Wuthering Heights: A Ghost Story part 1
The Bronte sisters had a man problem in Heathcliff. Considering how Charlotte overstepped her role as an executor of Emily's work and became its editor, the curtain on her relationship with Emily is pulled back and the importance of the Nelly, the narrating witness, emerges. The watchfulness of Nelly, the all-seeing housekeeper, may have been seeded in the intrusiveness of Charlotte, the boundary-crossing sister. At a young age, Charlotte had stolen among Emily's papers and read her poetry and short stories without permission. Emily forgave her, because Charlotte became her champion when it came to her writing. Charlotte not only encouraged her, but insisted upon the need to have Wuthering Heights published.
 |
| Sister Charlotte, getting a bit carried away with moral dilemmas in fiction |
It seems to me that the complex structure of Wuthering Heights is due to Emily's complex relationship with Charlotte. To begin with, many readers and critics have complained that the frame story--a first person narrative by the new tenant of Thrushcross Grange, Mr. Lockwood, relaying the history of Wuthering Heights as told by Nelly--renders Heathcliff and Cathy too distant, and blocks the immediacy of their characters. It is a peculiar and aloof stance toward the two, but seems to point to an authorial personality that perhaps found itself at odds with and at arm's length from immediate kin, and who actually felt oppressed or at least stifled by them.
Not all of that can be laid at the feet of Charlotte, because we know that their brother, Branwell, terrorized the family with his addictions and constant drain on their finances. But Emily's home atmosphere may possibly be reflected in Heathcliff's taut frustration over his dependent circumstances, and how his loyalty to Cathy, who is both his family and his beloved, binds him to daily compromises and degradation.
I now think that Emily struggled with how to present Heathcliff and Cathy realistically and mercilessly with all of their flaws laid bare, to a Charlotte-esque readership that would be closer to the horrified and scandalized Mr. Lockwood, who would identify with the moral and practical sensibilities found in Nelly. Perhaps this is why she pairs these witnesses together as the story's initial editorialists, to tip us off that she knows exactly what sort of reaction to the novel's monstrous characters she expected to receive. Yet she also challenges the reader to soften harsh judgment by emulating the sadder but wiser example set by Nelly.
In a similar way that Charlotte attempted to temper the extremes in Heathcliff's character, all of the novel's extreme action is tempered by solid and steady Nelly. She is the character who has a mind that knows itself, and isn't completely consumed by the events of the others' making. She must work alongside them, and is emotionally impacted by them, but she is not fully formed by Wuthering Heights, herself. She relates sympathetically to Mr. Lockwood--a stand-in for the reader--as he listens along with us to her account of both the natural and supernatural beings of Heathcliff and Cathy, the offspring of the "wily and windy moor".
The two wild lovers are bound to it, even in death, and their sorrow is bound to us as we change from the bewildered and fascinated Mr. Lockwood into the empathetic yet even-handed Nelly.
Their sorrow is also bound to us through the transformational life of this novel within Western culture. Like an oracle, Nelly is the only one capable of bearing the burden of telling this tragic tale because she isn't under its spell.
The clear-eyed distance she provides between the reader and the moorland characters allows them to be presented as they would in Greek drama or Shakespeare--raw creatures that spring out of Mother Earth to battle with the gods or play tricks on human heroes. As such, many of the characters that people Wuthering Heights are types. They cannot exist apart from the place, and events that happen beyond its borders "offstage" are recounted to us at a remove. These types are like the Wyrrd sisters assigned to set the scene of Macbeth, the Caliban and Ariel of the Tempest who must act at the bidding of their master, and the Friar of Romeo and Juliet, who must take on the role of intercessor and go-between. They each put on a frayed semblance of society, in order to fulfill the machinations of the plot, but then recede or return to their natural states when the principal action takes over.
Emily also uses types to contrast the natural element from its civilized appearance, to lay them before Charlotte as proof of her case that this distinction must be made. Hindley, the spiteful heir of Wuthering Heights has been sent away to school to be trained as a gentleman, but he violently brings out the whip against Heathcliff in front of polite company, the Lintons, who he wishes to impress. He can't control his baser instinct in spite of his wish to fit in. Cathy is turned into a protege and pet by the Lintons, but her body can't withstand their aristocratic impregnation of her. Once robust and running about, she weakens and dies under their scrupulous care and constant watchfulness. Her nature can't withstand the new frivolous and constraining mold she has squeezed herself into. Edgar Linton is pure societal form with no real substance. His feelings stem mostly from sentiment, offended pride and wounded vanity. He hates and avoids Heathcliff, not because Heathcliff has done anything directly against him, but because Heathcliff does not like him. That is offense enough.
In Heathcliff, himself, Emily produces a character that is fully sprung from Nature who later mimics the part of a gentleman, but only at the service of his elemental natural self. Nature simply does what nature will do, dispassionately and without reverence for its creatures. To accept this as just and inevitable may have proved so scandalous to Charlotte's beliefs and judgments that she took a heavy hand to force Wuthering Heights into submission.
In the scene after Heathcliff leaves the moor for the city, when Cathy makes her infamous "I am Heathcliff" speech to Nelly, it's as if Emily is pleading with Charlotte to understand that there are some people who are closer to the elements of nature than of heaven. This kind derives their strength from the heath and its cliffs and streams, and even the best ideals of religion can't save or satisfy them. While Charlotte presents salvation as controlling one's passions by way of virtue and sacrifice, Emily presents salvation as liberating the soul by way of throwing off societal roles and unnatural restraint.
Cut of the same cloth as Heathcliff, Catherine tells him that she dreamt of getting herself expelled from the comforts of heaven because she wanted to be at Wuthering Heights and nowhere else. I wonder if Heathcliff noticed that she didn't say that she wanted to always be at his side and nowhere else. However, she affirms that they both belong there and with each other in spite of how often they might stray. I recall an English professor who clasped her hands and said she wished the two would have run away to America together. But Emily's plotting instincts instruct us that they would ultimately cease to exist apart from the landscape.
All of the action takes place on the moor between Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange and, after all, the novel is titled after the place and not the people. The Lintons and their home are like heaven, where everything is perfect and safe, but contains none of what Cathy needs to stay alive and vital. She betrayed not only Heathcliff, but the heath itself, by leaving it for the finishing school the Lintons have spoiled her with.
 |
| Emily, the wild one, contained in a moment by the release of her mind |
By contrast, Charlotte Bronte portrays the moorlands in her own novels as a dangerous, dividing territory between lovers, blocking their union. The rough landscape is not to be trusted because it is not cultivated like Jane Eyre's Thornfield Hall. But for Emily, the heath/moor exists apart from morality, desire or human will.
In this same sense, Heathcliff exists apart from the moral code of society, without a sense of ethics, and he connives without a conscience. He's a force of nature that emerged outside of marriage, an amoral waif that becomes a beloved favorite with his own set of values based on loyalty, betrayal, exploitation and vengeance. When he returns to the streets of society to make his fortune and win back Wuthering Heights, he fulfills his scheme by taking on the guise of a fine gentleman, betraying himself as well. What was once just wild in him becomes depraved, in the way that wild things can, when caged.
The story of Cathy as an element is a ghost story, and her ghost torments Heathcliff, pointing to the possible reality of an afterlife of punishing separation, whether parted from him by her own choosing or by death. Heathcliff is deprived of any peace by her flickering memory. His fury and revenge turn the landscape into a horror show of doomed allegiances and ill health. There is only hope that the two can find their way back to the moor and each other to find that peace.
By the end of the novel, it seems as if Emily tried to reconcile her own feelings about having produced all of this fictional furor with Charlotte's more stoical views and governess-like pragmatism, by giving the innocent offspring of this cast of monsters, Hareton and Catherine, a purified bliss while still on earth. We can perhaps see them as the redeemers of their families and the land that they will inherit. And yet, it is the lost and wild ghosts of the story that we remember.
