We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 December 2020
Interpretations of Wuthering Heights often focus upon the grand passions of Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw, and the striking bond between them. But full and detailed consideration of the novel discourages the assumption that Emily Brontë is wholeheartedly endorsing their point of view, or any other. She consistently presents all her characters, Heathcliff and Catherine included, as blind to the world as others see it, and consequently as holding views that do not do justice to the fullness of things. Largely because of their myopia, all are ever at odds with one another, often physically, but usually conceptually, engaging in indecisive wars of words, benighted battles of too limited views. The battles occur as well within Catherine and Heathcliff, whose divided hearts reflect the confused divisions in the world at large. And the reader is fully implicated in the inconclusive conflicts, for his formulations and sympathies are repeatedly betrayed. Wuthering Heights provides him with no standard of judgment that comprehends the restricted ones of the characters, no privileged point of view to relieve his uncertainties. Whatever her intentions, Emily Brontë is clearly not just throwing her being vicariously into the lives of Heathcliff and Catherine. She possesses strong critical impulses and many contrary views, only one of them being that of Heathcliff.
Note 1 in page 61 See, e.g., Ernest A. Baker, The History of the English Novel, vin (London, 1937), 76, repr. in Richard Lettis and William E. Morris, éd., A Wuthering Heights Handbook (New York, 1961), p. 55: “Its force is concentrated in a series of tremendous climaxes; the fire and fury of one [such] scene gives momentum enough until the next. There are, it is true, intricate complications and obscurities in between; but, when the great moment arrives, the mental and moral situation is made clear enough by the actors themselves.” See also G. D. Klingopulos, “The Novel as Critical Poem (ii): Wuthering Heights,” Scrutiny, 14 (Sept. 1947), 269 : “ Wuthering Heights may be said to justify itself by the quality of some half-dozen or so speeches of Catherine's and Heathcliff's.” It is only right to say that in practice Klingopulos hardly ignores the rest of the novel.
Note 2 in page 61 C. Day Lewis, Notable Images of Virtue (Toronto, 1954), reprinted in William M. Sale, Jr., ed., Wuthering Heights: An Authoritative Text with Essays in Criticism (New York: Norton Critical Ed., 1963), p. 367, nicely refers to the ethical system implicit in this view as a “lurid and uncompromising antinomianism, in which passion is substituted for grace as the justification for an overriding of the [traditional] moral law.” Quotations from Wuthering Heights are taken from this edition.
Note 3 in page 61 I am anticipated in my observation of Joseph's use of “nowt” by J. Hillis Miller, The Disappearance of God: Five Nineteenth-Centurv Writers (Cambridge, Mass., 1963), p. 180.
Note 4 in page 61 John K. Mathison, “Nelly Dean and the Power of Wuthering Heights,” NCF, 11 (Sept. 1956), 121, reprinted in Lettis and Morris, p. 155, calls attention to Nelly's “ability to describe accurately, and yet disregard the facts in favor of explanation by a conventional formula.” “Nothing must interfere with Nelly's determination to impose her own meaning on events” (p. 152).
Note 5 in page 62 Allan R. Brick, “Wuthering Heights: Narrators, Audience, and Message,” CE, 21 (Nov. 1959), 81, reprinted in Lettis and Morris, pp. 219–20.
Note 6 in page 62 Note how frequently characters in the novel resist traditional classification: Nelly and the young Heathcliff, as well as Hareton, are neither exactly servants nor members of the household. Edgar, Heathcliff, and Linton are not true husbands, in the full sense of the word. In a sense Linton is not Heathcliff's son, Hareton is not Hindley's.
Note 7 in page 62 Love is not too strong a word: “She is genuinely in love with Edgar. ? love the ground under his feet, and the air over his head, and everything he touches, and every word he says. I love all his looks, and all his actions, and him entirely and altogether.' She speaks gaily, rather prettily of it” (Klingopulos, p. 273).
Note 8 in page 62 The divided personality is presented, at least at one point, by what the author calls her. Cf. “ 'What new phase of his character is this ?' exclaimed Mrs. Linton, in amazement” with “ 'Oh, the evil is that I am not,jealous, is it?' cried Catherine” (p. 97). When she feigns ignorance of Heathcliff's ways, she is “Mrs. Linton”; when she knows his sharp words so well as to return them in kind, she is “Catherine.”
Note 9 in page 62 On the matter of Catherine's creating her own Heathcliff see Herbert Goldstone, “ Wuthering Heights Revisited,” EJ, 48 (April 1959), 182: “Catherine's imagination harms her love for Heathcliff because it enables her to want a love that would perfectly embody both Heathcliff's and Edgar's values. If she could not so strongly visualize what Edgar's world means, she might care less for it and accept more readily Heathcliff's world. Yet ultimately her imagination does enable her to find happiness in her love. … In going out of her mind . . . she . . . retreats to an ideal world of her imagination in which she rediscovers her happiness as a child with Heathcliff. She creates her perfect Heathcliff.” See also Klingopulos, p. 270.
Note 10 in page 62 On this episode see Klingopulos, pp. 275–76.
Note 11 in page 62 Catherine Earnshaw, at the Grange, has a vision of the Heights (p. 108), but at the time she has lost sight of her immediate situation.
Note 12 in page 62 Pace Vereen Bell, “ Wuthering Heights and the Unforgivable Sin,” NCF, 17 (1962), 189, who believes that “the unforgivable sin is to accuse another of committing the unforgivable sin—or, more simply put, the absence of forgiveness, of forbearance, of mercy.”
Note 13 in page 62 When Cathy Linton is taken captive by Heathcliff, she is “deeply impressed and shocked at this new view of human nature—excluded from all her studies and all her ideas till now” (p. 181).
Note 14 in page 62 Heathcliff's mercurial nature makes interpreting the novel especially difficult. Heathcliff the ruffian invites a psychological treatment: his shabby upbringing accounts for his later mean streak. Heathcliff the beast of prey invites a treatment that renders the abuse rendered upon him as a child irrelevant. Heathcliff the devil invites a supernatural, religious treatment that undercuts the natural, bedrock bond between him and Catherine, and all his strong feelings that follow from it. Examples could be multiplied.
Note 15 in page 62 An Introduction to the English Novel, i (London, 1951), 150, reprinted in Lettis and Morris, pp. 116–17.
Note 16 in page 62 Arnold Kettle (Lettis and Morris, p. 109) observes, of the narrators, “They act as a kind of sieve to the story, . . . which has the purpose not simply of separating off the chaff, but of making us aware of the difficulty of passing easy judgments. One is left always with the sense that the last word has not been said.”
Note 17 in page 62 Early Victorian Novelists (Indianapolis, Ind., 1935), p. 162, reprinted in Lettis and Morris, p. 23.
Note 18 in page 62 Perhaps the best example of the novel's toying with the reader's sympathies (an example too lengthy to treat here) is Ch. xi, pp. 94–103.
Note 19 in page 62 Klingopulos, p. 275.
Note 20 in page 62 Klingopulos, pp. 271–72.
Note 21 in page 62 In a paper read to the Heretics, Cambridge Univ., reprinted in Lettis and Morris, pp. 6–7. Klingopulos also remarks that “the conclusion of the novel is diagrammatic” (p. 272).
Note 22 in page 62 The tranquillity that is presumed to precede and follow the events of the story may be merely conventional framing —a dramatically contrasting background for Emily Bronte's true considerations—but it accounts for the qualification in my remark here.
Note 23 in page 62 Mary Visick, The Genesis of Wuthering Heights, 2nd ed. (Hong Kong, 1965), p. 9; reprinted in the Norton Critical Ed., p. 308.
Note 24 in page 62 Cecil, in Lettis and Morris, p. 33. John E. Jordan, “The Ironic Vision of Emily Brontë,” NCF, 20 (June 1965), 1–18, is the first to take Lord David Cecil to task for this remark. Although Jordan's essay goes no deeper than the surface of the reading experience—he does not try to sound the novel for meaning—he makes several observations that support my argument here.
Note 25 in page 62 Others have sensed the general complications, but without really letting them affect their overview of the novel. See, e.g., F. H. Langman, “Wuthering Heights,” EC, 15 (July 1965), 304, who calls attention to the fact that we are given two, differing accounts of the beating administered Hindley by Heathcliff: “Thus we can't be sure what we have seen. . . . This kind of analysis, pushed too far, could make the novel impossibly ambiguous.” See especially Inga-Stina Ewbank's fine reading in Their Proper Sphere: A Study of the Brontë Sisters as Early-Victorian Female Novelists (Cambridge, Mass., 1966). She finds in Emily Brontë “an ultimate suspension of judgment” (p. 124), and, in the novel, an “interaction of judgments” (p. 125): “We have opposite attitudes and judgments played off against each other; and only the structure of the work as a whole gives anything like a conclusive evaluation” (p. 126). Of course, I disagree that the structure of the work does any such thing; the structure of the novel does not belie its texture.
