The Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Conteppy The Ethical Dimension of Wuthering Heights EMIL.IO DE GRAZIA E MILY BRONTE'S Wuthering Heights is one of those rare works that jars our moral sensibilities. Its first readers were struck by its moral tangles. "We are not disposed to ascribe any particular intention to the author in drawing the character of Heathcliff; nor can we perceive any very obvious moral in the story" (Examiner, Jan. 8, 1848). Most retreated to safe ortho- doxies about "the brutalizing influence of unchecked passion" (Britannia, Jan. 15, 1848), or the conse- quences of living "insubordinate to law .... And herein lies the moral of the book, though most people will fail to draw the moral from very irritation at it" (Leader, Dec. 28, 1850). Though more recently her total vision has been more justly established, little attention has been given to the principles implicit in the novel's structure and symbolism that define the nature of sin, account for the role of evil in the world, and point toward moral imperatives. Popular among critics is Dorothy Van Ghent's view that Wuthering Heights "works at a level of experience that is unsym- pathetic to, or rather, simply irrelevant to the social and moral reason," and that the novel "so baffles and confounds the ethical sense because it is not informed with that sense at all" ( The English Novel, 1953, p. 164). Though we seldom catch ourselves at it, we do find ourselves on the devil's side through much of the novel. As we sympathize with Heathcliff and come to accept him not as villain but as norm, we suspend not (176) https://digitalcommons.pittstate.edu/mwq/vol19/iss2/1 prary Thought, Vol. 19, Is. 2 [1978], Art. 1 WUTHERING HEIGHTS 177 only our disbelief but our moral sense, and accept a vision of the world that seems to take us beyond good and evil. Yet it is clearly an oversimplification to insist that the novel is (in Mrs. Van Ghent's words) "cer- tainly nonethical." The major key to the novel's ethical dimension is Heathcliff, whose process of "moral teething" dominates the action. While Wuthering Heights is one of world's great love stories, it is framed by a terrifying tale of revenge focusing on Heathcliff and developed in three sec- tions. The first describes his boyhood initiation into the world of the Heights. The second, encompassing the bulk of the novel, describes his separation from Catherine and others associated with the two houses. In the third, Heathcliff finally returns to and merges with Catherine. At the beginning Heathcliff is pri- marily sinned against; in the middle sections he be- comes the novel's "black villain." In the final phase, however, our sympathies for him are rekindled, and the villain is portrayed as an exonerated hero whose vision transcends and corrects conventional moral wisdom. Heathcliff s tale of initiation, separation, and re- union is told against the omnipresent backdrop of windows, door, beds, and bedchambers, conspicuous symbols of separation and reunion. With good reason Mrs. Van Ghent has suggested that windows symbol- ize "a separation between the daemonic depths of the soul and the limited and limiting lucidities of con- sciousness, a separation between the soul's otherness and its humanness" (p. 163). Doors and gates are even more prominent, and they too act as emblems of sepa- ration. As J. Hillis Miller has pointed out, Wuthering Heights, with its outer gate, doors to the house and kitchen, and upstairs inner chamber an oaken closet with a bed in it, is a "kind of Chinese box of enclo- sures within enclosures" ( The Disapperance of God, 34 Tanner et al. 178 THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY 1963, pp. 165-66). Instances of people isolating, ex- cluding, or imprisoning others abound. What all these instances suggest about "sin" is that it is the act or state of separation. Sin occurs-or is "committed" when people alienate themselves from each other, when deliberately or not, they destroy or remove from view the physical or spiritual common ground on which they meet. Sin occurs when one is separated from a source capable of sustaining him in life. This separation occurs on a number of levels. On a human level it occurs when people bound together by needs and desires are driven apart. Human alienation leads to disintegration of the self, which manifests itself in the struggle of the unconscious self against the conscious, and in the battle between the sexual and the spiritual. Extended, individual cases take on a histori- cal dimension: the conflict between two separate houses and cultural sensibilities, one representing a proper Victorianism and the other a demonic Roman- ticism. Sin also suggests a separation from nature, particularly the tumultous or the "wuthering," an finally from God, the ground of all being. Since th novel makes it clear that all these levels are inextrica bly bound, "sin" is any disintegration of the soul, o any tear in the fabric into which men, nature, and Go are woven. Wuthering Heights dramatizes a universal complic- ity in sin. Perhaps the most well-meaning offender i Earnshaw, guilty primarily of sins of omission. Hi desire to retain Heathcliff at the Heights is in part a act of Christian charity done in defiance of a wif "ready to fling it [Heathcliff] out of doors" on th night "it" was brought to the Heights (Norton Critic Edition, 2nd ed., p. 39). But Earnshaw fails to mollif the hostility activated by Heathcliff' s unsettling ap pearance on the scene; he fails to keep his house i order. There is a touch of vanity in his attitude towar Published by Pittsburg State University Digital Commons, 1978 'ol. 19 No. 2 WUTHERING HEIGHTS 179 Heathcliff, whom he regards as a surrogate for "a son who had died in childhood" (39) and appropriately christens. His favors help develop in Heathcliff what Nelly calls "a childhood's sense of superiority""' (63) that Hindley sees as a threat. As the hatred begins to simmer between the two, Earnshaw acts impulsively and unevenly, and the household, except Catherine, sides against Heathcliff. Thus Earnshaw, desiring to do good, helps initiate the fall of his house by perpe- trating the conditions that make separation possible. While Nelly's hostility to Heathcliff is not as heated as Hindley' s, it is hardly imperceptible. The practical and insular Nelly initially reacts to the infant Heath- cliff the same way Mrs. Earnshaw did: "I put it on the landing of the stairs," she says, "hoping it might be gone on the marrow" (30). She too refers to the infant as "it," and while Hindley administers blows, she pinches Heathcliff. Hindley hated him, she says, "and to say the truth I did the same" (38). Nelly later finds him "as uncomplaining as a lamb" (40), and Heath- cliff shows his affability by asking her to make him "decent." But still, Nelly confesses, "I couldn't dote on HeathclifT" (40). Nelly merely feels "compelled" to care for Heathcliff, and admits that "the greatest pun- ishment [she and Hindley] could invent for [Cath- erine] was to keep her separate from him" (43). In the absence of a real mother for Heathcliff, Nelly is a reluctant mother who, as it were, resents the illegiti- mate child thrust upon her by chance, and who, as servant, seeks to reestablish the noblesse oblige abro- gated, she feels, by the master of the house. Nelly is largely responsible for making Heathcliff feel his ini- tial alienation, and she widens the separation between him and "legitimate" members of the family. Like Nelly, Hindley regards Heathcliff as an illegit- imate intruder disrupting the hierarchical structure of the family. At the Christmas feast at which Nelly has 35 180 The Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Con THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY cheerfully advised Heathcliff to "frame high notions of [his] birth," Hindley becomes "irritated at seeing him clean and cheerful," and responds by locking him in his garret (55). At Earnshaw's death, the struggle becomes overt as Hindley jealously guards his right to assume the role of master of the household. Blaming his father for "treating Heathcliff too liberally," he tyranically reduces him to servant. "I wish my father were back again," Catherine writes in her book, "Hindley is a detestable substitute-his conduct to Heathcliff is atrocious-H. and I are going to rebel" (26). It is through this rebellion that Heathcliff be- comes more a "brother" to Catherine than is Hindley. Hindley responds by bolting the doors on Catherine and Heathcliff and by trying to keep them from sitting, eating and playing together. Ironically, in trying to destroy Heathcliff, Hindley helps destroy his own sister. "My misery arose," says Catherine looking bac on her childhood, "from the separation that Hindley had ordered between me and Heathcliff" (107). Like a stock romance heroine, Catherine stumbles into evil over her good intentions. Her altruistic bu naive desire to advance Heathcliff by marrying Edg leads to fragmented love triangles. Her marriage re- duces Heathcliff to platonic friend and leads to th isolation and spiritual destruction of Edgar. One con sequence of her decision is that she becomes divide against herself. The only obstacle to marrying Edg lives "in [her] soul, and in [her] heart" (71). In violat- ing her basic identity with Heathcliff she must "cheat [her] uncomfortable conscience" (73)-must, as he dream reflects, banish herself to a cold, insufferable "heaven" with a stranger. Thus she becomes a spiri- tual outcase, a ghost wandering out-of-doors yearnin to return home. In Edgar, separation manifests itself as resignatio retreat, and mild self-defeating jealousy. As Nelly ob https://digitalcommons.pittstate.edu/mwq/vol19/iss2/1 orary Thought, Vol. 19, Is. 2 [1978], Art. 1 WUTHERING HEIGHTS 181 serves in one of her more perceptive moments, "Well, we must be ourselves in the long run; the mild and generous are only more justly selfish than the domi- neering" (81). Edgar's very "decency'' is at the root of his sin. His alienation is clothed by the gentlemanly virtues of order and expediency which dilute his en- ergies. Instead of acting forcefully on his love, he resigns himself to the necessity of his own separation and insists on the separation of Catherine and Heath- cliff. Edgar becomes "eternally divided" from Isabella for her refusal to abandon Heathcliff and separates Linton and Cathy for "expediency's sake." By raising barriers between characters and by trying to retreat from the center of the web of complicity, he too is responsible for human suffering. While initially the victim, Heathcliff becomes the primary victimizer, "the black villain" presiding over a web not altogether of his own making. The noted psychiatrist Thomas Szasz has shown that victims of oppression tend to take on the characteristics of their oppressors. "I seek no revenge on you,' says Heath- cliff to Catherine. "That's not the plan. The tyrant grinds down his slaves and they don't turn against him, they crush those beneath them" (97). Separa- tion-psychological, physical and legal-is Heath- cliff's most effective weapon. He is cruel to the de- fenseless Isabella, denying her access to his bedroom while refusing to give her "the slightest right to claim a separation" (128). Seeing in Linton an image of Edgar, Heathcliff locks him out of the Heights, and later he imprisons Nelly and Cathy until he secures Cathy's promise to marry Linton. Even Hareton-with whose feelings Heathcliff can sympathize, "having felt them [himself]" (1 78)-becomes an intended vic- tim of Heathcliff, who separates Hareton from Hind- ley and tries to keep him from the civilizing influence of Cathy. The boy who had been locked out becomes 36 182 THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY Tanner et the adult who locks out others, and his hateful acts produce his own self-alienation. HeathclifFs "mind is ... eternally secluded in itself' (225). He feels a perpetual bereavement, a sense of estrangement from the living that only death can assuage. While Heathcliff is busy within the webwork of complicity exacting his terrible revenge, Lockwood is safely outside it, vainly trying to penetrate the mean- ing of events narrated by Nelly Dean. Lockwood is a link to the world outside the Heights and the Grange, but this stranger from the outside is incapable of whole understanding. His detachment-physical, emotional, and intellectual-keeps him from the truth. His very name suggests the symbols-doors and locks-of isolation he himself rather undramatically personifies. Incapable of passionate attachment, he is inclined to accept Nelly's conventional wisdom. Like his literary ancestors, the Witwouds and Mrs. Mar- wood of Congreve's The Way of the World, Lockwood represents a comically mean and worldly outlook. His meanness surfaces when he gashes Catherine's wrists against the broken window glass; it haunts him when the violence implicit in his conventional morality manifests itself in nightmares of judgment and dam- nation. If the novel has a villain pitiful for his narrowness of vision, it is Joseph, "the wearisomest, self-righteous pharisee that ever ransacked a Bible to rake the prom- ises to himself, and fling the curses on his neighbors" (42). Joseph represents the worst side of a legalistic religiosity only self-righteously devoted to "law" and "justice." Bound by a simplistic view that separates mankind into reprobates and regenerates, he is bound to be divisive. He is quick to judge on the basis of incomplete or distorted knowledge. Cathy's efforts to restore Hareton by making him "contrary" near the novel's end bring nothing but reproach from Joseph: Published by Pittsburg State University Digital Commons, 1978 ol. 19 No. 2 WUTHERING HEIGHTS 183 "O. Lord, judg 'em, for they' s norther law nur justice amang wer rullers!" (243). The "produce of [his] day's transactions is a pile of "dirty bank-notes" which he spreads on his large Bible (249). Each character, then, including those of the third generation-Linton, Hareton, and Cathy-helps spin the webwork of recrimination that eventually victim- izes almost everyone; each is "fallen." If it is to have ethical viability, however, separation must be predi- cated on an original monism; the separated must be reunifiable, man capable of atonement. While Wuth- ering Heights is a history of men alienated from each other, nature, and God, its thematic foundation is a faith that urges toward union are stronger than at- tempts to keep the human family separated. Person- if6ed by Heathcliff and Catherine and practiced by Cathy, this faith, as we shall see, depends on seeing the integrity of the natural and supernatural and of the real and dream worlds; it leads to a final vision of the unity of life and death. Both Heathcliff and Catherine feel an ultimate connection not only to each other but to nature; both feel strange powers urging them toward fulfillment and union, and both have dream or trance-like visions that compel them toward this one- ness. In Joseph's superstitiousness, Nelly's common sense, and Heathcliff and Catherine's visionary intu- ition, we are given three ways to truth. Nelly's com- mon sense generally fails to carry her beyond conven- tional wisdom. With the novel's protagonists we are invited to feel our way to a perception of essential unity. The distinction between "knowing" and "feel- ing" is sharply made. Nelly "isn't reasonable enough to feel [her] injustice to Heathcliff" (39-40); as Heath- cliff walks by Catherine's grave he "knows" no living thing is present but he "feels" Catherine's presence. For them, moreover, visions and dreams are paradigms 37 184 The Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Coijtemy THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY which intimate essential unity; they are the clouds into which consciousness melts as it approaches death and clearer vision. Appropriately, the cooler, more rational characters-Lockwood, Nelly, and Edgar-fear dreams, misconstrue their import, or fail to dream. Just as windows serve as "transparent membranes" sep- arating the inner and outer and the seen from the unseen, dreams and visions also act as transparent mediaries establishing a continuity between ordinary consciousness and mystic super-consciousness. Cath- erine's life "closed in a gentle dream" (139), as if she were awakening to a new life. Similarly, Cathy starts Hareton on the way to a new life by asking, "Do you ever dream, Hareton?" Heathcliffs visionary powers penetrate the mystery of being: he sees the unity of the dream and real worlds, the supernatural and natural, death and life. His unclosed eyes suggest that in death he sees fully. The sense of the oneness of life and death is at- tended by a sense of the primordial unity of man and nature. As children Heathcliff and Catherine are out- side society as they wander on the moors. But Lock- wood, a city-dweller, Nelly, a creature of the house- hold, Edgar, a devotee of books, and all the others lack their closeness to nature. Significantly, as the children grow older and "decent," they become separated from nature. "I wish I were out of doors-I wish I were a girl again-half savage, and hardy, and free, laments Catherine. "Open the window" (107). As Catherine moves from the influence of Heathcliff and Wuthering Heights to that of the civilized, decent, and decorous Edgar at Thrushcross Grange, a self-division occurs that eventually estranges her from others and leaves her a lonely ghost on the moors until reconciled with Heathcliff in the earth beyond the influence of the civilization that separated them. Bronte was not naively romantic in her advocacy of https://digitalcommons.pittstate.edu/mwq/vol19/iss2/1 orary Thought, Vol. 19, Is$. 2 [1978], Art. 1 WUTHERING HEIGHTS 185 natural piety. Catherine does not envision returning to a tame prelapsarian condition but to the "savage" and "wuthering," the "atmospheric tumult personified by Heathcliff, and the hardness and strength of Penni- stone Crag. To insist only on the tame is to deny the fullness of nature. Linton visualizes his "heaven" as a static existence full of blue sky, bright sun, and larks; his is that of sentimental Christians and naive roman- tics. Cathy's "heaven," on the other hand, is turbulent. She prefers "rocking," "rustling," and "great swells of long grass undulating in waves"; her skies are full not only of larks but of blackbirds and cuckoos (198-199). Cathy's vision is more whole than the feeble Linton's. Unlike Heathcliff, who strives to give full expression to his natural passions, most of the characters seek Linton's stasis. Nelly seeks it in domestic tranquility, Edgar in philosophic meditation, Joseph in other- worldly reward, and Lockwood in pastoral escape. While these seek to escape the pains of the "half-sav- age, and hardy, and free" yearning of Catherine and Heathcliff, they separate themselves from the wildness in the world and in their own natures. There is no escape, however, from time. In Bronte, history symbolically recapitulates itself, with the present reappearing as an image of the past. The past and present in Wuthering Heights share a metaphori- cal unity, the generations welded together not merely into a continuity but into an identity. In the two Catherines, in Edgar Linton and Linton, and in Heathcliff and Hareton (both "waifs of sorts"), we find personalities that symmetrically mirror each other's strengths and weaknesses, and through the course of the novel we watch as these strengths and weaknesses contend and resolve themselves in the union of Cathy and Hareton, symbolic reincarnations of Catherine and Heathcliff. This symmetry points to one of the novel's ethical themes: that the sins of the fathers will 38 Tanner et al: V 186 THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY be visited on the sons. The import of this moral is obscured if we consider it a supernatural judgment rather than a human principle operative in history. In Wuthering Heights the original unity torn apart by sin is, figuratively speaking, the family of man as it exists both in the historical present and as a historical development. Heathcliff is in effect Earnshaw' s son, Hindley's brother, Catherine's brother and husband, and Hareton's father. He is the symbolic hub of a new family who eventually unifies both houses in his name according to law, and provides the visionary basis for new love and hope in a future and stronger generation. The novel closes with the dawning of a New Year. The Lintons, weak in everything save culture and manners, pass on, leaving behind culture and manners as marks on history; Catherine and Heathcliff pass on hope and love. Dislocations in time and place are corrected, and we share with Cathy and Hareton the faith that in life there is redemptive possibility. Wuthering Heights is not, of course, primarily a historical but a psychological romance that boldly explores, with some deference to Victorian proprieties, sexual conflict. Heathcliff, Catherine, Isabella, and Edgar form love-triangles whose sexual sides are carefully and honestly developed. From the Earnshaw family's rejection of Heathcliff through their refusal "to have it in bed with them, or even in their room" (39) to Heathcliffs "going to bed" just before his death, bedchambers are conspicuous vehicles for Bronte' s sexual themes. As children, Heathcliff and Catherine sleep together, but when Catherine marries Edgar, Heathcliff becomes obsessed by bedrooms. No one is to rest in Catherine's room at the Heights, and no one, not even Isabella, is to intrude on the sanctity of his bedchamber, which "he allas keeps . locked, un' nob'dy iver mells on't, but hisseln" (121). The symbolism of locked bedchambers adds a Published by Pittsburg State University Digital Commons, 1978 ol. 19 No. 2 WUTHERING HEIGHTS 187 sexual dimension to the spiritual alienation suggested by locks and doors. HeathclifTs separation from Cath- erine leads to sexual isolation and frustration; his erotic passion in turn finds perverted expression as hatred and revenge. Heathcliffs energies are directed toward getting to sleep with Catherine-consummat- ing his relationship with her founded in innocence- but for him eros can be accomplished only in thanatos: "I dreamt I was sleeping in the last sleep, by that sleeper, with my heart stopped, and my cheek frozen against hers." "And if she had been dissolved into earth, or worse, what would you have dreamt of then?" [Nelly] said. "Of dissolving with her, and being more happy stull!" he answered. (229) Nelly prepares the bed, as it were, for the lovers when she, at Catherine's grave, "twisted the two [locks of Catherine's and Heathcliff's hair], and enclosed them together" (140). This twisting symbolically foreshad- ows the climactic deathbed scene during which Heathcliff finally realizes what he calls "my heaven." "Mr. Heathcliff was going to bed," says Nelly, and like one engaged in a ritualistic preparation for holy com- munion, "he wanted nothing to eat till morning" (259). Heathcliff finally merges with Catherine in the grave, their final bed where the distinction between body and spirit and love and death are dissolved. The ethical implications of the love-sex relation- ships operate suggestively. Until the novel's climactic resolution-the union of Catherine and Heathcliff in death and the parallel union of Cathy and Hareton in marriage-lovers are alienated from each other. Heathcliff, Catherine, and Edgar form a disjointed triangle the sides of which seldom touch; invariably each denies another the right to love and claims it for himself as an exclusive privilege. Instead of recogniz- ing Heathcliff' s passion for Catherine as love, Edgar considers Heathcliff' s presence "a moral poison that 39 The Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Conte 188 THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY would contaminate the most virtuous" (99). He insists on separating Catherine from him: "Will you give up Heathcliff hereafter, or will you give up me? It is impossible for you to be my friend and his at the same time; and I absolutely require you to choose" (102). Similarly, Heathcliff refuses to recognize Catherine's love for Edgar; she "degenerates into a mere slut" when not in his presence (126). Thus the mutually frustrated lovers are trapped in a web of recrim- ination in which their strongest love degenerates into attempts to possess. While Heathcliff' s strong passion becomes perverted into "greedy jealousy," Catherine fails to see how she, in her sexual innocence, has been the agent of separation. In agreeing to marry Edgar, she denies Heathcliff her sexual favors and violates her own integrity. Heathcliff will be a brother, not a lover. She separates body and soul, offering Edgar the former and Heatheliff the latter, and consequently she cannot give her whole self without becoming an unfaithful wife or cruel mistress. Thus she, like Heathcliff, wel- comes death, hoping that it will free her of the obli- gations of the body. She and Heathcliff, however, do commit adultery of a sort, and we are invited to approve the act. It is a communion of the flesh that we witness when Heath- cliff enters Catherine's chamber and "bestowed more kisses than ever he gave in his life before" (132). Catherine is on her death-bed, but it is also her love- bed. Nelly's presence in the scene is immaterial and may safely be dismissed as Bronte' s concession to genteel proprieties. The kisses eventually give way to "an embrace from which I thought my mistress would never be released alive" (134). In effect, Catherine "dies" sexually, and the next day she dies physically after giving birth to Cathy. After that night the lovers are separated again and must suffer the torments of the https://digitalcommons.pittstate.edu/mwq/vol19/iss2/1 orary Thought, Vol. 19, Iss. 2 [1978], Art. 1 WUTHERING HEIGHTS 189 damned until they are sleeping together in their final bed. The sorrow in the novel emanates toward others from two characters physically separated in part be- cause of faulty but binding marriages. Heathcliff and Isabella's and Catherine and Edgar's marriages are like binding legal agreements based on a notion of self as property possessed by partners holding exclusive rights. While Heathcliff perversely imprisons Isabella, Catherine imprisons herself by naively assuming that Edgar is capable of sharing her generous spirit toward Heathcliff. She underestimates how deep her own self-division is, how self-denying her marriage will become, and how hopelessly at odds her attitude is with common attitudes toward marriage. The mar- riages of Heathcliff and Isabella, Catherine and Edgar, and Cathy and Linton, abortive efforts to weld to- gether opposite temperaments, houses, and values, fail because there is no non-legalistic binding power, no deep love. In the end, marriages based on a knot of identity and understanding reconcile the opposites that have torn at each other throughout the novel. The vows spoken by Catherine and Heathcliff as young- sters are binding; the two finally consummate their "marriage" in death. Correspondingly, Hareton and Cathy marry and carry on in the world. These two successful marriages bring together different tempera- ments, houses and values, and are the basis for ex- panding the family of man. The urge to possess people in spirit and body finds an impersonal manifestation in the desire to possess property legally. Thrust into a loveless world where names, titles, and property are not shared, Heathcliff learns that what he cannot gain as love he can gain as property. His expropriation of Hindley' s horse only foreshadows the more clever and legal attempts to gain ownership of the Heights and Grange. His eros for 40 Tanner et al.: 190 THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY property is analogous to his eros for Catherine. When he senses that he will join Catherine in death, his hunger for property appropriately manifests itself as a deathwish: "I have not written my will yet, and how to leave my property, I cannot determine! I wish I could annihilate it from the face of the earth" (262). With restrained irony Bronte shows that as Heathcliffs schemes for revenge gradually become more elaborate, cruel, and irrational, they become more legal. While Heathcliff is always careful to keep "strictly within the limits of the law" (127), the law, indifferent to the human spirit, allows him to realize his desire to po- ssess the Heights and Grange, and becomes a tool for further injustice. The law constitutes a weak court of appeals for the moral tangles of Wuthering Heights. While the novel indicts the law as weak and manip- ulable, it attacks the church as separative. Wuthering Heights may be viewed as an iconoclastic history of two houses played against the backdrop of an eroding and crumbling church. In the early chapters the bells of Gimmerton Kirk ring audibly but in the distance. Later we find that the Kirk "has no minister now," and at the very end we find that "decay had made progress, even in seven months: many a window showed black gaps deprived of glass" (266). Like Catherine breaking through the glass to get into Heathcliff's chamber at the novel's beginning, Bronte breaks the windows of Gimmerton Kirk to indict the church. The novel's regular churchgoers are either habitually hypocritical or narrowly fanatic. When rain keeps the family from church, Hindley stretches out next to "his paradise on the hearth" while Catherine and Heathcliff are sent with Joseph to stage a service in the cold garret. When Nelly is sent to find a doctor and parson after Earn- shaw' s death, the doctor alone responds to the need. Catherine rips the back off "The Helmet of Salvation" ,an]Heathcliff, _stomp,_on "The_ Brad Way to De- Published by Pittsburg State University Digital Commons, 978 ol. 19 No. 2 WUTHERING HEIGHTS 191 struction' in protest against Hindley's hypocrisy and Joseph's bigotry. From Catherine's avowal that she would feel like an "exile" in "heaven" to HeathclifFs rejection, in the final scene, of repentence, the symbols of Christian belief, and churchyard burial, we find the novel's protagonists violating scared conventions. Joseph, whose belief is grounded in a heretical Manichaen dualism that images the world as a battle- ground between forces of good and evil, personifies the evil bent of the institutionalized church. Bronte does not share his view. For her evil has no inherent force. Good bears the same relation to evil as a kiss does to a pinch: while one is a token of success and the other of failure, both arise from the same primal en- ergy directing man toward union with others. With great justification, C. Day Lewis describes Wuthering Heights as an antinomian novel establishing conflicts not between good and evil but like and unlike (No- table Images of Virtue, 1954, p.11). Man is not good or evil but experiencing different forms and degrees of separation. Sin is not an act or series of acts to be judged individually, but a universal human condition; virtue is the effort to reverse this condition. Lockwood's dream, which takes us into a world fashioned in the image of a church and courtroom presided over by the minister-judge J abes, is a para- digm which foreshadows the novel's ethical implica- tions. Jabes' function is to delineate the separate "sins" of man and to execute judgment on the sinners. While the dream is a projection suggesting the extent to which Lockwood is captive to Jabes' judgmental morality, it also reflects an equally deep unconscious rejection of it. Lockwood's inattentiveness, which brings down the wrath of Jabes, suggests that Jabes' preoccupation with sin is obsessive and his judgments unjust. That Lockwood had Joseph "for a guide" into this dream is appropriate, for Joseph personifies the 41 192 THE MIDWEsV"/Ke$Quarterly: A Journal of Content judgmental morality advanced by J abes. Lockwood's nightmare shows that this kind of morality destroys the human personality, as we see his psyche rising, like the congregation, to do violence to the self. The implications of this morality when it is endorsed by society at large are also clear: "Every man's hand was against his neighbor" (29). The dream occurs early, for it introduces the view acted upon by characters spinning the webwork of recrimination that entraps them all. The malaise that drives Heathcliff, as victim, to revenge is shared by his victims. Isabella will have "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth" (149), and Nelly consoles her by assuring her that God will get even with Heathcliff. Even Cathy initially desires revenge: "however miserable you make us, we shall still have the revenge of thinking that your cruelty rises from your greater misery"" (228). Edgar's refusal to forgive Isabella is based on his feeling that she could never do enough to allow him to "get even" with her. The consequences of this feeling are clear enough; in Edgar's words, they must remain "eternally divided." If sin is separation, virtue is unconditional recon- ciliation. Nelly announces the novel's ethical impera- tive early in the novel: "we should learn to forgive" (57). Yet Wuthering Heights is the dismal record of an almost universal inability to apply the moral, and Heathcliff, master of revenge, is the center and soul of the novel. Bronte directs sympathies to the "black villain" in the final pages even while we feel that his moral teething" is only perversely accomplished. Yet we must consider that HeathclifFs war-"the anguish of [his] yearning"-is an intenser version of the gen- eral alienation and fragmentation of self the novel dramatizes. Like the romantic Faustian and Prometh- ean archetypes of whom Heathcliff is a descendant, he transcends conventional decency in the service of a https://digitalcommons.pittstate.edu/mwq/vol19/iss2/1 orary Thought, vol. 19,1ss. 2 (2{%}$[hhc HEIGHTS 193 higher compulsion. His suffering does not stem f lt b fr trom gm t or remorse ut rom separation. Through Heath- cliff, Bronte suggests that ethical behavior is not rooted in conventional standards but in a compulision toward unity. Heathcliff is free only to follow his impulse urging him to unity with Catherine. "You might as well bid a man struggling in the water, rest within arms-length of the shore," he says. "I must reach it first, and then I'll rest" (262). This romantic striving and his refusal to base actions on forseeable consequences give him dignity as tragic hero. If his faith makes him and others miserable, his suffering dignifies his faith and touches others. In the end even Nelly is deepened, less willing to fall back on common sense and its appropriate ethical corollary, moralizings merely fixing guilt and innocence. Yet lonely Nelly, like the insular Edgar and unerotic Lockwood, will never wholly understand Heathcliff' s passion; her in- ability to close his eyes means quite simply that her common sense cannot block his true vision. The doctrines of Paul Tillich greatly illuminate the concept of power and love latent in Wuthering Heights. Love, says Tillich, is "the drive toward the unity of the separated." Power, on the other hand, is "the possibility of self-affirmation in spite of internal and external negation." Thus, The more reuniting love there is, the more conquered non- being there is, the more power of being there is. The basic formula of power and the basic formula of love are identical: Separation and Reuinion or Being Taking Non- Being into itself. . Compulsion is the strange work of love. Sweetness, self-surrender and mercy are ... the proper work of love; bitterness, killing and condemnation are its strange work, but both are works of love. It is the strange work of love to destroy what is against love. (Love, Power and Justice, 1960, pp. 40, 48-49) The conclusion of Wuthering Heights reflects these principles. The power of love, personified in Heath- 42 Tanner et al.: 194 THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY cliff, prevails; those whose love is weak-Edgar, Isa- bella, and Linton-are gone. Heathcliffs image lives on in Hareton, Catherine's in Cathy. The living gen- eration, reconciled to the dead, continues forward, and the end is a beginning, a New Year's Day wedding for Hareton and Cathy. And thus tragedy is transformed into comedy. It might be noted that Heathcliff' s triumph finds an appropriate medium in literary romance. Many have noticed the sudden shift from the psychological real- ism of the novel's early and middle sections to the romance at the end, and some have seen the shift as a flaw. Whatever its artistic value, the novel's end is consistent with its theme. The thematic resolution of Wuthering Heights is not irrational but antirational. Through Heathcliff, a synoptic view that comprehends the apparently irreconcilable opposites of life and death and love and hate is posited. Bronte found the realistic literary mode an unfit vehicle for this synoptic view, for realism addresses itself to the common sense, which insists upon the separateness of apparent op- posites. Thus just as the realism of common sense gives way to visionary romanticism, so at the end Heathcliff the human character gives way to Heath- cliff the romantic type, and so a novel that in spots borders on the naturalistic gives way to unabashed literary romance. While Wuthering Heights dramatizes the struggles born of the gap between what ought to be and what is, it does not insist that the world cannot be changed. Mary Visick has suggested that in the struggle between the outlooks implied by Thrushcross Grange and Wuthering Heights, "Neither world is victorious over the other" (The Genesis of Wuthering Heights, 1958, p. 10). On the contrary, the novel is not a stalemate: its title is Wuthering Heights, not Thrushcross Grange or A Tale of Two Houses. The title clearly signals the Published by Pittsburg State University Digital Commons, 1978 ol. 19 No. 2 WUTHERING HEIGHTS 195 triumph of all that the Heights and its chief inhabitant symbolize. While Cathy and Hareton will abandon the Heights for the comforts and refinements of the Grange, they leave a Heights whose "house-door" and "jealous gate are finally open. 43