The Bronte Muse - Essay 3
Women writers have long drawn inspiration from the work and lives of the Bronte family. In this series of posts, headed The Bronte Muse, are three academic essays that explore aspects of their work and also related writings by other authors.
Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
Wuthering Heights, published in 1847, has been described as one of the few true Romance novels in English fiction. It has undergone many forms of literary evaluation but, as Q D Leavis says, “One has only to read the…critics of Wuthering Heights…to see that there is no agreed reading at all.” ( Leavis Q D. Lectures in America. 1969). This essay will compare two critical views of the novel, one Marxist, one Feminist and, drawing on these perspectives, go on to give a personal appraisal of the text.
Terry Eagleton in his book “Myths of Power” gives a Marxist critique of Wuthering Heights. Marxist criticism is concerned primarily with the social and political conditions that helped ‘write’ a text.
Eagleton, to place the text in a clear historical context, starts his analysis by outlining the socio-historical background to Emily Bronte’s life. She lived in West Yorkshire during an era of great industrial change and conflict (1818 -1848. He goes on to describe the complex relations between two social classes which “dominated the Bronte world: the industrial bourgeoisie and the landed gentry.” (Eagleton, T. Myths of Power: A Marxist Study of the Brontes. Palgrave Macmillan. Hampshire. 2005). Bronte, he argues, as an educated, genteel yet impoverished woman, forced to earn her own living, far from being the isolated genius “excluded from history [was in fact] entered, shaped and violated by history.” (Ibid, p7). Her novel Wuthering Heights, he claims, contains “deep ideological structures” (Ibid, p4), the most significant of which are the “major historical conflict between the ideologies of landed and industrial capital.” (Ibid p 8).
Feminist literary criticism is based on one fundamental perception: that society is patriarchal in structure and hence advantages men over women. In their seminal feminist work The Madwoman in the Attic Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar identify Milton’s Paradise Lost as “western culture’s central tale of the fall of woman and her shadow Satan self” (Gilbert S & Gubar S. The Madwoman in the Attic. Yale University Press. New Haven & London. 1979.), and go on to argue in their critique of Wuthering Heights that Bronte’s novel is “a radically corrective mis-reading of Milton’s epic” (Ibid, p189) with the fall from heaven to hell transposed into a fall from what might conventionally be perceived as hell (the Heights) to a place that parodies heaven (the Grange). Hence Bronte, by subverting Milton’s misogyny, challenges the patriarchal literary orthodoxy and champions an alternative mythology that is distinctly feminist in nature.
Eagleton’s focal point is the character of Heathcliff who, he says, is the centre of “irreconcilable ideological contradictions within the text,” (Eagleton, T. p100) such as those between labour and culture, or bondage and freedom. Eagleton argues that Heathcliff, symbolising both the disenfranchised proletariat and the new, ruthlessly energetic class of the industrial bourgeoisie, supersedes the ancient yeoman class of the Earnshaw family and challenges the power of the landed gentry at the Grange.
In Heathcliff’s ‘history’ can be traced a series of labour/culture conflicts, claims Eagleton. For example as a child he is brought into the Earnshaw family as a foundling from the urban slums of Liverpool. Heathcliff’s presence threatens the social structure at the Heights, expressly in Hindley’s hatred of the “cuckoo” who undermines his kinship and property rights. In contrast the Edenic liberty Heathcliff and Cathy enjoy as children is rooted in freedom from blood-ties, property or social status. They appear to exist in a classless, natural state “outside the family and society.” (Ibid, p103).
The central focus of Gilbert and Gubar’s critique is the character of Cathy Earnshaw whose heart’s desire as a small child is to own a riding whip – the gift she in fact asks for when her father makes his mythic journey to Liverpool. Gilbert and Gubar perceive in this request “a powerless younger daughter’s yearning for power.”(Gilbert S, Gubar S. P 264)
Metaphorically speaking Cathy gets her whip in the form of Heathcliff, the orphan waif - a weapon who “insulates her from…her brother’s domination.” (Ibid p264). They argue that paired with Heathcliff, Cathy achieves “an extraordinary fullness of being” (Ibid p264), not simply because of the shift in family dynamics – Heathcliff supplants Hindley in Mr Earnshaw’s affections - but primarily because Heathcliff becomes an alternative self for Cathy. Thus empowered Cathy “gets possession of the Kingdom of Wuthering Heights”. (Ibid 265) In childhood Cathy and Heathcliff exist in a state of prelapsarian bliss – genderless and wild. Thus Cathy is free from the societal constraints of her sex – she is neither feminine nor submissive, indeed she is increasingly rebellious against both the patriarchal religion of Joseph and her father’s discipline:
Gilbert and Gubar describe this as Bronte’s “authentic fantasy vision of heaven”. (Gilbert S, Gubar S. P 264). They point out that to conventional patriarchal society the Heights would seem a hellish place, associated as it is with: “an ascendant self-willed female who radiates…diabolical energy”. (Ibid 266)
For Eagleton the contradiction between labour and culture comes to a head when Hindley, having come into his inheritance, casts Heathcliff from the family circle and exploits him as a servant. Heathcliff is effectively deprived of culture – that commodity which acts as both a key to and a tool of power. He is forced to labour in the fields yet also, neglected, allowed to run wild on the moors with Cathy. This contradiction, Eagleton argues “encapsulates a crucial truth about bourgeois society” (Eagleton, T. p104) that there is freedom neither on the inside because of the oppressive demands of work and family, or on the outside because it leads merely to cultural impoverishment.
Gilbert and Gubar also see this event as highly significant for Cathy’s heaven is overturned by the ”patriarchal laws of primogeniture.” (Gilbert S, Gubar S. P 267). Hindley casts Heathcliff out and this marks the beginning of Cathy’s fall from a state of “perfect androgyny” (Ibid p270) into the hell of ladyhood. Symbolised by the plunge “from the top of the Heights to the park without stopping” (Bronte, E. P89) Cathy enters the apparent paradise of the Grange. The critics underline the fact that Cathy does not choose to enter the Grange; rather she is seized:
“Run, Heathcliff, run!” she whispered. “They have let the bulldog loose, and he holds me!” (Ibid 90)
They argue that the bloody wound the dog inflicts on Cathy is symbolically suggestive and in a Freudian sense represents the moment she is “thrust into adult female sexuality and castrated”. (Gilbert S, Gubar S. P272). Having been absorbed into the authoritarian “heaven” of the Grange Cathy must learn to submit and it is this lesson of submission to the patriarchal system that underpins Cathy’s eventual decision to choose Edgar over Heathcliff. Gilbert and Gubar, unlike many critics, do not see this as any kind of moral failing, stating “morality only becomes a relevant term where there are meaningful choices” (Gilbert S, Gubar S. P277). Cathy has no meaningful choices, she has been turned into a “lady” (fallen) and therefore must marry because that is all ladies can do. Heathcliff is not a viable choice under these terms, the critics’ state, because “his degradation has rendered him as powerless as a woman” and as Cathy has learned “if it is degrading to be a woman it is even more degrading to be like a woman.” (Ibid p277)
Eagleton reads this differently. He describes Cathy’s choice as “the pivotal event of the novel” (Eagleton, p 101) and argues it as socially based:
In a crucial act of self-betrayal and bad faith, Catherine rejects Heathcliff as a suitor because he is socially inferior to Linton and it is from this that the train of destruction follows. (Ibid, p101)
For Eagleton, Heathcliff is up until the moment Cathy rejects him “an admirable character”. (Ibid 111) The adult Heathcliff has often been viewed as a problematic character because of his obvious brutality and savagery. For Eagleton Heathcliff is a sympathetic figure intent on “avenging himself on a system which has robbed him of his soul,” yet can only do so by “battling with (the system) on its own hated terms.” (Ibid p 112). In short he must assume the qualities of aggressive capitalism to dispossess the traditional yeomanry of the Heights and the agrarian capital of the Grange. Thus Heathcliff buys a kind of freedom by oppressing others, a freedom that the novel insists (Eagleton argues) is “illusionary in nature [because it merely leads to] the exploiter imprisoning himself”. (ibid p105)
Gilbert and Guber also explain the unpalatable aspects of Heathcliff’s character by arguing that he is “somehow female in his monstrosity,” ( Gilbert & Gubar, p293) ie representative of the mythic “other”:
Heathcliff is female on the level…where orphans are female and heirs are male, where flesh is female and spirit is male, earth female, sky male, monsters female, angels male. (ibid, p294)
Both of these critiques were brilliant and ground breaking in their time, however it could be argued that their approach to the mystical/metaphysical aspects of the novel are not entirely adequate. Both perspectives are materialist in origin and both profoundly political in aim and after all Wuthering Heights, “goes much further than most English novels in dramatising an alternative to ordinary experience.” ( Peck, J. & Coyle, M. 1993. Literary Terms and Criticism. Macmillan. Hampshire. p 123). It is a truly Romantic text exploring transcendental states of being that appear to overcome the constraints not merely of civilisation but of identity and death. The relationship between Cathy and Heathcliff remains at the core of the narrative and seems to exist on an immaterial plane. Certainly the language used to describe their bond is spiritual in nature:
Surely you and everybody have a notion that there is or should be an existence of yours beyond you. What were the use of my creation if I were entirely contained her?... (Bronte, E. p 122 )
Whilst Heathcliff’s vehement question:
“Do I want to live? What kind of living will it be when you – oh, God! Would you like to live with your soul in the grave? (Ibid, p198)
suggests both the myth of Hermaphroditus – the experience of being whole, where the great polarities of male and female are fused into one double-sexed being - and Freud’s theory whereby love dissolves the ego-boundaries and transcends the inherent separateness of the human condition.
Ultimately though the love of Cathy and Heathcliff cannot be explained, it remains a kind of mystery in the medieval sense of the word, charged with a mystical significance:
“My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath – a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff…” (Ibid, p122)
As has been shown the critical responses to Wuthering Heights are many and varied and what a critic says about a text depends very much on the perspective they have adopted. Eagleton focuses upon the ideological contradictions within the novel, identifying the central idea of class struggle whereas Gilbert and Gubar are concerned with representations of women in the text and how Bronte may have been subverting the patriarchal literature that came before. Wuthering Heights can also be viewed as a principal example of the Romantic genre with its focus on the imagination, the emotional, the irrational and the sublime: an experience that is extraordinary, incomprehensible and ultimately transcendental.