKWOOD...... 34

III. THE NARRATOR AS HYPOCRITE: NELLY DEAN AND YOUNG HEATHCLIFF...... 67

IV. THE NARRATOR AS PRAGMATIST: NELLY DEAN AND CATHERINE EARNSHAW...... 88

V. THE MORAL STRUCTURE...... 119

VI. THE SYMBOLIC P L O T ...... 152

VII. WUTHERING HEIGHTS: ROMANTIC POEM AND VICTORIAN NOVEL...... 191

VIII. CONCLUSION...... 215

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF WORKS CITED...... 226

vl LIST OF FIGURES

Number Page

1 Correlation of Novel Time with Narrators 47

2 The Plot of Wuthering Heights 130

vii CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

Most commentators on Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights have stressed the spirituality of the romance between Heathcliff and Catherine Eamshaw and the ghostly manner in which their love is kept alive beyond the grave. During the past twenty years, however, a few critics have also begun to investigate the elements of social satire in Heathcliff's revenge and the morally affirmative nature of Catherine Linton's romance with Hareton— a love which . seems to resolve many of the problems created by Heathcliff* s and Catherine Earnshaw's destructive passions. My reading of

Wuthering Heights is an attempt to integrate these two approachesr to appreciate the novel's moral theme as well as its amoral passion, and to understand its social realism as well as its metaphysical symbolism. To accon^lish this I shall pay more attention than is customary to the unusual manner in which this story is told, its two pairs of lovers and two narrators, and the way its plot begins near the end. The following chapters will demonstrate that these puzzling technical aspects of Wuthering

Heights are evidence of a calculated ambiguity in its design, for

Emily Bronte has written a novel with two different plots which are 1 2 complementary in structure yet contradictory in their philosophical implications. Thus far, commentators have tended to analyze these similarities and differences separately; they concentrate on thematic parallels between the pairs of lovers and the different generations of Lintons and Earnshaws, or they emphasize the power of Heathcliff's and Catherine Earnahaw's passion, contrasting

it with the more conventional romance between Hareton and Catherine

Linton. This reading of Wuthering Heights, however, regards

these Bimi lari ties and differences as being an integral part of

the same ambiguous work, a novel with two different plots developed

so indirectly by the author that they are scarcely noticed, even

by those who tell the story.

To put this reading of Wuthering Heights in perspective,

we need to recall some of its most influential predecessors.

Most Victorian reviewers freely acknowledged the raw power of

Wuthering Heights, but they were uneasy about the immorality

of its two major characters, Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw.

Some wondered whether this strange story was not more of a

romance than a novel, and nearly all the reviewers tempered their

praise because they feared that Wuthering Heights was an abortive

product of its author's ungoverned fancy. *

* Seme of the more Interesting contemporary reviews of Wuthering Heights have been reprinted in Ruth H. Blackburn, The Bronte Sisters (Boston: D. C. Heath and Company, 1964), pp. 114-17, 119-22, and in Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights: An Authoritative Text with Toward the end of the nineteenth century, however, Swinburne hailed Wuthering Heights as

issuing sometimes from the tumult of charging waters, Cso that the reader] finds with something of wonder how absolutely pure and sweet was the element of living storm with which his own nature has been for a while made one; not a grain in it of - soiling sand, not a waif of clogging weed* As was the authorrs life, so is her book in all things: troubled and taintless, with little of rest in it, and nothing of reproach. ^

The first major appraisal of Wuthering Heights in the twentieth century (with the exception of C. P. Sanger's invaluable

Essays in Criticism, ed. William M, Sale, Jr., Norton Critical Editions (New York: W. W. Norton S Co., Inc., 1963}, pp. 279-85. All references to the novel will be from this edition and will be placed within parentheses in my text. The five contemporary reviews of Wuthering Heights which had been cut from newspapers and were found in Emily Bronte's writing desk are discussed in Charles Simpson, Emily Bronte (London: Country Life Ltd, 1929),pp. 172-79. Simpson reprints the only completely favorable review, but it is too general and unperceptive to be much of a compliment, and the newspaper from which it comes has not been traced. More notable exceptions to the generally unfavorable run of reviews through the 1850's are discussed in Allan R, Brick, "Lewes' Review of Wuthering Heights." Nineteenth Century Fiction. XIV (1959-60), 355-59— hereafter referred to as NCF-- and in Richard Stang, The.Theory of the Novel in England. 1850-70 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966), pp. 187-89, 220. A list of nineteentti-century reviews may be found In John Hewish, Emily Bronte: A Critical and Biographical Study (London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1969), pp. 188-89. For an analytical survey of early criticism through David Cecil, see Melvin R. Watson, "Wuthering Heights and the Critics," Trollopian. Ill (1943-49), 243-63.

Algernon C..Swinburne, "Emily. Bronte," Athenaeum. No. 2903 (June 16, i883), 762-63. . 4

3 chronology} continued this metaphor of storm and was pitched at the same rhapsodic level of rhetoric. Yet David Cecil wrote more than a review or an appreciation. His essay on Wuthering

Heights continues to be influential as a pioneer effort to give this novel a comprehensive critical interpretation* Assuming that for Emily Bronte man and nature are "different manifestations of a single spiritual reality," Cecil proposes that the Earnshaws of Wuthering Heights are "children of the storm" while the more gentle Lintons of Thrushcross Grange are "children of calm,"

The two households combine to form a "cosmic harmony" which

is upset by Heathcliff, who is himself a storm figure, yet

"an extraneous element" belonging to neither household. When

Catherine Eamshaw violates her own stormy nature, ignoring her natural attraction to Heathcliff in order to form an unnatural

union with Edgar Linton, a child of calm, Heathcliff becomes

"not , , , as usually supposed, a wicked man voluntarily

yielding to his wicked impulses," but "like a mountain torrent

diverted from its channel, which flows out on the surrounding

country, laying waste whatever may happen to lie in its way

, , • until the obstacles which kept It from its natural channel

®C[harles3 P[ercy3 S[anger3# "The Structure of Wuthering Heights" [19263# a paper read to the Heretics, Cambridge, England, Rpt, in Sale,and in most anthologies of criticism on Wuthering Heights, and in a separate volume with Irene Cooper Willis# The Authorship of Wuthering Heights (London: Dawsons of Pall Mall, 1967), All further references will be to this Dawson rpt. 4 are removed," By viewing the novel as this sort of cosmic allegory, Cecil is able to present an alternative to most

Victorian critics of Wuthering Heights who shared Charlotte

Bronte's moral disapproval of Heathcliff as "never once swerving in hi3 arrow-straight course to perdition."® Moreover, Cecil's placement of the second generation in this cosmological scheme meets the Victorian critics' second major objection, that

Wuthering Heights was crudely haphazard in construction. Being children of love, Hareton Earnshaw and Catherine Linton combine the good qualities of both parents (Heathcliff being a stepfather to Hareton), the "kindness and constancy of [Frances' and Edgar's3 calm" and "the strength and courage of [Heathcliff' s, Hindley's, and Catherine Earnshaw'sj storm." But Linton Heathcliff is

"a child of hate" and thus his calm is cowardice and his storm, cruelty. The elimination of Linton and the death of Heathcliff restore a symbolic equilibrium so that cosmic harmony can be resumed in the second generation. According to Cecil, Wuthering

Heights must not be judged as a confused Victorian novel with

Edgar as an ineffectual hero and Heathcliff a3 an unrepentant villain, but as a "microcosm of the universal scheme as Emily

^David Cecil, Early Victorian Novelists (London: Constable & Co., Ltd., 1934), pp. 153, 164-65.

^Charlotte Bronte, "Editor's Preface to the New Edition of Wuthering Heights (1850)," in Sale, p. 11. Bronte conceived it," a symbolic drama betvjeen the warring forces of storm.»'/■' and ■ '•J t calm. ■■■'■ s

In its own right Cecil's essay on Wuthering Heights is memorable for its imaginative flights of rhetoric. But whether his theoretical approach is appropriate seems questionable.

By having us view Wuthering Heights as an allegory, Cecil minimizes the most distinctive quality of Emily Bronte's writing: its "intense emotional attachment to this world" which is evident not only in Catherine Eamshaw's desire to inhabit the moors even after her death, but also in the concrete nature of the author's style, her vivid depiction of detail, and her realistic rendering of violence and cruelty.^ Cecil does acknowledge the concrete evocative power of Emily Bronte's natural settings and characterization. To accommodate this quality into his abstract allegorical conception of theme, however, he must view Wuthering Heights as an esthetic paradox: "By a prodigious feat of creative imagination, Emily Bronte has contrived to

Incarnate an interplay of ultimate principles in a drama of human beings•" When Cecil compares Emily Bronte to other

Victorian novelists, he celebrates Wuthering Heights as being

"pre-moral" because of its cosmic frame of reference. Yet

®Cecil, Early Victorian Novelists, pp. 164, .166-67. 7 Philippa Moody, "The Challenge to Maturity in Wuthering Heights. Melbourne Critical Review. No. 5 (1962), 27-39. 7 this virtue becomes a '•limitation1* when Cecil later compares

Wuthering Heights to War and Peace and regrets that, "portrayed as she is, without any of those vivifying accidents of incident that caught the eye of Tolstoy, Catherine Linton never achieves the intimate reality of Natasha Rostov." Such inconsistencies are the inevitable result of Cecil's paradoxical approach toward

Wuthering Heights, his attempt to view as allegory a novel whose world is so "true to fact" that "most readers fail to notice 8 . . . [the characters! represent spiritual principles at all."

Whether subsequent commentators agree with Cecil's conclusions or not, they tend to adopt his method of using a conceptual framework of their own to give a unified reading of the novel.

One critic of Wuthering Heights exposes some important details of the book's plot and characterization which contradict Cecil's antithesis between storm and calm; but then he shifts the blame for these inconsistencies from Cecil to Emily Bronte herself for not carrying out at all levels the "hidden design" that Cecil has revealed.® Another critic is so impressed by what Cecil has described as Emily Bronte's "pre-moral" view of life that

®Cecil, Early Victorian Novelists, pp. 155, 169, 175-77, 184.

®Derek Stanford in Muriel Spark and Derek Stanford, Emily Bronte. Her Life and Work (New York: Coward-McCann, Inc., 1966), pp. 265-66. 8

for him Heathcliff symbolizes the la and his every meeting with 10 Catherine Earnshaw represents a merging of primal sexual impulses*

In his chapter on Wuthering Heights in The Disappearance

of God. J. Hillis Miller uses a preconceived philosophical

thesis of his own and combines it with Emily Bronte's philosophy

which, like Cecil, he derives from her writings. Miller

categorizes Emily Bronte with a small group of other prominent

Victorian authors who, being out of touch with God, "attenpt,

like the romantics to bring God bacfc to earth as a benign

power inherent in the self, in nature, and in the human community,"

To establish Emily Bronte as one of these writers for whom God

is "out of reach," Miller assumes that she was influenced by

the Calvinistic Methodism of her family and therefore inherited the

doctrine of the futility of manrs a

God's grace. According to Miller, the characters in Wuthering

Heights are guilty of "the sin of Accepting separation from God

and seeking to establish a satisfactory world without Him." To

demonstrate this, however. Miller resorts to a character from

the Gondal epic who is clearly being more Byronic than Calvinistic

when she sees God in the "angel brow" of a boy she lovest

For Emily Bronte, as for Byron, all men are cursed, and no man deserves salvation, though all long.to be virtuous! "All

^°Thomas Moser, "What is the Ma tter with Emily Jai\e? Conflicting Impulses in Wuthering H

[are3 doomed alike to sin and mourn/ Yet all live with long gaze fixed afar,/ Adoring virtue's distant star." In this doctrine of the inevitability of sin Emily Bronte is more like the Calvinistic Methodist, George Whitefield, than like the Arminian Wesley.

Apart from the questionable practice of equating Calvin's use of the term "sin" with Byron's, Miller here imputes to Emily

Bronte a view of life which is closest to that of Joseph, the ccraic grotesque whose views are scorned by everyone in Wuthering

Heights, characters and narrators alike. Throughout his interpretation Miller makes no distinction between the narrators' and the characters' viewpoints in Wuthering Heights, or even between the narrators' own, although Emily Bronte has one narrator reject the other's notions about life in the other world as being too "heterodox" (Ch. xvi, p. 138). Whether she is writing a student essay, a- poem, or dialogue in a novel, Emily Bronte speaks with the same voice, according to Miller, because "the same moral and metaphysical laws prevail" in all her works.**

Other notable commentators on Wuthering Heights do not exhibit the bold speculative flair of Cecil's allegory or Miller's derivation of Emily Bronte's philosophy from the contradictory

J. Hillis Miller, The Disappearance of God (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1*963), pp. 1, 15, 157, 180*85. The conplete text of the poem quoted in part by Miller is in The Complete Poems of Emily Jane Bronte. eda Cm W. Hatfield (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941), pp. 121-22. 10 views of her fictional characters. Yet they, too, look for abstract patterns of order with which to interpret the novel.

Irving Buchen disregards Emily's possible theological convictions

(about which there is no biographical evidence anyway! and employs only those metaphysical presuppositions which Wuthering Heights seems to have in common with Emily's poetry. While man is on earth, his idea of heaven is all that he can remember about a prenatal experience of God which, in Wordsworthian fashion, fades as the child matures and becomes more and more an earthbound exile from his heavenly hone. Wuthering Heights proposes the passionate first love of adolescents as the means by which some of this prenatal experience can be recaptured, for the terms in which Catherine bemoans the loss of Heathcliff as her wild young companion on the moors are identical with those i which Emily Bronte uses in her poems to describe the child's 12 exile from his prenatal relationship with God.

In using Emily Bronte's poetry to derive his metaphysical formulation of the novel's theme, however, Buchen fails to take into account the two marriages of Catherine Linton which occupy almost half of the novel. Dorothy Van Ghent finds a more flexible pattern of ideas to encompass all of the major characters, and terms this the "two children figure." Like

Irving H. Buchen, "Emily Bronte and the Metaphysics of Childhood and Love," NCF. XXII (1967-68), 67. 11

Buchen, Van Ghent derives her pattern from Emily Bronte's poetry.

Then she adapts it to Wuthering Heights by pairing the major

characters— Catherine Earnshaw with Heathcliff and with Edgar, and Catherine Linton with Hareton— in patterns which change according to the sort of brother-sis ter, 1 over-mi stress, and

husband-wife relationships that are found in mythology and 13 romance, Vet, like Cecilrs allegory and Miller* s formulation

of theology. Van Ghent's archetypal patterns assume greater

significance than the novel itself warrants. The plot of

Wuthering Heights cannot be made to follow any of these unifying patterns applied externally by the commentators without considerable

distortion; and, in the case of Van Ghent, Emily Bronte's characters

are so fully dramatized that we need not probe the psychic

depths of racial memory to find, for example, that Heathcliff 14 and Catherine are motivated by "implicit incestuousness ■"

13 Dorothy Van Ghent, The English Novel, Form and Function (New Yorks Rinehart & Company, 1953), pp. 155-70, Van Ghent tries to find the same sort of abstract pattern in window images, and is penetratingly criticized for it in Inga-Stina Ewbank, Their Proper Sphere (London; Edward Arnold [Publishers?, Ltd., 19661, p, 141, Other arguments for "key" images are less convincing because the motifs recur less frequently and thus require too much ingenuity on the part of the critic who must apply them to the whole novel. See W. E. Buckler, "Chapter VII— Key to the Interpretation of Wuthering Heights." NCF, VII (1952-53), 51-55; Robert C. McKibben, "The Image of the Book in Wuthering Heights." NCF. XV (1960-61), 159-69; Elliott B. Gose, Jr, "Wuthering Heightsi The Heath and the Hearth," NCF. XXI (1966-67), 1-19.

■^Van Ghent, The English Novel, p. 169, For criticism of Van Ghent, see Edgar F, Shannon, Jr., "Lockwood's Dreams and the Exegesis of Wuthering Heights." NCF. XIV (1959-60), 97, 99, 106. 12

The most speculative phase of the commentators' search for hidden patterns of order In Wuthering Heights is psychoanalysis*

We have very little reliable biographical information on Emily

Bronte; and,beside Wuthering Heights, her only extant literary works are five student essays written to gain practice in French, and her poetry, most of which was composed for fantastic characters and situations in the Gondal cycle, a prose epic now lost*^

Nevertheless, the very lack of revelatory biographical and literary material has prompted speculation about Emily Bronte of the darkest sort. Romantic ladies, in particular, have sought autobiographical clues in the Byronic loves and sins of the Gondal poems. They have proposed a secret lover on the moors for Emily, or even incest with Branwell; and the latter suggestion has received support from other critics of Wuthering Heights who suppose that Heathcliff is old Earnshaw*s illegitimate son 16 so that his frustrated love for Catherine hints at incest.

Emily Bronte. Five Essays Written in French, ed. Fannie E. Ratchford, trans. Lorine White Nagel (Austins University of Texas Press, 1948). Only one of these essays, "The Butterfly," seems revelatory of Emily Bronte's psychology or personal philosophy, and an application of this essay to Wuthering Heights has been irrade by Miller, The Disappearance of God, pp. 163-6!>. For Gondal, see Fannie>tE. Ratchford, Gondal* s Queen. A Novel in Verse by Emily Jane Bronte. Arranged with an Introduction and- Notes (Austins University of Texas Press, 1955), pp. 11-36. 1 ft Romer Wilson [Florence Roma Muir Wilson O'BrienJ, All Alonet The Life and Private History of Emily Jane Bronte (London: Chatto & Windus Ltd., 1928); Virginia Moore, The Life and Eager Death of Emily BrontU (London: Rich & Cowan, Ltd., 1936); Norma Crandall, Emily BrontU. A Psychological Portrait (Rindge, Hew Hampshire: 13

Somerset Maugham has no doubt given the widest circulation

to an attenpt to explain Emily Bronte's passionate writings in

terms of amateur psychoanalysis. In a collection of prefaces

to novels published in 1948 he merely takes note of Emily Bronte's masculine appearance and her shyness with men, observing that

11 ■ • • much in her behavior that was strange to her contemporaries would be clear to a psychiatrist today." But in a revised version of these prefaces published seven years later, Maugham is more

explicit, suggesting that Emily had a lesbian affair While

she was teaching school at Law Hill and that she unconsciously projected her forbidden desires into her love poems and into

Catherine Eamshaw and Heathcliff, who are of course both idealized 17 images of herself.

R* and R. Smith, Publishers, 19571. For different readings of incest, see Eric Solomon, "The Incest Theme in Wuthering Heights." NCF. XIV (1959-60), 80-83; Q. D. Leavis, "A Fresh Approach to Wuthering Heights.11 in Lectures in America by F. R. Leavis and Q. D. Leavis (New York: Random House, Inc., 1969), p. 89; Miller, The Disappearance of God, p. 178; Van Ghent, The English Novel. p. 169. 17 W. Somerset Maugham, "Emily Bronte and Wuthering Heights." in Great Novelists and Their Novels: Essays on the Ten Greatest Novel3 of the World, and the Men and Women Who Wrote Then (Philadelphia: John C. Winston Company, 1948), p. 125; "Emily Bronte and Wuthering Heights." in The Art of Fiction: An Introduction to Ten Novels and Their Authors (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1955), pp. 231-32. For a point by point rebuttal of Maugham's psychologizing, see Edith M* Weir, review of "Emily Bronte and Wuthering Heights." in Ten Novels and Their Authors (British ed. of The Art of Fiction), in Bronte Society. Transactions and Other Publications. XII (1951-55), 414-18— hereafter referred to as BST. 14

Perhaps so many modern commentators have ranged so widely to find abstract patterns of meaning in Wuthering Heights because they cannot accept the more obvious plot that Emily

Bronte has devised, the frustration and suffering of one generation being replaced by the fulfillment and happiness of the next.

Mark Schorer feels that Mthe triumph is on the side of the cloddish world" because Hareton and Catherine Linton survive

Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw. "Emily Bronte begins by wishing to instruct her narrator, the sentimental dandy Lockwood, in the nature of a grand passion, and • • • somehow she ends by instructing herself in the vanity of human wishes" because

"the theme of the moral magnificence of unmoral passion is an inpossible theme to sustain. » • ■" As Schorer admits, however, the term "moral" as applied to Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw is very much his own: "Emily Bronte may merely have stumbled upon the perspectives which define the form and the theme of her book. VJhether she knew from the outset, or even at the end, what she was doing, we may doubt. . . ."^8 Using modern terminology of form and theme, Schorer has revived the viewpoint of Emily Bronte's contemporaries: that the reader

*®Mark Schorer, Introduction to Wuthering Heights. Rinehart Editions (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, Inc., 1950), p. xivr and "Technique as Discovery" in Forms of Modern Fiction: Essays Collected in Honor of Joseph Warren Beach, ed. William Van O'Connor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 19481, p. 13. IS

must supply his own moral because the author was an accidental genius, unaware of what 3he had wrought* Richard Chase agrees with Schorer, but blames the second half of Wuthering Heights on social and political forces* Like her sister, Charlotte, Emily

Bronte was unable to throw off the moral Inhibitions of the

Victorian age long enough to end her novel as Chase wouldk have its "The happy marriages at the end of Jane Eyre and Wuthering

Heights represent the ostensible triumph of the secular, moderate-liberal, sentimental point of view over the mythical^ tragic point of view*"*®

A Freudian commentator explains that the third generation of Lintons and Earnshaws results from a depletion of psychic energy in the author* Since Heathcliff is the Id, his son's and Hareton's less forceful relationships with Catherine Linton represent a diminishment of the Id to a point where "both boys desire not union with an equal but unsexed bliss with a mother*"^®

Like Richard Chase, Dorothy Van Ghent values the magical and the mythical possibilities of demonic love between Heathcliff

Richard Chase, "The Brontes, or Myth Domesticated," Kenyon Review. IX (1947), 505* Reprinted in Forms of Modern Fiction, pp. 102-19*

2®Moser, "What is the Matter with Emily Jane?" p. 13* For the Jungian response to this Freudian interpretation, see Vereen Bell, "Wuthering Heights as Epos," College English, XXV (1963), 199-208. 16

and Catherine Earnshaw, and she therefore concludes that Hareton and Catherine Linton represent "Victorian 'ameliorism.'"2*

One commentator, however, argues against "the unique metaphysical status" accorded Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw by Van Ghent and Cecil. He emphasizes the human aspect of

Heathcliff's suffering and proposes that Catherine's poetic delirium need not be taken seriously as an occult prophecy of life after death, but is primarily Emily Bronte's way of gaining sympathy for her heroine after she has behaved badly with Heathcliff and Edgar.2*5 Q. D. Leavis goes much further in reading Wuthering Heights as a conventional work of fiction.

To expose the novel's "truly human centrality," Mrs. Leavis

2*Van Ghent, The English Hovel, pp. 169-70. Van Ghent also charges that Catherine is guilty of "symbolic emasculation"; and Fine, "Lockwood's Dreams and the Key to Wuthering Heights." p. 24, n. 8, explains the phallic symbolism by noting that Catherine takes advantage of Hareton's hunting wound, which keeps him indoors, and snatches his pipe from his mouth in order to destroy it. When ho tries to take advantage of Jane Eyre, Rochester is blinded and his estate is destroyed. Hareton, on the other hand, must descend to the valley and leave his three-hundred year old ancestral home of the Heights merely because he has married Catherine Linton. Obviously, then, something has been lost, though whether the sacrifice is sexual in origin is not so clear as the Freudians make it seem. Lockwood, for example, facetiously suggests that Catherine and Hareton are leaving Wuthering Heights "for the use of such ghosts as choose to inhabit it," so perhaps this is Emily Bronte's way of allowing her spectral lovers to reclaim the paradise of their childhood (Ch. xxxiv, p. 265}. 22 John Hagan, "Control of Sympathy in Wuthering Heights." NCF, XXI (1966-67J, 318-19. 17

not only minimizes its supernatural and metaphysical aspects, but rationalizes them out of existence. She explains Lockwood's initial encounter with the savage Heathcliff and the ghost of

Catherine as "a false start— a start which suggests that we are going to have a regional version of the sub-plot of Lear. ..."

The mysterious love-hate relationship between Heathcliff and

Catherine is also rationalized as illegitimacy. Catherine senses that Heathcliff is her half-brother and so, according to Mrs. Leavis, i she never truly regards him’as a mate; yet, since Heathcliff does think of Catherine as a lover, Emily Bronte must expla in their incompatibility in social terms. For Mrs. Leavis, even the mystique of the moors can be explained in terms of social history, and the visions and dreams of Catherine are local folklore.

Despite Mrs. Leavis* attempts to ignore it, however, most commentators have found the primary fascination of Withering

Heights to be the mystical bond between Heathcliff and Catherine

Earnshaw, whose death only increases the intensity of their love.

Even those critics who acknowledge the structural significance of

Catherine Linton's romance with Hareton feel that it makes a disappointing conclusion after Heathcliff's passionate relationship with Catherine Earnshaw. Miller suggests that the reader's disillusionment is part of the novel's themet

D. Leavis, "A Fresh Approach to Wuthering Height s.*1 pp. 88, 89-90, 102, 145-49. 18

Is the second story simply an example of a weak, delusory love set against the authentic love of Heathcliff and the first Cathy? It would seem so, for while the first lovers will be satisfied with nothing less than a complete fusion of their souls, Hareton and the second Cathy are content to remain separate and to communicate with one another by means of an intermediary. 24

This contrast between lovers seems forced, however, because

Catherine Linton owes her very existence to her mother's "being

content to remain separate" from Heathcliff in relatively serene domestic circumstances with her husband, Edgar Linton (Ch. x, p. 81).

Miriam Allott was the first commentator to inquire about

the kinds of love in Wuthering Heights and how they relate to

one another thematically. Like Miller and Buchen, Allott seeks

to establish patterns of imagery related to Heathcliff's and

Hareton's romances and concludes that the end of Wuthering Heights

is not the "re-establishment of an original equilibrium" that

Cecil had proposed, but Hareton's and Catherine's own modification of the opposition between storm and calm for the purposes of daily living. Allott identifies this as "the rejection of

Heathcliff" and observes, "whether [Emily Bronte's} heart goes with

[this} rejection is another matter."*5® For Miller, Hareton and

^Miller, The Disappearance of God, p. 205.

^®Miriam Allott, "Wuthering Heights; The Rejection of Heathcliff?" Essays in Criticism, VIII (1958), 27, 47. Boris Ford, "Wuthering Heights." Scrutiny, VII (1938-39), 387, proposed that "the Catherine-Hareton relationship is the projection into 19 young Catherine end the novel happily, less through their own initiative than by virtue of "the breakthrough into God's ■ world of Heathcliff and Cathy*"26 William Marshall shares

this view and develops it more explicitly:

Whatever will toward affirmation the author might have brought, the novel itself concludes ‘ upon a note of resignation to the limits of man's capacities • • • perhaps even of triunph that the new world rising from the ruins of the old is but a shadow of that which collapsed*

Like Miller, Marshall sees the "new world," represented by

Catherine Linton and Hareton, as being sadly diminished* But, since he describes this new world as "simply a world of ordinary human behavior, purged of its violence," one wonders why Marshall thinks that the old world wa3 any better.^

The majority of commentators on Wuthering Heights find it easy to criticize Hareton and Catherine Linton by measuring them against esthetic standards set by Heathcliff and Catherine

Earnshaw. But when they try to explain these standards of reference which make the first part of the novel seem more satisfying, their arguments begin to break down* Miller's

the sphere of ordinary behaviour of the Catherine-Heatholiff; it is the expression in conventional social terms of the main spiritual conflict." But Ford offered no evidence to support his contention*

^®Miller, The Disappearance of God* p. 211*

^William H. Marshall, The World of the Victorian Novel (Cranbury, New Jersey; A. S. Barnes & Co., 1967), pp. 230, 473, n. 9. reference to Heathcliff*s and Catherine Earnshaw*a attainment of "God's world" is as abstract and metaphorical as Cecil's world of storm} and it seems even less relevant to what happens in the novel because Catherine dreams of being expelled from heaven back to earth,and that is where her ghost accompanies

Heathcliff, walking the moors at the end of the novel. Another commentator, Francis Fike, tries to relate the two couples thematically because both "are alienated from each other through pride and reunited with each other through love." But Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw do not fit comfortably into this abstract pattern, either. Fike is using "love" in a very special sense for, if Heathcliff and Catherine are "reunited" at all, it is only in a symbolic way, long after Catherine has died. And, when Fike meets this difficulty by trying to create a symbolic religion of love for Heathcliff, he is led astray. He depicts

Kelly Dean as the voice of moderate Christianity and observes signs of reform in Heathcliff when Nelly describes him as

"praying like a Methodist" over his dead Catherine.But this was not Nelly's description of Heathcliff. It was voiced by

Isabella, Heathcliff's much-abused wife, who hastened to add that "the deity he implored was senseless dust and ashes" because

she was ridiculing Heathcliff* s misplaced devotion to a corpse

28 Francis Fike, "Bitter Herbs and Wholesome Medicines: Love as Theological Affirmation in Wuthering Heights." NCF, XXIII (1968-69), 130, 142-45. (Ch. xvii, p. 144). For all their ingenuity, the commentators on Wuthering Heights have failed' to give a convincing demonstration, in terms of metaphysics or of thematic patterns of ideas and metaphors, why the frustrated love between Heathcliff and Catherine

Earnshaw should eclipse the successful union of Hareton and

Catherine Linton*

A few commentators explain the presence of two couples

Wuthering Heights by asserting that Emily Bronte is neither

"pre-moral" nor metaphysical, but ethical, since Catherine Linton and Hareton offer a positive solution to the problems created by their parents* Arnold Shapiro reminds us that in Wuthering

Heights Emily Bronte is not only a mystic, but also belongs with Dickens, Thackeray, and her own sister, Charlotte, "on the main road of Victorian social criticism, attacking those who judge others solely by surface appearances or money or birth*"

Heathcliff himself becomes subject to moral evaluation when he "casts himself in the iron mold of revenge" because Emily

Bronte makes his unjust treatment of Hareton and the others seem like a cruel parody of Hindley's attitude toward Heathcliff himself when they were both young?9 Mrs. Leavis agrees with this moral evaluation, but feels that "very perfunctory attention

Tis3 given to Heathcliff and Hareton as wholes" because Emily

^Arnold Shapiro, "Wuthering Heights as a Victorian Novel," Studies in the Novel, I (Fall, 19691, 287, 290-9* Bronte has changed her mind so often that she depicts them

in contradictory tones and styles. With her interest in social history, Mrs. Leavis prefers to concentrate on the two Catherines the mother who fails to mature and the daughter who is able to adapt to society. Like Shapiro, Mrs. Leavis feels that Emily

Bronte dramatizes situations which Invite moral evaluation.

Yet, in order to emphasize this aspect of Wuthering Heights

she distorts the rest of the novel by suggesting that minor figures like Joseph and Frances Earnshaw are more significantly realized characters than Heathcliff himself.

Inga-Stina Ewbank takes both the passion, and the morality of Wuthering Heights into account, although she believes that previous commentators have tended to obscure its ethical content with metaphysical speculation:

I feel that the characters in Wuthering Heights are, in various ways, presented as moral beings; and secondly, that they are not used, allegorically, to illustrate a philosophy— one which, in any case, can hardly be substantiated from the poems, the novel, or anything we know about Emily Bronte— but symbolically, to explore the human condition.

Ewbank agrees with most of the other critics that "Emily Bronte has imaginatively entered into two a-moral beings"; and she grants that "the most impressive, because imaginatively most

3®Q. D. Leavis, "A Fresh Approach to Wuthering Heights." pp. 88, 128-38. 2a realized, parts of the novel are those dealing with the love and agony of Catherine and Heathcliff." Yet Catherine and

Heathcliff are also viewed in terms of a moral code of values because, in addition to their own amoral principles, Wuthering

Heights includes the feelings of those they injure. In this manner, according to Ewbank, Emily Bronte contrives a balance of tensions between love and cruelty, morality and amorality, so that each opposite has its "answer":

If we went by the' imaginative quality of the writing only, and by our emotional response to it, we would see the love of the first Catherine and Heathcliff as the great positive statement of the novel, with the second generation as a feeble gesture towards a happy ending and, as many critics have complained, not an answer to the first* But in terms of the structure and the pattern of the whole, the love of the second Catherine and Hareton is an answer* ■ • • Natural imagery emphasizes the positive, life-affirming quality of the answer, for while Heathcliff, always connected with winter and sterile aspects of nature, is dying, the young people are busy planting flowers at the Heights* Ultimately, then, the novel affirms the domesticated virtues of man as a kind and social creature; it develops tov/ard the Bronte version of the good life * * . which envisages an alleviation of suffering and idleness through love that is kindness, affection, stronger teaching weaker, in a domesticated context* Emily Bronte is here very close to most of her contenporaries* vision of the good life* What distinguishes her and makes her novel unique is her powerful vision of the other life as well*^

31 Inga-Stina Ewbank, Their Proper Sphere (London: .Edward Arnold [Publishers^ Ltd., 1966), pp* 96, 101, 127* 24

In my eighth chapter I disagree with Ewbank*s conclusions about imagery. Yet she provides us with the most comprehensive view of Wuthering Heights offered thus far, one that is broad enough to encompass all of the others we have discussed. From this perspective we may, with Cecil, see "pre-moral" Emily Bronte create between Heathcliff and Catherine a bond whose passionate intensity seems to justify itself. Or with Hiller, Buchen,

Allott, and Marshall we may see philosophical Emily Bronte enabling Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw to escape all earthly limitations of time and space and to create, through the enduring power of their love, a spiritual world of their own which has the psychological attraction of myth admired by Van Ghent and

Chase. Then, concentrating on the other couple, with Shapiro,

Mrs. Leavis, and Ewbank, we may also see Emily Bronte as a

Victorian novelist alerting her public to the social efficacy of the unselfish love embodied in Hareton and Catherine Linton.

Unfortunately, however, Ewbank merely furnishes us with a general guideline for a complete reading of Wuthering Heights.

Her discussion is only one chapter in a study of all the Bronte sisters; and while she does offer a penetrating study of Emily

Bronte as being both like and unlike her contemporaries, Ewbank does not examine the entire structure of Wuthering Heights in detail. The following chapters will therefore constitute the large scale reading of Wuthering Heights that no other commentator 25 has provided, a comprehensive approach toward the total meaning of the novel which will encompass its most puzzling structural features: Emily Bronte's dual narration, her discontinuous time scheme, and her pairs of lovers#

We first examine Emily Bronte's narrator, Lockwood, an egoistic dandy who fancies himself a Byronic lover* Emily Bronte uses Lockwood as a foil to gain sympathy for Heathcliff, a truly frustrated lover whose genuine misanthropy exposes Lockwood's

Romantic pretensions# Lockwood's desperate cruelty in his dream about Catherine Earnshaw, and his insensitivity toward Heathcliff's anguish over Catherine's ghost, deepen the mystery and make us eager to hear from Emily Bronte's other narrator, Nelly Dean, why Heathcliff has created a climate of terror and cruelty at

Wuthering Heights# In fact, some of the details in Lockwood's dream about Catherine are actually explained much later by Nelly

Dean, the only person who knows Heathcliff's and Catherine's story* So, when Lockwood concludes the novel by ignoring local rumors that Catherine and Heathcliff have been seen as ghosts, and by calling the lovers "sleepers in that quiet earth," is his narration any more trustworthy at the end than it was at the beginning? By starting her story late in its time sequence with a narrator like Lockwood who knows as little as the reader about what is happening and cares even less, Emily Bronte imparts an intriguing ambiguity to her ghosts# 26

In comparison with Lockwood, Nelly Dean appears to be an admirable narrator who gives a clear, yet detailed, account of

Heathcliff, beginning with his first appearance at Wuthering

Heights. Yet this very honesty on the part of Nelly, her desire to leave nothing out of her narrative, exposes her own hypocrisy.

Unwittingly, Nelly reveals herself to be a participant in the episodes of injustice during Heathcliff's early years which contribute to his later desire for revenge. Being a servant herself, Nelly has unconsciously adopted the social attitudes of her masters, the Eamshaws and the Lintons, which they call moral principles so they can use them self-righteously, to defend their status quo. Before he is driven away from his home by

Catherine's match with Edgar, Heathcliff has been prepared by

Nelly's "cant” to expect such social injustice. Emily Bronte uses Nelly's hypocrisy to make Heathcliff the most moral character at Wuthering Heights before he turns to revenge; and even then,

Heathcliff gains his revenge on Hindley and Edgar through the very weapons of money and social prestige which Nelly had unknowingly sanctioned when Hindley himself was tyrannizing over

Heathcliff, the foundling.

Emily Bronte's narrative of Catherine Earnshaw's life differs from her story of Heathcliff because Nelly is more aware of why she dislikes her mistress. Nelly cannot comprehend how Catherine can expect her relationship with Heathcliff to coexist with her marriage to Edgar; and, since the reader does

not understand it either, he cannot call Emily Bronte's narrator

wrong. Yet Nelly's accounts of Catherine's mistaken marriage,

and of her mysterious illness at Thrushcross Grange, remain as

unsympathetic as her narrative of Heathcliff's youth at Wuthering

Heights. Nelly's moral pragmatism makes her subordinate personal

feelings to abstract principles of conduct, even during moments

of high emotion which occur during Catherine's delirium and

death. Just as she uses Lockwood's cowardly rejection of Catherine

ghost, Emily Bronte en$>loys Nelly's pragmatic denial of Heathcliff'

and Catherine's love to gain sympathy for them, even though we

scarcely understand that love ourselves.

In ray second, third, and fourth chapters I show how Emily

Bronte uses her dual narrators to develop a relationship between

Heathcliff and Catherine that is beyond the comprehension of

ordinary, flawed human observation, and to provide negative

examples which will demonstrate the sort of love that is needed

to restore civilized life to Wuthering Heights. My fifth chapter

then illustrates how Hareton and Catherine Linton provide this kind of love. Through a series of structural parallels between

the new generation and the previous one, Emily Bronte indicates how Catherine Linton grows beyond her mother's selfish pride and how Hareton instinctively returns love for Heathcliff*s attests to deprive him of the same advantages which Hindley 28 had denied Heathcliff. True to form, pragmatic Nelly Dean is too busy worrying about Heathcliff* s next move to observe any development in Catherine Linton or Hareton. When Catherine

Linton pursues her secret affair with Heathcliff*s sickly son, however, she exhibits the sort of unselfish devotion that will later prompt Catherine to do for Hareton what her mother was too proud to do for Heathcliffs to civilize her uncouth admirer, meeting adversity with a constructive kind of love that will save them both.

Nelly Dean is too concerned with keeping Catherine Linton away from Heathcliff, and Lockwood is too engrossed in his own fantasies of marrying Catherine, to anticipate the development of her love for Hareton. But both narrators are ready to acknowledge the desirability of Catherine's marriage to Hareton, while they are not even willing to consider the iconoclastic Implications of Catherine Earnshaw*s ghostly union with Heathcliff on the moors. Thus, my sixth chapter is devoted to the hidden plot of

Wuthering Heights which explores, by means of symbols, the strange relationship between Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw which the narrators are unwilling to accept. In my second chapter we observe Lockwood's cruel rejection of Catherine's ghost, and in my fourth chapter we examine Nelly's callous disregard for

Catherine's delirious fantasies while she is alive. So it should not surprise us to find that neither narrator wants to.understand the strange manner of Heathcliff's death and how it relates to

Catherine* In my sixth chapter we see how Emily Bronte encourages

her readers to look beyond her narrators for patterns of symbolic

correspondence between Catherine's dreams and fantasies of the

other world, Lockwood's dream of her ghost, and Heathcliff's

desire to be haunted by that ghost. During her final illness

Catherine prophesies that she will suffer separation from.

Heathcliff after death* Symbolically her fear seems to be confirmed

when her ghost in Lockwood's dream says that she has been wandering

for twenty years, approximately the amount of time that Catherine

has been spiritually separated from Heathcliff, both after death

and on earth because of Edgar Linton* So perhaps, when Heathcliff

begins to sense Catherine's presence after her ghostly appearance

to Lockwood, it is time for the lovers to be reunited in a world

of their own after death* This possibility remains symbolic

and speculative because Lockwood refuses to relate the rumors

of ghosts that he has heard to his own dreams of Catherine's

spectre, and does not even tell Nelly Dean that he had such

a dream, Nelly, for her part, never refers to the invisible

presence that drains all the life out of Heathcliff as the spirit

of Catherine Earnshaw. She tries to dismiss all talk of ghosts

as superstition; yet she does not stay in the same room with

Heathcliff's corpse, and no longer dares to walk at night near

Wuthering Heights* In my fifth chapter I suggest that the parallels between the different generations lend moral weight to Catherine's romance with Hareton; and in the sixth chapter I demonstrate how, after her death as well as before it, the strange bond . between Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw creates a symbolic plot to accompany the moral one. My seventh chapter therefore proposes that Emily Bronte's moral plot gives Wuthering Heights the social setting of a Victorian novel while her symbolic plot introduces elements of amoral passion which relate the novel to Romantic poetry. .We can observe parallels between Heathcliff and Jane

Eyre, but we must also note that Wuthering Heights begins and ends with Heathcliff in Byronic anguish over the spirit of

Catherine Earnshaw. The romance that develops between Hareton and Catherine Linton brings Wuthering Heights to a happy end in the moral tradition of many Victorian novels. Yet the Christian union between this couple is counterbalanced by an amoral, iconoclastic reunion between Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff after death.

In my eighth chapter I conclude this reading by examining the ambiguity which these two plots create within Wuthering

Heights--but only briefly, because the novel is designed to leave us in doubt. The symbolic plot points toward a mysterious reunion between Heathcliff and his Catherine, and the irregular chronology places Catherine's ghost alone in exile at the beginning 31 of the novel, to be contrasted with her spectral reappearance at the end in the coitpany of Heathcliff, Yet the narrators do not help us to cope with’ the symbolic plot, for they have already proved themselves to be insensitive to the sufferings of Heathcliff and Catherine and to the strange bond between them* Thus, the reader is left with the problem of acquainting himself with the author as implied in his own work, a problem that Wayne Booth formulates theoretically as follows:

All good novelists know all about their characters--all that they need to know. And the question of how to know, the question of "authority," is a relatively simple one. The real choice is much more profound than this would imply. It is a choice of the moral, not merely the technical, angle of vision from which the story is to be told.

To illustrate this general statement. Booth shows how the sensitive reader of Emma constructs an "implied author" by judiciously weighing all the novel's rhetorical elements in order to derive the "moral," or the ideal set of values, that Jane Austen seems to be advocating, 33 But my second; third, and fourth chapters demonstrate that the narrators of Wuthering Heights

^fayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), pp. 264-65, For an interesting^ discussion of dramatic concentration in Jane Austen and Emily Bronte, see Inga-Stina Ewbank, Their Proper Sphere, pp. 128-30, Ewbank's conclusion that, prior to Emily Bront’d, "only Jane Austen had more subtly used the whole structure and style of her novels to embody her moral vision" (p. 94) does seem to slight Dickens, though. 32

tend to diminish in "authority11; instead of learning what they

need to know, Lockwood and Nelly remain unaware of the moral

implications of the plot that I discuss in chapter five, and

they refuse to entertain the amoral implications of the other plot which I describe.in chapter six. When the reader tries

to gain his own "authority" by confronting these plots himself, he only compounds the difficulty because, as I point out in

chapter seven, the two plots are complementary in structure yet contradictory in rhetorical effect. Catherine Linton's romance with Hareton brings the moral plot to a conventionally happy conclusion by resolving the problems of selfishness, pride,and hatred created by the previous generation. Yet the ghosts of Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw also appear to achieve an unconventional resolution of their differences on their own terms. And, since we have felt their discord to be so much more compelling emotionally than the harmony achieved by Catherine Linton and Hareton, the comprehensive

"moral" which we derive from the "implied author" of Wuthering

Heights is elusive and ambiguous.

Even though the standards of val ue in Wuthering Heights seem to be contradictory, however, the theme is by no means incoherent. This reading of Wutherina Heights proposes that

Emily Bronte is hot only a philosopher and a prose poet but also a novelist with an astounding grasp of fictional techniques 33 which she puts to innovative use by achieving a calculated ambiguity in Wuthering Heights. The structure of this novel

is neither the result of an "accident of technique" as Schorer asserts, nor the product of social forces as Chase and Van Ghent

imply*®® After David Cecil's unique attempt to impose his own

"authority" on this novel through allegory, other critics have been more ambivalent about its structure. Their commentary on Wuthering Heights tends to concentrate either on the symbolic aspects of Heathcliff's love for Catherine Earnshaw or on the moral ioplications of Hareton's romance with Catherine Linton.

But ray reading of Wuthering Heights demonstrates that, without

fully realising it, these commentators have been restricting

their interpretations to only one of two different plots which are counterpoised to form an ambiguous whole. Emily Bronte's

two unreliable narrators, her discontinuous time scheme, and her pairs of lovers in different worlds, all cooperate to make

Wuthering Heights a unique novel which does not merely end but remains in ambiguous suspension, offering two different

endings to the reader who is able to assimilate both the domestic and the demonic*

33 * • ^Schorer, "Technique as Discovery," p. 13; Chase, "The Brontes, Or Myth Domesticated," p. 505; Van Ghent, The English Hovel, pp. 169-70. ------CHAPTER I I

THE NARRATOR AS EGOIST: LOCKWOOD

Some conmentators have suggested that the opening chapters of Wuthering Heights were written by Emily's brother, Branwell.*

Alice Law, in Patrick Branwell Bronte (Londons A, M, Philpot, Ltd., 1923), pp. 103-84, and in Emily Jane Bronte and the Authorship of Wuthering Heights (Altham, England: Old Parsonage Press, 1928), proposes that Branwell wrote all of Wuthering Heights. But E. F. Benson, Charlotte Bronte (Londons Longmans, Green and Co., 1932), pp. 175-76, and Ernest A, Baker, The History of the English Novel. VIII (London: H. F. & G. Witherby, 1937), 76, n. 8, believe that Branwell is responsible only for the Lockwood narrative at the beginning. Support for Branwell's authorship is provided by two of his friends, Francis H. Grundy, Pictures of the Past (London: ^Griffith and Farran, 1879), p. 80, and Francis A, Ley land. The Bronte Family.with Special Reference to Patrick Branwell Bronte (2 vols.; London: Hurst and Blackett, 1886), II, 157-58, 178-215. The evidence includes testimony from these friends, anecdotes about Branwell in which he claimed to have written at least a part of Wuthering Heights, and alleged verbal parallels from his letters and poems. But Branwell *s authorship has been discredited on esthetic grounds in: May Sinclair, The Three Brontes (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1912), pp. 272-75, 288-89; Irene Cooper Willis, The Authorship of Wuthering Heights (Tl§363, rpt. with Sanger, MThe Structure of Wuthering Height’s11: Fannie E. Ratchford, The Brontes* Web of Childhood (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941), pp. 171, 183, 247. And the logic and the historical veracity of the anecdotes about Branwell have been decisively challenged in Irene Cooper Willis, ,fThe Authorship of Wuthering Heights.11 Trollopian. II (1947-48), 157-168. Fannie E. Ratchford, in a review of The Four BrontUs. by Lawrence and E. M. Hanson in NCF. V (1950-51), 232-37, argues that Branwell's dissolute life did not enable Emily Bronte to experience degenerate passions vicariously, and that his immature writings could not have affected Emily's own<, except to improve them by negative exaiqple. 34 35

Lockwood, the stranger who narrates the first three chapters, certainly exhibits a pretentiousness and a clumsy wit which are alien to the passionate intensities of love and hatred that . predominate once Heathcliff's story begins* But most commentators now agree that the comic overtones of the opening chapters are the result of Emily's own characterization of Lockwood as a capricious town dandy*

Why does Emily Bronte begin and end Wuthering Heights with a narrator like Lockwood, only to have Nelly Dean tell the major part of the story? The answer may be found both in Lockwood's personality and in the chronology of the novel*

Lockwood comes to Wuthering Heights at a point in time which the' second narrator will not reach until nearly three quarters of the way through her own story. At the beginning, we share

Lockwood's confusion. But Emily Bronte has chosen an unsympathetic narrator so that we may soon surpass him in developing a more sensitive response toward the cruelty and suffering at Wuthering

Heights, and in seeking a more satisfying explanation than the narrator's own ("bad tea and bad temper"--Ch. ill, p. 28) for his mysterious dreams*

Commentators have tended to generalize about Lockwood as a character who represents everything from "the normal reader" 36

to "the only genuinely comic character in Wuthering Heights."^

But the following detailed analysis of Emily Bronte's Lockwood

will demonstrate that her narrative technique is sufficiently

flexible to make such fixed labels seem inadequate. Within

three chapters the author makes us laugh at her narrator, resent

his indifference, and finally join him in anticipating Nelly

Dean's explanation of the past with an interest beyond his

idle curiosity.

From the beginning Lockwood is mistaken when he presumes

that his own unhappy past will create a bond of suffering with

Heathcliff that will make his landlord a companionable host.

It may be to the narrator's credit that he catches himself in

the midst of this error. Nevertheless. Lockwood's immediate

questioning of his own ability to assess the character and * the intentions of others should arouse our suspicion, and the

episode he uses to illustrate his "peculiar" constitution is

not reassuring:

2 Carl K. Woodring. "The Narrators of Wuthering Heights." NOT. XI, (1956-57), 301; and George' J> Worth, "Emily Bronte's Mr. Lockwood," NOT. XII (1957-58), 319. On the other hand, Shapiro in "Wuthering Heights as a Victorian Novel," p. 288, observes that, as a representative of the outside world, Lockwood "too is guilty of dehumanizing other people, using them for his own ends" because he is "self-seeking and uncomprehending." 37

- While enjoying a month of fine weather at the sea-coast, I was thrown into the company of a most fascinating creature, a real goddess in my eyes, as long as she took no notice of me. I "never told my love" vocally; still, if looks have language, the merest idiot might have guessed I was over head and ears: she understood me at last, and looked a return— the sweetest of all imaginable looks. And what did I do? I confess it with shame-shrunk icily into myself, like a snail; at every glance retired colder and farther; till, finally, the poor innocent was led to doubt her own senses, and, overwhelmed with confusion at her supposed mistake, persuaded her mamma to decarqp. (Ch. i, p. IS)

Lockwood's account of his abortive love affair the previous

slimmer should make us wonder whether he is not again "bestowfing

hiq)own attributes over-liberally" (Ch. i, p. 15), this time

on his "goddess." The girl's interpretation of this might be

far different from Lockwood's because their affair seems to be

so completely a product of the narrator's own mind. Their

i encounter is so archly related and so one-sided that we may

wonder whether the girl was aware of Lockwood at all, her

• leave-taking perhaps being no more than a coincidence. The

suspicious introversion for which Lockwood apologizes in this

episode also seems to be curiously at variance with the

self-confidence he has just exhibited in forcing his courtesies

on Heathcliff, a very unwilling host.

Whatever doubts the reader might have about Lockwood's

seaside flirtation are strengthened by his attitude toward 38

Catherine Earnshaw's daughter throughout the novel. The moment he meets her, Lockwood begins to imagine another romance, as his "susceptible heart" casts him in the role of a handsome stranger whose obvious charms will alert Catherine to the fact that she has been mismatched, whether her husband be Heathcliff or Hareton. Lockwood's self-indulgent notion about striking up a romance with Catherine Earnshaw*s daughter casts serious doubt upon his ability to respond sympathetically toward the problems and needs of others. Completely ignoring young Catherine's ties to the countryside, her ancestral home, and her relatives,

Lockwood (being an escapist himself) can only dream of going off with her to "the stirring atmosphere of the town" (Ch. xxxi, p. 241). When he reports "I bit my lip in spite" (Ch. xxxil, p. 243) over Hareton's marriage to Catherine, Lockwood is not expressing a personal sense of genuine loss; the narrator is merely annoyed over this intrusion of reality into another of his self-serving fantasies. We have already examined Lockwood's daydreams of loving and leaving the girl at the seaside the previous summer and of taking Catherine Linton away from Hareton during the winter; and when he returns to Yorkshire the following autumn, staying just long enough to bemoan his loss of Catherine

Linton to Hareton even though he has never made a move to win her, Lockwood is on the way to the North "to devastate the moors of a friend" (Ch. xxxii, p. 241). Obviously Lockwood's reputation 39 among the ladies is so much of his own making that his assessment of one of these imaginary romances seems ironically appropriate to his whole inner life: "By this curious turn of disposition

I have gained the reputation of deliberate heartlessness, how undeserved, I alone can appreciate" (Ch. 1, p. 15). Lockwood should be the best judge of his "curious turn of disposition"; for, living apart in his own world of daydreams, only he knows that such a "reputation" even exists.

Lockwood* s reputation for misanthropy is similarly

"undeserved," for it is plain from the beginning that he merely plays the role of a stranger alienated from society because he finds it attractive: "CHeathcliff} little imagined how my heart wanned towards him when 1 beheld his black eyes withdraw so suspiciously under their brows as I rode up, . • ."(Ch. i, p. 13)»

But Lockwood grows uncomfortable when it becomesincreasingly obvious that Heathcliff* s misanthropy goes far beyond his own, which is merely a fashionable pose suitable to their rustic 3 environment. The harder Lockwood tries to establish communication

3 Schorer, Introduction to 'Wuthering Heights, p.. xiv, notes that "Emily Bronte begins by wishing to instruct her narrator, the sentimental dandy Lockwood, in the nature of a grand passion, • . •" and Miller, in The Disappearance of God, p. 169, agrees: "Unmediated relations to others may be a mortal danger to the self, but such relations are also a way of living a deeper and more authentic life. Lockwood has been a fixed unbeliever in any love of a year's standing CCh. vii, p. 582. At Wuthering Heights he witnesses a love which has lasted beyond the grave." 40 with his unresponsive landlord, the more he undercuts his own

Byronic role of the handsome stranger with a dark past who relishes his misanthropy amongst the desolation of the moors: "Dleathcliff! evidently wished no repetition of my intrusion* I shall Cretum!, notwithstanding. It is astonishing how sociable I feel myself conpared with him" (Ch. i, p. 17). Having been forewarned, we begin to see the humor .implicit in this paradox of a misanthropist who will brave the moors in the middle of winter to pay a social call where he is not wanted.

The second chapter provides ironic parallels with the first because, having been once repulsed by Heathcliff's dogs,

Lockwood makes another visit to receive much the same treatment from the people at Wuthering Heights. In the first chapter

Lockwood had begun to suspect that the master of the house was bred and raised to be. as vicious and inhospitable as his dogs. When he foolishly attempted to make friends with a

"ruffianly bitch" during his first visit to Wuthering Heights,

Lockwood received a warning: "'You'd better let the dog alone,' growled Hr. Heathcliff in unison Cwith the bitch pointer!. . . .

'She's not accustomed to be spoiled--not kept for a pet'" (Ch. i, p. 16). Lockwood's use of the word "growled" shows us that he is aware of Heathcliff's kindred feelings with his dog, and

Heathcliff himself readily acknowledges the parallel: "'Guests 41 are so exceedingly rare in this house that I and my dogs, I am willing to own, hardly know how to receive them'" (Ch. 1, p. 17),

Yet Lockwood's second visit to Wuthering Heights is no more successful because he is too egoistic to profit from Heathcliff's advice. His own sham misanthropy blinds him to the fact that anyone else can truly be bad-natured. So Lockwood returns in

Chapter ii, undaunted and unaware, still trying to introduce the amenities of town life to Wuthering Heights. This time, instead of Heathcliff, Lockwood first encounters a woman whom he assumes to be Heathcliff's wife. She watches him silently when he enters, just as Juno, the bitch pointer, had eyed him suspiciously on his first visit. But what was vigilance in the dogs seems like rudenss in people, so the same Lockwood who told us how he had withdrawn into himself "like a snail” the surnner before now adopts a contrary personality, boldly attempting to use his former enemy, Juno, to force "Mrs. Heathcliff" out of her shell!

"A beautiful animalf . . . Do you Intend parting with the little ones, madam?" "They are not mine," said the amiable hostess more repellingly than Heathcliff himself could have replied. "Ah, your favourites are among thesef" I continued, turning to an obscure cushion full of something like cats. "A strange choice of favourites," she observed scornfullyw Unluckily, it was a heap of dead rabbits.(Ch. ii, pp. 18-19) Even though Lockwood blames his faux pas on bad luck we suspect his own obtuseness, for the parallels between chapters suggest that his "amiable hostess1' is actually a human bitch. When

Lockwood continues to pester Catherine with his polite attentions, as he did with the bitch pointer and her puppies on his previous visit, she turns on him as they didt "*1 don't want your help,' she snapped, 'I can get [the tea canisters!! for myself'" (Ch. ii, p. 19). By having Lockwood use such words as "growled" and

"snapped" to characterize Iteathcliff' s and Catherine's reactions,

Emily Bronte draws a parallel between Lockwood's first rebuff from the dogs and his second encounter with their masters.

The comparison is comic because Lockwood seems to be aware of it, yet he makes the same mistake twice. His first encounter is provoked by his absurd gesture of making faces at the dogs, an unwitting parody of the romantic premise on which he founded his sunnier flirtation, that "looks have language." And his second encounter is provoked by his repeated attempts to treat

Catherine like a lady who would have a house pet or might require help getting the tea because it was the cook's night off. Even when Heathcliff snarls at Catherine over the tea and obliges Lockwood to acknowledge his host's "genuine bad nature," the narrator has reached this conclusion so belatedly that his reaction seems comic in its understatement! "I no longer felt inclined to call Heathcliff a capital fellow" (Ch. ii, p. 20>. 43

But these parallels between man and beast at Withering

Heights also have more serious implications. Emily Bronte's characterization of Lockwood as a dilettante who fancies himself a misanthropist makes us keenly aware that Heathcliff's sulleii brutality is no fashionable pose, but the bitter result of a lifetime of experience. Heathcliff is "willing to own" his kinship with the dogs (Ch. i, p. 17) because he is proud of his savagery. When Heathcliff fails in his duty as a host to introduce Lockwood to the rest of the household, it i3 not because he is a "clown" who knows no better, as Lockwood condescendingly ..supposes* Heathcliff takes pleasure in Lockwood's clumsy attempts to establish Hareton's and young Catherine's identities because he truly resents outsiders as much as his dogs do. When Lockwood reports that Heathcliff "relaxed into a grin," it is more likely a sneer because he has just provoked

Lockwood into becoming angry enough to talk of fighting the dogs barehanded (Ch. i, pp. 16-17). This seems to be the first meaningful exchange between the two men, for Heathcliff has finally goaded Lockwood into adopting his own language of domination through brute force.

Even if he is reading Wutherlng Heights for the first time, the reader should be able to sense that it is Heathcliff who has somehow reduced the level of communication to the snapping and growling of wild beasts. Lockwood glimpses * 44

enough in the opening chapters for us to suspect that Catherine ’ and Hareton are making Lockwood miserable because the/ themselves are chafing under some sort of oppression. When Catherine is irritated by his attempts to help her with the tea, Lockwood perceives that her expression "hover[sI between scorn and a kind of desperation" (Ch. ii, p. 19), and that even though both she and Hareton resent his presence, they do not wish him harm:

At first, the young man [Hareton} appeared about to befriend me. "I'll go with him as far as the park," he said. "You'll go with him to hell!" exclaimed his master [Heathcliff}, or whatever relation he bore. "And who is to look after the horses, eh?" "A man's life is of more consequence than one evening's neglect of the horses; somebody must go," murmured Mrs. Heathcliff, more kindly than I expected. (Ch. it, pp. 23-24)

Once we have read the complete novel, we can return to this passage and see how it fits into the story as a whole.

When Heathcliff asserts his authority over Hareton only to have

Catherine quietly take Hareton's part, he is being confronted with a tentative move by the children to join forces against his injustice, a rebellion which will develop to the point where it neutralises his revenge only two months later, when their opposition comes to a climax. In the above passage, however, Hareton's and

All ages and dates are calculated from the chronology in Sanger, Appendix to "The Structure of Wuthering Heights." pp. 21-[24}. 45

Catherine's fortunes are still very much in doubt; for in

chronological sequence the opening chapters belong between

Chapters xxx and xxi, just after Linton Heathcliff dies, leaving

Heathcliff in control of the Linton and Earnshaw estates* At.

this point Heathcliff is so confident of completing his revenge

that not even the presence of a stranger like Lockwood can

deter him from forcing Catherine and Hareton to pay for the wrongs

that their parents have committed. In the passage above, Lockwood

assumes Heathcliff to be Hareton's "master" because he treats

Hareton and Catherine as if he owns them as well as their property,

tyrannizing over Hareton as Hindley had oppressed him and trying

to make Catherine as miserable as her mother had made him. Zillah

gives an unfeeling account of her charge which demonstrates how

the lack of any sympathy or understanding has driven Catherine

to desperation after Linton* s death:

11. • . she has no lover, or liker among us— and she does not deserve one— for, let them say the least word to her, and she'll curl back.without respect of any onel She'll snap at the master himself, and as good as dares him to thrash her; and the more hurt she gets, the more venomous she grows." (Ch. xxx, p. 236)

Lockwood encounters Catherine in this condition for,., up to this point, Heathcliff has been successful in transforming her into.

a frustrated shrew as warped and embittered as Isabella. When

Lockwood, "half smiling," condescends to tell Catherine that she

is the proper person to invite him for tea, her annoyance makes 46 him think of her as a child who is pouting because she has to be reminded of her manners (Ch. 11, p. 19). But in reality

Lockwood has reminded Catherine of the more bitter truth that it is Heathcliff, not she, who dictates even the social amenities at Wu the ring Heights. Catherine's rudeness toward Lockwood is therefore the only way she can openly express her rebellion against Heathcliff's tyranny without suffering violent retaliation.

As a narrator Lockwood shows us just enough to suggest the hidden depths and twisted motivations which Nelly's story of

Heathcliff's revenge reveals in detail much later. Figure 1 on the following page relates the short but crucial sections of the novel which Lockwood narrates to the time scheme of the book as a whole. For the first three chapters Lockwood puzzles over the situation he encounters at Wuthering Heights, and then

Nelly fills in the past for him (and us) from the moment of

Heathcliff's arrival at Wuthering Heights until the time of

Lockwood's encounter with Heathcliff. Lockwood then goes to

London, returns eight months later to find Hareton and Catherine

Linton in love, and ends the novel a few months afterward, at the grave of Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw. Since all the other major events except for Lockwood's visits to Wuthering

Heights are related in chronological order, Emily Bronte has evidently displaced the month of November, 1801 from its natural sequence in order to begin her novel with it. To some extent LOCKWOOD*S WRITING TIME--4 MONTHS. 1 WEEK. 5 DAYS

BEGINNING END

A DAYS. 4 WEEKS A A WEEK. 3 MONTHS * * § H X XI XV XXXI XXXIV

TOTAL TIME OP NARRATION— 10 MONTHS

LOCKVi NELLY (.LOCKWOOD^ LO Hair XXX Mi mtri [IV KOV 1801 SUMMER 1771-OCT 1801 JAN 1802-SEPT 1802 SEPT 1802

NELLY — -I»| XXXII XXXIV FEB 1802 SEPT 1802

Figure 1: Correlation of Novel Time with Narrators 48

we always begin Emily Bronte's story in the position of Lockwood,

entering Wuthering Heights with no explanation of the family's

cruelty toward each other as well as toward their guest. After

one reading we know all about Heathcliff's plans for revenge,

and we may even suspect that Catherine's spirit takes possession

of him before his death. Yet, because the plot is not consecutive,

no re-reading of this novel will enable us to experience a

direct causal connection between the ghost which appears to.

Lockwood, Heathcliff's identification of it as Catherine Earnshaw, and the subsequent cessation of his vengeance against Catherine

Linton and Hareton which was to have been the culmination of all his plans since Catherine's death.

This puzzling displacement of events from a chronology otherwise notable for the detailed internal consistency of its dates can only lead us to one conclusion: that Emily Bronte has deliberately fragmented the sequence of events in her opening chapters by putting effects— Catherine Linton's surliness, Hareton's boorishness, and the appearance of a ghost— before the cause of these effects, Heathcliff's desire to avenge his frustrated love for Catherine Earnshaw.^

® After deducing his comprehensive chronology solely from internal evidence, Sanger remarks: "There is, so far as I know, no other novel in the world which it is possible to subject to an analysis of the kind I have tried to make. . . . Did the authoress carry all the dates in her head, or did she work with a calendar?" "The Structure of Wuthering Heights" in Sale's ed. of Wuthering Heights, p. 295. 49

Perhaps, then, Emily Bronte has introduced an egoistic and insensitive narrator into her novel for the same reason that she has fragmented its time scheme--to keep us from drawing easy conclusions about the extraordinary events we experience*

If an author Is careful about what he is doing (and the technical virtuosity of Emily Bronte's chronology leaves no doubt that she is being careful), the emotional impact of events is the reader's guarantee that the author wants him to remember them.

Certainly this is true of Lockwood's confrontations with the brutality of life at Wuthering Heights and his bloody exclusion of the ghost from Catherine's bedroom, two of the most outrageous and unforgettable sections of the book. Yet the narrator himself denies their significance; he glibly recommends a "stirring atmosphere'* (Ch. xxxi, p. 241) as a cure for. Catherine Linton's problems, and does not even bother to tell Nelly that he dreamed of a ghost whom Heathcliff identified as Catherine Earnshaw when Nelly tells him that she too has heard of the dead Catherine walking the moors with Heathcliff's ghost (Ch. xxxiv, p. 265).

There is so much difference between these events as we experience them, and as Lockwood interprets them, that we can only assume

Emily Bronte's superficial narrator to be a deliberate device— like the inverted chronology of the events themselves— for maintaining ambiguity and keeping us uncertain as to what has happened. 50

Just what this ambiguity is, in terms of the whole novel,,

will be discussed in my last three chapters on the plot and

theme of vrutherlna Heights. Here we can only consider how,

by means of Lockwood's narration, Emily Bronte compels us to

feel that certain events are profoundly significant, even though

we never know why and often do not understand what is happening.

We may smile at the Romantic pretensions which prompt

Lockwood to renew his visits where he is so obviously not wanted;

and yet we tend to identify with him in his attempts to find

out why everyone at Wuthering Heights should be so hostile toward

one another. Lockvnod earns some sympathy as a character

for having been so cruelly rebuffed by the boorish Heathcliff

and so contemptuously treated by Heathcliff's ill-tempered

companions. To a certain extent, we may sympathize with Lockwood

when another attack by the dogs forces him to hide within Catherine

Earnshaw's panel bed, "secure against the vigilance of Heathcliff

and every one else". (Ch. iii, p. 25). We can understand why,

in perusing Catherine Earnshaw's books, Lockwood should be attracted

to her diary by a caricature of Joseph because it was Joseph

who had set the dogs on Lockwood, forcing him to this retreat

in the first place. The diary itself recounts further evidence

of Joseph's tyranny over Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff

himself when he was a boy, so it appears that Lockwood has discovered

at least one source of the hostility which began when Catherine and Heathcliff were growing up. SI

Even though he does not realize it, Lockwood is never closer to the source of his hostility than the night when he is forced to sleep in Catherine's bedroom. For Heathcliff has preserved this room just as Catherine left it, and Lockwood unwittingly creates a suitable atmosphere for the ghostly child to appear by examining emotionally charged relics of her past. Scratched into the ledge of the window which opens over Catherine's bed is a "name repeated in all kinds of characters, large and small-■Catherine

Earnshaw. here and there varied to Catherine Heathcliff. and then again to Catherine Linton" (Ch. iii, p. 25). These characters must have been put there by Catherine at fifteen, when she was trying out different combinations of married names while making the crucial decision of whether to choose Heathcliff or Edgar*

By drowsily "spelling over" the names, Lockwood has indeed cast a spell which threatens to raise spirits from a living past:

", . . a glare of white letters started from the dark, as vivid as spectres--the air swarmed with Catherines; . . ." (Ch. iii, p. 25). Then Lockwood wakes up to find out more about Catherine's past; in a book of sermons that belonged to Catherine he discovers a diary scrawled in the margins which depicts Catherine and

Heathcliff seeking happiness together in defiance of an adult world of tyrannical hypocrites conposed of Hindley, Frances, 4

52

g and Joseph* Lockwood drowses again over this book and has an experience similar to the one occasioned by Catherine's names because both fantasies are based on what Lockwood was doing before he fell asleep: "I began to dream, almost before I ceased to be sensible of my locality" (Ch. iii, p. 28— italics mine),

Lockwood knows it is a dream because he is conscious of losing

"locality." ' As a dreamer he is disoriented toward his immediate

surroundings, yet susceptible to a new kind of reality in which past experiences reappear in unexpected combinations. The problem

of finding a guide through the snow led Lockwood to spend the night in Catherine's room to begin with; and Joseph becomes a

violent "pilgrim" throughout the dream because, ‘ in Catherine's diary, he was depicted as a hypocrite who used his religion to

create as much righteous mayhem as possible. The Reverend Jabes

Branderham and his text, "Seventy Times Seven," come from the book containing Catherine's marginalia which Lockwood had been

examining before he fell asleep. Thus, it seems that Lockwood's

impatience with the sermon that Joseph has forced him to hear is

an unconscious expression of his sympathy with the diary excerpt

describing Catherine's and Heathcliff's own rebellion against the

same sort of "lumber" which Joseph had "thrust upon" them.

C The esthetic charm of Catherine's diary is discussed in F. H. Langman, "Wuthering Heights," Essays in Criticism. XV (1965), 299-300. ! ! 53

Lockwood's first dream is a rather conventional nightmare. It seems terrifying to the person dreaming it, yet becomes comio in the retelling, especially when the audience can recognize some of the personal experiences which have become distorted* in the dream. Once we penetrate the inflated mock-religious rhetoric of Lockwood's charge ("sitting here, within these four walls, at one stretch, I have endured and forgiven") and of

Branderham's counter-charge ("seventy times seven didst thou gapingly contort thy visage"), we find that Lockwood is singly complaining of being bored and that Branderham is upset about his showing it by yawning in church. Emily Bronte has given ample basis in fact for both of these charges, as it happens, because

Lockwood fell asleep when he allowed his attention to wander from Catherine's marginalia to Branderham's text. Thus, Lockwood's first nightmare has skillfully .been constructed as a comic tautology; within the dream both men complain about the same "sin" because they share the blame for it, and that sin turns out to be the dream itself: * while I was, half consciously, worrying my brain to guess what Jabes Branderham would make of his subject, I sank back in bed, and fell asleep" (Ch. iii, p. 28).

. Of course, with Lockwood's dreams, just as with his earlier attempts to befriend those at Wuthering Heights, not even the author's comic exaggeration fully conceals the more serious, implications of what is happening. Ruth Adams suggests 54 that the moral climate of Wuthering Heights, where vengeance

Is being pursued apart from divine ordinances, is reminiscent of Genesis 4: 23-24:

23* And Lamech said unto his wives, Adah and Zillah, Hear my voice; ye wives of Lamech, hearken unto my speech: for I have slain a man to my wounding, and a young man to my hurt. 24• If Cain shall be avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy and sevenfold,

Adams therefore proposes that Genesis provides a thematic connection between Branderham's sermon on "Seventy Times Seven, and the

First of the Seventy-First," and the violence that ensues in

Lockwood's dream and in the novel as a whole, Edgar Shannon disagrees, however, because Matthew 18:21-22 contains a more

explicit reference to sinning "until seventy times seven":

21, Then came Peter to him, and said. Lord, how oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? till seven times? 22, Jesus saith unto him, I say not unto thee. Until seven times: but Until seventy times seven.

Shannon identifies the seventy-first, or unpardonable, sin as

Catherine Earnshaw's marriage to Edgar, Vereen Bell points out^

7This verse has other intriguing aspects. If "I have slain a man to my wounding" refers to Heathcliff's fight with Hindley, then "the young man [slainj to ray hurt" would be Hareton. One of Lamech's wives is named Zillah, the name Emily Bronte uses for one of the gruff servants at Wuthering Heights, and this point is worried relentlessly in John E. Jordan, "The Ironic Vision of Emily Bronte," NCF, XX (196S-66), 15-16. 55

however, that in Matthew Jesus is talking about forgiveness, not

an unpardonable sin. Thus, the text must apply not to Catherine

above but to everyone at Wuthering Heights who has suffered

an injury so extreme that he. cannot pardon it. Ronald E. Pine

agrees, with a broader interpretation that will encompass both

Adams' and Shannon's biblical references, and adds Genesis 16:12

as another source for Lockwood's reference to "every man's

hand [being! against his neighbour":

12. And [IshmaelJ will be a wild man; his hand will be against every man, and every man's hand against him; and he shall dwell in the presence of all his brethren.

Fine also discusses the Freudian implications of Lockwood's dream,

relating it to other dreams in the novel and concluding that

"they merge the theme of incest with the theme of the unpardonable

sin."8

Wuthering Heights is full of sinister illustrations for

Branderham's biblical text concerning "the sin that no Christian

need pardon" (Ch. iii, p. 29). Nelly seems to regard the

unpardonable sin as Heathcliff's very presence when she explains

D Ruth M. Adams, "Wuthering Heights: The Land East of Eden," NCP. XIII (1958-59), 58-62; Edgar F. Shannon, Jr., "Lockwood's Dreams and the Exegesis of Wuthering Heights," NCF. XIV (1959*60), 95-102; Vereen Bell, "Wuthering Heights and the Unforgivable Sin," NCF, XVII (1962-63), 188-89; Ronald E. Fine, "Lockwood's Dreams and the Key to Wuthering Heights," NCF, XXIV (1969-70), ‘ 18-27. 56 without apology that his silent endurance of Hindley's blows and her pinches "bred bad feeling in the house11 (Ch. iv, p. 401; and Zillah echoes Nelly's self-righteous justification of her own hard-heartedness when she complains that "the more hurt

[Catherine Linton} gets, the more venomous she grows" (Ch. xxx, p. 236). Lockwood argues that "terror made me cruel" in his treatment of the ghost, just as he and Branderham claim that their violence toward one another was provoked by an obscure "sin that no Christian need pardon." In each case, one act of injustice, oppression, or violence is used to justify another. Lockwood's dreams of violence foreshadow the perverted morality in Wuthering

Heights which I shall discuss more fully in Chapter v, a view of life that makes Lockwood's selfish egoism the norm and turns his dream of "every man's hand [being} against his neighbour"

(Ch. iii, p. 29) into reality.9

If the events in Lockwood's dreams symbolize significant issues in Wuthering Heights, then his negative reaction to these events also indicates his failure as a narrator. In his first nightmare Lockwood is bored with Branderham's enumeration of obscure sins and becomes restless to the point of Interrupting

g For another account of the enmity which Lockwood encounters, see Hiller, The Disappearance of God, pp. 187-90* 57 him, just as he later daydreams of abridging Nelly Dean's lengthy account of the complex sins at Wuthering Heights by running off to town with Catherine Earnshaw's daughter (Ch. xxxi, p. 241),

But the escapism of these dreams is eclipsed by Lockwood's second nightmare, which suggests to what lengths the narrator will go

in order to avoid the responsibility of becoming involved with whatever has been happening at Wuthering Heights. Immediately after his nightmare about the fight with Branderham's congregation,

Lockwood dreams that Catherine Earnshaw's ghost tries to enter

Wuthering Heights through her bedroom window. But there is no comedy here, as in Lockwood's previous nightmare; this time the violence is the dreamer's own idea, and does not seem to be the inevitable result of the grotesque situation he finds himself

in, terrifying, though that maybe. Since Lockwood uses brutality and deception to avoid hearing the "lamentable prayer" of a ‘

"lost" soul, Emily Bronte is not directing our sympathy toward him, but to the spectre itself:

Terror made me cruel; and, finding it useless to attempt shaking the creature off, I pulled its wrist on to the broken pane, and rubbed it to and fro till the blood ran down and soaked the bedclothes: still it wailed, "Let me ini" and maintained its tenacious gripe, almost maddening me with fear. "How can I?" I said at length. "Let me go, if you want me to let you in?" The fingers relaxed, I snatched mine through the hole, hurriedly piled the bocks up in a pyramid against it, and stopped my ears to exclude the lamentable prayer. 58

I seemed to keep them closed above a quarter of an hour, yet, the instant I listened again, there waB the doleful cry moaning on I "Begonel" I shouted, "1*11 never let you in, not if you beg for twenty years!" (Ch. iii, p. 30)

Of course, Lockwood's rejection of the spectre is symbolic, like his disruption of Branderham's sermon, because both actions are performed in dreams* Lockwood must still be asleep, even when he supposes that he is getting out of bed to silence the branch, so both of his dreams are apparently stimulated by the same real sound: the cones of the fir tree rattling against the window pane end the first dream as Branderham* s rapping on the pulpit and begin the second as Catherine* s ghost knocking at the window. Since the second dream begins with no transition between sleeping and waking, however, Lockwood experiences no loss of "locality11; this time he assumes a more realistic role which makes his new dream all the more sinister and terrifying.

The words "I thought" may easily go unnoticed in the exciting account of what happens. Yet they provide Lockwood's only qualification in a narrative which otherwise conveys such vivid inpressions that external reality still seems to dictate what happens: "• . . 1 thought, I rose and endeavoured to unhasp the casement. The hook was soldered into the staple, a circumstance observed by me when awake, but forgotten" (Ch. ill, p. 30).

Such concrete detail makes the appearance of the ghost 59

surprising as well as terrifying.*® There is nothing remotely comic about Lockwood's narration of his second dream# for we can no longer relate the dreamer's vivid recollection of what happens to his previous encounters with Heathcliff or Joseph, or to his recollection of the events in Catherine Earnshaw's diary.

Even though the bizarre events of Lockwood's second dream come as a shock after the burlesque overtones of his first one,

the narrator' s own cruelty and violence leave the most vivid and lasting impression. Until now, Lockwood might have been the foppish protagonist of a novel of manners. Perhaps, after being chastened by hi3 initial comedy of errors, Lockwood would come to recognize the true worth of Catherine, the beautiful diamond-in-the-rough. If so, then the narrator might even manage to win the grudging a pproval of Heathcliff, her boorish guardian. The sudden appearance of the ghost ends all further

*®A narrator like Lockwood, who is so quick to tell us about an objective detail like the soldered window casement, might be expected to give us a similar account of the bedroom afterward. Yet neither he nor Heathcliff, who has deliberately preserved Catherine's room as she left it, takes notice of the many changes (the broken window, the books piled against it, the blood on the bed clothes) which must have occurred if Lockwood had really confronted someone there. So Emily Bronte evidently does not mean to imply that the events which Lockwood describes as a dream have occurred in actuality. The graphic manner in which she has Lockwood recall it merely intensifies the illusion that the second nightmare is more "real" than the first. 60

speculation along these lines, however* For Emily Bronte not

only introduces an element of the supernatural; she depicts

Lockwood's violent rejection of the spectral child so vividly

that romantic comedy no longer seems possible.

As a character Lockwood has thus far provided some comic

relief from the bitter ferocity of the opening chapters of

Wuthering Heights. Yet, once Lockwood dreams of Catherine

Earnshaw's ghost, his faults are no longer so amusing; for it becomes increasingly .obvious that his egoistic self-deception

will prevent him, either as character or narrator, from being

able to provide the sympathy that everyone at Wuthering Heights

appears to need so desperately. When Lockwood throws open the

panels of Catherine Earnshaw's bed, Heathcliff take3 him for

Catherine's ghost and undergoes a remarkable transformation

from the cynical host who had delighted in bullying his guest.

But, from the way Lockwood tells the incident, he is obviously

unmoved by the fact that, even Heathcliff may be a vulnerable

human being:

I shall not soon forget the effect my action , produced. Heathcliff stood near the entrance [to the bedroomj, in his shirt and trousers, with a candle dripping over his fingers, and his face as white as the wall behind him. The first creak of the oak [bed panels! startled him like an electric shock: the light leaped from his hold to a distance of some feet, and his agitation was so extreme that he could hardly pick it up# 61

"It is only your guest, sir," 1 called out, desirous to spare him the humiliation of exposing his cowardice further. "I had the misfortune to scream in my sleep, owing to a frightful nightmare. I'm sorry I disturbed you." "Oh, God confound you, Mr. Lockwoodf . I wish you were at the— " commenced my host, setting the candle on a chair, because he found it impossible to hold it steady. "And who showed you up to this room?" he continued, crushing his nails into his palms, and grinding his teeth to subdue the maxillary convulsions." {Ch. iii, p. 31)

Already Lockwood has conveniently forgotten his own experience and the terror it produced; for now that it is Heathcliff fearing

that he has encountered a ghost, Lockwood contemptuously attributes

his terror to cowardice, noting each symptom with relish.** When

Lockwood recalls his own confrontation with Catherine, he seems

to assume that some real event has occurred*

Filce, in "Bitter Herbs and Wholesome Medicines: Love as Theological Affirmation in Wuthering Heights." p. 142, argues that Heathcliff is afraid of Catherine's return and suggests that this is also why he has soldered the hasp shut on her bedroom window. But Catherine Earnshaw's window is sealed because, a few months earlier, that had been her daughter's escape route to Thrushcross Grange so that she might see her father once more before he died (Ch. xxviii, p. 226). Heathcliff is trembling not only from the "cowardice" that Lockwood attributes to him, but also from vexation at Lockwood's trespassing in the locked shrine of Catherine's room and from astonishment that the noise was not caused by Catherine's spirit returning to her bed, since that was where he had experienced her presence before (Ch. xxx, p. 230). As soon as he recovers from finding Lockwood instead of Catherine, Heathcliff forces open the hasp himself and calls upon her to return. 62

"I suppose that [Zillah] van ted to get another- proof that the place [Catherine's bedroom] was haunted, at my expense. Well, it is--swarming with ghosts and goblinsf You have reason in shutting it up, I assure . you. No one will thank you for a doze in such a deni11 "What do you mean?" asked Heathcliff, "and what are you doing? Lie down and finish out the night, since you are here; but, for heaven's saket don't repeat that horrid noise* Nothing could excuse it, unless you were having your throat cutl" "If the little fiend had got in at the window, she probably would have strangled mel" I returned. (Ch. iii, p. 31)

Heathcliff's servant, Zillah, is the only person who befriended

Lockwood, having saved him twice from the dogs; and the second’ time she took Lockwood to Catherine's room at considerable personal risk because Heathcliff had forbidden anyone to enter it. It is thus a measure of Lockwood's selfishness and cowardice that he would accuse her, as well as Heathcliff himself, of deliberately exposing him to a ghost. Lockwood here describes what has happened as if it were no laughing matter, blaming others for what he had explained away earlier as merely a nightmare, "the effects of bad tea and bad temper" (Ch. iii, p. 28). Only when he observes Heathcliff also behaving as if the ghost had actually appeared does Lockwood become sufficiently detached to reflect upon the whole episode sarcastically as a pseudo-eventt

[Heathcliff] got on to the bed and wrenched open the lattice, bursting, as he pulled at it, into an uncontrollable passion of tears. 63

"Come ini come ini" he sobbed. "Cathy, do come. Oh, do--once morel Ohl my heart's darling, hear this time--Catherine. at last!" The spectre showed a spectre's ordinary caprice; it gave no sign of being; .... (Ch. iii, p. 33)

It is understandable that the narrator can laugh at Heathcliff, yet be terrified for himself, because the appearance of Catherine was so vivid that Lockwood still feels its reality, even when conEnon sense tells him that it could not have happened. Since at this point in the novel we are as confused a3 Lockwood, we may be disposed to accept his summary of the episode:

There was such anguish in the gush of grief that acconpanied [Heathcliff's3 raving, that my compassion made me overlook its folly, and I drew off, half angry to have listened at all, and vexed at having related my ridiculous nightmare, since it produced that agony, though why, was beyond my comprehension. (Ch. iii, p. 33)

Logically we cannot comprehend any more than Lockwood what the appearance of the spectre means and why it should affect Heathcliff b so profoundly. Nevertheless, Lockwood's mention of "compassion" here sounds hollow because we can understand his explanation of his callousness toward Heathcliff, yet we cannot accept it emotionally any more than we accepted his previous justification for his sadistic treatment of the spectral child. Since Lockwood's terror was partly our own during the weird episode of the spectre, we could at least feel that his cruelty then was a physical response born of desperation. But now that the terror is Heathcliff's 6 4 own, It seems like premeditated cruelty for the narrator to make fun of it. For us, it is enough that Heathcliff has undergone a dramatic change which suggests that the bitter childhood he shared with Catherine Eamshaw was only the prelude to even greater anguish over her death.

Now that we have a suspicion of the genuine suffering endured by Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw, Lockwood's own affected misanthropy seems less innocent. The absurd egoism . that prompted Lockwood to style his seaside flirtation a tragic romance, and which makes him invent a new romance with Catherine's daughter, provides a telling contrast with the authenticity of Heathcliff's private agony over Catherine Eamshaw. It seems ironic that Lockwood should moek Heathcliff for trying to summon ' ' I a "dream" of Catherine. For Lockwood's own loves have never been anything but dreams, the product of his own selfish desires, whereas Heathcliff's dream is at least founded upon the reality of past experiences like the one which Lockwood has just been reading about in Catherine's diary. Lockwood's cruel rejection of Catherine's childish spectre in his dream therefore represents a cowardly denial of syiqpathy for her suffering as a child when she was alive. He shuts out Catherine Earnshaw's ghost in his dream and excludes the memory of it from his consciousness, just as he seeks to escape any realistic confrontation with

Catherine Linton's terrible past by inventing a future "more 65

romantic than a fairy tale11 in which they go off to town together

(Ch. xxxi, p. 241). Lockwood's Byronic fantasies of misanthropy and thwarted love are comic only at the beginning, before it becomes clear that he is using them to evade the moral responsibility of accepting others' troubles along with their friendship.

We have seen how Emily Bronte takes extraordinary pains to characterize her first narrator, Lockwood, even though we soon reject him for being psychologically unfit to tell Heathcliff's story in the way we wish to hear it. Lockwood is necessary as a second narrator because he begins and ends as an outsider.

Like Horatio in Hamlet he is an intelligent observer who, from the very beginning, is forced to acknowledge the presence of a ghost. Yet Horatio is a true friend who knows more of Hamlet's plans than anyone else and is able to tell most of Hamlet's tale at the end, while Lockwood leaves Wuthering Heights no wiser than when he came. Unlike Horatio Lockwood denies the significance of Catherine's ghost although, as we shall see in Chapter vi, his dream represents a kind of objective reality because it contains certain facts which Lockwood only hears about much later, from Emily Bronte's other narrator.

Lockwood rationalizes the ghost and his cruel treatment of it, and secretly ridicules the first human response elicited from Heathcliff, his belief that the child in Lockwood's dream was the spectre of Catherine Earnshaw. When Lockwood .next 66 participates in the action of the novel, he claims to love

Catherine Linton and to envy Hareton; yet they know nothing of it, for he enters and leaves in a world of his own, untouched by theirs. Emily Bronte has made her first narrator's response to what has happened so superficial and egoistic that we are left in doubt from beginning to end. Should we believe in

Catherine's and Heathcliff's passionate affirmation of life after death and credit the sheer terror of the ghost's appearance?

Or can we accept his explanation that Catherine's spectre represents nothing more-than a bad dream and trust his calm assurance that the dead are at rest? CHAPTER III

THE NARRATOR AS HYPOCRITE*

NELLY DEAN AND YOUNG HEATHCLIFF

Emily Bronte's second narrator, with whom she entrusts most of Withering Heights, is less capricious and fanciful than her predecessor, Lockwood, Nelly's personal involvement does result in rash actions or mistaken conclusions which, at times, make her as unsympathetic a character as Lockwood; but this very desire to be engaged ir. the action and to interpret it also makes her more thorough and straightforward than Lockwood, with his self-indulgent fantasies. Lockwood's ego keeps him an outsider; his own vanity and self-deception prevent him from trying to understand the extraordinary people and events he is thrust among at Wuthering Heights. But Nelly has not only witnessed everything of importance that relates to Heathcliff; she has been so_ personally involved in it that she is eager to recount everything, even those events and sentiments which may not reflect credit on her. Nelly is not the ordinary narrator who tells a story for its own sake, or to evoke an inpressive response from an audience. She is interpreting what she has witnessed in a clear, straightforward manner so that even an 67 68 outsider, like Lockwood, will receive a vivid impression of the hatred and suspicion that pervade Withering Heights*

Yet Nelly, like Lockwood, has a grave flaw in her character which ultimately makes her an unreliable witness as well**

Despite the moral advice she freely gives to Heathcliff and

Catherine Eamshaw, Nelly has no more genuine concern than

Lockwood has for their problems and needs. In the next chapter we shall see that with Catherine Eamshaw this is partly Nelly's own fault* But here, with Heathcliff, Nelly's hypocrisy is largely society's owns the subtle way in which Nelly unintentionally- discriminates against Heathcliff even while trying to help him because, being a servant herself, she has unconsciously adopted

the 3elfish hypocrisy of her "betters," the Earnshaws and the

Lintons.

Both Nelly Dean and Heathcliff are outsiders who have been accepted by the Eamshaw family as playmates, even though they occupy the position of servants in the family as they grow

*The most extreme criticism of Nelly Dean may be found in James Hafley, "The Villain in Withering Heights." NCF. XIII (1958-59), 199-215* She is defended in: John Fraser, "The Name of Action: Nelly Dean and Wuthering Heights." NCF. XX (1965-66), 223-36; Philip Drew, "Charlotte Bronte as a Critic of Wuthering Heights." NCF. XVIII (1963-64), 367. The most balanced accounts of Nelly's virtues and defects are ins John X* Mathison, "Nelly Dean and the Power of Wuthering Heights," NCF. XI (1956-57), 106-29; Ewbank, Their Proper Sphere. pp. 116-25; Shapiro, "Wuthering Heights as a Victorian Novel," p. 288* 69 up. The resemblance goes little further, however, because

Nelly feels an antipathy toward Heathcliff from the moment he is first brought into the Eamshaw household* As a narrator,

Nelly calls her lack of justice toward young Heathcliff unreasonable

(Ch. iv, pp. 39-40), which should make us wonder to what extent

Emily Hronte uses Nelly to demonstrate how and why young Heathcliff grows into the spiteful adult who confronts Lockwood in the opening chapters of Wuthering Heights. For a close examination of Heathcliff's childhood reveals that Catherine's decision to marry Edgar is only one injustice among many earlier ones which pass unnoticed by the narrator, at least partly because she has been responsible for them herself.

When Nelly Dean begins her narrative in Chapter iv, she seems to be no more sympathetic toward Heathcliff's suffering than Lockwood had been. Her initial reception of the orphan had been sufficiently unkind to make old Earnshaw threaten to dismiss her from the household; and in her narrative Nelly observes that she must have had no more sense than the Earnshaw children themselves to leave the child "on the landing of the stairs, hoping it might be gone on the morrow" (Ch. iv, p. 39).

Our own appraisal of this act may even extend beyond Nelly's hindsight or Hr. Earnshaw's charge of "cowardice and inhumanity."

Her "hpfdng [Heathcliff] might be gone" seems to be a euphemism for wishing that the child might kill himself in a fall 70 down the dark stairway. Yet five chapters later, after Heathcliff himself has grown up, the narrator sees no irony in the fact that she then chastizes hint for harboring regrets about saving young Hareton from a fall over the same stairway (Ch. ix, p. 68).

As Nelly tells Lockwood of Heathcliff*s childhood, she unknowingly exposes more of this discrepancy between her high standards of

Christianity and social justice and her failure to live up to them. The narrator's parenthetical admission that Heathcliff said "precious little, and generally the truth" (Ch. iv, pp. 39-40). is especially poignant because it occurs in the midst of her unfeeling account of the persecutions the child had to endure from her, as well as from others. The narrator's explanation,

"I wasn't reasonable enough to feel my injustice" (Ch. iv, p. 40)# reveals that even now, from her more mature vantage point as narrator, Nelly still hypocritically subordinates feeling to the class prejudice that she calls "reason." She knows she wronged the child; yet, almost thirty years later, Nelly cannot bring herself to admire his hardiness or even to pity his circumstances. She candidly admits that her childhood friendship with Hindley dissolved when she was a fickle teenager swayed not by affection for Hindley's rival, Heathcliff, but by the prospect of receiving praise for nursing him back to health.

But the way the narrator relates this incident reveals even more because she still bears a grudge against Heathcliff for having 71 come between Hindley and her: "• . . 1 suppose he felt I did a good deal for him, and he hadn't wit to guess that 1 was compelled to do it" (Ch. iv, p. 40). It is bad enough for the narrator to reflect, without apology, that she had to be "compelled" to care for a sick nine-year-old child; but it seems worse that she is still sufficiently bitter to be contemptuous of Heathcliff for not realizing that he was unloved.

To Nelly it seems self-evident why Heathcliff merits no affection; he is "sullen" and it is only "hardness, not gentleness" that made him give her less trouble than Catherine did (Ch. iv, p. 40). But Nelly forgets she has just explained how he became hardened, by getting so used to Hindley* s blows and her pinches that he would not cry out or accuse anyone. From this it would seem that Nelly is actually transferring her own guilt to Heathcliff; for, in making Heathcliff out to be "sullen" by nature, Nelly blames him for being patient in adversity, a quality which she admires in Edgar after Catherine dies (Ch. xvii, p. 151). In order to demonstrate how "insensible" Heathcliff is toward the feelings of his "benefactor," old Mr. Earnshaw, Nelly tells

Lockwood the story of Heathcliff's quarrel with Hindley over a colt. But this episode makes Nelly herself appear in a more unfavorable light. When Heathcliff wants Hindley* s pony he uses blackmail, threatening to show old Earnshaw the bruises that Hindley has unjustly given him unless he receives the pony. 72

Then, when Hindley reluctantly complies, giving Heathcliff some extra blows for good measure, Nelly not only silently concurs in the sordid transaction but also takes part in it herself: "I persuaded [Heathcliff3 easily to let me lay the blame of his bruises on the horse; he minded little what tale was told since he had [the horse! he wanted" (Ch. iv, p. 41). Here again Nelly attributes her own failings to Heathcliff. It was she who first "minded little what tale was told" since she suggested the stratagem in the first place. Nelly was never really concerned about whether old Eamshaw heard the truth: she only wanted to avoid the disturbance that would result if he found out about the quarrel. Thus, Nelly's attitude toward Heathcliff is a measure of her own guilt: she resents most the fact that Heathcliff should have had such an easy conscience about the whole matter, that he had allowed himself to be persuaded so "easily" to use her own deceit in gaining the colt for himself. To Lockwood Nelly observes that, because

Heathcliff "bred bad feeling in the house," Hindley "had learnt to regard his father as an oppressor rather than a friend" (Ch. iv, p. 40). But the story of the colt shows us that the narrator is unjust in supposing that Heathcliff is "insensible" by nature; like

Hindley, Heathcliff also "learnt to regard" old Earnshaw as being detrimental to his best interests, and Nelly was his teacher.

Since Nelly is partly responsible for making Heathcliff a victim of injustice, Emily Bronte is able to portray him as being morally superior to her t&ile he is growing up. During that time, as Nelly puts it, Heathcliff says "precious little, and generally the truth" (Ch. iv, p. 40). With a few words Heathcliff exposes Nelly's moralistic cant when he returns from spying on Thrush cross Grange to report that Catherine will be staying there. One glimpse of the Linton children alerts Heathcliff to the fact that, through no merit of their own, some children seem to be spoiled by their parents while others are oppressed.

Nelly, of course, is quick to defend her role in the children's upbringing and attempts to rationalize the Earnshaws' injustice by claiming that the Linton children are better behaved than her own charges. But Heathcliff has just seen Edgar and Isabella

t fighting over a little dog; he realizes that they have been treated better than they deserve, just as he and Catherine have been treated far worse, and silences this adult hypocrisy with the simple truth: "'Don't you cant, Nelly'" (Ch. vi, p. 47).

In her dual role of character and narrator Nelly often deplores Heathcliff's and Catherine'.s naughty behavior, even though her own rough treatment of Heathcliff betrays an arbitrary sense of justice on her part;and theqpisode of the colt demonstrates that she is not averse to making the truth relative to the maintenance of peace in the Earnshaw household. Yet Nelly's 74 hypocrisy is not so self-serving as some critics have suggested.^

Even though Nelly is quick to seek the blame for what she observes as a character, she makes no final judgments as a narrator*

Her foil is the Earnshaws' servant, Joseph, who has pre-judged everyone from such a selfishly pietistical viewpoint that he remains a comic grotesque from beginning to end. To Lockwood,

Nelly describes Joseph accurately enough as, "the wearisomest, self-righteous pharisee that ever ransacked a Bible to rake the promises to himself, and fling the curses on his neighbours"

(Ch. v, p. 42). For, even though she is not above occasional religious cant herself, Nelly is not so dogmatic that she can be intimidated by Joseph. Nelly attempts to advise the children with the best of intentions. Yet Emily Bronte shows us, through her narrator's description of these attempts, that the same social pressures which make Catherine Earnshaw selfish and turn Heathcliff toward vengeance have also corrupted Nelly.

On Christmas Eve, Nelly finally begins to feel the force of those injustices which have frustrated Heathcliff's desires and ambitions; but by then Heathcliff has had enough bitter experience to make him suspect that Nelly's moral instincts

^Mathison, "Nelly Dean and the Power of Wuthering Heights." p. 122, accuses Nelly of "inevitable adherence to expediency for her own comfort," and Hafley, "The Villain in Wuthering Heights." pp. 202-08, charges that Nelly deliberately encourages Catherine's romance with Edgar in order to receive her share of the wealth and status that h e r mistress will acquire. 75

are uncertain. Christmas Eve is Heathcliff's first meeting with Catherine since they spied on the Lintons, and he is hurt and angered by her newly acquired apprehension that he may spoil her appearance: "'I shall be as dirty as I please, and I like to be dirty, and I will be dirty'" (Ch. vii, p. 52). Elsewhere

Nelly provides us with a penetrating analysis of this attitude:

. . . [Heathcliff] acquired a slouching gait, and ignoble look; his naturally reserved disposition was exaggerated into an almost idiotic excess of unsociable moroseness; and he took a grim pleasure, apparently, in exciting the aversion rather than the esteem of his few acquaintance [sic]. (Ch. viii, p. 63)

Nelly understands the nature of Heathcliff's resistance; and, to counteract it, she seeks to persuade him that he must swallow his pride and adopt the very social values of the Lintons that he has previously rejected. What Nelly falls to understand, however, is that Heathcliff has received a considerable blow

to his own "esteem" because his best (and only) friend now considers him inadequate. The narrator evidently construes Heathcliff's bitter repudiation of Catherine's snobbishness as more evidence of his being "sullen" and Insensitive, for there is no syntpathy in her account of his suffering: "He managed to continue work till nine o'clock, and then marched dumb and dour to his chamber"

(Ch. vii, p. 53). Since Nelly is as familiar with Heathcliff's deficiencies in manners and dress as Catherine is, she feels that in clinging to what remains of his self-respect he is merely 76. being tiresomely stubborn. When Heathcliff does undergo a complete reversal of attitude his reluctance implies that it has cost him dearly in terms of pride. But Nelly has had so little respect for him to begin with that she only wonders why it takes him so long to follow her advice:

He hung about me for a while, and having screwed ip his courage, exclaimed abruptly— "Nelly, make me decent, I'm going to be good." "High time, Heathcliff," I said, . . . (Ch. vii, p. S3)

Once Nelly succeeds in winning Heathcliff to her optimistic point of view, Emily Bronte exposes the falsity of that optimism by revealing that Nelly does not really know her own mind. .

Ironically enough, Nelly subverts her own ideal of peace on. earth at Christmas, when Catherine's triumphal return from

Thrushcross Grange subjects Nelly to some of Heathcliff's own feelings of disappointment and frustration. During her grand, ladylike entrance Catherine's "splendid garments" prevent her from returning the dogs' enthusiastic greeting, and Nelly is mortified to observe her mistress taking the same precautions with her human companions. In fact, when Catherine kisses

Nelly gingerly to avoid getting flour on her frock, Nelly is so vexed that she takes Heathcliff's part when Catherine realizes that 'her embrace with him has also endangered her appearance and he retorts, "'You needn't have touched mel'” Of course,■ 77

Kelly is honest enough to admit that Heathcliff is appallingly ill-kempt; but she is too upset to aid Hindley and Edgar by dwelling on Heathcliff's obvious deficiencies. Instead, Nelly places herself in the anomalous position of resenting the ladylike deportment which she had encouraged when Catherine was a wild, young tomboy. Sarcastically Nelly describes "playing lady's maid to the newcomer," Catherine, whose "fingers [were] wonderfully whitened with doing nothing" (Ch. vii, pp. 51-52). Once Nelly herself becomes miffed at the snobbishness which Catherine brings with her from the Lintons, she becomes more keenly aware of

Hindley's deliberate social slights to Heathcliff: "'Shake hands, Heathcliff,* said Hr. Earnshaw, condescendingly; 'once in a way, that is permitted'" (Ch. vii, p. 52). Hindley's politeness is clearly designed to anger Heathcliff and to embarrass

Catherine because both Hindley and his wife are "watchCing} anxiously their meeting, thinking it would enable them to judge.

In some measure, what grounds they had for hoping to succeed

* , in separating the two friends" (Ch. vii, p. 51). Here Nelly's sensitivity toward the nuances of social Injustice seems remarkable, not only because of her own previous neglect of Heathcliff* s feelings, but also because of the partiality toward Edgar which she will exhibit when another reunion occurs, ftien it will be

Heathcliff's return which threatens Edgar's marriage with Catherine, so Nelly will fail to notice any condescension on Edgar's part 78

when he attempts to chill Catherine's Joy by referring to Heathcliff as "a runaway servant" who ought to be received in the kitchen instead of the parlor (Ch. x, pp. 83*84). But just now, in the Christmas Eve episode, Nelly reacts quickly to such snobbery when it touches her personally. Realizing that Catherine must have acquired her high-handed attitude toward her old friends from the Lintons, Nelly sarcastically refers to Edgar and his sister as "darlings" too panpered and soft to associate with the likes of Heathcliff (Ch. vii, p. 52). She then drifts into sentimental reverie about the old days when servants were properly appreciated at Wuthering Heightst

. . . I remembered how old Earnshaw used to come in when all was tidied, and call me a cant lass, and slip a shilling into my hand, as a Christmas box; and front that I went on to think of his fondness for Heathcliff, and his dread lest he should suffer neglect after death had removed him; and that naturally led me to consider the poor lad's situation now, and from singing I changed my mind to crying. (Ch. vii, pp. 52-53)

Like the previous episode, in wh ich Catherine snobbishly rebuffed first Nelly and then Heathcliff, this one begins with a moment of self-pity, Nelly's fond recollection of a token of affection and praise for her services— the coin which, presumably, will no longer be forthcoming from Hindley. This self-pity is then transferred to Heathcliff, the orphan who had replaced Nelly in her master's affections and who, like her, is now being victimized by changes of circumstance over which he has no control. 79

It is not from love of Heathcliff that Nelly weeps--she has already assured us of that in her narration— but from pity for

him and for herself* Just as selfishness played its part in

Nelly's first change of attitude during Heathcliff's illness,

self-pity is important throughout the Christmas Day chapter; whereas Nelly acknowledged the selfishness in her narrative

then, however,- she does not perceive the self-pity which motivates

her now. The reader is thus encouraged to see beyond Nelly's

own account of what is happening by the parallel development

of the two episodes in the Christmas chapter, and by the unobtrusive *

transition which Nelly has used above: • • from that Cold

Earnshaw'8 generosity^ I sent on to think of his fondness for

Heathcliff, , . .»

"'Nelly, make me decent, I'm going to be good'11 (Ch. vii,

p. S3). Heathcliff's plea demonstrates the importance that

he attaches to Catherine's opinion of him; and his na?ve

oversimplification of the social barriers confronting him also

plaintively attests to Heathcliff's complete confidence in

Nelly's counsel— a confidence which, of course, turns out to be

misplaced* For, although she does not seem to realize it even

now, as she tells her story to Lockwood, Nelly places herself in

a false position when she encourages Heathcliff to assert his

physical superiority over Edgar: • . I'll steal time to arrange you so that Edgar Linton shall look quite a doll beside you; and that he does. You are younger, and yet. I'll be bound, you are taller and twice as broad across the shoulders— you could knock him down in a twinkling. Don't you feel that you could?" Heathcliff's face brightened a moment; then it was overcast afresh, and he sighed. "But, Nelly, if I knocked him down twenty times, that wouldn't make him less handsome, or me more so. I wish I had light hair and a fair skin, and was dressed and behaved as well, and had a chance of being as rich as he will bet" "And cried for mamma, at every turn," I added, "and trembled if a country lad heaved his fist against you, and sat at home all day for a shower of rain. O, Heathcliff, you are showing a poor spiritl" (Ch. vii, p. 541

Carried away by her resentment over the Lintons' influence on

Catherine and by her hypocritical enthusiasm for reforming

Heathcliff, Nelly offers advice which seems decidedly uncharacteristic when we recall her former role as peacemaker between Heathcliff and Hindley. The plan to have Heathcliff win Catherine by catering to her new standards of personal appearance certainly seems to be worthy of the Nelly whose pragmatism we have come to expect. But Heathcliff's own common sense tells him that Nelly is misguided in trying to bolster his ego by raising the prospect of a fight with Edgar, and events prove the boy to be more prudent than his counselor.

When Hindley* s and Edgar's taunts force Heathcliff to take

Nelly's advice and throw the applesauce, only Hindley profits. 81

because he.then has the excuse he is always watching for, to teach

Heathcliff a lesson in his own ways

"There, there, children--to your seats!" cried Hindley, bustling in. "That brute of a lad [Heathcliff3 has warmed me nicely [by provoking a flogging]. Next time, Master Edgar, take the law into your own fists— it will give you an appetite!" (Ch. vii, p. 56)

Hindley* s jocular paraphrase of taking the law into one's own hands parodies Nelly's serious exhortation of Heathcliff to combat, revealing how misguided she has been as an adviser.

Heathcliff is right, then, to insist on the irrelevance of Nelly's assumption that he can always win over Edgar in a fair fight. For life has never been fair to Heathcliff; Hindley's oppression has taught him that only birth, breeding, and wealth can give one person lasting power over another. Nelly's own narration reveals just this sort of bias:

[Catherine] had a wondrous constancy to old attachments; even Heathcliff kept his ' hold on her affections unalterably, and young Linton, with all his superiority, found it difficult to make an equally deep Impression.(Ch. viii, p. 61)

The qualification, "even Heathcliff," reveals that Nelly has always considered him inferior. In fact, on reflection the narrator finds it difficult to understand why Catherine had cared about

Heathcliff's opinion of her at all when Edgar clearly manifested such "superiority." 82

Even the fantasies with which Nelly seeks to assure Heathcliff

of his true worth are based on the very class prejudices which

she has been trying to circumvent i

"You're fit for a prince in disguise. Who knows but your father was Enperor of China, and your mother an Indian queen, each of them able to buy up, with one week's income, Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange together? And you were kidnapped by wicked sailors, and brought to England. Were I in your place, I would frame high notions of my birth; and the thoughts of what I was should give me courage and dignity to support the oppressions of a little farmer 1" So I chatted on; ■ • . (Ch. vii, pp. 54-S5)

By calling Hindley a "little farmer" and urging Heathcliff to

"frame high notions of his birth," Nelly advocates the same sort of class prejudice which, through bitter experience, Heathcliff has already learned he will never be able to overcome at Wuthering

Heights. Nelly's sympathy with Heathcliff's predicament at

Christmas cannot last because it is founded on the secret dreams and aggressive impulses which she herself once had as a servant

in the Earnshaw family. When she urges Heathcliff to think of himself as "a prince in disguise," there must be self-pity, and perhaps even jealousy, in Nelly's supposition, "were I in your place." The Christmas episode is unlike any other in which Nelly participates because she ordinarily has too much common sense to indulge in the romantic aspirations of Catherine or Heathcliff.

In this episode, Emily Bronte's narrator not only misleads Heathcliff 83 but also deceives herself, as her commentary reveals when she describes how Hindley and Edgar react toward Heathcliff, now that he is clean and presentable:

"What! Ter led Hindley} you are attesting the coxcomb, are you? Wait till I get hold of those elegant locks--see if I won't pull them a bit longerl" "They are long enough already," observed Master Linton, peeping from the door-way "I wonder they don't make his head ache* It's like a colt's mane over his eyes!" He ventured this remark without any intention to insult; but Heathcliff's violent nature was not prepared to endure the appearance of impertinence from one whom he seemed to hate, even then, as a rival* (Ch. vii, p. 55}

To assure a thirteen-year-old boy that he can overpower a sissy

two years older is to issue a challenge hard to resist, especially when the two teenagers are rival suitors. And, since this is what Nelly the character has just done, her narrative tone of

surprise ("[Heathcliff} seemed to hate [Edgar}, even then")

indicates either considerable naYvete in someone usually so

sensible and pragmatic or else a disturbing capacity for

self-deception. The latter seems more likely because the narrator

again misleads the reader when she asserts that Edgar did not

intend to insult his rival* Even if this were true (which seems

doubtful, in view of Edgar's-petulant insults when Heathcliff

appears in the next chapter), it is irrelevant because Heathcliff.

needs her defense far more than Edgar does. At this moment

Heathcliff neither knows nor cares what Edgar's intentions are* He realizes only that both Edgar and Hindley have ridiculed tlie change of appearance which represents his love for Catherine and his confidence in Nelly; and thus, he retaliates in accordance with Nelly's advice, not because of the "violent nature" which she attributes to him. Yet, once Heathcliff has thrown the applesauce at Edgar and has been thrashed by Hindley for it, he finds that Nelly wants the violence to end, even though she covertly acquiesced in it herself, scrubbing the applesauce off

Edgar's nose and mouth "rather spitefully" (Ch. vii, p. 55):

"I'm trying to settle how I shall pay Hindley back* I don't care how long I wait, if I can only do it^ at last* 1 hope he will not die before I do!" "For shame, Heathclifft" said I. "It is for God to punish wicked people; we should learn to forgive." "No, God won't have the satisfaction that I shall," he returned* "I only wish I knew the best way! Let me alone, and I'll plan it out: while I'm thinking of that, I don't feel pain*" (Ch. vii, p. 57)

With the best of intentions, Nelly has been playing both ends against the middle, arousing Heathcliff's hopes and sanctioning the use of violence toward Edgar, then sympathizing with Edgar and wishing no harm to Hindley after Edgar is attacked. Heathcliff has no more patience with her religious cant, for his revenge has been necessitated by Hindley who, according to Catherine's diary, professes to be a Christian himself. His rejection of

Nelly here is prophetic; for, after this abortive attempt to 85 advise Heathcliff, Nelly does let him alone, even at the crucial moment when she sees that he ha3 overheard Catherine announcing her decision to marry Edgar*

After the Christmas debacle Heathcliff no longer pays attention to Nelly's hypocritical moralizing* He has tried

her way and failed; and now, more embittered than ever with the

Earnshaws' and the Lintons* standards of value, and with the

religious cant used by Joseph and Nelly to justify those standards,

Heathcliff turns his attention toward a revenge of his own which

will predominate throughout the rest of the novel. Yet, even

as he runs away from Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff is following

the fanciful plan of revenge which Nelly had devised in order

to improve his morale at Christmas* By breaking all ties with

Yorkshire, Heathcliff does seem to return as a "prince in disguise";

. . . 1 heard a voice behind me say-- "Nelly, is that you?" It was a deep voice, and foreign in tone; yet there was something in the manner of pronouncing my name which made it sound familiar* (Ch. x, p. 82)

For Nelly, Heathcliff's "familiar" voice has been modified by

"deep" tones of maturity and the "foreign" accent of bitter

experience abroad. These ominous changes in young Heathcliff

keep Nelly from recognizing him now, just as they make Catherine

claim "that is not rajr Heathcliff" later (Ch* xv, p* 134), because * . *1 s * * neither Nelly nor Catherine is prepared to accept any responsibility

for having made Heathcliff a foreigner* 86

Heathcliff's return seems like a prophecy fulfilled because a ploughboy has become a "prince in disguise," a man of the world capable of using his hard-earned air of civility to

"buy up • ■ • Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange together" in accordance with Nelly's whimsical suggestion at Christmas.

In running away, Heathcliff has been able to obtain what he had always insisted he would need to conpete with Edgar and Hindley on their own terms. When he revisits Thrushcross Grange, Heathcliff brings with him enough money to gamble with Hindley for his property, and he has acquired a sufficient appearance of good breeding to captivate Edgar's sister. Up to this point, when

Heathcliff begins to put his revenge into practice, Emily Bronte has used Nelly's distorted view of his childhood to make him the most moral character in the novel,® Thus, even though we cannot condone Heathcliff's announcement of revenge, we can understand why he is planning a wicked but triumphant future in order to forget the "pain" of his bitter past.

®0f course, when he returns to execute his revenge, Heathcliff quickly forfeits his moral superiority. Arnold Kettle, "Emily Bronte: Wuthering Heights." Introduction to the English Novel (2 vols., 2d ed.; London: Hutchinson & Co. [Publishers!] Ltd., 1967), I, 130-4S, overlooks this change in Heathcliff from a frustrated orphan to a spiteful man of property more tyrannical than Hindley himself. For correctives to Kettle, see Shapiro, "Wuthering Heights as a Victorian Novel," pp. 291-95, 296, n.5 and Hagan, "Control of Sympathy in Wuthering Heights." pp. 305-07. 87

From the moment Heathcliff joins the family, Nelly resents him; and when, as a child, Heathcliff does not demonstrate sufficient gratitude for his rough and unjust upbringing, Nelly concludes that her charge has a hard, insensitive temperament.

But Emily Bronte uses the injustice of Nelly's observations to demonstrate just the opposite. Even before he is old enough to know why, Heathcliff discovers that the Eamshaws and the

Lintons, like Nelly herself, have little love and no sympathy to offer an outsider. Their Christian morality is hypocrisy because they use it to justify those principles of birth and wealth which serve to perpetuate their own status. Yet the narrator herself has been-so hypocritical about Heathcliff that she cannot perceive the same fault in others. Made ineffectual by her own prejudices, Nelly Dean moralizes in vain as Heathcliff is neglected and Catherine becomes a lady. CHAPTER IV

THE NARRATOR AS PRAGMATIST:

NELLY DEAN AND CATHERINE EARNSHAW

•p In a perceptive commentary on Nelly Dean, J. K. Mathison states that her inadequacies represent "the failure of the ordinarily good."1 In these two chapters on Nelly I extend this idea by proposing that Emily Bronte uses her principal narrator to demonstrate that pragmatic morality is useless when it is not practiced with love and understanding. Nelly misunderstands Catherine for much the same reason that she misguides Heathcliff because, like Lockwood, she is unable to care deeply enough about other people to sympathize with them when they are in need of help. The fact that Prances Earnshaw

is a relative stranger helps to explain why Nelly should fail

to recognize that her morbid eccentricities are the symptoms

of a genuine decline in her health. But when, throughout

Catherine Eamshaw’s whole life, Nelly repeatedly underestimates her illness, too, it seems apparent that Emily Bronte’s narrator

^Mathison, "Nelly Dean and the Power of Wuthering Heights." p. 123. 88 89 cares too little, even about her. best friends, to respond to their private needs or to sympathize with their personal problems*

Just as she regarded Heathcliff as being "sullen11 because he ignored old Mr. Earnshaw, so Nelly feels that Catherine is

"wayward" because she teases her father and joins Heathcliff in rebellion against Hindley*s oppression* Nelly want3 Catherine to behave like a little ladyj but, when the Lintons succeed in making her one, Nelly is still not pleased:

At fifteen [Catherine] was the queen of the country-side; she had no peer, and she did turn out a haughty, headstrong creature! I own I did not like her after her infancy was past; and I vexed her frequently by trying to bring down her arrogance; she never took an aversion to me, though. (Ch* viii, p, 61)

Since Nelly is so intent on "bringing down [Catherine's] arrogance," she no doubt approves of Catherine's "blushing for all" (Ch. vii, p* 56) during the argument between Heathcliff and Edgar at Christinas. In her sudden zeal to defend Heathcliff,

Nelly even imagines that Catherine is undisturbed by the quarrel:

I waited behind her chair, and was pained to behold Catherine, with dry eyes and an indifferent air, commence cutting up the wing of a goose before her. "An unfeeling child," I thought to myself, "how lightly she dismisses her old playmate's troubles. I could not have imagined her to be so selfish." She lifted a mouthful to her lips; then she set it down again: her cheeks flushed, and the tears gushed over them. She slipped her fork to the floor, and hastily dived'- ' under the cloth to conceal her emotion. I did not call her unfeeling long, . . . (Ch. vii, p. 56) 90

We have noted previously how Nelly has often misconstrued

Heathcliff's repressed emotion as sullenness; and here she confuses indifference with Catherine's lady-like attempt to conceal her distress over Heathcliff's punishment in front of the Lintons* Nelly is Catherine's only adult confidante. Yet in this examination of their friendship, we see that there is seldom any communication between them because, from Catherine's childhood to the moment of her death, Nelly always views her mistress as being in the wrong.

Nelly never believes that Catherine has truly become a lady because she observes her acting a dual role in order to deceive £dgar as well as Heathcliff;

. . . [Catherine} gained the admiration of Isabella, and the heart and soul of her brother— acquisitions that flattered her from the first, for she was full of ambition, and led her to adopt a double character without exactly intending to deceive anyone. In the place where she heard Heathcliff termed a “vulgar young ruffian," and "worse than a brute," she took care not to act like him; but at home she had small inclination to practise politeness that would only be laughed at, and restrain an unruly nature when it would bring her neither credit nor praise. (Ch. viii, p. 62)

Having been a witness to Catherine's and Heathcliff's childhood escapades, Nelly naturally feels that Catherine's "unruly nature" represents her true character. Thus when Edgar comes to call,

Nelly attempts to expose the hypocrisy of the company manners 91 that Catherine adopts before the.Lintons. Surely Catherine is within her rights when she asks Nelly to stop cleaning in Edgar's presence. Nelly admits that she "rather relished mortifying

[Catherine's] vanity, now and then" (Ch. viii, p. 65), and this personal desire to embarrass her mistress by provoking a quarrel should remind us of Hindley, who derived similar personal satisfaction from encouraging Heathcliff to quarrel with Catherine at Christmas. To point up this parallel, Emily Bronte has the narrator excuse her actions by a parenthetical reminder that she was only following Hindley's orders (Ch. viii, p. 64), a strange shift of allegiance after her indignant opposition toward Hindley's previous attempts to embarrass Heathcliff.

Nelly's and Hindley's motives are both suspect, yet the results they achieve are quite dissimilar. Hindley relies on the divisive force of Heathcliff's inferior social status, whereas Nelly provokes a dispute between social equals so that

Catherine and Edgar only become more intimate, once he forgives her. This turn of events greatly displeases Nelly, and her narrative reveals that she blames it on Edgar. Nelly's own actions have, she feels, been justified throughout; she only regrets that her good intentions have been wasted on Edgar, who is too weak and

infatuated to leave Catherine, even after she has behaved so badly;

". • • he possessed the power to depart, as much as a cat possesses the power to leave a mouse half-killed, or a bird half-eaten" 92

(Ch. viii, p. 66). It may seem that Nelly's use of Imagery confirms Mark Schorer's generalization that in Wuthering

Heights, "the domestic and the gentler animals are generally used for purposes of harsh satire and vilification."^ Nelly rails at Edgar here, just as Heathcliff will later compare him to a lamb and Catherine will scornfully amend that to "a sucking leveret." a baby hare so young and helpless that it is still being nursed (Ch. xi. pp. 99-100). Gut Nelly's metaphor does not represent him as being either gentle or weak.

On the contrary, since Edgar has chosen to disregard Nelly's warning, she transfers responsibility for the quarrel from

Catherine to him, luridly depicting Edgar as the cat who, driven by uncontrollable appetite, will continue to prey upon his victims. The narrator knows how unhappy this marriage will make both Edgar and Catherine. Yet social prejudice has so prevailed over Christian charity that Nelly shows neither forgiveness nor pity, but only lasting contempt. To her, Edgar has forfeited his birthright of natural "superiority" (Ch. vlii, p. 61) by proposing to a foolish girl who persists in attempting to maintain close ties with Heathcliff— someone who Nelly, Catherine,

Edgar, and even Heathcliff himself, agree is beneath her socially*

o Schorer, Introduction to Wuthering Heights, p. xv. 93

Even after Catherine and Edgar are both dead, Nelly has occasion to remind Lockwood not to be deceived by Edgar's good looks;

. . . even Heathcliff kept his hold on [Catherine's] affections unalterably, and young Linton, with all his superiority, found it difficult to make an equally deep impression. He was my late master; that is his portrait over the fireplace. It used to hang on one side, and his wife's on the other; but hers has been removed,or else you might see something of what she was. Can you make that out? Mrs. Dean raised the candle, and I discerned a soft-featured face, exceedingly resembling the young lady at the Heights, but more pensive and amiable in expression. It formed a sweet picture. The long light hair curled slightly on the temple; the eyes were large and serious; the figure almost too graceful. I did not marvel how Catherine Earnshaw could forget her first friend for such an .individual, I marvelled how he, with a mind to correspond with his person, could fancy my idea of Catherine Earnshaw. "A very agreeable portrait," I observed to the housekeeper. "Is it like?" "Yes," she answered; "but he looked better when he was animated; that is his every day countenance; he wanted spirit in general." (Ch. viii, pp, 61-62)

Lockwood is not disturbed that Edgar should look more feminine than either Catherine; on the contrary, he is delighted to find an untroubled, "sweet picture" of a gentleman in his own image, born to please the ladies, Nelly, on the other hand, is more critical of the portrait because her own robust constitution 94 and masculine aggressiveness make her averse to softness in others, as Mathison has amply demonstrated* ®

But Nelly tempers Lockwood's enthusiasm about Edgar's portrait for another, more specific, reason. Lockwood is probably correct in supposing that Nelly has shown him the portrait so that he will agree it was strange of Catherine not to recognize Edgar's obvious "superiority" over Catherine's

"first friend," Heathcliff. But Lockwood, a s usual, assumes too much. It is presumptuous of him to suppose that Edgar is also superior to his "idea of Catherine Earnshaw" because he does not yet have an accurate idea of Edgar as a person. In fact, Nelly would not want Lockwood to praise Edgar at Catherine's expense because she is about to give Lockwood a more realistic perspective, recounting the episode we have just discussed in order to show how Edgar once humbled himself before Catherine's imperious will. When Nelly looks at Edgar's portrait, then, Bhe recalls his "every day" softness. What Lockwood most admires in

Edgar, Nelly sees as a basic flaw in his character.4

3 Mathison, "Nelly Dean and the Power of Wuthering Heights." . pp. 109-112. 4This is, of course, only one of many views taken toward Edgar*. Shapiro. Wuthering Heights as a Victorian Novel," p. 287, charges Edgar with selfishness and with being cruel to Isabella. But Mary Visick, The Genesis of Wuthering Heights (Hong Kongr Hong Kong University Press, 1958), p. 59, feels that Edgar's "unorthodox charity of mind cancels out his occasional human pettiness" because he is able to envision Catherine as being 95

When Catherine comes to tell Nelly that she is going to marry Edgar, Nelly is still strongly influenced by their argument over Edgar's visit earlier that afternoon. Vexed by her failure to enlighten Edgar about Catherine's immaturity, Nelly is still smarting inwardly from the humiliating slap which Catherine gave her for trying to play chaperone. Thus, she is in no mood to oppose Catherine openly now:

"To-day, Edgar Linton has asked me to marry him, and I've given him an answer.. Now, before I tell you whether it was a consent, or denial, you tell me which it ought to have been.'1 "Really, Miss Catherine, how can I know?" I replied. "To be sure, considering the exhibition you performed in his'presence this afternoon, I might say it would be wise to refuse him: since he asked you after that, he must either be hopelessly stupid or a venturesome fool." "If you talk so, I won't tell you any more," she returned, peevishly, rising to her feet, "I accepted him, Nelly* Be quick, and say whether I was wrongl" "You accepted him? then, what good is it discussing the matter? You have pledged your word, and cannot retract." "But, say whether I should have done so— dot" she exclaimed in an irritated tone, chafing her hands together, and frowning. (Ch. ix, p. 70)

happy in the next world. Other notable defenses of Edgar may be found in: G. D. Klingopulos, "The Novel as Dramatic Poem (II): Wuthering Heights." Scrutiny. XIV (1946-47), 275-276; :.P. Drew, "Charlotte Bronte as a Critic of Wuthering Heights." p. 368, And Nelly herself generally defends Edgar, especially when contrasting him with Heathcliff (Ch. viii, p. 61; Ch. xvii, p. 151). 96

At the outset, Catherine plainly states that she has not come

to Nelly for advice; she has already accepted Edgar, and now

seeks adult sanction of her decision, merely to ease her troubled

conscience. But Nelly will not be pressured into stating cate­

gorically whether Catherine is right or wrong in accepting Edgar.

Instead, she seizes the initiative herself, putting Catherine

on the defensive by subjecting her to a very worldly "catechism"

which ends in a stalemate:

"You love Mr. Edgar, because he is handsome, and young, and cheerful, and rich, and loves you. The last, however* goes for nothing. You would love him without that, probably; and with it, you wouldn't, unless he possessed the four former attractions." "No, to be sure not: I should only pity him— hate him, perhaps, if he were ugly, and a clown." "But there, are several other handsome, rich young men in the world; handsomer, possibly, and richer than he is. What should hinder you from loving them?" "If there be any, they are out of my way. I've seen none like Edgar." "You may see some; and he won't always be handsome, and young, and may not always be rich." "He is now; and I have only to do with the present. I wish you would speak rationally." "Well, that settles it— if you have only to do with the present, marry Mr. Linton." "I don't want your permission for that— I shall marry him; and yet you have not told me whether I'm right." "Perfectly right; if people be right to marry only for the present. And now, let us hear what you are unhappy about."(Ch. ix, p. 71) 97

At the end of this passage Nelly is being ironic, for her catechism

has adequately exposed the folly of Catherine's decision to

marry Edgar. Both -women know that, even though Heathcliff

may be "ugly, and a clown" in comparison with Edgar, Catherine

feels much more than hatred or pity for him. This assumption

remains unspoken between them, however, because Catherine, irritable

over being defeated by the remorseless logic of Nelly's catechism,

seeks to discredit Nellyfc argument by calling it irrational.

Nelly understands that Catherine is desperately anxious to make

Nelly think the way she does; so, instead of continuing to

oppose Catherine point for point, as in her catechism, she tries

a new strategy of reductio ad absurdum. Sarcastically Nelly

adopts her mistress' own logic, carrying the argument to its

unsatisfactory conclusion in order to expose the sophistry with

which Catherine has sought to deceive her own consciences

"Your brother will be pleased; the old lady and gentleman will not object, I think; you will escape from a disorderly, comfortless home into a wealthy, respectable one; and you love Edgar, and Edgar loves you. All seems smooth and easy— where is the obstacle?" (Ch. ix, p. 71)

There may be a note of personal triumph in Nelly' 3 sarcastic

inquiry about the source of Catherine's unhappiness, for Nelly

knows without asking that Catherine has pla ced herself in an

impossible situation with Heathcliff, now that she and Edgar 98 have both disregarded her warnings. At this point it is Catherine who is at fault, so Nelly is entitled to be disagreeably smug about having done her duty; she has not, like so many other governesses (not to mention parents), given her blessing to a marriage merely because it will increase the wealth and social

status of her mistress.

But the ethical superiority of Nelly's position is lost

on Catherine. Although she may have been vanquished by Nelly's

superior logic, Catherine is far from undergoing an agonizing moral reappraisal. Instead of feeling guilty about having placed

Edgar's worldly attractions and advantages before Heathcliff's

needs and desires, she confidently claims that her marriage to

Edgar will be in Heathcliff's own best interest: "'It would

degrade me to marry Heathcliff now; so he shall never know how

I love him; • • ." (Ch. ix, p. 72). Of course, Nelly is not fooled

by Catherine's quick shift from the selfish pride of "'it would

degrade me'" to the self-sacrifice implicit in "'he shall never

know,'" which would make Catherine a martyr for keeping her love

for Heathcliff a secret. Nelly is too pragmatic herself to

let Catherine rationalize her self-interest by representing it

as idealism. When Catherine declares how selfless she is being,

to marry Edgar with the object of using his money to help Heathcliff,

Nelly disagrees: "r. . • though I'm hardly a judge, I think that's

the worst motive you've given yet for being the wife of young

Linton'" (Ch. ix, p. 73). 99

Despite the introductory disclaimer, Nelly's response amounts to a flat contradiction, Yet Catherine is too insecure now to lose her temper as she did before, when Nelly crossed her in front of Edgar* She has had so little success in defending her marriage on ethical grounds that she resorts instead to the metaphysical justification of "'an existence of yours beyond you'" (Ch. ix, pp* 73-74), which she had begun to develop previously when trying to tell Nelly about her dreams* At that time Catherine's decision to marry Edgar had been enough to drive off Heathcliff almost immediately. The reader may have been intrigued by

Catherine's attempts to explain, in terms of dreams and metaphors, . the presence of a spiritual bond between her and Heathcliff which, she was certain, could not be altered by her marriage to Edgar*

But Nelly was too superstitious then to listen to Catherine's dreams; and she is too much the pragmatic moralist now to entertain

Catherine's assumption that she can remain true to Heathcliff in spirit while marrying Edgar in the flesh* For her, no metaphorical distinction between worldly and spiritual love can alter the fact that Catherine is about to make everyone unhappy because she has accepted a proposal from one man, even though she loves another:

®We have just discussed the striking metaphor which Nelly used to describe Edgar in Chapter viii, and she uses others for Heathcliff in that chapter and the next (pp. 64, 68), As a narrator, then, Nelly can make striking use of metaphor when 100

"My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods. Time will change it. I'm well aware, as winter changes the trees* My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath--a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff--he's always, always, in my mind--not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself--but as my own being--so, don't talk of our separation again--it is impracticable; and--" She paused, and hid her face in the folds of my gown; but I jerked it forcibly away* I was out of patience with her follyl "If I can make any sense of your nonsense. Miss," I said, "it only goes to convince me that you are ignorant of the duties you undertake in marrying; or else that you are a wickecLunprincipled girl." {Ch* ix, p. 74)

One commentator neatly summarizes the effect of scenes like this by observing that "Nelly's incomprehension is part of the exile under which Catherine is suffering."® When Edgar weeps after

Catherine praises Heathcliff, Catherine unfairly casts all the blame on him by attributing his emotion either to envy or a sick headache (Ch. x, p. 86). Yet Nelly herself is scarcely more charitable. She receives Catherine's news of Edgar's proposal with the opinion that "he must either be hopelessly stupid or a venturesome fool" (Ch. ix, p. 70); and here she

she is moved to do so. But, as a character, Nelly finds it difficult to follow the metaphors used by others. Emily Bronte's other narrator, Lockwood, finds this out when he tries to interject a particularly pretentious conceit of his own into their conversation (Ch. vii, p. 58).

Ewbank, Their Proper Sphere, p. 119. 101 employs the same strategy, reducing Catherine's acceptance of

Edgar to two equally undesirable alternatives of ignorance or lack of principle. At such moments Nelly appears as peevish and as arbitrary as Catherine herself, and we feel that Charlotte

Bronte must have been oversimplifying when, in her preface to Wuthering Heights, she declared: "For a specimen of true benevolence and homely fidelity, look at the character of

Nelly Dean.” To give us a view of Nelly more commensurate, with the type of character Emily Bronte seems to be portraying here, Mathison would substitute common sense for Charlotte's

"true benevolence."® For the very practicality that has made

Nelly such a reliable judge of Catherine's worldly motives for marrying Edgar also prevents her from appreciating the

spiritual bond with Heathcliff in which Catherine places so much

trust, and makes Nelly reject out of hand the dream through which Catherine seeks to express her immortal commitment to

the Wuthering Heights of her childhood (Ch. ix, pp. 72-73).

Nelly's lack of sympathy for Catherine's illogical desires here

should remind us of Lockwood's amused disbelief over Catherine's ghost; for, in each case, the narrator is on the side of coirmon

^Charlotte Bronte, "Preface" in Sale, p. 11.

®Mathison, "Nelly Dean and the Power of Wuthering Heights." p. 115. 102 sense, yet the character wins our synpathy by the emotional integrity of his response to something beyond our understanding.

Those qualities in Nelly which Charlotte Bronte brings to our attention may be admirable in themselves, but too often they prove to be inadequate for the extraordinary circumstances in which Nelly finds herself.

Even if Nelly's response to Catherine does not receive our sympathy, it does seem consistent, however, and perhaps even inevitable in terms of the scene as a whole. As we have seen, Nelly has consistently sought to place Catherine on the defensive, making her justify her decision to marry Edgar in terms of a pragmatic ethic. Catherine, on the other hand, attenpts to defend herself by justifying her actions in terras of metaphysics; and finally, in a last attempt to speak Nelly's language, Catherine seeks to express her metaphysical justification in pragmatic terminology. The result is a complete contradiction in terms, which Nelly calls "nonsense," when Catherine describes as

"impracticable" the separation from Heathcliff which any practical person would regard as a sine qua non for a successful marriage with Edgar.

There is another, more obvious, lack of communication between Nelly and her mistress in Chapter ix. When Catherine informs Nelly of her decision to marry Edgar, Nelly believes that Heathcliff has left the house. Soon Nelly realises that 103

Heathcliff has overheard Catherine say it would degrade her to marry him, and that Heathcliff has left in disgust before hearing Catherine confess that she herself has more in common with Heathcliff than with Edgar, Yet Nelly chooses to remain silent, thereby permitting Heathcliff to retain a distorted impression of Catherine's feelings about him and also preventing

Catherine from knowing about it until too late, after he has run away. Nelly continues to keep all of this to herself, even when Catherine's suspicion that Heathcliff may have overheard them gives Nelly the opportunity to confess her share of the guilt for Heathcliff's sudden disappearance.

Mathison views this episode a s "Nelly's major failure" because "her own inconvenience is m o r e important than either

Heathcliff's or [Catherine's} suffering, • . But Mathison goes too far when he asserts that "Heathcliff and [Catherine} would have fared better with worse parental guidance," for this implies that the lovers' unhappiness is somehow caused by g Nelly's inadequacies. Another commentator goes even further, implying that, Nelly deliberately betrays Heathcliff in order to promote Catherine's romance with Edgar and to win herself a more comfortable position as lady's maid at Thrushcross Grange*

9 Mathison, "Nelly Dean and the Power of Wuthering Heights." pp. 122-23.

*°Hafley, "The Viliain in Wuthering Heights." pp. 202<-08. 104

When we view Nelly's "failure" in context, however, both of these charges seen excessive. We have already seen that

Nelly was very definitely "inconvenienced" earlier, by a slap

from Catherine when she sought to obstruct Catherine's romance with Edgar. Yet later that very day, Nelly continues to pursue

the same end, more indirectly this time, through her catechism,

Nelly feels that Catherine is too headstrong and unstable to be fit for marriage to anyone; fcnd, by the end of her catechism, .

she has proved that Catherine does not know her own mind. Thus,

Nelly's failure to tell Catherine that Heathcliff is overhearing

their conversation is quite consistent with her previous intentions.

Once she catches sight of Heathcliff, Nelly decides to perform

the same service for him that she had sought to provide for

Edgar earlier in the day: to let each of them see how immature

and unstable his ronantic idol becomes in time of stress,**

John Fraser, "The Name of Action: Nelly Dean and Wuthering Heights." NCF. XX (1965-66), 232-33, considers Nelly's failure to tell Catherine about Heathcliff's presence to be negligible because any meeting between Catherine and Heathcliff could have generated no light, but only heat. Evidently Fraser feels the conversation between Nelly and Catherine in Chapter ix exposes in Catherine a misguided sense of loyalty to Heathcliff that makes her marriage to Edgar inevitable. Thus, even if Nelly had permitted a meeting between Catherine and Heathcliff at this,moment, the outcome would have been similar: Catherine's naYve condescension (revealed by Nelly's exposure of her "worse motive yet" for marrying Edgar, that of civilizing Heathcliff with Edgar's money--Ch* ix, p* 73) would have clashed with Heathcliff*s sullen pride to produce the same bitterness and frustration. But the parallel situation in Chapter viii makes it just as possible to argue that a meeting Previously Nelly had failed to keep Edgar and Catherine apart; now, however, she succeeds too well with Heathcliff#

She knows that Heathcliff ran off before Catherine had a chance

to temper her criticism of him with a declaration of love#

Thus, she nervously silences Catherine, not wanting to hear any more herself now that Heathcliff is no longer there to

listen# It is probably guilt that inpels Nelly to take the absent Heathcliff's part, reminding Catherine that she is

deserting him by marrying Edgar. For Nelly is in a better

position than Catherine to know how Heathcliff will suffer

because he has heard only half the truth# Finally, when it

becomes clear that Heathcliff will not return, and when Catherine

grows concerned about his disappearance, Nelly feels obliged

to explain that he had overheard their conversation. But this

news so upsets Catherine that Nelly feels all the more justified

in having delayed its

She jumped up in a fine fright, flung Hareton onto the settle, and ran to seek for her friend herself, not taking leisure to consider why she was so flurried, or how her talk would have affected him. (Ch. ix, p. 74)

between Catherine and Heathcliff might have had the opposite effect. We know that Nelly is still conscious of having created a lovers' quarrel which brought Catherine and Edgar closer together, so perhaps she does not wish to give Catherine and Heathcliff the same opportunity. Since we cannot be certain of anything beyond the fact that Heathcliff and Catherine did not meet, this sort of speculation is unconvincing, whether it is used to,support Nelly or to attack her. 106

Throughout this chapter Nelly's common sense has prompted her to make the best of Catherine's bad bargain; and even Mathison, when he criticizes Nelly for not doing more, parenthetically concedes that

"few could have done better."*2 In this episode, as in most of the others, Catherine is in the wrong; yet it is Nelly who loses stature by coldly confronting her with righteous advice. With Catherine as with Heathcliff, Emily

Bronte is using her narrator to show that moral judgments, however well-intentioned, are no substitute for the love and understanding that all people need, especially those who are in trouble. From the beginning, Nelly only grudgingly accepted the role of substitute mother which came to her by default; The curate might set as many chapters as he pleased for Catherine to get by heart, and Joseph might thrash Heathcliff till his arm ached; they forgot everything the minute they were together again, at least the minute they had contrived some naughty plan of revenge; and many a time I've cried to myself to watch them growing more reckless daily, and I not daring to speak a syllable for fear of losing the small power I still retained over the unfriended creatures. (Ch. vi, p. 46) In trying to explain her lack of moral influence over the children,

Nelly foreshadows the inevitability of Heathcliff's vengeance.

Her observation that the children "forgot everything . . • the minute

they had contrived some naughty plan of revenge" is echoed by

Heathcliff himself at Christmas, when Nelly finds that she cannot prevent him from being humiliated by Hindley and Edgar: "'Let me

*2Mathison, "Nelly Dean and the Power of Wuthering Heights." p. 122. 107 alone [Nelly}, and I'll plan [my revenge]): while I'm thinking of that, I don't feel pain'"(Ch. vii, p. 57). As a child, Heathcliff has learned to ease the "pain" of frustration with thoughts of hatred instead of love; thus, as an adult, Heathcliff conceives a plan for revenge once he realizes that Catherine has married

Edgar. But the method fails. His agony is only increased when he discovers that the very plan through which he seeks to avenge his loss destroys Catherine herself as well as his enemies*

Of course, the narrator is claiming here that she was powerless to prevent all of this from the beginning. But is

Nelly's influence over them really only a matter of "power"?

Hindley's oppression provided her with enough power to instruct

Heathcliff how to be good at Christmas, and Catherine's own conscience gave Nelly the power to pass judgment on Catherine's relationship xvith Edgar. Yet we have seen that Nelly gains no more lasting moral influence over Heathcliff or Catherine than she had vfcen they were "reckless" children. As a character Nelly did not know, and as a narrator she apparently has not learned, that one develops moral authority not merely by gaining power over others but by exercising that power sympathetically, out of love.

In Nelly Dean, Emily Bronte shows the futility of a well-meaning Christian who exerts no more beneficial influence than Joseph with his threats of damnation or Hindley with his use of physical punishment because she, too, practices moral coercion 108

in its more subtle forms of criticism and reproof. Catherine and

Heathcliff do not hate Nelly as they do Hindley, or deride her as they do Joseph; they realize that, compared with them, she is a benevolent figure of authority. Both Catherine and Heathcliff, however, have learned to disregard Nelly's advice. To them, as to us, she represents little irore than adult authority because she uses moralistic cant to excuse her unjust treatment of

Heathcliff and because she gives Catherine advice when she asks for understanding,and sarcasm when she needs sympathy. Nelly's advocacy of Heathcliff against Hindley and her opposition to

Catherine's marriage through her catechism come too late. The material aspects of Edgar's appeal were evident to Heathcliff more than two years earlier, when Nelly was still optimistic about his

chances in a fair fight with Edgar and Heathcliff objected that

the competition had never been fair to begin withi H'I wish

1 had light hair and a fair skin, and was dressed and behaved as well, and had a chance of being as rich as he will bel'" (Ch. vii, p. 54). But for Catherine Nelly's catechism is not only too late,

since she has already accepted Edgar; it is also irrelevant because

Catherine wants to know whether she has been true not to society's ethical norms, but to her own feelings. Even after Nelly exposes

Catherine's selfishness in marrying Edgar, we still identify with

Catherine's passionate confusion rather than with Nelly's stern pragmatism. When Nelly blames Heathcliff's disappearance wholly on Catherine, and then in her narration agrees parenthetically 109

that this blame is justified (Ch. ix, p. 79), we cannot help sympathizing with Catherine and Heathcliff, whether they fully deserve it or not.

When Heathcliff*s return to Thrushcross Grange threatens

Catherine's marriage, Nelly tries to assess her own attitude toward the ensuing clash of wills between Catherine and Edgars

My heart invariably cleaved to the master's, in preference to Catherine's side; with reason, I imagined, for he was hind, and trustful, and honourable: and she— she could not be called the opposite, yet she seemed to allow herself such wide latitude that I had little faith in her principles, and still less sympathy for her feelings, (Ch. x, p, 93)'

Nelly's preference for Edgar merely reflects the moral pragmatism we have come to expect from this narrator. What seems important is Nelly's appeal to "reason" to justify her having "still less sympathy for [Catherine's3 feelings" than "faith in her principles,"

This statement echoes Nelly's apology for her treatment of

Heathcliff, ", , , 1 wasn't reasonable enough to feel my injustice,

• • ." (Ch. iv, pp. 39-40). With Catherine as with Heathcliff,

Emily Bronte's narrator so readily subordinates personal syn^athy to unjust principle that, in times of emotional crisis, she unwittingly becomes the devil's advocate.

This lack of feeling in Nelly's narration helps to make

Catherine's death seem memorably tragic. Before Edgar and

Catherine were married, Nelly tried to separate them by warning 110

Edgar, "'Miss is dreadfully wayward, sir! . . . you'd better be riding home, or else she will be sick, only to grieve us'”

(Ch. viii, p. 66). And during Catherine's delirium, Nelly

recalled her mistress' "former illness” when Catherine became

so delirious from searching for the runaway Heathcliff that

the doctor cautioned she might try to throw herself out of the window (Ch. ix, pp. 78-79). Thus, when Nelly cannot prevent

Catherine from wrenching open the window during her illness,

she concludes that the doctor's warning to her, and her own

warning to Edgar, must have come true; in the midst of her

illness Catherine has found such strength only because her

waywardness has finally become suicidal "insanity” (Ch. xii, pp. 108-09).. Catherine's poetic delirium prior to her death has

reminded at least one commentator of Ophelia, and it may be that

Catherine's catalogue of birds (Ch. xii, p. 105) owes something

to Ophelia's catalogue of herbs in Hamlet IV.v.175-86. But

Catherine is not Ophelia. Even if she had plunged from the window,

her death would not have been the last desperate act of a woman

deranged by love. Catherine only threatens to jump, and then she is

responding to Edgar's insistent demands that she choose between

^Arnold P. Drew, "Emily Bronte and Hamlet." Notes and Queries N. S. I (1954), 81-82. Many commentators feel King Lear to be most influential,even though no other parallels except this one from Hamlet are sufficiently similar to be convincing. See Lew Girdler, "Wuthering Heights and Shakespeare," Huntington Library Quarterly. XIX (1955-56), 385-92. himself and Heathcliff (Ch. xi, pp. 101-02; 109J. Here as elsewhere, Nelly fails to take into account the psychological nature of Catherine's illness; her desire to will her own death, if necessary, in order to escape from the inner conflict over

Edgar and Heathcliff which she had tried to explain to Nelly, and which Heathcliff's return after Catherine's marriage has forced to the surface.

There is method, then, in Emily Bronte's account of

Catherine's madness. Catherine's poetic delirium touches us the way in which we are moved by Mistress Quickly's account of Falstaff's deaths

"A' made a finer end and went away an it had been any christom child Ce. g. one in a christening robe--a perfect innocent}; . . . for after I saw him fumble with the sheets and play with flowers and smile upon his fingers' ends, I knew there was but one way; for his nose was sharp as a pen, and a' babbled of green fields." (Henry V

Like a convalescent child, Falstaff whiles away his last moments by playing with his fingers as if they were dolls. He "smiles upon his fingers* ends," responding to the expressions on the faces of his imaginary people in. much the same way as Catherine responds to the feathers in her pillow:

Both the expressions flitting over [Catherine's} face, and the changes of her moods, began to alarm me terribly; and brought to my recollection her former illness, and the doctor's injunction that she should not be crossed. 112

A-minute previously she wa3 not violent; now, supported on one arm, and not noticing my refusal to obey her, she seemed to find childish diversion in pulling the feathers from the rents [in the pillowlf she had just made, and ranging them on the sheet according to their different speciest her mind had strayed to other associations* "• • . here is a moor-cock's; and this— I should know it among a thousand— it's a lapwing's. ■ • • Did [HeathcliffJ shoot my lapwings, Nelly? Are they red, any of them? Let me look." "Give over with that baby-workI" I interrupted, dragging the pillow away, and turning the hole3 toward the mattress, for she was removing its contents by handfuls. "Lie down and shut your eyes, you're wandering. There's a messT" {Ch. xii, pp. 104-05)

Catherine's game with her pillow and its contents seems reminiscent of Falstaff's toying with his sheets and the flowers because both actions represent a final retreat into the innocence of a childhood which seems like paradise in comparison with the disillusionments of later life, Shakespeare's narrator is clearly touched by

Falstaff's childlike simplicity because it represents a state of innocence achieved at the end of an otherwise notoriously wordly career. But Nelly, unlike Mistress Quickly, is as callously pragiratic as ever, thinking only of the mess she will have to clean up afterward. . She has no sympathy with her mistress* illness, and therefore cannot respond to the fantasies through which Catherine seeks to forget her frustration over Heathcliff and her disappointment over Edgar.. At first, Nelly is greatly alarmed over Catherine's mentai instability; yet, within two paragraphs, she has already "crossed" her mistress, despite the 113 doctor's warning, because she persists in regarding Catherine as

a rational adult who perversely seeks to evade her responsibilities

by acting like a child. Mistress Quickly sympathizes with

Falstaff's retreat from reality on his "'one way'" toward death,

but Nelly dismisses the symptoms of Catherine's delirium as

"'baby-work'" and will not admit the possibility of Catherine's

worrying herself to death, until it is too late. Mistress

Quickly is charmed by the childlike simplicity of Falstaff's

end, whereas Nelly has only contempt for the weakness implicit

in Catherine's deliriums • . our fiery Catherine was no

better than a wailing childl" {Ch. xii, p. 106).

Of course, Catherine recovers from her delirium; but the

indifference of her nurse has been substantiated and is even

more dramatically demonstrated in a second scene preparatory

to Catherine's death. Making use of her narrative hindsight,

Nelly regrets that she sought to avoid another crisis with

Catherine by arranging for Heathcliff to see her without Edgar's

permission: "Was it right or wrong? 1 fear it was wrong, though

expedient" (Ch. xiv, p. 129). Nelly has so conpromised her

common sense standards of morality after Heathcliff's return

that she soon finds herself trapped in an intolerable situation.

Heathcliff has just had a passionate exchange with Catherine

when Nelly hears Edgar coming. But Catherine, who feels she is

dying, impulsively prevails upon Heathcliff to stay with her. At 114 this point, Nelly's patience runs out, and she overreacts, callously disregarding Catherine's feelings in favor of her own:

"Are you going to listen to her ravings?" I said [to Heathcliff3, passionately. "She does not know what she says. Will you ruin her, because she has not the wit to help herself? Get upl You could be free instantly. That is the most diabolical deed that ever you did. We are all done for— master, mistress, and servant." I wrung my hands, and cried out; and Mr. Linton hastened his step at the noise. In the midst of my agitation, I was sincerely glad to observe that Catherine's arras had fallen relaxed, and her head hung down. "She's fainted or dead," I thought, "so much the better. Far better that she should be dead, than lingering a burden and a misery-maker to all about her." (Ch. xv, p. 136)

It seems Ironic that Charlotte Bronte should praise Nelly

Dean for her "homely fidelity" when Nelly seems so willing to sacrifice Edgar's wife as a means of preserving peace in his

home. For, just as she once left Heathcliff out on the dark

stairway because she felt he was a born troublemaker, so Nelly now wishes Catherine were dead because she has grown up to become a "misery-maker" also. The prospect of being caught by her master makes Nelly feel like Pandarus. Just as she did with Heathcliff*s disappearance earlier, Nelly transfers her

share of the guilt to Catherine, who again receives more synqpathy

from us than she deserves, considering it was her own selfishness

which provoked this crisis in the first place. 115

The reader who supplies the pity and terror omitted by

Nelly during these symbolic death scenes may even find some of

the high seriousness of tragedy in the narrator's restrained announcement of Catherine's actual death offstage (Ch. xvi, p. 137). With Heathcliff, however, Nelly tries to make moral

capital out of Catherine's quiet, natural death in childbirth:

". * • she's deadl" I answered, checking my sobs and drying my cheeks. "Gone to heaven, I hope, where we may, everyone, join her, if we take due warning, and leave our evil ways to follow goodl" "Did she take due warning, then?" asked Heathcliff, attempting a sneer. "Did she die a saint? Come, give me a true history of the event. How did--" He endeavoured to pronounce the name, but could not manage it; and compressing his mouth, he held a silent combat with his 'inward agony, defying, meanwhile, my sympathy with an unflinching, ferocious stare. (Ch. xvi, pp. 138-39)

Heathcliff is no more disposed toward being edified by the

moralistic cant which Nelly calls "synpathy" now than he was

inclined to accept it as a child. His sarcastic reply shows how

bitter he has become toward Catherine since then, and he still

struggles to suppress his true feelings about her in front of

Nelly, just as he did prior to his last desperate plea to be made

"good" for Catherine's sake at Christmas.

Mathison sees Nelly's righteous inhumanity as a principal

source of "power" in Wuthering Heights because "we are constantly

directed toward feeling the inadequacy of the wholesome, and 116

toward sympathy with genuine passions, no matter how destructive or violent." ^ But we have little sympathy for Hindley, whose passions are genuinely destructive and violent; and we do develop sympathy for Catherine's daughter and Hareton, who turn out to be wholesome after all. Mathison seems to he oversimplifying, for ever since the novel* s first appearance, critics have been testifying to its considerable power without "feeling the inadequacy of the wholesome" because of Nelly Dean. It is only in an esthetic sense that Emily Bronte puts her readers in "sympathy" with violence, regardless of their moral or religious preconceptions.

The "power" of Wuthering Heights is still where it was when

Charlotte Bronte was giving Nelly Dean her unqualified approval: in the emotional authenticity which Emily Bronte herself imparts to the wost lurid scenes of hatred and violence, whether her narrator be Lockwood, Nelly, or even Isabella.

As a character Nelly often does not understand the other characters and wastes little sympathy on any of them; but as a narrator she has predicted, as prophetically as the chorus in a

Greek tragedy, what the results of their ill-fated relationships will be. By Chapter xvi Edgar's "doom" is assured, with hi3 wife being buried, his sister estranged and humiliated, and his worst

**Mathison, "Nelly Dean and the Power of Wuthering Heights." p. 129. 117 enemy plotting to secure his estate. And Heathcliff himself, despite his successful prospects for revenge, receives Nelly's news of Catherine's death with the kind of superhuman agony which Nelly had predicted he would experience if he chose

Catherine for his love (Ch. xvi, p. 139] ,

When Nelly takes a lock of Edgar'si hair and twists it with one of Heathcliff's, placing both inside of Catherine's locket after her death, Emily Bronte majr be parodying the honeysuckle and the vine twining above the grave of Tristan 15 and Isolde. The gesture seems ironically appropriate, for

Nelly has always tried to please everyone. She does regret having arranged the meetings between Heathcliff and Catherine at Thrushcross Grange, just as the nurse^ in Tristan holds herself responsible for having given Isolde the fatal love , potion. Yet, in another passage innocent of irony, Nelly also clears herself of deeper guilt:

I seated myself in a chair, and rocked, to and fro, passing harsh judgment on my many derelictions of duty; from whicl^ it struck me then, all the misfortunes of all my employers

15 The suffering which Heathcliff's and Catherine's love causes others as well as themselves, and the lovers' aspiration for reunion through or beyond death, create interesting parallels between Withering Heights and subsequent rewritings of medieval romance. In Tennyson's Idylls of the King, for example, Tristram tells Isolt, I will love thee to the death, / And out OUfc beyond into the dream to come'1* ("The Last Tournament C1872J." lines 714-15. 118

sprang* It was not the case. In reality, I am aware; but It was, in my imagination, that dismal night, and I thought Heathcliff himself less guilty than I. (Ch. xxvii, p. 220)

At most, Nelly's narrative reveals that she has been an inadvertent catalyst in Catherine's death and in Heathcliff's revenge, someone well-meaning yet misguided who precipitates the very loves and hates she wants most to avoid.

In the last three chapters I have proposed that Emily

Bronte is using her narrators' insensitivity to the inner needs of Heathcliff and Catherine to dramatize, by negative example, the kind of love that is necessary to resolve the conflicts at Wu the ring Heights. And the next two chapters will demonstrate that this clearer understanding of the narrators' limitations can also provide greater insight into the theme and structure of the novel as a whole. CHAPTER V

THE MORAL STRUCTURE

Whoever suspects that Wuthering Heights is deficient in purposeful organization should pay careful attention to the symmetrical relationships developing throughout the novel between the two generations of Lintons Ind Earnshaws.^ We can learn much from Heathcliff's determination to warp Haireton and to hurt young Catherine as he was warped by Hindley and hurt by

Catherine's mother. Once we begin to realize that the third generation is developing along the lines of the doomed second generation, the slightest indications of individuality in Hareton and young Catherine are thrown into bold relief as contrasting signs of hope that history will not repeat itself. This is the

"moral" plot of Withering Heights and it emerges not only from

^The publication of Wuthering Heights raised an almost unanimous outcry against the noVel's lack of organization. Protests in this centurjr, now in the minority, are in: E. P. Benson, Charlotte Bronte, pp. 17 4-75; H. W. Garrod, Introduction to Wuthering Heights, World's Classies (London: Oxford University Press, 1930); Charles Morgan, "Emily Bronte," in The Great Victorians, ed. H. J. and Hugh Hassingham (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Doran Company, 1932), 66; Baker, History of the English Novel. VIII, 75; W. Somerset Maugham, The Art of Fiction, pp. 237*38 120 the actions of individual characters, but also .from the complex patterns of comparison and contrast which form the structure of the novel itself*

With two important exceptions (Lockwood's initial visits to Wuthering Heights, and Heathcliff's retrospective account of his longing for Catherine in Chapter xxix), Emily Bronte's novel is principally devoted to Nelly Dean's account of Heathcliff's life in chronological sequence* Heathcliff is the protagonist at the beginning of Nelly's narrative; but, once Catherine decides to marry Edgar, he returns as an antagonist with a desire for revenge. As the main subject of Nelly's story, then, Heathcliff is morally ambiguous; he is both hero and villain, the character who is potentially most admirable and who also acts most ignobly toward others* At Wuthering Heights Heathcliff is the romantic protagonist, the orphan deprecated by Edgar Linton as a ''ploughboy1*

(Ch. x, p. 84) who loves beyond his station; and even when he returns to Thrushcross Grange and begins to challenge Edgar,

Heathcliff may still be somewhat sympathetic as a frustrated lover, inasmuch as Catherine herself disdains her husband's weakness* Yet Heathcliff is not merely the romantic antagonist in a conventional domestic triangle because his actions constitute far more than a threat to Catherine's marriage* Even before

Catherine's death Emily Bronte creates a growing suspicion In us that, Heathcliff will prove to be a treacherous lover, trading upon Edgar's tolerance and Catherine's affection in order to 121 seduce Isabella Linton and hasten his revenge. Soon after

Catherine's death we join Isabella in losing whatever romantic ■ illusions we may have retained concerning this disappointed lover.

The grim pleasure which Heathcliff derives from encouraging

Hindley's debasement is paralleled by the zeal with which he encourages Isabella to despise herself for dreaming that she ever could (or would want to) replace Catherine in his affections.

In his indiscriminate revenge on the innocent as well as the guilty. Heathcliff desires more than to make his victims hate him and each other. He seeks to debase them as he himself was humiliated by Hindley so that, like him. they will learn to despise themselves most of all. Heathcliff considers his revenge

"'a moral teething'" (Ch. xiv, p. 128) because he perceives a rough justice in forcing other innocents to become as wretchedly aware of their own humiliation as he had been forced to recognize his. After Hindley's death Heathcliff declares that he will take it on himself to perpetuate Hindley's tyranny because the justice of it pleases him: "'Now CHareton], my bonny lad. you are mine I And we' 11 see if one tree won't grow as crooked as another, with the same wind to twist it I'" (Ch. xvii, p. 154).

*nie moral structure of Wuthering Heights is thus determined by Heathcliff's desire to reenact the sufferings of his own generation among the descendants of the Earnshaws and the Lintons.

To describe that structure we shall first take note of. Emily 122

Bronte's plot parallels, her ominous comparisons between the generations. Then we shall examine the significant contrasts, the way in which young Catherine and Hareton substitute for the violence of Heathcliff's "'moral teething'" a gentler ethic of mutual understanding which enables this tempestuous novel to end in tranquility*

When Nelly Bean tells Lockwood her story, Catherine Linton is a girl of eighteen. Yet Nelly sees no more cause for optimism

> now than she did at Catherine's birth?

An unwelcomed infant it was, poor thingt It might have wailed out of life, and nobody cared a morsel, during those first hours of existence. We redeemed the neglect afterwards; but its beginning was as friendless as its end is likely to be. (Ch. xvi, p. 137)

What should have been a happy event for the Lintons was overshadowed by Catherine Earnshaw's death soon after the birth of her child.

And now that child's marriage to Linton Heathcliff follows the same gloomy pattern, as she becomes a widow shortly after her wedding. Catherine Linton's subsequent confinement at Wuthering

Heights transforms her into a true member of Heathcliff's bitter and frustrated "family." Prom the evidence of Lockwood's encounter with her there, the reader feels inclined to agree with Nelly that Catherine's end does seem likely to be "friendless."

What makes Nelly's gloomy prediction about Catherine Linton even more depressing is that Catherine had begun with some clear 123

advantages over her mother. Nelly exhibits a genuine affection for her, as opposed to her distaste for Catherine Earnshaw; and from her father Catherine also receives nothing but tolerance and affection (Ch. viii, pp. 61-62 and Ch. xviii, p. 155).

Thus, even though Catherine is denied the sort of boon companion her mother had in Heathcliff, she has little need for one since there is no Joseph or Hindley to contend with. It comes as no surprise that Nelly describes Catherine's childhood as "the happiest [twelve years} of my life" (Ch. xviii, p. 155). For

Catherine Linton is the only member of her generation who enjoys a childhood virtually free of conflict.

The years of respite come to an abrupt end, however, when

Catherine discovers Hareton and Heathcliff. In fact, her sheltered upbringing makes the very existence of these barbarous relatives all the more shocking and intriguing. Edgar and Nelly can now no longer conceal Catherine's past, and history begins to repeat itself with a vengeance that is Heathcliff's own. Catherine

Linton is as eager to tell Nelly of her illicit journey to

Wuthering Heights as the young Heathcliff was to give Nelly an account of his foray to Thrushcross Grange with Catherine's mother. For her part, Nelly is more concerned with reproving both of her charges' conduct than with sharing or interpreting their experiences (Ch. vi, pp. 47-50 and Ch. xviii, pp. 159, 162).

Yet Emily Bronte has arranged these incidents so that the reader 124 can draw his own conclusions from the parallels between them.

Catherine Linton is introduced to Hareton when his dogs attack hers, just as Catherine Earnshaw had been taken in by the

Lintons when she was attacked by their dog. At Wuthering

Heights Catherine Linton is pleased fo find companionship beyond the confines of her own family, as her mother had been flattered by the Lintons' attentions to her at Thrushcross Grange. Yet

Catherine is also dismayed by the ill manners exhibited by

Hareton and Heathcliff during her visits to Wuthering Heights, just as her mother had been disturbed by Heathcliff's behavior when she returned to Wuthering Heights after her stay with the Lintons*

Catherine Earnshaw had met that predicament pragmatically, by acting like a lady with Edgar and like a tomboy with Heathcliff

(Ch. viii, p. 62), But her daughter is a Linton who has been raised solely according to their standards. If she is not spoiled, as Isabella was, Catherine Linton has at least been so overprotected and indulged that she is naive and therefore becomes easy prey for

Heathcliff. In fact, after the death of her young husband when

Heathcliff has her subjugated, Catherine Linton begins to crack under the strain. She shows signs of becoming as hateful as

Edgar's sister, Isabella, another panqpered Linton whom Heathcliff ■ had delightedly transformed into a spiteful shrew. By the time that Lockwood visits Wuthering Heights, Catherine's immaturity and a temper inherited from her mother have clashed with Heathcliff's ♦ 125 tyranny, making her bitterly resentful toward everyone. Since she is already playing the role of hostess at Wuthering Heights under great duress, Catherine welcomes Lockwood's arrival in

time for tea by snapping at Heathcliff, "'Is lie to have any?'"

(Ch. ii, p. 20). Obviously, Heathcliff's cruelty and Hareton's coarseness have so subverted Catherine's gentle upbringing that Nelly seems justified in fearing that Catherine, like

Isabella before her, has reached a hopeless impasse at Wuthering

Heights.

Other parallels between Heathcliff's youth and Hareton's

suggest that Hareton has fared no better than Catherine. When

Nelly returns to Wuthering Heights to see whether Hindley is

still alive, she encounters his son instead. Little Hareton repulses Nelly's proferred affection with such "practised emphasis"

(Ch. xi, p. 95) that Nelly's analysis of Heathcliff appears

to apply equally well to Hareton:

. . . CHeathcliffl acquired a slouching gait and an ignoble look; his naturally reserved disposition was exaggerated into an almost idiotic excess of unsociable moroseness; and he took a grim pleasure, apparently, in exciting the aversion rather than the esteem of his few acquaintance CsicJ. (Ch. viii, p. 63)

Even before he is old enough to know what he is doing, Hareton * has learned to emulate the young Heathcliff, who had also learned

from the Earnshaws to accentuate his own defects in order to avoid the risks of social contact with his betters. When Hareton 126 grows up he becomes so much like his surly guardian that Lockwood can barely keep from laughing at the same "almost idiotic excess of unsociable moroseness" that Nelly had observed in Heathcliff:

Heathcliff smiled • ■ . as if it were rather too bold a jest to attribute the paternity of that bear [Hareton} to him. "My name is Hareton Earnshaw," growled the other; "and I'd counsel you to respect it!" "I have shown no disrespect," was my reply, laughing internally at the dignity with which he announced himself. He fixed his eye on me longer than I cared to return the stare, for fear I might be tempted either to box his ears, or render ray hilarity audible. (Ch. ii, p. 21)

Heathcliff's smile goes beyond mere amusement over a case of mistaken identity. He is pleased that Lockwood, ah outsider, should see Hareton and himself as father and son, a tribute to . the success of Heathcliff's plan to make this young "bear" growl to his own savage tune.

Other parallels serve to show U3 how close Heathcliff comes to duplicating his own misguided youth in raising Hareton. When

Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw first caught sight of Isabella and Edgar Linton through a window at Thrushcross Grange, they associated the spoiled children with a family dog which they had been quarreling over. Indignantly, young Heathcliff told Nelly: « "The idiots! That was their pleasure! to quarrel who should hold a heap of warm hair, and each begin to cry because both, after struggling to get it, refused to take it. We laughed outright at the petted things, we did despise them!" (Ch. vi, pp. 47-48) 127

While still a child himself, Heathcliff used the terra "'petted things*" to equate these other pampered children with the family dog; so it is fitting that, as a man, Heathcliff should show how he despises his own "petted" Linton, Isabella, by hanging her springer spaniel (Ch. xii, p. 110 and Ch. xiv, p. 127).

Of course, Isabella quickly discovers the enormity of her error in allowing Heathcliff to engineer her "escape" from Thrushcross

Grange. At the first opportunity, while Heathcliff and Hindley are locked in combat, Isabella makes her own escape from Wuthering

Heights. But as she rushes out the door, Isabella also gives us a glimpse of young Hareton indulging in a grotesque parody of

Heathcliff's brutality by hanging an entire litter of puppies

(Ch. xvii, p. 150).

Like Catherine Linton, Hareton has been sacrificed to

Heathcliff's revenge. In the opening chapters of Wuthering

Heights Lockwood inraediately accepts Catherine Linton as mistress of the house, even though he i3 appalled at her ill temper.

But Lockwood believes Hareton to be no more than a farm .hand returning from the fields; and even after Hareton joins Catherine at the table, he is slow to accept this "clown," with his unruly hair, soiled hands, and coarse table manners as a member of the * family (Ch. ii, pp. 18-21 )• Here, at the beginning of her novel,

Emily Bronte has brought the history of grief and injustice at

Wuthering Heights full circle. Lockwood's citified estimate 128 of Hareton is analogous to Catherine Earnshaw's own disdainful appraisal of Heathcliff when Hindley, perceiving that she had returned front the Lintons as a lady, permitted her to welcome the ploughboy in order to embarrass her with his uncombed hair and dirty hands (Ch. vii, pp. 51-52). Heathcliff's revenge is complete, for he has been able to use Hindley's methods of miseducation on Hindley's own son in order to recreate, through

Hareton, the dissatisfied young boor that Heathcliff himself once was. Heathcliff discusses his own role in arranging these parallels between past and present when his son, Linton, joins

Hareton at Wuthering Heights after Isabella's death. To Nelly,

Heathcliff admits; "My design is as honest as possible. • • » That the two cousins [Catherine and Linton!! may fall in love, and get married'" (Ch. xxi, p. 174). But of course, as Isabella had

to find out for herself, Heathcliff is far from "'honest'11 where love is concerned. Soon after this he also tells Nellyc "If [Hareton} were a born fool I should not enjoy it half so much* But he's no fool; and I can syiqpathize with all his feelings, having felt them myself. . . . Don* t you think Hindley would be proud of his son, if he could see him? almost as proud as I am of mine. But there's this difference; one is gold put to the use of paving stones, and the other is tin polished to ape a service of silver. Mine has nothing valuable about it; yet I shall have the merit of making it go as far as such poor stuff can go. His had first rate qualities, and they are lost--rendered worse than unavailing." (Ch. xxi, p. 178) 129

In reality, Heathcliff cares nothing for Catherine Linton*a future with hi3 sickly son. He only desires to make Linton l,rgo as far as such poor stuff can go'1' to keep Catherine and Hareton' apart in order to requite Hareton's father for having interfered between

Catherine's mother and himself.

The extensive plot parallels that we have observed are the result of Heathcliff's master plan to make the younger generation suffer the same humiliations that he and Catherine Earnshaw had

% to endure. To the extent that Heathcliff succeeds, he creates a symmetry of design between the past and the present that unifies the plot of Wuthering Heights (see Figure 2 on the following page). This pattern begins to form even before Catherine Earnshaw'a death, when Heathcliff, frustrated by Catherine's marriage to

Edgar, elopes with Edgar's sister. With her Heathcliff fathers a Linton child of his own, whom he then forces to marry Edgar's daughter in order to lay claim to the Linton estate. As Figure 2

shows, Heathcliff is matching Hindley at his own tyrannical game

by using Linton Heathcliff to forestall a new alliance between

the Lintons and Earnshaws, just as Hindley had used Edgar Linton

to frustrate Heathcliff.

These parallels between past and present are reinforced by « the fact that Linton seems to be a caricature of Edgar. We have

already noted how Heathcliff delights in forcing Catherine Linton

to marry his son because he feels that Hareton is the more worthy GENERATION 2: - HINDLEY EARNSHAW

CHAPTERS IV-XVI

CATHERINE EARNSHAW HEATHCLIFF S *

GENERATION; 3: -CATHERINE LINTON HARETON EARNSHAW

CHAPTERS XVII-XXXIV

Figure 2: The Plot of Wuthering Heights 131

choice, just as he believed himself to be the inevitable mate

for Catherine's mother. But, however prejudiced Heathcliff may be toward Edgar, his estimate of Linton seems ominously correct.

Nelly's only criticism of Edgar is that he "wanted spirit in

general"; so, when her first inpression of Linton is that he

"might have been taken for [Edgar'si younger brother" except

for a "sickly peevishness," we see Edgar's weakness magnified

to the point of distortion in his nephew (Ch. viii, p. 62 and

Ch. xix, pp. 163-64). Linton Heathcliff is a caricature of

his uncle, inasmuch as he displays so many of the very defects

which Heathcliff once ascribed to Edgar in order to embarrass

him before Catherines physical weakness, moral indecisiveness,

and a selfish pride which, in Linton, has degenerated into

groveling self-pity.

Through physical and psychological torture, Heathcliff

overcomes Linton's innate listlessness and fulfills his promise

to make "'such poor stuff'" go a3 far as it can. Linton's inherited

resemblance to Edgar provides the physical attraction necessary

for Heathcliff to initiate an adolescent affair between Catherine

and his son. But what strengthens and sustains Catherine's interest

in Linton (and thereby diverts her attention from Hareton) is pity, • the maternal instinct which Heathcliff arouses by his sadistic

expedient of torturing the sickly Linton to death before Catherine's

eyes.. In this barbaric manner Heathcliff is able to make his son 132 play the role of Edgar, as Emily Bronte's plot parallels reveal.

Nelly and Catherine quarrel so heatedly over the attention she pays to Linton that Catherine slaps Nelly, just as her mother had slapped Nelly previously in a similar quarrel over Edgar

(Ch. viii, p. 65 and Ch. xxi, p. 182). Linton Heathcliff himself also accuses Catherine of striking him during an incident which again recalls Catherine'3 mother, who once grew sufficiently upset to strike Edgar (Ch. viii, p. 65 and Ch. xxiii, pp. 192-93).

The rivalry between Linton and Hareton over Catherine also evokes memories of the argument during Christmas when Heathcliff answered

Edgar's ridicule with a dish of hot applesauce. Hareton also responds to Linton's snobbish taunts with physical force, and

Nelly sympathizes with Hareton now as she did with Heathcliff then (Ch. vii, p. 55 and Ch. xxiv, pp. 200-01). And, once again, mere sympathy is not enough. Heathcliff overtly forces

Catherine to marry Linton against her father's wishes, Just as

Hindley had covertly encouraged Catherine's mother to marry

Edgar against Nelly's advice and her own better judgment.

Once Linton Heathcliff dies, however, other parallels from

Heathcliff's past begin to haunt him. Hareton and Catherine form a romantic alliance against Heathcliff, just as Heathcliff • himself and Catherine's mother had joined forces in their struggle against Hindley. When Catherine Linton ridicules Hareton's clumsy attempts to read her favorite literature, he strikes her 133

and burns those books of hers that he has saved. Heathcliff then comes upon Hareton and senses that the boy's distress is caused by the same inability to please Catherine Linton that he once felt over Catherine Earnshaw. In the past, Heathcliff took grim pleasure in the knowledge that "'I've got [Hareton! faster than his scoundrel of a father secured me, . • (Ch. xxi, p. 178). But now Catherine Earnshaw is uppermost in Heathcliff's thoughts, and Hareton's resemblance to her begins to break his hold over the younger generation:

. . . Mr. Heathcliff, coming up the causeway, encountered [HaretonJ and laying hold of his shoulder, asked— "What's to do now, my lad?" "Naught, naughtT" he said, and broke away, to enjoy his grief and anger [at Catherine's taunts! in solitude. Heathcliff gazed after him, and sighed. "It will be odd, if I thwart myself I" he muttered, unconscious that [Lockwood! was behind him. "But when I look for his father in his face, I find her [Catherine Earnshaw! every day morel How the devil is he so like? I can hardly bear to see him." (Ch. xxxi, pp. 239-40) \ It is appropriate for Lockwood to be the unseen observer of this rare show of personal emotion--perhaps even a "sigh" of regret— on

Heathcliff's part. For, less than two months before, Lockwood had also observed in secret another example of Heathcliff's personal reaction to the spirit of Catherine Earnshaw, his private anguish over her more mysterious manifestation in the form of a ghostly child (Ch. Ill, p. 33). 134

Several weeks pass and Lockwood is replaced by Nelly, who comes from Thrushcross Grange to stay with Catherine, and who smuggles in more of Catherine's library to replace those books confiscated by Heathcliff and burned by Hareton. By this time

Catherine so regrets having abused Hareton for his illiteracy that she leaves one of her books with him as a token of reconciliation. But now a new obstacle appears, creating another parallel between Heathcliff's past and Hareton's present. Joseph threatens to destroy Catherine's peace offering and she meets that challenge by declaring that Joseph's own library of religious works shall answer for her volumes of prose and verse (Ch. xxxil, p. 249). This conflict echoes the entry in Catherine Earnshaw's diary which Lockwood discovered written in the margins of her books, just before he dreamed of her ghost. In that diary entry

Catherine recalled the “initiatory step" of her and Heathcliff's rebellion against Hindley, when they injured two of Joseph's religious volumes by throwing them into the dog kennel. This was the children's way of protesting against Joseph's hypocrisy in punishing them for what Hindley and Francis were doing themselves.

For Joseph had accused the children of "'laiking,'" or huddling together to share each other's warmth on a cold Sunday, when the • adults were putting their own "paradise" on the hearth to earthly use "like two babies, kissing and talking nonsense by the hour" 13$

2 (Ch. iii, pp. 26*27). Ultimately, of course, this children's rebellion led not to freedom but to their first view of Thrushcross

Grange, after which Heathcliff returned home alone and Catherine became a lady. Thus, when Heathcliff comes upon Hareton and

Catherine Linton seated comfortably by the fire with their, heads together over a book, he has a glinpse of what his own . future with Catherine Earnshaw might have been if Joseph, Hindley, and Edgar had not come between them? He came upon us [Nelly, Hareton, and Catherine} quite unexpectedly, entering by the front way, and had a full view of the whole three, ere we could raise our heads to glance at him. Well, I reflected, there was never a pleasanter, or more harmless sight; and it will be a burning shame to scold them. The red firelight glowed on their bonny heads, and revealed their faces, • • ■ They lifted their eyes together, to encounter Mr. Heathcliff. Perhaps [Mr. Lockwood} you have never remarked that their eyes are precisely similar, and they are those of Catherine Earnshaw. . . . With Hareton the resemblance is carried farther; it is singular, at all times--then, it was particularly striking, because his senses were alert, and his mental faculties wakened to unwonted activity. I suppose this resemblance disarmed Mr. Heathcliff: he walked to the hearth in evident agitation, . . . He took the book from [Hareton's} hand, and glanced at the open page, then returned it without any observation, merely signing Catherine away. (Ch. xxxili, p. 254) Heathcliff tries to explain how he now feels to Nelly, and partly succeeds:

2Sale, p. 27, n. 1, glosses “'laikingM,as “playing," but the context implies that Joseph is using it as a euphemism for liking, or spooning. 136

••Five minutes ago, Hareton seemed a personification of my youth, not a human being. I felt to him in such a variety of ways, that it would have been impossible to have accosted him rationally.

"• . ■ Hareton's aspect was the ghost of my immortal love, of my wild endeavours to hold my right, my degradation, my pride, my happiness, and ray anguish— "But it is frenzy to repeat these thoughts to you [Nelly}; only it will let you know why with a reluctance to be always alone, his society is no benefit, rather an aggravation of the constant torment I suffer; • • (Ch. xxxiii, p. 2SS) % In trying to duplicate Hindley's tyranny by keeping Catherine

Linton and Hareton apart, Heathcliff meets himself in Hareton, having invoked "'the ghost of [his} immortal love.'" With

Linton's death the plot of Wuthering Heights begins to repeat itself and Heathcliff is "'frenz[ied}'M to discover that he can no longer continue because Hareton's resemblance to Catherine

Earnshaw is now "'a personification of [his] youth'"; it personalizes

Heathcliff's vengeance, making it too painful a reenactment of his own bitter past.

Emily Bronte has thus brought her plot full circle literally as well as figuratively. She has arranged her time scheme discontinuously so that two episodes which actually occur less than four months apart span the length of her novel. In the first of these episodes, near the beginning of Wuthering Heights. we see how Heathcliff is delighted to observe Lockwood regard 137

Hareton disdainfully, just as Catherine Earnshaw had slighted

Heathcliff. And in the second episode, near the end of Wuthering

Heights. Heathcliff again contemplates the parallels that he has arranged between his past and present, but this time with less relish because Hareton's budding romance with Catherine Linton has brought the past too near*

The reader who has been able to review Heathcliff's whole

life between these two episodes may be able to appreciate his

"strange change" (Ch. xxxiii, p. 255) more fully than Emily

Bronte's narrator, Kelly Bean* For Kelly does not seem to appreciate the ironic accuracy of her metaphor when she surmises that Heathcliff has been "disarmed" by the young lovers' resemblance to Catherine Earnshaw, As he mutely waves Catherine away,

Heathcliff is relinquishing his role of Hindley Earnshaw. He no longer cares about keeping the young couple apart; and yet he

cannot bear to see Catherine Linton by the hearth, either, reminding him of what he missed with Catherine Earnshaw, With quiet irony Emily Bronte has Heathcliff Inform Kellyt

", * . [Hareton'si society is no benefit, rather an aggravation of the constant torment I suffer; and it partly contributes to render me regardless how he and his cousin go on together. I can give them no attention,any more." (Ch* xxxiii, p. 255)

At the very last, Heathcliff paradoxically assumes the tone of a

loving guardian, as if his "'attention'" were what Catherine and

Hareton had always needed. Distantly bemused at the irony of his 138

past having become a present too painful to be endured, Heathcliff absently turns aside from Hareton and Catherine, devoting all of his attention to his memory of Catherine Earnshaw, that ghost

from the past which his vengeance has invoked*

We have seen how, through the use of plot parallels, Emily

Bronte demonstrates Heathcliff's success in making Hareton and

Catherine Linton as unhappy as he and Catherine had been* Yet

these same comparisons between past and present which measure

the progress of Heathcliff's revenge also highlight certain contrasts

which suggest that his very success may be self-defeating. Like

Hindley with Catherine Earnshaw, Heathcliff encourages Catherine

Linton to make an unsound marriage* But the parallel is inexact

because Heathcliff must force Catherine Linton to marry his son,

whereas Catherine's mother was willing to marry Edgar at Heathcliff's

expense (Ch. ix, pp. 71-73). Catherine Earnshaw thought first

of herself, and of marrying for the present; and, while Catherine

Linton is also worried about her own future, she is willing to

defer her romance with Linton Heathcliff for the sake of her

father, whom she loves "'better than [her3self'" (Ch. xxii,

pp. 186-87). > This phrase of Catherine Linton highlights a major contrast

between the generations. For the concept of loving anyone more

than oneself would never have occurred to Catherine's mother*

Catherine Earnshaw's strongest profession of her love for Heathcliff, 139

"'Nelly, I am Heathcliff . . .'"is also an affirmation of self; and It is echoed by Heathcliff, who declares her to be "'my life'" and "'my soul'" (Ch. ix, p., 74 and Ch. xvi, p. 139). Catherine feels perfectly consistent In marrying, Edgar because her passionate identification with Heathcliff is based on self-love; whatever she does that is good for herself must also be of benefit to

Heathcliff. Boldly Catherine declares that she is marrying Edgar to improve Heathcliff's status because Heathcliff "'comprehends in his person my feelings to Edgar and myself'" (Ch. ix, p. 73).

But in her na£ve idealism and selfish pride, Catherine quite forgets what her disastrous marriage confirms soon afterward: that Edgar also has feelings toward her, and that his attitude toward Heathcliff is likely to be very different from hers*

Nelly reminds Catherine that "'you'll not find [Edgar}

so pliable as you calculate upon'" because she has a pragmatic view of marriage as an attainable ideal, the sort of domestic harmony that she feels Catherine's daughter achieves with Hareton

Earnshaw:

Earnshaw was not to be civilized with a wish; and my young lady was no philosopher, and no paragon of patience; but both their minds tending to the same point— one loving and desiring to esteem, and the other loving and desiring to be esteemed--they contrived in the end to reach it. (Ch. xxxii, p. 249)

The contrast between these two marriages is clear. Catherine

Earnshaw* s love for Heathcliff is a passionate affirmation of 140

self so that, in betraying him^ she ultimately betrays her own happiness. She loves Heathcliff, yet without compunction criticizes

his ignorance (Ch. viii, p. 64) because the Lintons have taught

her to feel that such coarseness is alien to her own nature

(Ch. viii, p, 62). Catherine's daughter also ridicules Hareton without remorse as long as that makes her socially acceptable

to Linton Heathcliff (Ch. xxi, p. 179). Yet, after Linton is

dead and Lockwood discourages Catherine from belittling Hareton,

she then learns to subordinate her selfish pride to a loving

concern for Hareton's benefit. Thus, the series of tableaux

in which Emily Bronte dramatizes a growing intimacy between

Hareton and Catherine should not be dismissed as shallow Victorian •

ameliorism; for these scenes depict Catherine learning to love

as well as Hareton learning to read. As Catherine Earnshaw

demonstrated with Heathcliff, personal pride must become mutual

respect for love to endure: in Nelly Dean's terms, "one loving

to esteem, and the other loving and desiring to be esteemed."

Many commentators underestimate the second half of Wuthering

Heights because they mistake Emily Bronte's lighter treatment of

^This is decidedly a minority view. Shapiro, in "Wuthering Heights as a Victorian Novel," pp. 284, 290, 294-95, and Pike, in "Bitter Herbs and Wholesome Medicine: Love as Theological Affirmation in Wuther i ng Heights /'pp. 145-49, also defend the positive values of Catherine Linton's relationship with Hareton. Most other commentators, however, derive nothing but disappointment from Emily Bronte's happy couple. For a survey of opinion, see my first chapter, pp. 14-21. 141

Hareton and Catherine Linton as evidence of a decline in interest or of creative energy on the part of the author. Yet in contrast

to young Linton, who provides a pitiless caricature of Edgar's general lack of "'spirit'" (Ch. viii, p. 62), Emily Bronte

introduces an element of burlesque into Hareton, making his degradation seem less serious. As we have already observed,

Hareton's hanging a litter of puppies parodies Heathcliff's cruelty; arid we have also noticed how Lockwood manages to derive considerable comic relief from Hareton during his otherwise harrowing visits to Wuthering Heights. Even while Lockwood is belatedly discovering Heathcliff's "genuine bad nature," he can hardly refrain from chuckling over Hareton, a shaggy young "bear" with a decidedly "shabby coat" who gruffly attempts to defend a dignity he does not possess (Ch. ii, pp. 19-21). When Heathcliff prevents Catherine Linton from seeing her sick father by administering

several sharp slaps to either side of her head, Nelly is outraged at his "diabolical violence"; but when Hareton slaps Catherine

in the mouth Lockwood does not altogether disapprove, for Hareton

is.delivering a "manual check" to the "saucy tongue" which has

just ridiculed his illiteracy (Ch. xxvii, pp. 215-16 and Ch. xxxi, i p. 239). Emily Bronte lightens her usual tone of pitiless intensity * while depicting Hareton's reform under Catherine Linton because

these lovers' quarrels are child's play in comparison to the agonies

of spiritual estrangement which Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw must endure. 142

With Hareton and Catherine Linton, Emily Bronte dramatizes a moral theme in place of the amoral clash of wills which

Heathcliff and Catherine Eamshaw have prepared us to expect* '

Even if Heathcliff had continued his opposition to Hareton's and Catherine's intimacy, we are led to believe that he could not Have reduced them to the moral degeneracy of Hindley Eamshaw

or Isabella Linton, For, despite Heathcliff's determination

to embitter Hareton by exposure to the same poverty, cruelty,

and ignorance that had frustrated his own development, Hareton

loves the hand that strikes him (Ch. xvii, p, 154 and Ch. xxi,

p, 178) and weeps over the corpse of his oppressor (Ch. xxxiv,

p. 264), Hareton even defends Heathcliff before Catherine; and,

like Catherine herself, who once had to choose between Linton

and Edgar, Hareton remains loyal to his first love, his "father1*

(Ch. xxii, pp. 186-87 and Ch. xxxiii, p. 252), Even when

Heathcliff succeeds in forcing Catherine to marry his son against

Edgar* s wishes, or when he becomes the cause of dissension

between Hareton and Catherine, his victories are only temporary

because he brings out the best in his victims--their devotion to

others, even at great personal cost to themselves.

Of course, Heathcliff's oppression of Catherine and Hareton t does not seem temporary to Nelly Dean; she is too disheartened

by the success of Heathcliff's revenge to contrast his victims'-

generosity of spirit with the selfishness of Catherine's mother 143 and the meanness of Hareton's father under similar circumstances.

In fact, Nelly is scornful of Catherine's "silly credulity" in believing what Heathcliff tells her, that Linton is more likely to die than Edgar (Ch. xxii, pp. 188-89). But past events have 4 proved Nelly to be unreliable in such matters herself. She did not perceive the symptoms of fatal disease in Hindley's wife and she grossly underestimated the delicacy of Catherine Earnshaw's constitution. So now, even though Nelly derides Linton's infirmities,

Catherine's feelings are more trustworthy; despite all she can do for Linton, including marriage, he only outlives Edgar by a matter of weeks.

Nelly habitually underestimates the staying power of

those weaker than herself because of another, more serious, reason which brings us to the central theme of Wuthering Heights. ® Of

all the characters in the novel, including Nelly herself, only

Hareton and Catherine Linton learn to see far enough beyond

4 Mathison, "Nelly Dean and the Power of Wuthering Heights." pp. 109-12, presents a perceptive and conprehensive discussion of how Nelly's own robust health affects her attitudes toward others.

® For an opposing view, see Klingopulos, "The Novel as Dramatic Poem (II): Wuthering Heights." pp. 269-86. Since Klingopulos believes "no amount of interpretation of the Cathy-Hareton courtship will yield a moral order by which to judge all that has taken place," he regards the view that Cathy and Hareton are a "necessary compromise between the Linton and Heathcliff levels tto be!] almost certainly a sentimental one" (pp. 272, 285). 144

themselves to imagine what other people's needs and feelings might be. At one point in her narrative, Nelly exclaims to

Lockwood: "Well, we must be for ourselves in the long run*

The mild and generous are only more justly selfish than the domineering; . ■ (Ch. x, p. 81). By the "domineering" Nelly presumably means Catherine Earnshaw as well as Heathcliff, for

this statement is a preface to her account of how the Lintons' i marriage disintegrates when Catherine becomes contenptuous of

Edgar after Heathcliff returns. Yet Edgar himself, the "mild and generous," is not spared either; for, even though he is the

local magistrate, Edgar's application of justice in his own behalf seems to be tainted by hypocrisy. As long as he can keep order in the house by indulging Catherine's whims of temper,

Edgar gladly does so (Ch. x, p* 81), Yet, once Heathcliff

forces their rivalry to a crisis, Edgar's generosity yields

to pride. By demanding that Catherine choose between them,

Edgar too leaves himself open to a charge of being more selfish

than just, as Catherine herself is quick to perceive,

Nelly's terra "justly selfish" should therefore warn us

not to oversimplify Catherine's marriage as a conventional romantic

triangle. Catherine's feelings about Heathcliff are altered • along with her regard, for Edgar because each person translates

his own fears and desires into a subjective principle of justice 145

6 and then proceeds to act on that basis. Heathcliff and Hindley at least have the relatively straightforward motivation of exacting the revenge which they feel to be their due. But Edgar and

Catherine, who try to be more civilized, are only more subtly • destructive because they rationalize their selfishness; Edgar tells himself that he submits to Catherine not from his own desire for domestic tranquility but for the sake of her health, and Catherine tells Nelly that she is marrying Edgar less for

V her own comfort than for Heathclifff s. When Heathcliff returns and begins attacking her, Catherine is therefore as shocked and angered by his ingratitude as she is sickened by her husband's selfish demands, and she dies disillusioned with them both.

Since many other events of consequence in Wuthering Heights are the result of a tangle of conflicting motives similar to those in Catherine's marriage and death, Nelly seems to be correct in asserting that the members of Heathcliff's generation destroy each other "in the long run" for "justly selfish" reasons. Hindley uses the death of his wife, Frances, to justify his dissipation

^David Sonstroem, "Wuthering Heights and the Limits of Vision," PM1A. LXXXVI (1971), 52, agrees the central theme is that "how one feels is related to how one sees." But he forgets the moral developed by Hareton and Catherine Linton which serves to .counterbalance this amoral relativism; and this oversight leads Sonstroem to the bleak conclusion that Emily Bronte merely "plays a shell game with our sympathies" throughout her novel (p. 5 9 ). 146 and his neglect of Hareton; and Heathcliff acts as if his frustrated love for Catherine will somehow be requited by his cruelty toward her daughter and Hindley* s son. A few months of marriage to

Heathcliff are enough to reduce the pampered, genteel Isabella

Linton to the brutish level of Hindley Earnshaw. When Isabella becomes embroiled in Hindley* s final struggle with Heathcliff, even Hindley is shocked for a moment at her degeneracy. Isabella tells Nellys

I surveyed the weapon rwhich Hindley would use to attack Heathcliff! inquisitively; a hideous notion struck me. How powerful I should be possessing such an instrument! I took it from his hand, and touched the blade. He looked astonished at the expression my face assumed during a brief second. It was not horror, it was covetousness. (Ch. xiii, p. 119)

Even the complacent gentleman, Lockwood, enters into the spirit of justifiable mayhem that pervades Wuthering Heights when he defends his savage repulsion of the ghostly child with the excuse that "terror made me cruel" (Ch. iii, p. 30). Here the reader has direct confirmation of Nelly's dictum that "the mild . . . are only more justly selfish" (Ch. x, p. 81).

As we observed in my third chapter, Nelly herself is not wholly Innocent of the callous self-interest, with which Edgar and Catherine Earnshaw charge her during the course of their stormy marriage (Ch. xii, pp. 109-10). Nelly knows that

Heathcliff* s planned alliance between Catherine Linton and 147

Heathcliff* s son would be as disastrous for the new generation as

Catherine Earnshaw* s marriage to Edgar had been for Heathcliff* s own* Thus, her desperate attempts to thwart Heathcliff's revenge seem more Justifiable than the other characters* self-centered designs. Yet these very fears for Catherine* s safety blind

Nelly to Catherine's generous heart; and for Catherine's happiness

Nelly seems almost as willing as Heathcliff himself to sacrifice

Linton, if that will help.

Nelly's own "justly selfish" motives allow young Catherine's unselfish interest in Hareton to take her by surprise. Even though she applauds this development after the fact (Ch. xxxii, p. 250),

Nelly has not been able to anticipate it. When she says, • I can see no remedy, at present, unless [Catherine! could marry again; and that scheme, it does not come within my province to arrange" (Ch. xxx, p. 236), Nelly does not consider Hareton.

She is merely dropping a broad hint to the foppish Lockwood himself, who offers Catherine no solid companionship but only idle fantasy:

"What a realization of something more romantic than a fairy tale it would have been for Mrs. Linton Heathcliff, had she and I struck up an attachment, as her good nurse desired, and migrated together into the stirring atmosphere of the town)" (Ch. xxx, pp. 240-41)

With her pessimistic view of human nature, Nelly never expects to find an unselfish rapport developing between young Catherine \

148 and Hareton at Wuthering Heights; and thus, Emily Bronte leaves us In considerable doubt whether her narrator ever recognizes unselfishness to be their saving grace, even when she encounters

It in others.

Admittedly, the reader finds that Wuthering Heights provides powerful confirmation of human selfishness. The very term "justly

selfish"--the only generalization which Nelly uses to place events

in moral perspective--is an ethical paradox. No one can be both

just and selfish simultaneously. If the "mild and generous" are

as selfish as the "domineering," then in Nelly's view of sinful

humanity there can be no justice, but only degrees of justification

for what people do to satisfy themselves. Yet, even a s they suffer

under Heathcliff* s oppression, Hareton and Catherine Linton represent

an alternative to Nelly's pessimism. Heathcliff*s cruelty seems

to have taught Catherine's daughter and Hindley*s son to respond

instinctively toward others, not merely without self-interest but

in opposition to it.

By the parallel structure of her plot Emily Bronte calls

attention to this contrast between young Catherine and Hareton

and the other characters. The symmetrical genealogies of the

Linton and Eamshaw families enable Heathcliff to transfer to « the next generation those conflicts and tensions that have destroyed

his own. But when Heathcliff's scheme fails, this symmetry

between generations also helps the reader to understand why. When 149

young Catherine disregards Nelly's counsel, she is not seeking an advantageous match for "justly selfish" reasons, like her mother before her* Disagreeable as Linton Heathcliff may be, at least he recognizes the value of what Catherine is doing for him:

. . • Catherine, do me this justice; believe that if 1 might be as sweet, and as kind, and as good as you are, I would be, as willingly and more so, than as happy and as healthy. And believe that your kindness has made me love you deeper than if I deserved your love, and though I couldn' t, and cannot help showing my nature to you, I regret it and repent it, and shall regret and repent it, till I die!'" (Ch. xxiv, p. 203)

Linton's very candor is a measure of his selfishness because he is using his own weakness to play upon Catherine's sympathies* What natters, however, is the moral imperative so evident in Catherine's response: "'I felt he spoke the truth; and I felt I must forgive him; and though he should quarrel the next moment, I must forgive him again*'" In sacrificing herself for Linton's sake, Catherine reveals the same generosity of spirit which will eventually enable her to anticipate Hareton's true'worth and then develop it, bringing happiness to them both.

It would be unrealistic to expect Nelly, in her actions as. a character, to anticipate Catherine's and Hareton*s ultimate happiness. But even as a narrator Nelly, who was so quick to comment on the faults of her own generation, seems strangely silent about the virtues of the next one, even when their moral 150 courage presages a more hopeful future. All of Heathcliff's calculated designs on the younger generation come to nothing because, unlike her mother and Heathcliff, young Catherine is willing to accept Hareton with all his liabilities, just as

Hareton himself loves his "wolfish" guardian without hope of reward. Since Catherine was formerly the wife of Linton Heathcliff, when she marries Hareton she will combine the name of Heathcliff vrith the family names of Linton and Earnshaw. Her married

V * name of Catherine Linton Heathcliff Earnshaw may even represent a mundane solution to the supernatural predicament created by her mother when she scratched these same three names into her window ledge and created the spectral "'changeling'" of Catherine

Earnshaw Linton v/ho invaded Lockwood's dream.

Emily Bronte's contrast between the two generations implies that Catherine and Hareton survive their hostile environment because they have within them the selfless devotion which Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw lacked and which Lockwood, for all his gentility, and Nelly, for all her morality, can neither recognize in others nor supply themselves. Regardless of Nelly and Lockwood, and in spite of Heathcliff, Catherine and Hareton develop the moral courage to be both just and unselfish. Emily Bronte's t new generation will neither withdraw from life like Edgar nor remain embittered by it like Heathcliff, Hindley, and Catherine

Earnshaw. Hareton and Catherine end the novel in happiness 151 together because they are influenced neither by Lockwood's escapism nor by the moral confusion of Nelly Dean when she seeks to defend the "justly selfish" members of her own generation. CHAPTER VI

THE SYMBOLIC PLOT

In the previous chapter I have shovm how Emily Bronte uses

Hareton and Catherine Linton to introduce a new dimension of moral fulfillment which counterbalances the frustrated desires of their elders. But Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw also share passionate beliefs of sufficient intensity to generate a symbolic plot of their own, quite independent of the moral one in which Catherine Linton and Hareton seek domestic happiness*

In this symbolic plot Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw share passionate convictions about their own timeless world of the

spirit which exists beyond the loves and hates of all the other characters in Wuthering Heights, Yet the lovers* assumption

that their spiritual bond entitles them to be reunited after death, no matter what they do in life, conflicts sharply with

the social mores and religious assumptions of Catherine Linton*s marriage to Hareton, The mystical relationship which develops

symbolically, between Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw therefore*

isolates them in a world of their own. By the end of the

novel, they are rumored to be roaming the moors in a spiritual

152 153 world somewhere between the conventional realm of heaven in which the narrators profess belief and the real world of revenge and marriage where Hareton and Catherine Linton suffer and find happiness together at Wuthering Heights*^

When Catherine Earnshaw is still in her teens, she tries to explain her feelings about Heathcliff to her nurse, Nelly

Dean, in terms of symbols and metaphors* Their relationship is essentially spiritual, and Catherine describes it as "rock," an image with many religious connotations, in an attempt to . convince Nelly that her affection for Heathcliff is immutably spiritual and exists quite independent of Edgars

"My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods* Time will change it. I'm well aware, as winter changes the trees* My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath— a source of little visible delight, but necessary." (Ch* ix, p. 741

But Heathcliff is, in actuality, no Rock of Ages* Catherine does describe their love as bedrock, her one foundation on earth* Yet her dependence on Heathcliff is by no means a matter of faith in a superior being; it is rather an exchange

^Perhaps because they are so young, Hareton and Catherine seldom express opinions about an afterlife* Hareton, of course, has had no orthodox religious instruction beyond Joseph's threats and curses; and when Catherine compares her idea of heaven with Linton's, she envisions it as the natural world of the moors being experienced at a heightened intensity of pleasurable sensation: "*■ * * I wanted all to sparkle, and dance in a glorious jubilee/" (Ch* xxiv, p* 199)* 154 of human identities ("'Nelly, I am Heathcliff • ■ .'"I which has resulted from the bitter experiences they shared: "'My great miseries in this world have been Heathcliff* s miseries, and I watched and felt each from the beginning; my great thought in living is himself'" (Ch. ix, p. 74). After Catherine's marriage this total identity, which even transcends the earthly existence of those experiencing it, becomes increasingly important.

For Heathcliff and Catherine both continue to suffer from the force of Heathcliff's frustrated love, not only when he returns to quarrel with Edgar but also long after, when Edgar, Hindley, and Catherine are all dead and Heathcliff himself is being haunted to death by her spirit. '

Emily Bronte's symbolic plot begins almost immediately in Wuthering Heights, when Lockwood encounters the ghost of

Catherine Eamshaw. For, even though Lockwood dismisses his dream as a random fantasy, the reader who pays close attention to Catherine's and Heathcliff's subsequent beliefs about a life after death will find that Catherine's appearance as a ghost is intimately related to her past as well as to her future.

Even as a young girl, Catherine had thoughts about her death which were so unorthodox that she was forced to cast them in

i the form of a dream when relating them to the narrator, her superstitious nurse, Nelly Dean: 155

"I dreamt, once, that I was Tin heaven}," "I tell you I won't harken to your dreams. Miss Catherine! 1*11 go to bed," [Nelly Dean} interrupted. . • •

"This is nothing," cried she; "I was only going to say that heaven did not seem to be my home; and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; and the angels were so angry that they flung me out, into the middle of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights; where I woke sobbing for joy," (Ch, ix, p, 72)

Catherine can reassure Nelly that "'this is nothing'" because, to her, the dream is a pale, metaphorical representation of a feeling that has become an essential part of her being. But

Nelly is an orthodox Christian who does not even want to hear of a dream in which someone weeps for sorrow in heaven and for joy upon learning that earth is to be her paradise after all.

To Catherine this is an epiphany, a personal experience so profoundly spiritual that she introduces her secular allegory with sacramental imagery, as the kind of dream that goes "'through and through [one}, like wine through water, , ■ . alterfing}

the colour of my mind'" (Ch. lx, p. 72), In a Victorian novel

this may seem close to blasphemy; yet it actually constitutes

the opening speech in Emily Bronte's symbolic plot, as Catherine announces the iconoclastic assumption which Heathcliff appears « to accept also before his death, that some people may find their

eternal "'home'" in an earthly paradise. 156

The place for Catherine's paradise is Wuthering Heights and the time is her childhood, when she and Heathcliff ran wild together over the moors* With dismay and disapproval, Nelly • describes their escapades for Lockwood! n * • • it was one of .

[Catherine's and Heathcliff's] chief amusements to ruii away to the moors in the morning and remain there all day, and the after-punishment grew a mere thing to laugh at" (Ch* vi, p. 46).

This is the spirit of Catherine* s youth which she longs to recapture when her tempestuous marriage to Edgar Linton transforms her romantic longing for freedom into a desperate kind of escapism*

She tells Nelly, • * * I wish I were a girl again, half savage, and hardy, and free; and laughing at injuries, not maddening under them?'" (Ch* xii, p. 107). As a child, Catherine could

shrug off the limited injury of Hindley's corporal punishment or of her father's displeasure; but now, as an adult, Catherine

is suffering from a deeper and more lasting injury, the psychological

consequences of her decision to marry Edgar instead of Heathcliff*

Catherine longs to be "'half savage*" again because Heathcliff's

return has made her conscious of having been corrupted by the

social values of the Lintons. After she had decided to marry

Edgar, Catherine explained her choice to Nelly in these termst • * . if the wicked man [Hindley] * * * had not brought Heathcliff

so low, 1 shouldn't have thought of it'" (Ch. ix, p. 72)* Yet,

even as she attempted to justify her selfishness, Catherine 157 confessed* "'In whichever place the soul lives— in my soul, and in my heart. I'm convinced I'm wrong!(Ch. ix, p. 71).

This crucial error in Catherine's life is also the source for her longing to be "'hardy'" again, as in her childhood. When

Catherine discovered that Heathcliff had fled after overhearing her remarks about marrying Edgar, she sought him in the chill wind and rain of the moors. When she failed, she punished herself by staying up all night in her wet clothes and giving herself a fever. This illness debilitated her during her marriage because it had the paradoxical effect of rendering her psychologically more likely to be irritated and physically less able to bear it.-

Catherine's illness is therefore mental and spiritual as well as physical. In fact, Emily Bronte does not even tell us of Catherine's pregnancy until she dies in childbirth (Ch. xvi, p. 137). While carrying Edgar's child, Catherine dwells upon her own childhood as an escape from her responsibilities; for she never admits that she herself is partly to blame for having literally become sick to death of Edgar and Heathcliff, too.

To the end of her short life, Catherine blames all those around her--Heathcliff, Edgar," and Nelly--but never herself for the tensions and conflicts that ultimately kill her. Only once does Catherine admit that she may have been at fault,, when she tells Heathcliff, "'If I've done wrong, I'm dying for it.'" 158

But to this she adds, "'It is enough!'" implying that her death

* is sufficient expiation in itself for any guilt she may have incurred (Ch. xv, p. 135)•

But Catherine's outward confidence in her earthly past and her spiritual future is at odds with her inner doubts and feelings of guilt, and this conflict provides the psychological

"action" for Emily Bronte's symbolic plot. Catherine's chronic I illness, aggravated by the hunger strike with which she hopes to punish Edgar, makes her semi-delirious at certain times during her pregnancy; and in the fantasies which result, Emily Bronte uses metaphors and symbols to create a poetic representation of Catherine's subconscious uncertainties about her past--fearful misgivings which sometimes distort her confident dreams of a future paradise■

In her bedroom at Thrushcross Grange, Catherine looks into her mirror and suddenly cannot believe that she sees her own reflection. Nelly tries to reason with her, but-*

say what I could, I was incapable of making her comprehend tthe reflection} to be her own; so I rose and covered Tthe mirror} with a shawl* "It's behind there still!" she pursued, anxiously. "And it stirred. Who is it? I hope it will not come out when you are gone! Oh! Nelly, the room is haunted! I'm afraid of being alone!"

"There's nobody here!" I insisted. "It was yourself. Mrs. Linton; you knew it a while since." 159

"Myself," she gasped, "and the clock is striking twelver It's true, then; that's dreadful f"

Trembling and bewildered, she held me fast, but the horror gradually passed from her countenance; its paleness gave place to a glow of shame* "Oh, dear I I thought I was at home," she sighed* "I thought I was lying in my chamber, at Wuthering Heights*" (Ch* xii, p. 106)

In this extraordinary scene Catherine is terrified in her delirium by significant images of her past, present, and future which crowd together, becoming superimposed over each other as in a composite photograph* Midnight is the time that Catherine's baby will be born, and two hours later Catherine will die,

"having never recovered • ■ • consciousness" (Ch* xvi, p. 137)*

So the face which Catherine sees in her mirror as the clock strikes twelve is hers; yet it is not completely her own, for it also belongs to the spectre which she senses is "'waiting to come out*" after she is dead and Nelly, like everyone else

Catherine knew when she was alive, is "'gone*'" Nelly is right because Catherine's mirror does reflect only herself; but

Catherine is right, too, because it is a self which "haunts" her bedroom at Thrushcross Grange now, just as it will haunt her bedroom later, at Wuthering Heights* The ghostly image that

Catherine sees is actually a composite of three Catherines; the "'Mrs* Linton'" whom Nelly knows; the Catherine Earnshaw 160 whom Catherine recalls as "'lying in my chamber at Wuthering

Heights'"; and the "'changeling'" spirit of both these Catherines which will eventually appear at Wuthering Heights in the shape of young Catherine Earnshaw, and yet refers to Itself as

"'Catherine Linton'" in Lockwood's dream.

Like the reflection of herself which Catherine sees in the mirror, the very room in which she lies wavers before her between past, present, and future. Catherine imagines that she is looking at an image'reflected in the polished surface, of the "'black press'" in her bedroom at Wuthering Heights, instead of in the mirror which occupies a corresponding position in her present room, just as she supposes the bed she is lying , on to be at Wuthering Heights instead of in Thrushcross Grange.

She is suddenly terrified by surroundings which ought to be familiar to her because, like her own reflected image, they have begun to represent her future as well as her past.

Catherine's vision of the bedroom at Wuthering Heights is far more than what she recalls from fond memory; it is also what her spirit will, see two more times, once when it appears to

Lockwood outside the window and again when it enters that window

to reclaim Heathcliff upon his death. « But Lockwood* s dream and Heathcliff* s death do not occur until long after Catherine's own death, so what happens to her

in the meantime? Catherine's first dream of being expelled 161 from heaven to Wuthering Heights was only a substitute for something even more ominous which Nelly balked at hearing

(Ch. ix, p. 72). Perhaps Catherine was also thinking of this when, after Nelly had convinced her that the spectral image in her bedroom mirror was really herself, she responded, "'It's true, then; that's dreadfulI

Previously, when Catherine had been terrified by her reflection, she took some comfort in dreaming that she was safe in her bed at Wuthering Heights. But during her final illness Catherine has another dream of being back in her old bed, a dream that recurs so often she fears for her sanity, since this time she associates it with the loss both of Wuthering

Heights and of Heathcliff. When Catherine lies on the floor recovering from one of her hysterical fits, the dawn coming through her bedroom window gives her a vivid recollection of the first time during her childhood that she was separated from Heathcllffs

"'Before I recovered sufficiently to see and hear, it began to be dawn; and, Nelly, I'll tell you what I thought, and what has kept recurring and recurring until I feared for my reason. I thought as I lay there with my head against that table leg Cin my bedroom at Thrushcross Grange!, and my eyes dimly discerning the grey square of the window, . that I was enclosed in the oak-panelled bed at home Cin Wuthering Heights!; and my heart ached with some great grief which, just waking, I could not recollect. . . . I was laid alone, for the first time, and, rousing from a dismal doze after a night 162

of weeping, I lifted my hand to push the panels aside: it struck the table-top Cin this bedroom}t I swept it along the carpet Chere}, and then memory burst in--my late anguish was swallowed in a paroxysm of despair* I cannot say why I felt so wildly wretched— it must have been temporary derangement, for there is scarcely cause**" (Ch. xli, p. 107)

Hindley had decreed that Catherine and Heathcliff should sleep

In separate rooms, ostensibly as punishment for running off to

Thrushcross Grange together five weeks earlier. But Hindley* s true aim is to help the Lintons diminish Heathcliff* s influence on Catherine so that they will drift apart (Ch. vi, p. 50-

Ch. vii, p. 51)* Thus, the "'great grief*" which Catherine remembers waking up to at Wuthering Heights is not only her t first night without Heathcliff at her side; it is also her painful recollection of their quarrel over the ladylike airs which Catherine had brought with her on returning from Thrushcross

Grange. As Catherine recalls all of this, she is disturbed to find that the "'paroxysm of despair*" which she feels now should be so much greater than the anguish she had experienced then, when the event actually occurred. Catherine is afraid to reflect upon her present intensity of feeling and tries to dismiss it as some "'temporary derangement*" brought on by

illness. But the grief this memory evokes is not temporary, for she also mentions that it has "'kept recurring and recurring*"

until she is forced to ponder its significance: 163

• • supposing at twelve years old, I had been wrenched from the Heights, and every early association, and my all in all, as Heathcliff was at that time, and had been converted at a stroke into Mrs. Linton, the lady of Thrushcross Grange, and the wife of a stranger; an exile, and outcast, thenceforth, from what had been my world.'11 (Ch. xii, p. 107) Hindley had been able to part Heathcliff and Catherine physically, and even then only temporarily. But when the twelve-year-old

Catherine returned from Thrushcross Grange as a "lady" conscious of Heathcliff's social inferiority, she separated them in spirit more quickly and completely than Hindley ever had, until her engagement to Edgar finally compelled Heathcliff to leave altogether*

Thus, Catherine is so besieged with doubts about her past that she fears for her future. The number twelve is the hour when Catherine will lose consciousness for the last time on earth; and twelve is the age she will become when she awakens to find herself "converted at a stroke" not into the Mrs. Linton she knows but into the form of a ghostly child whom she here supposes to be in "exile," and who ultimately identifies herself as Catherine Linton in Lockwood's dream.

When she was young, Catherine also used to dream of being cast out of heaven back to Wuthering Heights; but now, since her betrayal of

Heathcliff's love, Catherine begins to fear being excluded from

Wuthering Heights itself, the earthly paradise of her dreams*

Catherine's feverish terror of becoming an "'outcast . . . from what had been my world'" seems to be realized long after her death, when her spectre appears outside her old bedroom window at Wuthering 164

Heights, scratching on the pane for Lockwood to let it in. Evidently

Lockwood has unintentionally invoked Catherine* s troubled spirit by reading over the three names, "'Catherine Earnshaw,*" "'Catherine

Heathcliff,*" and "'Catherine Linton,*" which recall her youthful dilemma since she must have scratched them in the window sill while making her crucial decision of whom to marry (Ch. ill, p. 25). As yet, however, Lockwood knows nothing of Catherine* s marriage to

Edgar Linton, so he is surprised when the ghost identifies itself as Catherine Linton. Her spirit appears in the form of a child, so

Lockwood shrewdly supposes it to be a "'changeling'" (Ch. iii, pp. 30-31). For Catherine's spectre is trying to fulfill her original dream of returning to the Wuthering Heights of her youth; declaring itself to be a "'waif'" who has wandered homeless for twenty years, Catherine's spirit tries to re-enter her former bedroom which Heathcliff has preserved just as it was before

Catherine Earnshaw became Catherine Linton.

The chronology of the novel supports this symbolic consistency between Lockwood's dream, Catherine's past# and her prophetic

forebodings about the future. For almost twenty years have elapsed

in the story between Catherine's death and Lockwood's appearance at

Wuthering Heights. In addition, Catherine's spectre might be referring

* to the length of time that she and Heathciiff have been separated in

spirit, from the day he ran away after overhearing her express a preference for Edgar to the moment of his death in her bedroom— 165 another period of almost twenty years*^ Perhaps the correlation between these periods represents more than coincidence, and

Catherine was meant to spend the same amount of time wandering

“'lost*" on the moors after death as Heathcliff spends in life, being tormented by the futility of his revenge and his inability to communicate with her. When Catherine and Heathcliff were children Nelly noticed that "the greatest punishment we could invent for her was to keep her separate from him" (Ch. v, p. 43).

Thus, as we have seen, Catherine dates her being "'an exile, and outcast . . . from what had been ray world'" from the moment that Hindley forces her to sleep apart from Heathcliff, after they have stolen a glimpse of Catherine's new world at Thrushcross

Grange. For Heathcliff, however, this separation does not become

Inevitable until the moment he overhears Catherine declare her intention of marrying Edgar and does not stay to hear her affirm an even deeper commitment to Heathcliff himself which transcends even death: "'If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the Universe would turn to a mighty stranger'"

2 A strict computation according to Sanger's Appendix in "The Structure of Wuthering Heights" reveals that Catherine has actually been separated from Heathcliff for nearly twenty-two years on earth and for almost eighteen after she dies. But in parables and folktales, uneven numbers are generally rounded off for the sake of a poetic formula. Wuthering Heights is in this folk tradition, for the novel is itself an oral tale being told by Nelly to Lockwood, and it contains striking vestiges of other tales about the demonic and the supernatural. 166

(Ch. ix, p. 74). Perhaps, then, Catherine does "'continue to be'" even after death because Heathcliff remains behind, longing for their reunion. Such a life-ln-death would also constitute

Catherine's "punishment" because it separates her from Heathcliff

In spirit just as Hindley, Edgar, and Catherine herself helped to separate them bodily. If this is so, then Lockwood is too close to the truth when he blurts out; "*• . • that minx,

Catherine Linton, or Earnshaw, or however she was called--she must have been a changeling— wicked little soult She told me she had been walking the earth these twenty years: a just punishment for her mortal transgressions. I've no doubt!'"

Heathcliff is astounded by Lockwood's outburst; for his unwelcome guest of a night has presumed to pass judgment on Catherine's whole life by implying that her ghost is a lost soul seeking £ expiation from sin. Even Lockwood, Insensitive as he generally is, instantly regrets having overextended himself and confesses,

"I blushed at ray inconsideration" (Ch. ill, pp. 31-32).

3 « This situation had been used by Emily Bronte before, in one of heir Gondal poems (Hatfield, Complete Poems. 154. "Written in Aspin Castle," lines 80-84)i

And this is she for whom he [Lord Alfred!! died: For whom his spirit, unforgiven. Wanders unsheltered, shut from heaven-- An outcast for eternity* 167

Of course, Lockwood's and Nelly's moral codes are too orthodox to be the sole measure of the love-hate relationship between

Catherine and Heathcllff in Emily Bronte's symbolic plot.- To secure her own peace of mind as a good Christian, Nelly Dean - allows Catherine the benefit of considerable doubt by piously commending her to heaven just after her death. Catherine herself had dreamed that she was unfit to stay in heaven, however, and

Heathcliff is outraged by Nelly's conventional sentiment:

''Her life closed in a gentle dream--may she wake as kindly in the other worldl" "May she wake in torment I" [Heathcliff! cried, with frightful vehemence. . . . "Why, she's a liar to the endl Where is she? Not thare--not in heaven— not peri shed--where? Oh [Catherine!* you said you cared nothing for my sufferings* And I pray one prayer— I repeat it until my tongue stiffens— Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest, as long as I am living* Tou said I killed you— haunt me, thenT . . . Be with me always— take any form— drive me madf only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you*" (Ch. xvi, p. 139)

If Catherine's spirit is in purgatory, as Lockwood's Christian interpretation of his dream implies, then Heathcllff may bear

i seme responsibility himself for putting her there with his curse,

"•Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest, as long as I am living*'"

But after he has heard of Lockwood's dream, Heathcliff rushes to the window and calls upon Catherine* s.ghost to return because* he wants to be haunted. What Lockwood and Nelly would think of as a curse, Heathcliff calls a "'prayer'" for, to him, her presence

"•In any form'" is a blessing. 168

Through this relationship of love and hate between Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw, Emily Bronte maintains psychological continuity within her symbolic plot. We have already observed how Catherine tried to explain her love for Heathcllff in terms of mutual suffering (Ch. ix, p. 74); and Heathcliff accuses

Catherine of unnecessarily prolonging their torment by marrying

Edgar (Ch. xv, pp. 134-35). Yet Heathcliff, too, is willing to endure the agony of their separation as long as Catherine's death will not prevent spiritual communication between them:

"• . ..Catherine, you know that I could as soon forget you as my existencel Is it not sufficient for your infernal selfishness, that while you are at peace I shall writhe in the torments of hell?11 "I shall not be at peace,11 moaned Catherine. . . .

uI'm not wishing you greater torment .than I have, Heathcliff I I only wish us never to be parted— and should a word of mine distress you hereafter, think I feel the same distress underground, and for my own sake, forgive raef” (Ch. xv, p. 133)

The bond of suffering forged between Catherine and Heathcllff by Hindley's oppression wa3 merely strengthened when the lovers inflicted further punishment upon themselves by marrying Edgar and Isabella; and now that Catherine is dying, they are both willing (and even sadistically eager) to perpetuate their mutual torment, if that is how they can remain in spiritual contact beyond the grave. 169

In one of those hallucinations which Nelly attributes

to temporary "insanity'* caused by fever, Catherine attempts

to find out how long she will have to remain alone in spiritual

limbo after her deatht

"It's a rough journey, and a sad heart to travel it; and [Heathcliff, you and U must pass by Glmmerton Kirk, to go that journey! Werve braved its ghosts often together, and dared each other to stand among the graves, and ask them to come* But Heathcliff, if I dare you now, will you venture? If you do. I'll keep you. I'll not lie there by myself; they may bury me twelve feet deep, and throw the church down over me, but I won't rest till you are with me, I never will!" She paused,and resumed, with a strange smile, "He's considering--he'd rather I'd come to him I Find a way, thent not through that Kirkyard* You are slow! Be content, you always followed me!" (Ch, xii, p, 108)

In order to return to the home of her childhood after her married

life at Thrushcross Grange, Catherine has to "'pass by'" the

graveyard at Ginner ton Kirk; for she must be dead and buried

before she can revisit Wuthering Heights* Heathcliff, she

foresees with great accuracy, will want to slow down their

journey in death by calling upon her to "'come to him'1* after

she is dead, to haunt him while he clings stubbornly to life*

But, as Catherine maintains in their last meeting, she will not « be satisfied until they are together again after death* Sarcastically

' Catherine calls upon Heathcliff to find a way to her that is

not through the grave* She can afford a "smile" over this, for 170 time is on her side. Heathcliff may be "'slow,'" but she foresees that he will eventually be content*'* to follow her to a world of their own at Wuthering Heights*

Actually, Heathcliff is slow to follow Catherine not only * in dying but also in accepting her vision of an afterlife* As we observed in ray third chapter, Heathcliff has been wronged so often in his childhood that he attains a degree of moral awareness which all the other characters lack* Even when

Catherine mokes her metaphysical declaration of shared identity, that Heathcliff is "'more myself than I am,*" she is also trying to "'cheat [her] uncomfortable conscience'" about deciding to marry Edgar. So her confession of love for Heathcliff has ethical implications as well; Heathcliff, she is saying, is more like my moral self than I have been, remaining truer to our 4 love (Ch.ix, pp. 73-74). In my fourth chapter we also saw

^This ethical reading of "more myself than I am" is suggested by Ralph Harper, Human Love--Existential and Mystical (Baltimore: 'Johns Hopkins Press, 1966}, p. 143. In The Disappearance of God. p. 178, Miller proposes that this statement also identifies Catherine with her dead brother who had the name of Heathcllff, so her love "is in a manner incestuous." Van Ghent, The English Novel, p. 169, pursues the psychological implications of this:

In Emily Bronte's use of the symbolism of the incest motive, the incestual impulse appears as an attempt to make what is "outside" oneself identical with what is "inside" onself--a performance that can be construed in physical and human terms only by violent destruction of personality bounds, by rending of flesh and at last by death. 171 how Heathcllff forfeits his moral superiority by seeking vengeance upon his return, after finding that Catherine has married Edgar.

Even before she suspects the role that Isabella will play in

Heathcllff* s revenge on Edgar, Catherine warns Isabella that

Heathcliff Is a "'fierce, pitiless, wolfish man*" and that

"'avarice is growing with him a besetting sin'" (Ch. x, p. 90).

While virtually on her deathbed, Catherine urges forgiveness instead of revenge. Then, when she perceives Heathcliff struggling to show n o emotion over this, Catherine uses her ethical advantage to punish him: '"That is not mjr Heathcliff,*" she tells Nelly with smug self-righteousness, "*I shall have mine yet; and take him with me--he*s in my soul,'" But Heathcliff will not accept such cant from Catherine now, any more than he has from Nelly in the past. Relying on their metaphysical sense of identity, he reminds Catherine that her soul is inseparable from his, so she is killing them botht

"I have not broken your heart— you have broken it— and in breaking it, you have broken mine. So much the worse for me, that I am strong. Do I want to live? . . . would you like to live with your soul in the grave?" (Ch. xv, pp. 134-35)

While Catherine is alive, Heathcliff refuses to share her view of an afterlife because he realizes that she is using it to , escape her share of responsibility for the suffering she will leave behind on earth. She longs to be ■"* incomparably above and beyond you all.*" But Heathcliff reminds Catherine "*so 172 much the worse for me that I ant strong'" because he will continue to suffer from her betrayal of their love while he is alive*

Even after Catherine is dead and he continues to feel her presence above ground without being able to see her, Heathcliff blames

Catherine for "'show[ingJ herself, as she often was in life, a devil to me*'" As Catherine had predicted, "'he'd rather

I'd come to himi*"; and, since Catherine's spirit will not manifest itself above ground, Heathcliff can only anticipate a reunion with her body instead, when his dust mingles with hers in the grave (Ch* xxix, pp. 228‘-30)*

One commentator has found the lovers' disparate views on the possibility of life after death to be incompatible, but another argues that they are part of the ambiguity which Emily

Bronte seeks to maintain concerning Catherine's and Heathcliff's metaphysical beliefs and aspirations*'* This latter view seems more probable because Emily Bronte withholds Heathcliff's revelation of his desperate struggle to be reunited with Catherine's

spirit until the chapter preceding the romance between Catherine's daughter and Hareton* Since Lockwood dreams of Catherine's ghost

harper. Human Love, p. 143; Hagan, "Control of Sympathy in Vfuthering Heights." p* 316. Hagan goes too far, however, when he asserts that Heathcliff's view of Catherine in her coffin "persuades him that his hopes have been in vain— that, as Lockwood affirms at the end of the novel, Catherine has been all these years only a quiet sleeper in the quiet earth." This is doubtful because, even as he tells Nelly about viewing Catherine's corpse, Heathcliff affirms his "strong faith in ghosts" and says that the sight of Catherine has only pacified him a little* about two months after Heathcliff's confession of his longing, and since Heathcliff then relinquishes his revenge on Catherine's daughter and Hareton, the reader may conclude that Lockwood has provided the evidence of Catherine's spiritual presence that

Heathcliff has been seeking. Yet such a deduction remains clouded . in ambiguity because of a missing link in this causal chain of events--Lockwood's dream, which Emily Bronte has removed to the beginning of her novel. If the reader chooses to connect

Catherine's ghost with Heathcliff's withdrawal from a life of revenge and his strange manner of dying, then the conclusion e remains his own and not the author's.

Whatever significance the reader may attach to Lockwood's dream, however, the fact remains that Heathcliff's death is symbolically consistent with Catherine's aspirations of returning to Wuthering Heights in spiritual form. As she was dying,

Catherine mocked Heathcliff by telling how "'twenty years hence'" he would be visiting her grave only to say how much he regretted having to join her (Ch. xy, p. 133). But when, after nearly twenty years, Heathcliff does go to Catherine's grave to prepare a place for himself there (Ch. xxix, pp. 228-29 and Ch. xxxiv, p. 263),

® Hagan, "Control of Sympathy in Wuthering Heights." pp. 315-17, points out that this ambiguity is also established by the state of Heathcliff's health. Since he, like Catherine, is starving to death when he has his most vivid supernatural experiences, some readers may discount Lockwood's dream altogether and rationalize the entire metaphysical dimension of Wuthering Heights as hallucinatory wish-fulfillment on the part of the lovers themselves. 174 hla visit is the culmination of a long and painful vigil from which death will be the release. Heathcliff has declared that

Catherine is "'not in heaven,'" yet "'not perished'" either; and he beseeches her to haunt him in "'any form,'" even one that will

"'drive ChimJ mad'"— Just so long as they can remain in contact after she is dead (Ch. xvi, p. 139). So Catherine's spirit accepts

Heathcliff's challenge and does almost drive him mad, dangling him over the "'abyss'" of his loneliness by revealing its presence so subtly that he cannot tell what form she has assumed. On the day Catherine was buried, Heathcliff felt her presence

"'not under Chim], but on the earth'" (Ch. xxix, p. 229). He rushed back to Wuthering Heights to see if she was in her room, or his, but found only frustration theret

"I looked round impatiently— I felt her by me— I could almost see her, and yet I could not! I ought to have sweat blood then, from the anguish of my yearning, from the fervour of my supplications to have but one glimpse! I had not one. She showed herself, as she often was in life, a devil to mef" (Ch. xxix, p. 230)

Heathcliff. even tries to sleep in Catherine's bed, only to find, as Lockwood does much later, that her roan "'swarrats? with

Catherines'" (Ch. iii, p. 25). In fact, as Heathcliff describes

it, Catherine's spirit "'was either outside the window, . . . or a entering the room'" (Ch. xxix, p. 230)— an experience so similar to Lockwood's dream that Catherine's presence seems to have a supernatural existence of its own, independent of the beholder. 175

Heathcliff is beaten out'" of Catherine's room because, whenever he opens his eyes, he cannot bear to find her gone.

He tells Nelly,"*it was a strange way of killing, not by inches, but by fractions of hair-breadths^ to beguile me with the spectre of a hope through eighteen yearst'" (Ch. xxix,p. 230). Lockwood's dream, then, has made Heathcliff's "'spectre of a hope*" visible for the first time since Catherine's dream. After his unsuccessful attempt to stay in Catherine's bedroom, Heathcliff had sealed it, permitting no one to enter; and later he also solders the bedroom window shut to prevent Catherine's daughter from escaping through it, as she did once before (Ch. xxviii, p. 226)* But when Lockwood's dream shows Heathcliff that the same window which keeps Catherine

Linton in may also be keeping Catherine Earnshaw out, he wrenches it open and calls upon the ghost to return (Ch. iii, p. 33). Little « more than a month later, Heathcliff's cry seems to have been answered, for he begins to notice Catherine's face not in her daughter, a3 might be expected but in Haretom • . • when I look for his father in his face, I find her every day morel How the devil is he so like? I can hardly bear to see him'" (Ch. xxxl, p. 240). Two months later Heathcliff's anguish is intensified because Catherine haunts him everywhere, not merely in Hareton's facer

• . I am surrounded with her image! The most ordinary faces of men and women-- my own features— mock me with a resemblance. The entire world is a dreadful collection of memoranda that she did exist, and that I? have lost her!'" (Ch. xxxlii, p. 255) 176

The closer Heathcllff comes to dying, the more tangible

Catherine's presence becomes* Toward the end, Nelly observes

Heathcllff gazing "within two yards distance" at a "fancied

object" which, "whatever it was, • • * communicated, apparently,

both pleasure and pain, in exquisite extremes*" He trie3 to

explain this anguished happiness to Nelly, saying, "'I'm too

happy, and yet I'm not happy enough* My soul* s bliss kills

my body, but does not satisfy itself'" (Ch. xxxiv, pp. 261-62).

Heathcliff's bliss is evidently his impending union with Catherine's

spirit; and Heathcliff's anguish is that his body will not weaken

more quickly, for he senses that death must make him pure spirit,

too, before his soul can join with Catherine's and be "'satisfied'"

by what Catherine had confessed that she, too, needed to go

on livings • • • surely you CNellyJ and everybody have

a notion that there is, or should be, an existence of yours

beyond you* What were the use of my creation if I were entirely

contained here?'" (Ch* ix, pp. 73-74). Before her death Catherine

had predicted, and Heathcliff had agreed, that he would be slow

to follow her because of his physical stamina* Yet now, like

Catherine, Heathcllff no longer feels so self-contained because

his soul is reaffirming its identity with hers:

t "I have neither a fear, nor a presentiment, nor a hope of death. Why should I? With my hard constitution, and temperate mode of living, and unperilous occupations, I ought to, and probably shall remain above ground, till there is scarcely a black hair on my head. And 177

yet I cannot continue in this condition! • • • I have a single wish, and my whole being and faculties are yearning to attain it,- They have yearned towards it so long, and so unwaveringly, that I'm convinced it will be reached— and soon— ‘because it has devoured my existence, I am swallowed in the anticipation of its fulfillment," (Ch. xxxiii,p. 256)

Perhaps the taste for revenge that Heathcliff so often indulges has made him masochistic, for he desires his own death yet

refuses to will it. Nelly admonishes him: "'Your cheeks are hollow, and your eyes blood-shot, like a person staring with hunger, and going blind with loss of sleep.'" But Heathcliff

is too strong to yield to any suicidal impulse by willfully

refusing to eat, as Catherine had done. He tells Nelly:

"It is not ray fault, that I cannot eat or rest, . . . I assure you, it is through no settled designs. I'll do both, as soon as I possibly can. But you might as well bid a man struggling in the water, rest within arms-length of the shore! I must reach it first, and then I'll rest." (Ch. xxxiv, p. 262)

As Heathcliff was once Catherine's rock, so she is now his haven ashore, her spiritual influence growing until it distracts him altogether from prolonging his mortality through food and sleep. Her spirit draws him out for long walks on the moors, the earthly paradise of Catherine's dreams where t h e y « played happily together as children and where, after Heathcliff's death, they are observed walking together again, as ghosts

(Ch. xxxiv, p. 265).' Now that Catherine's spirit has been "'lost'" 178 on the moors for more than twenty years, Heathcllff senses

that her return is imminent. A few days before his death he returns to Catherine's bedroom and finds that he is now able

to endure the restless nights there (Ch. xxxiv, p. 260). The aching memory of Catherine's living presence which once drove him out of her room (Ch. xxix, p. 230) has beennsplaced by an

agonizing devotion to her spirit which now hovers just out of

sight. Heathcliff's pain does not diminish, but increases in

proportion to his bliss, as Catherine's spirit struggles with

his body for the release of his soul. His last words ares

"'By Godl she's relentless. Oh, damn it I It's unutterably too

much for flesh and blood to bear, even mine'11 (Ch. xxxiv, p. 263).

As the Romantic poets often employ a wild natural setting

to reflect human character and emotions, so Emily Bronte

symbolically associates Heathcliff with the Yorkshire moors where

Catherine longs to return. We have already observed how Catherine

described their love as having the strength and permanence of rock

(Ch. ix, p. 74), and Heathcliff's very name combines two of the

most distinctive contrasting features of the Yorkshire countryside.

Nelly and Catherine also attempt tocbpict Heathcliff's nature

even more specifically in terms of the local landscape. When I comparing him with Edgar, Nelly describes Heathcliff in terras

of "a bleak, hilly coal country" (Ch. viii, p. 64), and Catherine

warns Isabella that Heathcliff is "'an arid wilderness of furze

[a prickly flowering shrub] and whinstone [a hard dark-colored rock]'" 179

(Ch, x, p. 89)— two natural features of a wasteland landscape as bleak and compelling as the Yorkshire moors themselves*

This association of Heathcliff with the moors is far more subtle than the pathetic fallacy of the bolt of lightning which signals his departure from Wuthering Heights after Catherine accepts Edgar's proposal of marriage (Ch. ix, p. 76). Motifs of wind and rain coming through windows from the moors are associated both with Catherine's guilt over deserting Heathcliff and with her desire to be reunited with him as in the past.

Catherine first subjected herself to hunger and exposure as penance for driving Heathcliff away from Wuthering Heights.

She was wet and hungry and tired from staying up all night after her unsuccessful search for Heathcliff on the moors; thus, when

Nelly opened a window in the morning, she found Catherine shivering from the fever that would ultimately kill her (Ch. ix, p. 77). Catherine next hastened the progress of her illness by exposing herself to the chill wind again, at Thrushcross

Grange, after she was pregnant with Edgar's child. This time

Catherine was on a hunger strike to punish both Edgar and Heathcliff for making her married life so miserable. As she told Nelly then,

"'I felt that . . . we should all be driven asunder for nobody knows how longl'" (Ch. xi, p. 101). Catherine sensed that she was dying and longed to return to her earthly paradise at

Wuthering Heights for a "'chance of life'";so she threw 180 open the window herself, welcoming the chill wind for the recollections it brought of her wild excursions with Heathcliff on the moors--the only place where they had truly been happy and free, and where Heathcliff now walks at night to get closer to her spirit (Ch* xii, pp. 106-08 and Ch. xxxiv, pp. 257-58).

In terms of imagery, Heathcliff's death has thus been amply prepared for. These symbolic motifs of the lovers' suffering and of their longing to be reunited converge once more when, under an open window, Nelly finds Heathcliff's body, drenched in rain and gaunt with hunger, just as near an open window she had encountered Catherine twice before, wet and hungry and longing to be with Heathcliff at Wuthering Heights.

The symbolic patterns in Heathcliff's death scene thus create the impression that Catherine's spirit has reclaimed him by means of the same punishment that Catherine herself had endured for his sake: hunger, lack of sleep, and exposure to wind and rain.

This symbolic correspondence between Catherine's desire to return and Heathcliff's desire to join her in death is conplete when Nelly Dean finds Heathcliff lying in the same bed that

Catherine had dreamed of returning to, and that Lockwood had been lying in when she did try to return. During her fatal illness Catherine wished to throw open the window at Thrushcross

Grange so that she could feel "'that wind sounding in the firs 181 by the lattice'” of her window at Wuthering Heights, for she longed to be back in her old panelled bed there. At this point

Nelly could bear her strange behavior no longer and declared that her mistress was behaving ”no better than a wailing child”

(Ch, xii, p. 106). This image of a child, associated with

Catherine's desire to return, manifests itself to Lockwood when he lies in Catherine's bed, hears the wind stirring in the the trees by the window, and dreams that it is Catherine herself, scratching at the pane as a child, wailing ”*Let me ini'”

(Ch. iii, p. 30)• When Nelly finds Heathcliff lying in the same bed where Lockwood lay, Heathcliff's hand has been cut by the window, just as the wrist of Catherine's spectre had been cut by it some months before in Lockwood's dream. But then Lockwood had kept the broken window shut, using the jagged glass to slash Catherine so deeply that her blood soaked the bedclothes, while now Heathcliff has merely been grazed bloodlessly by the window swaying open in the wind. The symbolic distinction is clear; upon Heathcliff's death, Catherine's spirit is free 7 to enter at will and to reclaim her own without further resistance.

When Heathcliff began his entomkment in Catherine's room, Nelly

7 Shannon, "Lockwood's Dreams and the Exegesis of Wuthering Heights.” p. 107, suggests that the "lattice 'flapping to and fro' echoes a persistent folk belief that the window of a dead person's room must be opened to allow egress for the soul.” For other folk motifs used in Catherine's death, see Q. D. Leavis, Lectures in America, pp. 145-49. 182 had speculated that the window over Catherine's bed was ,fwide enough for anybody to get through, and it struck me that rHeathcliff J plotted another midnight excursion” (Ch. xxxiy, p. 260). In view of Nelly's previous prophetic observations, . the reader may therefore speculate that Heathcliff's spirit joined Catherine's at the stroke of twelve, the same time that

Catherine herself was last conscious of being alive.

To confirm this inpression that Heathcliff and Catherine have been reunited in their earthly paradise at Wuthering

Heights, Emily Bronte adds one further twist to the thread of her symbolic plot. When Heathcliff walks the moors near Wuthering

Heights as a ghost, he is accompanied by a woman who is obviously not the apparition of a wailing child that had appeared to

Lockwood. For, when she returned alone to Wuthering Heights as a spectral child, Catherine had wandered lost, finding the moors -to be a purgatory for her lonely spirit; but, now that

Heathcliff is dead, Catherine's spirit joins him as a woman, a final change which- may signify that Catherine has at last achieved the earthly paradise of her dreams (Ch. xxxiv, p. 265).

Now that Heathcllff and Catherine have outlived their desire to torment each other, are they able to walk the moors in mature « companionship as ghosts, reunited in spirit on the same moors which long ago had united them as children?

Just as Emily Bront'e employs structural parallels between two generations to provide Hareton and Catherine Linton with 183 a moral theme, so she also uses symbolic correspondences between

Heathcllff and Catherine Earnshaw to develop a different plot as a complement, or perhaps even an alternative, to that theme.

Heathcllff does not refrain from carrying out his revenge merely because he has a change of heart when he notices how young

Catherine and Hareton resemble his dead love, or because he is impressed by their innate goodness and generosity. These sentimental interpretations of Emily Bronte's moral plot are no more viable than the inference that his revenge has simply 8 burned itself out. When young Catherine and Hareton are pursuing their courtship, Heathcliff is reduced to a secondary figure in the background because he has already been distracted by Catherine's spirit from pursuing his revenge, as well as from eating and sleeping. He scarcely notices Catherine and

Hareton having a lovers' quarrel over him; wan, pale, and sighing

O . Baker, History of the Hovel. VIII, 77, n. 9 asserts that, "It is astounding to hear very superior folk talk about the 'sentimental' ending of Wuthering Heights: they must have got the word on the brain without being quite clear what it means. Sentimentality is non-existent in the story of Catherine and Heathcliff; that is one of its supreme glories." Yet many critics, while they rightly refrain from charging Emily Bronte with sentimentality, nonetheless fail to give her sufficient credit for prior preparation of the change in Heathcliff. Taking his own wry explanation at its face value, they assert ' that Heathcliff abruptly desists at the peak of his revenge because he has simply grown tired or has lost interest. See Schorer, Introduction to Wuthering Heights, p. xiii; Shannon, "Lockwood's Dreams and the Exegesis of Wuthering Heights." pp. 104-05; Shapiro, "Wuthering Heights as a Victorian Hovel," p. 294. 184 like a forlorn lover himself, Heathcliff is wholly preoccupied with his own devotion to a union with Catherine unattainable in life (Ch. xxxi, pp. 239-40). He tells Nelly:

"It is a poor conclusion, is it not, . . . An absurd termination to my violent exertions? . . . My old enemies have not beaten me; now would be the precise time to revenge myself on their representatives [young Catherine and Hareton?; I could do it; and none could hinder me. But where is the use? I don't care for striking, I can't take the trouble to raise my hand! That sounds as if I had been labouring the whole time, only to exhibit a fine trait of magnanimity. It is far from being the case— I have lost the facility of enjoying their destruction, and I am too idle to destroy for nothing* "Nelly, there is a strange change approaching--I'm in its shadow at present." (Ch. xxxiii, pp. 254-S5);.

Too often the last sentence of the excerpt quoted above is ignored, with the result that Heathcliff's explanation is taken out of context. Just as he had tried before to explain to Nelly how he felt about Catherine's ghost ("'. . . I'm too happy and yet

I'm not happy enough'"--Ch. xxxiv, p. 262), Heathcliff tries again, using the same sort of antitheses to express his paradoxical attitude toward Hareton:

", • • Hareton's aspect [is! the ghost of my immortal love, of my wild endeavours to hold my right, my degradation, my pride, my happiness, and my anguish— "But it is frenzy to repeat these , thoughts to you [NellyJ; ..." (Ch# xxxiii, p. 255)

Of course, Nelly is too stoically pragmatic to understand any more now about Heathcliff's love and hatred for the living Hareton 185 than she understood then about Heathcliff's anguish and happiness over the dead Catherine. But the reader who takes note of these parallels knows that Emily Bronte means to develop his own understanding of this "'strange change . . . approaching'" beyond that of her narrator. Hareton's mysterious resemblance to Catherine

Earnshaw obstructs Heathcliff's "'wild endeavours to hold This! right'" because it diverts all his energies from the action of revenge ("'I can't take the trouble to raise my handl'") to the contemplation of Catherine's own invisible presence, "'the ghost of [myl immortal love.'"

The narrators' personal limitations* prevent them from recognizing the ambiguity of what they have witnessed. Lockwood is content to attribute Catherine's ghost to "bad tea and bad temper" (Ch. ill, p. 28). He does not connect his dream of

Catherine's spectre with Catherine's own longing to return or with

Nelly's report that the ghosts of Catherine and Heathcllff have been seen walking the moors near Wuthering Heights. Being complacent and dogmatic, Lockwood has little interest in any world beyond the one he has created for himself through his egotistical fantasies.

When Nelly wonders whether people like Catherine "'are happy in the other world,'" he dismisses the question as "something heterodox" t and will not discuss it (Ch. xvi, p. 138); yet he is quick enough to make a joke of his own about the ghosts who "'choose to inhabit'"

Wuthering Heights (Ch. xxxiv, p. 265). 186

Nelly Dean reproves Lockwood for his flippant attitude

toward ghosts, for she must remain behind after he has gone back

to town. It seems significant that Nelly should ask, near the

end of her story, whether Catherine might be happy in another * world; for Nelly has experienced nearly all that she tells Lockwood

first hand, and apparently these experiences have made her more

sensitive than he to the philosophical ambiguity of what has

happened. Of course, Nelly would never admit this; yet her own

predilection toward the status quo in morality and religion has

produced a deep division in her response toward Heathcliff's end.

Nelly begins her story thinking of heaven in sentimental terras,

* as a comfortable refuge from life's dangers and disappointments g (Ch. v, p. 44 and Ch. xvi, p. 137). After Catherine's death,

Nelly finds herself "instinctively echoCingJ" Catherine's own

anticipation of her afterlife as an ambiguous state of being

"'incomparably beyond, and above us all!'" But Nelly uses her

own Christian sentiments to interpret Catherine's heterodox

notions about death. Whether or not Catherine's spirit has

yet taken wing from earth to heaven, Nelly says, "her spirit

® Francis Fike, "Bitter Herbs and Wholesome Medicines: Love as Theological Affirmation in Wuthering Heights." p. 130, aptly describes Nelly as "the prototype of the nominal Christian who knows and says appropriate things at'appropriate times but whose life of independent prudence is little augmented by her religious belief s." 187 is at home with Godf" (Ch. xvi, p. 137).10 By the time Nelly has watched Heathcliff die, however, she is deriving far less comfort from her Christian assurance. , During Catherine's fitful illness Nelly was able to restrain her fears by rationalizing her mistress' prophetic visions as mere insanity induced by the fever. Yet, even though she is also able to maintain this psychological detachment through much of Heathcliff's even stranger

illness, the constant strain of trying to ignore the implications

of Heathcliff's relationship with Catherine begins to tell on

Nelly. Catherine's quiet end had prompted Nelly to explain to

Lockwood how she enjoyed sitting alone with the dead in order

to reflect upon the peace that came over them (Ch.'xvi, pp. 137-38),

But Heathcliff's final restlessness over joining Catherine's spirit

makes Nelly wonder, "'Is he a ghoul, or a vampire?'" and troubles

her with uneasy dreams (Ch, xxxiv, p. 280). When she finally

discovers Heathcliff's body, Nelly cannot bear to sit with it.

Shannon, "Lockwood's Dreams and the Exegesis of Wuthering Heights," p, 108, thinks that "Nelly Dean, for once, abandoning trite ideas, seems to express the author's own view" when Catherine's peaceful death makes Nelly "see a repose that neither earth nor hell can break" (Ch. xvi, p. 137). Since Helen Burns echoes Nelly's view of heaven as "a rest— a mighty home" (Jane Eyre: Art Autobiography. in The Shakespeare Head Bronte, eds. T. J. Wise and J. A, Symington, I [Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1931 J, 71-- * hereafter cited as SHB), Shannon, p. 107, n. 15, also perceives "a family kinship between the attitudes of Emily and! Charlotte Bronte." Shannon neglects to mention, however, that Helen Burns' passivity is as alien to Jane Eyre or Charlotte as Nelly Dean's conventionality is to Catherine or Emily. 188 or even to remain alone in the same room with it, because of the unearthly triumph reflected in Heathcliff's facet

• quickly pushing Cthe panels of Catherine's bedj aside, I peeped in. Mr* Heathcliff was there— laid on his back* His eyes met mine so keen and fierce, 1 started; and then he seemed to smile*

• • • I combed his black long hair from his forehead; I tried to close his eyes— to extinguish, if possible, that frightful, life-like gaze of exultation, before anyone else beheld it* They would not shut; they seemed to sneer at ray attenpts, and his parted lips and sharp, white teeth sneered toot Taken with another fit of cowardice, I cried out for Joseph." (Ch. xxxiv, p. 264)

Even if Lockwood had confided in Nelly about his dream of

Catherine's spectre, we can surmise that her Christian pragmatism would have compelled her to react toward that just as she already has toward the dreams and visions which Catherine and Heathcliff experience throughout Wuthering Heights; she would either refuse to listen to Lockwood altogether, or she would avoid serious consideration of what he said by classifying his dream along with Catherine's as "superstition,” something to be feared but not believed* Considering Nelly's determined orthodoxy, however, the very fact that she has become sufficiently uneasy by the end of Wuthering Heights to ask Lockwood about Catherine in the "'other world*" should make us wonder. As Nelly herself puts its CThe little shepherd boy] probably raised the phantoms Cof Heathcliff and Catherine] from thinking, as he traversed the moors alone, on the nonsense he had heard his parents and companions repeat— yet still, 1 don't like being out in the dark now; » . . (Ch. xxxiv, p. 265).

Of course, Catherine did tell Heathcliff, ''*1 won't rest till you are with me'" (Ch. xii, p. 108, italics mine), and

Heathcliff himself threatened to "'prove, practically, that the dead are not annihilated'" only if Nelly did not bury him next to Catherine, according to his instructions (Ch. xxxiv, p. 263).

So perhaps Lockwood is justified in receiving from Heathcliff's and Catherine's grave the comfortable impression that they are

"sleepers in that quiet earth" (Ch. xxxiv, p. 266).,In the very midst of Lockwood's reverie, however, Emily Bronte's imagery maintains a final ambiguity, for "sleepers" may awaken at any time. Moreover, she has given this final viewpoint to her least reliable narrator, one who has demonstrated even less sensitivity toward the extraordinary loves and hates of Heathcliff and the two Catherines than Nelly herself. Lockwood would rather shut his eyes to the evidence her tale provides of a connection between

Catherine's vision and Heathcliff's strange death than be forced to entertain any "heterodox* speculation about what it all means.

Thus, his tranquility at the end of Wuthering Heights may only be coiqdacency, the quiet tone of his lovely imagery signifying nothing more than wishful thinking. Ambiguity is built into the structure of Wuthering Heights, for Emily Bronte uses two different plots; and the symbolic one is so controversial that neither narrator will openly admit its existence* CHAPTER VII

WUTHERING HEIGHTS* ROMANTIC POEM

AND VICTORIAN NOVEL

In Wuthering Heights the symbolic plot and the moral plot seem, at least in part, to be the result of different

literary techniques. The patterns of correspondence between

Catherine's dreams of another world and Heathcliff's belief

in her ghost are poetic, for they depend upon the reader's

interpretation of metaphors and symbols, upon his own feelings about this relationship between the living and the dead rather

than on any objective evidence in the novel that it exists. The moral of Wuthering Heights, on the other hand, is based on

events that have occurred and are demonstrable in terms of

plot parallels, a traditional novelistic technique. We shall

first compare the iconoclastic assumptions underlying Emily

Bronte's symbolic plot with certain themes in Romantic poetry

like Wordsworth's use of the local landscape to reflect man's

spiritual aspirations, and Byron's and Shelley's use of heroic

suffering to advocate man's freedom from self-restraint and

social convention. Then we shall determine what the moral plot of Wuthering Heights has in common with that of Jane Eyre. 191 192 another Bronte novel which the twentieth-century reader tends to regard as being Victorian* This contrast between the Romantic and the Victorian aspects of Wutherinq Heights reveals an ambiguity of theme which is dramatized through the two

\ different plots*

In Nelly Dean's superstitious imagining about Heathcliff*

Emily Bronte adapts folklore to her own symbolic purposes* giving her hero a Byronic aura of supernatural power and dark mystery* "'But where did [Heathcliff, a foundlingl come from, the little dark thing . • • ?'" Nelly wonders* "'Is he a ghoul* or a vampire?'" {Ch* xxxiv* p* 260). Nelly's conjectures are not wholly unfounded* for Heathcliff has violated Catherine's grave to view her body; and, if he is not a vampire himself* he seems to be the victim of one* for Catherine's spirit draws

Heathcliff out on long night walks from which he returns progressively more pale and wan* until he dies and will not bleed when the window lattice grazes his hand. Thus* when

Nelly finds that she cannot close Heathcliff's eyes after his death* she cries out in terror for Joseph {Ch* xxxlv* p. 264).

Such vestiges of folk belief may have been derived from the lurid stories in Aunt Branwell's "mad Methodist Magazines*" « or from those which Patrick Bronte told to thrill the 193 children#* Charlotte herself may have inherited her father's spellbinding technique# For she once devised a story so horrifying that she could not bear to finish it, an incident which may be the common source for Emily Bronte's account of Nelly's panic and for Charlotte's own description of the way Jane

Eyre's morbid fear of the dead threw her into a fit when she 2 was confined in the red-room#

Heathcliff is far more than a one-dimensional folk character from the ballads that Nelly sings in the kitchen# however#

He arrives at Wuthering Heights with the dark and questionable past of the demon lover; yet he dies with the metaphysical aspiration of Byron's Cain and Manfred or Shelley's Prometheus-* as a Romantic hero daring to affront God himself in the maintenance

*Cf# Charlotte Bronte# Shirley? A Tale. SHB. IX# 80s

"• . • on a shelf which had belonged to [Shirley's? aunt Mary [stood? some mad Methodist Magazines# full of miracles and apparitions# of preternatural warnings# ominous dreams# and frenzied fanaticism [and? the equally mad Letters of Mrs. Elizabeth Rowe from the Dead to the Living# . ■

For an overdrawn but interesting description of Methodism and the Brontes# see G# Elsie Harrison# Methodist Good Companions (London? Epworth Press# 1935)# 109-38# Miller# The Disappearance of God# pp. 181-83# offers an account of John Wesley's writings and their influence as well# •

^Jana Eyre. SHB. I, 15# The story about Charlotte is from Ellen Nussey# "Reminiscences of Charlotte Bronte# Scribner* s Monthly May, 1871, rpt. BST# II (1899; rpt. 1965), 18-31, and also in Thomas J# Wise and J. Alexander Symington, ed.# The Brontes; Their Lives. Friendships and Correspondence. SHB# I# 92-100# My source 194 of his own beliefs. Heathcliff becomes an alien demon in Yorkshire whose great love for Catherine transcends all moral laws and makes him ruthless on the grand scale of Milton's Satan* When

Catherine and Heathcliff engage in a violently passionate embrace which leaves Catherine senseless, Nelly observes, "1 did not feel as if I were In the conpany of a creature of my own species"

(Ch. xv, p. 134), and both Nelly and Catherine's daughter refer to Heathcliff as the devil. - At one point, young Catherine even reminds Heathcliff that ultimately his revenge will be no more profitable than Satan's:

"Mr. Heathcliff, you have nobody to love you; and, however miserable you make us, we shall still have the revenge of thinking that your cruelty rises from your greater miseryf You are miserable, are you not? Lonely, like the devil, and envious like him?" (Ch. xxix, p. 228)

Heathcliff's observation, "'while I'm thinking of (jrevenge},

I don't feel pain'" (Ch. vil, p. 57) seems to be a pathetic human echo of "'Evil be thou my Good'" (Paradise Lost iv. 110), the energetic philosophy which made Milton's Satan such a hero to the Romantics. As William Hazlitt explains it, Satan's strength is the flawed human energy of pride:

. . . Satan is not the principle of malignity, or of the abstract love of evil--but of « the abstract love of . power, of pride.

*s Scribner* s. pp. 64, 79. Annette B. Hopkins, The Father of the Brontes (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1958), pp. 168-70, has noticed disturbing contradictions between Ellen Nussey's public and private recollections of Patrick Bronte, however* 195

of self-uill personified, to which last principle all other good and evil, and even his own, are subordinate.^

Heathcliff is like Satan, then, in his sustained attempt to

create his own morality through sheer force of will. Byron

so admired this sort of energy that he called Satan the hero

of Paradise Lost and wrote his own drama, Cain, in which Lucifer 4 communicated this vital principle to man. Shelley, for his part, phrased a "moral" commendation of Satan that pleased him

so much he used it in two different essays*

Milton's Devil as a moral being is as far superior to his God as One who perseveres in some purpose which he has conceived to be excellent in spite of adversity and torture, is to One who in the cold security of undoubted triumph inflicts the most horrible revenge upon his enemy. . . .

If energy and perseverance are the bases of morality, as the

Romantics would have it, then Heathcliff's revenge is a "moral

teething" for himself as well as his victims (Ch. xiv, p. 128).

^William Hazlitt, "On Shakespeare and Milton," The Collected Works of Hazlitt. ed. A. R. Waller and Arnold Glover,V (London! J. M. Dent & Co., 1902), 64.

^Letter to Francis Hodgson, May 12, 1821, The Works of Lord Byron. Letters and Journals, ed. Rowland E. Prothero, V < (London! John Murray, 1901), 284.

®"0n the Devil, and Devils" and "A Defense of Poetry," in The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Roger Ingpen and Walter E. Peck, VII (London: Ernest Benn Limited, 1930), 91, 129. 196

For,even though Heathcliff la not scheming on an epic scale like

Milton's Satan, he does ease his own suffering with thoughts

of revenge unconstrained by Christian orthodoxy. When Heathcliff

is about to die and Nelly piously urges him to "'send for some­

one--some minister of any denomination, • . • CtoJ show you how

very far you have erred from [the Bible's3 precepts'" (Ch. xxxiv,

p. 263), Heathcliff replies, "*I tell you, I have nearly attained

my heaven; and that of others is altogether unvalued and uncoveted

by mel'" Such iconoclastic pronouncements even remind one critic

of William Blake's "anarchic individualism," although he realizes

that Emily Bronte probably never read Blake.

Heathcliff does not seem Romantic, then, merely because

Emily Bronte is imitating any one author. Wuthering Heights

exhibits a deeper inclination on the part of its author to think

in terms of the thoughts, attitudes, and symbols of Romantic poetry in general, even though she is writing a novel. In his

relationship with Catherine Earnshaw, the Byronic Heathcliff also experiences a sense of loss and a longing to recapture

^Baker, The History of the English Novel. VIII, 74-75, n. 6. C. Day Lewis, in Notable Images of Virtue: Emily Bronte. George Meredith. W. B, Yeats (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1954), pp. 10, 12, attributes Emily Bronte's similarity with Blake « to "a shared quality of innocence, childlike and visionary." 197 his childhood which is reminiscent of Wordsworth.^ The symbolic plot of Wutherinq Heights which was described in the previous chapter evokes a whole spectrum of Romantic associations from

Blake through Wordsworth to Byron and Shelley because it is iconoclastic, substituting an amoral "natural" religion of the moors and a faith in the redemptive power of suffering for the moral rewards and domestic comforts of Catherine Linton's marriage to Hareton. Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw are not the usual heroes of Victorian fiction who tend to be more admirably human or more ethically noble than those around them. Their unique stature is the result of iconoclasm, an amoral assertion of spiritual affinity which we would expect to find in Romantic fiction or poetry, but not in the realistic social setting of a Victorian novel.

In terms of sources. Romantic poetry exercises its greatest influence over Wutherinq Heights indirectly through another work of Emily's imagination, the Gondal epic. This began as a series of imaginary adventures which the Brontes collaborated on as children; they continued working on it until their teens, when

Charlotte departed for Roe Head School, and Emily and Anne broke away from Branwell's influence to create their own Imaginary *

7 Buchen discusses this Wordsworthian element in Wutherinq Heights in "Emily Bronte and the Metaphysics of Childhood and Love," pp. 63-70. 198

8 land named Gondal. Yet we cannot dismiss the Gondal epic as Bronte juvenilia. Emily never ceased thinking about these fantastic tales of incredible cruelty, deadly combat, and unrequited love; she may .even have worked on them while writing Wutherinq

Heights, and she almost certainly returned to them after her novel g was finished. Even though Emily's own Gondal epic was lost or destroyed, many of the poems which she apparently composed for it remain, along with portions of Charlotte's and Branwell's own versions of their epic cycle in prose and poetry. Since some of the situations implied in Emily's poems parallel development in the other extant prose versions of the epic cycle, several commentators have been able to speculate about Emily's own prose narrative.*® Their reconstructions demonstrate that Emily Bronte

8 Ratchford, Brontes* Web, p. 52.

^Ratchford, Bronte s' Web, pp. 173-74, 184, and Gondal* s Queen. pp. 32, 173-84.

*®The most imaginative and ambitious reconstruction of Gondal is by Fannie £• Ratchford. Her preliminary work in finding some continuity in Emily's poems and in devising her own narrative to impart this continuity may be found in Hatfield. The Complete Poems of &nily Jane Bronte, pp. 14-19 and in Brontes* Web, pp. 64-66, 133-40, 155, 165-67, 251-58. The culmination of these labors is Gondal* s Queen, in which Miss Ratchford places over half of Emily Bront'd's nearly two hundred poems in a plot sequence linked by her own prose narrative which establishes a dramatic context fort each poem within the Gondal epic. To appreciate how speculative Miss Ratchford's "novel in verse" is, however, the reader should compare two other reconstructions of Gondal which differ both from Miss Ratchford's and from each^other in many significant respects: Laura Hinkley, The Brontes: Charlotte and Emily 199 was prone to the Byronic extravagance of Branwell and Charlotte, even when she was reacting against their exaggerations.** Here for example, is a Gondal character using the sort of argument that made Byron and Shelley question the justice of Milton's

God and admire the heroism of his Satan instead:

A God of hate could hardly bear To watch through all eternity His own creations dread despair

If I have sinned long, long ago That sin was purified by w o e . *2

Byron's Manfred relies upon a similar argument to resist the spirits who charge him with many crimes and desire to carry off his soul:

What I have done is done; I bear within A torture which could nothing gain from thine: The Mind which is immortal makes itself Requittal for its good or evil thoughts • • • (Manfred III, iv* 127-30)

(New York: Hastings House Publishers, 1945), pp. 171-91, 353-63, and W. D. Paden, An Investigation of Gondal (New York: Bookman Associates, 1958). All such attempts to reconstruct the Gondal epic have been questioned by Stanford, in Spark and Stanford, Emily Bronte, Her Life and Work, p. 125, on the grounds that "what is good in Gondal is incidental and irrelevant to Cthe poetryj whilst what is most successfully designed as part of a whole ri.e. the plot and characters of the missing prose narrative!) is generally bad." Such generalizations are suspect, however, because we have no reliable criteria for determining which, or even how many, of Emily Bronte's poems actually were composed for the Gondal epic (Gondal*s Queen, pp. 31-32). "

**Satchford, Gondal's Queen, p. 22#

*^Hatfield, Complete Poems. No. 133, "P. De Samara. Written in the Gaaldine Prison Caves to A. G. A.," lines 10-13, 17-18. 200

To the bitter end, Heathcliff also refuses to acknowledge having committed any injustice for which to repent. He courts annihilation, longing to "dissolve" in the earth with Catherine,

just as Manfred cries "Earthf take these atoms!"1 when he tries

to hurl himself over a precipice (Wuthering Heights, Ch. xxix,

p* 229; Manfred I. ii. 109). Yet Heathcliff also resists death

as Manfred does, even though it offers the only prospect of release

from his soul' s agony (Wutherinq Heights. Ch. xxxiv, pp. 256,

262-63; Manfred 1. ii. 13-42). Catherine shares this ambivalent attitude, for she longs to die yet fears what will happen afterward.

Like Manfred and Heathcliff, Catherine also claims to have no

regrets when she is dying. She believes, with the character

from Gondal, that her "sin [has been} purified by woe««i "'If

I've done wrong,'"she tells Heathcliff, "'I'm dying for it.

It is enough* rM (Ch. xv, p. 135). By believing in"'an existence

of [their ownj beyond [them3'"(Ch. ix, pp. 73-74), yet refusing

to be judged by any other power beside themselves, Heathcliff

and Catherine meet death in the tradition of Byron's Cain and

Manfred, Shelley's Prometheus, and Emily's own Gondal characters;

they are self-sufficient Romantic heroes whose sufferings constitute

their own expiation from sin.

This Romantic influence reflected both in the Gondal cycle

and in Wuthering Heights is not merely confined to Heathcliff

and Catherine Earnshaw. With the exception of the narrators. 201 all the important characters in Wuthering Heights are ’’more like each other than they are unlike"; and these similar qualities of mind and spirit seem to owe more to Romantic poetry in general than to particular novels of the period. The characters—

are passionate, honest and frank, they show little fear, they have a shared elation— even joy— in a natural impulse reaching a natural end, even though it may be a savage one. . . . Conversely, frustration is always agony . . . and in general all characters respond similarly . to it by obeying an urge to revenge upon the oppressor. . . . They merely accept fate and react to their suffering.*3

Of course, as Romantic heroes Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw embody these traits with even greater intensity than those around them.

Their passionate outcries ring with conviction, for Heathcliff counterattacks his tormentors with cruel revenge while Catherine transcends others' loves and hates with her visions of a mystical return to Wuthering Heights after death. The violent outbursts of

Hindley and Isabella seem "ill-directed and pointless" by con^tarison because they "despair and degenerate" in crisis. Even Catherine's daughter and Hareton seem emotionally underdeveloped as characters because Wuthering Heights shares the Romantic assumption of the Condal

®Wendy A. Craik, The Bronte Novels (London: Methuen & Co., Ltd., 1968), pp. 13-14. For the most sensible and convincing exploration of hypothetical parallels between Gondal poems and particular characters in the novel, see Mary Visick, The Genesis of Wutherinq Heights, passim. 202

epic, that improvement and repentance are not required so Ion? as the characters "experience the full consequences of their actions."^*

When -we take note of the Victorian elements in the moral structure of Wutherinq Heights, we are viewing the novel fran a twentieth-century perspective, of course* The Victorian reviewers themselves did not perceive the moral of Catherine

Linton's romance with Hareton, probably because it was overshadowed by the amoral passion of Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw and because the narrators showed no awareness of such a moral themselves* ^ If we view the first half of the novel in terms of the second half, however, the younger generation does provide

Wutherinq Heights with a moral. Since Hareton and Catherine

Linton are able to find happiness by thinking of others as well as themselves, their conduct provides an ethical perspective

14 •* Craik, The Bronte Novels, pp. 12, 14-15. xs ** Only'one of Emily Bronte's contemporaries, George Henry Lewes, in The Leader. December 28, 1850, p* 953, hinted at a moral in Wutherinq Heights, and he did not have much confidence that anyone else would recognize iti • such brutes we should all be, or the most of us, were our lives as insubordinate to law; were our affections and sympathies as little cultivated, our imaginations as undirected. And herein lies the moral of the book, though most people will fail to draw the moral from very irritation at it. • • ." See Allan R. Brick, "Lewes's Review of Wuthering Heights," NCF. XIV (1959-60), 355-59. 203 with which to evaluate Heathclifft we tend to sympathize with him as a frustrated lover betrayed by Hindley Earnshaw* s malevolence and Catherine Earnshaw's selfish concern with social status, until he forfeits our sympathy by unjustly denying Hareton and

Catherine their chance to right old wrongs. To this extent,

Wutherinq Heights may be compared with other Victorian novels which invite moral interpretation, despite its unconventional means of expressing that moral through plot parallels, a discontinuous time scheme, and two unreliable narrators.

Emily Bronte is also a Victorian social critic in the 16 tradition of Dickens, Thackeray, and her own sister, Charlotte.

Wuthering Heights ends with the conventional denouement of a marriage to solve the religious and social problems posed by

Catherine Earnshaw's unconventional relationship with Heathcliff.

For Catherine Earnshaw is alienated from her own family by her

friendship with young Heathcliff, who 13 himself an outcast

to begin with--an orphan like Pip, Oliver Twist, or Jane Eyre.

In fact, Catherine's random diary entry which Lockwood discovers

by accident could virtually be a missing page from Jane Eyre. ^

*®The most balanced discussion of Emily Bronte's social criticism is in Shapiro, MWuthering Heights as a Victorian Novel." 17John Malhara-Dembleby, The Key to the Bronte Works (Londons Walter Scott Publishing Co., Ltd., 1911) marshalls parallel passages from Charlotte* s novels and Wuthering Heights to prove that Charlotte Bronte did write Emily's novel, but the style of Wutherinq Heights is so unique that Malham-Dembleby has long since been discredited. See Willis, The Authorship of Wuthering Heights, passim. 204

Both works portray what has become, for our century, a paradigm of Victorian injustice: the potentially lovable waif, frustrated and embittered by adults who urge upon him their own strict principles of conduct not out of love, but from a self-righteous sense of duty toward an inferior being* The orphan's first and only name ''Heathcliff," which is finally engraved on his tombstone

(Ch. xxxiv, p. 260), serves as a mute reminder of what the Reeds never allow Jane Eyre to forget, that the orphan is fed and clothed only through the charity of a family to which "it" can never properly belong. Like Jane Eyre locked in the red-room as it grows dark, Heathcliff is cast into outer darkness on the landing of the stairway at Wuthering Heights where Nelly puts him to spend his first night with the Eamshaws.

Catherine Earnshaw is not, of course, an orphan herself.

But, as Arnold Kettle points out, her love for Heathcliff is founded upon the social injustices he suffers as an orphan,

"an affinity . . . forged in rebellion."1® As a child Catherine harbors sympathies which make her the social outcast that Heathcliff and Jane Eyre have been since birth--and because of it.

Perhaps because they are both children considered to be beyond salvation, Jane Eyre and Catherine Earnshaw are able,

^®Kettle, An Introduction to the Novel. I, 142-45. 205 almost with impunity, to expose the hypocrisy of adults who have sacrificed love to principle. Jane routs Mrs. Reed through the passionate sincerity of her righteous indignation; and we know that Catherine is fully capable of the same, for she "turnCsJ

Joseph's religious curses into ridicule" (Ch. v, p. 43). Yet

Catherine turns old Mr. Earnshaw's own cant back upon him more gently, since she realizes that Joseph has been able to influence her father against her only because he is in his dotage:

I [Nelly Dean!] remember the master, before he fell into a doze, stroking [Catherine's!] bonny hair--it pleased him rarely to see her gentle— and saying— "Why canst thou not always be a good lass, Cathy?" And she turned her face up to his, and laughed, and answered— "Why cannot you always be a good man, Father?" But as soon as she saw him vexed again, she kissed his hand, and said she would sing him to sleep. (Ch. v, p. 44)

This scene is made even more poignant by the fact that old Earnshaw never wakes from this "sleep" of reconciliation into which his daughter lulls him.

Of course, Nelly Dean does not see herself, old Earnshaw, or even Hindley, as being hypocritical. She is as deeply divided over her troublesome wards as Bessie is over Jane Eyre, for both nurses are good souls at heart; they simply cannot refrain from doing their duty, and this requires them to regard the rebellious children a3 being hardened criminals before they are in their teens. Like 206

Jane Eyre, Catherine Earnshaw rebels against such treatment by flaunting the adult canons of behavior which her nurse attempts

to impose upon her. Just as Jane remains unrepentant about

John Heed, Catherine will not repent over grieving her father

after he has fallen under the influence of his canting,

self-righteous servant, Josephs

"May, Cathy," the old man would say, "I cannot love thee; thou'rt worse than thy brother. Go, say thy prayers, child, and ask God's pardon. I doubt thy mother and I must rue that we ever reared thee!" Hiat made her cry, at first; and then, being repulsed continually hardened her, and she laughed if I {Nelly] told her to say she was sorry for her faults, and beg to be forgiven. (Ch. v, p. 43).

Heathcliff, too, is considered to be a "hardened" troublemaker;

but, since his status in the Earnshaw household is more precarious

than Catherine's, he must be more temperate about his rebellion.

After the first night, when he is allowed to live "by chance’1

(Ch. iv, p. 39), Heathcliff quickly gains Catherine as an ally,

which divides the family still further. Then, like Jane Eyre,

Heathcliff gratifies his more violent impulses on Hindley, the

family's own child, who imitates his mother in showing contempt

for the foundling she has grudgingly taken in. But, whereas

Jane strikes out instinctively to combat John Reed's injustice, v

i . Heathcliff displays more self-possession and cunning by using

Hindley* s own anger to force him to give up his pony. For Heathcliff Is a careful rebel who does not, like Catherine

(Ch. viii, p. 65), openly strike back at those in authority:

THeathcliffl seemed a sullen, patient child, hardened, perhaps, to ill-treatment: he would stand Hindley's blows without winking or shedding a tear, and my pinches moved him only to draw in a breath, and open his eyes as if he had hurt himself by accident, and nobody was to blame. (Ch. iv, p. 40)

Apart from its revelation of Nelly's own gratuitous cruelty, this passage reveals that she does not begin to understand how

Heathcliff has been forced to repress his hostility because of his uncertain future among unfriendly adults. Therefore, when

Catherine's decision to marry Edgar makes Heathcliff express all these childhood hostilities in terms of revenge, Nelly places all the blame on Heathcliff from the beginning: "Cas a child! he complained so seldom . . . that 1 really thought him not vindictive— I was deceived completely . • ." (Ch. iv, p. 41).

Since Emily Bronte's contemporaries could see little point to Wuthering Heights at all, however, they concentrated on the social criticism in Jane Eyre. The Quarterly Review depicted Charlotte's novel as "pre-eminently an anti-Christian composition • • . a proud and perpetual assertion of the rights of man, for which we find no authority ei.ther in God's word or in God's providence." Yet the same reviewer who denounced

Jane Eyre at*length found "Currer Bell's" relation, "Ellis," to be beneath contempt: "For though there is a decided family likeness between [Charlotte and Emily Brontel, yet the aspect of the Jane and Rochester animals in their native state, as

Catherine and Heathfield CsicJ. is too odiously and abominably pagan to be palatable even to the most vitiated class of English ig readers J 1 Those who agreed with the Quarterly Review would probably not have seen much difference between Heathcliff*s determination to be revenged on Hindley and Jane Eyre*s refusal to forgive Mrs. Reed. Nelly reminds Heathcliff that God alone should punish the wicked and Heathcliff replies, "'God won't have the satisfaction that 1 shall'" (Ch* vii, p. 57), just as

Helen Burns counsels Jane to turn the other cheek and she responds,

"'when we are struck at without a reason, we should strike back again very hard; I am sure we should--so hard as to teach the person who struck us never to do it again*'To Emily

Bronte's contemporaries such parallels might well have suggested that Jane Eyre and Heathcliff were equally hell-bent on undermining the Christian foundations of Victorian society*

Today, however, Heathcliff seems to be a more rebellious victim of society than Jane Eyre or Rochester* We tend to view

Heathcliff as the more radical protagonist because he is profoundly

^ " Vanity Fair and Jane Eyre," in Quarterly Review. LXXXIV (1848), 173-75*. 209 amoral, and not merely immoral according to the imperfect standards of his day. Emily Bronte has Heathcliff compare himself with

God and exposes a blasphemous tendency in her hero to derive personal "'satisfaction'" from his revenge, while Charlotte remains more reassuringly within the confines of orthodox

Christianity. Jane Eyre's righteous indignation is firmly grounded in the Old Testament, for she agrees to consider Helen's

New Testament doctrine of forgiveness at "a more convenient 5*1 season," and even suspects that her friend may be right*

Heathcliff, on the other hand, never questions his right to seek personal vengeance indefinitely; after he hastens the ruin of Hindley and Edgar, Heathcliff appropriates for himself what he takes to be God's "'satisfaction'" in vengeance by "visiting 22 the iniquity of the fathers upon the children" (Exodus 20:5).

21SHB. I, 67.

22G, S. McCaughey, "An Approach to Wuthering Heights." The Humanities Association Bulletin. XV (Autumn, 1964), 28-34, proposes that Heathcliff is in fact a scourge of God who strengthens the Eamshaws and Lintons by destroying their weaker representatives and by saving their property so that it may devolve upon Hareton and young Catherine, those heirs who are more worthy of it. But McCaughey's views that "Hindley would have drunk and gambled away his estates, Heathcliff notwithstanding,"and that Edgar should have disowned Isabella so that his property would not have been jeopardized (pp. 31-32), are very much his. own. For * nothing in the novel itself encourages us to take this long view of Heathcliff's revenge. Emily Bronte's narrator and all the characters, including Heathcliff himself, feel that he schemes to secure the Linton and Earnshaw estates for his own selfish, vengeful reasons. Catherine herself resents having to love a 210

From a historical standpoint, then, Heathcliff may be viewed as a Byronic hero in a Victorian social context. To Catherine

Earnshaw, he justifies his cruel vengeance in these terms: "'The tyrant grinds down his slaves and they don*t turn against him, they crush those beneath them'11 (Ch. xi, p. 97). Heathcliff views himself as being a slave of Catherine, his "' tyrant, '" so he plays the tyrant himself with those "'beneath*" him: Isabella,

Catherine Linton, Hareton, and even his own son, Linton.

Catherine's daughter and Hareton must therefore restore moral equilibrium to society by establishing a "teacher-pupil

relationship" which substitutes mutual understanding for Heathcliff*s 4. divisiveness and culminates in love instead of hatred. ° In

Heathcliff whose interest in acquiring property has made him . as petit-bourgeois as Edgar; and after Catherine's death, Heathcliff no longer has any moral justification for revenge. The sadistic aftermath of his marriage to Isabella and his oppression of young Catherine, Linton, and Hareton diminish Heathcliff's stature still further because he is no longer a heroic victim, struggling against the injustices of society.

^Shapiro, "Wuthering Heights as a Victorian Novel," pp. 294-95, Shapiro, in "A Study in the Development of Art and Ideas in Charlotte Bronte's Fiction" (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Indiana University, 1965), points out that this theme was also used by Charlotte Bronte in The Professor. By remaining closer to the Bronte idiom, Shapiro is more convincing than William H. Marshall in "Hareton Earnshaw: Natural Theology on the Moors," Victorian Newsletter. No. 21 (1962), 14-15, and in The World of the Victorian Novel, pp. 234-40, who denigrates the Hareton-Heathcliff relationship because it represents the triunph of strength over right and wrong, a "natural theology appropriate to Browning'3 Caliban." This theology is attached by Ralph Rader, review of The World of the Victorian Novel, in NOT. XXIII (1966-69), 348. For a more positive, orthodox perspective, see Fike, "Bitter Herbs and Wholesome Medicines: Lore 211 the first half of her story, Emily Bronte uses the orphan,

Heathcliff, to demonstrate how unjust society is; and in the second half, she uses young Catherine and Hareton to dramatize the way in which that injustice can be alleviated through unselfish devotion*

But today, as in Its own day, Wuthering Heights is known not for its moral, or for its social criticism, but for boldness and originality as a work of art-- what the Victorian public only grudgingly admired as crudeness, the result of primitive energy rather than artistic genius. For Emily Bronte is not only a Victorian social critic and a moralist; she is also a

Romantic, adapting many of the thoughts, attitudes, and symbols of Romantic poetry to the novel form. In approved Victorian fashion Wuthering Heights does begin with an orphan and ends with a happy marriage; but it also begins and ends with Heathcliff in Byronic anguish over his imminent reunion with the spirit of his dead love, Catherine Earnshaw.

We have seen how the Romantic assumptions underlying what

I have called the symbolic plot in ray sixth chapter contradict the morality of Catherine Linton's romance with Hareton discussed

as Theological Affirmation .in Wuthering Heights.11 pp. 145-49. Fike interprets the love between Hareton and Catherine as agape, a theology of improvement in human relationships. 212

In the previous chapter* The latter plot I have termed Victorian because it appeals to the pragmatic morality which we associate with that age, the conviction that marriage can be "made” to work by shared diligence and good faith. Even Lockwood, a sham

Romantic who only fancies himself a disappointed lover, is grudgingly forced to admit that Catherine and Hareton are a

couple fit to "'brave Satan and all his legions'" (Ch. xxxlv, p. 266). And Nelly Dean, herself the personification of moral pragmatism, welcomes her mistress's second marriage as "the

crown of all my wishes" because Catherine and Hareton have made domestic harmony their goal: with"both their minds tending to

the same point--one loving and desiring to esteem, and the other

loving and desiring to be esteemed— they contrived in the end

to reach it" (Ch. xxxli, pp. 249-50). Inga-Stina Ewbank observes

that passages like this place Hareton's and Catherine Linton's

romance in the tradition of Victorian novels about education

in the ways of polite society!

In the first pair tof lovers, Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw^, love was seen as a superhuman passion, as an affinity existing outside every social or moral category; in the second, the direction of the lovers' feelings is defined in the human and socially weighted word 'esteem' (a key-word in Charlotte Bronte's vocabulary of love).

24 Ewbank,; Their Proper Sphere, p. 127. 213

Emily Bronte's Victorian couple thus achieves the Dickensian

ideal of love as happiness achieved through moral courage in

adversity, while her Romantic couple personifies the Byronlo

ideal of love as torment indulged to the furthest limits of

experience, including death. Catherine Linton and Hareton

earn their reward of marriage here and now because they have

learned to be more loving according to the ethical dictates of their society. But Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff believe

in a love for the hereafter which subverts society's ideal

of mutual happiness achieved through domestic order and harmony.

As children they are united in rebellion and as adults their

love is more an expression of pain and conflict than of pleasure

and harmony. Catherine describes her love as "'a source of little

visible delight'" because "'he's always, always in ray raind«not

as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself'"

(Ch. ix, p. 74); and Heathcliff evidently agrees, for after

Catherine's death he wants her to "'wake in torment'" so they

can continue their mutual suffering: "'Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest, as long as I am living!'" (Ch. xvi, p. 139).

Both Heathcliff and Catherine do nothing for themselves or for others to deserve reward instead of punishment; and, unlike

their Victorian counterparts, they learn very little in terms

of ethics, only changing for the worse as they grow older and more frustrated. If, at the end of Wuthering Heights, they do inhabit their own world on the moors where they can roam together as ghosts, then Heathcliff and Catherine have been living by a moral principle of their own: that the torment and suffering caused by their thwarted love on earth somehow entitles them to supernatural reunion after death* CHAPTER VIII

CONCLUSION

In the previous chapter we have cailed Jane Eyre a Victorian novel because it seems to reflect the moral conflicts of its own time more than Wutherinq Heights does* Yet most of Charlotte

Bronte's novels also resemble Wutherinq Heights more than other novels of the period in one important respect. Although she manages to disguise and suppress it more thoroughly than Emily, Charlotte

Bronte exhibits the same tendency as her sister to create characters whose unsatisfied desires are so intense that they threaten to overwhelm the self or to endanger others. In Charlotte's novels this tendency has been variously referred to as Romantic or "new*1

Gothic. And in Wutherinq Heights, as we saw in the previous chapter,

Emily Bronte carries this interest in personal emotion to its logical conclusion by implying that Heathcliff's and Catherine's passion for each other makes them self-sufficient, providing their only punishment and their sole reward.^

.... I ■ I in— ■ ■ ■ » «

*To compare Charlotte's and Bnily's emphasis on the psychology of the individual, see Edith M. Fenton, "The Spirit of Emily Bronte's Wutherinq Heights as Distinguished from that of Gothic Romance," Washington University Studies. VIII (1920), 103-22; Robert B.

215 216

But comparisons and contrasts between Charlotte and Emily

Bronte should not tempt us either to underestimate Jane Eyre as being too traditional or to oversinplify Wuthering Heights as representing a reaction against that tradition. For Emily

Bronte does not merely use Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw

to represent a Romantic world view and Hareton and Catherine

Linton to dramatize a Victorian world view, leaving the reader

to choose between them. After seeing Catherine Linton snap at Lockwood at the beginning of Wuthering Heights, we are not

likely to confuse her with a Dickensian heroine at the end. And

if, in the first half of the novel Heathcliff were no more than a Byronic hero sweating blood and gnashing his teeth over the unattainable, then in the second half he would be no better than a stage villain torturing the innocent heroine in a Victorian melodrama. But of course he is primarily neither figure. The art of Emily Bronte prevents either Catherine Linton or Heathcliff

from degenerating, into these fictional stereotypes of the heroine

and the villain. Catherine is a girl who learns as she becomes

a woman, and Heathcliff is not merely the fiend that Kelly and

Heilman, "Charlotte Bronte* s 'New* Gothic,11 in From Jane Austen to Joseph Conrad; Essays Collected in Memory of James T. Hlllhouse. ed. Robert C. Rathburn and Martin Steinmann, Jr. (Minneapolis! University of Minnesota Press, 1958), pp. 118-32; David Lodge, "Fire and Eyre: Charlotte Bronte's War of Earthly Elements," in The Language of Fiction (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, Ltd., 1966), pp. 114-20. 217

Catherine call him, but a frustrated human being who tries

unsuccessfully to diminish his own sufferings by inflicting them

on others*

The structure of Wuthering Heights does not favor any one

theme by implying the superiority of one kind of love over

another* In the first chapter we have observed how most

commentators are mainly interested in the strange love between 4 Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw, but that some critics, beginning

with Miriam Allott, have begun to place more enphasis on Catherine

Linton's romance with Hareton* Inga-Stina Ewbank agrees with

Allott that the imagery of the novel implies a rejection of

Heathcliff's destructive passion since he and Catherine are

generally associated with nature's more sterile and deadly

aspects--the blinding snow storm which endangers Lockwood's

visit to Heathcliff and the chill rain which contributes to

Catherine's fatal illness--while Hareton and Catherine Linton

plant flowers in spring, anticipating a renewal of life at the

end of the novel. Yet Allott concludes that Emily Bronte's

heart was not in this triumph of normality and Ewbank concedes

that the sufferings of Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw are

"imaginatively most realised." Their arguments imply that

the art of Wuthering Heights— -its structure, characterization,

^Allott, "The Rejection of Heathcliff," pp. 37-44, 47; Ewbank, Their Proper Sphere, pp. 99, 127. and rhetoric--belie the intentions of its author. Either

Emily Bronte did not know what she was doing, as the Freudians contend, or she betrayed her artistic instincts by giving the

Victorian public what it wanted--or what she thought it wanted, since the largely unfavorable contemporary reviews testify to a spectacular miscalculation there also.

My reading, however, affirms that whatever ambiguity we find in the imagery, the theme, and the structure of Wuthering

Heights is calculated by its author. My discussion of the symbolic plot demonstrates that Emily Bronte's imagery encourages the reader to adopt an ambivalent attitude toward Heathcliff's reunion with his loved one after death. When Catherine throws open a window and dreams of release from her frustrating menage a trois at Thrushcross Grange, Nelly fears that her mistress will catch her death of cold. But for Catherine such a death represents a "'chance of life'"; she associates the damp chill wind from the moors with a spiritual return to Wuthering

Heights (Ch. xii, p. 1081. For Heathcliff, too, rain from the moors seems to represent a new life of the spirit when Nelly finds him dead, with his face "washed with rain" and reflecting an unearthly look of. triunqph (Ch. xxxiv, p. 264). Since Emily

Bronte's lovers anticipate sharing an existence beyond the 219 grave, the weather from the moors that brings death has positive aspects which counterbalance the negative ones stressed by

Allott and Ewbank.3

Perhaps Allott and Ewbank oversimplify the imagery, making it symbolize a dichotomy of values in Wuthering Heights. because they underestimate the novel's structural complexity.

Emily Bronte's last chapter is devoted primarily to the mysterious circumstance of Heathcliff's death, not to Hareton's approaching marriage. Other commentators oversimplify the dual plot structure of Wuthering Heights by trying to establish a causal relationship between Heathcliff's cessation of revenge and Catherine Linton's love for Hareton. Melvin Watson introduced this view, suggesting that Heathcliff is an Elizabethan hero-villain who projects the warring passions of love and hate within his own soul onto the plot of the novel.* Others have gone well beyond Watson's

Elisabeth Th. M. Van De Laar, The Inner Structure of Wuthering Heights (The Hague: Mouton & Co., 1969) categorizes virtually every important image in the novel, but the conclusions reached tend to be both predictable and pedantic: "The images in [Catherine Earnshaw'al dreams etc. move along a, vertical axis; they receive their impetus from the dynamic force of the psychic realities they express" (p. 99}•

*Melvin R. Watson, "Tempest in the Soul: The Theme and Structure of Wuthering Heights." NCF. IV (1949-50), 87-100, * To support this view of Heathcliff as a tragic hero, the second part of Watson's article is devoted to an improbable dramatic structure in which a phrase like "continued Mrs. Dean" can signal a shift from one act to the next. 220

Implications of a thematic connection between the shift from love to hate in Heathcliff s generation and from hate to love in Hareton* s. One critic believes that Nelly "at the end does not perceive the irony that undermines her entire philosophic - position [of moderate Christianity, a belief in the perfectability of human nature}— that Hareton and Catherine can find happiness

• • • only because Heathcliff has ceased to exert his necrophilic power." And another critic finds affirmation instead of irony in the same set of circumstances, suggesting that Heathcliff no longer comes between Hareton and Catherine Linton because his capacity for love has been restored and he has forgiven his enemies.^

Emily Bronte's truth, however, lies somewhere between these extremes of cynicism and sentimentality because the structure of Wuthering Heights remains as philosophically g ambiguous as its imagery* Heathcliff's own candid, matter-of-fact

Marshall, The World of the Victorian Novel, p. 245; Pike, "Bitter Herbs and Wholesome Medicines: Love as Theological Affirmation in Wuthering Heights." pp. 144-45. g We have already noted in my first chapter how J. Hillls Miller uses Emily Bronte's poems and her student essay, "Ihe Butterfly," to derive a philosophy of which Wuthering Heights is the culmination. Irving H. Buchen, "Metaphysical and Social * Evolution in Wuthering Heights.11 Victorian Newsletter. No. 31 (1967), 15-20, also uses Miller's method and concludes that Heathcliff's and Hareton's apparent resolution of their metaphysical and social problems at the end of the novel represents "a movement toward cyclical renewal" (p. 19). 221 appraisal of his conduct should warn commentators to be wary of drawing sweeping conclusionst

"I don't care for striking, I can* t take the trouble to raise my handl That sounds as if I had been labouring the whole time, only to exhibit a fine trait of magnanimity. It is far from being the case— I have lost the faculty of enjoying tCatherine's and Hareton*s} destruction, and I am too Idle to destroy for nothing. "Nelly, there Is a strange change approaching— I'm in its shadow at present." (Ch. xxxiii, p. 2551

In discussing the symbolic plot of Wuthering Heights, we saw that this "strange change" which diverts Heathcliff from avenging his frustrated love for Catherine Earnshaw on her daughter is his growing awareness of Catherine's own spiritual presence.

This is the only point in the novel where the symbolic plot intersects the moral one, where Heathcliff's supernatural aspirations for a reunion with Catherine influence the perverted morality of his "justice"— his plan to frustrate the next generation of lovers as he had been frustrated by Catherine.

But Nelly and Lodcwood never openly acknowledge Catherine's

supernatural influence, and the plot parallels discussed in the fifth chapter encourage us to feel that Catherine Linton and Hareton are developing a love based on mutual understanding • * which Heathcliff could never have attained with his Catherine, and which he is therefore powerless to prevent in others.

The structure of Wuthering Heights, like its imagery, remains 223

It is safer not to think about them at all. Or we can dismiss both narrators as being unreliable and speculate for ourselves what new dimension the author has added to Wuthering Heights through her symbolic plot and her discontinuous time scheme*

Perhaps Emily Bronte rearranged the chronology of the novel because she wanted her story to begin with the ghost of Catherine

Earnshaw as a child seeking her home and to end it with Catherine as a spectral adult having found that home with Heathcliff*

If so, there may even be a poetic level of justice in this novel which decrees that Catherine's spirit should wander alone for almost the same number of years as she had rejected Heathcliff, and which permits her to haunt him to death only when this becomes necessary to thwart his revenge on her daughter and

Hareton.®

Nelly's ambiguity and Lockwood's skepticism leave each reader to decide for himself, whether, in terms of ideas, Wuthering

Heights satisfies him with a harmonious ending or challenges him with two new beginnings which are contradictory in their social and philosophical implications. And inevitably, such ambiguity in theme and structure makes us look to the author* Did Emily

8 ' B* H, Lehmann, "<3f Material, Subject, and Form: Wuthering Heights.11 in The Image of the Work: Essays in Criticism. University of California Publications, English Studies 11 (Berkeley, 19551, . 15, suggests another advantage of this dislocated chronology. By putting Heathcliff and Catherine's ghost first, Emily Bronte insures that we know they have some special relationship, even after neathcliff runs away and leaves her. 222 so ambiguous that the reader is encouraged to believe in both plots, the moral force of love in Catherine Linton and Hareton and the supernatural strength of the bond that draws Heathcliff toward Catherine, diverting him from revenge*

The quiet ending of Wuthering Heights is therefore the poise of structural tensions, of ambiguities in balance. Just as Emily Bronte's moral plot affords Catherine's daughter the prospect of marital harmony with Hareton in Christian union at Thrushcross Grange, so her symbolic plot permits Catherine herself to find happiness with Heathcliff in spiritual reunion at Wuthering Heights* Since the symbolic plot is amoral, however, we are confronted by several intriguing alternatives* We can be dogmatic like Lockwood and reject out of hand all rumors of ghosts and all of Heathcliff's and Catherine's speculations about the other world as being too "heterodox" (Ch. xvi, p. 138),

Or we can be pragmatic like Nelly Dean and call such ideas superstition, neither affirming nor denying their existence because

^Thomas Vargish, "Revenge and Wuthering Heights." Studies in the Novel. Ill (Spring, 1971), 15-16, is so impressed by Heathcliff's cessation of revenge, he asserts that Heathcliff's claim, • , I've done no injustice, . • •'" (Ch. xxxiv, p. 262),"somehow strikes us as appropriate, and perhaps even true"; and Sonstroem agrees, in "Wuthering Heights and the Limits of Vision," p. 59. But Heathcliff's supernatural reunion with Catherine Earnshaw does not negate the fact that Hareton is now free to marry Catherine Linton as well. The moral plot may be on a lower plane in terms of esthetic interest and intensity; but it coexists with the symbolic plot and keeps it in ethical perspective, nevertheless. 224

Bronte write Wuthering Heights as a Romantic poem within a

Victorian novel because she was able, in her own mind, to reconcile the tenets of Christianity with a mystical desire for each sinner to be resurrected in a paradise of his own devising? Charlotte Bronte once hinted temptingly that ”in some points I consider Ellis CEmily* s pen name? somewhat of a theorist: now and then he broaches ideas which strike my sense as much more daring and original than practical; his reason may be in advance of mine, but certainly it often travels a different road.”® Yet we can never be sure whether Catherine's and Heathcliff's iconoclastic belief in personal immortality reflects the author's own mystical aspirations* The biographical

information on Emily Bronte is so scanty that we are left with

little more than anecdotes like this one to "eaqplain” the philosophical ambiguity of Wuthering Heights, as well as the enigmatic personality of its author. Emily was lying, silent as usual, on a hearth rug while her friend, Mary Taylor, told of someone who had asked what religion Mary was, "with a view

^Charlotte Bronte, letter to W, S. Williams, February 15, 1^848, in SHB, II, 189. 225 of getting Cher3 for a partisan." To this, Mary replied that her religion was a personal matter between herself and God.

"That's right," said Emily Bronte.*0

*°E. C. Gashell. The Life of Charlotte Bronte, ed, Tenple Scott and B. W. Willett (Edinburgh: John Grant, 1924), p. 126. This anecdote is from a portion of Mary Taylor's letter not included in the first edition of the Life. BIBLIOGRAPHY OP WORKS CITED

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