Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, 1847.
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RATING: off the scale
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Page references to the novel are to the Wordsworth Classics edition (revised 2000). The whole story is revealed in detail, so do not read it if you would rather not know.
Emily Brontë is not a teenage scribbler in the throes of sexual awakening, and Wuthering Heights is not a love story. It is a set-to between ‘polite society’ and what lies untamed outside it, the work of a consummate artist, with a deep knowledge and understanding of the work of her literary forbears. Bunyan, Milton and Shakespeare are the most evident - not so much as direct influences, but more as central features of the cultural landscape that Brontë inhabits. It is a staggering creative achievement, far and away the greatest European novel of the nineteenth century; and its disruption of the notion of ‘polite society’ speaks directly and powerfully to the limited world of Jane Austen in particular.
The first three chapters form a prologue, before the chronological narrative begins, recounting the first two visits to Wuthering Heights, on successive days in 1801, of Mr Lockwood, Heathcliff’s new tenant at Thrushcross Grange. These take place a long way into the story, and Brontë could not have started as she does without already having the whole arc of the novel clear in her mind. At this point, Catherine Earnshaw (Linton after her marriage to Edgar Linton) is long dead, and Linton Heathcliff, Heathcliff’s son from his marriage to Edgar’s sister and Cathy’s sister-in-law, Isabella Linton (also long dead) has very recently died. Resident at Wuthering Heights are Heathcliff; Catherine Heathcliff, née Linton (daughter of Catherine Earnshaw and Edgar Linton), Linton Heathcliff’s young widow; Hareton Earnshaw, a direct descendant of the original Hareton Earnshaw, the first owner (1500) of Wuthering Heights, and the son of Hindley Earnshaw, whose father brought Heathcliff as a young boy to his home; the ‘stout housewife’, Zillah, and the servant Joseph, a sour Calvinist much given to preaching hellfire and damnation.
Mr Lockwood is a visitor from another world, that of polite society: in effect, he has wandered in from the pages of a Jane Austen novel, and he just cannot find his bearings. He finds Heathcliff’s household ‘completely removed from the stir of society’ (1). On his second visit, nobody initially opens the door to him; Catherine, whom he describes as exquisitely beautiful, declines to greet him or to make him tea, and addresses him curtly when they speak: the only sentiment her eyes evinced ‘hovered between scorn and a kind of desperation, singularly unnatural to be detected there’ (7). She refuses him assistance as the weather worsens, as does Heathcliff when he enters. The scene that then unfolds draws on the genre of comedy of manners, for its own distinctive purpose. Lockwood blunders through a series of misunderstandings regarding the relationships between the individual members of the household, first mistaking Catherine for Heathcliff’s wife, then mistaking Hareton Earnshaw for her husband. He is trying to make sense of what he sees in terms of families in the polite society from which he comes, but Heathcliff’s household is the antithesis of such a family – along with the relatively recently arrived Zillah, it consists of a sullen misanthrope, a hostile young widow, a young man who turns out to be bound to Heathcliff because his father gambled his land away to him, and a bigoted servant without a shred of humanity. Lockwood, unhappy in his conjectures regarding the relationships before him, begins ‘to feel unmistakably out of place in that pleasant family circle’ (9); and indeed he is: we are not in Kansas anymore: we have stepped away both from polite society, and from the comedy of manners as a genre. Wuthering Heights shares some key aspects of Austen’s fiction: land and property play central roles, as does marriage. But here everything is turned on its head. In Austen’s world, Cathy’s marriage to Linton would be an excellent match, but in Brontë’s it is a disaster; and where Austen’s characters aspire to marry well and for love, Heathcliff marries out of hatred, with the objective of revenge. He is an outsider, taken as a child from the streets of Liverpool by Earnshaw when he is homeless, talking ‘gibberish’ and ‘as good as dumb’ (25); the significance of his having the aspect of a dark-skinned gypsy is that the gypsy is an itinerant figure on the fringes of society.
Chapter 3 reveals the world we are in, as Lockwood stays the night, discovers a little of Cathy Earnshaw’s history, and dreams that her ghost appears at his window. By the device of having Lockwood observe, scratched into the ledge by his bed, ‘a name repeated in all kinds of characters, large and small – Catherine Earnshaw, here and there varied to Catherine Heathcliff, and then again to Catherine Linton’, we surmise that the crucial decision on which the story depends is whether Cathy chooses to marry Heathcliff or Linton. Diary entries by her in the religious tomes on the same ledge register Hindley Earnshaw’s cruelty towards Heathcliff after the death of Mr Earnshaw Sr., Cathy’s resolve to join forces with Heathcliff in rebellion, and Hindley’s determination to keep them apart (15). Lockwood’s two-part dream follows, involving first the preaching by the Reverend Jabes Branderham of a pious discourse that concludes by reference to ‘the sin that no Christian need pardon’(16), and second the appearance of Cathy’s distraught spirit at the window: in choosing Linton over Heathcliff, Cathy is committing an unpardonable sin; and after her death, while Heathcliff lives, her spirit will suffer the agony of separation. Only in death will he join her. Cathy and Heathcliff are not doomed lovers, then, but twin souls – the scale is existential, not sentimental, and it extends beyond this world.
By the end of Chapter 3, then, we know something of the arc of the story and its central themes. It is so far not a comedybut a tragedy of manners: Cathy as a child is wild, joyful and affectionate, and likes nothing more than to escape with Heathcliff to the moors to ‘ramble at liberty’. She will be tamed and ‘civilized’, but Heathcliff will not, and they will be split apart. Schooling is provided for her but denied to Heathcliff; and at first she tries to pass her learning on to him, but in the end she gives up the attempt. A decisive turning point comes when she is hunted and captured by the Lintons, kept at Thrushcross Grange for five weeks while her torn ankle heals, and has her manners ‘improved’ through a plan of reform by means of ‘fine clothes and flattery, which she took readily’: ‘so that instead of a wild, hatless little savage jumping into the house, and rushing to squeeze us all breathless, there alighted from a handsome black pony a very dignified person, with brown ringlets falling from the cover of a feathered beaver, and a long cloth habit, which she was obliged to hold up with both hands that she might sail in’ (36). Heathcliff makes a sorry contrast: ‘not to mention his clothes, which had seen three months’ service in mire and dust, and his thick uncombed hair, the surface of his face and hands was dismally beclouded’ (37). Things between them go as badly as might be expected. And as Cathy is drawn into the orbit of the Lintons, flaws develop in her character. As Nelly (Ellen) Dean, Cathy’s servant at Thrushcross Grange and the principal narrator describes her: ‘At fifteen she was the queen of the countryside; she had no peer; and she did turn out a haughty, headstrong creature!’ She becomes proud, arrogant and ‘full of ambition’ and adopts ‘a double character, without exactly intending to deceive anyone’ (47). That is to say, she learns to present herself as polite society expects. In the meantime Heathcliff swears revenge on Hindley (42), and descends into ‘savage sullenness and ferocity’, as if he were ‘possessed of something diabolical’ (46). One fateful day Cathy arranges for Edgar to visit, lies to Heathcliff about it, pinches and slaps Nelly to force her to leave the room, slaps Edgar himself, obliges him to stay, and seals his fate: in no time, they have confessed themselves lovers (51). She later discusses with Nelly her intention to marry Edgar, unaware that Heathcliff is listening: this is the event that drives him away. At the same time, she confesses to Nelly that she is very unhappy. She will marry Edgar, to be ‘the greatest woman of the neighbourhood’, but: ‘In my soul and in my heart, I’m convinced I am wrong!’ (56). And so she is.
There follows her account of having once dreamed that she was in heaven:
‘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. That will do to explain my secret, as well as the other. I’ve no more business to marry Edgar Linton than I have to be in heaven; and if the wicked man in there had not brought Heathcliff so low, I shouldn’t have thought of it. It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now; so he shall never know how I love him: and that, not because he’s handsome, Nelly, but because he’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same; and Linton’s is as different as a moonbeam from lightening, or frost from fire’ (55). Cathy, then, is a fallen angel; or to put it another way, she has eaten the fruit of the tree of polite society, and condemned herself and Heathcliff to expulsion from paradise.
It is at this precise moment, unbeknownst to Cathy, that Heathcliff leaves. In the brilliant passage that follows, Cathy dismisses the idea that she and Heathcliff could be separated, exclaiming: ‘Who is to separate us, pray? They ‘ll meet the fate of Milo!’ (56). She is entirely deluded, and has no idea what is at stake: it is she, and she alone, who can separate them, and he is already gone; and it is she who will meet the fate of Milo (trapped by the hands when he sought to split a living tree), if only briefly, when Lockwood dreams of trapping her hand in the window at Wuthering Heights. What she says next discloses the depth of the tragedy: ‘If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger: I should not seem part of it. … Nelly, I am Heathcliff!’ (59). Her existence is bound up with his, and she is committing an act of unimaginable folly.
Bewitched as she is by the lure of polite society, Cathy pretends to herself that marriage to Edgar will enable her to do good by Heathcliff (a suggestion that the worldly-wise Nelly immediately rebuffs). She condemns their twin souls to torment as a result: and a protracted and recurrent crisis ensues, as it dawns on her that she has lost him. She enters into a state of agitation; a brief and violent storm follows, misread by Joseph and Hindley but signifying the tumult in her soul; she sits outside all night in the rain in the hope that Heathcliff will return, then suffers a period of fever and delirium which incidentally brings about the death of Edgar’s parents when she is conveyed to Thrushcross Grange to convalesce (63). Her subsequent marriage to Linton is reported, virtually in passing (64); the household is broken up; and the story moves on to the return three years later of Heathcliff, now a wealthy and imposing man: he takes tea with Cathy and Edgar, and Edgar tries and fails to preserve the niceties of polite society (68-70). Cathy, still deluded, thinks that with Heathcliff back the harmony of her universe is restored, and declares herself to be an angel again (72). But Isabella develops an unexpected passion for Heathcliff, from which she will not be dissuaded, and Cathy grotesquely plays the matchmaker between them: Heathcliff, unattracted otherwise but aware that she is her brother’s heir, determines to marry her, making his motive clear: ‘And as to you, Catherine, I have a mind to speak a few words now, while we are at it. I want you to be aware that I know you have treated me infernally – infernally! Do you hear? And if you flatter yourself that I don’t perceive it, you are a fool; and if you think I can be consoled by sweet words, you are an idiot; and if you fancy I’ll suffer unrevenged, I’ll convince you of the contrary, in a very little while! Meantime, thank you for telling me your sister-in-law’s secret: I swear I’ll make the most of it. And stand you aside!’ (81). He sets about courting Isabella, and Cathy’s crisis deepens: she locks herself into her room for three days, refusing to eat, and is pitched into feverish bewilderment and madness; dreams that she is back in her old bed at Wuthering Heights; and pronounces her own epitaph:
‘I cannot say why I felt so wildly wretched: it must have been temporary derangement, for there is scarcely cause – But, supposing at twelve years old, I had been wrenched from the Heights, and every association, and my all in all, as Heathcliff was at that time, and been converted at a stroke into Mrs Linton, the lady of Thrushcross Grange, and the wife of a stranger: an exile, an outcast, thenceforth, from what had been my world – you may fancy a glimpse of the abyss where I grovelled! (…) Oh, I’m burning! I wish I were out of doors! I wish I were a girl again, half savage and hardy, and free . . . and laughing at injuries, not maddening under them! Why am I so changed? Why does my blood rush into a hell of tumult at a few words? I’m sure I should be myself were I once among the heather on those hills. Open the window again wide: fasten it open! Quick, why don’t you move?
…
I suppose we shall have plenty of lamentations now . . . I see we shall . . . but 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 headstone; and you may please yourself, whether you go to them or come to me!’ (91-3, emphasis mine).
Nelly takes this to be the raving of a fevered mind – but Cathy sees the choice she made for exactly what it was, though still without taking responsibility for it. Her ‘brain fever’ continues for two months; we learn that she is with child; and as her end approaches Heathcliff gains access to her – and speaks the truth to her, as he invariably does:
‘Why did you despise me? Why did you betray your own heart, Cathy? I have not one word of comfort. You deserve this. You have killed yourself. Yes, you may kiss me, and cry; and wring out my kisses and tears: they’ll blight you – they’ll damn you. You loved me – then what right had you to leave me? What right – answer me – for the poor fancy you felt for Linton? Because misery, and degradation, and death, and nothing that God or satan could inflict would have parted us, you, of your own will, did it. I have not broken your heart – you have broken it; and in breaking it, you have broken mine’ (117).
In short order Catherine Linton is born, and Cathy dies and is buried on the moor, prompting Edgar Linton to withdraw from society. His sister Isabella has earlier written to Nelly at length of the disaster that her marriage to Heathcliff has predictably become. She now manages to escape from Wuthering Heights (with child as it turns out), swiftly departs to somewhere ‘in the south, near London’, and in due course gives birth to Linton Heathcliff. Hindley Earnshaw succeeds in drinking himself to death, leaving his young son Hareton an orphan; and as he has mortgaged all his land to Heathcliff, the estate passes into his hands.
We are now at the mid-point of the book. Relatively little time has passed – Hindley Earnshaw is twenty-seven when he dies, Cathy not yet nineteen; Heathcliff is barely a year older; and Isabella a year younger. The universe has been thrown into chaos, and it remains to restore it to order again. That is to say, this is not the story of Cathy and Heathcliff, but an intricate dance over three generations, Catherine Linton, Linton Heathcliff and Hareton Earnshaw making up the third. Brontë skips unceremoniously twelve years forward, while they get through their childhoods. When she picks up the narrative again, the second generation of the Earnshaws and Lintons are almost entirely out of the picture, though Edgar Linton still has a role to play, and the focus is squarely on the third; and as before, the central theme is the clash between order and chaos: the norms of polite society on the one side, and its uncivilised and untamed outside on the other. Chapters 18 and 19 introduce this new generation, and set up the sequence of events that is to follow.
The central figure is Catherine Linton, who is her mother’s daughter, but with a significant twist:
‘She was the most winning thing that ever brought sunshine into a desolate house: a real beauty in face, with the Earnshaw’s handsome dark eyes, but the Linton’s fair skin, and small features, and yellow curling hair. Her spirit was high, though not rough, and qualified by a heart sensitive and lively to excess in its affections. That capacity for intense attractions reminded me of her mother: still, she did not resemble her; for she could be soft and mild as a dove, and she had a gentle voice and pensive expression: her anger was never furious; her love never fierce: it was deep and tender’.
She does have some ‘faults to foil her gifts’; but, home-educated by her loving father, ‘curiosity and a quick intellect urged her into an apt scholar: she learned rapidly and eagerly, and did honour to his teaching’; and until she is thirteen, she knows only Thrushcross Grange, and Mr Heathcliff does not exist for her (137). At a stroke, ‘polite society’ has its representative, destined to do battle with Heathcliff, and prevail.
Edgar Linton is summoned by Isabella, who is dying, to take Linton back to Thrushcross Grange, and while he is away, Catherine escapes Nelly’s supervision and finds her way to Wuthering Heights, where she meets Hareton. Their association begins badly, as Hareton’s dogs attack Catherine’s when she reaches the farm. But at her request he shows her the ‘Fairy Cave’ and other local delights, then takes her inside; and when Nelly arrives in search of her, ‘she seemed perfectly at home, laughing and chattering, in the best spirits imaginable, to Hareton – now a great, strong lad of eighteen – who stared at her with considerable curiosity and astonishment: comprehending precious little of the fluent succession of remarks and questions which her tongue never ceased pouring forth’ (140).
The course of true love proves anything but smooth. Cathy has just as much difficulty in making sense of the household as Lockwood will later, mistaking Hareton first for the son of the owner, then for a servant, before reacting with incredulity when she is informed that he is her cousin. For his part, Hareton is first angered by Catherine’s slighting treatment of him; but ‘recovering from his disgust at being taken for a servant’, he is moved by her distress, fetches her pony, and offers her a puppy (which she refuses) as a gift. As with Catherine, Nelly is our guide to Hareton’s character, and the manner in which it differs from that of his father, describing him as ‘a well made, athletic youth, good looking in features, and stout and healthy, but attired in garment befitting his daily occupations of working on the farm, and lounging among the moors after rabbits and game’; and adding that ‘I thought I could detect in his physiognomy a mind owning better qualities than his father ever possessed’. Heathcliff has not subjected him to physical violence, but rather: ‘he appeared to have bent his malevolence on making him a brute; he was never taught to read or write; never rebuked for any bad habit which did not annoy his keeper; never led a single step towards virtue, or guarded by a single precept against vice’. At the same time, the household is very different to what it was, with Hindley gone and Zillah in command: ‘the house, inside, had regained its ancient aspect of comfort under female management, and the scenes of riot common in Hindley’s time were not now enacted within its walls’ (143).
The third of the trio, Linton Heathcliff, who arrives at Thrushcross Grange following the death of his mother, is a sickly, ailing and ‘peevish’ child, who claims that he cannot sit in in a chair, or, we later learn, eat porridge. He is quickly taken to Wuthering Heights, at his father’s insistence, and without Catherine’s knowledge. At this point, then, Catherine and Linton are apart; Heathcliff values Linton as the prospective heir to the Linton property, and declares that he will see to his education by a private tutor, ‘with a view to preserve the superior and the gentleman in him, above his associates’ (152). Brontë moves the story briskly another three years on, to Catherine’s sixteenth birthday. She is out with Nelly, looking for a colony of moor-game (grouse); she comes across Heathcliff and Hareton; and Heathcliff invites her into his house, where ‘you shall receive a kind welcome’ (155). Nelly accuses Heathcliff of ‘a bad design’ in thereby letting her know that Linton is there:
‘My design is as honest as possible. I’ll inform you of its whole scope,’ he said. ‘That the two cousins may fall in love, and get married. I’m acting generously to your master. His young chit has no expectations, and should he second my wishes, she’ll be provided for at once as joint successor with Linton.’
‘If Linton died,’ I answered, ‘and his life is quite uncertain, Catherine would be the heir.’
‘No, she would not,’ he said. ‘There is no clause in the will to secure it so: his property would go to me; but, to prevent disputes, I desire their union, and I am resolved to bring it about’ (156).
At the same time, Heathcliff reveals his determination to exclude Hareton from polite society:
‘I’ve a pleasure in him,’ he continued reflecting aloud. ‘He has satisfied my expectations. If he were a born fool I should not enjoy it half so much. But he’s no fool; and I can sympathise with all his feelings, having felt them myself. I know what he suffers now, for instance, exactly: it is merely a beginning of what he shall suffer, though. And he’ll never be able to emerge from his bathos of coarseness and ignorance. I’ve got him faster than his scoundrel of a father secured me, and lower; for he takes a pride in his brutishness. I’ve taught him to scorn everything extra-animal as silly and weak. … And the best of it is, Hareton is damnably fond of me! You’ll own that I’ve outmatched Hindley there’ (159).
In what follows, Hareton Earnshaw is unable to read the inscription over the door (NB: it reads 1500 Hareton Earnshaw), and Linton mocks him. Catherine is persuaded by her father on her return home not to visit further, but enters a clandestine correspondence with Linton, terminated when Nelly discovers it. Months pass. In the autumn, as Edgar Linton’s health declines, Catherine learns from a chance encounter with Heathcliff that he will be away for a week, and that Linton is pining for her and looking likely to die. Catherine and Nelly visit the next day, Cathy and Linton are reconciled, Nelly is laid up for three weeks with a cold, and Cathy secretly resumes her visits to Wuthering Heights. One particular visit goes badly: Hareton has been learning his letters and haltingly reads his name over the door for Catherine; she mocks him, and they act violently towards one another (181-3). Catherine continues to visit, growing closer to Linton, Nelly recovers, and finds out. Catherine desists from visiting; Edgar Linton gets worse and, foreseeing his death, warms to the possibility of the marriage and enters into correspondence with young Linton; and in the summer of her eighteenth year Catherine is allowed to ride out with Nelly to meet him on neutral ground.
Events move quickly from this point. On a second such outing, with Edgar Linton failing fast, Catherine and Nelly are lured into Wuthering Heights, and locked in; Nelly is confined to a room for four days and waited on by Hareton, and in the meantime, Catherine and Linton are married. Catherine manages to get away in time to be at her father’s bedside when he dies; Heathcliff arrives to take her back to Wuthering Heights; she taunts him (“Mr Heathcliff, you have nobodyto love you; and however miserable you make us, we shall still have the revenge of thinking that your cruelty arises from your greater misery!’, 208); and he recounts how he has opened Cathy’s coffin, and how he felt her presence on the day she was buried, but has not felt it since despite his yearning for her. Linton dies, leaving his estate to his father. Hareton and Cathy clash repeatedly, despite his awkward attempts to please her; he stumbles in his efforts to read; and the glimpse of another world throws him into confusion: ‘He had been content with daily labour and rough animal enjoyments, till Catherine crossed his path. Shame at her scorn, and hope of her approval, were his first prompters to higher pursuits; and instead of guarding him from one, and winning him the other, his endeavours to raise himself had produced just the opposite result’ (219). A crack appears in Heathcliff’s scheme of revenge, as Hareton’s embrace of brutishness is undermined by his love for Catherine; and Heathcliff (who has declared his sympathy for Hareton) begins to see things differently: ‘It will be odd if I thwart myself! … But, when I look for his father in his face, I find her every day more! How the devil is he so like? I can hardly bear to see him’ (220). And with that, everything is in place for the finale.
The final three chapters form an epilogue that documents Catherine’s routing of Heathcliff and turns upside down the circumstances of the ‘prologue’ set out in the first three. Lockwood, now the narrator, has left Thrushcross Grange, returning only eight months later. Visiting Wuthering Heights, he finds that all is changed:
‘I had neither to climb the gate, nor to knock – it yielded to my hand. That is an improvement! I thought. And I noticed another, by the aid of my nostrils; a fragrance of stocks and wall flowers, wafted on the air, from amongst the homely fruit trees’ (222).
Inside, all is sweetness and light, the grumblings of Joseph apart. Catherine is teaching Hareton to read, as they tease each other affectionately; and Heathcliff, it transpires, is three months dead. Nelly recounts to Thornwood how Catherine and Hareton grew close, and Catherine faced Heathcliff down, shifting the balance of power in the household: in the crucial encounter, Catherine and Hareton are challenged by Heathcliff for uprooting some currant bushes to plant flowers, and Catherine ‘puts in her tongue’:
‘We wanted to plant some flowers there,’ she cried. ‘I’m the only person to blame, for I wished him to do it.’
‘And who the devil gave you leave to touch a stick about the place?’ demanded her father-in-law, much surprised. ‘And who ordered you to obey her?’ he added, turning to Hareton.
The latter was speechless; his cousin replied –
You shouldn’t grudge us a few yards of earth, for me to ornament, when you have taken all my land!’
‘Your land, insolent slut? You never had any!’ said Heathcliff.
‘And my money,’ she continued, returning his angry glare, and meantime, biting a piece of crust, the remnant of her breakfast.
‘Silence! he exclaimed. ‘Get done, and begone!’
‘And Hareton’s land, and his money,’ pursued the reckless thing. ‘Hareton and I are friends now; and I shall tell him all about you!’
The master seemed confounded a moment: he grew pale, and rose up, eyeing her all the while, with an expression of mortal hate.
‘If you strike me, Hareton will strike you!’ she said, ‘so you may as well sit down’ (232).
After a brief confrontation, Heathcliff backs down, and Hareton’s transformation is completed: ‘His honest, warm and intelligent nature shook off rapidly the clouds of ignorance and degradation in which it had been bred; and Catherine’s sincere commendations acted as a spur to his industry (233-4). Catherine is Cathy’s daughter, and Hareton her nephew – and increasingly, Heathcliff sees her in both of them, and is disarmed: ‘I have lost the facility of enjoying their destruction, and I am too idle to destroy for nothing’ (234). He ceases to oppose them; his thoughts turn solely to Cathy, and the possibility of joining her; he comes to imagine her presence before him; and willingly embraces his death.
Brontë manages her narrative with extraordinary skill throughout, and is sparing in pointing the moral. It falls to Joseph, originally a loyal servant to old Mr Earnshaw and hostile to young Heathcliff, to pass judgement:
‘Th’ divil’s harried off his soul,’ he cried, ‘and he muh hev his carcass intuh t’ bargin, for ow’t Aw care! Ech! What a wicked un he looks grinning at death!’ and the old sinner grinned in mockery.
I thought he intended to cut a caper round the bed; but suddenly composing himself, he fell on his knees, and raised his hands, and returned thanks that the lawful master and the ancient stock were restored to their rights (244).
Reflecting, then, on the whole arc of the story from the perspective of its conclusion, the full import of a number of aspects of the prologue becomes clear: first, Hareton Earnshaw’s name is again over the door – he has learned to know it, and with marriage to Catherine he will reclaim his inheritance; second, regarding the names scratched in the wood, Heathcliff’s Cathy is born an Earnshaw, and chooses to become Cathy Linton rather than Cathy Heathcliff; but it is Catherine Linton who will become Catherine Heathcliff and finally Catherine Earnshaw, and thereby unite the Earnshaw and Linton properties; and third, even in the degraded circumstances of the Heathcliff household, both Hareton and Catherine are shown to retain a spark of humanity: it is Hareton who takes Lockwood into the house and invites him to sit down, and later offers to go with him as far as the park; and Catherine who insists that a man’s life is of more consequence than one evening’s neglect of the horses: ‘somebody must go’, with Lockwood adding, ‘more kindly than I expected’ (11). Brontë unobtrusively avoids at the outset any inconsistency in the denouement of the story.
The overall pattern that is traced is as elegant as can be. At the outset, Wuthering Heights is in the hands of the Earnshaws, and Thrushcross Grange in those of the Lintons; and as Nelly Dean points out to Lockwood on the first meeting, Hareton is the last of the Earnshaws, as ‘Miss Cathy’ is the last of the Lintons (24). Heathcliff, by bringing about the marriage of Catherine Linton to Linton Heathcliff in his pursuit of revenge will unwittingly be the agent of the unification of the two families and their property. And the whole novel is built upon the parallel and contrasting stories of Cathy Earnshaw and her daughter Catherine Linton (wrong and right choices; false and true ‘civilisation’; and one marriage that pitches the universe into chaos, and another - Catherine’s second, made from her own choice - that sets it back to rights). The true love story is not that between Cathy and Heathcliff, but that between Catherine and Hareton. Emily Brontë’s first and only novel is a work of consummate skill, and creative genius, and I hope she knew that, when she put down her pen.
Emily Brontë is not a teenage scribbler in the throes of sexual awakening, and Wuthering Heights is not a love story. It is a set-to between ‘polite society’ and what lies untamed outside it, the work of a consummate artist, with a deep knowledge and understanding of the work of her literary forbears. Bunyan, Milton and Shakespeare are the most evident - not so much as direct influences, but more as central features of the cultural landscape that Brontë inhabits. It is a staggering creative achievement, far and away the greatest European novel of the nineteenth century; and its disruption of the notion of ‘polite society’ speaks directly and powerfully to the limited world of Jane Austen in particular.
The first three chapters form a prologue, before the chronological narrative begins, recounting the first two visits to Wuthering Heights, on successive days in 1801, of Mr Lockwood, Heathcliff’s new tenant at Thrushcross Grange. These take place a long way into the story, and Brontë could not have started as she does without already having the whole arc of the novel clear in her mind. At this point, Catherine Earnshaw (Linton after her marriage to Edgar Linton) is long dead, and Linton Heathcliff, Heathcliff’s son from his marriage to Edgar’s sister and Cathy’s sister-in-law, Isabella Linton (also long dead) has very recently died. Resident at Wuthering Heights are Heathcliff; Catherine Heathcliff, née Linton (daughter of Catherine Earnshaw and Edgar Linton), Linton Heathcliff’s young widow; Hareton Earnshaw, a direct descendant of the original Hareton Earnshaw, the first owner (1500) of Wuthering Heights, and the son of Hindley Earnshaw, whose father brought Heathcliff as a young boy to his home; the ‘stout housewife’, Zillah, and the servant Joseph, a sour Calvinist much given to preaching hellfire and damnation.
Mr Lockwood is a visitor from another world, that of polite society: in effect, he has wandered in from the pages of a Jane Austen novel, and he just cannot find his bearings. He finds Heathcliff’s household ‘completely removed from the stir of society’ (1). On his second visit, nobody initially opens the door to him; Catherine, whom he describes as exquisitely beautiful, declines to greet him or to make him tea, and addresses him curtly when they speak: the only sentiment her eyes evinced ‘hovered between scorn and a kind of desperation, singularly unnatural to be detected there’ (7). She refuses him assistance as the weather worsens, as does Heathcliff when he enters. The scene that then unfolds draws on the genre of comedy of manners, for its own distinctive purpose. Lockwood blunders through a series of misunderstandings regarding the relationships between the individual members of the household, first mistaking Catherine for Heathcliff’s wife, then mistaking Hareton Earnshaw for her husband. He is trying to make sense of what he sees in terms of families in the polite society from which he comes, but Heathcliff’s household is the antithesis of such a family – along with the relatively recently arrived Zillah, it consists of a sullen misanthrope, a hostile young widow, a young man who turns out to be bound to Heathcliff because his father gambled his land away to him, and a bigoted servant without a shred of humanity. Lockwood, unhappy in his conjectures regarding the relationships before him, begins ‘to feel unmistakably out of place in that pleasant family circle’ (9); and indeed he is: we are not in Kansas anymore: we have stepped away both from polite society, and from the comedy of manners as a genre. Wuthering Heights shares some key aspects of Austen’s fiction: land and property play central roles, as does marriage. But here everything is turned on its head. In Austen’s world, Cathy’s marriage to Linton would be an excellent match, but in Brontë’s it is a disaster; and where Austen’s characters aspire to marry well and for love, Heathcliff marries out of hatred, with the objective of revenge. He is an outsider, taken as a child from the streets of Liverpool by Earnshaw when he is homeless, talking ‘gibberish’ and ‘as good as dumb’ (25); the significance of his having the aspect of a dark-skinned gypsy is that the gypsy is an itinerant figure on the fringes of society.
Chapter 3 reveals the world we are in, as Lockwood stays the night, discovers a little of Cathy Earnshaw’s history, and dreams that her ghost appears at his window. By the device of having Lockwood observe, scratched into the ledge by his bed, ‘a name repeated in all kinds of characters, large and small – Catherine Earnshaw, here and there varied to Catherine Heathcliff, and then again to Catherine Linton’, we surmise that the crucial decision on which the story depends is whether Cathy chooses to marry Heathcliff or Linton. Diary entries by her in the religious tomes on the same ledge register Hindley Earnshaw’s cruelty towards Heathcliff after the death of Mr Earnshaw Sr., Cathy’s resolve to join forces with Heathcliff in rebellion, and Hindley’s determination to keep them apart (15). Lockwood’s two-part dream follows, involving first the preaching by the Reverend Jabes Branderham of a pious discourse that concludes by reference to ‘the sin that no Christian need pardon’(16), and second the appearance of Cathy’s distraught spirit at the window: in choosing Linton over Heathcliff, Cathy is committing an unpardonable sin; and after her death, while Heathcliff lives, her spirit will suffer the agony of separation. Only in death will he join her. Cathy and Heathcliff are not doomed lovers, then, but twin souls – the scale is existential, not sentimental, and it extends beyond this world.
By the end of Chapter 3, then, we know something of the arc of the story and its central themes. It is so far not a comedybut a tragedy of manners: Cathy as a child is wild, joyful and affectionate, and likes nothing more than to escape with Heathcliff to the moors to ‘ramble at liberty’. She will be tamed and ‘civilized’, but Heathcliff will not, and they will be split apart. Schooling is provided for her but denied to Heathcliff; and at first she tries to pass her learning on to him, but in the end she gives up the attempt. A decisive turning point comes when she is hunted and captured by the Lintons, kept at Thrushcross Grange for five weeks while her torn ankle heals, and has her manners ‘improved’ through a plan of reform by means of ‘fine clothes and flattery, which she took readily’: ‘so that instead of a wild, hatless little savage jumping into the house, and rushing to squeeze us all breathless, there alighted from a handsome black pony a very dignified person, with brown ringlets falling from the cover of a feathered beaver, and a long cloth habit, which she was obliged to hold up with both hands that she might sail in’ (36). Heathcliff makes a sorry contrast: ‘not to mention his clothes, which had seen three months’ service in mire and dust, and his thick uncombed hair, the surface of his face and hands was dismally beclouded’ (37). Things between them go as badly as might be expected. And as Cathy is drawn into the orbit of the Lintons, flaws develop in her character. As Nelly (Ellen) Dean, Cathy’s servant at Thrushcross Grange and the principal narrator describes her: ‘At fifteen she was the queen of the countryside; she had no peer; and she did turn out a haughty, headstrong creature!’ She becomes proud, arrogant and ‘full of ambition’ and adopts ‘a double character, without exactly intending to deceive anyone’ (47). That is to say, she learns to present herself as polite society expects. In the meantime Heathcliff swears revenge on Hindley (42), and descends into ‘savage sullenness and ferocity’, as if he were ‘possessed of something diabolical’ (46). One fateful day Cathy arranges for Edgar to visit, lies to Heathcliff about it, pinches and slaps Nelly to force her to leave the room, slaps Edgar himself, obliges him to stay, and seals his fate: in no time, they have confessed themselves lovers (51). She later discusses with Nelly her intention to marry Edgar, unaware that Heathcliff is listening: this is the event that drives him away. At the same time, she confesses to Nelly that she is very unhappy. She will marry Edgar, to be ‘the greatest woman of the neighbourhood’, but: ‘In my soul and in my heart, I’m convinced I am wrong!’ (56). And so she is.
There follows her account of having once dreamed that she was in heaven:
‘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. That will do to explain my secret, as well as the other. I’ve no more business to marry Edgar Linton than I have to be in heaven; and if the wicked man in there had not brought Heathcliff so low, I shouldn’t have thought of it. It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now; so he shall never know how I love him: and that, not because he’s handsome, Nelly, but because he’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same; and Linton’s is as different as a moonbeam from lightening, or frost from fire’ (55). Cathy, then, is a fallen angel; or to put it another way, she has eaten the fruit of the tree of polite society, and condemned herself and Heathcliff to expulsion from paradise.
It is at this precise moment, unbeknownst to Cathy, that Heathcliff leaves. In the brilliant passage that follows, Cathy dismisses the idea that she and Heathcliff could be separated, exclaiming: ‘Who is to separate us, pray? They ‘ll meet the fate of Milo!’ (56). She is entirely deluded, and has no idea what is at stake: it is she, and she alone, who can separate them, and he is already gone; and it is she who will meet the fate of Milo (trapped by the hands when he sought to split a living tree), if only briefly, when Lockwood dreams of trapping her hand in the window at Wuthering Heights. What she says next discloses the depth of the tragedy: ‘If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger: I should not seem part of it. … Nelly, I am Heathcliff!’ (59). Her existence is bound up with his, and she is committing an act of unimaginable folly.
Bewitched as she is by the lure of polite society, Cathy pretends to herself that marriage to Edgar will enable her to do good by Heathcliff (a suggestion that the worldly-wise Nelly immediately rebuffs). She condemns their twin souls to torment as a result: and a protracted and recurrent crisis ensues, as it dawns on her that she has lost him. She enters into a state of agitation; a brief and violent storm follows, misread by Joseph and Hindley but signifying the tumult in her soul; she sits outside all night in the rain in the hope that Heathcliff will return, then suffers a period of fever and delirium which incidentally brings about the death of Edgar’s parents when she is conveyed to Thrushcross Grange to convalesce (63). Her subsequent marriage to Linton is reported, virtually in passing (64); the household is broken up; and the story moves on to the return three years later of Heathcliff, now a wealthy and imposing man: he takes tea with Cathy and Edgar, and Edgar tries and fails to preserve the niceties of polite society (68-70). Cathy, still deluded, thinks that with Heathcliff back the harmony of her universe is restored, and declares herself to be an angel again (72). But Isabella develops an unexpected passion for Heathcliff, from which she will not be dissuaded, and Cathy grotesquely plays the matchmaker between them: Heathcliff, unattracted otherwise but aware that she is her brother’s heir, determines to marry her, making his motive clear: ‘And as to you, Catherine, I have a mind to speak a few words now, while we are at it. I want you to be aware that I know you have treated me infernally – infernally! Do you hear? And if you flatter yourself that I don’t perceive it, you are a fool; and if you think I can be consoled by sweet words, you are an idiot; and if you fancy I’ll suffer unrevenged, I’ll convince you of the contrary, in a very little while! Meantime, thank you for telling me your sister-in-law’s secret: I swear I’ll make the most of it. And stand you aside!’ (81). He sets about courting Isabella, and Cathy’s crisis deepens: she locks herself into her room for three days, refusing to eat, and is pitched into feverish bewilderment and madness; dreams that she is back in her old bed at Wuthering Heights; and pronounces her own epitaph:
‘I cannot say why I felt so wildly wretched: it must have been temporary derangement, for there is scarcely cause – But, supposing at twelve years old, I had been wrenched from the Heights, and every association, and my all in all, as Heathcliff was at that time, and been converted at a stroke into Mrs Linton, the lady of Thrushcross Grange, and the wife of a stranger: an exile, an outcast, thenceforth, from what had been my world – you may fancy a glimpse of the abyss where I grovelled! (…) Oh, I’m burning! I wish I were out of doors! I wish I were a girl again, half savage and hardy, and free . . . and laughing at injuries, not maddening under them! Why am I so changed? Why does my blood rush into a hell of tumult at a few words? I’m sure I should be myself were I once among the heather on those hills. Open the window again wide: fasten it open! Quick, why don’t you move?
…
I suppose we shall have plenty of lamentations now . . . I see we shall . . . but 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 headstone; and you may please yourself, whether you go to them or come to me!’ (91-3, emphasis mine).
Nelly takes this to be the raving of a fevered mind – but Cathy sees the choice she made for exactly what it was, though still without taking responsibility for it. Her ‘brain fever’ continues for two months; we learn that she is with child; and as her end approaches Heathcliff gains access to her – and speaks the truth to her, as he invariably does:
‘Why did you despise me? Why did you betray your own heart, Cathy? I have not one word of comfort. You deserve this. You have killed yourself. Yes, you may kiss me, and cry; and wring out my kisses and tears: they’ll blight you – they’ll damn you. You loved me – then what right had you to leave me? What right – answer me – for the poor fancy you felt for Linton? Because misery, and degradation, and death, and nothing that God or satan could inflict would have parted us, you, of your own will, did it. I have not broken your heart – you have broken it; and in breaking it, you have broken mine’ (117).
In short order Catherine Linton is born, and Cathy dies and is buried on the moor, prompting Edgar Linton to withdraw from society. His sister Isabella has earlier written to Nelly at length of the disaster that her marriage to Heathcliff has predictably become. She now manages to escape from Wuthering Heights (with child as it turns out), swiftly departs to somewhere ‘in the south, near London’, and in due course gives birth to Linton Heathcliff. Hindley Earnshaw succeeds in drinking himself to death, leaving his young son Hareton an orphan; and as he has mortgaged all his land to Heathcliff, the estate passes into his hands.
We are now at the mid-point of the book. Relatively little time has passed – Hindley Earnshaw is twenty-seven when he dies, Cathy not yet nineteen; Heathcliff is barely a year older; and Isabella a year younger. The universe has been thrown into chaos, and it remains to restore it to order again. That is to say, this is not the story of Cathy and Heathcliff, but an intricate dance over three generations, Catherine Linton, Linton Heathcliff and Hareton Earnshaw making up the third. Brontë skips unceremoniously twelve years forward, while they get through their childhoods. When she picks up the narrative again, the second generation of the Earnshaws and Lintons are almost entirely out of the picture, though Edgar Linton still has a role to play, and the focus is squarely on the third; and as before, the central theme is the clash between order and chaos: the norms of polite society on the one side, and its uncivilised and untamed outside on the other. Chapters 18 and 19 introduce this new generation, and set up the sequence of events that is to follow.
The central figure is Catherine Linton, who is her mother’s daughter, but with a significant twist:
‘She was the most winning thing that ever brought sunshine into a desolate house: a real beauty in face, with the Earnshaw’s handsome dark eyes, but the Linton’s fair skin, and small features, and yellow curling hair. Her spirit was high, though not rough, and qualified by a heart sensitive and lively to excess in its affections. That capacity for intense attractions reminded me of her mother: still, she did not resemble her; for she could be soft and mild as a dove, and she had a gentle voice and pensive expression: her anger was never furious; her love never fierce: it was deep and tender’.
She does have some ‘faults to foil her gifts’; but, home-educated by her loving father, ‘curiosity and a quick intellect urged her into an apt scholar: she learned rapidly and eagerly, and did honour to his teaching’; and until she is thirteen, she knows only Thrushcross Grange, and Mr Heathcliff does not exist for her (137). At a stroke, ‘polite society’ has its representative, destined to do battle with Heathcliff, and prevail.
Edgar Linton is summoned by Isabella, who is dying, to take Linton back to Thrushcross Grange, and while he is away, Catherine escapes Nelly’s supervision and finds her way to Wuthering Heights, where she meets Hareton. Their association begins badly, as Hareton’s dogs attack Catherine’s when she reaches the farm. But at her request he shows her the ‘Fairy Cave’ and other local delights, then takes her inside; and when Nelly arrives in search of her, ‘she seemed perfectly at home, laughing and chattering, in the best spirits imaginable, to Hareton – now a great, strong lad of eighteen – who stared at her with considerable curiosity and astonishment: comprehending precious little of the fluent succession of remarks and questions which her tongue never ceased pouring forth’ (140).
The course of true love proves anything but smooth. Cathy has just as much difficulty in making sense of the household as Lockwood will later, mistaking Hareton first for the son of the owner, then for a servant, before reacting with incredulity when she is informed that he is her cousin. For his part, Hareton is first angered by Catherine’s slighting treatment of him; but ‘recovering from his disgust at being taken for a servant’, he is moved by her distress, fetches her pony, and offers her a puppy (which she refuses) as a gift. As with Catherine, Nelly is our guide to Hareton’s character, and the manner in which it differs from that of his father, describing him as ‘a well made, athletic youth, good looking in features, and stout and healthy, but attired in garment befitting his daily occupations of working on the farm, and lounging among the moors after rabbits and game’; and adding that ‘I thought I could detect in his physiognomy a mind owning better qualities than his father ever possessed’. Heathcliff has not subjected him to physical violence, but rather: ‘he appeared to have bent his malevolence on making him a brute; he was never taught to read or write; never rebuked for any bad habit which did not annoy his keeper; never led a single step towards virtue, or guarded by a single precept against vice’. At the same time, the household is very different to what it was, with Hindley gone and Zillah in command: ‘the house, inside, had regained its ancient aspect of comfort under female management, and the scenes of riot common in Hindley’s time were not now enacted within its walls’ (143).
The third of the trio, Linton Heathcliff, who arrives at Thrushcross Grange following the death of his mother, is a sickly, ailing and ‘peevish’ child, who claims that he cannot sit in in a chair, or, we later learn, eat porridge. He is quickly taken to Wuthering Heights, at his father’s insistence, and without Catherine’s knowledge. At this point, then, Catherine and Linton are apart; Heathcliff values Linton as the prospective heir to the Linton property, and declares that he will see to his education by a private tutor, ‘with a view to preserve the superior and the gentleman in him, above his associates’ (152). Brontë moves the story briskly another three years on, to Catherine’s sixteenth birthday. She is out with Nelly, looking for a colony of moor-game (grouse); she comes across Heathcliff and Hareton; and Heathcliff invites her into his house, where ‘you shall receive a kind welcome’ (155). Nelly accuses Heathcliff of ‘a bad design’ in thereby letting her know that Linton is there:
‘My design is as honest as possible. I’ll inform you of its whole scope,’ he said. ‘That the two cousins may fall in love, and get married. I’m acting generously to your master. His young chit has no expectations, and should he second my wishes, she’ll be provided for at once as joint successor with Linton.’
‘If Linton died,’ I answered, ‘and his life is quite uncertain, Catherine would be the heir.’
‘No, she would not,’ he said. ‘There is no clause in the will to secure it so: his property would go to me; but, to prevent disputes, I desire their union, and I am resolved to bring it about’ (156).
At the same time, Heathcliff reveals his determination to exclude Hareton from polite society:
‘I’ve a pleasure in him,’ he continued reflecting aloud. ‘He has satisfied my expectations. If he were a born fool I should not enjoy it half so much. But he’s no fool; and I can sympathise with all his feelings, having felt them myself. I know what he suffers now, for instance, exactly: it is merely a beginning of what he shall suffer, though. And he’ll never be able to emerge from his bathos of coarseness and ignorance. I’ve got him faster than his scoundrel of a father secured me, and lower; for he takes a pride in his brutishness. I’ve taught him to scorn everything extra-animal as silly and weak. … And the best of it is, Hareton is damnably fond of me! You’ll own that I’ve outmatched Hindley there’ (159).
In what follows, Hareton Earnshaw is unable to read the inscription over the door (NB: it reads 1500 Hareton Earnshaw), and Linton mocks him. Catherine is persuaded by her father on her return home not to visit further, but enters a clandestine correspondence with Linton, terminated when Nelly discovers it. Months pass. In the autumn, as Edgar Linton’s health declines, Catherine learns from a chance encounter with Heathcliff that he will be away for a week, and that Linton is pining for her and looking likely to die. Catherine and Nelly visit the next day, Cathy and Linton are reconciled, Nelly is laid up for three weeks with a cold, and Cathy secretly resumes her visits to Wuthering Heights. One particular visit goes badly: Hareton has been learning his letters and haltingly reads his name over the door for Catherine; she mocks him, and they act violently towards one another (181-3). Catherine continues to visit, growing closer to Linton, Nelly recovers, and finds out. Catherine desists from visiting; Edgar Linton gets worse and, foreseeing his death, warms to the possibility of the marriage and enters into correspondence with young Linton; and in the summer of her eighteenth year Catherine is allowed to ride out with Nelly to meet him on neutral ground.
Events move quickly from this point. On a second such outing, with Edgar Linton failing fast, Catherine and Nelly are lured into Wuthering Heights, and locked in; Nelly is confined to a room for four days and waited on by Hareton, and in the meantime, Catherine and Linton are married. Catherine manages to get away in time to be at her father’s bedside when he dies; Heathcliff arrives to take her back to Wuthering Heights; she taunts him (“Mr Heathcliff, you have nobodyto love you; and however miserable you make us, we shall still have the revenge of thinking that your cruelty arises from your greater misery!’, 208); and he recounts how he has opened Cathy’s coffin, and how he felt her presence on the day she was buried, but has not felt it since despite his yearning for her. Linton dies, leaving his estate to his father. Hareton and Cathy clash repeatedly, despite his awkward attempts to please her; he stumbles in his efforts to read; and the glimpse of another world throws him into confusion: ‘He had been content with daily labour and rough animal enjoyments, till Catherine crossed his path. Shame at her scorn, and hope of her approval, were his first prompters to higher pursuits; and instead of guarding him from one, and winning him the other, his endeavours to raise himself had produced just the opposite result’ (219). A crack appears in Heathcliff’s scheme of revenge, as Hareton’s embrace of brutishness is undermined by his love for Catherine; and Heathcliff (who has declared his sympathy for Hareton) begins to see things differently: ‘It will be odd if I thwart myself! … But, when I look for his father in his face, I find her every day more! How the devil is he so like? I can hardly bear to see him’ (220). And with that, everything is in place for the finale.
The final three chapters form an epilogue that documents Catherine’s routing of Heathcliff and turns upside down the circumstances of the ‘prologue’ set out in the first three. Lockwood, now the narrator, has left Thrushcross Grange, returning only eight months later. Visiting Wuthering Heights, he finds that all is changed:
‘I had neither to climb the gate, nor to knock – it yielded to my hand. That is an improvement! I thought. And I noticed another, by the aid of my nostrils; a fragrance of stocks and wall flowers, wafted on the air, from amongst the homely fruit trees’ (222).
Inside, all is sweetness and light, the grumblings of Joseph apart. Catherine is teaching Hareton to read, as they tease each other affectionately; and Heathcliff, it transpires, is three months dead. Nelly recounts to Thornwood how Catherine and Hareton grew close, and Catherine faced Heathcliff down, shifting the balance of power in the household: in the crucial encounter, Catherine and Hareton are challenged by Heathcliff for uprooting some currant bushes to plant flowers, and Catherine ‘puts in her tongue’:
‘We wanted to plant some flowers there,’ she cried. ‘I’m the only person to blame, for I wished him to do it.’
‘And who the devil gave you leave to touch a stick about the place?’ demanded her father-in-law, much surprised. ‘And who ordered you to obey her?’ he added, turning to Hareton.
The latter was speechless; his cousin replied –
You shouldn’t grudge us a few yards of earth, for me to ornament, when you have taken all my land!’
‘Your land, insolent slut? You never had any!’ said Heathcliff.
‘And my money,’ she continued, returning his angry glare, and meantime, biting a piece of crust, the remnant of her breakfast.
‘Silence! he exclaimed. ‘Get done, and begone!’
‘And Hareton’s land, and his money,’ pursued the reckless thing. ‘Hareton and I are friends now; and I shall tell him all about you!’
The master seemed confounded a moment: he grew pale, and rose up, eyeing her all the while, with an expression of mortal hate.
‘If you strike me, Hareton will strike you!’ she said, ‘so you may as well sit down’ (232).
After a brief confrontation, Heathcliff backs down, and Hareton’s transformation is completed: ‘His honest, warm and intelligent nature shook off rapidly the clouds of ignorance and degradation in which it had been bred; and Catherine’s sincere commendations acted as a spur to his industry (233-4). Catherine is Cathy’s daughter, and Hareton her nephew – and increasingly, Heathcliff sees her in both of them, and is disarmed: ‘I have lost the facility of enjoying their destruction, and I am too idle to destroy for nothing’ (234). He ceases to oppose them; his thoughts turn solely to Cathy, and the possibility of joining her; he comes to imagine her presence before him; and willingly embraces his death.
Brontë manages her narrative with extraordinary skill throughout, and is sparing in pointing the moral. It falls to Joseph, originally a loyal servant to old Mr Earnshaw and hostile to young Heathcliff, to pass judgement:
‘Th’ divil’s harried off his soul,’ he cried, ‘and he muh hev his carcass intuh t’ bargin, for ow’t Aw care! Ech! What a wicked un he looks grinning at death!’ and the old sinner grinned in mockery.
I thought he intended to cut a caper round the bed; but suddenly composing himself, he fell on his knees, and raised his hands, and returned thanks that the lawful master and the ancient stock were restored to their rights (244).
Reflecting, then, on the whole arc of the story from the perspective of its conclusion, the full import of a number of aspects of the prologue becomes clear: first, Hareton Earnshaw’s name is again over the door – he has learned to know it, and with marriage to Catherine he will reclaim his inheritance; second, regarding the names scratched in the wood, Heathcliff’s Cathy is born an Earnshaw, and chooses to become Cathy Linton rather than Cathy Heathcliff; but it is Catherine Linton who will become Catherine Heathcliff and finally Catherine Earnshaw, and thereby unite the Earnshaw and Linton properties; and third, even in the degraded circumstances of the Heathcliff household, both Hareton and Catherine are shown to retain a spark of humanity: it is Hareton who takes Lockwood into the house and invites him to sit down, and later offers to go with him as far as the park; and Catherine who insists that a man’s life is of more consequence than one evening’s neglect of the horses: ‘somebody must go’, with Lockwood adding, ‘more kindly than I expected’ (11). Brontë unobtrusively avoids at the outset any inconsistency in the denouement of the story.
The overall pattern that is traced is as elegant as can be. At the outset, Wuthering Heights is in the hands of the Earnshaws, and Thrushcross Grange in those of the Lintons; and as Nelly Dean points out to Lockwood on the first meeting, Hareton is the last of the Earnshaws, as ‘Miss Cathy’ is the last of the Lintons (24). Heathcliff, by bringing about the marriage of Catherine Linton to Linton Heathcliff in his pursuit of revenge will unwittingly be the agent of the unification of the two families and their property. And the whole novel is built upon the parallel and contrasting stories of Cathy Earnshaw and her daughter Catherine Linton (wrong and right choices; false and true ‘civilisation’; and one marriage that pitches the universe into chaos, and another - Catherine’s second, made from her own choice - that sets it back to rights). The true love story is not that between Cathy and Heathcliff, but that between Catherine and Hareton. Emily Brontë’s first and only novel is a work of consummate skill, and creative genius, and I hope she knew that, when she put down her pen.