Tag Archives: Emily Bronte

Monsters in Literature: Catherine and Heathcliff

Many years ago, though not that many years, I made a list of literary monsters. I scribbled it in an exquisite Japanese diary, which had nearly transparent pages, illustrated with delicate flowers.

Monsters are not real, I told myself – they stay on the page- and yet the list got longer. This week I fell ill reading a Gothic novel -there’s always some virus going around – and I tossed and turned, couldn’t sleep, tried to nap in vain, sat on the couch listlessly. Finally I drank a lot of herbal tea and recovered.

But the illness began while I was rereading Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, a disturbing Gothic novel which I used to read as a romance. But I didn’t always revere Emily as I do now. When I first read Wuthering at 12 I was disappointed. I had expected Emily to be another Charlotte, and Wuthering Heights to be like Jane Eyre.

Years passed. One night, when I was jittery about being alone, and stayed with a friend, one of her roommates gave me her copy of Wuthering Heights. She pressed it on me because she considered it the greatest English novel, a novel about soulmates, about separated halves of one person, and Catherine leaves her soulmate Heathcliff because she is materialistic and wants the comforts of being a rich man’s wife..

I have read Wuthering many, many times. There is an unforgettable scene in which Catherine storms out of the kitchen, and locks herself in her room, furious because her husband Edgar drives away Heathcliff, her childhood friend and would-be lover, who had returned after many years away. Catherine accuses Edgar of cowardice, since he does not drive out Heathcliff himself. Instead, he sets some strong, stocky servants on him. Strong Heathcliff lopes away unscathed.

And then there is illness as metaphor. Because of the violence and the aftermath of her violent emotions, Catherine becomes ill, as tends to happen in Victorian novels. And no one heeds her until it is almost too late, because the housekeeper does not believe her. So is the housekeeper the real monster?

Catherine and Heathcliff metamorphose into monsters. Catherine had loved Heathcliff, with whom she grew up, but deserted him to marry rich, soft Edgar Linton. Heathcliff disappears, and returns many years later, never saying where he’d been. But Heathcliff revenges himself on Edgar and Catherine by marrying, then torturing, Cathy’s sister-in-law, Isabella. The revenge continues after Catherine’s death. Yet Heathcliff is truly in hell. At one point, he digs up Catherine’s grave. Eerily, she has not discomposed.

There are many monsters in Wuthering Heights. The second generation, however, has a chance of redemption..

So what is a monster? Is it Frankenstein’s monster? Is it a psychological state? The word is derived from the Latin monstrum, which means “a divine omen indicating misfortune, an evil omen, a portent.”

It can also mean “monstrous man” (monstrum hominis) or “monstrous woman” (monstrum mulieris). And in Wuthering Heights, the monsters are human.

The gradual estrangement of Catherine and Heathcliff triggers monstrous behavior. But the arc of their story begins far back in the past.

“Wuthering Heights” As a Cross-Genre Novel

I cannot count the number of times I’ve read Wuthering Heights. It’s a romance, it’s a Gothic, and it’s a brutal revenge story. Emily Bronte’s novel is gorgeous and lyrical, but it is also violent – some Bronte fans find it too disturbing to include in their personal Bronte canon.

When I first read Wuthering Heights I focused on the perfect love between Catherine and Heathcliff, who are twin souls, raised together, romping on the moors, falling in love. And it is the fault of Catherine, who decides to marry rich, mild, blond Edgar Linton instead of her beloved dark, déclassé Heathcliff, that Heathcliff becomes a human monster.

Folio Society edition, with introdution by Patti Smith

Dreams are important in Wuthering Heights. Before Cathy marries Edgar, she confides in Nellie, who is one of two unreliable narrators, that she dreamed that she was in heaven 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 top of Wuthering Heights; where I woke sobbing for joy.”

And she goes on: “It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff, now, so he shall never know how I love him…. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same, and Linton’s is as different as a moonbeam from lightning.”

There is another important dream, near the beginning of the novel. Mr. Lockwood, the first narrator, is Heathcliff’s tenant at Thrushcross Grange. He pays a visit to his misanthropic landlord, and is snowbound overnight. The housekeeper puts him into Catherine’s old room, but warns him to be quiet because Heathcliff keeps the room shut up. It is never used.

Mr. Lockwood is curious about Catherine. She has written three diifferent versions of her name: Catherine Earnshaw, Catherine Heathcliff, and Catherine Linton. He also reads her diary and learns about her friendship iwth Heathcliff.

Is it any wonder that she features in his dream?

In Lockwood’s nightmare, he hears Catherine at the window: “Let me in! Let me in!”

And then “Terror made me cruel; and finding it useless to attempt shaking the creature off, I pulled its wrist on to the broken pane, and rubbed it to and fro till the blood ran down and soaked the bed-clothes…”

He screams in his sleep; Heathcliff finds him in Cathy’s room; and literally believes Lockwood’s nightmare, and that Cathy has come back to him after 20 years.

There is, I might add, another scnee where he digs up her grave.

I love the intensity of Emily Bronte, and I have a rather strange recommendation. Read an edition without notes, and fall into the poetic rhythms of the prose.

It is still possible, after many years, to enter this novel as if it is a different world. And at the end Emily Bronte circles back – and there is a new generation, Catherine’s daughter Cathy and nephew Hareton, become a joyful new version of Catherine and Heathcliff.

DIY WUTHERING HEIGHTS MERCH.

At the coffeehouse, a barista picked up her pen and asked, “What’s a convenient name for you?” I was so struck by the idea of a “convenient name” that I decided on a homage to Wuthering Heights: “Cathy with a C,” I said.

Yup. There it is.

Critical Madness: Did Branwell Write “Wuthering Heights”?

The Heritage Press edition of *Wuthering Heights*

Emily Bronte’s Gothic novel, Wuthering Heights, shocked readers when it was published in 1847. The violence and brutal revenge plot continue to shock readers. Emily wrote under the male pseudonym, Ellis Currer, which theoretically facilitated publication and sales, but did not shield her from critics’ and readers’ outrage.

Some Victorian critics esteemed Wuthering Heights, others hated it. I think of Bronte as a predecessor of D. H. Lawrence, whose wild, sometimes violent novel, Women in Love, was banned in 1920. (Gudrun’s violence is as great or greater than Heathcliff’s.) Emily’s most ardent admirer in the 19^th century was the novelist Mrs. Humphrey Ward, who claimed that Emily was a better writer than Charlotte.

Emily might have been shocked, however, to learn that, though her work was embraced in the twentieth century, some (mostly male) critics believed that she had not written her own novel. In other words, it was too brilliant and too disturbing to be the conception of a rector’s spinster daughter. Some critics believed that Charlotte had written it; others believed that their brother, Branwell, an alcoholic and drug user, was the author. These speculations were debunked before my time, but I recently reread the 1942 Heritage Press edition of Wuthering Heights, and in the introductory essay, “How This Book Came to Be,” .John T. Winterich considers these issues seriously.

What would Emily Bronte have thought? I picture her walking on the moors, growling, “I’m done with publishing.” Winterich favors the theory that Branwell may not have written the novel but probably contributed to it. There is no evidence that Branwell wrote any of it, aside from the gossip of three of Branwell’s friends, who claimed he did. The boys’ club tried to appropriate the best for its own -perhaps while drinking.

As a common reader, I’m a great fan of Wuthering Heights. It can be read on many levels: as a romance about twin souls; as a prototype of monstrous, unhappy, destructive love; or as a classic of obsessive love and narcissism which shatters not only the lovers, Catherine and Heathcliff, but the lives of their respective spouses and children.

Structured as a double frame story, it is narrated by Mr. Lockwood, Heathcliff’s tenant at the Grange, who repeats the story of Wuthering Heights, as told by Nelly, his housekeeper and the former housekeeper at Wuthering Heights.

The tragedy begins with the intrusion of a stranger. On a dark, stormy night, Mr. Earnshaw, the father of Catherine and Hindley, returns from London with a dark, dirty orphan boy under his coat, instead of the gifts for his children. Jealous Hindley hates Heathcliff on sight, but Catherine and Heathcliff become as close as brother and sister, and then even best friends, and roam the moors wildly. They fall in love in adolescence, but after Mr. Earhshaw dies,.Hindley banishes Heathcliff to the stables. Catherine decides to marry a neigbor, gentle, rich Edgar Linton, whom I viewed contemptuously as “a milksop” on my first reading long ago.

Why, why, why would she marry Linton when she was in love with Heathcliff? At a book club, the Why’s and Why Not’s among us were equally divided. The Why’s were romantic and blamed Catherine for deserting Heathcliff; the Why Not’s were practical and thought Catherine should have a comfortable life. I can see it both ways though I blame Catherine’s selfishness for Heathcliff’s transformation. They were twin souls: they should have stayed together!

Catherine is not untroubled about the love question, and, unaware that Heathcliff is in the next room, she explains her qualms to Nelly: “If I were in heaven, I should be intensely miserable.”

And she continues:

I was only going to say that 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 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.

This is my favorite speech in literature, and I shall leave you to ponder it and read or reread Wuthering Heights, one of the most beautifully-written novels of the 19th century.