This is the received view:
Catherine and Heathcliff are childhood sweethearts who grow
into ardent and apparently inseparable lovers. Unfortunately, Catherine is a
selfish little gold digger who cruelly spurns her low-born gypsy boy and
marries Edgar Linton instead. Edgar is a socially well appointed and refined
gentleman, so the union offers her a comfortable, prosperous lifestyle and a
position in society. Heathcliff is a bit miffed and takes himself off to earn
his fortune. When he returns, he and Cathy attempt to rekindle their
relationship but Edgar is having none of it. Heathcliff gets angry and plots
revenge, Cathy dies of a brain fever, Heathcliff pines, Cathy’s ghost wails
etc, etc.
Rubbish. Catherine and Heathcliff were never lovers. The
full rationale is in the essay here,
but let me restrict this post to a few bullet pointed bits of evidence:
1) At no point in the novel do they ever behave towards one
other as lovers in the conventional sense. They never embrace in that way, they
never kiss, they never use the conventional language of lovers.
2) At no point in the novel do they ever express sexual
jealousy over their respective relationships with other people.
3) Their attempt to rekindle their relationship is not done
clandestinely.
4) Both express frustration at Edgar’s objection. Heathcliff
even goes as far as telling Nellie Dean that he doesn’t understand it, as he
surely would if his intentions amounted to an extra-marital affair.
5) When Cathy is dying, she tells Nellie that she would
never have married Heathcliff even if she hadn’t married Edgar, because she doesn’t even like Heathcliff.
Poor Edgar is completely bamboozled by the whole business.
Well, of course he is. That’s because he’s seeing the whole thing through the
eyes of earthbound social convention, and regards Heathcliff as Catherine’s ex
boyfriend who is trying to cuckold him. And for more than a hundred and seventy
years, the reading public has been making the same mistake.
So what’s it really all about? The answer, surely, lies in
Catherine’s oft-quoted but little understood statement:
‘I AM HEATHCLIFF.’
Get it?
15 comments:
http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/novel_19c/wuthering/psych.html
~interpreted here as also one person, although somewhat differently, but kinda the same. I mean, not exactly what you're saying, but sort of. OR scratch all that and i'll just say i thought you'd find this interesting.
Actually, one bit of it is very close to what I'm saying. The problem is that the only person who can know what a character, situation or relationship is all about is the author; the author's intention, therefore, is the point at issue.
The reason I wrote that essay in the first place was because I'd been so taken aback by what I saw as the similarities between me and Emily Bronte. When I subsequently read and re-read Wuthering Heights, I truly felt - rightly or wrongly - that I was seeing it through her mind.
What I find a bit silly is when clever academics start interpreting characters in terms of Freudian and Jungian psychology. Emily would obviously not have been aware of either school, since neither existed in her day, and I doubt she would have had any interest them anyway. To look for her motives in character creation in those terms strikes me as a step too far and verging on sophistry.
When it comes to questions like this i also try to think of the author's intentions, but it seems that most analyst of art and literature tend to analyze with the idea that the interpretations they've gleaned are based on the artist or writer's subconscious influences on the work. So then they fit them into the framework of either Freudian or Jungian interpretations.
I doubt that Emily had Ego, Psyche, and ID in mind when she wrote Wuthering Heights.
In conscious mind, i mean.
Also, the 'mad woman in the attic' is popularly interpreted psychologically to be Jane Eyre's double, a repressed shadow self.
Heathcliff is her half brother. I don't know how people miss that, to be honest.
I've always thought he was her adopted brother... her father found him on the streets and bought him home. I guess it could be assumed that he was her father's illegitimate child by another woman...?
I'm going to have to reread... i believe i remember passages in which they kiss and talk of their love for one another... Its a good time of year to read Wuthering Heights, anyway.
Andrea: I understand what you're saying about analysing the character in terms of the author's subconscious drives, but if you're going to do that, surely you have to start by having an intimate knowledge of the author. It would be irrational to the point of absurdity to assess the author from the character, then reverse the process and explain the character in terms of the author's subconscious drives.
My prior reading about Emily indicated that her singular preoccupation was the notion that material life is a prison from which she longed to escape. I suggest that it was from such a relatively simple base that she constructed the relationship between Catherine and Heathcliff.
Beverley: I've heard people express reservations before about C/H on the basis that there's something implicitly incestuous about it, but there's nothing in the book to suggest there was any blood relationship between them. Heathcliff was not Catherine's half brother unless you speculate on Andrea's suggestion, but why speculate?
Well, when you study psychology there are things that are common to most all people across the board. I think this is the basis for analysis on such matters. Basic and elemental 'drives', etc. For example its kind of like how people who have been diagnosed with certain mental illnesses have certain characteristics in common... i've known three people with borderline personality disorder, for example, and its uncanny some of the similarities between them, even with small mundane things. I once read a description of a few 'borderlines' and how alike they were and was shaken with some of the things they would do which are just like the three people i know.
I think Catherine and Heathcliff were in less in romantic love with one another than they were infatuated, maybe obsessed, and codependant upon each other, probably due to the hardships they'd shared growing up together.
But Catherine didn't experience any hardships. Heathcliff was the only one to be abused after old Mr Earnshaw died.
Anyway, I'm sticking with my view of Emily's intentions based on my understanding of her nature. And I know I might be wrong, but then who can know that they're right? And I repeat the point that any opinion as to the relationship between C and H is idle and pointless speculation without a firm opinion of their creator's nature.
She was treated badly by Hindley and even Joseph with all his preaching and punishments after her father's death. Not to the same degree as Heathcliff.
I'm not trying to argue you out of your opinion. I also don't think their love was of the romantic nature that film adaptations and most readers seem to read it as.
What exactly do you think Catherine means when she says 'I am Heathcliff?"
It's an enigmatic statement, isn't it? My view is based on two items of evidence:
1) Emily is well known for having regarded spiritual reality as being both more 'real' and more desirable than material reality.
2) Catherine is quite explicit in expressing her dislike of Heathcliff, and yet both are driven mad in their different ways by enforced separation.
It seems to me, therefore, that Emily envisaged them as one soul split into two bodies. And it isn't so unresonable to speculate from there that Emily drew them from two sides of her own nature - the light and the dark, if you like.
Interesting. I want to know more about Emily. Any recommended reading?
All my knowledge and gut feelings about Emily came from reading books about the Brontes generally, rather than Emily in particular. I don’t remember what the books were called – I took out everything the library had. I think the problem with books about Emily is this:
It seems she was a very private person who left no known diary, was not given to written correspondence, shunned publicity, and died before she had the chance to become known and ‘watched.’ How much can you find to write about such a person in order to fill a book? The result, or so I gather from what others have said, is that authors have presumed to construct all sorts of extreme ‘theories’ such as:
She had a secret lover.
She had an incestuous affair with her brother.
She didn’t write Wuthering Heights at all; Charlotte did – a theory that Charlotte rebutted in the preface to the third edition of Jane Eyre, when there was a suggestion doing the rounds that Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell were all one person.
And so on…
My views on Emily are based on anecdotal evidence, remarks by those who knew her, my own gut instinct deriving from the similarities in our natures, and, to a lesser extent, some of her poetry. I suppose her very mystery is part of what makes her so fascinating.
Post a Comment