WUTHERING HEIGHTS: IDEAS AND THEMES

Wuthering Heights was published in 1847 under the pseudonym “Ellis Bell”.

Charlotte presented her sister Emily as an unconscious artist who “did not know what she had done”. Unlike what Charlotte thought of her sister, some literary critics agree on the fact that it is a very carefully constructed novel.

The main problem of critical response was that critics could not work out its moral standpoint. Both lovers deliberately marry other partners.

As Catherine Earnshaw dies halfway through the novel, which pair of lovers is meant to carry our approval, Catherine and Heathcliff or young Catherine and Hareton?

Moreover their voices reach us through a medley of others: Mr Lockwood, Nelly, Isabella, who are often ignored by readers.

A parable of a natural equilibrium disturbed by an external force and eventually somehow restored. The theory that a principle of calm and storm informs the novel provided a comprehensive interpretation. The two aspects (calm and storm) are not necessarily conflicting and will ultimately lead to a state of equilibrium. The world described by the novel is pre-moral, and the drives of the main characters seem to reach beyond their death and strive for transcendence. (Early Victorian Novelists, Lord David Cecil, 1934)

A restless force, represented by C and H, which continually pushes against a framework of religion, propriety, social expectations. The novel represents a clash of social classes and economic interests where the respectable farming class (the Earnshaws) is progressively destroyed by the newly wealthy capitalists (H) and the traditional gentry (the Lintons).

Lockwood and Nelly represent, from different class perspectives, the normal views of society (family relationships, class characteristics, social etiquette, duty, responsibility) whereas C symbolises vitality, the spirit of life, a mystical vocation for social position and romantic love. (romantic love: for Edgar > leading to marriage; Romantic love: for Heathcliff > intense but unfulfilled).

For Freud the courtship-and-marriage pattern is the normal feminine path through the Oedipus complex, in which the young girl looks for a lover who is like her forbidden father. The Catherine-and-Heathcliff type is based on an earlier stage in which children look for a confirmation of their identity in a mirror image of themselves. It is a kind of love which finds its archetype in the myth of Narcissus. Juliet Mitchell in Women: The Longest Revolution claims that Romantic love, which “does not have a sexual object that that is ultimately different from itself” represents “the triumph of death over life” whereas “legitimate or married love” is “the triumph of sexuality over death, the species over the individual”.

The metaphorical use of landscape and weather results in their appearing like part of the characterization more than like a background to the events.

The contrast between the two houses is grounded in specific details (time, place and class of their occupants). WH: functional place, agricultural economy, farmers. TG: place of leisure, products of other people’s labour, landowners > Victorian England in 1847, Yorkshire. Marxist reading: H as a mobile atom in the class structure, representing the working class, oppressed and alienated by those who own the means of production, a classic case of upward social mobility. “The weapons he uses against the Earnshaws and Lintons are their own weapons of money and arranged marriages. (...) we recognize a rough moral justice in what he has done to his oppressors” (Kettle, Introduction to the English Novel). He may be a disruptive element in the novel, but his actions do make sense within the ethic of revenge.

Does it centre round H or C? Modern criticism tends to assert that it is C’s story. Feminist writers of the 1970s established a picture of Victorian women as “relative creatures”, existing only in so far as they related to some man, whether father, brother or husband > If C were to marry H, they would be “beggars”.

Girls reach maturity by recognizing their inferiority, and compensate for this by attaching themselves to a powerful man; boys transcend their powerlessness by identifying with adult men and competing with them for the possession of women. C’s and H’s originally androgynous mind is split by socialization into sadistic male and masochistic female.

In WH “Gothic” excesses are not “escapist” but work to reinforce a “realist” analysis of power structures. The second generation characters do not replicate their elders’ barbarity , so the novel mimics the real historical tendency towards more companionable relationships between men and women.

Lockwood is far from an all-knowing narrator; the first three chapter are a catalogue of mistakes. He is a failure as a guide and as a representative of civilized behaviour: he rubs Catherine’s wrists on the broken window pane “till the blood ran down and soaked the bedclothes” > Dorothy van Ghent, “The Window Image in Wuthering Heights”: windows, doors, gates are vulnerable points in the barrier between the houses and the landscape. They separate the inside from the outside, the human from the alien, the other (but which is less human, Catherine’s ghost or Lockwood?) > Freud: civilization is built on repression; people learn to live together by internalizing social rules. The uncanny is “the return of the repressed”; we are frightened by uncanny occurrences not because they are totally outside and unknown to us but because they are part of our own nature that we cannot afford to acknowledge. The novel seems haunted throughout by potential presences, hallucinations and apparitions.

David Daiches argues that in place of the Christian heaven, WH offers us “mother earth”(C’s dream about the angels flinging her out of Paradise ...) > H exhumes the corpse of his lover and looks forward to the same worms reducing both their corpses to earth.

Because C seems unconscious of the impropriety of her behaviour, her love has been seen as sexless. C wants to love both H and E, and perhaps Emily obtained this idea from Percy Shelley’s “Epipsychidion” (free love ethic).

If the ghost of C wails to be let in, and H begs her to return, what is it that keeps them apart? It might be an appeal that he should find room in a heart obsessed with hatred. C is let in at last when H can accept C and Hareton and when their union seems to seal the end of the conflict between the two houses.

The novel is also about intense suffering (see for instance the abuses parental figures carry out on children, or the sadistic sides of characters like Hindley or Heathcliff). Evil is often the outcome of some wrongdoing. Therefore we wonder to what extent the characters should be held responsible for their cruelties. Are their torments self-inflicted? Should we pity victims and victimizers alike?

The ending is ambiguous: C and H ghostly walking, reported by the country folk, seems incompatible with Lockwood’s final sentences about “the sleepers in that quiet earth”. Lockwood describes three headstones in the churchyard, and C in the centre wears a locket in which H’s hair is twisted with E’s.