I.: Vol. 19 No. 4 "Like a Mad Dog": The Radical Romanticism of Wuthering Heights JUDITH WEISSMAN A L THOUGH IT IS commonly assumed that Wuth- ering Heights is the most Romantic of the Victo- rian novels, nevertheless, there is not a critical con- sensus about the actual ideas which connect it with other Romantic literature. Some have considered it primarily a Gothic novel, an example of the kind of Romanticism that Wordsworth and Goethe opposed; others, realizing that it has a genuine intellectual pur- pose, have attempted to connect it with sources in English Romantic poetry and theory-primarily Byron, Wordsworth, and Blake. Yet these attempts are largely unsuccessful, for Emily Bronte does not really borrow from other, earlier Romantics as, say, George Eliot borrows from Wordsworth. She transvaluates- to use Nietzsche's word-certain Romantic ideas; the true link between Wuthering Heights and the works of other Romantics is that is is a redefinition of the elemental feelings of human beings-the instincts. We never see a true example of Emily Bronte's original man, for unlike Rousseau she declines to describe him to us; instead we must imaginatively infer the original human qualities as we try to understand what Heath- cliff and Cathy would have been if they had not fallen into civilization. To uncover the central characters of Wuthering Heights we must think by negations, going beyond the misconceptions of generations of critics, the values of the unreliable narrators Nelly Dean and (383) 39 384 The Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Cont THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY Lockwood, and the acquired characteristics of Heath. cliff and Cathy. Some of the right words for them (though thei author intended them to bear the wrong meanings) ar in Lady Eastlake's angry review of Wuthering Height in 1848. Comparing Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights she says, "For though there is a decided family like ness between the two, yet the aspect of the Jane an Rochester animals in their native state, as Catherin and Heathcliff, is too odiously and abominably paga to be palatable even to the most vitiated class o English readers." The words "pagan" and "animals i their native state' approach the truth of Wutherin Heights more clearly than most recent criticism does though we must remove from those words thei Christian connotations and cease to believe, as we rea Wuthering Heights, that pagans and animals ar damned because they have not been blessed by th word of God. The true Romanticism of Wuthering Heights lies i its reconsideration of human instincts, the nature pos sessed by both the pagan and the Christian, the adu and the child, possibly even the human being and th animal. Two of the assumptions that most Romantic share are that there is such a nature and that it does no need to be changed by Christian morality or controlle by the power of reason. Romanticism can be said t have begun with Rousseau's declaration, in The Di course on the Origin and Foundation of Inequali Among Mankind, that in spite of the corrupt condi tions of the soul of civilized man, "confining myself t the first and most simple operations of the human sou I think I can distinguish in it two principles prior t reason; one of them interests us deeply in our o preservation and welfare, the other inspires us with natural aversion to seeing any other human being, b https://digitalcommons.pittstate.edu/mwq/vol19/iss4/1 porary Thought, Vol. 19, lss. 4 [1978], Art. 1 WUTHERING HEIGHTS 385 especially any being like ourselves, suffer or perish." Later Romantics believed in other instincts-Words- orth, in the capacity for joy; Blake, in sexual energy ~a poetic imagination; but one essential link among Rousseau, Wordsworth, Blake, Emily Bronte, William Morris, Peter Kropotkin as Romantics is the belief that the instincts themselves are good, that human beings have gone wrong in giving up instincts for the sake of civilization, and that a truer understanding of human instincts can be the basis of a better human culture in the future. In Wuthering Heights it is admittedly difficult to imagine a community of people like Heathcliff and Cathy. They are utterly destructive to the Christian, capitalist, Victorian community in which they exist unhappily; this destructiveness has prompted many critics to judge them as inherently destructive, neces- sarily tragic or evil, irrevocably in conflict with any culture whatsoever. Yet a possibility that is inadver- tantly suggested by Lady Eastlake' s judgment of Wuthering Heights as pagan, and which has not been considered by later critics, is that Heathcliff and Cathy represent human beings at an earlier historical stage and that they might be perfectly acceptable members of another kind of culture. Lady Eastlake clearly did not know that both pagans and many kinds of animals are highly socialized-their native state is not one of uncontrolled destructive energy. An important bit of evidence that has been virtually ignored by critics is that Heathcliff is very different as part of the Earnshaw family at Wuthering Heights from what he was when Mr. Earnshaw found him, a gypsy child abandoned in the city, without speech, without human attachments, without a home. Just as the instincts can be destroyed by civilization, they can also be stunted by a lack of the proper environment in which a species is meant to Jive. Just as a wolf or a chimpanzee removed from its 40 Brennan et a 386 THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY kind will not have the characteristics of the species, i Wuthering Heights a human being cannot develop i total isolation and without a home. Emily Bronte takes seriously the common Romanti idea that primitive man was in some ways superior t civilized man, shows what this idea means to Englis Christian culture, and nevertheless asserts its value through the action of the book rather than through th narrative voices, which represent civilization. The vi olence of Wuthering Heights, produced by the clas between Heathcliff and Cathy and the rest of thei community, is different from the violence of a Gothi novel in that it does suggest, in spite of the wreckag of several human lives, that Heathcliff and Cathy ma offer a kind of Romantic hope for a more truly huma life in the future. To some extent the hope is embodie in Hareton and the second Catherine, who make a pr ductive compromise between paganism and civiliza tion: Catherine becomes more hot-tempered at Wuth ering Heights, less lady-like, and learns to spea Hareton's country language; and Hareton, who Heathcliff has turned into an illiterate country labore learns to read; and they both learn to love passionate} Yet is would be wrong to limit the possibilities sug gested by Wuthering Heights to Hareton and Cat erine; perhaps a more important sign of change is th last image of the crumbling kirk, the sign that an ol Christian order is dying and making room for som thing new. The very few novels in English which c genuinely be called Romantic-I would add T House of the Seven Gables and Howards End t Wuthering Heightswisely stop short of portraying new order in such detail that they would becom programmatic utopias; they simply suggest that a gre change will follow the destructive action of the novel themselves. The sources of the change in Wuthering Heights a Published by Pittsburg State University Digital Commons, 1978 Vol. 19 No. 4 WUTHERING HEIGHTS 387 Heathcliff and Cathy, without whom life would have on at Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange in the orderly manner that Nelly Dean would have liked. They enter and change a world grown dull in the way that Yeats imagines in "Leda and the Swan" that divinity entered the world to begin the Greek cycle of history. Like Zeus, they bring incomprehen- sible terror and violent destruction into the world, along with a hope and a glory that are only dimly understood. The great difference, however, is that Zeus is a divinity, and Heathcliff and Cathy are en- tirely human. They are different from the people around them only in that they have not given up the two primary elements of their original nature, absolute love for each other and for the place that is their home, Wuthering Heights and the surrounding moors. These two instincts appear, in an attenuated form, in other characters as well: Hindley Earnshaw is so at- tached to his wife that he falls apart after her death; Joseph, the unpleasant old puritan, is unalterably faithful to the Earnshaw family and to Wuthering Heights as a place. His grief is genuine when Cath- erine and Hareton dig up part of his garden: "Aw mun hev my wage, and Aw mun goal Aw hed aimed tuh dee wheare Aw'd sarved fur sixty year; un' Aw thowt Aw'd lug my books up intuh t' garret, un' all my bits uh stuff, un' they sud hev t' kitchen tuh theirseln; fur t' sake uh quietness. It wur hard tuh gie up my own hearthstun, bud Aw thowt Aw could do that! Bud nah, shoo' s taen my garden frough me, un by th' heart, Maister, Aw cannot stand it" (ch. 33). Hareton, whom Heathcliff unintentionally strengthened by taking him out of his position of class privilege, is loyal to Heathcliff, defending him to Catherine: "He said he wouldn't suffer a word to be uttered to him in his disparagement; if he were the devil, it didn't signify; he would stand by him; and he'd rather she would 41 388 The Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Conte THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY abuse himself, as she used to, than begin on Heathcliff" (ch. 33). Even Nelly Dean, who repeated declares that Heathcliff and Cathy are revolting to h shares their instincts, for she is irrevocably attached her own childhood friend, Hindley Earnshaw. I came to a stone where the highway branches off on to t moor at your left hand; a rough sand-pillar, with the lett W.H. cut on its north side, on the east, G., and on the sou west, T.G. It serves as a guide-post to the Grange, and Heig and village. The sun shone yellow on its grey head, reminding me summer; and I cannot say why, but all at once a gush of chil sensations flowed into my heart. Hindley and I held it favourite spot twenty years before. I gazed long at the weather-worn block; and, stooping do perceived a hole near the bottom still full of snail-shells pebbles, which we were fond of storing there with m perishable things; and, as fresh as reality, it appeared thal beheld my early playmate seated on the withered turf, his d square head bent forward, and his little hand scooping out earth with a piece of slate. "Poor Hindley!" I exclaimed, involuntarily. I started-my bodily eye was cheated into a moment belief that the child lifted its face and stared straight into mi It vanished in a twinkling; but, immediately, I felt an irres ible yearning to be at the Heights. (Ch. 11) The intense attachments to person and place must formed early; but once formed, they are as solid as stones with which Nelly and Hindley played. though people like Nelly try to forget such atta ments in order to grow up and become responsi adults in the Christian world, the instinctive atta ments last, in spite of their conscious wishes. The creature in Wuthering Heights whose insti tive attachments to one place and one person are p are the dogs. Critics have remarked on the importa of animal imagery in the book, but it has not b pointed out that dogs are by far the most import animals in Wuthering Heights. At the very beginni https://digitalcommons.pittstate.edu/mwq/vol19/iss4/1 porary Thought, Vol. 19, lss. 4[1978), Art. 1 WUTHERING HEIGHTS 389 L ·kwood is startled by the number of dogs at Wuth- ~c g Heights and at their fierce protectiveness; Cath- "!", arshaw is drawn into the world of the Lintons # she is attacked by the dog that is guarding +jshcross Grange. Isabella Linton has a dog whom Heathcliff tries to hang, and who leaves with her when she runs away from Heathcliff; she leaves "accompa- nied by Fanny, who yelped wild with joy at recovering her mistress" (Ch. 17). Isabella is also touched by the fidelity of a dog at Wuthering Heights whom she had owned when it was a puppy: "an unexpected aid presently appeared in the shape of Throttler, whom I now recognized as the son of our old Skulker; it had spent its whelphood at the Grange, and was given by my father to Mr. Hindley. I fancy it knew me: it pushed its nose against mine by way of salute" (Ch. 13). When Heathcliff comes to see Cathy on the day she dies, he is welcomed by a dog: Nelly says, "As I spoke, I observed a large dog lying on the sunny grass beneath, raise its ears as if about to bark, and then smoothing them back, announce by a wag of the tail that someone approached whom it did not consider a tranger" (Ch. 15). It is important, in interpreting Wuthering Heights, to understand that the instincts that dogs and human beings share are not the instincts of wild animals; dogs have been bred to have instincts of fidelity to person and place which allow them to have genuine relationships with human beings of the kind that no wild animal, however supposedly tame, can ever have. Emily Bronte emphasizes the identity of the two primary instincts of dogs and human beings through the voices of characters who compare Heathcliff to a dog, intending to insult him. Isabella, mocking Heathcliff's attachment to Cathy, suggests, "If I were you, I'd go stretch myself over her grave and die like a faithful dog" (Ch. 17.). And Nelly describes her own 42 Brennan et al.: 390 THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY horror at watching Heathcliff embrace Cathy just be- fore she dies: "He flung himself into the nearest seat, and on my approaching hurriedly to ascertain if she had fainted, he gnashed at me, and foamed like a mad dog, and gathered her to him with greedy jealousy. I did not feel as if I were in the company of a creature of my own species; it appeared that he would not under- stand, though I spoke to him; so I stood off, and held my tongue, in great perplexity" (Ch. 15.). In spite of the insulting intentions of Isabella and Nelly, Wuthering Heights as a whole suggests that the most intense human life is lived by those who adhere to the instinctive feelings which they share with dogs. Heathcliff and Cathy gain their overwhelming power as fictional characters from both the intensity and the simplicity of their emotions. They are more than an- imals because they add language and thought to those emotions; and in spite of the misdirection of their lives, through them we can glimpse what human life might be like for people who have not become adults in the Christian world that is dominated by belief in the abstract virtues so important to Nelly Dean-pity, charity, peace, duty. Nelly's moral system-and per- haps all systems to which our word moral is applica- ble-implies standards of judgment which tend to obliterate the uniqueness of people, and to which the uniqueness of places and natural objects is irrelevant. It is almost impossible for us as readers to imagine thought without moral abstractions, since those ab- stractions are part of our language; one of the reasons that Emily Bronte makes Wuthering Heights so difR- cult as a novel, and requires so much imaginative thought from her readers, is that she is demanding that we envision a way of living and thinking that our culture has taught us to repress in the interests of adulthood, morality, and social order. Although Heathcliff and Cathy, who live without Published by Pittsburg State University Digital Commons, 1978 Vol. 19 No. 4 WUTHERING HEIGHTS 391 abstract morality, are anomalous and destructive in the context of a bourgeois society, the world of the Victo- rian novel, they are not unique in our cultural history, or our literature. Cathy explains the code that Heath- cliff lives by: "He's not a rough diamond-a pearl- containing oyster of a rustic; he's a fierce, pitiless, wolfish man. I never say to him, 'Let this or that enemy alone because it would be ungenerous or cruel to harm them'; I say 'Let them alone, because I should hate them to be wronged' "(Ch. 10). He does obey her commands; she remembers, in her madness, how Heathcliff set a trap over a nest of baby lapwings, "and the old ones dare not come. I made him promise he'd never shoot a lapwing after that, and he didn't" (Ch. 12). He is motivated by loyalty and a wish to obey rather than by ideas of right and wrong. His motiva- tions are like those of the warriors in Beowulf, who swear fealty to a leader and obey him in war, and who must avenge the deaths of friends and family simply for the sake of loyalty and honor; loyalty and honor are also the standards by which warriors fight in the Iliad. We are accustomed to treating violence in war with a certain respect; Heathcliff is disconcerting because, deprived of the old, heroic mode of warfare, he con- ducts his pagan, vengeful battles through the medium of class war, which is usually genteelly disguised in the novel. Heathcliff shocks because he exists in a novel, the realm of bourgeois morality; he would not be shocking on the fields of Troy, where a war is fought to avenge the abduction of a wife, where Achilles must kill Hector to avenge the death of Pa- troclus, even though he knows that his own death will follow. It is not, however, Emily Bronte' s purpose to advo- cate a return to the ethical code of vengence and feuds, for Heathcliff finally realizes that vengeance has not given him what he wants-companionship with Cathy 43 392 The Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Conte THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY at their home. Before he dies, he simply gives up his elaborate plans against the younger Catherine and Hareton, not because he repents, but because "I don't care for striking. I can't take the trouble to raise my hand. That sounds as if I had been labouring the whole time only to exhibit a fine trait of magnanimity. It is far from being the case-I have lost the faculty of enjoying their destruction, and I am too idle to destroy for nothing" (Ch. 33). He had to act out his wish for economic revenge against the two families who, in Cathy's opinion, had made him unfit to marry her; but finally the love between them makes vengeance irrele- vant. He sees Cathy's eyes in the faces of both Hareton and Catherine and, in spite of himself, ceases to wish to hurt them. And only then does Cathy, as a ghost, appear to him, since only then is he ready to join her as a ghost. His devotion to revenge has been a tragic waste, valuable only as a measure of his pain at the loss of Cathy, but unable to bring her back. And the shadowy but overwhelming fact that many critics try to ignore or explain away is that she does come back. The unalterable validation of Heathcliff and Cathy is that they survive as ghosts, visible not only to each other, but to old people, young people, and even animals in the country. Nelly Dean, the good Christan and sensible soul, tells Lockwood, after Heathcliff dies: But the country folks, if you asked them, would swear on their Bible that he walks. There are those who speak to having met him near the church, and on the moor, and even within this house. Idle tales, you'll say, and so say I. Yet that old man by the kitchen fire affirms he has seen two on 'em looking out his chamber window, on every rainy night, since his death-and an odd thing happened to me about a month ago. I was going to the Grange one evening-a dark evening, threatening thunder-and, just at the turn of the Heights, I encountered a little boy with a sheep and two lambs before https://digitalcommons.pittstate.edu/mwq/vol19/iss4/1 iporary Thought, Vol. 19, Is5. 4 [1978], Art. 1 WUTHERING HEIGHTS 393 him; he was crying terribly, and I supposed the lambs were skittish, and would not be guided. "What is the matter, my little man?" I asked. "They's Heathcliff and a woman, yonder, under t' Nab." he blubbered, "un Aw darnut pass 'em." I saw nothing; but neither the sheep nor he would go on, so I bid him take the road lower down. (Ch. 34) Heathcliff and Cathy live on as ghosts because they are too intensely attached to each other and to their home to leave bodily form, or that one place on earth that they love. Their human intensity raises them above the dogs whose instincts they share, and transforms them in death. They are not transmuted into purely spiritual creatures who transcend the body, for as ghosts they are recognizable as themselves, and they stay on earth. Emily Bronte does not ever say that the Christian heaven to which Nelly Dean aspires does not exist for other souls; the point is that these two human beings have an attachment to bodily life on earth that is intense enough to keep them in that life. Each exists for the other as an absolutely valuable individual, whose physical and spiritual existences cannot be separated. Heathcliff suggests the identity of the body and the soul when he desperately asks Cathy, in one of the most startling statements in the book, 'Would you like to live with your soul in the grave?" (Ch. 15). Her body is his soul; to satisfy their souls they must be able to see each other's bodies after death. Emily Bronte's use of ghosts calls upon her readers' lingering belief in a non-Christian life after death, present in folk tales and the wishes of children. This belief is implicit in the ballad that Nelly unthinkingly sings: It was far in the night, and the bairnies grat, The mither beneath the mools heard that. (Ch. 9) The mother hears because she loves her children too much to leave them, even in death. Supernatural char- 44 Brennan et al. 394 THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY acters like the ghosts of Heathcliff and Cathy do not exist in English Romantic poetry, in which spirit is an immanent version of a once transcendant God; nor are ghosts common in the English novel, from which they were banished by Fielding in Tom Jones. Yet they persist as part of our folk-culture, which Emily Bronte transforms as part of her vision of a primitive life in which people have enough spiritual energy to con- tinue living on earth as long as they wish. The ghosts of Heathcliff and Cathy are bound to the earth by the love of a particular place, Wuthering Heights, as Cathy foresees in the dream that she tells Nelly: "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 heath on the top of Wuthering Heights; where I woke sobbing for joy" (Ch. 9). The Christian heaven, where souls lose their identity be- fore God, is worthless to Heathcliff and Cathy; their only heaven is their home, a word of ultimate value in Wuthering Heights. Both the house and the land around it are loved because they are known, and known with a clarity and precision that Emily Bronte does not try to describe, but illuminates with Cathy's mad murmurings over the feathers which she has pulled from her pillow in her last illness: "That's a turkey's," she murmured to herself; "and this is a wild-duck's; and this is a pigeon's. Ah, they put pigeon's feathers in the pillows-no wonder I couldn't die! Let me take care to throw it on the floor when I lie down. And here is a moor-cock's; and this-I should know it among a thousand- it's a lapwing's. Bonny bird; wheeling over our heads in the middle of the moor. It wanted to get to its nest, for the clouds touched the swells, and it felt rain coming. This feather was picked up from the heath, the bird was not shot; we saw its nest in the winter, full of little skeletons." (Ch. 12) Many children, like Heathcliff and Cathy, pick up feathers and recognize the birds that they come from; Published by Pittsburg State University Digital Commons, 1978 Vol. 19 No. 4 WUTHERING HEIGHTS 395 most adults cease to see feathers on the ground and cease to remember species of birds or to identify feathers with particular birds. Cathy and Heathcliff, unlike Wordsworth's poetic children for whom nature is spiritual and symbolic, love the birds and the moors because they know them intimately and precisely. They know each kind of bird, perhaps even each bird; elements of nature are individuals rather than cate- gories to them, for they do not see through the medium of abstractions or groupings. They even know the birds so well that they can understand their feelings and motivations, as if they could communicate. The love of a particular, known place is not in- tensely experienced by many characters in the English novel, or by many readers, since one of the primary characteristics of the middle class, to which the novel and its readers belong, is mobility, usually for the sake of what we call progress or opportunity or variety of experience. But there are other parts of the human race to whom such love is essential, especially people whom we call primitive, like the native Americans who fight to regain places sacred to their tribes, and the Vietnamese and Laotians who return to devastated homes, which remain homes in spite of the devasta- tion, or even the forgotten people who cling to dying small towns in America. This feeling of absolute belonging to a place is, however, asserted in a few other works of English Romantic literature besides Wuthering Heights, like Wordsworth's "Michael"" and Forster's Howards End; the love of home in these works is different from the sentimental or pastoral longing for home in works like David Copperfield or eighteenth century English po- etry because in them separation from place means tragedy or even destruction for a human being rather than just sorrow. The land with which Michael will 45 396 The Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Conterr THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY not part does not provide him with ecstasy or tell him of the still sad music of humanity: Those fields, those hills-what could they less? had laid Strong hold on his affections, were to him A pleasurable feeling of blind love, The pleasure which there is in life itself. (lines 74-78) His home cannot be replaced by another piece of land, whereas the Spirit of "Tintern Abbey" rolls through all of nature. It is "Tintern Abbey"" rather than "Mi- chael" that we think of as the great Romantic affirma- tion of meaning in nature; yet the more primitive attachment to place in "Michael" is part of Romanti- cism too, an affirmation of a way of life simpler and stronger than thought. This primitive sense of place is recaptured in the twentieth century in Howards End; Forster leads his readers beyond a Romantic joy in landscape to a mysterious belief in the supernatural attachment of Mrs. Wilcox to her home, which she inhabits in life and in death. Her words to Margaret Schlegel, upon learning that Margaret's rented home is going to be torn down and replaced, could serve as a gloss on the meaning of home in Wuthering Heights: "Can what they call civilization be right, if people mayn't die in the room where they were born?" (Ch. 10). And even more recently Raymond Williams, in The Country and the City, largely devoted to the de- mystification of literary nostalgia for a rural home, admits that he himself has feelings about his own rural home that are exactly like those that Emily Bronte affirms in Wuthering Heights: "The only landscape I ever see, in dreams, is the Black Mountain village in which I was born. When I go back to that country, I feel a recovery of a particular kind of life, which appears, at times, as an inescapable identity, a more positive connection than I have known elsewhere" (p. 84). Wuthering Heights is the most shocking and violent https://digitalcommons.pittstate.edu/mwq/vol19/iss4/1 porary Thought, Vol. 19, Is5. 4 [1978], Art. 1 WUTHERING HEIGHTS 397 of the great Victorian novels; and it is indeed, as Lady Eastlake said, pagan. Yet its paganism is its great virtue. It is not a Gothic novel, an exploration of depravity and horror, but a declaration that we are capable of living more passionately and simply than we do. The image of the true human self in Wuthering Heights terrifies through its simplicity, for it is diff- cult for civilized people to think that what we really need is to love one person and one place on earth, as dogs do. But the shock of simplicity is the source of much of the power of many of the greatest Romantic manifestos-The Discourse on the Origin and Foun- dation of Inequality Among Mankind, The Lyrical Ballads, The Songs of Innocence and Experience, Walden, Mutual Aid, News from Nowhere. The sim- plicity of their passions gives Heathcliff and Cathy the power to continue to live at Wuthering Heights, a sign to us, if not to Nelly and Lockwood, that a great change in human life is possible. 46