Gothicizing the Domestic: Subversion of the Patriarchal

Home in Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights

By

Jessica Yopp

Senior Honors Thesis

Hollins University
 Yopp 2

April 2007
 Yopp 3

Gothicizing the Domestic: Subversion of the Patriarchal Home in Jane Eyre and Wuthering
Heights

In an 1855 review of Jane Eyre in Blackwood’s Magazine, Margaret Oliphant wrote,

“Ten years ago we professed an orthodox system of novel-making…when suddenly, without

warning, Jane Eyre stole upon the scene, and the most alarming revolution of modern times has

followed the invasion of Jane Eyre” (554-68). Having held “such an honoured place in the

corpus of English literature for so long,” it is often surprising for modern readers to discover the

“moral outrage” that accompanied the 1847 publication of Charlotte and Emily Brontë’s novels,

Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights (Barker 90). Brimming with coarseness, sexuality, and

passion, the novels of the Brontës “displayed all those qualities which polite Victorians most

feared” (Barker 90). However, these qualities seem not to have been the most shocking to

nineteenth-century critics. Instead, the novels’ “refusal to accept the forms, customs, and

standards of society—in short, [their] rebellious feminism” (Gilbert and Gubar 338) was what

most disturbed their audiences.

Writing during an era when “women were increasingly confined to the home, and gender

roles were insistently codified” (Heiland 3), the Brontës used their writing to voice their

rebellion. Working in the relatively new and still suspect form of novel writing, the sisters wrote

to a primarily middle-class, female audience, connecting their works to the moralizing

Sentimental-Domestic novels of the same period. Although also working to evoke emotional

response from the reader, Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights separate themselves from the genre

of Sentimental novels in their inclusion of Gothic elements. Having long been identified as a

genre of dissent, “the transgressive acts at the heart of gothic fiction generally focus on

corruption in, or resistance to, the patriarchal structures that shaped…family life, and gender
 Yopp 4

roles” (Heiland 5). The Gothic’s focus on the irrational as opposed to Domestic realism also sat

it apart from Sentimental novels. However, “While the fantastic idiom of gothic and the realistic

idiom of domestic fiction might at first glance seem opposed, literary criticism has become

increasingly interested in the connections between the two” (Heiland 115).

Criticism of Gothic fiction has varied over the years, with most critics in the early

twentieth-century working to find redeeming qualities for the genre. Montague Summers, for

example, writes in The Gothic Quest (1938) that the tradition has to do with “the spiritual as well

as the literary and artistic seeking for beauty” (398). By the 1970s, the advent of feminist literary

criticism changed previous methods of interpreting Gothic fiction. The emergence of studies

such as Ellen Moers’s Literary Women (1976), Elaine Showalter’s A Literature of Their Own:

British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing (1977), and Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan

Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), both verified the study of women’s writing as an

important subject, and recognized the role of gender in Gothic fiction. Some critics, like Diane

Long Hoeveler, argue that Gothic novels do not reflect the reality of female experience, but

instead “encode and proffer the dominant ideology,” instructing women on how to become

“professional victims” (2). Other critics, like Michelle A. Massé, profess that the traumas

inflicted on the female characters correspond to a feared reality, where “Both the nightmare

stasis of the protagonists and the all-enveloping power of the antagonists are extensions of…real-

world experience” (688).

In writing Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, Charlotte and Emily Brontë combined the

hitherto separate genres of Sentimental-Domestic fiction and Gothic fiction. Using the rebellious

nature of the Gothic form, the Brontës were able to critique the concepts of “home” and the

domestic which were present in their novels. At the same time, they did not allow for their
 Yopp 5

characters to become stereotyped, or for their female protagonists to become “professional

victims.” Simon Avery argues that “it is at the interface between these two types of writing,”

Domestic and Gothic, “that the most disturbing and innovative effects of the Brontë novels occur

(121). By including conventional Gothic elements such as description of the sublime, double

identity, and Gothic setting, while simultaneously revising and redefining these “claptraps,” the

Brontës presented a new form of novel. This new form of novel-making, combining the reality of

Sentimental-Domestic fiction, the subversion of reality in the Gothic, and the political agenda of

feminism, is what provoked Margaret Oliphant to refer as “the most alarming revolution of

modern times.”

The Gothic Tradition

Largely credited as the first Gothic novel, Horace Walpole’s publication of The Castle of

Otranto (1764) remains the paradigmatic source of Gothic conventions, influencing writers up to

the present day. Introducing nearly all the familiar “Gothic trappings” of the tradition, Walpole’s

novel contains supernatural occurrences, ruined castles, stock characters, and emotional

sublimity. However, as Elizabeth MacAndrew notes, “The first work in a conventional genre is

not itself conventional, but an innovative break from the past” (IX). Subtitling his work “A

Gothic Tale,” Walpole consciously labeled his writing using a term still associated at the time

with barbarism and the “Dark Ages.” “Gothic” was usually used in a derogatory manner,

meaning someone or thing that is characteristic of the Middle Ages. To be called “Goth” was to

be termed as “one who behaves like a barbarian, esp. in the destruction or neglect of works of

art” (“Gothic”). During the European Age of Enlightenment, “high art” was considered to be
 Yopp 6

classical works, as opposed to Romantic works of literature. The Enlightenment was a rejection

of all things associated with the “Dark Ages,” including irrationality, superstition, and tyranny.

Although retaining some of its association with barbarism and “low art,” “‘Gothic’ had

only recently come to be seen as romantic and interesting, not just ugly and forbidding”

(MacAndrew IX). In general, the appearance of the Gothic genre “can be seen as one symptom

of a widespread shift away from neoclassical ideals of order and reason, toward romantic belief

in emotion and imagination” (Hume 282). Walpole saw his writing as part of this shift away

from Enlightenment principles, stating, “the great resources of fancy have been dammed up, by a

strict adherence to common life” (Walpole 7). Separating itself from rationality and realism, the

Gothic functioned to

open horizons beyond social patterns, rational decisions, and institutionally

approved emotions….It acknowledged the nonrational—in the world of things

and events, occasionally in the realms of the transcendental, ultimately and most

persistently in the depths of the human being. (Heilman 179)

This emphasis on the individual is one of many characteristics shared with literature of the

Romantic period, lasting from 1789-1832. In addition to being interested in individual

experience and autonomy, Romantic writers like Mary Shelley, Jane Austen, and Samuel Taylor

Coleridge also placed feeling and emotion over reason and rationality. These characteristics

linked together Gothic and Romantic novels in particular, since Romantic poetry was considered

by its writers to be superior to the “trashy” novels of their contemporaries. Because of their

similarities, the two genres of novels were criticized on the same level, labeled as “sub-literary,”

and below the standard of neoclassical and historical writing (Chew 1196). The point of

separation between the two styles, Robert Hume argues, is in Romanticism’s “faith in the ability
 Yopp 7

of man to transcend or transform” the world imaginatively (289). Influenced by the politics of

the French and American revolutions, the Romantics believed in the worth and power of the

individual to change and effect society. Gothic writers, on the other hand, do not see solutions to

the “limitations of the human condition,” and offer no solutions to the paradoxes they present

(Hume 289).

Gothic and Romantic fiction likewise arose from “a recognition of the insufficiency of

reason or religious faith to explain and make comprehensible the complexities of life” (Hume

290). Rejecting Enlightenment values, early Gothic fiction instead strove to find meaning

through the senses. With the primary purpose of Gothic fiction being to induce emotional

responses from the reader, writers used suspense, horror, and supernatural occurrences to inspire

such reactions, relying on the imagination of the reader to live vicariously through the characters.

This emphasis on the imaginative and fantastic caused the novels to be heavily criticized as

escapist and irrelevant, with the opinion that “art that is completely fanciful, and autonomous

creation that does not refer to reality” (Kilgour 7) is harmful to society. Other critics, like

Coleridge, supported the use of the supernatural, suggesting that external reality is secondary to

the importance of internal reality: “how beings like ourselves would feel and act” in the

situations facing the characters (373).

Gothic literature has also been criticized for being purely sensational, without providing

any meaning or moral implications. Even contemporary critics like Elizabeth Napier argue that

the Gothic is an escapist form, identified by “profound uncertainty about its genuine status and

intent” (40). However, critics like Robert Hume acknowledge that the “uncertainty” of the

Gothic coincides with the “increasing psychological concern with moral ambiguity” (285). The

late eighteenth century “was the first era in which the mind was studied inductively, and the
 Yopp 8

changes in world view, especially in ideas about the moral state of man…were given literary

expression” (MacAndrew 5-6). Interest in the internal psyche, the subconscious, and definitions

of morality were explored by Gothic writers, largely through the experiences of the characters.

By subjecting the characters and the reader to terrifying suspense and horrifying circumstances,

the result is “to transport the reader beyond himself into the world of the mind,” so that the

emotions are “themselves the subject matter of the novel” (MacAndrew 26-27).

The Gothic’s emphasis on emotions closely allies it with the Sentimental-Domestic novel

of the same period. Also working to induce emotion from the reader, the Sentimental novel

makes “the reader weep with and for the afflicted characters” in the same way that “Gothic tales

inspire pity and terror” (MacAndrew 26). However, the agenda behind evoking the senses in the

Sentimental novel was different than that of the Gothic. The central characteristic behind

Sentimentalism was “not so much to analyse feelings as to moralize on them so as to teach the

reader certain values that at the time were still regarded as absolute” (Voogd 77). The

Sentimental-Domestic novel, also referred to as the “novel of manners” (Hume 282),

concentrated on virtuous role models in a world of evil, in order to provide a didactic message

emphasizing the accepted morals of society. These novels “generally lead the reader to

contemplate the exterior actions of the life around him,” as opposed to early Gothic and

Romantic fiction, which “lead the reader to consider internal mental processes and reactions,” so

that one genre is “social” and the other is “individual” (Hume 288).

Many modern critics, however, acknowledge the aspects of early Gothic novels which

give them greater social meaning. In addition to its conscious break from Enlightenment

principles, the Gothic genre was also radical in its ability to criticize society. Maggie Kilgour

attributes this ability to the genre’s persistent use of imaginative and separate characters and
 Yopp 9

settings: “Its escape from the real world has a deeper moral purpose, as distance enables

literature to become an indirect critique of things as they are” (9). Likewise, David Punter

defines the Gothic as “not an escape from the real but a deconstruction and dismemberment of it”

(97). Adding to the Gothic’s rejection of traditional psychological concepts and definitions of art,

the genre’s subversive implications contributed to its reputation as a rebellious form. So much

so, that Kenneth Graham suggests the Gothic “was as rebellious in letters as its contemporary

parallel in France was in politics” (260).

The Female Gothic

In her book Literary Women (1976), Ellen Moers was first to give a name to a genre of

writing that had hitherto not been recognized as separate. Moers coins the term “Female Gothic”

to describe “work that women writers have done in the literary mode that, since the eighteenth

century, we have called the Gothic” (90). This group of writers included Ann Radcliffe, who was

the first female to enter into the trend of popular Gothic writing with The Mysteries of Udolpho

in 1794, thirty years after Walpole. Mary Shelley also popularized the Gothic mode in 1818 with

Frankenstein. Although the works of these women seem to contain an emphasis on the morality

and values found in Sentimental fiction, they differ in their inclusion of Gothic elements, which

subvert and reject these values. As suggested by Elizabeth MacAndrew in The Gothic Tradition

in Fiction, “Sentimental novels reflect an ideal…the Gothic represents the distortion of that

ideal” (24). As a “vehicle for female anger” (Kilgour 9), women writers utilized the rebellious

nature of the Gothic mode to give voice to their own disagreement with the world. The genre of

the Female Gothic became an outlet into which writers like the Brontës were able to “critique the
 Yopp 10

premises about women and the home” to which other writers “felt obligated to adhere” (Ellis

xii).

The Female Gothic genre is described as such not only because it consisted of women

writers, but also because their work was written for a largely female audience. In the late

eighteenth century and early nineteenth century, a new class of women novel readers had

emerged “whose newly created leisure allowed her to make use of the circulating library and

whose ‘placement’ in the home made her a reader eagerly courted by publishers” (Ellis x).

Because of the private nature of the lives these women led, literature became a window through

which they could view the outside world. In her article “Women’s Lit: Profession and Tradition,”

Ellen Moers describes the relationship women had with literature in this era:

Women through most of the 19th century were barred from the universities,

isolated in their own homes, chaperoned in travel, painfully restricted in

friendship. The normal literary life was closed to them. Without it, they studied

with a special closeness the works written by their own sex, and relied on a sense

of…familiarity with the women who wrote them. (27-28)

Concerns over the socially subversive influences of reading developed as new classes of readers

emerged in the nineteenth century. Especially in the case of women, the rise in literacy “became

a focal point in debates over authority and self-determination” (Kilgour 6). Female Gothic

writers used the special relationship they shared with their audience and the sense of

rebelliousness already present in the growth of literacy to bring forth a feminist message.

Throughout the history of Gothic literature, each generation of writers modified the

convention to correspond to their own concerns or to explore a particular problem. Besides their

work containing aspects of the supernatural and fantastic in order to thrill and excite, what
 Yopp 11

indeed evokes real terror is “when the ghost, the double, or the lurking assassin correspond to

something that is actually feared” in real life (MacAndrew 8). The nightmare that Gothic

literature presents to its audience always relates back symbolically to the problems with which

humanity is currently contending. In actuality, “history, both individual and societal, is the

nightmare from which the protagonist cannot awaken” (Massé 681-682). Female Gothic writers

continued this practice by adapting the Gothic to focus on the problems that women were

combating. As Maggie Kilgour suggests, “The female gothic itself is not a ratification but an

exposé of domesticity and the family…by cloaking familiar images of domesticity in gothic

forms, it enables us to see that the home is a prison, in which the helpless female is at the mercy

of ominous patriarchal authorities” (9). The nightmare portrayed was “created by the individual

in conflict with the values of her society and her prescribed role” (Fleenor 10). It is significant

that many of the women writers in this genre emerged at the same time that the feminist

movement began. The publication of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of

Woman was in 1792, the same year as Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho. Just as

conventional Gothic literature alluded to tyranny, Female Gothic writers portrayed their

experience of tyranny: patriarchal society. They created an antithesis to the Sentimental Novel,

claiming that the morals and values prescribed to women were not beneficial, but amounted to

oppression. Writers like Radcliffe portrayed a veritable hell in their novels, where female

protagonists are taken, tormented and abused, despite their virtue. This treatment symbolized the

conditions that were present in the actual world, rather than creating an imaginative one meant to

thrill. Indeed, it is reality itself that is questioned and observed in the Female Gothic, left open to

criticism. In this way the women writers “could first accuse the ‘real world’ of falsehood and
 Yopp 12

deep disorder. Or, perhaps, they rather asked whether masculine control is not just another

delusion in the nightmare of absurd reality in which we are all involved” (Doody 560).

In the same way that Female Gothic writers chose to adapt the Gothic convention to suit

their purpose, Charlotte and Emily Brontë likewise adapted the style of the Female Gothic to

create what Robert Heilman terms the “New” Gothic. Heilman suggests that the Brontës,

Charlotte especially, not only gave emotion and feeling to her characters, but also made those

emotions realistic. He argues that “sexuality, hate, irrational impulse” and other characteristics

are “grasped, given life, not merely named and pigeon-holed” (166). In this way, the characters

no longer function just as abstract symbols, but as actual people. Their subjective emotions

constitute the symbolic. Christine Alexander agrees with this definition of “New” Gothic and

adds “what impresses us is the terrifying ghostliness of the real world we know, a terror confined

to the human consciousness that apprehends it” (409). This shift of focus from symbolic

characters to symbolic emotions is best seen in the Brontës’ new portrayal of the conventional

Gothic heroine. Heilman cites that the heroine of the “New” Gothic shows,

violent devotedness that has in it at once a fire of independence, a spiritual

energy, a vivid sexual responsiveness, and, along with this, self-righteousness, a

sense of power, sometimes self-pity and envious competitiveness. To an extent

the heroines are ‘unheroined,’ unsweetened. Into them there has come a new

sense of the dark side of feeling and personality (166).

Through this new characterization and definition of the Gothic heroine, the Brontës make their

first steps toward adapting the Gothic genre in order to make a new statement about and against

patriarchy.
 Yopp 13

The Heroine’s Crisis of Identity

In traditional Gothic plots, although main female characters do appear, “the narrative is

shaped by the mystery the male presents and not by the drama of the supposed protagonist, the

Gothic heroine” (Massé 679). Heroines of the Gothic are instead passive characters, victims of

circumstance and the corruption surrounding them. Early Gothic heroines were created to be

submissive, morally flawless, and innocent. So innocent, in fact, that they often have no

knowledge of evil, passion, or sexuality. They’re most representative of “Eves before the fall”

(Conger 95). These heroines reflect the ideals of the era in which they were created, to exemplify

the socially acceptable definition of the “good” woman. Their relationship to the Gothic plot was

to serve as the embodiment of the manners and mores of Victorian society. The heroines

eventually fall victim to the advances of the “evil” antagonists, who represent the corruption of

social expectations.

The paradigmatic example of the traditional Gothic heroine is Isabella from Horace

Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1764). Pursued by the father of her betrothed, she flees in horror

from the castle, without attempting to expose his corrupt desires to the other occupants. What

creates the trademark Gothic terror is the heroine’s discovery of darkness and evil. Michelle

Massé in her article “Gothic Repetition: Husbands, Horrors, and Things That Go Bump in the

Night,” describes this realization:

The heroines of the Gothic, inculcated by education, religion, and bourgeois

familial values, have the same expectations as those around them for what is

normal. Their social contract tenders their passivity and disavowal of public
 Yopp 14

power in exchange for the love that will let them reign in the interpersonal and

domestic sphere…What is gives the lie to what they are told should be, and they

are haunted by the discrepancy. (688)

Although expecting a content future in her prescribed role as wife and domestic dweller, the

heroine is shocked and terrified by the discovery of “immoral” forces. These forces are usually

embodied in the male antagonists of the story, who attempt to manipulate and subvert the

“proper order” that the heroine is expecting. Massé argues that the characterization of heroines in

Gothic novels and the corruption they face provides a feminist statement against patriarchal

order. She suggests that, “the silence, immobility, and enclosure of the heroines mark their

internalization of repression as well as the power of the repressing force. Indeed, their frequently

commented-on passivity, lack of differentiation, and lack of development through experience

only emphasize this point” (688). The Gothic form isn’t creating a fantastic world but is instead

revealing the condition of women in the real world at hand. Instead of being a story about an

individual, it “implicates and indicts the culture that refuses her voice” (Massé 709). Although

Isabella is the protagonist of Walpole’s novel, her character is not the focus of the story.

Alternatively, it is the sexual deviance of Manfred, the fully developed antagonist, that is the

central point of the novel. The submissiveness of the heroines like Isabella represents just how

immobile and victimized real life women were when repressed under the expectations of

patriarchal society. The commentary is that women who are forced to follow these expectations

are the true victims of an unrelenting society.

Other critics, like Syndy McMillen Conger and Elaine Showalter, however, claim that the

stereotypical characterization of the heroines as innocent and submissive only reinforce

prevailing beliefs that such behavior is desirous in women. They argue that this created for the
 Yopp 15

audience of women readers an unattainable ideal, requiring further repression of individual

authority and instinct to emulate. To counterbalance the virtuous ideal of the heroine was the

femme fatale, the female representative of vice. The femme fatale in Gothic fiction is “dark,

imperious, passion-ridden,” and has “independence of spirit, the emotional vibrancy, the

ingenuity, and the moral fallibility the heroine often lacks” (Conger 95). She may also show her

own sexual initiative and become a competitor for man’s affections, such as the Baroness

Lindenberg in Matthew Gregory Lewis’ The Monk (1796). But, at the cost of having authority

and independence, the femme fatale is labeled as “evil,” the opposite of the heroine, and

becomes the outcast of society. In early Gothic fiction good and evil are starkly different, with

each being an absolute extreme. In this way, the personalities of the female characters were

polarized, with no opportunity for them to have psychological individuality. The female audience

reading this material in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries became divided against

themselves, given two very different examples of how they could act. Syndy McMillen Conger

suggests this is a device upholding patriarchal control over the minds of women:

[The female reader] was quietly being instructed…to choose between two equally

impossible feminine models. Did she yearn only to be virtuous? Then she must

strive for a body ‘light and airy’ and a mind equally so; she must be utterly

compliant, selfless, dependent, and pure. Did she pine instead for an all-

subsuming, passionate love affair? Then she must expect to be soundly punished,

even damned, or become vicious, subject to criminal impulses and madness. (95)

By relating female independence and power to the corruptive forces of the femme fatales, the

message to women was that any subversive behavior would be harmful not only to themselves,

but also to society.

 Yopp 16

Charlotte and Emily Brontë, again modifying the Gothic tradition to create a “New”

Gothic, redefined the role and character of the heroine in Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre.

Feeling a sense of “dissatisfaction with contemporary fictional definitions of femininity and

feminine happiness” (Conger 92), the Brontës remodeled the conventional heroine to make a

new statement about the role of women in society. Making their heroines difficult to place in any

category of “good” or “evil,” the Brontës rejected using them solely as symbols. Instead, their

subjective emotions are the main focus of the novels. At the beginning of Wuthering Heights the

reader is first introduced to the Catherine, who is beautiful, but also sullen and rude to

Lockwood. Lockwood, representing the expectations that sentimental society held, attempts to

ascertain to whom she is married, and tries to classify her as the “ministering angel” of

Wuthering Heights (13). His phrases “parody the sentimentality of fictions that keep women in

their ‘place’ by defining them as beneficent fairies or amiable ladies” (Gilbert and Gubar 261).

Later the reader is introduced to Catherine Earnshaw, not as a woman of marriageable age, but as

a child. This detail is important because it allows the audience to see how she develops and

changes over time, instead of being a static character that has already entered into womanhood.

As a child, Catherine is both naughty and loving, independent and loyal. These opposing

characteristics continue into adulthood, with her ability to be cruel and manipulative and yet still

be pursued and loved, unlike the femme fatale. Emily Brontë creates in Catherine a character that

cannot be placed in categories of good and evil, but is instead a complex character that

demonstrates to audiences that women have the right to be complex.

In Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë also creates a non-traditional heroine. Similarly

introducing her heroine as a child, Charlotte shows that young Jane, like Catherine, shows sparks

of independence. Suppressed by the tyrannical treatment of Mrs. Reed and her children, she
 Yopp 17

breaks into fits of “rage,” which are her instinctual reactions to being denied freedom. It’s in this

rage where she finds the most freedom, as in her confrontation with Mrs. Reed. After

condemning her for unjust treatment, Jane notes, “my soul began to expand, to exult, with the

strangest sense of freedom, of triumph, I ever felt. It seemed as if an invisible bond had burst,

and that I had struggled out into unhoped-for liberty” (48). Jane’s hunger for freedom parallels

that of the femme fatale, but Brontë is showing that heroines can also pursue independence, and

take an active role in their stories. Likewise, Brontë is demonstrating that the desire for

independence in women is not “evil,” but human and natural.

What separates Catherine and Jane most from their predecessors, though, is their

introspection. In traditional Gothic fiction, the heroine was placed in a conflict, and the situation

was always external. In her passivity she was a character of consequence, affected by her

surroundings, not by anything within herself. Charlotte and Emily Brontë’s new heroines, on the

other hand, must face the conflicts that reside in their own minds. This further subverts the

previous definition of the Gothic heroine, as well as the definition of femininity. Because the

heroines have the ability to have internal conflicts, it “increases the psychological complexity of

the Gothic heroine, [and] broadens immeasurably the bounds within which femininity may

move” (Conger 100). However, though facing internal conflicts, these conflicts arise from the

heroines’ struggle against the external world. The similarity that Catherine and Jane share with

earlier Gothic heroines is that the terror they are subjected to is a form of knowledge or

discovery. Thrust into the adult reality of Thrushcross Grange and Lowood school, the girls learn

that their youthful independence is not tolerated or valued. Female characters in early Gothic

novels discovered in their adulthood the knowledge of evil and immorality. Catherine and Jane
 Yopp 18

discover in their adolescence the terror of a world where they have no power or control:

patriarchal society.

The conflict from which both Catherine and Jane suffer originates within their own

minds, as a struggle between what they naturally desire, and what they feel is expected or

required of them as women. This creates a self-divided personality; a trope long used in the

Gothic tradition. However, in traditional Gothic fiction it is the lead male character who suffers

from the split personality. In his case it is the discovery of evil within his own mind that causes

the duality. Charlotte and Emily Brontë adapt this trope, allowing for the psychological

complexity usually allocated to the male characters to apply to their heroines. The duality

imposed upon them is caused by an external force, which Jane and Catherine are responding to

within their minds.

In Wuthering Heights, Catherine does not resemble the traditional Gothic heroine because

she is first presented as a child. Because of this the audience is able to see Catherine as she is

before the influence of outside forces. She displays her true personality and desires, as when her

father asks her what she desires him to bring back for her on his trip to Liverpool. Catherine

requests that he bring her a whip, symbolic of the “powerless younger daughter’s yearning for

power” (Gilbert and Gubar 264). She gets her whip, figuratively, in the form of Heathcliff.

Named after a son who died in childhood, Heathcliff becomes representative of the power that

young Catherine longs for, but is denied because of her gender. Hindley, not Catherine, will

inherit Wuthering Heights after their parents’ death, but as an adopted second son Heathcliff is

able to challenge this inheritance on behalf of Catherine. He becomes an extension of Catherine,

doing “her bidding in anything” (43) and Nelly observes that “the greatest punishment we could

invent for her was to keep her separate from him” (42). Catherine’s childhood is unplagued by
 Yopp 19

duality, and she fulfills her desire to be mischievous and unyoked despite her father’s plea, “Why

canst thou not always be a good lass, Cathy?” (43). Wuthering Heights becomes a haven for

Catherine, where she is able, through Heathcliff, to resist the patriarchal control of her father and

of the religion that Joseph urges on her. According to Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar,

Heathcliff’s presence gives the girl a fullness of being that goes beyond power in

household politics, because as Catherine’s whip he is…an alternative self or

double for her, a complementary addition to her being who fleshes out all her

lacks…Thus in her union with him she becomes…a perfect androgyne. (265)

Forming a complete and thus androgynous being, Catherine and Heathcliff are able to escape the

social pressures and expectations attached to sexuality and sexual identity.

In contrast, Catherine and Heathcliff’s separation is inevitable with the emergence of her

sexuality, “with all the terrors which attend that phenomenon in a puritanical and patriarchal

society” (Gilbert and Gubar 270). The heroine’s initiation into discovering her sexual identity is

symbolically violent and forced, with her being held captive at Thrushcross Grange by the

Lintons. Attacked by their bulldog, Skulker, Catherine is prevented from escaping with

Heathcliff away from the Grange. The way in which the dog is described is phallic, having a

“huge, purple tongue hanging half a foot out of this mouth, and…pendant lips” (49). Likewise,

the bleeding she suffers as result of the attack has sexual connotations. She and Heathcliff are

then separated, and Catherine is taken inside the house while Heathcliff is locked outside of it.

As a representative of her power and control, this symbolic sexual initiation has denied Catherine

everything that Heathcliff had brought to her.

Having lost one portion of her soul, Catherine must now create another “self,” one that is

not natural, but nonetheless socially acceptable. Returning to Wuthering Heights, Catherine has
 Yopp 20

put on the manners and garments of a “dignified person,” and Hindley exclaims, “I should

scarcely have known you.” The Lintons advise Catherine that she must “not grow wild again”

and should learn to rule herself at the Heights as she had at Thrushcross Grange (53). Gilbert and

Gubar explain that upon entering into sexual identity in a patriarchal world,

She must learn to repress her own impulses, must girdle her own energies with the

iron stays of ‘reason’… And just as her entrance into the world of Thrushcross

Grange was forced and violent, so this process by which she is obliged to

accommodate herself to that world is violent and painful, an unsentimental

education. (274)

This education is one which is upon all ladies of society, designed to repress the desires of the

original self. When Catherine is forced to learn this lesson, it causes a fragmentation of her

personality, doubling her identity. Nelly recognizes this, stating that she had “adopt[ed] a double

character without exactly intending to deceive anyone” (67). At the same time, Heathcliff,

representing the rebellious part of herself, is the one who is imprisoned and starved, while

Catherine represses her need to mourn his absence and hides under the dinner table to conceal

her emotion.

Catherine’s conversation with Nelly following Edgar’s proposal confirms the notion that

Heathcliff is an integral part of her being. She confides in Nelly her doubts about the marriage,

revealing that she is now truly fragmented. Catherine confesses that the obstacle to marriage is,

“Here! And here!...striking one hand on her forehead, and the other on her breast” (79-80).

Unable to decipher in which “place the soul lives” (80), her crisis is a psychological one, as an

attempt to discover her true “self.” She is forced to choose between two modes of identity: one

formed almost entirely by her id, the “instinctive impulses of the individual,” and the other
 Yopp 21

regulated by the super-ego, the “aspect of the psyche which has internalized parental and social

prohibitions” (OED). This new level of psychological complexity is not only revolutionary in its

development of female character, but it also manages to predate the theories of Sigmund Freud

by nearly a century. What Gothic literature had previously explored only in terms of masculinity,

Brontë updates and adapts, by indicting the super-ego as the force oppressing women in society.

Her commentary is that, much like Catherine, women are divided between two modes of

personality: the freedom-desiring id, or original self, and the super-ego, ruled by the expectations

of a patriarchal society.

Catherine’s eventual decision to marry Edgar Linton, Gilbert and Gubar argue, was not

actually a choice, but instead a product of her forced education. She is not given any meaningful

choices, as she herself perceives that marrying Heathcliff would turn them both into beggars, and

there are no other men of status in the area. In this way her actions can no longer be labeled as

good or evil, since “social and biological forces have fiercely combined against her” (Gilbert and

Gubar 277). Once married to Edgar, Catherine is separated from her childhood counterpart,

denying her the source of her power and freedom. It is not until Heathcliff returns that she is

confronted again by the knowledge of her fragmented self. Catherine’s split personality is most

specifically shown in a scene prior to her death, when she has shut herself in her bedroom and

refused food for several days. Unable to recognize herself in the bedroom mirror, she enquires of

Nelly, “Don’t you see that face?” Nelly tries to convince her it is her own reflection, exclaiming,

“That is the glass—the mirror, Mrs Linton; and you see yourself in it,” but despite her efforts, “a

succession of shudders convulsed her frame, and she would keep straining her gaze towards the

glass” (123-124). Catherine is overcome by horror in her inability to recognize her own person,

because the reflection is no longer an image of her true self, but of the role she has been forced to
 Yopp 22

occupy. The fragmentation of her self “has now gone so far beyond the psychic split betokened

by her division from Heathcliff that body and image (or body and soul) have separated” (Gilbert

and Gubar 282-283). In general, mirrors work as a literary devices which raise “questions about

the objects they reflect,” as well as showing “the disparity between reality and appearance”

(Weidhorn 850). This detail reflects both on Catherine’s dilemma, and the emphasis of internal

psychology on which Gothic literature relies. By using a mirror, Brontë is not only suggesting

her heroine’s fragmented identity, but also that regardless of the external façade humanity adopts

to remain socially acceptable, raw, internal emotion still exists, deep inside the mind. Used

throughout Gothic literature, this theme emphasizes that “what has been divided struggles

mightily for reunion, a reunion that often results in death” (Henningfield 145). Appropriately,

Catherine is unable to live once Heathcliff returns, because their reunion can never be complete.

With this knowledge, she refuses to eat and makes herself sick, not out of perversity, but because

“she cannot, and will not, live divided” (MacAndrew 184). Brontë’s argument is that in a male-

controlled society, women are unable to sustain elements of both the id and super-ego without

resulting disaster. Catherine’s desire to remain with Heathcliff—symbolic of her power,

freedom, and original self—is what determines her demise, as she tells him, “You and Edgar

have broken my heart, Heathcliff!...I shall not pity you, not I. You have killed me” (160).

Likewise suggesting the fragmentation of a character, Gothic writers also use the

doppelgänger, a German term meaning “double-goer.” A doppelgänger is usually an alternate

identity of the main character, representing a different side of the character’s personality. In

Gothic literature it is most often used to show the character’s dark side. A famous example

would be the doubling of Dr Jekyll in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and

Mr Hyde (1886). In Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff can be seen as a doppelgänger of Catherine,

 Yopp 23

representing the side of her that desires freedom and autonomy. However, she is also doubled by

her surviving daughter, Catherine Linton II. Catherine turns out to be her mother’s opposite: a

child of culture, dutiful to her father, a product of the refined education that forms women into

the same mold used for the traditional Gothic heroine. Although she has the eyes of her mother,

Catherine II can only contain fragments of the original Catherine. Therefore, she represents the

final product of the eldest Catherine’s cultivation at Thrushcross Grange: a woman containing

only fragments of her original self.

Charlotte Brontë, in writing Jane Eyre, likewise decided that her Gothic heroine should

suffer from a crisis of identity. Brontë presents young Jane Eyre as an orphan tyrannized by her

aunt, Mrs. Reed, and her children, Eliza, John, and Georgiana. Continually tormented by John

Reed, she describes him as a “tyrant” and “slave-driver.” In this way Jane is placed in the

racialized position of slave, associating her early on with Bertha, whose mother was a Creole

living in Jamaica. By using the analogy to slavery, Brontë is associating enslavement based upon

race to the oppression of women, based upon gender. It is significant that the abusive character

of John Reed is assumed to be the future patriarch of Gateshead, as he reminds Jane, “all the

house belongs to me, or will do in a few years” (23). Until that point, Mrs. Reed assumes charge

of the household and bestows her love and care only on her own children, the proper patriarchal

line of descent. Enraged by the abuse she is subjected to by this “proper” family, Jane’s anger is

her instinctual reaction to her entrapment at Gateshead. Young Jane is consistently referred to in

animalistic language, such as “rat” and “toad,” to emphasize that her actions are instinctual and

natural. Likewise, this also highlights the idea of the subconscious, since after her fight with John

Reed she submits, “I was a trifle beside myself; or rather out of myself” (24).
 Yopp 24

In addition, when Jane retaliates against Mrs. Reed’s verbal abuses, she admits that “it

seemed as if my tongue pronounced words without my will consenting to their utterance:

something spoke out of me over which I had no control” (39). Jane is confronted with this

instinctual, angry side of herself when she faces a mirror in the red-room and observes,

All looked colder and darker in that visionary hollow than in reality: and the

strange little figure there gazing at me, with a white face and arms specking the

gloom, and glittering eyes of fear moving where all else was still, had the effect of

a real spirit: I thought it like one of the tiny phantoms, half fairy, half imp. (26)

Contemplating the injustices of her life at Gateshead, she imagines “some strange expedient to

achieve escape from insupportable oppression—as running away, or, if that could not be

effected, never eating or drinking more, and letting myself die” (27). Her thoughts echo the death

of Catherine, who starved herself into sickness. However, Jane is also confronted with a third

alternative in the red-room: escape through madness. Feeling that she saw a “vision from another

world,” she observes that, “My heart beat thick, my head grew hot; a sound filled my ears, which

I deemed the rushing of wings: something seemed near me; I was oppressed, suffocated:

endurance broke down” (29). Jane’s show of madness is the ultimate expression of her anger

towards injustice. This madness succeeds in granting her escape from Gateshead, by giving her

the opportunity to go to school. However, Lowood school only presents another form of

oppression that Jane must contest with.

Jane’s initial introduction to Lowood is through its representative and owner, Mr.

Brocklehurst. Upon meeting him, she describes his appearance in phallic terms, observing him as

“a black pillar…the straight, narrow, sable-clad shape standing erect on the rug: the grim face at

the top was like a carved mask, placed above the shaft by way of capital” (42). Brocklehurst, as
 Yopp 25

another symbol of patriarchy, is rich and influential, and appropriately the master of a school

which teaches young girls conformity and submission. At this cold new home Jane is forced to

learn how to suppress the anger and rage inherent in her behavior at Gateshead, just as all women

are expected to hide any emotions subversive to society. Original nature is to be covered up, as

Brocklehurst explains when he is told that one of the girls’ hair is naturally curly, contrary to his

dress code: “Naturally! Yes, but we are not to conform to nature” (73). At Lowood, Jane is

exposed to two models of femininity in the characters of Miss Temple and Helen Burns. As the

“angel of the house,” Miss Temple is the paradigmatic example of ladylike virtues. Besides

being benevolent and kind, Miss Temple also conceals the anger she undoubtedly feels due to the

unjust treatment of her students. Gilbert and Gubar note that “it is clear enough that she has

repressed her own share of madness and rage, that there is a potential monster beneath her

angelic exterior” (345). Although angered by Brocklehurst’s sermon justifying the near-

starvation of the students, Jane observes that Miss Temple “gazed straight before her, and her

face…appeared to be assuming also the coldness and fixity of [marble]; especially her mouth

closed as if it would have required a sculptor’s chisel to open it” (73). Jane also notices this

resentment in her classmates, who, when ordered to face the wall, she notes “the looks and

grimaces with which they commented on this maneuver: it was a pity Mr. Brocklehurst could not

see them too; he would perhaps have felt that, whatever he might do with the outside of the cup

and platter, the inside was further beyond his interference than he imagined” (73).

Practicing a similar mode of self-renunciation as Miss Temple is Helen Burns, who,

when being sent to stand in the middle of the room as a form of punishment, Jane notes, “I

expected she would show signs of great distress and shame; but to my surprise she neither wept

nor blushed: composed, though grave, she stood, the central mark of all eyes (62). Helen
 Yopp 26

explains to Jane that “it is weak and silly to say you cannot bear what it is your fate to be

required to bear” (65). However, as is suggested by her last name, Burns, she also carries a

concealed resentment inside her that is contrary to the cold and icy atmosphere of Lowood. Like

Jane, Helen also dreams of an escape into freedom, but she finds it though her spirituality. Helen

accepts the injustices placed upon her in this life in expectation of heavenly justice in the

afterlife. She explains to Jane,

We are, and must be, one and all, burdened with faults in this world: but the time

will soon come when, I trust, we shall put them off in putting off our own

corruptible bodies; when debasement and sin will fall from us with this cumbrous

frame of flesh, and only the spark of the spirit will remain,--the impalpable

principle of life and thought. (68)

Helen is attributing the need to conceal this “spark of the spirit” to the existence of our bodies.

For women, this idea means the flesh determines the inescapable duty they must uphold, to

silently suffer the injustices of this life. Jane, however, finds Helen’s reasoning hard to follow,

and admits, “I was no Helen Burns” (75). When Miss Temple leaves Lowood eight years after

Jane’s first arrival there, Jane notes while pacing her chamber, “I was left in my natural element;

and beginning to feel the stirring of old emotions.” While looking out the window, she still

desires freedom, and submits, “for liberty I uttered a prayer” (92-93). Jane’s way of dealing with

the unjust world “is still the Promethean way of fiery rebellion, not Miss Temple’s way of

ladylike repression, not Helen Burn’s way of saintly renunciation. What she has learned from her

tow mothers is, at least superficially, to compromise” (Gilbert and Gubar 347). Jane’s

compromise, then, is to change her prayer for liberty instead to a plea: “Grant me at least a new

servitude!” (93).
 Yopp 27

Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar suggest that in leaving Lowood and coming to

Thornfield, Jane is continuing a pilgrimage for independence and equality that she had started

after leaving Gateshead (358). Initially, it appears Jane has found equality in the form of Mr.

Rochester. Their relationship is one of spiritual and mental equality, as their conversations do not

consist of the usual niceties of Victorian language. On the part of Rochester, Jane commends his

coarse speech directed towards her, claiming “I should never mistake informality for insolence:

one I rather like, the other nothing free-born would submit to, even for a salary” (140). Likewise,

Rochester admires Jane for her plain speech, commenting that her answers are “frank and

sincere; one does not often see such a manner: no, on the contrary, affectation, or coldness, or

stupid, coarse-minded misapprehension of one’s meaning are the usual rewards of candour”

(140-141). He continues, “But I don’t mean to flatter you: if you are cast in a different mould to

the majority, it is no merit of yours: Nature did it” (141). Jane’s frankness is due to her resistance

to the formalities of society that go against human nature. Rochester and Jane’s equality is based

on their spiritual and mental equality. However, the subjects of their conversations also

demonstrate this detail. When he relates his sexual relationship with Celine to Jane, it

“emphasizes, at least superficially, not his superiority to Jane but his sense of equality with her”

(Gilbert 352). Jane also comments that “the ease of his manner freed me from painful restraint:

the friendly frankness…with which he treated me, drew me to him. I felt at times, as if he were

my relation, rather than my master” (151).

Recognition of their equal bond reaches its climax when it is threatened by Blanche

Ingram, the foil of Jane. Playing the potential role of femme fatale, it is significant that Brontë

wrote the sociable “lily-flower” of the drawing room as the antagonist. Her cruel speech against

governesses, instead of being declared coarse as Jane’s speech, attracts “not only the admiration,
 Yopp 28

but the amazement of her auditors” (182). In addition, her opinions on marriage emphasize

gender inequality, stating “Whenever I marry…I am resolved my husband shall not be a rival,

but a foil to me. I will suffer no competitor near the throne” (182). However, Jane’s speech

provides a different view of love, declaring to Rochester,

I have as much soul as you,--and full as much heart!...I am not talking to you now

through the medium of custom, conventionalities, nor even of mortal flesh:--it is

my spirit that addresses your spirit; just as if both had passed through the grave,

and we stood at God’s feet, equal,--as we are! (252).

Rochester also accepts this as the true grounds of their relationship, and tells Jane “My bride is

here…because my equal is here, and my likeness” (253). Gilbert and Gubar comment on this

scene, suggesting, “The energy informing both speeches is, significantly, not so much sexual as

spiritual; the impropriety of its formulation is…not moral but political, for Charlotte Brontë

appears here to have imagined a world in which the prince and Cinderella are democratically

equal” (354). Their reference to Cinderella creates a parallel between the two female

protagonists, since both are relatively poor orphans who capture the attentions of two rich men.

However, in Brontë’s text, as the spiritual counterpart of Jane, Rochester’s role as the financially

and intellectually superior “Master” is negated. Since his wealth and experience was the product

of gendered privileges given to him by society, this superiority is irrelevant. By momentarily

placing Jane and Rochester outside of the roles and expectations of society, Brontë shows that

equality is possible for “the prince and Cinderella” in a world not delineated by patriarchal

standards.

Despite these avowals of equality, an impediment to the relationship still exists. After

their engagement, Rochester immediately begins to treat her as inferior, calling her “angel” and
 Yopp 29

“girl-bride.” He attempts to decorate her with jewels and fine dresses, displaying his patriarchal

power as the financial superior. Jane’s annoyance and anger is aroused by this new treatment, as

she reveals, “I thought his smile was such as a sultan might…bestow on a slave his gold and

gems had enriched: I crushed his hand, which was ever hunting mine, vigorously, and thrust it

back to him red with the passionate pressure” (267). Rochester responds by telling her “it is your

time now, little tyrant, but it will be mine presently: and when once I have fairly seized you, to

have and to hold, I’ll just—figuratively speaking—attach you to a chain like this” (269). His

treatment causes her to show symptoms of fragmentation, as she begins to doubt the success of

the marriage, and on the day before the wedding she ponders her new name as well as her new

dress and appearance as something unfamiliar and foreign. Amid this confusion, Jane is visited

during the night by the haunting form of Bertha, who tears her wedding veil, the extravagant

accessory that Rochester “cheated” Jane into accepting. The veil not only represents their

upcoming wedding, but also, as she teases Rochester, a device to “masque your plebeian bride in

the attributes of a peeress” (278). Jane had resented the veil, the symbol of his aristocratic

prowess and control over her, so Bertha acted for her, tearing the veil in two pieces.

Bertha’s other appearances in the novel also suggest that she has been acting in

correlation with Jane’s emotions. After Rochester reveals his sexual deviances to Jane it is that

night that Bertha tries to burn him in his bed. Likewise, after tricking Jane with his gypsy

disguise, Bertha tries to kill her brother, Mason. Bertha acts as a double, or doppelgänger, for

Jane while at Thornfield, as the “angry aspect of the orphan child, the ferocious secret self Jane

has been trying to repress ever since her days at Gateshead” (Gilbert and Gubar 16). The “mad

woman” in the attic of Thornfield is the personified rage that Jane still retains, as she feels she

remains unequal with Rochester, and therefore unequal in the world. This rage is the same that
 Yopp 30

she felt at Gateshead, as shown through the similar wording and imagery that Brontë uses to

connect Bertha and young Jane. Both characters are compared with wild animals, beginning with

Jane being referred to as a “bad animal” and “mad cat” early in the novel (22,24). Likewise,

when she observes Bertha in the attic of Thornfield, the description is animalistic: “whether beast

or human being, one could not, at first sight, tell: it groveled, seemingly, on all fours; it snatched

and growled like some strange wild animal…a quantity of dark, grizzled hair, wild as a mane,

hid its head and face” (289-90). Reinforcing this connection, Jane admits that she has only

become “insensible from terror” twice: the episode in the red-room at Gateshead and when

Bertha tears her veil, glaring at her with a “fiery eye” (281). Because of the existence of Bertha,

the marriage cannot be completed, both literally and figuratively, since the rage inherent in Jane

still exists. Realizing that the rage will not quell until her pilgrimage towards independence has

been completed, Jane once again escapes through madness. Bertha acts on the resentments held

by Jane, burning and destroying Thornfield, “the symbol of Rochester’s mastery and of her own

servitude,” as well as destroying herself, “as if she were an agent of Jane’s desire as well as her

own” (Gilbert and Gubar 360).

The Brooding Male Monster

Forming a counterpart to the female characters in Gothic fiction are the male characters,

both protagonists and antagonists. In early Gothic novels such as Horace Walpole’s Castle of

Otranto, the male characters were divided in two categories, good and evil, in a way similar to

the female characters. However, authors questioned the definition of “evil”through the male

antagonist, who struggles psychologically, usually adopting a split personality. Overcome with

corruption in his own mind, the stereotypical “male monster” pursues the female victim,

attempting to illegitimately claim her as his own, disrupting proper social order. For example, in
 Yopp 31

Walpole’s novel, Manfred pursues Isabella despite the fact that he is married, and she is

betrothed to his son. In his frantic pursuit for her, he resorts to murdering those in his way, which

leads to the accidental murder of his own daughter, Matilda. Manfred’s crimes against his family

and his corruption of royal lineage make him the “monster” of the story. On the other hand, the

male hero, although “granted some degree of imperfection and self-awareness,” represents the

ultimate triumph of order and patriarchy, marrying the heroine and creating an “advantageous

marriage and the restoration of tranquility” (Conger 92, 103). These characteristics are seen in

Theodore, who, as the proper heir of Otranto, marries Isabella and continues the “proper” royal

line. However, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, again revising the Gothic convention, created a new

identity for male characters in the Gothic. In the same way that the Brontës reformed the

traditional heroine into becoming a more complex and ambiguous being, they also made their

heroes into complicated characters, showing characteristics of both the male monster and the

faultless hero.

In Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff is introduced not as a prince or a child of noble lineage,

but instead as a social outcast. Orphaned, poor, and without a surname, he is separated from the

source of patriarchal power: inheritance and derivation. The dirty “gipsy brat” evokes the image

of the noble savage, a literary character popular during the eighteenth and nineteenth century.

The noble savage “refers to a person possessing natural or primitive virtues…who is free from

the restraints and falsification of civilization” (Labat 918). The noble savage motif was also

popularized by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who in his 1762 novel Emile gave instruction on how to

train a natural man to live in society. In the opening line of Emile, Rousseau condemns this

society, stating, “Everything is good in leaving the hands of the Creator of Things; everything

degenerates in the hands of man” (37). Despite being referred to as “devil” and “demon,”
 Yopp 32

Heathcliff’s values are aligned with that of the noble savage, while contrasted with those of

Hindley Earnshaw, who abuses the “sullen, patient child” (38). Heathcliff represents “nature’s

innocent child as opposed to the corrupted and scheming man of the Old World,” represented by

the tyrannical Hindley. Brontë used the noble savage motif “chiefly as a weapon…to castigate

society’s faults” (Labat 922-24). As with the racialized language used to describe Bertha in Jane

Eyre, the role of the noble savage likewise has racial implications. Heathcliff, the “dark…black-

haired child” (36), is described as the “gipsy brat” (37), implicating that he is of a different

ethnicity than the Earnshaws and Lintons. Supporting this idea is Nelly’s assertion to Heathcliff

that “Who knows, but your father was Emperor of China, and your mother an Indian queen”

(58). By identifying him as a member of a different race or ethnicity, Brontë is reaffirming him

as the “other” in the story, separate from the corruption of a male-dominated society.

Acting as the foil to Heathcliff is Edgar Linton, who represents the ultimate power of

patriarchy. Despite being described as effeminate and “a soft thing” (73), Edgar is a patriarch

because his power comes from “books, wills, testaments, leases, titles, rent-rolls, documents,

languages, all the paraphernalia by which patriarchal culture is transmitted from one generation

to the next” (Gilbert 281). In this way, the male who seems most characteristic of being the hero

is actually the villain, since it from him and Thrushcross Grange that Catherine attempts to

escape. Edgar represents the education that commands women to learn their “place” in society,

and is the ultimate cause of Catherine’s fragmented personality. He plays the Gothic villain who

pursues the heroine, as Edgar “possessed the power to depart [from Catherine] as much as a cat

possesses the power to leave a mouse half killed or a bird half eaten” (73).

Upon his separation from Catherine, Heathcliff the hero proclaims that he has been

denied part of himself: “Oh God! It is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live
 Yopp 33

without my soul!” (169). But as Gilbert and Gubar suggest, “to be merely a body…is to be a sort

of monster, a fleshly thing, an object of pure animal materiality” (293). Playing as much a victim

of society and tyranny as the heroine, Heathcliff is actually “female” in his monstrosity since

without the patriarchal advantages of Edgar he is equally powerless. Seeking revenge against the

system that took away his soul, he presents a new definition of the “male monster,” as one who

perverts order as an act of rebellion, not evil. In order to subvert this order, Heathcliff finds he

must first take on the characteristics of a patriarch, and he returns after a long absence with

enough wealth to appropriate Wuthering Heights from Hindley. He then proceeds to set up an

exaggerated reenaction of Catherine’s abduction from him by seducing and stealing away

Isabella from Edgar. Isabella becomes representative of the traditional Gothic heroine, trapped

inside the prison of Wuthering Heights as Catherine was trapped inside Thrushcross Grange.

Heathcliff continues to pervert proper order by creating his own illegitimate line, made up of his

son Linton, Hareton Earnshaw, and the young Catherine Linton. By stealing Catherine and

Linton, he creates an ironic version of patriarchy, over which he reigns as the cruel patriarch.

Mocking the injustices of social order, he puts his own selfish son, Linton, ahead of the more

sympathetic son of Hindley, Hareton. Heathcliff remarks to Nelly,

one is gold put to the use of paving stones; and the other is tin polished to ape a

service of silver—Mine has nothing valuable about it; yet I shall have the merit of

making it go as far as such poor stuff can go. His had first-rate qualities, and they

are lost—rendered worse than unavailing. (219)

He recognizes this as the same treatment he was subjected to as a boy, labeled as a servant

despite his good nature, while the abusive Hindley and Edgar were privileged. Also reenacting

the injustices beheld on Catherine, he seduces, tricks, and entraps Isabella and Catherine Linton,
 Yopp 34

both literally inside Wuthering Heights, and metaphorically through marriage. Paralleling

Catherine’s first visit to Thrushcross Grange, Heathcliff lures Edgar’s daughter to the Heights

using Linton, finally forcing the marriage to his son upon her. In Heathcliff’s own marriage, his

harsh treatment of Isabella causes her to tell Nelly, “I assure you, a tiger, or a venomous serpent

could not rouse terror in me equal to that which he wakens” (144). This new order constructed by

Heathcliff is both his interpretation on how male-controlled society works, and that of the author,

who shows that patriarchal order itself is what inspires terror.

Charlotte Brontë, in writing Jane Eyre, also chose to create a new kind of Gothic hero to

accompany her non-traditional heroine. Brontë used the motif of the Byronic hero to create

Edward Rochester, who is likewise moody, cynical, and introspective. In addition, Rochester

serves as a figure of attraction and repulsion, “beautiful but damned” (Winnifrith 4). Byronic in

his self-consciousness, his lack of pride denies “his status as [a traditional] hero” (Thorslev 187).

The first appearance of Rochester is infused with Romanticized imagery, including a powerful

description by Jane comparing his horse to a Gytrash. These images suggest male power and

dominance; however, she quickly realizes he is human when he and his horse fall on the ice. Jane

remains firm in her offers to help him, and he concedes, admitting “necessity compels me to

make you useful” (122). This action dually humbles Rochester into needing the help of a woman,

while it empowers Jane, who notes, “My help had been needed and claimed; I had given it; I was

pleased to have done something; trivial, transitory though the deed was, it was yet an active

thing, and I was weary of an existence all passive” (122). So, although the status of their

relationship is that of master and servant, they also begin somewhat as equals, with a more

balanced power between them.

 Yopp 35

After this encounter Rochester continues to treat Jane as an equal, relating to her his

weaknesses and faults, as well as using her in times of need, such as when Mason is stabbed by

Bertha. At the first appearance of Jane Eyre, critics viewed Brontë’s new hero negatively,

claiming that Rochester’s treatment of the heroine was full of trickery and deceit. In 1857

William C. Roscoe wrote of Charlotte Brontë’s heroes, stating,

No writer in the world has ever so uniformly represented women at so great a

disadvantage. They invariably fall victims to the man of strong intellect, and

generally muscular frame, who lures them on with affected indifference and

simulated harshness….All these men are in their attachment utterly and

undisguisedly selfish, and we must say we grudge them their easily won victories

over the inexperienced placid little girls they lay siege to. (350)

Men saw Rochester as a tyrant taking advantage of the heroine through his rough treatment,

however Elaine Showalter argues that this wasn’t the author’s intention. She observes that

Brontë’s hero “flattered the heroine’s spirit by treating her as an equal rather than as a sensitive,

fragile fool who must be sheltered and protected” (143).

In this way, Rochester may appear monstrous, but he “is not a real monster, and Brontë

did not intend him to remain unredeemed, despite his physical (and, intermittently, moral)

‘monstrousness’” (Demoor 175). Instead, the true role of male monster is cast on John Reed,

Brocklehurst, and St John Rivers. Physically, John Reed and Brocklehurst meet the description

of a monstrous human being. Jane’s account of John describes him as “large and stout for his

age, with a dingy and unwholesome skin; thick lineaments in a spacious visage, heavy limbs and

large extremities. He gorged himself habitiually at table, which made him bilious, and gave him

a dim and bleared eye and flabby cheeks” (22). Brocklehurst’s appearance is also macabre, as
 Yopp 36

young Jane exclaims, “what a great nose! And what a mouth! And what large prominent teeth!”

(43). Their treatment of the heroine is likewise monstrous, as John Reed bullies young Jane so

that she reveals “There were moments when I was bewildered by the terror he inspired; because I

had no appeal whatever against either his menaces or his inflictions” (22). She likewise remains

powerless against the abuses that Brocklehurst’s school, Lowood, inflicts on her, starving her

and the other students into proper submission.

St John Rivers, on the other hand, provides a different view of the “male monster.”

Marysa Demoor, in her essay “Male Monsters or Monstrous Males in Victorian Women’s

Fiction,” suggests that St John is instead a “monstrous male,” who while displaying “the cruelty

and wickedness which are prerequisites of a monstrous nature…is in fact potentially more

dangerous than the male monster if only because his genuine nature is hidden behind a

handsome, sometimes even an angelic, countenance” (176). Jane describes John Rivers’

appearance as “harmonious,” with a Greek face, blue eyes and fair hair (338-9). She eventually

falls under his “freezing spell” (389), nearly consenting to marry him and go with him as

missionary to India. However, St John represents patriarchy, and the marriage he offers is

loveless. Jane realizes, “He prizes me as a soldier would a good weapon; and that is all” (395).

She sees that “a marriage to him would be cold, like ice, and she would be forced to continually

hide the flames that still burn inside her” (Gilbert 361). Claiming that “such a martyrdom would

be monstrous,” she tells St John, “I am ready to go to India, if I may go free” (395). In traditional

Gothic fiction, marriage to the patriarch restores order and saves the heroine from the male

monster. However, Brontë is proposing that the real monsters are the patriarchs themselves, who

offer loveless marriages that subvert the freedom of the heroine.

 Yopp 37

Although Rochester is the foil of St John Rivers, Brocklehurst, and John Reed, his status

as Gothic hero remains ambiguous. Brontë suggests that good and evil are relative and uncertain,

rather than objective and direct. After Jane and Rochester are engaged, he begins to treat her as

inferior, making it necessary for her to once again escape and continue her pilgrimage for

independence. Rochester’s new treatment of Jane is due to the fact that although he considers her

a spiritual equal, he has yet to consider her equal sexually and socially. Rochester remains

financially superior, as well as more traveled and experienced, because of advantages given to

him through his gender. Both Jane and Rochester are unable to accommodate this inequality,

with Rochester flaunting his financial superiority by buying her dresses and jewels, and telling

her “all the ground I have wandered over shall be re-trodden by you: wherever I stamped my

hoof, your slyph’s foot shall step also” (258). However, the inequality between them is not

simply one-sided, for Rochester also proves to be inferior to Jane. In an earlier conversation he

asks her whether she agrees that he “has the right to be masterful” (140) because of his age and

experience. She replies, “I don’t think, sir, you have a right to command me, merely because you

are older than I, or because you have seen more of the world than I have—your claim to

superiority depends on the use you have made of your time and experience” (140). Rochester

then admits, “I have made an indifferent, not to say a bad use of both advantages” (140). Later,

he reveals that his guilt is from marrying Bertha Mason for money and status, not equality. This

marriage is similar to the one he almost entered into with Blanche, which Jane claimed, “to wed

one inferior to you—to one with whom you have no sympathy—whom I do not believe you truly

love…I would scorn such a union: therefore I am better than you” (252). Rochester nevertheless

defends his behavior, telling her,

 Yopp 38

I am not a villain: you are not to suppose that—not to attribute to me any such bad

eminence; but, owing, I verily believe, rather to circumstances than to my natural

bent, I am a trite common-place sinner, hackneyed in all the poor petty

dissipations with which the rich and worthless try to put on life (141).

This statement shows that Charlotte Brontë’s new Gothic hero is susceptible to the same forces

that the heroine struggles against. Just as the heroine is not able to express her true nature, the

hero’s attitude and actions are also determined by the forces surrounding him. Rochester’s

“proper” marriage to Bertha results in punishment and separation from the true desire of his

heart: Jane. In this way, both Heathcliff and Rochester are victims of patriarchal society,

connecting them with the heroines who likewise suffer oppression under that order. Because of

this phenomenon, both novels serve as Humanist texts in addition to being Feminist. Charlotte

and Emily Brontë’s commentary is that any order which attempts to establish rigid gender roles

is harmful to all humanity, not only to one particular group.

Castles, Ruins, and the Pastoral Sublime

Adding to the psychological interpretation of the texts is the use of Gothic setting. In

Gothic novels, one of the most important devices an author uses to evoke emotion is setting. By

portraying places such as castles, locked rooms, labyrinths, ruins, and vast landscapes, the

authors are able to elicit strong reactions from their readers, who live vicariously through the

characters. In this way, “the setting itself provides as much suspense as does the plot or the

characters” (“Gothic Literature” 137). The emotion that most Gothic writers attempt to invoke in

their writing is horror and terror due to confinement. Through depicting “prison cells, monastic

cells, shackles, locked rooms, or dark tunnels, the space of the Gothic novel is claustrophobic
 Yopp 39

and confining, tapping into a primal human fear” (“Gothic Literature” 137). In writing Jane Eyre

and Wuthering Heights, Charlotte and Emily Brontë adopted this convention and adapted it to

make the fear of claustrophobia parallel to the confinement and imprisonment of women in

society.

In Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë created two manors in which her heroine would live,

paralleling the split-personality that she herself would eventually adopt. The first, Wuthering

Heights, is one in which Lockwood, as a civilized man of society, considers hellish. As first

introduced to the reader, the Heights is described as being in disarray and disorder, with

Lockwood finding himself overrun by a “half-dozen four-footed fiends” (7). The furniture, he

finds, looks as it should belong to a “homely, northern farmer,” although the manor is owned by

a gentleman, who he suspects must have an aversion to “showy displays” (5). The anatomy of he

house “lay bare to an enquiring eye” (5), suggesting the absence of locked rooms or enclosed

spaces. Lockwood’s repulsion for the Heights is furthered by his inability to find a social order

inside the house, for he cannot discern the relationships between its inhabitants. Likewise, he is

confused over the behavior of Catherine, who instead of acting as a “ministering angel” (13) is

rude to her guest, and refuses his offer of help when she has trouble reaching a canister.

Lockwood, as a gentleman, is able to consider this a hell because it is associated “with an

ascendant self-willed female who radiates what…most people consider ‘diabolical’ energy…the

life energy of fierce, raw, uncultivated being” (Gilbert 266). For the eldest Catherine, however,

Wuthering Heights is her version of heaven. With Heathcliff making her a whole being, for her

the Heights “in its stripped functional rawness is essentially anti-hierarchical and egalitarian”

(274).
 Yopp 40

Thrushcross Grange, on the other hand, “reproduces the hierarchical chain of being that

Western culture traditionally proposes as heaven’s decree” (Gilbert 274). Representing the ideal

house commonly portrayed in domestic and sentimental novels, Thrushcross Grange is the

opposite of Wuthering Heights, its interior “carpeted with crimson” and decorated with

“crimson-covered chairs and tables, and a pure white ceiling bordered by gold, a shower of

glass-drops hanging in silver chains from the centre, and shimmering with little soft tapers” (48).

However, this “heaven” actually reveals itself to be a portrait of the “imperfect world of

bourgeois society,” as Heathcliff and Catherine mock and despise the quarreling children inside

of its walls (Ellis 218). After her separation from Heathcliff and marriage to Edgar, the Grange

becomes her version of hell, as it becomes a prison from which she cannot escape. At the climax

of her illness Catherine is enclosed inside her bedroom at Thrushcross Grange, representing her

imprisonment inside the marriage she was forced into. Feeling her “blood rush into a hell of

tumult,” she longs to escape the room to return to Wuthering Heights, and demands that Nelly

open the window. Nelly replies, “I won’t give you your death of cold,” wherein Catherine

retorts, “You won’t give me a chance of life, you mean” (125-6). The prediction of death

becomes a reality as Thrushcross Grange becomes a “metaphorical coffin” to Catherine, her

death resulting both from her fragmented self and the realized terror of confined imprisonment

(Ellis 218).

In Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë introduces the young heroine as already imprisoned,

trapped inside the confines of Gateshead. She first presents Jane as viewing the outside world

through a window, which is cold and wintry. Taking refuge behind scarlet draperies, the world

inside Gateshead is “claustrophobic, fiery, like ten-year-old Jane’s own mind” (Gilbert 339).

Later, as punishment for defending herself against the tyrannical abuse of John Reed, she is
 Yopp 41

enclosed in the red-room, the death chamber of the patriarch Mr. Reed. Containing an easy chair

“like a pale throne” and a wardrobe holding a miniature of the deceased Mr. Reed, the room

represents the confining element of patriarchy: “No jail was ever more secure” Jane observes.

The room becomes Gothically haunting, “for the spirit of a society in which Jane has no clear

place sharpens the angles of the furniture, enlarges the shadows, strengthens the locks on the

door” (Gilbert 340). The red imagery present in the room suggests Jane’s aversion and rage

against the injustices placed against her by this society. Occupied by a bed “hung with curtains

of deep-red damask,” a table “covered with a crimson cloth,” red carpet, and the walls “a soft

fawn colour, with a blush of pink in it,” the warm red colors suggest fire and warmth. This

imagery is contrasted with the frigidness of the outside world observed by Jane in the opening of

the novel. Reading “Bewick’s ‘History of British Birds,’” she is fascinated by the description of

the “death-white realms” of the Arctic, “that reservoir of frost and snow, where firm fields of ice,

the accumulation of centuries of winters…the multiplied rigors of extreme cold” (21). To Jane,

this cold world is representative of what lies beyond the entrapment of Gateshead, and the anger

she feels at this repression. Being confined to the red-room, she is confronted by her rebellious

thoughts, and she admits “my head grew hot…I was oppressed, suffocated” (29). Through this

rage, Jane is able to escape the room, and Gateshead.

Upon her arrival at Thornfield, Jane has now been taught how to repress and conceal the

rebellion she holds inside, and the setting of her new residence reflects this aspect of herself. Not

just a gloomy mansion, the architecture of the house becomes metaphorical, paralleling the mind

of the heroine. Jane finds she frequents the third floor of the mansion, to pace the corridor and

“allow my mind’s eye to dwell.” She explains, “the restlessness was in my nature, it agitated me

to pain sometimes” (116). Unsatisfied with the tranquility and confinement of the mansion,
 Yopp 42

Jane’s “mind’s eye” dwells far enough to reveal the spirit of rebellion is still present inside her,

despite its concealment. Jane relates to the reader,

Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel;

they need exercise and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they

suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would

suffer;…It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do

more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex. (116-

117)

After this speech, Jane admits to hearing the laughter of Grace Poole, who she mistakes to be the

“madwoman,” whenever she visits this area of the mansion. She admits, “When thus alone, I not

unfrequently heard Grace Poole’s laugh: the same peal, the same low, slow ha! ha! Which, when

first heard, had thrilled me” (117). This feminist spirit, however, is confined to the third floor of

Thornfield, as is Bertha Mason, the personification of Jane’s rage. The locked room that holds

Bertha is symbolic of the patriarchal education that represses and holds part of Jane’s mind,

causing the fragmentation of her character.

In both Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, the homes containing locked rooms and

confining spaces are reminiscent of the Gothic tradition’s preoccupation with the failed home.

Having lost its “prelapsarian purity,” the failed home locks in the “innocent” females, as result of

the villain’s disruption of proper societal order (Ellis ix). On the pages of the Brontës’ novels,

however, this lost “purity” finds itself in the houses that uphold this order, such as Thrushcross

Grange and Gateshead. Their criticism is that the patriarchal homes are the true “sites of terror,”

disrupting nature and the “prelapsarian,” or original, state of things. Instead, they argue it is in

nature, the Garden of Eden, where both the heroines and heroes are able to live in equality and
 Yopp 43

peace. Adopting another convention of the Gothic, the Brontës show this idea through their

description and version of the sublime.

The definition of sublimity is “a sense of grandeur, awe, or loftiness; sometimes an

emotional experience combining terror and delight” (Ljungquist 1243). Influencing the Gothic

writers’ view of the sublime was Edmund Burke’s work, A Philosophical Enquiry into the

Origin of our Idea of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757). He suggested that the feeling of

sublimity comes from a sense of powerlessness, caused by viewing something large and massive,

or being in a setting that is vast and open. In Gothic novels, the structures most often used to

invoke a feeling of sublimity are ruins. The landscape in Gothic fiction is filled “with broken

pillars and buildings which, isolated in time and space, have lost any relation to the world around

them. These structures lack any mediation with the public realm” (Milbank 9). Lacking the

confining walls of Gothic mansions and dungeons, the decaying and dilapidated ruins of castles

are the products of history, showing the traumas of a corrupt past. At the same time, ruins also

present a sense of timelessness, since it is eternal nature that slowly tears away at the structures.

In this way, “the Romantic sublime cancels out history, and becomes the act of the conquering

consciousness subliming all it sees” (Milbank 146). In Jane Eyre, when Jane returns to

Thornfield to find Rochester, she is surprised to find that it is in ruins:

The lawn, the grounds were trodden and waste: the portal yawned void. The front

was…but a shell-like wall, very high and very fragile looking, perforated with

paneless windows: no roof, no battlements, no chimneys—all had crashed in…

there was the silence of death about it: the solitude of a lonesome wild. (414)

The remains of Thornfield, whose architecture had symbolized the oppression of Jane’s mind, no

longer carry the history of a patriarchal society. Having stood as the symbol of inequality
 Yopp 44

between Jane and Rochester, the destroyed mansion now suggests that they are again equal.

Likewise, since the prison holding the confined rage of the heroine, symbolized by Bertha, is

now opened, the rage itself disappears, as Rochester’s “mad” wife had destroyed herself in the

process of destroying the castle.

The Gothic also focuses on nature itself as inspiring sublimity. As “a product of wild,

irregular, and uncontrollable nature” (“Gothic Literature” 141), the natural sublime “operates

most effectively away from the social markers of city life, away too from the view of the country

vista as this or that lord’s possession” (Milbank 145). “Edenic in its innocence,” (Milbank 146)

sublime nature represents ultimate timelessness: a “prelapsarian” return to original nature. This is

the sublime present in Wuthering Heights, as shown through the moors lying between the houses

of Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange. In this natural setting, “the young Catherine and

Heathcliff overcome the social divisions between them in a landscape disassociated from human

traces, providing for them a shared myth of power” (Milbank 146). Through the sublime, Brontë

creates a world that isn’t subjected to gender or sphere classification, allowing equal amounts of

power to both Catherine and Heathcliff. Also, Burke suggests in his Enquiry that the key to the

vastness of nature is in its unity. He writes that “every thing great by its quantity must

necessarily be, one, simple and entire” (139). So it is only in this vast nature that Catherine is

able to remain undivided from Heathcliff, her “other self.” This natural world, representing unity

and freedom, is the one Catherine claims to be her true heaven. In the Gothic treatment of natural

sublimity, “the vast and empty spaces of the earth acquired a sacred character, a sense of nature’s

immensity ceased to be a mere metaphor for an incomprehensible spiritual realm and became an

actual part of human experience” (Ljungquist 1245). This transcendentalist notion is likewise

reflected in Catherine’s character, since for her, nature “is not an emblematic reminder of God’s
 Yopp 45

providence…but rather is itself divine” (Conger 97). Recalling a dream she had of visiting

heaven, Catherine 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” (81). For

Catherine, the patriarchal Christian view of heaven is hierarchical and hellish, whereas the

freedom presented by nature is heavenly. Therefore, when she is nearing death at Thrushcross

Grange she tells Edgar, “they can’t keep me from my narrow home out yonder—My resting

place where I’m bound before Spring is over! There it is, not among the Lintons, mind, under the

chapel-roof; but in the open air with a head-stone” (127). Appropriately, Nelly reveals to

Lockwood that the ghosts of Heathcliff and Catherine are rumored to haunt the hillsides between

Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange, united once again in the natural heaven of their

youth.

Conclusion

The endings of Gothic novels have long been criticized as ambiguous, unsatisfactory, and

inconclusive. The closing of early Gothic novels were characterized by the marriage of the

heroine to the hero, allowing her to escape the corrupt pursuit of the antagonists. Michelle A.

Massé writes, “Our repression-based analyses thus construct a critical fiction that reassures that

most of the heroine’s fears are not ‘real,’ while those that are will be erased by the transition

from unjust to just authority, by the move from father’s house to husband’s” (680). The novels of

Anne Radcliffe are especially known for endings that attempt to explain away the supernatural

present in the story, persuading audiences that what was feared can be accounted for and

rationalized. Many critics have condemned such inconclusive endings, claiming that they do not
 Yopp 46

provide answers for the questions they pose. Elizabeth Napier points out that the Gothic genre is

marked by “profound uncertainty about its genuine status and intent” (40), which “lacks the guts

to confront its own moral and aesthetic implications” (Kilgour 10). Coleridge makes a similar

argument in regard to reading novels in general, writing “it excites mere feeling without at the

same time ministering to an impulse to action…they afford excitement without producing

reaction” (195-6).

Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights seem in danger of repeating the Gothic’s tradition of

ambiguous endings. At the conclusion of Jane Eyre, Jane has returned to a blinded Mr.

Rochester, whose disability and loss of wealth now makes him dependent on her. Paralleling the

plots of early Gothic novels, Jane and Rochester are married. This marriage, on the other hand, is

one of equality, with the patriarchal differences that had stood between them now erased. Their

new manor, Ferndean, reflects the natural freedom associated with their relationship, residing in

nature away from societal expectations. Gilbert and Gubar, however, suggest that “the physical

isolation of the lovers suggests their spiritual isolation in a world where such egalitarian

marriages as theirs are rare, if not impossible” (369). They add that such seclusion suggests

Brontë herself

was unable clearly to envision viable solutions to the problem of patriarchal

oppression…perhaps because no one of her contemporaries, not even a

Wollstonecraft or a Mill, could adequately describe a society so drastically altered

that the matured Jane and Rochester could really live in it. (369-70)

Allison Milbank likewise argues that the ending reflects an incomplete and fragmentary

existence, citing the novel’s last words, “Amen; even so, come, Lord Jesus!” (441), as showing

“the still unfinished nature of eschatological transformation” (23).

 Yopp 47

Likewise, the conclusion of Wuthering Heights signifies that the story is unfinished,

suggesting through repetition that its events are cyclical. The death of Heathcliff and the union of

Cathy and Hareton, Helene Moglen asserts, “brings with it the resolution of conflict…Hareton,

the social outcast…is educated and assimilated into the world of Thrushcross Grange. Morality

controls instinct as Cathy’s flowers replace the wild undergrowth of the heath, and the female

dream is realized” (403). Moglen also attests that “The movement of the novel…is cohesive and

linear, not cyclical” (405). However, I would argue that because Cathy II is once again Catherine

Earnshaw, and a male with patriarchal control, Hareton Earnshaw, has once again established

control over Wuthering Heights, the ending of the novel cycles back to the situation at its

beginning. When Lockwood first arrives at the Heights, he notices carved above the threshold

“the date ‘1500,’ and the name ‘Hareton Earnshaw’” (4). The date symbolizes the end of the

Medieval period, and the title is that of the first patriarch of Wuthering Heights. Although the

young Hareton Earnshaw was unable to read the carved name at first, “Joesph had instilled into

him a pride of name, and of his lineage” (197). Despite his connections to Heathcliff, Hareton

still remains the “proper heir” of the Heights, based upon the patriarchal system of name and

lineage. Likewise, young Catherine has begun to teach him to read, instilling in him the required

knowledge for a patriarch. Because control of the manor has returned to the Earnshaws, the end

of the novel sets up the possibility for the same events to be repeated. Repetition of events and

characters happen in the interior of the story, so it is feasible that the same could occur outside

the frame of the text. Massé suggests that repetition occurs both in individual narratives of the

Gothic, and within the entire genre, marking “a persistent and active attempt by authors, their

characters, and readers to rework the feminine social contract” (682). In addition, Brontë

indicates that the “order” of “Cathy’s flowers” accompanying the Earnshaw marriage is not final,
 Yopp 48

writing that Nelly perceives “decay had made progress” at Wuthering Heights, and that “many a

window showed black gaps deprived of glass; and slates jutted off, here and there, beyond the

right line of the roof, to gradually be worked off in coming autumn storms” (337).

Some critics, like Robert D. Hume, suggest that because of the inconclusive endings of

Gothic fiction, it is secondary to Romantic writing, which uses imagination as the “vehicle of

escape from the limitations of the human condition” (289). He writes that, “The Gothic writers,

though possessed by the same discontent with the everyday world, have no faith in the ability of

man to transcend or transform it” (289). On the other hand, I believe that Gothic writers,

including Charlotte and Emily Brontë, make their arguments most vividly through their inability

to rely solely on imagination. Because “their explorations lie strictly within the realm of this

world” (Hume 289), their conclusions cannot lie outside of what is real. As Massé points out, the

heroine of the Gothic “will always reawaken to the still-present actuality of her trauma because

the gender expectations that deny her identity are woven into the very fabric of her culture,

which perpetuates her trauma while denying its existence” (684). The Brontë’s hybrid of

Sentimental-Domestic fiction and Gothic fiction emphasizes the horror of female oppression that

is in existence in the actual world. By not annihilating the existence of this trauma in the

conclusion of their novels, they’re further emphasizing that in reality the trauma still stands.

There is no solution in the final pages of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, because no solution

is present in actuality. Instead, Charlotte and Emily Brontë are pointing out that freedom from

oppression cannot be achieved for either the characters in their stories or their readers until the

system of patriarchal control is abandoned.

 Yopp 49

Works Cited

Alexander, Christine. “That Kingdom of Gloom: Charlotte Brontë, the Annuals, and the Gothic.”

Nineteenth-Century Literature 47.4 (1993): 409-436.

Avery, Simon. “Some strange and spectral dream’: The Brontës’ Manipulation of the Gothic

Mode.” Brontë Society Transactions. 23(2), 120-35.

Barker, Juliet. The Brontës. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994.

Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. Ed. Beth Newman. Boston: Bedford Books, 1996.

Brontë, Emily. Wuthering Heights. Ed. Pauline Nestor. London: Penguin Book, 1995.

Chew, Samuel. The Nineteenth Century and After. Ed. A.C. Baugh. 2nd ed. A Literary History of

England IV. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1967.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Coleridge’s Miscellaneous Criticism. Edited by T.M. Raysor.

Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1936.

Conger, Syndy McMillen. “The Reconstruction of the Gothic Feminine Ideal in Emily Brontë’s

Wuthering Heights.” The Female Gothic. Ed. Juliann Fleenor. Montreal: Eden Press,

1983.

Demoor, Marysa. “Male Monsters or Monstrous Males in Victorian Women’s Fiction.”

Exhibited by Candlelight. Ed. Valeria Tinkler-Villani. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995.

Doody, Margaret Ann. “Deserts, Ruins and Troubled Waters: Female Dreams in Fiction and the

Development of the Gothic Novel,” Genre, 10 (Winter 1977)

Ellis, Kate Ferguson. The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic

Ideology. Urbana : University of Illinois Press, 1989.

Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the

Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979.

 Yopp 50

“Gothic.” Oxford English Dictionary. 19 October 2006 <http://oed.com/>

“Gothic Literature.” Literary Movements for Students: Presenting Analysis, Context, and

Criticism on Literary Movements. Ed. David Galens. Vol. 2. Detroit: Gale, 2002.

Graham, Kenneth W. “Afterword: Some Remarks on Gothic Origins.” Ed. Kenneth Graham

Gothic Fictions: Prohibition/Transgression. New York: AMS Press, 1989.

Heiland, Donna. Gothic & Gender: An Introduction. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004.

Heilman, Robert B., “Charlotte Brontë’s ‘New Gothic’” The Victorian Novel: Modern Essays in

Criticism, Ed. Ian Watt. London: Oxford University Press, 1971.

Henningfield, Diane Andrews. Critical Essay on Gothic Literature, in Literary Movements for

Students: Presenting Analysis, Context, and Criticism on Literary Movements. Ed. David

Galens. Vol. 2. Detroit: Gale, 2002.

Hoeveler, Diane Long. Gothic Feminism : The Professionalization of Gender From Charlotte

Smith to the Brontës. University Park, Pa: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998.

Hume, Robert D. “Gothic Versus Romantic: A Revolution of the Gothic Novel.” PMLA 84

(1969): 282-290.

Kilgour, Maggie. The Rise of the Gothic Novel. London: Routledge, 1995.

Labat, Joseph. “Noble Savage.” Dictionary of Literary Themes and Motifs L-Z. Ed. Jean-Charles

Seigneuret. London: Greenwood Press, 1988.

Ljungquist, Kent. “Sublimity.” Dictionary of Literary Themes and Motifs L-Z. Ed. Jean-Charles

Seigneuret. London: Greenwood Press, 1988.

MacAndrew, Elizabeth. The Gothic Tradition in Fiction. New York: Columbia University Press,

1979.
 Yopp 51

Massé, Michelle A. “Gothic Repetition: Husbands, Horrors, and Things That Go Bump in the

Night.” Signs 15.4 (1990): 679-709.

Milbank, Alison. Daughters of the House : Modes of the Gothic in Victorian Fiction. New York:

St. Martin's Press, 1992.

Moers, Ellen. Literary Women. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1976.

Moers, Ellen. “Women’s Lit: Profession and Tradition,” Columbia Forum, I (Fall 1972)

Moglen, Helene. Charlotte Brontë: The Self Conceived. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1976.

Moglen, Helene. “The Double Vision of Wuthering Heights: A Clarifying View of Female

Development.” The Centennial Review of Arts and Sciences 15 (1971): 391-405.

Napier, Elizabeth. The Failure of Gothic: Problems of Disjunction in an Eighteenth-Century

Literary Form. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987.

Oliphant, Margaret. Rev. of Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë. Blackwood’s Magazine. 77 (May

1855): 554-68.

Punter, David. The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present

Day. London: Longman, 1980.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Emile, or On Education. Trans. Allan Bloom. New York: Basic Books,

1979.

Showalter, Elaine. A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing.

Princeton University Press, 1977.

Summers, Montague. The Gothic Quest: A History of the Gothic Novel. London: Fortune Press,

1938.

Thorslev, Peter Larsen. The Byronic Hero: Types and Prototypes. Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press, 1962.

 Yopp 52

Voogd, Peter de. “Sentimental Horros: Feeling in the Gothic Novel.” Exhibited by Candlelight.

Ed. Valeria Tinkler-Villani. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995.

Walpole, Horace. Preface to the Second Edition. The Castle of Otranto. Ed. W.S. Lewis.

London: Oxford University Press, 1964.

Weidhorn,, Manfred. “Mirror.” Dictionary of Literary Themes and Motifs L-Z. Ed. Jean-Charles

Seigneuret. London: Greenwood Press, 1988.

Winnifrith, Tom. The Brontës and Their Background: Romance and Reality. London:

Macmillan, 1973.