Literary Criticism of Wuthering Heights  

Wuthering Heights is not just a love story, it is a window into the human soul, where one
sees the loss, suffering, self discovery, and triumph of the characters in this novel. Both the
Image of the Book by Robert McKibben, and Control of Sympathy in Wuthering Heights by
John Hagan, strive to prove that neither Catherine nor Heathcliff are to blame for their
wrong doings. Catherine and Heathcliff’s passionate nature, intolerable frustration, and
overwhelming loss have ruined them, and thus stripped them of their humanities.

McKibben and Hagan take different approaches to Wuthering Heights, but both approaches
work together to form one unified concept. McKibben speaks of Wuthering Heights as a
whole, while Hagan concentrates on only sympathies role in the novel. McKibben and Hagan
both touch on the topic of Catherine and Heathcliff’s passionate nature. To this, McKibben
recalls the scene in the book when Catherine is "in the throes of her self-induced illness"
(p38). When asking for her husband, she is told by Nelly Dean that Edgar is "among his
books," and she cries, "What in the name of all that feels has he to do with books when I am
dying." McKibben shows that while Catherine is making a scene and crying, Edgar is in the
library handling Catherine’s death in the only way he knows how, in a mild mannered
approach. He lacks the passionate ways in which Catherine and Heathcliff handle ordeals.
During this scene Catherine’s mind strays back to childhood and she comes to realize that
"the Linton’s are alien to her and exemplify a completely foreign mode of perception" (p38).
Catherine discovers that she would never belong in Edgar’s society. On her journey of self-
discovery, she realized that she attempted the impossible, which was to live in a world in
which she did not belong. This, in the end, lead to her death. Unlike her mother, when Cathy
enters The Heights, "those images of unreal security found in her books and Thrushhold
Grange are confiscated, thus leading her to scream, "I feel like death!" With the help of
Hareton, Cathy learns not to place her love within a self created environment, but in a real
life where she will be truly happy. The character’s then reappear as reconciled, and stability
and peace once more return to The Heights.

Hagan, when commenting on Catherine’s passionate nature, recalls the same scene when
Catherine is near death. Hagan shows, like McKibben, that Catherine has an ability to love
with fierce passion, something that only herself and Heathcliff share. "I’ll not be there by
myself; they may bury me twelve feet deep, and throw the church down over me, but I
won’t rest til you are with me. I never will" (p108). Hagan shows that by Emily Bronte’s use
of sympathy, the reader cannot pass moral judgment on the characters. Even though
Catherine is committing adultery, and Heathcliff is planning a brutal career of revenge, the
reader still carries sympathy for them. Because Catherine chose to marry Edgar, she created
a disorder in their souls. Bronte, Hagan says, modifies our hostile response to Catherine and
Heathcliff by always finding a way to express their misery.

McKibben’s and Hagan’s ideas interlock when commenting on the apparent frustration that
both Catherine and Heathcliff face throughout the novel. McKibben concentrates on
Catherine’s frustration and hopelessness when she realizes that she never belonged on
Thrushhold Grange. Hagan recalls the emptiness and frustration Heathcliff encountered
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when he came back to The Heights to find Catherine married to Edgar. The atmosphere of
Thrushhold Grange is that of normalcy and convention. McKibben goes farther to explain
that convention is "merely an accepted method of simplifying reality." By simplifying her life,
Catherine assumes that she will avoid all of the unpleasant aspects of life. Sadly, she ended
up doing just the opposite. Catherine pretended to be something that she’s not, and by
doing so lead her to a life of hidden frustration. When Heathcliff found out that Catherine
was married to Edgar, he decided that the only way to get even with Edgar was to marry
Isabella. Because of his marriage, Catherine became so sick with jealousy and plain
frustration that she ended up killing herself. The years after Catherine’s death were so
empty and full of regret and frustration that Heathcliff ultimately also ends up killing himself.

Hagan and McKibben both end their analysis with the idea of Catherine’s and Heathcliff’s
overwhelming loss. Catherine’s self discovery of a wasted life leads her to her death. She
faces at the end what she refused to see during her life. She and Heathcliff had always
belonged together. Although Edgar was a good man, he could never share the blind passion
that Catherine and Heathcliff had. Shortly after Catherine’s death, Heathcliff is driven to
madness by the thought that only "two yards of loose earth are the sole barrier between us"
(p229). He opens her casket in the hopes of holding her in his arms once again, only to find
that she is gone, and the only way to reunite with her is through death. By showing
Heathcliff’s misery, Bronte, Hagan comments, " uses symapthy to modify our hostile
response to his cruel treatment of Isabella and his unjust scorn of Edgar" (p73).

Hagan and McKibben, though they use different approaches, concentrate on the same basic
points. They proved that the reader stripes both Heathcliff and Catherine of all their evils
because they were not in a state of mind to think rationally. Bronte’s use of sympathy is so
well done that the reader continues to view Heathcliff and Catherine as victims, rather than
immoral and corrupt villains. Hagan states that in the end, "we do not condone their
outrages, but neither do we merely condemn them. We do something larger and more
important: we recognize in them the tragedy of passionate natures whom intolerable
frustration and loss have stripped them of their humanity" (p75).

LATER CRITICAL RESPONSE TO WUTHERING HEIGHTS

Initially Jane Eyre was regarded as the best of the Brontë sisters' novels, a judgment
which continued nearly to the end of the century. By the 1880s critics began to place
Emily's achievement above Charlotte's; a major factor in this shift was Mary
Robinson's book-length biography of Emily (1883). In 1926, Charles Percy Sanger
worked out the chronology of Wuthering Heights by closely examining the text;
though other critics have since worked out alternate chronologies, his work affirmed
Emily's literary craft and meticulous planning of the novel and disproved Charlotte's
presentation of her sister as an  unconscious artist who "did not know what she had
done." Critics are still arguing about the structure of Wuthering Heights:  for Mark
Schorer it is one of the most carefully constructed novels in English, but for Albert J.
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Guerard it is a splendid, imperfect novel which Brontë loses control over
occasionally.

Despite the increasing critical admiration for Wuthering Heights, Lord David Cecil
could write, in 1935, that Emily Brontë was not properly appreciated; even her
admirers saw her as an "unequal genius." He countered this view by identifying the
operation of cosmic forces as the central impetus and controlling force in the novel.
He was not the first critic to perceive cosmic forces in the novel; Virginia Woolf, for
one, had earlier written of Emily Brontë and her novel that 

She looked out upon a world cleft into gigantic disorder and felt within her the power
to unite it in a book. That gigantic ambition is to be felt throughout the novel–a
struggle, half thwarted but of superb conviction, to say something through the mouths
of her characters which is not merely "I love" or "I hate," but "we, the whole human
race" and "you, the eternal powers..." the sentence remains unfinished.
Nevertheless, Cecil's theory that a principle of calm and storm informed the novel was
a critical milestone because it provided a comprehensive interpretation which
presented the novel as a unified whole. He introduced a reading which later critics
have generally responded to, whether to build on or to reject. Cecil premised that,
because Emily was concerned with what life means, she focused on her characters'
place in the cosmos, in which everything–alive or not, intellectual or physical–was
animated by one of two spiritual principles: the principle of the storm, which was
harsh, ruthless, wild, dynamic and wild, and the principle of calm , which was gentle,
merciful, passive, and tame. The usual distinction between human being and nature
did not exist for her; rather, for her, they were alive in the same way, an angry man
and an angry sky both literally manifesting the same spiritual principle of storm. Cecil
cautioned that
in spite of their apparent opposition these principles are not conflicting. Either–Emily
Brontë does not make clear which she thinks–each is the expression of a different
aspect of a single pervading spirit; or they are the component parts of a harmony.
They may not seem so to us. The world of our experience is, on the face of it, full of
discord. But that is only because in the cramped condition of their earthly incarnation
these principles are diverted from following the course that their nature dictates, and
get in each other's way. They are changed from positive into negative forces; the calm
becomes a source of weakness, not of harmony, in the natural scheme, the storm a
source not of fruitful vigour, but of disturbance. But when they are free from fleshly
bonds they flow unimpeded and unconflicting; and even in this world their discords
are transitory. The single principle that ultimately directs them sooner or later imposes
an equilibrium....
Because these principles were neither good nor evil but just were, the novel was not
concerned with moral issues and judgments; rather, it presented, in Cecil's view, a
pre-moral world.

Just as Brontë resolved the usual conflict between the principles of storm and calm
into equilibrium, so she resolved the traditional opposition between life and death by
allowing for the immorality of the soul in life as well as in the afterlife. Cecil
extrapolated, "The spiritual principle of which the soul is a manifestation is active in
this life: therefore, the disembodied soul continues to be active in this life. Its ruling
preoccupations remain the same after death as before." In other words, the individual's
nature and passions did not end with death; rather, death allowed their free expression
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and fulfillment and so held the promise of peace. This was why Catherine's spirit
haunted Wutheirng Heights after her death.

Cecil's theory is one of the twentieth century outpourings of interpretations trying to

prove the novel had a unified structure. Surveying these myriad efforts, J. Hillis
Miller challenged the assumption that the novel presents a unified, coherent, single
meaning: "The secret truth about Wuthering Heights, rather, is that there is no secret
truth which criticism might formulate in this way... It leaves something important still
unaccounted for... The text is over-rich." He suggests that readers and critics should
push their reading of or theory about the novel as far as they can, until they can face
the fact that their interpretation fails to account for all the elements in the novel, that
the novel is not amenable to logical interpretation or to one interpretation which
accounts for the entire novel.

Perhaps F.R. Leavis penned the most quoted (most infamous?) modern interpretation
of Wuthering Heights when he excluded it from the great tradition of the English novel
because it was a "sport," i.e., had no meaningful connection to fiction which preceded it or
influence on fiction which followed it.

Brontë: Table of Contents

Overview of Emily Brontë

Publication of Wuthering Heights & Contemporary Critics
Day 1
Later Critical response to Wuthering Heights
Film Versions of Wuthering Heights

Themes in Wuthering Heights

Day 2
The Narrator

Wuthering Heights as Socio-Economic Novel

Psychological Interpretations of Wuthering Heights
Day 3 Religion, Metaphysics, Mysticism and Wuthering Heights
The Gothic and Wuthering Heights
Romanticism and Wuthering Heights

Love
"I am Heathcliff"
Day 4
Sex
Emily Bronte's Poetry

OVERVIEW OF EMILY BRONTË

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Emily Brontë has become mythologized both as an individual and as one of the
Brontë sisters. She has been cast as Absolute Individual, as Tormented Genius, and as
Free Spirit Communing with Nature; the trio of sisters–
Charlotte, Emily, and Anne–have been fashioned into Romantic
Rebels, as well as Solitary Geniuses. Their lives have been
sentimentalized, their psyches psychoanalyzed, and their home
life demonized. In truth, their lives and home were strange and
often unhappy. Their father was a withdrawn man who dined
alone in his own room; their Aunt Branwell, who raised them
after the early death of their mother, also dined alone in her
room. The two oldest sisters died as children. For three years
Emily supposedly spoke only to family members and servants.
Their brother Branwell, an alcoholic and a drug addict, put the family through the hell
of his ravings and threats of committing suicide or murdering their father, his physical
and mental degradation, his bouts of delirium tremens, and, finally, his death.

As children, Charlotte, Branwell, Emily, and Anne had one another and books as
companions; in their isolation, they created an imaginary kingdom called Angria and
filled notebooks describing its turbulent history and character. Around 1831, thirteen-
year old Emily and eleven-year old Anne broke from the Angrian fantasies which
Branwell and Charlotte had dominated to create the alternate history of Gondal. Emily
maintained her interest in Gondal and continued to spin out the fantasy with pleasure
till the end of her life. Nothing of the Gondal history remains except Emily's poems,
the references in the journal fragments by Anne and Emily, the birthday papers of
1841 and 1845, and Anne's list of the names of characters and locations.

Little is known directly of Emily Brontë. All that survives of Emily's own words
about herself is two brief letters, two diary papers written when she was thirteen and
sixteen, and two birthday papers, written when she was twenty-three and twenty-
seven. Almost everything that is known about her comes from the writings of others,
primarily Charlotte. Even Charlotte's novel, Shirley, has been used as a biographical
source because Charlotte created Shirley, as she told her biographer and friend
Elizabeth Gaskell, to be "what Emily Brontë would have been had she been placed in
health and prosperity."

Often Wuthering Heights is used to construct a biography of Emily's life, personality,

and beliefs. Edward Chitharn equates Emily, the well-read housekeeper of the family
home, with Nelly based on the similarity of their roles and the similarity of their
names, "Nelly" being short for "Ellen" which is similar to Emily's pseudonym "Ellis."
The supposed anorexia of Catherine, who stops eating after Edgar's ultimatum, and of
Heathcliff, who stops eating at the end, is used as proof of Emily's anorexia; support
for this interpretation is found in the tendency of all four Brontë siblings not to eat
when upset. Alternately, Emily's supposed anorexia is used to explain aspects of the
novel. Katherine Frank characterizes Emily as a constantly hungry anorexic who
denies her constant hunger; "Even more importantly," Frank asks, "how was this
physical hunger related to a more pervasive hunger in her life–hunger for power and
experience, for love and happiness, fame and fortune and fulfilment?" Well, one
expression of these hungers is the intense focus on food, hunger, and starvation in
Wuthering Heights . Furthermore, the kitchen is the main setting, and most of the
passionate or violent scenes occur there.
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Similarly, Emily's poems are used to interpret her novel, particularly those poems
discussing isolation, rebellion, and freedom. Readings of Wuthering Heights as a
mystical novel, a religious novel, or a visionary novel call on "No coward soul is
mine," one of her best poems. The well known "Riches I hold in light esteem" is cited
to explain her choice of a reclusive lifestyle, as is"A Chainless Life." The fact that
many of these poems were written as part of the Gondal chronicles and are dramatic
speeches of Gondal characters is blithely ignored or explained away. (In 1844 Emily
went through her poems, destroying some, revising others, and writing new poems;
she collected them and clearly labeled the Gondal poems.)

The poems and Wuthering Heights have also been connected. The editor of her
poems, C.W. Hatfield, sees the same mind at work in both, and Charles Morgan
perceives in them "the same unreality of this world, the same greater reality of
another,... and a unique imagination."

PUBLICATION OF WUTHERING HEIGHTS AND ITS

CONTEMPORARY CRITICAL RECEPTION

The publication history of and critical response to Wuthering Heights are intertwined
with those of Charlotte's Jane Eyre and Anne's Agnes Grey. Wutheirng Heights and
Agnes Grey were accepted for publication before Charlotte had finished writing Jane
Eyre. However, their publisher delayed bringing their novels out, with the result that
Jane Eyre was published first. It became a best seller. In an effort to cash in on the
success of Jane Eyre, he implied that Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey were written
by "the author of Jane Eyre"–to the distress of all three sisters. The pseudonyms they
had adopted unintentionally contributed to his deception.

Wanting their works to be judged for their literary merit and not on their sex, Anne,
Charlotte, and Emily published their novels under names which were not obviously
masculine, Acton, Currer, and Ellis Bell. Preserving their male identities was so
important to the Brontë sisters that Charlotte maintained that identity even in writing
to her publishers; for instance she described the Bells' beliefs as "gentlemanlike..."
and consistently referred to her sisters as "he." In addition, Emily had an intense sense
of privacy which made hiding her identity especially important to her. In order to
prove to Charlotte's publishers that Acton, Currer, and Ellis Bell were not one person,
Charlotte and Anne met with them in London; during the interview, Charlotte
inadvertently revealed that they were three sisters; her admission enraged Emily.

Public debate about whether the Bells were one, two, or three persons and whether
they were male or female continued until 1850, when Charlotte's "Biographical
Notice" to a new edition of Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey publically identified
Anne and Emily as Acton and Ellis Bell, respectively. Before and after Charlotte's
biographical essay, reviewers of Wuthering Heights consistently compared it to Jane
Eyre, generally to its detriment. One reviewer believed that Jane Eyre helped "to
ensure a favorable reception" for her sisters' novels (Atlas, January 1848).

CHARLOTTE BRONTË'S 1850 EDITION

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In 1850, Charlotte edited her sisters' poems and novels; in a "Preface" and
"Biographical Notice," she provided biographical details about her sisters and herself,
characterized the novels and her sisters, and defended both. A second round of
reviews appeared in response to this reissuing of Emily's and Anne's novels and
Charlotte's introduction. In general, reviewers were moved by pity at the early deaths
of Emily and Anne, as well as at the general hardship of the Brontë sisters' lives and
were amazed at the discrepancy between their uneventful lives and the violence and
passion portrayed in their novels. They also had a greater sense of Emily's
achievement, which was increasingly compared to Shakespeare's.

However, Charlotte overemphasized the negativity of the original reviews of

Wutheirng Heights when she charged that the original reviewers had not appreciated
Wuthering Heights. In reality, its power and its author's ability had originally been
acknowledged, along with censure for its violence, brutality, and "coarseness." (Click
here for illustrative excerpts from the reviews). Charlotte's biased view that reviews
had been overhwlemingly negative became fact in literary history and biography and
continues to be repeated.

Perhaps more significant than her misperception were the characterizations which
Charlotte promulgated about her sister; they are still being repeated. First, Charlotte
presented her sister as "a child and nursling of the moors" through whom nature
spoke; this explained the novel's being "moorish, and wild, and knotty as a root of
heath." Next Charlotte metamorphosed Emily into an accurate transcriber of the
Yorkshire life and inhabitants. Then Charlotte transformed Emily, in turn, (1) into a
Christian allegorist, with Heathliff representing the sinner; (2) into the passive
receptor of the creative gift; and, finally, (3) into the visionary artist. It did not matter
to Charlotte that some of her characterizations of Emily were contradictory. Thus,
Emily was driven by a creative gift which "at times strangely wills and works for
itself, " so that she was unaware of what she had created, and she was a controlled
sculptor who saw how she could mold a granite block into "the vision of his
meditations." She rarely spoke with the local people, and she knew them intimately, "
knew their ways, their language, their family histories." Charlotte claimed that Emily
was impervious to the influence of others and could grow only through time and
experience by following the dictates of her own nature. In one form or another, all
these characterizations continue to appear in critical discussions of Emily Brontë and
her novel.

THEMES IN WUTHERING HEIGHTS

The concept that almost every reader of Wuthering Heights focuses on is the passion-
love of Catherine and Heathcliff, often to the exclusion of every other theme–this
despite the fact that other kinds of love are presented and that Catherine dies half way
through the novel. The loves of the second generation, the love of Frances and
Hindley, and the "susceptible heart" of Lockwood receive scant attention from such
readers. But is love the central issue in this novel? Is its motive force perhaps
economic? The desire for wealth does motivate Catherine's marriage, which results in
Heathcliff's flight and causes him to acquire Wuthering Heights, to appropriate
Thrushcross Grange, and to dispossess Hareton. Is it possible that one of the other
themes constitutes the center of the novel, or are the other themes secondary to the
theme of love? Consider the following themes:
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Clash of elemental forces.
The universe is made up of two opposite forces, storm and calm. Wuthering Heights
and the Earnshaws express the storm; Thrushcross Grange and the Lintons, the calm.
Catherine and Heathcliff are elemental creatures of the storm.  This theme is
discussed more fully in Later Critical response to Wuthering Heights 

The clash of economic interests and social classes.

The novel is set at a time when capitalism and industrialization are changing not only
the economy but also the traditional social structure and the relationship of the
classes. The yeoman or respectable farming class (Hareton) was being destroyed by
the economic alliance of the newly-wealthy capitalists (Heathcliff) and the traditional
power-holding gentry (the Lintons). This theme is discussed more fully in Wuthering
Heights as Socio-Economic Novel.

The striving for transcendence.

It is not just love that Catherine and Heathcliff seek but a higher, spiritual existence
which is permanent and unchanging, as Catherine makes clear when she compares her
love for Linton to the seasons and her love for Heathcliff to the rocks. The dying
Catherine looks forward to achieving this state through death. This theme is discussed
more fully in Religion, Metaphysics, and Mysticism.

The abusive patriarch and patriarchal family.

The male heads of household abuse females and males who are weak or powerless.
This can be seen in their use of various kinds of imprisonment or confinement, which
takes social, emotional, financial, legal, and physical forms. Mr. Earnshaw expects
Catherine to behave properly and hurtfully rejects her "bad-girl" behavior. Edgar's
ultimatum that Catherine must make a final choice between him or Heathcliff restricts
Catherine's identity by forcing her to reject an essential part of her nature; with loving
selfishness Edgar confines his daughter Cathy to the boundaries of Thrushcross
Grange. A vindictive Hindley strips Heathcliff of his position in the family, thereby
trapping him in a degraded laboring position. Heathcliff literally incarcerates Isabella
(as her husband and legal overseer), and later he imprisons both Cathy and Nellie;
also, Cathy is isolated from the rest of the household after her marriage to Linton.

Study of childhood and the family.

The hostility toward and the abuse of children and family members at Wuthering
Heights cut across the generations. The savagery of children finds full expression in
Hindley's animosity toward Heathcliff and in Heathcliff's plans of vengeance.
Wrapped in the self-centeredness of childhood, Heathcliff claims Hindley's horse and
uses Mr. Earnshaw's partiality to his own advantage, making no return of affection.
Mr. Earnshaw's disapproval of Catherine hardens her and, like many mistreated
children, she becomes rebellious. Despite abuse, Catherine and Heathcliff show the
strength of children to survive, and  abuse at least partly forms the adult characters
and behavior of Catherine and Heathcliff .

The effects of intense suffering.

In the passion-driven characters–Catherine, Heathcliff, and Hindley–pain leads them
to turn on and to torment others. Inflicting pain provides them some relief; this
behavior raises questions about whether they are cruel by nature or are formed by
childhood abuse and to what extent they should be held responsible for or blamed for
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their cruelties. Is all their suffering inflicted by others or by outside forces, like the
death of Hindley's wife, or is at least some of their torment self-inflicted, like
Heathcliff's holding Catherine responsible for his suffering after her death? Suffering
also sears the weak; Isabella and her son Linton become vindictive, and Edgar turns
into a self-indulgent, melancholy recluse. The children of love, the degraded Hareton
and the imprisoned Cathy, are able to overcome Heathcliff's abuse and to find love
and a future with each other. Is John Hagan right that "Wuthering Heights is such a
remarkable work partly because it persuades us forcibly to pity victims and
victimizers alike"?

Self-imposed or self-generated confinement and escape.

Both Catherine and Heathcliff find their bodies prisons which trap their spirits and
prevent the fulfillment of their desires: Catherine yearns to be united with Heathcliff,
with a lost childhood freedom, with Nature, and with a spiritual realm; Heathcliff
wants possession of and union with Catherine. Confinement also defines the course of
Catherine's life: in childhood, she alternates between the constraint of Wuthering
Heights and the freedom of the moors; in puberty, she is restricted by her injury to a
couch at Thrushcross Grange; finally womanhood and her choice of husband confine
her to the gentility of Thrushcross Grange, from which she escapes into the freedom
of death.

Displacement, dispossession, and exile.

Heathcliff enters the novel possessed of nothing, is not even given a last or family
name, and loses his privileged status after Mr. Earnshaw's death. Heathcliff displaces
Hindley in the family structure. Catherine is thrown out of heaven, where she feels
displaced, sees herself an exile at Thrushcross Grange at the end, and wanders the
moors for twenty years as a ghost.  Hareton is dispossessed of property, education,
and social status. Isabella cannot return to her beloved Thrushcross Grange and
brother. Linton is displaced twice after his mother's death, being removed first to
Thrushcross Grange and then to Wuthering Heights. Cathy is displaced from her
home, Thrushcross Grange.

Communication and understanding.

The narrative structure of the novel revolves around communication and
understanding; Lockwood is unable to communicate with or understand the
relationships at Wuthering Heights, and Nelly enlightens him by communicating the
history of the Earnshaws and the Lintons. Trying to return to the Grange in a
snowstorm, Lockwood cannot see the stone markers. A superstitious Nellie refuses to
let Catherine tell her dreams; repeatedly Nellie does not understand what Catherine is
talking about or refuses to accept what Catherine is saying, notably after she locks
herself in her room. Isabella refuses to heed Catherine's warning and Nellie's advice
about Heathcliff. And probably the most serious mis-communication of all is
Heathcliff's hearing only that it would degrade Catherine to marry him.

The fall.
Recently a number of critics have seen the story of a fall in this novel, though from
what state the characters fall from or to is disputed. Does Catherine fall, in yielding to
the comforts and security of Thrushcross Grange? Does Heathcliff fall in his "moral
teething" of revenge and pursuit of property? Is Wutheirng Heights or Thrushcross
Grange the fallen world? Is the fall from heaven to hell or from hell to heaven? Does
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Catherine really lose the Devil/Heathcliff (this question arises from the assumption
that Brontë is a Blakeian subbversive and visionary)? The theme of a fall relies
heavily on the references to heaven and hell that run through the novel, beginning
with Lockwood's explicit reference to Wuthering Heights as a "misanthrope's heaven"
and ending with the implied heaven of the ghosts of Heathcliff and Catherine roaming
the moors together. Catherine dreams of being expelled from heaven and deliriously
sees herself an exile cast out from the "heaven" of Wuthering Height–a literal as well
as a symbolic fall. Heathcliff, like Satan, is relentless in his destructive pursuit of
revenge. Inevitably the ideas of expulsion from heaven, exile, and desire for revenge
have been connected to Milton's Paradise Lost and parallels drawn between Milton's
epic and Brontë's novel; Catherine's pain at her change from free child to imprisoned
adult is compared to Satan's speech to Beelzebub, "how chang'd from an angel of light
to exile in a fiery lake."

POINT OF VIEW IN WUTHERING HEIGHTS

Any serious discussion of Wuthering Heights must consider the complex point of
view that Brontë chose. Lockwood tells the entire story, but except for his experiences
as the renter of Thrushcross Grange and his response to Nelly, he repeats what Nellie
tells him; occasionally she is narrating what others have told her, e.g., Isabella's
experiences at Wuthering Heights or the servant Zilla's view of events. Consequently,
at times we are three steps removed from events. Contrary to what might be expected
with such narrative distance from events, we do not feel emotionally distant from the
characters or events. Indeed, most readers are swept along by the impetuosity and
tempestuous behavior of Heathcliff and Catherine, even if occasionally confused by
the time shifts and the duplication of names. Brontë's ability to sweep the reader while
distancing the narration reveals her mastery of her material and her genius as a writer.

To decide why she chose this narrative approach and how effective it is, you must
determine what Lockwood and Nelly contribute to the story–what kind of people are
they? what values do they represent? how reliable are they or, alternately, under what
conditions are they reliable? As you read the novel, consider the following
possibilities:

 Lockwood and Nelly are opposites in almost every way. (1) Lockwood is a
sophisticated, educated, affluent gentleman; he is an outsider, a city man.
Nelly is a shrewd, self-educated servant; a local Yorkshirewoman, she has
never traveled beyond the Wuthering Heights-Thrushcross Grange-Gimmerton
area. Nelly, thus, belongs to Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange in a
way that the outsider Lockwood (or Heathcliff) never does. (2) Lockwood's
illness contrasts with her good health. (3) Just as the narrative is divided
between a male and a female narrator, so throughout the book the major
characters are balanced male and female, including the servants Joseph and
Nelly or Joseph and Zillah.. This balancing of male and female and the lovers
seeking union suggests that at a psychological level the Jungian animus and
anima are struggling for integration in one personality.
 Does Lockwood represent the point of view of the ordinary reader (that is, us).
If so, do his reactions invalidate our everyday assumptions and judgments?
This reading assumes that his reactions are insensitive and unintelligent. Or do
he and Nelly serve as a bridge from our usual reality to the chaotic reality of
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 Wuthering Heights? By enabling us to identify with normal responses and
socially acceptable values, do they help make the fantastic behavior believable
if not understandable?
 Does the sentimental Lockwood contrast with the pragmatic Nelly? It has been
suggested that the original purpose of the novel was the education and
edification of Lockwood in the nature of passion-love, but of course the novel
completely outgrew this limited aim.

Nelly–as the main narrator, as a participant, and as precipitator of key events–requires

more attention than Lockwood.
 To what extent do we accept Nelly's point of view? Is her conventionality
necessarily wrong or limited? Is it a valid point of view, though one perhaps
which cannot understand or accommodate the wild behavior she encounters?
Does she represent normalcy? Is she a norm against which to judge the
behavior of the other characters? Or does she contribute, whether
unintentionally, semi-consciously, or deliberately, to the disasters which
engulf her employers? To what extent is Nelly admirable? Is she superior to
the other servants, as she suggests, or is she deluded by vanity?
 Is Nelly's alliance or identification with any one character, one family, or one
set of values consistent, or does she switch sides, depending on circumstances
and her emotional response? Does she sympathize with the children she raised
or helped to raise, a group consisting of Heathcliff, Catherine, Hareton, and
Cathy? If Nelly's loyalties do keep shifting, does this fact reflect the difficulty
of making moral judgments in this novel?
 Is her interpretation of some characters or kinds of events more reliable than
of others? Is she, for instance, more authoritative when she speaks of more
conventional or ordinary events or behavior than of the extreme, often
outrageous behavior of Heathcliff or Catherine?  Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
notes that although Heathcliff talks about himself to Nelly with honesty and
openness, she persists on seeing him as a secretive, alienated, diabolical
schemer. Is Sedgwick's insight valid? If so, what does it reveal about Nelly?
Another question might be, why do so many people confide in or turn to
Nelly?

There are two more questions that can be raised about the reliability of Lockwood and
Nelly. The first is, did Lockwood change any of Nellie's story? This is, it seems to
me, a futile question. I see no way we can answer this question, for there are no
internal or external conversations or events which would enable us to assess his
narrative integrity. The same principle would apply to Nellie, if we wonder whether
she deliberately lied to Lockwood or remembered events incorrectly. However, it is
entirely another matter if we ask whether Nellie or if Lockwood misunderstood or
misinterpreted the conversations and actions each narrates. In this case, we can
compare the narrator's interpretation of characters and events with the conversations
and behavior of the characters, consider the values the narrator holds and those held
or expressed by the characters and their behavior, and also look at the pattern of the
novel in its entirety for clues in order to evaluate the narrator's reliability.

11
 WUTHERING HEIGHTS AS SOCIO-ECONOMIC NOVEL

The novel opens in 1801, a date Q.D. Leavis believes Brontë chose in order "to fix its
happenings at a time when the old rough farming culture, based on a naturally
patriarchal family life, was to be challenged, tamed and routed by social and cultural
changes; these changes produced Victorian class consciousness and ‘unnatural' ideal
of gentility." In 1801 the Industrial Revolution was under way in England; when
Emily Brontë was writing in 1847, it was a dominant force in English economy and
society, and the traditional relationship of social classes was being disrupted by
mushroom-new fortunes and an upwardly-aspiring middle class. The criterion for
defining a gentleman was shifting to money, from character, breeding, or family. This
social-economic reality provides the context for socio-economic readings of the
novel.

Is Brontë supporting the status quo and upholding conventional values? Initially the
answer would seem to be "no." The reader sympathizes with Heathcliff, the gypsy
oppressed by a rigid class system and denigrated as "imp" or "fiend." But as
Heathcliff pursues his revenge and tyrannical persecution of the innocent, the danger
posed by the uncontrolled individual to the community becomes apparent. Like other
novels of the 1830s and 40s which reveal the abuses of industrialism and overbearing
individualism, Wuthering Heights may really suggest the necessity of preserving
traditional ways.

This is not the way Marxist critics see the novel. For Arnold Kettle, the basic conflict
and motive force of the novel are social in origin. He locates the source of Catherine
and Heatcliff's affinity in the (class) rebellion forced on them by the injustice of
Hindley and his wife Frances.

He, the outcast slummy, turns to the lively, spirited, fearless girl who alone offers him
human understanding and comradeship. And she, born into the world of Wuthering
Heights, senses that to achieve a full humanity, to be true to herself as a human being,
she must associate herself totally with him in his rebellion against the tyranny of the
Earnshaws and all that tyranny involves.
Catherine's death inverts the common standards of bourgeois morality and so has
"revolutionary force." Heathcliff is morally ruthless with his brutal analysis of the
significance of Catherine's choosing Edgar and her rejecting the finer humanity he
represents. Despite Heathcliff's implacable revenge, we continue to sympathize with
him because he is using the weapons and values (arranged marriages, accumulating
money, and expropriating property) of Victorian society against those with power; his
ruthlessness strips them of any romantic veneer. As a result, he, too, betrays his
humanity. Through the aspirations expressed in the love of Cathy and Hareton,
Heathcliff recognizes some of the quality of his love for Catherine and the
unimportance of revenge and property; he thereby is enabled to regain his humanity
and to achieve union with Catherine. "Wutherng Heights then," Kettle concludes, "is
an expression in the imaginative terms of art of the stresses and tensions and conflicts,
personal and spiritual, of nineteenth-century capitalist society."

Writing nearly twenty-five years later, Marxist Terry Eagleton posits a complex and
contradictory relationship between the landed gentry and aristocracy, the traditional

12
power-holders, and the capitalist, industrial middle classes, who were pushing for
social acceptance and political power. Simultaneously with the struggle among these
groups, an accommodation was developing based on economic interests. Though the
landed gentry and aristocracy resisted marrying into first-generation capitalist wealth,
they were willing to mix socially and to form economic alliances with the
manufacturers and industrialists. The area that the Brontës lived in, the town of
Haworth in West Riding, was particularly affected by these social and economic
conditions because of the concentration of large estates and industrial centers in West
Riding.

Proceeding from this view of mid-nineteenth century society, Eagleton sees both class
struggle and class accommodation in Wutheirng Heights. Heathcliff, the outsider, has
no social or biological place in the existing social structure; he offers Catherine a non-
social or pre-social relationship, an escape from the conventional restrictions and
material comforts of the upper classes, represented by the genteel Lintons. This
relationship outside society is "the only authentic form of living in a world of
exploitation and inequality." It is Heathcliff's expression of a natural non-social mode
of being which gives the relationship its impersonal quality and makes the conflict
one of nature versus society. Heathcliff's connection with nature is manifested in his
running wild as a child and in Hindley's reducing him to a farm laborer. But
Catherine's marriage and Hindley's abuse transform Heathcliff and his meaning in the
social system, a transformation which reflects a reality about nature–nature is not
really "outside" society because its conflicts are expressed in society.

However, Heathcliff the adult becomes a capitalist, an expropriator, and a predator,

turning the ruling class's weapons of property accumulation and acquisitive marriage
against them. Society's need to tame/civilize the unbridled capitalist is handled in the
civilizing of Hareton. Hareton represents the yeoman class, which was being
degraded. In adopting the behavior of the exploiting middle classes, Heathcliff works
in common with the capitalist landowner Edgar Linton to suppress the yeoman class;
having been raised in the yeoman class and having acquired his fortune outside it, he
joins "spiritual forces" against the squirearchy. Thus, he represents both rapacious
capitalism and the rejection of capitalist society. However, because the capitalist class
is no longer revolutionary, it cannot provide expression for Heathcliff's rejection of
society for a pre-social freedom from society's restraints. From this impossibility
comes what Eagleton calls Heathcliff's personal tragedy: his conflictive unity
consisting of spiritual rejection and social integration. Heathcliff relentlessly pursues
his goal of possessing Catherine, an obsession that is unaffected by social realities. In
other words, the novel does not fully succeed in reconciling or finding a way to
express all Heathcliff's meanings.

Eagleton acknowledges that ultimately the values of Thrushcross Grange prevail, but
that Brontë's sympathies lie with the more democratic, cozy Wuthering Heights. The
capitalist victory over the yeomanry is symbolized by the displacement of Joseph's
beloved currant bushes for Catherine's flowers, which are in Marxist terms "surplus
value." With Heathcliff's death a richer life than that of Thrushcross Grange also dies;
it may be a regrettable death–but it is a necessary death because the future requires a
fusion of gentry and capitalist middle class, not continued conflict.

13
Psychological analyses of Wuthering Heights abound as critics apply modern
psychological theories to the characters and their relationships,

A FREUDIAN INTERPRETATION

The most common psychological readings are Freudian interpretations. Typical of

Freudian readings of the novel is Linda Gold's interpretation. She sees in the
symbiosis of Catherine, Heathcliff, and Edgar the relationship of Freud's id, ego, and
superego. At a psychological level, they merge into one personality with Heathcliff's
image of the three of them buried (the unconscious) in what is essentially one coffin.
Heathcliff, the id, expresses the most primitive drives (like sex), seeks
pleasure, and avoids pain; the id is not affected by time and remains in
the unconscious (appropriately, Heathcliff's origins are unknown, he is
dark, he runs wild and is primitive as a child, and his three year absence
remains a mystery). Catherine, the ego, relates to other people and
society, tests the impulses of the id against reality, and controls the
energetic id until there is a reasonable chance of its urges being fulfilled. Edgar, the
superego, represents the rules of proper behavior and morality inculcated by teachers,
family, and society; he is civilized and cultured. As conscience, he compels Catherine
to choose between Heathcliff and himself.

In Freud's analysis, the ego must be male to deal successfully with the world; to
survive, a female ego would have to live through males. This Catherine does by
identifying egotistically with Heathcliff and Edgar, according to Gold. Catherine
rejects Heathcliff because a realistic assessment of her future with him makes clear
the material and social advantages of marrying Edgar and the degradation of yielding
to her unconscious self. Her stay at Thrushcross Grange occurs at a crucial stage in
her development; she is moving through puberty toward womanhood. She expects
Edgar to accept Heathcliff in their household and to raise him from his degraded state;
this would result in the integration of the disparate parts of her personality–id, ego,
and superego–into one unified personality. Confronted by the hopelessness of
psychological integration or wholeness and agonized by her fragmentation, she dies.

Gold carries her Freudian scrutiny to the second generation; the whole history of both
generations of Earnshaws, Lintons, and Heathcliffs may be read as the development
of one personality, beginning with Catherine Earnshaw and ending with Catherine
Linton Heathcliff Earnshaw. The second Cathy has assimilated and consolidated the
id/Heathcliff and the superego/Edgar through marriages with Hareton and Linton.

JUNGIAN INTERPRETATIONS

Jungian readings also interpret the relationship of Catherine and Heathcliff as aspects
of one person; those aspects may be the archetype of the shadow and the individual or
the archetypes of the animus/anima and the persona. These
interpretations are derived from Jung's distinction between the
collective unconscious and the personal unconscious. The collective
unconscious is inherited, impersonal, and universal. The content of the
collective unconscious is mainly archetypes; some archetypes are the
same in a particular society or time period, others are the same in all
societies and times. The archetypes may find expression in myth and fairy tales. The
14
most common and influential archetypes are the shadow, the animus, and the anima.
Every human being also has a personal unconscious, in which material is stored that
was once conscious but has been forgotten or repressed. The personal unconscious
adapts archetypes based on the individual's experiences. The personal unconscious
finds expression in dreams and metaphor.

The shadow. In the collective unconscious, the shadow is absolute evil. In the
personal unconscious, the shadow consists of those desires, feelings, etc. which are
unacceptable, perhaps for emotional or for moral reasons. The shadow is generally
equated with the dark side of human nature. The shadow is emotional, seems
autonomous because uncontrollable, and hence becomes obsessive or possessive.
Heathcliff, then, can be seen as Catherine's shadow–he represents the darkest side of
her, with his vindictiveness, his sullenness, his wildness, and his detachment from
social connections. She rejects this part of herself by marrying Edgar, thereby
explaining Heathcliff's mysterious disappearance. But Heathcliff, the shadow, refuses
to be suppressed permanently; Jung explains that even if self-knowledge or insight
enables the individual to integrate the shadow, the shadow still resists moral control
and can rarely be changed. Cathy's efforts to integrate Heathcliff into her life with
Edgar are doomed; her inability to affect Heathcliff's behavior can be seen in his
ignoring her prohibition about Isabella. The resurfaced Heathcliff obsessively seeks
possession of Catherine to insure his own survival.

The animus and the anima. What Jung calls the persona is the outer or social self
that faces the world. The animus is the archetype that completes women, that is, it
contains the male qualities which the persona lacks. The animus generally represents
reflection, deliberation, and ability for self-knowledge and is male. The anima
represents the female traits that a man's persona lacks, generally the ability to form
relationship and be related, and it is female. The relationship of the anima/animus to
the individual is always emotional and has its own dynamic, because, as archetypes,
the anima and animus are impersonal forces. The individual is rarely aware of his
anima/her animus. In some of its aspects, Jung says, the animus is the "demon-
familiar." The animus of a woman and the anima of a man take the form of a "soul-
image" in the personal unconscious; this soul-image may be transferred to a real
person who naturally becomes the object of intense feeling, which may be passionate
love or passionate hate. "Wherever an impassioned, almost magical, relationship
exists between the sexes, it is invariably a question of a projected soul-image." When
a man projects his anima onto a real women or a woman projects her animus onto a
man, a triad arises, which includes a transcendent part. The triad consists of the man,
the woman, and the transcendent anima/animus. Not surprisingly, the object of the
projection will be unable to live out the lover's animus or anima permanently.

Now to apply Jung's theory to Catherine, for whom Heathcliff.is the animus, and to
Heathcliff, for whom Catherine is the anima. For Catherine, Heathcliff expresses
anger and hostility, freedom, command, irresponsibility, rebellion, and spontaneity.
For Heathcliff, Catherine is beauty, love, status, and belonging. The projection of
their soul-images explains their profound sense of connection or identity with each
other, e.g., Catherine's "I am Heathcliff" speech and Heathcliff's references to
Catherine as his soul and his life. The element of transcendence in the projection is
expressed in Catherine's vision of something, some life, beyond this one, in her view
of existence after death, in Heathcliff's longing to see Catherine's ghost, and their life
15
together after death. And is there any question about Heathcliff's being a "demon-
familiar"?

MONOMANIA: A NINETEENTH CENTURY THEORY

An entirely different approach is taken by Graeme Tytler, who applies

nineteenth-century psychological theory to the novel. In Brontë's day, an
obvious label for Heathcliff would have been monomaniac, a term which
is today equated with obsession but was in the nineteenth century a
specific disorder with clearly defined symptoms and progression. Graeme
Tytler theorizes that Heathcliff fits the contemporary medical diagnosis of
monomania, as defined by Jean Etienne Dominique Esquirol, one of the founders of
modern psychiatry. Esquirol defined monomania as "the disease of going to extremes,
of singularization, of one-sidedness." The application of this definition to Heathcliff is
too obvious to need further comment; equally relevant to a diagnosis of Heathcliff is
Esquirol's listing of the causes of monomania:
Monomania is essentially a disease of the sensibility. It reposes altogether upon the
affections, and its study is inseparable from a knowledge of the passions. Its seat is in
the heart of man, and it is there that we must search for it, in order to possess
ourselves of all its peculiarities. How many are the cases of monomania caused by
thwarted love, by fear, vanity, wounded self-love, or disappointed ambition.

Tytler distinguishes stages in the development of Heathcliff's monomania. Heathcliff

shows a predisposition to monomania up to and slightly after Catherine's death in
such behavior as his single-minded determination to be connected to her after her
death. It is, however, not until eighteen years or so after her death that he shows signs
of insanity. Much of what he says and does after Chapter xxix is symptomatic of
monomania–hallucinations, insomnia, talking to himself or to Catherine's ghost, his
preoccupation at meals and in conversation, his sighs and moans, his harsh treatment
of Cathy and Hareton, and his being haunted by Catherine's image.

RELIGION, METAPHYSICS, AND MYSTICISM

Wuthering Heights as a Religious Novel

Wuthering Heights as a Metaphysical Novel
Emily Brontë as a Mystic
The passionate yearning of Catherine and Heathcliff for each other, their desperate
striving for union, and their intransigence in pursuing that quest suggest transcendent
meanings; as a result, the novel has been read as a religious novel and as a
metaphysical novel and Emily Brontë has been called a mystic. Brontë's reputation as
a mystic is also based on her poetry.

Wuthering Heights as a Religious Novel

16
Wuthering Heights is not a religious novel in the sense that it supports a particular
religion (Christianity), or a particular branch of Christianity (Protestantism), a
particular Protestant denomination (Church of England). Rather, religion in this novel
takes the form of the awareness of or conviction of the existence of a spirit-afterlife.

An overwhelming sense of the presence of a larger reality moved Rudolph Otto to call
Wuthering Heights a supreme example of "the daemonic" in literature. Otto was
concerned with identifying the non-rational mystery behind all religion and all
religious experiences; he called this basic element or mystery the numinous. The
numinous grips or stirs the mind so powerfully that one of the responses it produces is
numinous dread, which consists of awe or awe-fullness. Numinous dread implies
three qualities of the numinous: its absolute unapproachability, its power, and. its
urgency or energy. A misunderstanding of these qualities and of numinous dread by
primitive people gives rise to daemonic dread, which Otto identifies as the first stage
in religious development. At the same time that they feel dread, they are drawn by the
fascinating power of the numinous. Otto explains, "The daemonic-divine object may
appear to the mind an object of horror and dread, but at the same time it is no less
something that allures with a potent charm, and the creature, who trembles before it,
utterly cowed and cast down, has always at the same time the impulse to turn to it,
nay even to make it somehow his own." Still, acknowledgment of the "daemonic" is a
genuine religious experience, and from it arise the gods and demons of later religions.
It has been suggested that Gothic fiction originated primarily as a quest for numinous
dread.

For Derek Traversi the motive force of Brontë's novel is "a thirst for religious
experience," which is not Christian. It is this spirit which moves Catherine to exclaim,
"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
here? (Ch. ix, p. 64). Out of Catherine's–and Brontë's–awareness of the finiteness of
human nature comes the yearning for a higher reality, permanent, infinite, eternal; a
higher reality which would enable the self to become whole and complete and would
also replace the feeling of the emptiness of this world with feelings of the fullness of
being (fullness of being is a phrase used by and about mystics to describe the
aftermath of a direct experience of God). Brontë's religious inspiration turns a
discussion of the best way to spend an idle summer's day into a dispute about the
nature of heaven.  Brontë's religious view encompasses both Cathy's and Linton's
views of heaven and of life, for she sees a world of contending forces which are
contained within her own nature. She seeks to unite them in this novel, though,
Traversi admits, the emphasis on passion and death tends to overshadow the drive for
unity. Even Heathcliff's approaching death, when he cries out "My soul's bliss kills
my body, but does not satisfy itself" (Ch. xxxiv, p. 254), has a religious resonance.

Thomas John Winnifrith also sees religious meaning in the novel: salvation is won by
suffering, as an analysis of references to heaven and hell reveals. For Heathcliff, the
loss of Catherine is literally hell; there is no metaphoric meaning in his claim
"existence after losing her would be hell" (Ch. xiv, p. 117). In their last interview,
Catherine and Heathcliff both suffer agonies at the prospect of separation, she to
suffer "the same distress underground" and he to "writhe in the torments of hell" (XV,
p. 124). Heathcliff is tortured by his obsession for the dead/absent Catherine.
Suffering through an earthly hell leads Healthcliff finally to his heaven, which is
17
union with Catherine as a spirit. The views of Nelly and Joseph about heaven and hell
are conventional and do not represent Brontë's views, according to Winnifrith.

Wuthering Heights as a Metaphysical Novel

Metaphysics is the "branch of speculative inquiry which treats of the first principles of
things, including such concepts as being, substance, essence, time, space, cause,
identity, etc.; theoretical philosophy as the ultimate science of Being and Knowing"
(OED). Dorothy Van Ghent finds evidence, at one level of Wuthering Heights, of
metaphysical exploration:

the book seizes, at the point where the soul feels itself cleft within and in cleavage
from the universe, the first germs of philosophic thought, the thought of the duality of
human and nonhuman existence, and the thought of the cognate duality of the psyche.
The novel presents the collision between two types of reality, restrictive civilization
and anonymous unrestrained natural energies or forces. This collision takes the form
of inside/domestic versus outside/nature, human versus the "other," the light versus
the dark within the soul. The novel repeatedly shows efforts to break through or cross
the boundary of separation of the various dualities, like Lockwood's breaking the
window in his dream or the figure of two children who struggle for union (Catherine
and Heathcliff, Cathy and Linton, Cathy and Hareton). The two kinds of realities are,
in Van Ghent's reading, both opposed and continuous There is a continuous
movement to break through the constraint of civilization and personal consciousness
and also a movement toward "passionate fulfillment of consciousness by deeper
ingress into the matrix of its own and all energy." In other words, the impetus of life is
toward unifying the dark and the light, the unknown and the known, the elemental and
the human.

Catherine and Heathcliff, Van Ghent explains, are violent elementals who express the
flux of nature; they struggle to be human and assume human character in their
passion, confusions, and torment, but their inhuman appetites and energy can only
bring chaos and self-destruction. The second generation presents the childish romance
of Cathy and Linton and the healthy, culturally viable love of Cathy and Hareton. The
adult love of Cathy and Hareton involves a sense of social and moral responsibilities
in contrast to the asocial, amoral, irresponsible, and impulsive child's love of
Catherine and Heathcliff. Van Ghent calls their love a "mythological romance"
because "the astonishingly ravenous and possessive, perfectly amoral love of
Catherine and Heathcliff belongs to that realm of the imagination where myths are
created"; a primary function of myth being to explain origins, practices, basic human
behavior, and natural phenomena. The two kinds of love (childish and adult) and the
two generations are connected by Heathcliff in his role first as demon-lover and
finally as ogre-father and by the two children figure.

Emily Brontë as a Mystic

Though the word mysticism is often used vaguely to indicate occultism or

spiritualism, it has a very specific meaning in Christianity and Western culture.
18
Evelyn Underhill defines mysticism as "the direct intuition or experience of God" or
"the life which aims at union with God" and a mystic as "a person who has, to a
greater or less degree, such a direct experience–one whose religion and life are
centered, not merely on an accepted belief or practice, but on that which he regards as
first-hand personal knowledge." If her use of "God" is expanded to include a higher
presence or force and spiritual reality, her definition includes most discussions of
Brontë as a mystic. The mystic traditionally goes through three stages–(1) purgation,
or a purification of the individual and disengagement from worldly affairs; (2)
illumination, or the conviction of God's power and surrender to His will; and (3)
union with God. Typically mystics experience oceanic feelings during union with
God. Ellen Moers defines oceanic feelings as "the sensation of selflessness and
release from the flesh and to the comprehension of the universal Oneness that are
often experienced on the open seas." Moers believes that for Brontë the expanse of the
moors created oceanic feelings, as can be seen in her poems and novel.

Claims that Brontë is a mystic are often based primarily–and even entirely–on her
poems. Lines like these from "High waving heather, 'neath stormy blasts" are cited to
prove her mysticism or at least her mystical leanings:

Earth rising to heaven and heaven descending,

Man's spirit away form its drear dungeon sending,
Bursting the fetters and breaking the bars.
Relying entirely on the poems, Caroline F.E. Spurgeon identifies Emily Brontë as an
unusual type of mystic:
In her poems her mysticism is seen principally in two ways: in her unerring
apprehension of values, of the illusory quality of material things, even of the nature
she so loved, together with the certain vision of the one Reality behind all forms. This,
and her description of ecstasy, of the all-sufficing joy of the inner life of one who has
tasted this experience, mark her out as being among those who have seen, and who
know. In The Prisoner, the speaker, a woman, is "confined in triple walls," yet in spite
of bolts and bars and dungeon gloom she holds within herself an inextinguishable joy
and unmeasured freedom brought to her every night by a ‘messenger'.
Other ideas that also qualify her, in Spurgeon's eyes, as a mystic are the fact that
Brontë knows that ordinary things hold the secret of the universe and that she has a
sense of the continuousness of life and the oneness of God and man, as expressed in
"No coward soul is mine":
O God within my breast
Almighty ever-present Deity
Life, that in me hast rest
As I Undying Life, have power in Thee!...

With wide-embracing love

Thy spirit animates eternal years
Pervades and broods above,
Changes, sustains, dissolves, creates and rears

Though Earth and moon were gone

And suns and universes ceased to be
And thou wert left alone
Every Existence would exist in thee
19
Similarly, Winifred Gerin reads "On a sunny brae alone I lay" as a description of a
mystical experience in which every detail is sharply defined in terms of sight,
sensation, and hearing. The "glittering spirits," who sing to the poet of the ecstasy of
being, reveal that death, far from being the tragedy of life, is its one certain bliss.
Some of the mystical ideas that Spurgeon and Gerin identify can also be found in
Wuthering Heights, particularly in the speeches of Catherine and Heathcliff, and
critics regularly support claims of mysticism in the novel by referring to the poems.

THE ENGLISH GOTHIC NOVEL: A BRIEF OVERVIEW

The English Gothic novel began with Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1765),
which was enormously popular and quickly imitated by other novelists and soon
became a recognizable genre. To most modern readers, however, The Castle of
Otranto is dull reading; except for the villain Manfred, the characters are insipid and
flat; the action moves at a fast clip with no emphasis or suspense, despite the
supernatural manifestations and a young maiden's flight through dark vaults. But
contemporary readers found the novel electrifyingly original and thrillingly
suspenseful, with its remote setting, its use of the supernatural, and its medieval
trappings, all of which have been so frequently imitated and so poorly imitated that
they have become stereotypes. The genre takes its name from Otranto's medieval–or
Gothic–setting; early Gothic novelists tended to set their novels in remote times like
the Middle Ages and in remote places like Italy (Matthew Lewis's The Monk, 1796) or
the Middle East (William Beckford's Vathek, 1786).

What makes a work Gothic is a combination of at least some of these elements:

   a castle, ruined or intact, haunted or not (the castle plays such a key role that
it has been called the main character of the Gothic novel),
   ruined buildings which are sinister or which arouse a pleasing melancholy,
   dungeons, underground passages, crypts, and catacombs which, in modern
houses, become spooky basements or attics,
   labyrinths, dark corridors, and winding stairs,
   shadows, a beam of moonlight in the blackness, a flickering candle, or the
only source of light failing (a candle blown out or, today, an electric failure),
   extreme landscapes, like rugged mountains, thick forests, or icy wastes, and
extreme weather,
   omens and ancestral curses,
   magic, supernatural manifestations, or the suggestion of the supernatural,
   a passion-driven, wilful villain-hero or villain,
   a curious heroine with a tendency to faint and a need to be rescued–
frequently,
   a hero whose true identity is revealed by the end of the novel,
   horrifying (or terrifying) events or the threat of such happenings.
20
The Gothic creates feelings of gloom, mystery, and suspense and tends to the
dramatic and the sensational, like incest, diabolism, necrophilia, and nameless terrors.
It crosses boundaries, daylight and the dark, life and death, consciousness and
unconsciousness. Sometimes covertly, sometimes explicitly, it presents transgression,
taboos, and fears–fears of violation, of imprisonment, of social chaos, and of
emotional collapse. Most of us immediately recognize the Gothic (even if we don't
know the name) when we encounter it in novels, poetry, plays, movies, and TV series.
For some of us–and I include myself– safely experiencing dread or horror is thrilling
and enjoyable.

Elements of the Gothic have made their way into mainstream writing. They are found
in Sir Walter Scott's novels, Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre , and Emily Brontë's
Wuthering Heights and in Romantic poetry like Samuel Coleridge's "Christabel,"
Lord Byron's "The Giaour," and John Keats's "The Eve of St. Agnes." A tendency to
the macabre and bizarre which appears in writers like William Faulkner, Truman
Capote, and Flannery O'Connor has been called Southern Gothic.

THE GOTHIC AND WUTHERING HEIGHTS

Whether or not Wuthering Heights should be classified as a Gothic novel (certainly it

is not merley a Gothic novel), it undeniably contains Gothic elements.

In true Gothic fashion, boundaries are trespassed, specifically love crossing the
boundary between life and death and Heathcliff's transgressing social class and family
ties. Brontë follows Walpole and Radcliffe in portraying the tyrannies of the father
and the cruelties of the patriarchal family and in reconstituting the family on non-
patriarchal lines, even though no counterbalancing matriarch or matriarchal family is
presented. Brontë has incorporated the Gothic trappings of imprisonment and escape,
flight, the persecuted heroine, the heroine wooed by a dangerous and a good suitor,
ghosts, necrophilia, a mysterious foundling, and revenge. The weather-buffeted
Wuthering Heights is the traditional castle, and Catherine resembles Ann Radcliffe's
heroines in her appreciation of nature. Like the conventional Gothic hero-villain,
Heathcliff is a mysterious figure who destroys the beautiful woman he pursues and
who usurps inheritances, and with typical Gothic excess he batters his head against a
tree. There is the hint of necrophilia in Heathcliff's viewings of Catherine's corpse and
his plans to be buried next to her and a hint of incest in their being raised as brother
and sister or, as a few critics have suggested, in Heathcliff's being Catherine's
illegitimate half-brother.

A FEMINIST THEORY OF THE GOTHIC AND WUTHERING

HEIGHTS

Ellen Moers has propounded a feminist theory that relates women writers in general
and Emily Brontë in particular to the Gothic. Middle-class women who wanted to
write were hampered by the conventional image of ladies as submissive, pious, gentle,

21
loving, serene, domestic angels; they had to overcome the conventional patronizing,
smug, unempowering, contemptuous sentimentalizing of women by reviewers like
George Henry Lewes, who looked down on women writers:

Women's proper sphere of activity is elsewhere [than writing]. Are there no husbands,
lovers, brothers, friends to coddle and console? Are there no stockings to darn, no
purses to make, no braces to embroider? My idea of a perfect woman is one who can
write but won't. (1850)
Those women who overcame the limitations of their social roles and did write found it
more difficult to challenge or reject society's assumptions and expectations than their
male counterparts. Ellen Moers identifies heroinism, a form of literary feminism, as
one way women circumvented this difficulty. (Literary feminism and feminism may
overlap but they are not the same, and a woman writer who adopts heroinism is not
necessarily a feminist.) Heroinism takes many forms, such as the intellectual or
thinking heroine, the passionate or woman-in-love heroine, and the traveling heroine.
Clearly all the Brontë sisters utilize the passionate heroine, whether knowingly or not,
to express subversive values and taboo experiences covertly.

What subversive values and taboo experiences does Emily Brontë express with her
passionate heroine Catherine? Moers sees subversion in Brontë's acceptance of the
cruel as a normal, almost an energizing part of life and in her portrayal of the erotic in
childhood. The cruelty connects this novel to the Gothic tradition, which has been
associated with women writers since Anne Radcliffe . The connection was, in fact,
recognized by Brontë's contemporaries; the Athenaeum reviewer labeled the Gothic
elements in Wuthering Heights "the eccentricities of ‘woman's fantasy'" (1847).
Moers thinks a more accurate word than eccentricities would be perversities. These
perversities may have originated in "fantasies derived from the night side of the
Victorian nursery–a world where childish cruelty and childish sexuality come to the
fore." Of particular importance for intellectual middle-class women who never
matured sexually was the brother-sister relationship. In childhood, sisters were the
equal of their brothers, played just as hard, and felt the same pleasures and pains; girls
clung to this early freedom and equality, which their brothers outgrew, and displaced
them into their writing:

Women writers of Gothic fantasies appear to testify that the physical teasing they
received from their brothers–the pinching, mauling, and scratching we dismiss as the
unimportant of children's games–took on outsize proportions and powerful erotic
overtones in their adult imaginations. (Again, the poverty of their physical experience
may have caused these disproportions, for it was not only sexual play but any kind of
physical play for middle-class women that fell under the Victorian ban.)

Moers applies this principle to the Brontës' chronicles of Angria and Gondal, which
the sisters collaborated on with their brother. Their turbulent sagas are filled with
unbridled passions, imprisonment, adultery, incest, murder, revenge, and warfare.
Thus the uncensored fantasies of Angria and Gondal, whose imaginative hold Emily
never outgrew, may have provided an outlet for the sisters' imaginations, passions,
and aspirations; fostered their intellectual and artistic equality with their brother; and
provided the model for Emily's impassioned Heathcliff and Catherine as well as for
Charlotte's Rochester.

22
THE ROMANTIC NOVEL, ROMANTICISM, AND WUTHERING
HEIGHTS

The Romantic Novel

Romanticism and the Brontës
Romantic Elements in Wuthering Height

THE ROMANTIC NOVEL

Robert Kiely raises the question, in The Romantic Novel in England, Is there actually
an English romantic novel? He skirts answering his own question by suggesting that
some novels are influenced by Romanticism and incorporate the same style and
themes that appear in Romantic poetry and drama. In his discussion, the term
romantic novel is often equated with the romance, with the Gothic novel, and with the
romantic elements in a novel. Kiely regards Wuthering Heights as a model of
romantic fiction; it contains these romantic/Gothic elements which charterize the
romantic novel:

 The dynamic antagonism or antithesis in the novel tends to subvert, if not to

reject literary conventions; often a novel verges on turning into something
else, like poetry or drama. In Wuthering Heights, realism in presenting
Yorkshire landscape and life and the historical precision of season, dates, and
hours co-exist with the dreamlike and the unhistorical; Brontë refuses to be
confined by conventional classifications.
 The protagonists' wanderings are motivated by flight from previously-chosen
goals, so that often there is a pattern of escape and pursuit. Consider
Catherine's marriage for social position, stability, and wealth, her efforts to
evade the consequences of her marriage, the demands of Heathcliff and Edgar,
and her final mental wandering.
 The protagonists are driven by irresistible passion–lust, curiosity, ambition,
intellectual pride, envy. The emphasis is on their desire for transcendence, to
overcome the limitations of the body, of society, of time rather than their
moral transgressions. They yearn to escape the limitations inherent to life and
may find that the only escape is death. The longings of a Heathcliff cannot be
fulfilled in life.
 Death is not only a literal happening or plot device, but also and primarily a
psychological concern. For the protagonists, death originates in the
imagination, becomes a "tendency of mind," and may develop into an
obsession.
 As in Gothic fiction, buildings are central to meaning; the supernatural, wild
nature, dream and madness, physical violence, and perverse sexuality are set
off against social conventions and institutions. Initially, this may create the
impression that the novel is two books in one, but finally Thrushcross Grange
and Wuthering Heights fuse.

23
  Endings are disquieting and unsatisfactory because the writer resists a
definitive conclusion, one which accounts for all loose ends and explains away
any ambiguities or uncertainties. The preference for open-endedness is,
ultimately, an effort to resist the limits of time and of place That effort helps
explain the importance of dreams and memories of other times and location,
like Catherine's delirious memories of childhood at Wuthering Heights and
rambles on the moors.

ROMANTICISM AND THE BRONTËS

Romanticism, the literary movement traditionally dated 1798 to 1832 in England,

affected all the arts through the nineteenth century. The Brontës were familiar with
the writings of the major romantic poets and the novels of Sir Walter Scott. When
Charlotte Brontë, for instance, wanted an evaluation of her writing, she sent a sample
to the romantic poet Southey. The romantic elements in the Brontës' writings are
obvious. Walter Pater saw in Wuthering Heights the characteristic spirit of
romanticism, particularly in "the figures of Hareton Earnshaw, of Catherine Linton,
and of Heathcliff–tearing open Catherine's grave, removing one side of her coffin,
that he may really lie beside her in death–figures so passionate, yet woven on a
background of delicately beautiful, moorland scenery, being typical examples of that
spirit."

As the details of their lives became generally known and as Jane Eyre and Wuthering
Heights received increasingly favorable critical attention, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne
were cast in the role of Romantic Rebels. Contributing to the Romantic Rebels Myth
was the association of Romanticism and early death; Shelley having died at 29, Byron
at 36, and Keats at 24. Branwell died at the age of 31, Emily at 30, and Anne at 29; to
add to the emotional impact, Branwell, Emily, and Anne died in the space of nine
months. The Romantic predilection for early death appears in Wuthering Heights;
Linton is 17 when he dies; Catherine, 18; Hindley, 27; Isabella, 31; Edgar, 39;
Heathcliff, perhaps 37 or 38.

ROMANTIC ELEMENTS IN WUTHERING HEIGHTS

The major characteristics of Romanticism could be extrapolated from a reading of

Wuthering Heights:

 the imagination is unleashed to explore extreme states of being and

experiences.
 the love of nature is not presented just in its tranquil and smiling aspects but
also appears in its wild, stormy moods,
 nature is a living, vitalizing force and offers a refuge from the constraints of
civilization,

24
  the passion driving Catherine and Heathcliff and their obsessive love for each
other are the center of their being and transcend death,
 so great a focus is placed on the individual that society is pushed to the
periphery of the action and the reader's consciousness,
 the concern with identity and the creation of the self are a primary concern,
 childhood and the adult's developing from childhood experiences are
presented realistically,
 Heathcliff is the Byronic hero; both are rebellious, passionate, misanthropic,
isolated, and wilful, have mysterious origins, lack family ties, reject external
restrictions and control, and seek to resolve their isolation by fusing with a
love object,
 Hareton is the noble savage and, depending on your reading of the novel, so is
Heathcliff,
 Brontë experiments with the narrative structure (the Chinese-box structure in
which Lockwood narrates what Nelly tells him, who repeats what others told
her),
 the taste for local color shows in the portrayal of Yorkshire, its landscape, its
folklore, and its people,
 the supernatural or the possibility of the supernatural appears repeatedly.

 ROMANTIC LOVE IN WUTHERING HEIGHTS


Romantic love takes many forms in Wuthering Heights: the grand passion of
Heathcliff and Catherine, the insipid sentimental languishing of Lockwood,
the coupleism of Hindley and Frances, the tame indulgence of Edgar, the
romantic infatuation of Isabella, the puppy love of Cathy and Linton, and the
flirtatious sexual attraction of Cathy and Hareton. These lovers, with the
possible exception of Hareton and Cathy, are ultimately self-centered and
ignore the needs, feelings, and claims of others; what matters is the lovers'
own feelings and needs.
 Nevertheless, it is the passion of Heathcliff and Catherine that most readers
respond to and remember and that has made this novel one of the great love
stories not merely of English literature but of European literature as well.
Simone de Beauvois cites Catherine's cry, "I am Heathcliff," in her discussion
of romantic love, and movie adaptations of the novel include a Mexican and a
French version. In addition, their love has passed into popular culture; Kate
Bush and Pat Benetar both recorded "Wuthering Heights," a song which Bush
wrote, and MTV showcased the lovers in a musical version.
 The love-relationship of Heathcliff and Catherine, but not that of the other
lovers, has become an archetype; it expresses the passionate longing to be
whole, to give oneself unreservedly to another and gain a whole self or sense
of identity back, to be all-in-all for each other, so that nothing else in the world
25
 matters, and to be loved in this way forever. This type of passion-love can be
summed up in the phrase more--and still more , for it is insatiable,
unfulfillable, and unrelenting in its demands upon both lovers.
  

 HEATHCLIFF AND CATHERINE: TRUE LOVERS?

 Despite the generally accepted view that Heathcliff and Catherine are deeply
in love with each other, the question of whether they really love each other has
to be addressed. This question raises another; what kind of love--or feeling--is
Emily Brontë depicting? Her sister Charlotte, for example, called Heathcliff's
feelings "perverted passion and passionate perversity."

I list below a number of interpretations of their love/ostensible love.

  Soulmates. Their love exists on a higher or spiritual plane; they are soul
mates, two people who have an affinity for each other which draws them
togehter irresistibly. Heathcliff repeatedly calls Catherine his soul. Such a love
is not necessarily fortunate or happy. For C. Day Lewis, Heathcliff and
Catherine "represent the essential isolation of the soul, the agony of two souls–
or rather, shall we say? two halves of a single soul–forever sundered and
struggling to unite."

  A life-force relationship. Clifford Collins calls their love a life-force

relationship, a principle that is not conditioned by anything but itself. It is a
principle because the relationship is of an ideal nature; it does not exist in life,
though as in many statements of an ideal this principle has implications of a
profound living significance. Catherine's conventional feelings for Edgar
Linton and his superficial appeal contrast with her profound love for
Heathcliff, which is "an acceptance of identity below the level of
consciousness." Their relationship expresses "the impersonal essence of
personal existence," an essence which Collins calls the life-force. This fact
explains why Catherine and Heathcliff several times describe their love in
impersonal terms. Because such feelings cannot be fulfilled in an actual
relationship, Brontë provides the relationship of Hareton and Cathy to
integrate the principle into everyday life.
  Creating meaning. Are Catherine and Heathcliff rejecting the emptiness
of the universe, social institutions, and their relationships with others by
finding meaning in their relationship with each other, by a desperate assertion
of identity based on the other? Catherine explains to Nelly:
 ...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 here? My great miseries in this world have been Heathcliff's
miseries, and I watched and felt each from the beginning; my great thought in
living is himself. 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" (Ch. ix, p. 64).
 Dying, Catherine again confides to Nelly her feelings about the emptiness and
torment of living in this world and her belief in a fulfilling alternative: "I'm

26
 tired, tired of being enclosed here. I'm wearying to escape into that glorious
world, and to be always there; not seeing it dimly through tears, and yearning
for it through the walls of an aching heart; but really with it, and in it" (Ch. xv,
p. 125).
  Transcending isolation. Their love is an attempt to break the boundaries
of self and to fuse with another to transcend the inherent separateness of the
human condition; fusion with another will by uniting two incomplete
individuals create a whole and achieve new sense of identity, a complete and
unified identity. This need for fusion motivates Heathcliff's determination to
"absorb" Catherine's corpse into his and for them to "dissolve" into each other
so thoroughly that Edgar will not be able to distinguish Catherine from him.
 Freud explained this urge as an inherent part of love: "At the height of being in
love the boundary between ego and object threatens to melt away. Against all
the evidence of his senses, a man who is in love declares ‘I' and 'you' are one,
and is prepared to behave as if it were a fact."
  Love as religion. Love has become a religion in Wuthering Heights,
providing a shield against the fear of death and the annihilation of personal
identity or consciousness. This use of love would explain the inexorable
connection between love and death in the characters' speeches and actions.

Robert M. Polhemus sees Brontë's religion of love as individualistic and

capitalistic:
 Wuthering Heights is filled with a religious urgency–unprecedented in British
novels–to imagine a faith that might replace the old. Cathy's "secret" is
blasphemous, and Emily Brontë's secret, in the novel, is the raging heresy that
has become common in modern life: redemption, if it is possible, lies in
personal desire, imaginative power, and love. Nobody else's heaven is good
enough. Echoing Cathy, Heathdiff says late in the book, "I have nearly
attained my heaven; and that of others is altogether unvalued and uncoveted
by me!" ...The hope for salvation becomes a matter of eroticized private
enterprise....
 ... Catherine and Heathcliff have faith in their vocation of being in love with
one another.... They both believe that they have their being in the other, as
Christians, Jews, and Moslems believe that they have their being in God. Look
at the mystical passion of these two: devotion to shared experience and
intimacy with the other; willingness to suffer anything, up to, and including,
death, for the sake of this connection; ecstatic expression; mutilation of both
social custom and the flesh; and mania for self-transcendence through the
other, That passion is a way of overcoming the threat of death and the
separateness of existence. Their calling is to be the other; and that calling, mad
and destructive as it sometimes seems, is religious.

27
  The desire for transcendence takes the form of crossing
boundaries and rejecting conventions; this is the source
of the torment of being imprisoned in a body and in this
life, the uncontrolled passion expressed in extreme and
violent ways, the usurpation of property, the literal and
figurative imprisonments, the necrophilia, the hints of
incest and adultery, the ghosts of Catherine and
Heathcliff–all, in other words, that has shocked readers
from the novel's first publication. Each has replaced
God for the other, and they anticipate being reunited in
love after death, just as Christians anticipate being
reunited with God after death. Nevertheless, Catherine
and Heatcliff are inconsistent in their attitude toward
death, which both unites and separates. After crying
"Heathcliff! I only wish us never to be parted,"
Catherine goes on to say, "I'm wearying to escape into
that glorious world," a wish which necessarily involves
separation (Ch. xv, p. 125).

Conventional religion is presented negatively in the

novel. The abandoned church at Gimmerton is decaying; the minister stops
visiting Wuthering Heights because of Hindley's degeneracy. Catherine and
Heathcliff reject Joseph's religion, which is narrow, self-righteous, and
punitive. Is conventional religion replaced by the religion of love, and does the
fulfillment of Heathcliff and Catherine's love after death affect the love of
Hareton and Cathy in any way? Does the redemptive power of love, which is
obvious in Cathy's civilizing Hareton, relate to love-as-religion experienced by
Heathcliff and Catherine?
  Love as addiction. Is what Catherine and Heathcliff call love and
generations of readers have accepted as Ideal Love really an addiction?
Stanton Peele argues that romantic or passion love is in itself an addiction.
What exactly does he mean by addiction?
 An addiction exists when a person's attachment to a sensation, an object, or
another person is such as to lessen his appreciation of and ability to deal with
other things in his environment, or in himself, so that he has become
increasingly dependent on that experience as his only source of gratification.
 Individuals who lack direction and commitment, who are emotionally
unstable, or who are isolated and have few interests are especially vulnerable
to addictions. An addictive love wants to break down the boundaries of
identity and merge with the lover into one identity. Lacking inner resources,
love addicts look outside themselves for meaning and purpose, usually in
people similar to themselves. Even if the initial pleasure and sense of
fulfillment or satisfaction does not last, the love-addict is driven by need and
clings desperately to the relationship and the lover. Catherine, for example,
calls her relationship "a source of little visible delight, but necessary." The loss
of the lover, whether through rejection or death, causes the addict withdrawal
symptoms, often extreme ones like illness, not eating, and faintness. The
addict wants possession of the lover regardless of the consequences to the
28
 loved one; a healthy love, on the other hand, is capable of putting the needs of
the beloved first.

I AM HEATHCLIFF

 How deep a chord Emily strikes with the relationship of Catherine and
Heathcliff is shown by the use Simone de Beauvoir makes of it in writing of
the French tradition of the grandes amoureuses or the the great female lovers.
Catherine's affirmation "I
am Heathcliff" is for de
Beauvoir the cry of every
woman in love. In her
feminist, existentialist
reading, the woman in love
surrenders her identity for
his identity and her world
for his world; she becomes
the incarnation or
embodiment of the man she
loves, his reflection, his
double. The basis for this
relationship lies in the roles
society assigns to males and
females.

The male is the standard or

norm, the One; he is the
subject who is capable of
choice, of acting, of taking
responsibility, and of
affecting his destiny. The
female, who is measured
against the standard of the
male, becomes the Other,
dependent on him; she is an object to be acted upon by man, the subject; she is
given meaning and status by her relationship to him. She is taught to regard
man as godlike and to worship him; the goal of her existence is to be
associated with him, to love him and be loved by him, because this allows her
to share in his male power and sovereignty. She achieves happiness when the
man she loves accepts her as part of his identity. In reality, because no man is
godlike, she is ultimately disappointed but refuses to acknowledge his
fallibility; because no man can give her either his ability to act and choose or
the character to accept responsibility for those actions and choices, she does
not really achieve or even participate in his status as subject or standard. She
remains dependent, Other. It comes as no surprise, then, to find that the
woman in love, who is seldom the wife, at least traditionally in France and
Italy, is the woman who waits.
 Catherine implies that their love is timeless and exists on some other plane
than her feelings for Linton, which are conventionally romantic. If their love

29
 exists on a spiritual or at least a non-material plane, then she is presumably
free to act as she pleases in the material, social plane; marrying Edgar will not
affect her relationship with Heathcliff. By dying, she relinquishes her material,
social self and all claims except those of their love, which will continue after
death. Heathcliff, in contrast, wants physical togetherness; hence, his drive to
see her corpse and his arrangements for their corpses to merge by decaying
into each other.
 If identity rather than personal relationship is the issue or the nature of their
relationship, then Catherine is free to have a relationship with Edgar because
Heathcliff's feelings and desires do not have to be taken into account. She
needs to think only of herself, in effect.
 In Lord David Cecil's view, conflict arises between unlike characters, and the
deepest attachments are based on characters' similarity or affinity as
expressions of the same spiritual principle. Thus, Catherine loves Heathcliff
because as children of the storm they are bound by their similar natures. This
is why Catherine says she loves Heathcliff "because he's more myself than I
am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same." As the
expression of the principle of the storm, their love is, of course, neither sexual
nor sensual.
 Because of the merging of their identities or, perhaps it would be more
accurate to say, because of their intense desire to merge and refusal to accept
their literal separateness, Catherine's betrayal of her own nature destroys not
only her but threatens Heathcliff with destruction also.
 Is Catherine deluding herself with this speech? Louis Beverslius answers yes,
Catherine is preoccupied, if not obsessed with the image of herself "as
powerfully, even irresistibly, attracted to Heathcliff." Their bond is a negative
one:

they identify with one another in the face of a common enemy, they
rebel against a particular way of life which both find intolerable. It is
not enough, however, simply to reject a particular way of life; one
cannot define oneself wholly in terms of what he despises. One must
carve out for oneself an alternative which is more than a systematic
repudiation of what he hates. A positive commitment is also necessary.
The chief contrast between Catherine and Heathcliff consists in the fact
that he is able to make such a commitment (together with everything it
entails) while she is not. And, when the full measure of their characters
has been taken, this marks them as radically dissimilar from one
another, whatever their temporary 'affinities' appear to be. It requires
only time for this radical dissimilarity to become explicit.

Their dissimilarities appear when she allies herself, however sporadically,

with the Lintons and oscillates between identifying with them and with
Heathcliff. When Heathcliff throws hot applesauce at Edgar and is banished,
Catherine initially seems unconcerned and later goes off to be with Heathcliff.
Her rebelliousness changes from the open defiance of throwing books into the
kennel to covert silence and a double character. Catherine both knows
30
 Heathacliff and does not know him; she sees his avarice and vengefulness, but
believes that he will not injure Isabella because she warned him off.
Catherine's mistaken belief that she and Heathcliff still share an affinity moves
her to distinguish in their last conversation between the real Hathcliff whom
she is struggling with and the image of Heathcliff which she has held since
childhood. It is with the false image that she has an affinity:

    Oh, you see, Nelly! He would not relent a moment, to keep me out
of hte grave! That is how I'm loved! Well, never mind! That is not my
Heathcliff. I shall love mine yet; and take him with me–he's in my
soul.

The fact that to maintain the fiction of their affinity Catherine has to create
two Heathcliffs, an inner and an outer one, suggests that total affinity does not
exist and that complete mergining of two identities is impossible.

 Catherine is similarly deluded about her childhood and has painted a false
picture of the freedom of Wuthering Heights.
 Catherine's assertion that Heathcliff is "more myself than I am" is generally
read as an expression of elemental passion. But is it possible that she is using
Heathcliff as a symbol of their childhood, when she had freedom of movement
and none of the responsibilities and pressure of adulthood, when she was "half
savage, and hardy and free."? Does Catherine become, in the words of Lyn
Pykett, "the object of a competitive struggle between two men, each of whom
wants her to conform to his own version of her"?

SEX IN WUTHERING HEIGHTS

 Is the religious fervor of their love a sublimation of sexual passion?  The

Spanish director Luis Buñuel focuses on the conflict between religious belief
and sexual passion in his adaptation Los abismos de pasion.

 Is the love of Catherine and Heathcliff sexual? Is it true that even when
Catherine is clasped to Heathcliff's breast "we dare not doubt her purity"
(Sidney Dobell, 1840); Swinburne agrees with Dobell because theirs is a
"passionate and ardent chastity."
 Incest:
1. Is Heathcliff really Mr. Earnshaw's illegitimate son?
2. If not, are Catherine and Heathcliff raised so like brother and sister that
there is emotional incest? or the hint of incest? English law did not allow the
marriage of siblings by adoption and of non-related/non-adopted children
raised in the same household; this prohibition would seem to apply to
Catherine and Heathcliff. Christopher Heywood suggests that by using the
name of a son who had died, the Earnshaws precluded his marrying Catherine.
Does this legal prohibition reinforce the implication of incest in their love?  3.
Is Cathy really Heathcliff's child, so that Cathy and Linton are half brother and
sister?

31
   If the marriage of Linton and Cathy is unconsummated, it could be declared
void, if challenged. 
 Richard Chase sees Emily, like her sisters, presenting a masculine universe
informed by sexual energy or élan. Catherine seems to fear Heathacliff,
presumably because, as the embodiment of the spirit of the wild Yorkshire
moors and the universal élan, he cannot be tamed:

We realize that with a few readjustments of the plot he need not have entered
the story as a human being at all. His part might have been played by Fate or
Nature or God or the Devil. He is sheer dazzling sexual and intellectual force.
As Heathcliff expires at the end of the book, we feel, not so much that a man
is dying, as that an intolerable energy is flagging. And we see that Heathcliff
without energy cannot possibly survive in human form.... The two novels
Wuthering Height and Jane Eyre end similarly: a relatively mild and ordinary
marriage is made after the spirit of the masculine universe is controlled or
extinguished.

 The point about Heathcliff's impersonality or non-humanness has been made

repeatedly by critics. According to Chase, both Emily and Charlotte Brontë
suffered from a failure in nerve; in different ways, both backed off from
uniting their heroines and their demonic lovers. Thus, their novels explore the
neuroses of women in a patriarchal society.

 Is Catherine's marrying Edgar is an attempt to escape the adult sexuality of

Heathcliff? If so, then how do we account for her emphatic hope to produce
several heirs for Edgar? And is there any reason to assume that Edgar is not
capable of healthy or normal sexual relations?

 EMILY BRONTË'S POETRY: AN OVERVIEW

 Poems by Currer, Ellis and Action Bell, published in 1846 and paid for by
Charlotte, Emily, and Anne, contained twenty-one poems by Emily and by
Anne and nineteen by Charlotte. Despite the fact that it received two
encouraging reviews, only two copies were sold. Charlotte edited Emily's
poems and rewrote some for the 1850 edition of her sisters' poems and novels.
She included seventeen previously unpublished poems from Emily's
manuscripts and one poem not found in Emily's manuscript ("Often rebuked,
yet always back returning").
 Emily Brontë has been called one of the great English lyric poets and has
found admirers among other poets. Emily Dickinson thought so highly of
Emily Brontë's poetry that she chose "No coward soul" to be read at her
funeral.
 High waving heather, 'neath stormy blasts bending  (December 13, 1836)
High waving heather, 'neath stormy blasts
bending,
Midnight and moonlight and bright shining stars;
Darkness and glory rejoicingly blending,
Earth rising to heaven and heaven descending,
32
 Man's spirit away from its drear dongeon sending,
Bursting the fetters and breaking the bars.

All down the mountain sides, wild forest lending

One mighty voice to the life-giving wind;
Rivers their banks in the jubilee rending,
Fast through the valleys a reckless course
wending,
Wider and deeper their waters extending,
Leaving a desolate desert behind.

Shining and lowering and swelling and dying,

Changing for ever from midnight to noon;
Roaring like thunder, like soft music sighing,
Shadows on shadows advancing and flying,
Lightning-bright flashes the deep gloom defying,
Coming as swiftly and fading as soon.
  
 Riches I hold in light esteem (March 1, 1841)

Riches I hold in light esteem

And Love I laugh to scorn
And lust of Fame was but a dream
That vanished with the morn–

And if I pray, the only prayer

That moves my lips for me
Is–"Leave the heart that now I bear
And give me liberty."

Yes, as my swift days near their goal

'Tis all that I implore
Through life and death, a chainless soul
With courage to endure!

 A Day Dream (March 5, 1844)

On a sunny brae alone I lay
One summer afternoon;
It was the marriage-time of May
With her young lover, June.

From her Mother's heart seemed loath to part

That queen of bridal charms,
But her Father smiled on the fairest child
He ever held in his arms.

The trees did wave their plumy crests,

The glad birds carolled clear;

33
 And I, of all the wedding guests,
Was only sullen there.

There was not one but wished to shun

My aspect void of cheer;
The very grey rocks, looking on,
Asked, "What do you do here?"

And I could utter no reply:

In sooth I did not know
Why I had brought a clouded eye
To greet the general glow.

So, resting on a heathy bank,

I took my heart to me;
And we together sadly sank
Into a reverie.

We thought, "When winter comes again

Where will these bright things be?
All vanished, like a vision vain,
An unreal mockery!

"The birds that now so blithely sing,

Through deserts frozen dry,
Poor spectres of the perished Spring
In famished troops will fly.

"And why should we be glad at all?

The leaf is hardly green,
Before a token of the fall
Is on its surface seen."

Now whether it were really so

I never could be sure-,
But as, in fit of peevish woe,
I stretched me on the moor,

A thousand thousand glancing fires

Seemed kindling in the air;
A thousand thousand silvery lyres
Resounded far and near:

Methought the very breath I breathed

Was full of sparks divine,
And all my heather-couch was wreathed
By that celestial shine.

And while the wide Earth echoing rang

34
 To their strange minstrelsy,
The little glittering spirits sang,
Or seemed to sing, to me:

"0 mortal, mortal, let them die;

Let Time and Tears destroy,
That we may overflow the sky
With universal joy.

"Let Grief distract the sufferer's breast,

And Night obscure his way;
They hasten him to endless rest,
And everlasting day.

"To Thee the world is like a tomb,

A desert's naked shore;
To us, in unimagined bloom,
It brightens more and more.

"And could we lift the veil and give

One brief glimpse to thine eye
Thou would'st rejoice for those that live,
Because they live to die."

The music ceased-the noonday Dream

Like dream of night withdrew
But Fancy still will sometimes deem
Her fond creation true.

 To Imagination (September 3, 1844)

 Emily personfies Imagination as a physical presence separate from the
individual in several poems, including this one.

When weary with the long day's care,

And earthly change from pain to pain,
And lost, and ready to despair,
Thy kind voice calls me back again
0 my true friend, I am not lone
While thou canst speak with such a tone!

So hopeless is the world without,

The world within I doubly prize;
Thy world where guile and hate and doubt
And cold suspicion never rise;
Where thou and I and Liberty
Have undisputed sovereignty.

What matters it that all around

35
 Danger and grief and darkness lie,
If but within our bosom's bound
We hold a bright unsullied sky,
Warm with ten thousand mingled rays
Of suns that know no winter days?

Reason indeed may oft complain

For Nature's sad reality,
And tell the suffering heart how vain
Its cherished dreams must always be;
And Truth may rudely trample down
The flowers of Fancy newly blown.

But thou art ever there to bring

The hovering visions back and breathe
New glories o'er the blighted spring
And call a lovelier life from death,
And whisper with a voice divine
Of real worlds as bright as thine.

I trust not to thy phantom bliss,

Yet still in evening's quiet hour
With never-failing thankfulness I
welcome thee, benignant power,
Sure solacer of human cares
And brighter hope when hope despairs.

 R. Alcona to J. Brenzaida (March 3, 1845)

Cold in the earth, and the deep snow piled above thee!

Far, far removed, cold in the dreary grave!

Have I forgot, my Only Love, to love thee,
Severed at last by Time's all-wearing wave?

Now, when alone, do my thoughts no longer hover

Over the mountains on Angora's shore;
Resting their wings where heath and fern-leaves cover

That noble heart for ever, ever more?

Cold in the earth, and fifteen wild Decembers

From those brown hills have melted into spring--
Faithful indeed is the spirit that remembers
After such years of change and suffering!

Sweet Love of youth, forgive if I forget thee

While the World's tide is bearing me along:
36
 Sterner desires and darker hopes beset me,
Hopes which obscure but cannot do thee wrong.

No other Sun has lightened up my heaven;

No other Star has ever shone for me:
All my life's bliss from thy dear life was given
All my life's bliss is in the grave with thee.

But when the days of golden dreams had perished

And even Despair was powerless to destroy,
Then did I learn how existence could be cherished,
Strengthened and fed without the aid of joy;

Then did I check the tears of useless passion,

Weaned my young soul from yearning after thine;
Sternly denied its burning wish to hasten
Down to that tomb already more than mine!

And even yet, I dare not let it languish,

Dare not indulge in Memory's rapturous pain;
Once drinking deep of that divinest anguish,
How could I seek the empty world again?
 Death, that struck when I was most confiding (April 10, 1845)
 The Gondal title of this poem was "Rosina Alcona to Julius Brenzaida."

  

Death, that struck when I was most confiding

In my certain Faith of joy to be,
Strike again, Time's withered branch dividing
From the fresh root of Eternity!

Leaves, upon Time's branch, were growing brightly,

Full of sap and full of silver dew;
Birds, beneath its shelter, gathered nightly;
Daily, round its flowers, the wild bees flew.

Sorrow passed and plucked the golden blossom,

Guilt stripped off the foliage in its pride;
But, within its parent's kindly bosom,
Flowed forever Life's restoring tide.

Little mourned I for the parted Gladness,

For the vacant nest and silent song;
Hope was there and laughed me out of sadness,
Whispering, "Winter will not linger long."

And behold, with tenfold increase blessing

Spring adorned the beauty-burdened spray;
37
 Wind and rain and fervent heat caressing
Lavished glory on its second May.
High it rose; no winge'd grief could sweep it;
Sin was scared to distance with its shine:
Love and its own life had power to keep it
From all 'Wrong, from every blight but thine!

Heartless ' Death, the young leaves droop and

languish!
Evening's gentle air may still restore–
No: the morning sunshine mocks my anguish
Time for me must never blossom more!

Strike it down, that other boughs may flourish

Where that perished sapling used to be;
Thus, at least, its mouldering corpse will nourish
That from which it sprung-Eternity.

 The Two Children (May 28, 1845)


 Emily's name for these two poems in the Gondal saga was "A. E. and R. C"; it was
Charlotte who gave them this title. The image of two children appears a number of
times in Emily Brontë's poetry as well as in her novel. In this poem, the "melancholy
boy" resembles Heathcliff and Hareton, while the "Child of Delight! with sunbright
hair" resembles Catherine Earnshaw and Cathy Linton; the poem hints that they are
to redeem the "melancholy boy." The dark-light, male-female pair appears in the
novel and in the Gondal saga as well.
Part I

Heavy hangs the raindrop

From the burdened spray;
Heavy broods the damp mist
On Uplands far away;

Heavy looms the dull sky,

Heavy rolls the sea -
And heavy beats the young heart
Beneath that lonely Tree -

Never has a blue streak

Cleft the clouds since morn -
Never has his grim Fate
Smiled since he was born -

Frowning on the infant,

Shadowing childhood's joy;
Guardian angel knows not

38
 That melancholy boy.

Day is passing swiftly

Its sad and sombre prime;
Youth is fast invading
Sterner manhood's time -

All the flowers are praying

For sun before they close,
And he prays too, unknowing,
That sunless human rose!

Blossoms, that the westwind

Has never wooed to blow,
Scentless are your petals,
Your dew as cold as snow -

Soul, where kindred kindness

No early promise woke,
Barren is your beauty
As weed upon the rock -

Wither, Brothers, wither,

You were vainly given -
Earth reserves no blessing
For the unblessed of Heaven!

Part II

Child of Delight! with sunbright hair

And seablue, sea-deep eyes;
Spirit of Bliss, what brings thee here,
Beneath these sullen skies?

Thou shouldest live in eternal spring,

Where endless day is never dim;
Why, seraph, has thy erring wing
Borne thee down to weep with him?

"Ah, not from heaven am I descended,

And I do not come to mingle tears;
But sweet is day though with shadows
blended;
And, though clouded, sweet are youthful
years -

I, the image of light and gladness,

Saw and pitied that mournful boy;
And I swore to take his gloomy sadness,
39
 And give to him my beamy joy -

"Heavy and dark the night is closing;

Heavy and dark may its biding be;
Better for all from grief reposing,
And better for all who watch like me -

"Guardian angel, he lacks no longer;

Evil fortune he need not fear;
Fate is strong–but Love is stronger,
And more unsleeping than angel's care.

 How beautiful the Earth is still ( June 2, 1845)

 Charlotte Brontë wrote "Never was better stuff penned." in the manuscript of
this poem.

How beautiful the Earth is still

To thee–how full of Happiness;
How little fraught with real ill
Or shadowy phantoms of distress;

How Spring can bring thee glory yet

And Summer win thee to forget
December's sullen time!
Why dost thou hold the treasure fast
Of youth's delight, when youth is past
And thou art near thy prime?

When those who were thy own compeers,

Equal in fortunes and in years,
Have seen their morning melt in tears,
To dull unlovely day;
Blest, had they died unproved and young
Before their hearts were wildly wrung,
Poor slaves, subdued by passions strong,
A weak and helpless prey!

"Because, I hoped while they enjoyed,

And by fulfilment, hope destroyed
As children hope, with trustful breast,
I waited Bliss and cherished Rest.

"A thoughtful Spirit taught me soon

That we must long till life be done;
That every phase of earthly joy
Will always fade and always cloy--

"This I foresaw, and would not chase

40
 The fleeting treacheries,
But with firm foot and tranquil face
Held backward from the tempting race,
Gazed o'er the sands the waves efface
To the enduring seas–

"There cast my anchor of Desire

Deep in unknown Eternity;
Nor ever let my Spirit tire
With looking for What is to be.

"It is Hope's spell that glorifies

Like youth to my maturer eyes
All Nature's million mysteries--
The fearful and the fair–

"Hope soothes me in the griefs I know,

She lulls my pain for others' woe
And makes me strong to undergo
What I am born to bear.
"Glad comforter, will I not brave
Unawed the darkness of the grave?
Nay, smile to hear Death's billows rave,
My Guide, sustained by thee?

The more unjust seems present fate

The more my Spirit springs elate
Strong in thy strength, to anticipate
Rewarding Destiny!

 The Prisoner. A Fragment (October 9, 1845)

 This poem is part of a larger Gondal poem which Emily revised for
publication in 1846. She cut lines 1-12, 45-64, and 93-152. She added the
concluding stanza, which starts with "She ceased to speak..." The original title
of the poem is "Julian M. and A.G. Rochelle," the names of two lovers in the
Gondal saga.
  

In the dungeon crypts idly did I stray,

Reckless of the lives wasting there away;
"Draw the ponderous bars; open, Warder stern!"
He dare not say me nay–the hinges harshly turn.

"Our guests are darkly lodged," I whispered, gazing through

The vault whose grated eye showed heaven more grey than
blue.
(This was when glad spring laughed in awaking pride.)
41
 "Aye, darkly lodged enough!" returned my sullen guide.

Then, God forgive my youth, forgive my careless tongue!

I scoffed, as the chill chains on the damp flagstones rung;
"Confined in triple walls, art thou so much to fear,
That we must bind thee down and clench thy fetters here?"

The captive raised her face; it was as soft and mild

As sculptured marble saint or slumbering, unweaned child;
It was so soft and mild, it was so sweet and fair,
Pain could not trace a line nor grief a shadow there!

The captive raised her hand and pressed it to her brow:

"I have been struck," she said, "and I am suffering now;
Yet these are little worth, your bolts and irons strong;
And were they forged in steel they could not hold me long."

Hoarse laughed the jailor grim: "Shall I be won to hear;

Dost think, fond dreaming wretch, that I shall grant thy
prayer?
Or, better still, wilt melt my master's heart with groans?
Ah, sooner might the sun thaw down these granite stones!

"My master's voice is low, his aspect bland and kind,

But hard as hardest flint the soul that lurks behind;
And I am rough and rude, yet not more rough to see
Than is the hidden ghost which has its home in me!

About her lips there played a smile of almost scorn:

"My friend," she gently said, "you have not heard me mourn;
When you my parents' lives-my lost life, can restore,
Then may I weep and sue-but never, Friend, before!"

"Yet, tell them, Julian, all, I am not doomed to wear

Year after year in gloom and desolate despair;
A messenger of Hope comes every night to me,
And offers, for short life, eternal liberty.

He comes with western winds, with evening's wandering airs,

With that clear dusk of heaven that brings the thickest stars;
Winds take a pensive tone, and stars a tender fire, And
visions rise and change which kill me with desire–

"Desire for nothing known in my maturer years

When joy grew mad with awe at counting future tears;
When, if my spirit's sky was full of flashes warm,
I knew not whence they came, from sun or thunderstorm;

"But first a hush of peace, a soundless calm descends;

42
 The struggle of distress and fierce impatience ends;
Mute music soothes my breast-unuttered harmony
That I could never dream till earth was lost to me.

"Then dawns the Invisible, the Unseen its truth reveals;

My outward sense is gone, my inward essence feels
Its wings are almost free, its home, its harbour found;
Measuring the gulf it stoops and dares the final bound!

"Oh, dreadful is the check-intense the agony

When the ear begins to hear and the eye begins to see;
When the pulse begins to throb, the brain to think again,
The soul to feel the flesh and the flesh to feel the chain!

"Yet I would lose no sting, would wish no torture less; go

The more that anguish racks the earlier it will bless;
And robed in fires of Hell, or bright with heavenly shine,
If it but herald Death, the vision is divine."

She ceased to speak, and we, unanswering turned to go–

We had no further power to work the captive woe;
Her cheek, he gleaming eye, declared that man had given
A sentence unapproved, and overruled by Heaven.

 The Visionary (October 9, 1845)

 This poem is part of the same Gondal poem from which Emily carved "The
Prisoner. A Fragment." Charlotte Brontë took lines 1-12 of Emily's original
poem, "Julian M. and A.G Rochelle," and added 8 lines of her own. Thus, the
positive ending in which the watcher has a spiritual experience is Charlotte's
and the watcher may be seen as Emily rather than a Gondal character. In
Charlotte's version, it is hard to explain the guiding light in the window of
stanze 2.
  

Silent is the House-all are laid asleep;

One, alone, looks out o'er the snow wreaths deep;
Watching every cloud, dreading every breeze
That whirls the 'wildering drifts and bends the groaning trees.

Cheerful is the hearth, soft the matted floor;

Not one shivering gust creeps through pane or door;
The little lamp burns straight, its rays shoot strong and far;
I trim it well to be the Wanderer's guiding-star.

Frown, my haughty sire; chide, my angry dame;

43
 Set your slaves to spy, threaten me with shame:
But neither sire nor dame, nor prying serf shall know
What angel nightly tracks that waste of winter snow.

What I love shall come like visitant of air,

Safe in secret power from lurking human snare;
Who loves me, no word of mine shall e'er betray,
Though for faith unstained my life must forfeit pay.

Burn, then, little lamp; glimmer straight and clear

Hush! a rustling wing stirs, methinks, the air:
He for whom I wait, thus ever comes to me;
Strange Power! I trust thy might; trust thou my constancy.

 No coward soul is mine (Jan. 2, 1846)

 Charlotte Brontë notes, "The following are the last lines my sister Emily ever
wrote."

No coward soul is mine

No trembler in the world's storm-troubled sphere
I see Heaven's glories shine
And Faith shines equal arming me from Fear

0 God within my breast

Almighty ever-present Deity
Life, that in me hast rest
As I Undying Life, have power in Thee!

Vain are the thousand creeds

That move men's hearts, unutterably vain,
Worthless as withered weeds
Or idlest froth amid the boundless main

To waken doubt in one

Holding so fast by thy infinity
So surely anchored on
The steadfast rock of Immortality

With wide-embracing love

Thy spirit animates eternal years
Pervades and broods above,
Changes, sustains, dissolves, creates and rears

Though Earth and moon were gone

And suns and universes ceased to be
And thou wert left alone
Every Existence would exist in thee

44
 There is not room for Death
Nor atom that his might could render void
Since thou art Being and Breath
And what thou art may never be destroyed.

 Often rebuked, yet always back returning

 Harold Bloom calls this Emily Brontë's finest poem; however, C.W. Hatfield,
who edited her poems, speculates that Charlotte wrote or revised this poem. It
first appeared in the 1850 edition of Emily's novel and poems; no manuscript
version of this poem is known.
  

Often rebuked, yet always back returning

To those first feelings that were born with me,
And leaving busy chase of wealth and learning
For idle dreams of things which cannot be:

To-day, I will seek not the shadowy region;

Its unsustaining vastness waxes drear;
And visions rising, legion after legion,
Bring the unreal world too strangely near.

I'll walk, but not in old heroic traces,

And not in paths of high morality,
And not among the half-distinguished faces,
The clouded forms of long-past history.

I'll walk where my own nature would be leading:

It vexes me to choose another guide:
Where the gray flocks in ferny glens are feeding;
Where the wild wind blows on the mountain side

What have those lonely mountains worth revealing?

More glory and more grief than I can tell:
The earth that wakes one human heart to feeling
Can centre both the worlds of Heaven and Hell.

45