Wuthering Heights

Critical approaches and questions.

1.Victorian readers expected a novel to be a message from an author to his readers.
Is there a message or moral to WH? Is there a clear author?
2. Some early comments:
a compound of vulgar depravity and unnatural horrors
a dark tale darkly told
not a single trait of character is elicited which can command our admiration
a perfect pandemonium of low and brutal creatures
the hardness, selfishness and cruelty of Heathcliff are in our opinion inconsistent with the romantic love that he is stated to have felt for Catherine Earnshaw
shocking pictures of the worst forms of humanity
the reader is shocked, disgusted, almost sickened by details of cruelty,inhumanity , and the most diabolical hate and vengeance

Emily's sister, Charlotte, wrote 'It is moorish, and wild, and knotty as a root of heath' and 'Heathcliff, indeed, stands unredeemed; never once swerving in his arrow-straight course to perdition.'

To sum up, the Victorians saw WH as an immoral and uncivilised book.

3. C20 views.
Humanism: the focus on the crafted work of art.
Lord David Cecil in 1934 saw the novel as dealing with the big questions:
Looking at the world, she asks herself not, how does it work? what are its variations? - but what does it mean?......her great characters exist in virtue of the reality of their attitude to the universe.
He saw that Emily does not oppose Man and Nature, life and death or even good and evil; in her book the opposites are the calm and the storm:
on the one hand what may be called the principle of storm - of the harsh, the ruthless, the wild, the dynamic; and on the other the principle of calm - of the gentle, the merciful, the passive and the tame
However, importantly, he felt that she saw these as 'component parts of a harmony'. This harmony is there at the beginning with the peaceful co-existence of the stormy WH and the calm TG. It is disrupted by the arrival of H:
It is the destruction and reestablishment of this harmony which is the theme of the story.
The harmony within H is upset by C's infidelity and by Hi's cruelty, so that H becomes an active force for destruction.

Harvey followed him, arguing that the novel confronts the big issues of time, reality, identity, freeedom, essence and existence.

Formalism: focus on the language and structure:

Mark Schorer found how landscape is applied to character in pt two of the novel:
Now, my bonny lad, you are mine! And we'll see if one tree won't grow as crooked as another , with the same wind to twist it!

Characters are described using landscape terms; eg: Catherine has a 'clouded' brow, H was 'beclouded' then later his face 'brightened' before being 'overcast' afresh. Linton's soul is as different from H's as 'a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire'. Catherine's face 'was just like the landscape - shadows and sunshine flitting over it in rapid succession; but the shadows rested longer , and the sunshine was more transient'. H is ' a fierce, pitiless, wolfish man' who struggles like a 'bear' and 'foams' like a 'mad dog'.

The verbs are of violent movement, and create a desire for rest, a rest that is given by the novel's ending.

Dorothy Van Ghent found in the language a recurrent 'window' motif, from Lockwood's dream to the gazing in at the windows of TG to Catherine's death after throwing open a window. Other doors and barriers feature at key moments of the action.
In the structure she found the 'Two Children figure': the book moves through pairs of children (C and H; Cathy and Linton H, and Cathy and Ha.
She also analysed the duality of the narration: Nelly and Lockwood (L tells us what Nelly tells him).

CP Sanger found a pattern in the families:
The most obvious thing about the structure of the story which deals with three generations is the symmetry of the pedigree. Mr and Mrs Earnshaw at WH and Mr and Mrs Linton at TG each have one son and one daughter; Mr Linton's son marries Mr Earnshaw's daughter, and their only child Catherine marries successively her two cousins - Mr Linton's grandson and Mr Earnshaw's grandson.

James Hafley argued that Nelly Dean is 'The Villain in WH'. She is both ambitious and resentfulof her lack of status within the family, and uses her privileged access to people's emotional weaknesses to manipulate events so that she is left effective mistress of TG.

QD Leavis found three plots co-existing: the fairy tale (based on the father's gifts); the corruption of the child's native goodness by society and the sociological plot, 'a thoroughly realistic account of the life indoors and outdoors at WH as well as at the gentleman's residence at the Grange.'
She gives primacy to the second, and explains how 'Cathy has in the second half to unlearn, very painfully, the assumptions of superiority on which she has been brought up at the G.' So, she transcends the psychological temptations and the impulses which would have made her repeat her mother's history.

Deconstruction
Deconstructionist critics refute the idea of any all-inclusive explanation or lists of alternative inclusive explanations; since language defines by differentiating meanings from other words, meanings are always deferred, out of reach. A search for meanings within WH takes one through a series of 'frames', beginning with that of the double narrator. Any idea of an interpretation will be value laden and relative. J Hillis Miller states:
The secret truth about WH is that there is no secret truth.
He adds
The sense of 'something missing' is an effect of the text itself...created by figures of one sort or another - substitutions, equivalences, representative displacements...controlled by the invitation to believe that some invisible or transcendent cause, some origin, end, or underlying ground, would explain all the enigmatic incongruities of what is visible.

Psychoanalysis
Is the novel a study in abnormal psychology?

Freud argues that repression is a mechanism whereby 'uncivilised' infants 'forget' and stow away in the unconscious those primitive desires - such as lust, greed and rage - which are incompatible with socialised behaviour.
Children achieve this repression through meeting the 'reality principle'.
In addition repression can come from outside, as oppression from others.

Wade Thompson writes
The world of WH is a world of sadism, violence, and wanton cruelty,wherein the children - without the protection of their mothers - have to fight for very life against adults who show almost no tenderness , love , or mercy. Normal emotions are almost completely inverted: hate replaces love, cruelty replaces kindness, and survival depends on one's ability to be tough, brutal, and rebellious.

So, does Catherine encounter the reality principle, but find it impossible fully to repress the basic urges - perhaps because of a deep-rooted suspicion of adults, since she never knew a protective mother - so that the conflict kills her? 'I wish I were a girl again, half savage and hardy and free...' She was NOT free, except from the pressure to repress those primitive desires. The only way in which she can become a child again is through death (enabling her to be the child-ghost) and the birth of Cathy (in a myth like way, enabling her reincarnation). (This interpretation: IC)
Note that her 'love' for H is expressed through pain, hate, relentless recrimination; is this again reflecting the adults' treatment of them as children, and the absence of mother-love? Love is, to each, an intuitive sense of something missing, definable only through its absence or opposite. Its inevitable 'deferral' creates the insistent and violent frustrations of the language, at once confirming both deconstructionist and psychological interpretations of the novel. (IC) It is therefore consistent that Hareton is able to love Cathy in a full, adult way - consider the way each had an effective mother substitute (Nelly; Edgar) and, at a crucial stage, was protected, loved and nurtured in a selfless way.(IC) This also explains why Catherine
(a) perceives that she is marrying Linton to help H - she is fatally unable to trust the adult world, and sees in the weak adult Linton the chance to enter and manipulate it for her ends and those of her companion in persecution, exile and suffering, H;
(b) is not really in love with H, as their bond is more that of guerilla combattants than adult and sexual.

'I am Heathcliff' perhaps suggests another Freudian approach: H represents the id, while Catherine is the ego; both sides of the human personality. Thomas Moser wrote
The primary traits which Freud ascribed to the id apply perfectly to Heathcliff: the source of psychic energy; the seal of the instincts (particularly sex and death); the essence of dreams; the archaic foundation of personality - selfish, asocial, impulsive...

(NB remember also H's origins - the name of a dead brother, and - perhaps - an illegitimate half brother? So the 'love' could equally be sibling bonding rather than adult and sexual).

Note that the taming of the id could also represent the victory of culture over nature or the Victorian over the Romantic.

Anne Williams argues that the novel is about the way culture separates not only a woman's head from her heart…it also cuts her off from the energy and active power culture attributes to the male…
She states that it is culture's demand that she separate herself from her own 'masculine' principle, in order to marry and gain access to the rewards that culture grants to the 'real' woman…

I.Curr 2000