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 WutheringHeights to be like Jane Eyre.
Penguin hardcover edition
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” (monstrumhominis) 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.
In this winter issue of The Thornfield Hall Newsletter, I muse on Mary Shelley’s Matilda,a novel posthumously published in 1959; the new Wuthering Heights sensation; and the International Booker Prize longlist.
Mary Shelley’s Radical Novel, Mathilda
Don’t let anyone tell you differently: Mary Shelley’s Matilda is a masterpiece. This brilliant short novel, like Shelley’s Frankenstein, can be read as psychological horror.
It begins with the narrator Matilda’s reunion with her father. She has never met him: after her mother died in childbirth, he deserted her and turned her over to his stern older sister. Now he is entranced by 16-year-old Matilda, who closely resembles her mother. The father and daughter develop an unusually close relationship, and he admits to incestuous love for Matilda.
Their relationship is shattered. Matilda, weeping and tearing her hair like the heroine of a Greek tragedy, rushes to her room. After reading the letter he wrote before leaving, Matilda, fearing he might commit suicide, takes off in a carriage to track him down. The scene resembles the scene in Bleak House, in which Esther and Inspector Bucket try to find Lady Dedlock. I would say that Dickens read Mary Shelley, except Matilda wasn’t published yet.
Matilda is as Gothic as Shelley’s Frankenstein, and shares similar themes. Just as Dr. Frankenstein’s repulsion and abandonment turn his ugly creature into a monster, Matilda’s father’s confession and flight change her from a joyous girl into a miserable, lonely, faded young woman.
Is her father, as he says, “a monster”? Or a “fallen Archangel?” Perhaps he is too forgiving of himself. After his admission of love for Matilda, he says he’s a “worm,” but soon becomes manic. He teeters from hatred to joy.
“Yes, yes, I hate you! You are my bane, my disgust, my poison! Oh, no! … You are none of all these, you are my light, my only one, my life – My daughter, I love you!”
Matilda begins to believe that she is the monster. She moves to a desolate place in the country where she meets a poet (Percy Bysshe Shelley?), who is also grieving a loss. (This friendship is not romantic.) By the way, Shelley took the name Matilda from the guide in Dante’s Purgatorio. Dante’s Matilda is a Persephone figure who acts as Dante’s guide through the Terrestrial Paradise.
Although Mary Shelley sent the manuscript of Matilda to her father, William Godwin, the philosopher, he was scandalized and refused to sent it to a publisher. He had a complicated relationship with his daughter, and was a reluctant father. His wife, Mary Wollstonecraft, died two weeks after giving birth to Mary. Godwin married a second time to find someone to do child care.
Matilda was finally published in 1959.
The Wuthering Heights Hullabaloo
Emily Brontë is my favorite Brontë sister, and I suspect that the new film of Wuthering Heights sells books. There is a new edition of the novel published in Simon & Schuster’s Female Filmmakers Collection, a series of books curated by female filmmakers. Emerald Fennel, the writer and author of the new film of Wuthering Heights, wrote the introduction to this new edition.
It’s Book Award Season Again!
The International Book Prize longlist was announced today. The nominees are:
Shida Bazyar, The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran, translated from German by Ruth Martin
Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, We Are Green and Trembling, translated from Spanish by Robin Myers
Anjet Daanje, The Remembered Soldier, translated from Dutch by David McKay
Mathias Énard, The Deserters, translated from French by Charlotte Mandell
Ia Genberg, Small Comfort, translated from Swedish by Kira Josefsson
Rene Karabash, She Who Remains, translated from Bulgarian by Izidora Angel
Daniel Kehlmann, The Director, translated from German by Ross Benjamin
Ana Paula Maia, On Earth As It Is Beneath, translated from Portuguese by Padma Viswanathan
Matteo Melchiorre, The Duke. translated from Italian by Antonella Lettieri
Marie Ndiaye, The Witch, translated from French by Jordan Stump
Shahrnush Parsipur, Women Without Men translated from Persian by Faridoun Farrokh
Olga Ravn, The Wax Child, translated from Danish by Martin Aitken
Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, Taiwan Travelogue, translated from Mandarin Chinese by Lin King
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.
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 19th 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.
Everyone loves Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, her classic novel about an orphan who suffers at a charity school, then becomes a teacher, then a governess, is engaged to her rich, middle-aged employer, Mr. Rochester – and learns at the altar that he has a mad wife in the attic.
Many readers consider this Gothic novel a romance: in fact, some wish Bronte had written Jane Eyre over and over. But I prefer Charlotte’s searing last novel, Villette. The narrator, Lucy Snowe, is a brilliant, if unattractive, teacher who falls into unrequited love. Bronte includes many Gothic elements, including a specter in the attic, and a drug trip on laudanum, which was administered to her without her knowledge.
For a long time I forgot about Charlotte’s third novel, Shirley. And so this week I have been rereading it with pleasure. In this stunning industrial novel, Bronte examines the industrial revolution from different points-of-view: that of a cotton mill owner, Robert Moore, who cannot remain competitive unless he introduces machines into the mill; unemployed workers, some of whom lost their jobs to machines ; and Caroline Helstone, Robert’s cousin, who believes in mediation and kindness.
Romance also plays a part in this industrial novel: in fact, some critics complain about a “lack of unity.” To me, Bronte’s smooth writing unites the industrial theme with the romance seamlessly. Caroline is in love with Robert, who is ambivalent about his feelings for her; and when Shirley, a feminist heiress who often refers to herself as “a gentleman,” because women have fewer opportunities than men, arrives in the neighborhood, Robert calculates that it might be wiser to marry an heiress for her money.
One of the cleverest aspects of the book is Charlotte’s subtle allusions to her sisters’ novels. She began to write Shirley in the late 1840s, and completed it in 1849 after the deaths of her siblings, Emily, Anne, and Branwell. No wonder she pays homage to Emily’s Wuthering Heights and to Anne’s two novels, Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Perhaps she alludes to Branwell, as well. She and Branwell obsessively wrote their Angria stories together.
Charlotte’s style is milder than Emily’s, but she seems in Shirley to rewrite a few of Emily’s scenes from a different angle. For instance, there are vicious dog scenes in both Wuthering Heights and Shirley. In Chapter XV of Shirley, “Mr. Donne’s Exodus,” Shirley’s dog, Tartar, barking and growling, chases two terrified curates up the stairs. This recalls a more savage scene in Chapter 1 of Wuthering Heights, in which Mr. Lockwood, Heathcliff’s tenant, pays a visit to his landlord, only to find himself left alone in a a room with six savage dogs.
Emily’s scenes are intensely savage, but there is also humor. Mr. Lockwood narrates:
Not anxious to come in contact with their fangs, I sat still – but, imagining they would scarcely understand tacit insults, I unfortunately indulged in winking and making faces at the trio, and some turn of my physiognomy so irritated madam, that she suddenly broke into a fury, and leapt on my knees. I flung her back, and hastened to interpose the table between us. This proceeding activated the whole hive. Half-a-dozen four-footed fiends, of various sizes, and ages, issued from hidden dens to the common center….
Charlotte’s take on the dog scene is very different: it is wholly comical. Two impolite, unpopular currates, Malone and Doone, arrive at Shirley’s house and rush up the stairs, chased by her black-muzzled, tawny dog, Tartar. Shirley and Caroline know that his “growl, more terrible than the bark – menacing as thunder…” never lasts long. And so Caroline and her friend Shirley laugh quietly, but are gracious when they save the curates, until more comedy ensues.
Here is a paragraph from the scene of Tartar with the curates.
…a gentleman was fleeing up the oak staircase, making for refuge in the gallery or chambers in hot haste: another was backing fast to the stair-foot, wildly flourishing a knotty stick, at the same time reiterating, “Down! Down! Down!” while the tawny dog bayed, bellowed, howled at him, and a group of servants came bundling from the kitchen. The dog made a spring; the second gentleman turned tail and rushed after his comrade; the first was already safe in a bedroom: he held the door against his fellow – nothing so merciless as terror; – but the other fugitive struggled hard: the door was about to yield to his strength.
In another scene in Shirley, Caroline Helstone, like Catherine Linton, née Earnshaw, in Wuthering Heights, is ill with a fever, and on the verge of death. She calls out deliriously that she must see Robert Moore one more time before she dies.
“Oh, I should like to see him once more before all is over: Heaven might favour me thus far!” she cried. “God grant me a little comfort before I die!” was her humble petition.
There is nothing humble in Volume II, Chapter 1, of Wuthering Heights in Catherine’s brief clandestine reunion with her first love and soulmate, Heathcliff. On her deathbed, she says that Heathcliff has killed her, and thrived on it.
“I wish I could hold you,” she continued, briefly, “till we were both dead! I shouldn’t care what you suffered. I care nothing for your sufferings. Why shouldn’t you suffer? I do! W ill you forget me – will you be happy when I am in the earth? Will you say twenty years hence, ‘That’s the grave of Catherine Earnshaw. I loved her long ago, and was wretched to lose her; but it is past – my children are dearer than she was, and, at death, I will not rejoice that I was going to her, I shall be sorry to lose them?’ Will you say so, Heathcliff?”
Passion kills Catherine in Wuthering Heights, but Caroline Helstone recovers, due to the bonding of women, one in particular. There is no female bondingin Wuthering Heights. Emily’s women rarely interact with one another.
Charlotte also alludes to Anne Bronte’s Agnes Grey: Shirley’s governess is named Agnes – though Agnes Pryor is a middle-aged Agnes Grey. As a young woman, Agnes Pryor suffered like Agnes Grey as she tried to govern her charges; and she was desperately lonely, living in isolation from the adults of the family.
Now Agnes Pryor is a widow with a secret: we learn some of the nightmarish details of her marriage,though she is too discreet to reveal much. But they are not unlike the sufferings of Helen Graham in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and alcohol is implied, if not specifically mentioned.
Of course Anne wrote a happy ending to Agnes Grey. Grey married a gentle clergyman, and presumably lived with him happily ever. We want her to be happy, but was the curate always kind? Did something Gothic happen? People change. They have secrets, like Mr. Rochester. We hope Agnes Grey found bliss. We are not entirely sanguine. But that’s because I’ve also been reading Austen’s Northanger Abbey, in which Catherine Morland adores Gothic novels and puts a Gothic spin on everything!
