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Wuthering
Heights
A Critical Reflection
As
the book proceeds, anything else will be told about the origins
of
Heathcliff, but, nonetheless, some
critic thinks him to be an illegitimate son of Mr. Earnshaw. He is named
Heathcliff (rupe di brughiera in
Italian), after the name of an Earnshaws' dead son and, gradually, substitutes
Hindley in the affection of his father and shows a passionate, natural
kinship with a Catherine who seems to share the same nature: stormy and
powerful like the wind, hard and thick like the rocks of Wuthering Heights.
Hindley, seven years older than Heathcliff, keeps on beating and mistreating for
every reason, even the most innocent ones, in a sort of sadist
"crescendo" until he almost kills him throwing him under an horse feet
in "the hope he'll kick out
his brain"! When Mr. Earnshaw dies, in 1777, Cathy is 12, Heathcliff is 13
while Hindley, who is 20, becomes the real master of the house, takes Frances,
his wife, with him and keeps on beating Heathcliff, worst than before,
until he's forbidden to get in the house. In
the same year, Cathy and Heathcliff go to Thrushcross Grange - the first time
the two buildings get in contact in the novel - and spy the scene inside by the
window, forced to run away the are stopped
by the Lintons' bulldog
that seizes Cathy's ankle so
that a servant can catch them but the bulldog lays dead;
throttled off,
his huge, purple tongue
hanging half a foot out of his mounth, and his pendant lips streaming with
bloody slaver
cruelly killed by Heatcliff after a
fight with no weapons, a sort of
panic struggle deeply fought in nature, far off from man society:
I got a stone
and thrust it between his jaws, and
tried with all my might to cram it down his throat.
Cathy, wounded as she is, is soon
recovered n the house where she'll be for five days while Heathcliff is
not allowed to come in and goes back to Wuthering Heights remaining an outsider
to Thrushcross Grange After her wound healing, Cathy comes back home very
changed at an external sight but her soul always
is the
same wild and powerful universe of free nature as usual,
nonetheless she has seen another kind of world and wants to have a part
in it, a part to be somehow shared
by Heathcliff too.
Later, when Edgar asks her
to marry him she accepts and further says to Nelly, her servant and
the storyteller herself, telling about a dream she had:
I was only going
to say that 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 heat on the top of Wuthering Heights, where I woke
sobbing for joy. That will do explain my secret, as well as the other. I have no
more business to marry Edgar Linton than I have to be in heaven; and if the
wicked man in there had not brought Heatcliff so low, I shouldn't have thought
of it. It would degrade me to marry Heatcliff, now; so he shall never know how I
love him; and that, not because he's handsome, Nelly, but because he's more
myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same, and
Linton's is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire.
Heatcliff. who,
unseen, has been listening
to her speech until the part concerning the degradation in marrying him, runs
away in the stormy night and comes back to the "moors"
three years later, rich of a
mysteriously achieved richness, finding
Cathy married to Edgar Linton. Anyway
he claims his natural links on her over the artificial link of her husband.
Cathy dies in 1784, at the age of 19, giving birth to her daughter, also called
Catherine. Meanwhile, Isabel Linton, being totally possessed by Heatcliff, runs
away with him to Wuthering Heights - where he was the only master now - so that
he can easily take an advantage on her and begins his revenge, a sort of
Shakespearean revenge which no one escapes from: Hindley drinks himself to death;
Hareton, his son, is an easy prey for Heathcliff who degrades him into a rough
and ignorant servant of his own; Cathy Linton is now married to Linton, his
degenerate and weak son born by his marriage with Isabel. Side by side with his
revenge, his obsession with the dead Cathy keeps on growing at such an extent
that, finally, he stops eating and sleeping in order to have a sort of deathly
reunion with her, while the young Catherine,
whose husband had died only two months after the marriage,
succeeds in softening and educating Hareton until he marries her in 1803.
The circle is finally closed: Cathy Earnshaw after having become Linton marrying
Edgar, turns herself again to Earnshaw through her homonymous daughter's
marriage with Hareton Earnshaw, back to Wuthering Heights again.
Cathy and Heathcliff are the main
characters of this novel but we may say that the latter is the chief character
since we haven't to forget that Cathy is a character living at Wuthering Heights
since her birth and couldn't have felt that inhuman and powerful passion she
felt for anyone but Heatcliff, the intruder come from nowhere -since knowing he
has been found in Liverpool, a sea town with an important port, tells us nothing
about his real origins - to change situation and induce the story itself. There
are different natures and angles in Heathcliff's personality and figure. He is a
sort of natural creature apart from man society, his strength and charm are
those belonging to nature when seen in its wildest and original
shape, he has got no moral without being consequently unmoral since he
belongs to a world never touched by the man conception of morality or a
sociological ethics so to impede - unlike any other characters - a sociological
analysis; he is also a sort of Prince of Darkness, moving in
the night, dark and gloomy, looking
for preys to satisfy his lust for
revenge, sucking their lives out -
just like
the Dracula by
Bram Stoker - in a very vampiristical
way until he also finds his rest in the coffin. In
this sense, this double figure of his clearly points out the double shape
of the novel whether Emily Brontė is
concerned in working out the interference of an extremed natural passion with
human feelings or in creating an ominous Gothic effect of her own. However, in
one way or another, he always behaves
as a force acting on the other characters.
What happens between him and Catherine is something that really exceeds
the mere romance and goes far beyond the conception of vampiristical
love by E.A.Poe, what we see it's a very strong passion taken to such an
extremed point with no way back, a passion which wasn't earthly at all so that
Heathcliff kills himself to be finally with her beloved - melted in a single
spirit - in the kingdom of death. Charlotte
Brontė, Emily's elder sister, so
defines their relation:
a passion such
as might boil and glow in the bad essence of some evil genius; a fire that might
form the tormented centre - the ever-suffering soul of a magnate of the infernal
world: and by its quenchless and ceaseless ravage effect the execution of the
decree which dooms him to carry Hell with him wherever he wanders.
So strong a relation that Cathy
- without knowing that Heathcliff has just run away in the stormy night -
can say considering an eventual separation of theirs:
We separated.
(...) Who is to separate us,
pray? They'll meet the fate of Milo! Not as long as I live, Ellen - for
no mortal creture. Every Linton on
the face of the earth might melt into nothing before I could consent to forsake
Heathcliff!
And further:
my love for
Linton is like the foliage in the woods. Time will change it, I'm well aware,
as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal
rocks beneath - a source of little visible delight but necessary.
Nelly, I am Heathcliff -
he's always, always in my mind - not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a
pleasure to myself - but as my own being - so don't talk of our separation again
- it is impracticable.
As we can see in these declarations,
Cathy never plays a passive role towards Heathcliff,
she also has been endowed with a wild an natural temper so that her
personal, inner fusion with him may only be considered as a encounter of two
twin souls even at an inhuman extent as such, impossible to be avoided since
they are each other but impossible to be fulfilled in a marriage, or something
like that, since it can't have a sort of social recognition just in its being
inhuman, in its belonging not to this earth, meant as the place where man's
society lives. Cathy's marriage to
Edgar Linton is a sort of social device to help Heathcliff,
even if she splits herself into two levels - one is social,
the other one is inhuman - and may love and respect him as her husband
always being in love with Heathcliff on the
other level. A level that has only been ignited by Heathcliff's coming so to
be definitively external, since it is someway revealed at the very beginning of
the narrative when she, still a child, asks her father - when he was
leaving to Liverpool; where
he would have met the little
Heathcliff - for a whip.
The structure of Wuthering Heights,
always perfect and plain, shows many modern angles really
peculiar and
impossible to
be found
in the whole Victorian novel. First
of all its narrative device.
There are two tellers and two time levels:
Lockwood, the lodger of
Thrushcross Grange - in the year 1801, 17
years after Cathy's death - tell us about the present time while Nelly - Cathy's
maid and Thrushcross Grange housekeeper after her death - tells him about the
past. So that the book seen as a
whole is the result of an oblique narrative in which the first teller hasn't
seen the reported story, being only told about it. This narrative form is
masterly led on by Emily Brontė who really builds up Lockwood as a character
knowing nothing about past actions. His first impression of Heathcliff is the
most evident misunderstanding we may conceive:
...Mr.
Heathcliff and I are such a suitable pair to divide the desolation between us. A
capital fellow!
He begins to show an interest about the
past after reading some notes by Catherine and having a dream,
deeply rooted in the gothic side of Wuthering Heights:
---He
dreams of
a branch
beating through a broken
window-pane--- "I must stop it, nevertheless!"
I muttered, knocking my knuckles through the glass, and stretching an arm
out to seize the importunate branch: instead of which, my finger closed on the
fingers of a little ice-cold hand!
The intense
horror of nightmare came over me; I tried to draw back my arm, but the hand
clung to it, and a most melancholy voice sobbed:
"Let me in
- let me in!"
"Who are
you?" I asked, struggling,
meanwhile, to disengage myself.
"Catherine
Linton", it
replied shiveringly,
"I'm come home, I'd lost my way on the moor!"
As it spoke, I
discerned, obscurely, a child's face looking through the window - terror made me
cruel; and, finding it useless to attempt shaking the creature off, I
pulled its wrist on to the
broken pane, and rubbed it to and fro till the blood ran down and soaked the
bedclothes: still it wailed, "Let me in!" and maintained its tenacious
gripe, almost maddening me with fear.
His search of a teller, first addressed
to Heathcliff, is unsuccessful until, in the 4th chapter, he finds a well
willing teller in Nelly, who starts telling him about the story from its very
beginnings. As a teller she represents both the common sense arid the common
ethics exposing, in her telling about the events, the relative ideas and
judgements of her own thus revealing to be a sort of simple and common
background against the extremed relationship of Heathcliff and Cathy.
The use of language also is very modern
in Wutherinq Heights, since every character uses a language of its own in
according to its culture and school education, thus giving
the verbal interaction
system a very vivid shape that recalls us to a more solid and tangible reality.
The best specimen of such a linguistical operation
is Joseph, the old servant at
Wuthering Heights, as religious at sight as sadist on action:
"T'
maister's dahn i' t'
fowld. Goa rahned by th'
end ut' laith, if yah went
tuh spake tull him."
And further:
"Und hah
isn't that nowt comed in frough th' field,
be this time? What is he abaht? qirt eedle seeght!
We may close this short analysis of
such a complex narrative quoting a passage from the 1850 preface by Charlotte
Brontė:
Wuthering Heights was hewn in a wild workshop, with simple tools, out of homely materials. The statuary found a granite block on a solitary moor: gazing thereon, he saw how from the crag might be elicited the head, savage, swart, sinister; a form moulded with at least one element of grandeur - power. He wrought with a rude chisel, and form no model but the vision of his meditations. With time and labour, the crag took human shape; and there it stands colossal, dark and frowning, half statue, half rock; in the former sense, terrible and goblin like; in the latter, almost beautiful, for its colouring is of mellow grey, and moorland moss clothes it; and heath, with its blooming bells and balmy fragrance, grows faithfully close to the giant's foot.
S. A. PETTIGNANO, Messina 1990
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