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THE LUNATIC AND THE DEVIL'S DISCIPLE:
THE 'LOVERS' IN WUTHERING HEIGHTS
By MARIANNE THORMXHLEN
Heathcliff,to the point of refusingto sit with him when he asks for some-
one to keep him company shortlybeforehis death.
Fortunately,interestin a person is not dependent on sympathyfor him
or her, or Lockwoodwould never have asked the housekeeperat Thrush-
cross Grangeto tell him 'the historyof Mr. Heathcliff',and she could not
have renderedsuch a detailednarrative,down to reproductionsof lengthy
conversations.The contrastbetween the humdrumnarratorsin Wuthering
Heightsand the extraordinarymain protagonistsof the story has been
commented on for more than a hundred years.The failuresand foibles of
the formerensure that a reader'ssympathyis not naturallydrivento fuse
with any viewpointof theirs.The result is that the readeris liberatedfrom
any pressureto identify with any person or persons in the novel. Emily
Bronte forces us to take up our own standpoint,or to decide to forgo the
adoption of any point of view at all. There are severalindicationsto the
effectthat this absence of guidancetowardsan attitudeis the outcome of a
deliberate authorial policy. Bronti does not even allow young Cathy-
warmheartedand courageousin herself,but stubborn,spoilt, and incon-
siderate,too-to ingratiateherselfwith the reader,any more than she does
with Lockwoodon his firstarrivalat the Heights.
The natureof the bond between Catherineand Heathcliffhas been the
subjectof much speculation.Severalrecentcommentatorshave picked up
the suggestion,firstput forward-as faras I havebeen able to find out-by
Eric Solomon,9that Heathcliffmay have been an illegitimatechild of old
Mr Earshaw's, and hence Catherine'shalf-brother.This would go some
way towards accounting for the kinship one senses between them. In
addition, it would explain Mr Earshaw's seemingly incomprehensible
partialityfor the gypsy-darkfoundling. The chroniclersof Gondal and
Angria, who were also admirersof Byron, were thoroughlyfamiliarwith
the existence of various kinds of forbidden love, including that of half-
siblings. The sexlessness of the Catherine-Heathcliffrelationship,noted
(as 'purity') by early reviewersand emphasized in Lord David Cecil's
seminal appraisal,10has been regardedin the light of possible blood ties.
But if Catherine and Heathcliff are indeed related by blood, they will
hardlyknow it themselves.Nor will anybody else afterthe death of old Mr
Earshaw, who does nothing to check their intimacy. Consequently,talk
of 'incest' seems a little off-target.
The only time when the closeness between Catherineand Heathcliffis
untroubled by anything except the interferenceof elders is their child-
hood. It is a state of total alliancewhich ends with Catherine'sfirststay at
9 'The Incest Theme in Fiction, 14 (June 1959), 80-3.
WutheringHeights',Nineteenth-Century
10 First Novelistsin 1935 and reprinted, in excerpts, in several volumes
printed in Early Victorian
of WutheringHeightscriticism, including Allott's Casebookand the Norton Critical Edition of the
novel.
186 THORMAHLEN
14 In his
preface to the Washington Square Press edition of the novel (1960), A. J. Gu6rardcalls
Catherine's expectation to 'have' both Heathcliff and Edgar the 'major oddity' of the book; the
preface is reprinted in T. A. Vogler (ed.), TwentiethCenturyInterpretations of WutheringHeights
(Englewood Cliffs, 1968).
15 Vol.
I, ch. v, p. 40. One example of what looks like over-charitablenesstowards Catherine is
offered by a critic who has observed that 'insanity is not so far away' from her; P. W. Martin says
that Edgar would 'make a poor analyst, for he will not allow Cathy consciously to reconcile herself
to her love for Heathcliff in the context of her idealized love for him' (a tough order for a devoted
husband, one would have thought); see his Mad Womenin RomanticWriting(Brighton, 1987), 111-
12.
16 A
spot-on diagnosis in M. Spark and D. Stanford, EmilyBronte:HerLife and Work(London,
1953; reissued 1985), p. 252 in the 1985 edition.
17 It is a little unkind to
lay this misfortune at Catherine's door; but she does catch her illness
through sheer negligence, and she seems to have been an extremely demanding patient-maybe
one reason why the neighbourly Lintons offer to take her in.
18 C. P. Sanger's classic 'Chronology of Wuthering Heights'in his 'The Structure of Wuthering
Heights'is reprinted, with the ground-breaking essay itself, in the Norton Critical Edition of the
novel (pp. 296-8). A similar chronology is prefixed to U. C. Knoepflmacher, Wuthering Heights:A
Study(Athens, Oh., 1994), by arrangement with Cambridge University Press.
19 Vol. I, ch. XIII, p. 134.
188 THORMAHLEN
26 Isabella is
arguably a poor Linton specimen; but it might at least be said in her defence that
she, unlike her Earnshaw counterpart, Catherine, manages to break free from an intolerable situ-
ation and shows some initiative.
27 See e.g. A. Scull, TheMost Solitaryof Afflictions:
MadnessandSocietyin Britain 1700-1900 (New
Haven and London, 1993); W. F. Bynum, R. Porter, and M. Shepherd (edd.), The Anatomyof
Madness(London, 1985), vol. i; and R. Hunter and I. Macalpine (edd.), ThreeHundredrears of
Psychiatry(London, 1963).
28 See A. Scull, 'A Victorian Alienist:
John Conolly, FRCP, DCL (1794-1866)', in Bynum et al.,
TheAnatomyof Madness,121.
190 THORMAHLEN
and in
discourse on the subject called Letterson Demonologyand Witchcraft;47
addition to his explorations of men, deities, and evil in Manfredand Cain,
Lord Byron composed his own drama of a pact with Satan, the unfinished
The DeformedTransformed.48 Both Scott and Byron mention 'Monk' Lewis
in connection with their sources, and both refer to the most famous of con-
temporary Teufelspakte,Goethe's Faust.49In a typical exchange between
the about-to-be-transformed young man and the devil ('the Stranger') in
Byron's drama, the former says, ingenuously, 'Your aspect is I Dusky, but
not uncomely', to which compliment the Stranger replies (p. 28),
If I chose,
I might be whiter;but I have a penchant
For black-it is so honest, and besides
Can neitherblush with shame nor pale with fear.
supportsit, too. The case for(b) is put, unforgettably,by the last paragraph
of the novel;here Lockwoodis the spokesman.As for(c), our acceptanceof
it is partly dependent on the reliability we assign to local rustics. None of
these people is what one would call an authoritativewitness. On 'cold
reflection',Nelly even comes to doubt her own assuranceto the extent of
asking Lockwood to dispel her doubts of a happy afterlifefor such as
CatherineEamshaw Linton.
Her question is, as the cautious Lockwood recognizes, 'something
heterodox',and he prudentlydeclines to answerit. Emily Bronti has left
her readersto answerit for themselves-another example, it seems to me,
of her consistentrefusalto provideus with a pointd'appuiat which we can
seek shelterfromthe stormsof Wuthering Heights.
There will alwaysbe those who resistthe notion that Wuthering Heightsis
a carefully wrought literary work written by an artist who brought
deliberation and detachment to her writing as well as imagination and
'native genius'. One element, with a bearing on the lunacy-cum-devilry
dimension, which implies elaborationis the way in which Bronti makes
Catherineand Heathcliffimpute their own abnormitiesto others.Cather-
ine has the bad taste-to put it mildly-to taunt the lovesickIsabellawith
being mad ('You are surelylosing your reason','Is she sane?','Nelly, help
me to convince her of her madness'62).During their last meeting, Heath-
cliffwildlyasksCatherine,'Areyou possessedwith a devil... to talkin that
manner to me, when you are dying?'63The tactlessnessof this exclamation
(like the less than chivalrous'Don't tortureme till I'm as mad as yourself')
can be ascribed to Heathcliff's heart overflowingat his mouth; but it is
hardto regardhis subsequentexhortationto EdgarLinton,who entersthe
room to find his adoredwife senseless in the arms of the man he hates, as
anything but grotesque: 'unless you be a fiend, help her first'.64It is
difficultto believe that such pointed absurditiesare not the result of an
authorialstrategy.
Recent criticismof Wuthering Heightshas reflectedgrowinguneasiness
over the reluctanceof many mid-twentieth-centuryscholarsto recognize
the fundamentalwickednessof Heathcliff.65 As the precedingreviewof his
diabolicaldimensionshas implied, that reactionseems a reasonableone to
me. I have avoidedreferringto the bond betweenCatherineand Heathcliff
62 Vol. I, ch. x, pp. 101-2. Shortly before, even more preposterously, Catherine has accused
Edgar and Isabella of being 'spoiled children' who 'fancy the world was made for their accom-
modation'-an unwittingly self-diagnosing piece of pure burlesque which Nelly loses no time in
turning the right way round (pp. 98-9).
63 Vol.
II, ch. I, p. 159.
64 Ibid. 163.
65 See
e.g. T. Reed, Demon-Loversand TheirVictimsin BritishFiction(Lexington, Ky., 1988), 70-
1, and R. D. Stock, The Flutesof Dionysus:DaemonicEnthrallmentin Literature(Lincoln, Nebr. and
London, 1989), 270-3. After a damning recapitulation of Heathcliff's crimes, Stock exclaims,
'"Primordialenergy" can do better than this!'
WUTHERING HEIGHTS 197
as 'love', and put quotation marks around the word 'lovers' as applied to
them, because the nature of their passions fits no description of the
concepts known to me.
But this does not amount to maintaining that the mutual obsession of a
mentally unstable girl and a man with dubious priorities lacks power and
pathos. On the contrary: few scenes in classic English fiction are as harrow-
ing as the one where the delirious Catherine identifies the bird species that
contributed to the feathers in her pillow and is horror-struck by her own
image in the looking-glass.66 Here Nelly Dean's harshness ('Give over with
that baby-work!') really grates on the reader. Similarly, the anguish of
Heathcliff's outburst at the window by the box-bed at Wuthering Heights,
after Lockwood has told him of his nightmare-'Cathy, do come. Oh do-
once more! Oh! my heart's darling, hear me this time-Catherine, at
last!'67-communicates itself to any reader, as it does to Lockwood.
Towards the end of the book, a climactic moment puts an end to Heath-
cliff's Revenger's Tragedy, thereby freeing his consciousness for its grad-
ual invasion by a sense of Catherine's nearness: entering the Heights,
Heathcliff finds Cathy and Hareton together, studying. They lift their eyes,
simultaneously, and meet his-two pairs of eyes, and both hers. Here it
does not seem overly sentimental to speak of love extinguishing the
impulse to revenge. Undramatic as it is, this moving little scene is a major
turning-point in the novel.
The monstrosities of the two main protagonists of WutheringHeights
hence do not invalidate the force and genuineness of their emotions. Con-
sequently, even readers who, like Nelly, have no patience with Catherine
and little empathy with Heathcliff cannot but have time for them both.
66 Vol. 67 Vol.
I, ch. XII, pp. 122-4. I, ch. III, p. 27.