Chapter 6 Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights: Abroad Prepared by: Dr. Hend Hamed Assistant Professor of English Literature

Wuthering Heights and the World Beyond Whereas most early British critical responses to the novel balanced criticism of its ‘coarseness’ with praise for its power and originality, some North American reviews were significantly less favourable. The American Review: “We fear that the author of Wuthering Heights has some unsound timbers in here”. The rotten goings-on within Wuthering Heights the house are here applied not just to the building, but to the novel’s author.

The Sense of ‘Abroad’ in Wuthering Heights: The Contrasting World of Wuthering Heights and The Grange The contrasting worlds of Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange represent a conflict between northern rural values and the more urban cultures of the south of England. To Lockwood, the north is strikingly ‘other’, a foreign place. To the inhabitants of the north, London and the south are equally foreign.

The Sense of ‘Abroad’ in Wuthering Heights: The Contrasting World of Wuthering Heights and The Grange Critic Queenie Leavis saw Wuthering Heights as home to a ‘wholesome’, ‘primitive’, and ‘natural’ society pitted against the overdeveloped, artificial culture of the Grange. Critic Terry Eagleton has suggested that “One of Wuthering Heights more notable achievements is ruthlessly to de-mystify the Victorian notion of the family as a pious, pacific space within social conflict”.

The Sense of ‘Abroad’ in Wuthering Heights: Heathcliff Heathcliff is the most obvious representative of ‘abroad’ in the context of the local and domestic world of the novel. He enters the domestic scene from another world: from the streets of Liverpool. Mr. Earnshaw: He is a gift of God, though it’s as dark almost as if it came from the devil. Mrs. Earnshaw: He is a gypsy brat.

The Sense of ‘Abroad’ in Wuthering Heights: Heathcliff Mr. Linton: He is a little Lascar, or an American or Spanish castaway. (Lascars were ship’s crew of Indian origin, often left to starve on arrival at the ship’s destination. Spanish or American castaways might be runaway African slaves from South America or the United States). Mr. Lockwood: A dark-skinned gypsy in aspect. Taken together with his possible Irish background, the indeterminate array of possible origins for Heathcliff might make him an angel of revenge on behalf of a formidable, collective of oppressed ethnic groups.

The Sense of ‘Abroad’ in Wuthering Heights: Heathcliff Nelly: recommends him to use his otherness to construct a family romance: ‘You’re fit for a prince in disguise. Who knows, but your father was Emperor of China, and your mother an Indian queen?’ (The mysterious heroes of Gothic romance and Romantic verse dramas are frequently foreign).

The Sense of ‘Abroad’ in Wuthering Heights: Heathcliff Heathcliff’s foreignness has historical origins within the contemporary context of the novel: At a basic level, Heathcliff represents the experience of society’s marginalized and dispossessed. Though not a ‘regular black’, his ethnicity is uncertain and his class is that of a beggar. Bronte’s description of him may owe something to newspaper reports and illustrations of starving Irish peasants during the Great Famine, a period of mass starvation and emigration in British-ruled Ireland between 1845 and 1852 (see Fig. 6.2 P. 382).

The Sense of ‘Abroad’ in Wuthering Heights: Heathcliff A collection on behalf of famine victims was taken at Haworth church and others arrived by ship at Liverpool, possibly witnessed by Emily’s brother Branwell in 1845, shortly before she began work on her novel. None of this is certain. The mystery over Heathcliff’s origins, over his whereabouts when he disappears from the novel, and over the source of the wealth with which he returns connect him in a suggestive but non-specific way with the world of commercial enterprise and colonial exploitation.

The Sense of ‘Abroad’ in Wuthering Heights: Heathcliff This very lack of specificity opens up a wealth of possible connections that have been explored in recent postcolonial and cultural criticism, including views of Heathcliff not just as a racial ‘other’ but of the yet more topical category of ‘terrorist’.

The Uncanny Things that we would describe as uncanny are those that disturb our sense of the familiar. The familiar suggests ‘what is known’ or ‘literally, what is of the family’; the word is thus close to our theme of ‘home’. The ‘uncanny’ has an immediate contrasting association with what is strange and unfamiliar, which relates to our other theme of ‘abroad’.

The Grotesque The ‘grotesque’ is another quality that might be associated with the ‘uncanny’. There are certainly numerous grotesque elements in Wuthering Heights: The apparition at Lockwood’s window, Heathcliff’s ‘vampire’, frightful life-like gaze of exultation in death, or his behavior during his final encounter with Catherine, when he seems to Nelly a creature of another species.

The Grotesque There are specific possible sources for Wuthering Heights in the Hoffman’s novel The Devil’s Elixir (1816), and his short stories ‘The Entail’ and ‘The Sandman’. Bronte could readily have had access to these works via translations in the periodicals she read at home. Critics Andrew Benner and Nicholas Royle provide a helpful summary of some of the common features of the uncanny, emphasizing how the uncanny defamiliarises – how it turns ‘home’ into ‘abroad’. (P. 384/5)

The Grotesque Wuthering Heights could certainly be seen as the ‘suspect place’ which Freud cited as the Latin equivalent of the uncanny in his account of Hoffmann. Schelling defined the uncanny as that which ‘ought to have remained … secret and hidden but has come to light’. The reviewer who complained that Wuthering Heights ‘lifts the veil and shows boldly the dark side of out depraved nature’ saw the novel as uncanny in this sense: There is something ‘unheimlich’ going on at Wuthering Heights, or perhaps it is something ‘Heimlich’?

The Grotesque Wuthering Heights could certainly be seen as the ‘suspect place’ which Freud cited as the Latin equivalent of the uncanny in his account of Hoffmann. Schelling defined the uncanny as that which ‘ought to have remained … secret and hidden but has come to light’. The reviewer who complained that Wuthering Heights ‘lifts the veil and shows boldly the dark side of out depraved nature’ saw the novel as uncanny in this sense: There is something ‘unheimlich’ going on at Wuthering Heights, or perhaps it is something ‘Heimlich’?

The Grotesque Home and abroad can both be mapped onto the uncanny, with Heathcliff’s otherness, a matter of his uncanny nature as much as his foreign origin. The atmosphere of terror reigning over the contemporary domestic sphere at Wuthering Heights is relevant, too. This homely uncanny, central to the novel, clearly shapes its challenging employment of the Gothic elements discussed earlier. Read P. 305/306 (underlined parts)

Wuthering Heights and Romantic Poetry From the moment of its publication, Wuthering Heights invited comparisons with forms outside the novel and its chief ‘home’ genre, the romance. Emily Bronte has also been frequently described as a writer whose work has its true home not in prose fiction, but in poetry. (Read P. 387 – Heathcliff’s quote)

Wuthering Heights and Romantic Poetry What are the dramatic qualities in this passage and why does the reviewer describe it as a ‘dramatic poem’? Bronte’s language in this passage builds up a sequence of balancing phrases and rhythmic repetitions, just as poetry often does. Some of the words that she chooses (diction) are also reminiscent of poetry: the archaic ‘yesternight’, for example.

Wuthering Heights and Romantic Poetry What are the dramatic qualities in this passage and why does the reviewer describe it as a ‘dramatic poem’? This passage could be described as a ‘dramatic poem’ because of the way it is delivered by Heathcliff (the term dramatic monologue might be applied here – meaning a poem in which an imaginary speaker addresses an imaginary audience). In ‘night and day’, through eighteen year – incessantly – remorselessly – the 2 rhyming four-syllable adverbs (incessantly – remorselessly) create an insistent rhythmic portrayal of the mental disturbance they describe.

Wuthering Heights and Romantic Poetry What are the dramatic qualities in this passage and why does the reviewer describe it as a ‘dramatic poem’? In a lyrical last sentence the passage closes with the ‘stopped’ heart of Heathcliff’s dream and a final cadence ‘my cheek frozen against hers’.

Wuthering Heights and Romantic Poetry The novel’s relationship with poetry is certainly a crucial aspect of its composition. Both Bronte’s own work as a poet and her extensive reading of poetry had a profound impact on the language and rhythms of Wuthering Heights. There are constant echoes of the poetic language of the Bible, of the 17th century poet John Milton, and above all, of the Romantic poets.

Wuthering Heights and Romanticism I Wuthering Heights and Romanticism I. The Relationship between Heathcliff and Catherine Wuthering Heights’ affinities with Romantic literature are especially strong in its portrayals of romantic union and of the natural world. Specific allusions to Romantic poetry underpin Catherine and Heathcliff’s passionate declarations of a union of souls.

Wuthering Heights and Romanticism I Wuthering Heights and Romanticism I. The Relationship between Heathcliff and Catherine Catherine’s ‘I am Heathcliff’ echoes a line from Shelly: ‘I am not thine: I am a part of thee’. Heathcliff’s invocations of Catherine: ‘Come in … hear me’, ‘Be with me always – take any form – drive me mad’ recall Manfred’s speech to his dead sister in Byron’s verse drama Manfred. (P. 388).

Wuthering Heights and Romanticism I Wuthering Heights and Romanticism I. The Relationship between Heathcliff and Catherine Read Para 1. P. 389

Wuthering Heights and Romanticism II Wuthering Heights and Romanticism II. Evocations of the Natural World / Human Nature A further link with Romanticism is apparent in the novel’s constant evocations of the natural world, whether stormy or lyrical, and the notion of an earthly afterlife for some of the protagonists. Throughout Wuthering Heights, every mood and season in nature, its weather, skies, birdsong, is lovingly detailed.

Wuthering Heights and Romanticism II Wuthering Heights and Romanticism II. Evocations of the Natural World / Human Nature Romantic views of human nature, and the corrupting effects upon it of a lack of sympathy, have also informed some readings of Wuthering Heights which can be interpreted as a story about the distortion of innate affections. Read P. 390/1

Wuthering Heights and the World Within (Psychology) Victorian readers’ encounters with the novel were conditioned by their awareness of contemporary contexts (including mercantile competition, Irish immigration, and social marginalization), even if issues of class, race, and gender are more sharply emphasized in current criticism. The dominant models of psychology at the time presented a view of the individual interior life as driven by warring energies fighting for dominion as energetically as in the political and economic struggles of the world outside.

Wuthering Heights and the World Within (Psychology) In phrenology, the most widely accepted psychological theory at the time of Wuthering Heights’ publication, the mind was envisaged as consisting of competing faculties. These faculties required an outlet, and while the exercise of self-control was crucial to achieving a balance between the forces within each individual, over-tyrannical suppression was likely to breed revolt.

Wuthering Heights and the World Within (Psychology) Critic Sally Shuttleworth sees Heathcliff as ‘an imaginative projection of what may happen if the energy of the oppressed is harnessed and controlled in the service of aggressive individualism and upward mobility”. Heathcliff’s psychology might be understood as a microcosm of aggressive capitalism abroad.

Wuthering Heights and the World Within (Psychology) Shuttleworth compares Heathcliff to Bertha. Both figures demonstrate the consequences of suppressing the socially marginalized. Bertha’s suppressed energies erupt in uncontrolled revolution, Heathcliff’s in controlled revenge. Unlike Bertha, Heathcliff is not mad; at least Nelly assures us that his actions are perfectly sane, apart from his monomania over his attachment to Catherine.

Wuthering Heights and the World Within (Psychology) The notion of ‘monomania’, or partial insanity, was a new idea in 19th century psychology which rapidly became popular. It supports a view of the mind as divided entity within a ‘world of struggling, conflicting energies’. For Susan Meyer, Wuthering Heights provides ‘an extended critique of imperialism … in part by exploring what would happen if the suppressed power of the ‘savage’ outsiders were unleashed’.

Wuthering Heights and the World Within (Psychology) Heathcliff’s programme of revenge might this speak to Victorian anxieties about the uncanny potential of both dispossessed classes and maltreated races to usurp the pre-eminence of those currently in possession of wealth and power. (See Fig. 6.2 on P. 393 – the figure shows Heathcliff with African features).

Theology and Domestic Ideals “If I were in heaven, Nelly, I should be extremely miserable. … I dreamt, once, that I was there … 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”. (P. 71) “To-day I am within sight of my heaven … hardly three feet to sever me!” (P.292)

Theology and Domestic Ideals Emily Bronte locates the afterlives of her protagonists at home on Earth rather than in Heaven, suggesting a pantheistic rather than conventionally Christian world view and exploiting the potential of the Romantic uncanny to reveal and revel in Das Unheimliche within the heart of home. Her novel fuses distinctions between ‘home’ and ‘abroad’: the domestic and the Romantic transcendent cohabit; the dead walk ‘abroad’ in the landscape they frequented while living.

Theology and Domestic Ideals: Heterodox Theology The relationship of Heaven and Hell is explicitly brought into question from the point of Catherine’s speech quoted above and Heathcliff’s ‘heaven’ is buried within the Earth. The novel is seen as a systematic reversal of Biblical hierarchies that goes well beyond the more obvious satire levelled against the Bible-spouting character of old Joseph.

Theology and Domestic Ideals: Heterodox Theology In their The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar analysed Victorian women writers as subverting the dominant traditions of authoritative texts. In the chapter “Looking Oppositely: Emily Bronte Bible of Hell’, Wuthering Heights is read as a rebellious reversal of the Bible and John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667).

Theology and Domestic Ideals: Miltonic Elements in Wuthering Heights Among the Miltonic elements in Bronte’s novel are the links between Heathcliff and Milton’s fallen angel Satan. From the start, Heathcliff is seen as a gift less of God than of the Devil. Almost all the characters compare him to the devil. To Isabella, his eyes are the “clouded windows of hell” from which a ‘fiend’ looks out (P. 160).

Theology and Domestic Ideals: Miltonic Elements in Wuthering Heights Gilbert and Gubar’s reading of Bronte’s relationship with Milton contributed to a shift of focus from Heathcliff to the novel’s female characters. They read Wuthering Heights as a revised myth of the fall of woman, a ‘fall from hell to heaven’, a ‘fall into culture’; the novel becomes a ‘rebelliously topsy-turvy’ retelling of Milton’s and Western culture’s central tale of the fall of woman and her shadow self, Satan.

Theology and Domestic Ideals: Miltonic Elements in Wuthering Heights Previous readings tended to concentrate on the character of Heathcliff as the force of rebellion, while in the hands of Gilbert and Gubar, Wuthering Heights becomes a powerful text of feminist revolt. Catherine becomes the protagonist of a female Bildungrosman, with Heathcliff now of most interest as her alter-ego, her true double.

Theology and Domestic Ideals: Feminist Views Gilbert and Gubar view the novel as a daring inversion of the hierarchies of Heaven and Hell and a valorization of natural passions. Theological inversion thus works in tandem with the Gothic, which they, like many other critics, see as voicing the outrage and madness that follows from women’s imprisonment by Victorian domesticity. For, if Catherine’s view that ‘heaven did not seem to be my home’ subverts religious hierarchies, it also seems to undermine Victorian idealization of the domestic.

Theology and Domestic Ideals: Feminist Views As we saw, attitudes to home rested on particular views of women’s domestic roles. These views argued not only that women should remain within the domestic sphere and behave in a genteel manner, but also that they could have a transforming effect upon the world through the domestic work best suited to their supposedly more affectionate natures: “Such is her appointed task, and a woman without active and tender sympathies and affections is a mere rebel against nature” (Grey and Shirreff 59).

Theology and Domestic Ideals: Feminist Views There are conflicts between different accounts of women’s roles that reflect diverse religious, educational, and political agendas. Above all, it is the absence of stable attitudes towards the status of women within individual texts that is most striking.

Theology and Domestic Ideals: Feminist Views There were deeply held differences of opinion about how women should be educated and what they should be educated for. The different voices in this contemporary debate, and the contradictions within their utterances, highlight the fact that Wuthering Heights was not simply a radical statement in opposition to a firmly agreed ideology, but a powerful intervention within a highly unstable ideological context.

Theology and Domestic Ideals: Feminist Views Feminism and feminist critics have made us conscious of the very considerable force of the novel as dramatization of female rage. For Catherine Earnshaw, the end point of rebellion is death. This is because her subjugation in marriage to Edgar Linton has starved her nature of its true wild and uncivilized home. Is it possible to map our theme of home and abroad onto a conflict between nature (our true home) and civilization (as imposed from ‘abroad’)? Is Linton and all he represents the real villain of this romance and the sole object of Catherine’s fury?

Nature versus Civilization For many readers, Wuthering Heights dramatizes a struggle between nature and civilization, which reflects Romantic ideas about the superiority of nature over culture. Critic George Henry Lewes writes: “It was a happy thought to make [Catherine] love the kind, weak, elegant Edgar, and yet without lessening her passion for Heathcliff. Edgar appeals to her love of refinement, and goodness and culture; Heathcliff clutches her soul in his passionate embrace”. While Edgar is an appropriate husband, she loves Heathcliff with a passionate abandonment which sets culture, education, the world, at defiance.

Nature versus Civilization David Cecil characterized Wuthering Heights as a universalizing drama of ‘children of the storm’ and ‘children of calm’, with the children of the storm firmly aligned with the forces of nature. Gilbert and Gubar’s sympathies were firmly on the side of nature, and they assumed that Bronte’s were too.

Nature versus Civilization Wuthering Heights, for all its cruelty, provided an authentic sphere for Catherine and Heathcliff’s ‘true’ uncivilized natures, and the injury that forces Catherine’s entry into the world of Thrushcross Grange symbolized the crippling repression of women with middle-class domesticity. In their version of the dramatic contest between nature and civilization, nature’s claims remain paramount, notwithstanding what they saw as the irritating final domestic scene in which Catherine and Heathcliff’s descendants betray the elemental passions of their parental generation – young Catherine arranging primroses in Hareton’s porridge and teaching him to read.

Nature versus Civilization The fact that civilization has to write the story – and teach Hareton to read it – is a regrettable necessity in this view of the novel. A reading of the relationship between home and abroad as a conflict between nature and culture becomes difficult to sustain along binary lines.

Nature versus Civilization Helen Small finds at the end of the novel an ‘optimistic turn’ characteristic of much of Emily Bronte’s poetry and other writings, a move away from a brutalist model of natural law towards a view of human nature which values the desire to cultivate the mind. However, J. Hillis Miller maintains that Wuthering Heights never offers its readers a single unified and logically coherent meaning. We can always find something to complicate our effort of interpretation, and this is an essential richness in the experience of reading the novel.

Domestic Readings of Wuthering Heights Lewes’ view of the civilization/nature conflict has affinities with feminist readings that see the more radical aspect of the novel residing not in a championing of union with Heathcliff as a rebellious ideal, but in the sense that, as Lewes perceives, Catherine has reasons to desire both Heathcliff and Edgar and becomes equally enraged, as she herself declares, at both.

Domestic Readings of Wuthering Heights Such a reading highlights the ways in which the apparently contrasting male characters in the novel are alike in their abuse of power, and queries the ‘loving equality between Catherine Heathcliff’ which critics wedded to the idea of the novel as a celebration of Romantic rebellion. It is possible to see Catherine’s desire for a well-ordered home as reasonable, and to argue that her destruction is brought about by the forced choice between mates rather than her ‘false’ choice of Edgar.

Domestic Readings of Wuthering Heights Such a reading means that we can recuperate not an ideal of ‘home’ but the idea of the domestic – in its full horror and glory – as being of overriding importance within the novel, rather than something to be impatiently dismissed in favour of transcendent Romantic ideal. This accommodation of the domestic alongside the Romantic elements in the novel, also sees more akin to Bronte’s aesthetic practice of mixing romance and realism. The categories of romance and realism, home and abroad, coexist as much as they compete within the novel.

Domestic Readings of Wuthering Heights In terms of its genre, the novel can be seen as tracing a gradual progression away from the Gothic mode of the first- generation story towards the form of realist domestic fiction that came to dominate the Victorian novel. The first-generation story is characterized by domestic violence, a ‘forced’ marriage, and incarceration, whereas the second-generation story ends with the withdrawal of the hero and heroine into the nuclear family and the gentler home world of Thrushcross Grange; thus, to some extent, the novel indicates ‘both changing patterns of fiction and the emergence of new forms of the family’.

Domestic Readings of Wuthering Heights Feminist readings of the second-generation plot view it as either a retelling or a revision of the first-generation story, depending on whether they read the novel as voicing protest against the triumph of patriarchal power of as depicting its reform. Perhaps it does both. In Wuthering Heights, the coexistence of the literary and domestic is also emphasized by the numerous domestic scenes in which books and reading feature.

‘Reading’ in Wuthering Heights Bronte’s own reading is significant in the novel. In addition to these intertextual references to other works of literature, books themselves make numerous dramatic appearances within her story, reminding us of our own situation as readers and interpreters of Wuthering Heights.

‘Reading’ in Wuthering Heights Occasions in the novel when books are read and the significance of reading in the novel: When Lockwood reads the first Catherine’s diaries in the form of annotations written in a copy of the Bible. (We are exposed here to the heroine’s defiant attitude to the most authoritative of texts. Catherine records how she and Heathcliff damage the religious pamphlets they have been set to read by Joseph before absconding to the moors. Also, writing in the margins of books might equally be a sign of Catherine’s marginal family and gender status).

‘Reading’ in Wuthering Heights Occasions in the novel when books are read and the significance of reading in the novel: Books are not only symbols of intellectual independence and resistance to tyranny. They have a material presence and value, and are predominantly the preserve of rich men. (Lockwood piles books against the window to try and keep Catherine’s ghost out, and Edgar retreats to his books when in conflict with his wife).

‘Reading’ in Wuthering Heights Occasions in the novel when books are read and the significance of reading in the novel: The second Catherine also reads book. On her marriage to Linton (Heathcliff’s son), they become his, and she is entirely deprived of her books by Heathcliff and has not even their margins to write on.

‘Reading’ in Wuthering Heights Occasions in the novel when books are read and the significance of reading in the novel: Hareton’s desperate desire to read suggests the healing as well as empowering value of culture. Under Catherine’s mockery of his illiteracy, he burns with shame and burns his store of books. In the following September, Lockwood finds Catherine teaching a willing and devoted Hareton to read. Hareton’s acquisition of reading skills presages the rapid increase of access to print culture within the Victorian home and suggests a corresponding increase of interpretive activity. Heathcliff’s discovery of Catherine and Hareton reading together seems a decisive point in his loss of appetite for revenge.

‘Reading’ in Wuthering Heights Occasions in the novel when books are read and the significance of reading in the novel: For Old Joseph, this is competing literary activity, a threat to the authority of his Bible. Joseph’s obsessive and cantankerous reading of the Bible shapes his voice, making him, at one level, spokesman of a repressive religious authority, but at another, giving him an idiom which reflects what would have been one of the few texts available to a person of his class.

‘Reading’ in Wuthering Heights Occasions in the novel when books are read and the significance of reading in the novel: Nelly is able to narrate because she reads. Her account of having sampled most of the contents of the household library might seem a device for explaining how she is equipped for her task as narrator. The frequent scenes of reading in the novel continue to mirror our own constant efforts to interpret the wealth of significant detail within the text.

A Divided Afterlife Wuthering Heights was no immediate success. The status of Wuthering Heights as a popular novel is a twentieth-century phenomenon, following the success of the 1939 film with Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon. In the three weeks following the film’s release, more copies of the novel were sold than in any five-year period since its publication.

A Divided Afterlife Emily Bronte’s own moorland home has become an important point of reference for readers of Wuthering Heights. In addition to the vast numbers of visitors to the village of Haworth every year, many more can explore the Bronte Parsonage Museum website for information about the town during the time the Brontes lived there. One effect of film adaptations of Wuthering Heights was a decisive shift of attention to the female characters of the story.

A Divided Afterlife Film adaptations generally tell us more about twentieth and twenty-first-century expectations of domestic romance within the film genre than about the novel itself.

Conclusion Film adaptations have consistently aimed to make Wuthering Heights a timeless and universal romantic myth. This profound split between critical and popular representations of the novel exemplifies how stories take on a life of their own within our culture independent of their original contexts. Readers and audiences contribute to any text’s meaning, as they interpret it in terms of their own interest and concerns. Texts go abroad, we make them at home. The themes of home and abroad, and the concept of the reader, have been used to interpret the novel.