Themes in Wuthering Heights
The concept that almost every reader of Wuthering Heights focuses on is the passion-love of Catherine and Heathcliff, often to the exclusion of every other theme-this despite the fact that other kinds of love are presented and that Catherine dies half way through the novel. The loves of the second generation, the love of Frances and Hindley, and the "susceptible heart" of Lockwood receive scant attention from such readers. But is love the central issue in this novel? Is its motive force perhaps economic? The desire for wealth does motivate Catherine's marriage, which results in Heathcliff's flight and causes him to acquire Wuthering Heights, to appropriate Thrushcross Grange, and to dispossess Hareton. Is it possible that one of the other themes constitutes the center of the novel, or are the other themes secondary to the theme of love? Consider the following themes:
Clash of elemental forces.
The universe is made up of two opposite forces, storm and calm. Wuthering Heights and the Earnshaws express the storm; Thrushcross Grange and the Lintons, the calm. Catherine and Heathcliff are elemental creatures of the storm. This theme is discussed more fully in Later Critical response to Wuthering Heights
The clash of economic interests and social classes.
The novel is set at a time when capitalism and industrialization are changing not only the economy but also the traditional social structure and the relationship of the classes. The yeoman or respectable farming class (Hareton) was being destroyed by the economic alliance of the newly-wealthy capitalists (Heathcliff) and the traditional power-holding gentry (the Lintons). This theme is discussed more fully in Wuthering Heights as Socio-Economic Novel.
The striving for transcendence.
It is not just love that Catherine and Heathcliff seek but a higher, spiritual existence which is permanent and unchanging, as Catherine makes clear when she compares her love for Linton to the seasons and her love for Heathcliff to the rocks. The dying Catherine looks forward to achieving this state through death. This theme is discussed more fully in Religion, Metaphysics, and Mysticism.
The abusive patriarch and patriarchal family.
The male heads of household abuse females and males who are weak or powerless. This can be seen in their use of various kinds of imprisonment or confinement, which takes social, emotional, financial, legal, and physical forms. Mr. Earnshaw expects Catherine to behave properly and hurtfully rejects her "bad-girl" behavior. Edgar's ultimatum that Catherine must make a final choice between him or Heathcliff restricts Catherine's identity by forcing her to reject an essential part of her nature; with loving selfishness Edgar confines his daughter Cathy to the boundaries of Thrushcross Grange. A vindictive Hindley strips Heathcliff of his position in the family, thereby trapping him in a degraded laboring position. Heathcliff literally incarcerates Isabella (as her husband and legal overseer), and later he imprisons both Cathy and Nellie; also, Cathy is isolated from the rest of the household after her marriage to Linton.
Study of childhood and the family.
The hostility toward and the abuse of children and family members at Wuthering Heights cut across the generations. The savagery of children finds full expression in Hindley's animosity toward Heathcliff and in Heathcliff's plans of vengeance. Wrapped in the self-centeredness of childhood, Heathcliff claims Hindley's horse and uses Mr. Earnshaw's partiality to his own advantage, making no return of affection. Mr. Earnshaw's disapproval of Catherine hardens her and, like many mistreated children, she becomes rebellious. Despite abuse, Catherine and Heathcliff show the strength of children to survive, and abuse at least partly forms the adult characters and behavior of Catherine and Heathcliff .
The effects of intense suffering.
In the passion-driven characters-Catherine, Heathcliff, and Hindley-pain leads them to turn on and to torment others. Inflicting pain provides them some relief; this behavior raises questions about whether they are cruel by nature or are formed by childhood abuse and to what extent they should be held responsible for or blamed for their cruelties. Is all their suffering inflicted by others or by outside forces, like the death of Hindley's wife, or is at least some of their torment self-inflicted, like Heathcliff's holding Catherine responsible for his suffering after her death? Suffering also sears the weak; Isabella and her son Linton become vindictive, and Edgar turns into a self-indulgent, melancholy recluse. The children of love, the degraded Hareton and the imprisoned Cathy, are able to overcome Heathcliff's abuse and to find love and a future with each other. Is John Hagan right that "Wuthering Heights is such a remarkable work partly because it persuades us forcibly to pity victims and victimizers alike"?
Self-imposed or self-generated confinement and escape.
Both Catherine and Heathcliff find their bodies prisons which trap their spirits and prevent the fulfillment of their desires: Catherine yearns to be united with Heathcliff, with a lost childhood freedom, with Nature, and with a spiritual realm; Heathcliff wants possession of and union with Catherine. Confinement also defines the course of Catherine's life: in childhood, she alternates between the constraint of Wuthering Heights and the freedom of the moors; in puberty, she is restricted by her injury to a couch at Thrushcross Grange; finally womanhood and her choice of husband confine her to the gentility of Thrushcross Grange, from which she escapes into the freedom of death.
Displacement, dispossession, and exile.
Heathcliff enters the novel possessed of nothing, is not even given a last or family name, and loses his privileged status after Mr. Earnshaw's death. Heathcliff displaces Hindley in the family structure. Catherine is thrown out of heaven, where she feels displaced, sees herself an exile at Thrushcross Grange at the end, and wanders the moors for twenty years as a ghost. Hareton is dispossessed of property, education, and social status. Isabella cannot return to her beloved Thrushcross Grange and brother. Linton is displaced twice after his mother's death, being removed first to Thrushcross Grange and then to Wuthering Heights. Cathy is displaced from her home, Thrushcross Grange.
Communication and understanding.
The narrative structure of the novel revolves around communication and understanding; Lockwood is unable to communicate with or understand the relationships at Wuthering Heights, and Nelly enlightens him by communicating the history of the Earnshaws and the Lintons. Trying to return to the Grange in a snowstorm, Lockwood cannot see the stone markers. A superstitious Nellie refuses to let Catherine tell her dreams; repeatedly Nellie does not understand what Catherine is talking about or refuses to accept what Catherine is saying, notably after she locks herself in her room. Isabella refuses to heed Catherine's warning and Nellie's advice about Heathcliff. And probably the most serious mis-communication of all is Heathcliff's hearing only that it would degrade Catherine to marry him.
The fall.
Recently a number of critics have seen the story of a fall in this novel, though from what state the characters fall from or to is disputed. Does Catherine fall, in yielding to the comforts and security of Thrushcross Grange? Does Heathcliff fall in his "moral teething" of revenge and pursuit of property? Is Wutheirng Heights or Thrushcross Grange the fallen world? Is the fall from heaven to hell or from hell to heaven? Does Catherine really lose the Devil/Heathcliff (this question arises from the assumption that Brontë is a Blakeian subbversive and visionary)? The theme of a fall relies heavily on the references to heaven and hell that run through the novel, beginning with Lockwood's explicit reference to Wuthering Heights as a "misanthrope's heaven" and ending with the implied heaven of the ghosts of Heathcliff and Catherine roaming the moors together. Catherine dreams of being expelled from heaven and deliriously sees herself an exile cast out from the "heaven" of Wuthering Height-a literal as well as a symbolic fall. Heathcliff, like Satan, is relentless in his destructive pursuit of revenge. Inevitably the ideas of expulsion from heaven, exile, and desire for revenge have been connected to Milton's Paradise Lost and parallels drawn between Milton's epic and Brontë's novel; Catherine's pain at her change from free child to imprisoned adult is compared to Satan's speech to Beelzebub, "how chang'd from an angel of light to exile in a fiery lake."
Later Critical Response to Wuthering Heights
Initially Jane Eyre was regarded as the best of the Brontë sisters' novels, a judgment which continued nearly to the end of the century. By the 1880s critics began to place Emily's achievement above Charlotte's; a major factor in this shift was Mary Robinson's book-length biography of Emily (1883). In 1926, Charles Percy Sanger worked out the chronology of Wuthering Heights by closely examining the text; though other critics have since worked out alternate chronologies, his work affirmed Emily's literary craft and meticulous planning of the novel and disproved Charlotte's presentation of her sister as an unconscious artist who "did not know what she had done." Critics are still arguing about the structure of Wuthering Heights: for Mark Schorer it is one of the most carefully constructed novels in English, but for Albert J. Guerard it is a splendid, imperfect novel which Brontë loses control over occasionally.
Despite the increasing critical admiration for Wuthering Heights, Lord David Cecil could write, in 1935, that Emily Brontë was not properly appreciated; even her admirers saw her as an "unequal genius." He countered this view by identifying the operation of cosmic forces as the central impetus and controlling force in the novel. He was not the first critic to perceive cosmic forces in the novel; Virginia Woolf, for one, had earlier written of Emily Brontë and her novel that she looked out upon a world cleft into gigantic disorder and felt within her the power to unite it in a book. That gigantic ambition is to be felt throughout the novel-a struggle, half thwarted but of superb conviction, to say something through the mouths of her characters which is not merely "I love" or "I hate," but "we, the whole human race" and "you, the eternal powers..." the sentence remains unfinished.
Nevertheless, Cecil's theory that a principle of calm and storm informed the novel was a critical milestone because it provided a comprehensive interpretation which presented the novel as a unified whole. He introduced a reading which later critics have generally responded to, whether to build on or to reject. Cecil premised that, because Emily was concerned with what life means, she focused on her characters' place in the cosmos, in which everything-alive or not, intellectual or physical-was animated by one of two spiritual principles: the principle of the storm, which was harsh, ruthless, wild, dynamic and wild, and the principle of calm , which was gentle, merciful, passive, and tame. The usual distinction between human being and nature did not exist for her; rather, for her, they were alive in the same way, an angry man and an angry sky both literally manifesting the same spiritual principle of storm. Cecil cautioned that
in spite of their apparent opposition these principles are not conflicting. Either-Emily Brontë does not make clear which she thinks-each is the expression of a different aspect of a single pervading spirit; or they are the component parts of a harmony. They may not seem so to us. The world of our experience is, on the face of it, full of discord. But that is only because in the cramped condition of their earthly incarnation these principles are diverted from following the course that their nature dictates, and get in each other's way. They are changed from positive into negative forces; the calm becomes a source of weakness, not of harmony, in the natural scheme, the storm a source not of fruitful vigour, but of disturbance. But when they are free from fleshly bonds they flow unimpeded and unconflicting; and even in this world their discords are transitory. The single principle that ultimately directs them sooner or later imposes an equilibrium....
Because these principles were neither good nor evil but just were, the novel was not concerned with moral issues and judgments; rather, it presented, in Cecil's view, a pre-moral world.
Just as Brontë resolved the usual conflict between the principles of storm and calm into equilibrium, so she resolved the traditional opposition between life and death by allowing for the immorality of the soul in life as well as in the afterlife. Cecil extrapolated, "The spiritual principle of which the soul is a manifestation is active in this life: therefore, the disembodied soul continues to be active in this life. Its ruling preoccupations remain the same after death as before." In other words, the individual's nature and passions did not end with death; rather, death allowed their free expression and fulfillment and so held the promise of peace. This was why Catherine's spirit haunted Wutheirng Heights after her death.
Cecil's theory is one of the twentieth century outpourings of interpretations trying to prove the novel had a unified structure. Surveying these myriad efforts, J. Hillis Miller challenged the assumption that the novel presents a unified, coherent, single meaning: "The secret truth about Wuthering Heights, rather, is that there is no secret truth which criticism might formulate in this way... It leaves something important still unaccounted for... The text is over-rich." He suggests that readers and critics should push their reading of or theory about the novel as far as they can, until they can face the fact that their interpretation fails to account for all the elements in the novel, that the novel is not amenable to logical interpretation or to one interpretation which accounts for the entire novel.
Perhaps F.R. Leavis penned the most quoted (most infamous?) modern interpretation of Wuthering Heights when he excluded it from the great tradition of the English novel because it was a "sport," i.e., had no meaningful connection to fiction which preceded it or influence on fiction which followed it.
Love in Wuthering Heights
Romantic love takes many forms in Wuthering Heights: the grand passion of Heathcliff and Catherine, the insipid sentimental languishing of Lockwood, the coupleism of Hindley and Frances, the tame indulgence of Edgar, the romantic infatuation of Isabella, the puppy love of Cathy and Linton, and the flirtatious sexual attraction of Cathy and Hareton. These lovers, with the possible exception of Hareton and Cathy, are ultimately self-centered and ignore the needs, feelings, and claims of others; what matters is the lovers' own feelings and needs.
Nevertheless, it is the passion of Heathcliff and Catherine that most readers respond to and remember and that has made this novel one of the great love stories not merely of English literature but of European literature as well. Simone de Beauvois cites Catherine's cry, "I am Heathcliff," in her discussion of romantic love, and movie adaptations of the novel include a Mexican and a French version. In addition, their love has passed into popular culture; Kate Bush and Pat Benetar both recorded "Wuthering Heights," a song which Bush wrote, and MTV showcased the lovers in a musical version.
The love-relationship of Heathcliff and Catherine, but not that of the other lovers, has become an archetype; it expresses the passionate longing to be whole, to give oneself unreservedly to another and gain a whole self or sense of identity back, to be all-in-all for each other, so that nothing else in the world matters, and to be loved in this way forever. This type of passion-love can be summed up in the phrase more--and still more , for it is insatiable, unfulfillable, and unrelenting in its demands upon both lovers.
Heathcliff and Catherine: True Lovers?
Despite the generally accepted view that Heathcliff and Catherine are deeply in love with each other, the question of whether they really love each other has to be addressed. This question raises another; what kind of love--or feeling--is Emily Brontë depicting? Her sister Charlotte, for example, called Heathcliff's feelings "perverted passion and passionate perversity." I list below a number of interpretations of their love/ostensible love.
Soulmates. Their love exists on a higher or spiritual plane; they are soul mates, two people who have an affinity for each other which draws them togehter irresistibly. Heathcliff repeatedly calls Catherine his soul. Such a love is not necessarily fortunate or happy. For C. Day Lewis, Heathcliff and Catherine "represent the essential isolation of the soul, the agony of two souls-or rather, shall we say? two halves of a single soul-forever sundered and struggling to unite."
A life-force relationship. Clifford Collins calls their love a life-force relationship, a principle that is not conditioned by anything but itself. It is a principle because the relationship is of an ideal nature; it does not exist in life, though as in many statements of an ideal this principle has implications of a profound living significance. Catherine's conventional feelings for Edgar Linton and his superficial appeal contrast with her profound love for Heathcliff, which is "an acceptance of identity below the level of consciousness." Their relationship expresses "the impersonal essence of personal existence," an essence which Collins calls the life-force. This fact explains why Catherine and Heathcliff several times describe their love in impersonal terms. Because such feelings cannot be fulfilled in an actual relationship, Brontë provides the relationship of Hareton and Cathy to integrate the principle into everyday life.
Creating meaning. Are Catherine and Heathcliff rejecting the emptiness of the universe, social institutions, and their relationships with others by finding meaning in their relationship with each other, by a desperate assertion of identity based on the other? Catherine explains to Nelly:
...surely you 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? 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. 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. I should not seem part of it" (Ch. ix, p. 64).
Dying, Catherine again confides to Nelly her feelings about the emptiness and torment of living in this world and her belief in a fulfilling alternative: "I'm tired, tired of being enclosed here. I'm wearying to escape into that glorious world, and to be always there; not seeing it dimly through tears, and yearning for it through the walls of an aching heart; but really with it, and in it" (Ch. xv, p. 125).
Transcending isolation. Their love is an attempt to break the boundaries of self and to fuse with another to transcend the inherent separateness of the human condition; fusion with another will by uniting two incomplete individuals create a whole and achieve new sense of identity, a complete and unified identity. This need for fusion motivates Heathcliff's determination to "absorb" Catherine's corpse into his and for them to "dissolve" into each other so thoroughly that Edgar will not be able to distinguish Catherine from him.
Freud explained this urge as an inherent part of love: "At the height of being in love the boundary between ego and object threatens to melt away. Against all the evidence of his senses, a man who is in love declares `I' and 'you' are one, and is prepared to behave as if it were a fact."
Love as religion. Love has become a religion in Wuthering Heights, providing a shield against the fear of death and the annihilation of personal identity or consciousness. This use of love would explain the inexorable connection between love and death in the characters' speeches and actions.
Robert M. Polhemus sees Brontë's religion of love as individualistic and capitalistic:
Wuthering Heights is filled with a religious urgency-unprecedented in British novels-to imagine a faith that might replace the old. Cathy's "secret" is blasphemous, and Emily Brontë's secret, in the novel, is the raging heresy that has become common in modern life: redemption, if it is possible, lies in personal desire, imaginative power, and love. Nobody else's heaven is good enough. Echoing Cathy, Heathcliff says late in the book, "I have nearly attained my heaven; and that of others is altogether unvalued and uncoveted by me!" ...The hope for salvation becomes a matter of eroticized private enterprise....... Catherine and Heathcliff have faith in their vocation of being in love with one another.... They both believe that they have their being in the other, as Christians, Jews, and Moslems believe that they have their being in God. Look at the mystical passion of these two: devotion to shared experience and intimacy with the other; willingness to suffer anything, up to, and including, death, for the sake of this connection; ecstatic expression; mutilation of both social custom and the flesh; and mania for self-transcendence through the other, That passion is a way of overcoming the threat of death and the separateness of existence. Their calling is to be the other; and that calling, mad and destructive as it sometimes seems, is religious.
The desire for transcendence takes the form of crossing boundaries Catherine dying and rejecting conventions; this is the source of the torment of being imprisoned in a body and in this life, the uncontrolled passion expressed in extreme and violent ways, the usurpation of property, the literal and figurative imprisonments, the necrophilia, the hints of incest and adultery, the ghosts of Catherine and Heathcliff-all, in other words, that has shocked readers from the novel's first publication. Each has replaced God for the other, and they anticipate being reunited in love after death, just as Christians anticipate being reunited with God after death. Nevertheless, Catherine and Heatcliff are inconsistent in their attitude toward death, which both unites and separates. After crying "Heathcliff! I only wish us never to be parted," Catherine goes on to say, "I'm wearying to escape into that glorious world," a wish which necessarily involves separation (Ch. xv, p. 125).
Conventional religion is presented negatively in the novel. The abandoned church at Gimmerton is decaying; the minister stops visiting Wuthering Heights because of Hindley's degeneracy. Catherine and Heathcliff reject Joseph's religion, which is narrow, self-righteous, and punitive. Is conventional religion replaced by the religion of love, and does the fulfillment of Heathcliff and Catherine's love after death affect the love of Hareton and Cathy in any way? Does the redemptive power of love, which is obvious in Cathy's civilizing Hareton, relate to love-as-religion experienced by Heathcliff and Catherine?
Love as addiction. Is what Catherine and Heathcliff call love and generations of readers have accepted as Ideal Love really an addiction? Stanton Peele argues that romantic or passion love is in itself an addiction. What exactly does he mean by addiction?
- An addiction exists when a person's attachment to a sensation, an object, or another person is such as to lessen his appreciation of and ability to deal with other things in his environment, or in himself, so that he has become increasingly dependent on that experience as his only source of gratification.
Individuals who lack direction and commitment, who are emotionally unstable, or who are isolated and have few interests are especially vulnerable to addictions. An addictive love wants to break down the boundaries of identity and merge with the lover into one identity. Lacking inner resources, love addicts look outside themselves for meaning and purpose, usually in people similar to themselves. Even if the initial pleasure and sense of fulfillment or satisfaction does not last, the love-addict is driven by need and clings desperately to the relationship and the lover. Catherine, for example, calls her relationship "a source of little visible delight, but necessary." The loss of the lover, whether through rejection or death, causes the addict withdrawal symptoms, often extreme ones like illness, not eating, and faintness. The addict wants possession of the lover regardless of the consequences to the loved one; a healthy love, on the other hand, is capable of putting the needs of the beloved first.
Understanding “I am Heathcliff”
Catherine implies that their love is timeless and exists on some other plane than her feelings for Linton, which are conventionally romantic. If their love exists on a spiritual or at least a non-material plane, then she is presumably free to act as she pleases in the material, social plane; marrying Edgar will not affect her relationship with Heathcliff. By dying, she relinquishes her material, social self and all claims except those of their love, which will continue after death. Heathcliff, in contrast, wants physical togetherness; hence, his drive to see her corpse and his arrangements for their corpses to merge by decaying into each other.
If identity rather than personal relationship is the issue or the nature of their relationship, then Catherine is free to have a relationship with Edgar because Heathcliff's feelings and desires do not have to be taken into account. She needs to think only of herself, in effect.
In Lord David Cecil's view, conflict arises between unlike characters, and the deepest attachments are based on characters' similarity or affinity as expressions of the same spiritual principle. Thus, Catherine loves Heathcliff because as children of the storm they are bound by their similar natures. This is why Catherine says she loves Heathcliff "because he's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same." As the expression of the principle of the storm, their love is, of course, neither sexual nor sensual.
Because of the merging of their identities or, perhaps it would be more accurate to say, because of their intense desire to merge and refusal to accept their literal separateness, Catherine's betrayal of her own nature destroys not only her but threatens Heathcliff with destruction also.
Is Catherine deluding herself with this speech? Louis Beverslius answers yes, Catherine is preoccupied, if not obsessed with the image of herself "as powerfully, even irresistibly, attracted to Heathcliff." Their bond is a negative one: they identify with one another in the face of a common enemy, they rebel against a particular way of life which both find intolerable. It is not enough, however, simply to reject a particular way of life; one cannot define oneself wholly in terms of what he despises. One must carve out for oneself an alternative which is more than a systematic repudiation of what he hates. A positive commitment is also necessary. The chief contrast between Catherine and Heathcliff consists in the fact that he is able to make such a commitment (together with everything it entails) while she is not. And, when the full measure of their characters has been taken, this marks them as radically dissimilar from one another, whatever their temporary 'affinities' appear to be. It requires only time for this radical dissimilarity to become explicit.
Their dissimilarities appear when she allies herself, however sporadically, with the Lintons and oscillates between identifying with them and with Heathcliff. When Heathcliff throws hot applesauce at Edgar and is banished, Catherine initially seems unconcerned and later goes off to be with Heathcliff. Her rebelliousness changes from the open defiance of throwing books into the kennel to covert silence and a double character. Catherine both knows Heathacliff and does not know him; she sees his avarice and vengefulness, but believes that he will not injure Isabella because she warned him off. Catherine's mistaken belief that she and Heathcliff still share an affinity moves her to distinguish in their last conversation between the real Hathcliff whom she is struggling with and the image of Heathcliff which she has held since childhood. It is with the false image that she has an affinity:
Oh, you see, Nelly! He would not relent a moment, to keep me out of hte grave! That is how I'm loved! Well, never mind! That is not my Heathcliff. I shall love mine yet; and take him with me-he's in my soul.
The fact that to maintain the fiction of their affinity Catherine has to create two Heathcliffs, an inner and an outer one, suggests that total affinity does not exist and that complete mergining of two identities is impossible.
Catherine is similarly deluded about her childhood and has painted a false picture of the freedom of Wuthering Heights.
Catherine's assertion that Heathcliff is "more myself than I am" is generally read as an expression of elemental passion. But is it possible that she is using Heathcliff as a symbol of their childhood, when she had freedom of movement and none of the responsibilities and pressure of adulthood, when she was "half savage, and hardy and free."? Does Catherine become, in the words of Lyn Pykett, "the object of a competitive struggle between two men, each of whom wants her to conform to his own version of her"?
Wuthering Heights as a Socio-Economic Novel
The novel opens in 1801, a date Q.D. Leavis believes Brontë chose in order "to fix its happenings at a time when the old rough farming culture, based on a naturally patriarchal family life, was to be challenged, tamed and routed by social and cultural changes; these changes produced Victorian class consciousness and `unnatural' ideal of gentility." In 1801 the Industrial Revolution was under way in England; when Emily Brontë was writing in 1847, it was a dominant force in English economy and society, and the traditional relationship of social classes was being disrupted by mushroom-new fortunes and an upwardly-aspiring middle class. The criterion for defining a gentleman was shifting to money, from character, breeding, or family. This social-economic reality provides the context for socio-economic readings of the novel.
Is Brontë supporting the status quo and upholding conventional values? Initially the answer would seem to be "no." The reader sympathizes with Heathcliff, the gypsy oppressed by a rigid class system and denigrated as "imp" or "fiend." But as Heathcliff pursues his revenge and tyrannical persecution of the innocent, the danger posed by the uncontrolled individual to the community becomes apparent. Like other novels of the 1830s and 40s which reveal the abuses of industrialism and overbearing individualism, Wuthering Heights may really suggest the necessity of preserving traditional ways.
This is not the way Marxist critics see the novel. For Arnold Kettle, the basic conflict and motive force of the novel are social in origin. He locates the source of Catherine and Heatcliff's affinity in the (class) rebellion forced on them by the injustice of Hindley and his wife Frances.
He, the outcast slummy, turns to the lively, spirited, fearless girl who alone offers him human understanding and comradeship. And she, born into the world of Wuthering Heights, senses that to achieve a full humanity, to be true to herself as a human being, she must associate herself totally with him in his rebellion against the tyranny of the Earnshaws and all that tyranny involves.
Catherine's death inverts the common standards of bourgeois morality and so has "revolutionary force." Heathcliff is morally ruthless with his brutal analysis of the significance of Catherine's choosing Edgar and her rejecting the finer humanity he represents. Despite Heathcliff's implacable revenge, we continue to sympathize with him because he is using the weapons and values (arranged marriages, accumulating money, and expropriating property) of Victorian society against those with power; his ruthlessness strips them of any romantic veneer. As a result, he, too, betrays his humanity. Through the aspirations expressed in the love of Cathy and Hareton, Heathcliff recognizes some of the quality of his love for Catherine and the unimportance of revenge and property; he thereby is enabled to regain his humanity and to achieve union with Catherine. "Wutherng Heights then," Kettle concludes, "is an expression in the imaginative terms of art of the stresses and tensions and conflicts, personal and spiritual, of nineteenth-century capitalist society."
Writing nearly twenty-five years later, Marxist Terry Eagleton posits a complex and contradictory relationship between the landed gentry and aristocracy, the traditional power-holders, and the capitalist, industrial middle classes, who were pushing for social acceptance and political power. Simultaneously with the struggle among these groups, an accommodation was developing based on economic interests. Though the landed gentry and aristocracy resisted marrying into first-generation capitalist wealth, they were willing to mix socially and to form economic alliances with the manufacturers and industrialists. The area that the Brontës lived in, the town of Haworth in West Riding, was particularly affected by these social and economic conditions because of the concentration of large estates and industrial centers in West Riding.
Proceeding from this view of mid-nineteenth century society, Eagleton sees both class struggle and class accommodation in Wutheirng Heights. Heathcliff, the outsider, has no social or biological place in the existing social structure; he offers Catherine a non-social or pre-social relationship, an escape from the conventional restrictions and material comforts of the upper classes, represented by the genteel Lintons. This relationship outside society is "the only authentic form of living in a world of exploitation and inequality." It is Heathcliff's expression of a natural non-social mode of being which gives the relationship its impersonal quality and makes the conflict one of nature versus society. Heathcliff's connection with nature is manifested in his running wild as a child and in Hindley's reducing him to a farm laborer. But Catherine's marriage and Hindley's abuse transform Heathcliff and his meaning in the social system, a transformation which reflects a reality about nature-nature is not really "outside" society because its conflicts are expressed in society.
However, Heathcliff the adult becomes a capitalist, an expropriator, and a predator, turning the ruling class's weapons of property accumulation and acquisitive marriage against them. Society's need to tame/civilize the unbridled capitalist is handled in the civilizing of Hareton. Hareton represents the yeoman class, which was being degraded. In adopting the behavior of the exploiting middle classes, Heathcliff works in common with the capitalist landowner Edgar Linton to suppress the yeoman class; having been raised in the yeoman class and having acquired his fortune outside it, he joins "spiritual forces" against the squirearchy. Thus, he represents both rapacious capitalism and the rejection of capitalist society. However, because the capitalist class is no longer revolutionary, it cannot provide expression for Heathcliff's rejection of society for a pre-social freedom from society's restraints. From this impossibility comes what Eagleton calls Heathcliff's personal tragedy: his conflictive unity consisting of spiritual rejection and social integration. Heathcliff relentlessly pursues his goal of possessing Catherine, an obsession that is unaffected by social realities. In other words, the novel does not fully succeed in reconciling or finding a way to express all Heathcliff's meanings.
Eagleton acknowledges that ultimately the values of Thrushcross Grange prevail, but that Brontë's sympathies lie with the more democratic, cozy Wuthering Heights. The capitalist victory over the yeomanry is symbolized by the displacement of Joseph's beloved currant bushes for Catherine's flowers, which are in Marxist terms "surplus value." With Heathcliff's death a richer life than that of Thrushcross Grange also dies; it may be a regrettable death-but it is a necessary death because the future requires a fusion of gentry and capitalist middle class, not continued conflict.
Wuthering Heights as a Religious Novel
Wuthering Heights is not a religious novel in the sense that it supports a particular religion (Christianity), or a particular branch of Christianity (Protestantism), a particular Protestant denomination (Church of England). Rather, religion in this novel takes the form of the awareness of or conviction of the existence of a spirit-afterlife.
An overwhelming sense of the presence of a larger reality moved Rudolph Otto to call Wuthering Heights a supreme example of "the daemonic" in literature. Otto was concerned with identifying the non-rational mystery behind all religion and all religious experiences; he called this basic element or mystery the numinous. The numinous grips or stirs the mind so powerfully that one of the responses it produces is numinous dread, which consists of awe or awe-fullness. Numinous dread implies three qualities of the numinous: its absolute unapproachability, its power, and. its urgency or energy. A misunderstanding of these qualities and of numinous dread by primitive people gives rise to daemonic dread, which Otto identifies as the first stage in religious development. At the same time that they feel dread, they are drawn by the fascinating power of the numinous. Otto explains, "The daemonic-divine object may appear to the mind an object of horror and dread, but at the same time it is no less something that allures with a potent charm, and the creature, who trembles before it, utterly cowed and cast down, has always at the same time the impulse to turn to it, nay even to make it somehow his own." Still, acknowledgment of the "daemonic" is a genuine religious experience, and from it arise the gods and demons of later religions. It has been suggested that Gothic fiction originated primarily as a quest for numinous dread.
For Derek Traversi the motive force of Brontë's novel is "a thirst for religious experience," which is not Christian. It is this spirit which moves Catherine to exclaim, "surely you 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, p. 64). Out of Catherine's-and Brontë's-awareness of the finiteness of human nature comes the yearning for a higher reality, permanent, infinite, eternal; a higher reality which would enable the self to become whole and complete and would also replace the feeling of the emptiness of this world with feelings of the fullness of being (fullness of being is a phrase used by and about mystics to describe the aftermath of a direct experience of God). Brontë's religious inspiration turns a discussion of the best way to spend an idle summer's day into a dispute about the nature of heaven. Brontë's religious view encompasses both Cathy's and Linton's views of heaven and of life, for she sees a world of contending forces which are contained within her own nature. She seeks to unite them in this novel, though, Traversi admits, the emphasis on passion and death tends to overshadow the drive for unity. Even Heathcliff's approaching death, when he cries out "My soul's bliss kills my body, but does not satisfy itself" (Ch. xxxiv, p. 254), has a religious resonance.
Thomas John Winnifrith also sees religious meaning in the novel: salvation is won by suffering, as an analysis of references to heaven and hell reveals. For Heathcliff, the loss of Catherine is literally hell; there is no metaphoric meaning in his claim "existence after losing her would be hell" (Ch. xiv, p. 117). In their last interview, Catherine and Heathcliff both suffer agonies at the prospect of separation, she to suffer "the same distress underground" and he to "writhe in the torments of hell" (XV, p. 124). Heathcliff is tortured by his obsession for the dead/absent Catherine. Suffering through an earthly hell leads Healthcliff finally to his heaven, which is union with Catherine as a spirit. The views of Nelly and Joseph about heaven and hell are conventional and do not represent Brontë's views, according to Winnifrith.
Wuthering Heights as a Romantic Novel
Robert Kiely raises the question, in The Romantic Novel in England, Is there actually an English romantic novel? He skirts answering his own question by suggesting that some novels are influenced by Romanticism and incorporate the same style and themes that appear in Romantic poetry and drama. In his discussion, the term romantic novel is often equated with the romance, with the Gothic novel, and with the romantic elements in a novel. Kiely regards Wuthering Heights as a model of romantic fiction; it contains these romantic/Gothic elements which charterize the romantic novel:
The protagonists' wanderings are motivated by flight from previously-chosen goals, so that often there is a pattern of escape and pursuit. Consider Catherine's marriage for social position, stability, and wealth, her efforts to evade the consequences of her marriage, the demands of Heathcliff and Edgar, and her final mental wandering.
The protagonists are driven by irresistible passion-lust, curiosity, ambition, intellectual pride, envy. The emphasis is on their desire for transcendence, to overcome the limitations of the body, of society, of time rather than their moral transgressions. They yearn to escape the limitations inherent to life and may find that the only escape is death. The longings of a Heathcliff cannot be fulfilled in life.
Death is not only a literal happening or plot device, but also and primarily a psychological concern. For the protagonists, death originates in the imagination, becomes a "tendency of mind," and may develop into an obsession.
As in Gothic fiction, buildings are central to meaning; the supernatural, wild nature, dream and madness, physical violence, and perverse sexuality are set off against social conventions and institutions. Initially, this may create the impression that the novel is two books in one, but finally Thrushcross Grange and Wuthering Heights fuse.
Endings are disquieting and unsatisfactory because the writer resists a definitive conclusion, one which accounts for all loose ends and explains away any ambiguities or uncertainties. The preference for open-endedness is, ultimately, an effort to resist the limits of time and of place That effort helps explain the importance of dreams and memories of other times and location, like Catherine's delirious memories of childhood at Wuthering Heights and rambles on the moors.
Romantic Elements in Wuthering Heights
The major characteristics of Romanticism could be extrapolated from a reading of Wuthering Heights:
the imagination is unleashed to explore extreme states of being and experiences.
the love of nature is not presented just in its tranquil and smiling aspects but also appears in its wild, stormy moods,
nature is a living, vitalizing force and offers a refuge from the constraints of civilization,
the passion driving Catherine and Heathcliff and their obsessive love for each other are the center of their being and transcend death,
so great a focus is placed on the individual that society is pushed to the periphery of the action and the reader's consciousness,
the concern with identity and the creation of the self are a primary concern,
childhood and the adult's developing from childhood experiences are presented realistically,
Heathcliff is the Byronic hero; both are rebellious, passionate, misanthropic, isolated, and wilful, have mysterious origins, lack family ties, reject external restrictions and control, and seek to resolve their isolation by fusing with a love object,
Hareton is the noble savage and, depending on your reading of the novel, so is Heathcliff,
Brontë experiments with the narrative structure (the Chinese-box structure in which Lockwood narrates what Nelly tells him, who repeats what others told her),
the taste for local color shows in the portrayal of Yorkshire, its landscape, its folklore, and its people,
the supernatural or the possibility of the supernatural appears repeatedly.The Gothic in Wuthering Heights
Whether or not Wuthering Heights should be classified as a Gothic novel (certainly it is not merley a Gothic novel), it undeniably contains Gothic elements.
In true Gothic fashion, boundaries are trespassed, specifically love crossing the boundary between life and death and Heathcliff's transgressing social class and family ties. Brontë follows Walpole and Radcliffe in portraying the tyrannies of the father and the cruelties of the patriarchal family and in reconstituting the family on non-patriarchal lines, even though no counterbalancing matriarch or matriarchal family is presented. Brontë has incorporated the Gothic trappings of imprisonment and escape, flight, the persecuted heroine, the heroine wooed by a dangerous and a good suitor, ghosts, necrophilia, a mysterious foundling, and revenge. The weather-buffeted Wuthering Heights is the traditional castle, and Catherine resembles Ann Radcliffe's heroines in her appreciation of nature. Like the conventional Gothic hero-villain, Heathcliff is a mysterious figure who destroys the beautiful woman he pursues and who usurps inheritances, and with typical Gothic excess he batters his head against a tree. There is the hint of necrophilia in Heathcliff's viewings of Catherine's corpse and his plans to be buried next to her and a hint of incest in their being raised as brother and sister or, as a few critics have suggested, in Heathcliff's being Catherine's illegitimate half-brother.
Gothic Elements in Wuthering Heights
What makes a work Gothic is a combination of at least some of these elements:
a castle, ruined or intact, haunted or not (the castle plays such a key role that it has been called the main character of the Gothic novel),
ruined buildings which are sinister or which arouse a pleasing melancholy,
dungeons, underground passages, crypts, and catacombs which, in modern houses, become spooky basements or attics,
labyrinths, dark corridors, and winding stairs,
shadows, a beam of moonlight in the blackness, a flickering candle, or the only source of light failing (a candle blown out or, today, an electric failure),
extreme landscapes, like rugged mountains, thick forests, or icy wastes, and extreme weather,
omens and ancestral curses,
magic, supernatural manifestations, or the suggestion of the supernatural,
a passion-driven, wilful villain-hero or villain,
a curious heroine with a tendency to faint and a need to be rescued-frequently,
a hero whose true identity is revealed by the end of the novel,
horrifying (or terrifying) events or the threat of such happenings.
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Extracted from City University of New York (CUNY)