Life – Death- Afterlife in Wuthering Heights

Dr. Madhumita Majumdar

Assistant Professor of English
Bhangar Mahavidyalaya

Haworth was a remote, semi-industrial village, built on the edge of the moors — the

railways did not come there until 1867. A report by a public health inspector of the time stated

that Haworth was one of the least sanitary villages in England, and did not have a single water

closet. Incidentally water supply came into the village after flowing through the over-full burial

ground beside the church. Half the population died before the age of six and the average life

expectancy was 26 (Wilson). This place the Brontës called home!

Amongst the three Bronte sisters, Emily Brontë was said to be a bundle of passions. Her

only novel, Wuthering Heights reveals Emily’s obsessions with some dark subjects. Where did

this darkness and turbulent passion come from? A part of the answer lies in the house of

Haworth Parsonage where the Brontë children lived their short and all too tragic lives.

At 5ft and 6inches, Emily was the tallest of the three novelist sisters. Gondal, a mystical

land of magic was weaved by Emily and her sister, Anne as children to escape the pain that was

theirs forever after the untimely demise of their mother. In the Gondal poems Emily’s different

voices and personae interestingly visit and explore the themes of imprisonment and death. The

dark and overpowering emotions manifested in the poems by a younger Emily certainly

channelize into her invention of Catherine and Heathcliff, the characters in her only novel,

Wuthering Heights. Charlotte, the more practical one along with their brother, Branwell invented

the Kingdom of Angria. The tiny books written by the sisters at Haworth are a sign of their
closed and secret world. Neighbours of the Brontës noted that in the presence of strangers, the

little children would ‘hug one another like timorous animals huddling against predators. They

spoke not with the local Yorkshire dialect, but with the Northern Irish brogue of their father, the

Rev Patrick Bronte’ (Wilson). As the Brontës spent most of their lives cloistered away in

Haworth Parsonage, often in poor health, people have tended to assume that they were timid as

they were retiring but the truth is far from this. Claire Harman in a new biography, Charlotte

Brontë: A Fiery Life (2015) mentions an interesting episode that reveals the fiery side of Emily.

It is said that one day the family dog, Keeper – a mastiff dirtied a counterpane with his muddy

paws; this left Emily so angry that she punched the hapless dog very hard almost leaving him

blind. Thus it is not uncanny when Heathcliff and Catherine share this cruel streak of their

creator. Catherine when she sees Isabella is deeply attracted to Heathcliff warns her sister-in-law

thus:

He’s fierce, pitiless, wolfish man. He’d crush you like a sparrow’s egg if he found you a
troublesome charge. He’d be quite capable of marrying your fortune. (Wuthering Heights,
p.93).

And we can recall the scene when Heathcliff eloped with Isabella, he hung the latter’s puppy

leaving it to die. Intimidated but Isabella too is attracted to violence though she is finally

incapable of performing it (she says this when Heathcliff kills her puppy):

I surveyed the weapon inquisitively, a hideous notion struck me. How powerful I should
be possessing such an instrument! I took it from his hand and touched the blade. He
looked astonished at the expression on my face assumed during a brief second. It was not
horror, it was covetousness (Wuthering Heights,p.65)

It is thus perhaps not very strange that Emily Brontë's spiritual belief and secular

spiritualism is symbolized by her love of nature and typified by 'shadows of the dead' which she
saw around her. Gilbert and Gubar saw Emily Brontë's poetry and beliefs as threatening the

rigidly hierarchical state of heaven and hell, and suggested that Emily believed that the dead

remained on the earth and moved around her (Gilbert and Gubar, p.225). Emily apparently saw

dead friends and dead family members watching her at night. A brief stay at Brussels and the

tutoring of M. Heger saw Emily and her elder sister learning French. Soon after Emily left

Brussels, she composed a prose allegory, "Le Palais de la Mort," that influenced the second of

the two poems Self-Interrogation." In the essay as well as the poem Death is personified. In the

poem Death logically convinces the human speaker that life is hardly worth living with its

emptiness. Janet Gezari notes that the said poem is one the grim poems of Emily written

especially after the death of Aunt Branwell in 1842 that brought Charlotte and Emily back to

Hawthrone. This would mean the end of the brief stay for Emily who unlike her elder sister

would never return to Brussels. The poems are here stated to reiterate the point that Emily was

again and again returning to the notion of Death and sometimes an afterlife in works poems,

prose and of course her novel.

The Brontës have been associated with the ghostly, an association that continues till date.

It is a well-known fact that the house at Haworth has been converted into a museum as tribute to

the Brontës. Throughout the twentieth century, biographers and creative writers have seen Emily

as someone who longed for death and communed with spirits. Lucasta Miller, the author of The

Bronte Myth (2001) speaks of séance conducted at the parsonage way back in 1940. Again as

recently as 2006, Cornelia Parkar along with novelist Justine Picardie was commissioned by the

Parsonage Museum as part of her Brontean Abstracts to record and conduct a séance! Parker

justified her foray into spiritualism that when science could not answer her questions, then using

psychic methods seemed an interesting path( Regis and Wynne, p.17). Spiritualism, the belief
that the dead communicate with the living became fashionable throughout Europe around 1850

(Queen Victoria and Prince Albert participated in Spiritualist séances as early as 1846. On July

15 that year, the Clairvoyant Georgiana Eagle demonstrated her powers before the Queen at

Osborne House, on the Isle of Wight). Here was Emily talking something similar in her novel,

Wuthering Heights. Even after Catherine Earnshaw is dead, Heathcliff invokes her asking her to

haunt him:

Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest as long as I am living. You said I killed
you – haunt me then. The murdered do haunt their murderers. I believe –I know
that ghosts have wandered the earth. Be with me always – take any form – drive
me mad. Only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! It
is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!
(Wuthering Heights, p.150)

Incidentally a little before Catherine died, she envisions a heaven. Catherine is heard saying:

‘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’(Wuthering Heights, p.143). It is as though she had in mind a heaven that was like the moors

in every way but without the constraints of physicality: the spirit of natural freedom pervading

everywhere. Heathcliff on the other hand cannot imagine how Catherine can be happy with her

soul in the grave, alone and away from her Heathcliff. Interestingly when Catherine is

contemplating the marriage proposal from Edgar, she is not exactly looking with euphoria or

happiness to her new life rather the doom of death loom large. She speaks of her dream to Nelly:

''I was only going to say that heaven did not seem to be my home; and I broke my heart with

weeping to come back to earth; and the angels were so angry that they flung me out into the
middle of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights; where I woke sobbing for joy.'' (Wuthering

Heights, p.148) One thing is clear Catherine wishes not to leave Wuthering Heights; and

secondly, it foreshadows, warns of, Catherine's life after death. Nearly every character in

Wuthering Heights is afflicted with death at a young age, which creates a fixation on death!

Edward Chitman, Emily’s biographer, wrote that Emily Brontë's religious symbolism

showed no hope for everlasting life and her spirit languished in 'dead despair'. Emily believed in

the 'soul' that was crushed by worldly experience. It is death that released the soul to peaceful

oblivion rather than everlasting life, so Emily concluded. Emily desired freedom and 'liberty' for

an unconfined and 'chainless soul' (Wuthering Heights, p.146). Emily Brontë's derisive view of

patriarchal heaven suggests that it cannot contain or even partially fulfill her wild desires or

experiences. She has no fear of hell or its perennial fire because her 'will' is strong. It is then safe

to conclude that Emily’s frustration and secular spirituality blended to create her idea of life and

after-life.

All Emily wanted was peaceful sleep, vibrant with imagination and thought and away

from earthy woes. The moors where she lived and nature all around are intrinsically linked to her

spiritual beliefs but this adoration is different from another Victorian, Gerald Hopkins. Hopkins

visualized nature as an essential part of God's glory while Emily was more into the mystical

aspect of nature and the moods produced rather than the contours of nature. Obviously, Emily’s

poetry is reflective of the changing faces of her own faith as well as the changes in belief within

her society as this was also the time when the Victorians began increasingly to see a separation

of the 'moral sense from the religious institutions that had once expressed it' (Gilmour, p.93).

Emily, who could never bring herself to accept the patriarchal and ordered concept of

Christianity, came to reflect upon some of the processes of doubt in Victorian England. No
wonder, Emily allows Heathcliff literally to stare at his death and share the grave of his beloved.

The sky above and the wild nature all come to endorse this union of Heathcliff and Catherine

that did not find fruition in the social domain. Heathcliff strongly believes that death cannot

separate him and Catherine:

Because misery and degradation, and death, and nothing that God or Satan inflict
would have parted us, you, of your own will, did it. I have not broken your heart –
you have broken it; and in breaking it, you have broken mine (Wuthering Heights,
p.144).

In his final days Heathcliff seems to be communicating directly with Catherine’s presence and is
so drawn towards a world beyond the material that:

I have to remind myself to breathe - almost to remind my heart to beat! And it is

like bending back a stiff spring: it is by compulsion that I do the slightest act not
prompted by one thought; and by compulsion that I notice anything alive or dead,
which is not associated with one universal idea. (Wuthering Heights, p.391)

Indeed, Heathcliff’s own approach to death in Chapter 34 leaves Nelly unsure as to whether he is
dead or alive:

Mr. Heathcliff was there - laid on his back. His eyes met mine so keen and fierce, I
started; and then he seemed to smile. I could not think him dead: but his face and throat
were washed with rain; the bed-clothes dripped, and he was perfectly still. (Wuthering
Heights, p.393)

Incidentally the strangest notion about death in the novel gives the corpse a certain value,

as if in the afterlife the body mattered. After Catherine’s death, Heathcliff enters her room to

find a locket round her neck that contained a lock of hair of Linton. Heathcliff replaces it with
his hair but as Linton enters the room Heathcliff leaves in a hurry and that means his and

Linton’s hair happen to be twined in the locket of Catherine. In fact, it was a popular practice of

the time to bury with the dead things needed in the afterlife. John Callcott Horsley, a popular

Victorian painter, wrote in his diary about a little red-velvet bag that he hung around his wife

Elvira’s neck after her death in 1852. It contained his and his children’s locks which his wife had

cut herself when she sensed that she was nearing her death, labelling each person’s name and the

date when it was snipped! Like Horsley and his family, both Edgar Linton and Heathcliff want a

fragment of their bodies to go with Catherine hoping that it would act as connect between life

and death. The other was also true, the memorabilia of the dead like a lock of hair or even a

hairpin was preserved by those left behind. In all probability Charlotte Brontë' too wore an

amethyst bracelet entwined with the hair of Emily and Anne as a physical link with her dead

sisters. Having such mourning jewellry was again the fashion of the day, till photography

replaced it.

Wuthering Heights has many characters who visualize or believe in postmortem lives.

Nelly’s conventional heaven to Catherine’s dream about being kicked out of heaven and landing

on the paradise of the earthly moors are few examples. There are country folks who report of

having seen the ghosts of Catherine and Heathcliff. A young shepherd claimed his sheep refused

to be guided because the dead lovers flit across the road and the shepherd is not alone in his

claim. Catherine promises Heathcliff that “they may bury me twelve feet deep, and throw the

church down over me; but I won’t rest till you are with me—I never will!”(Wuthering Heights,

p.113). He believes her, having always had a “strong faith in ghosts” (Wuthering Heights, p.257).

Catherine’s corpse, buried with his hair in her locket is not enough for Heathcliff – he designs to

press his flesh against hers after his death. In fact Heathcliff digs up Catherine’s grave twice.
When Linton dies and his grave is dug next to his wife , Heathcliff strikes one side of the coffin

loose and bribes the sexton “to pull it away, when I am laid there, and slide mine out too . . . by

the time Linton gets to us, he’ll not know which is which!”(Wuthering Heights, p.256). His

yearning for Catherine even after her death includes her body; he wants to find her “resting her

darling head on the same pillow as she did when a child,” and it doesn’t matter if his heart is

“stopped and my cheek frozen against hers”(Wuthering Heights, p.212). Nelly is shocked and

asks if Heathcliff was not afraid of disturbing the dead thus. This kind of eroticism with the dead

bodies or parts of it was not unknown to the Victorians. I wonder if Emily had been thinking of

Tennyson’s 1842 Locksley Hall which she knew well wherein the speaker thinks it “Better thou

wert dead before me . . . Better thou and I were lying, hidden from the heart’s disgrace, / Roll’d

in one another’s arms, and silent in a last embrace” when envisioning the idea of Heathcliff’s

obsession of Catherine’s dead body. Heathcliff desires his body to become one with that of

Catherine’s in the grave. Catherine has a strong presence in her afterlife – it is her icy hand that

pulls Lockwood and more importantly it is she Heathcliff believes does not allow him to sleep or

eat. In one of his attempts to feel her, Heathcliff decides to sleep on Catherine’s box bed but gets

“beaten out of” it, and the moment he closes his eyes, she is “either outside the window or

sliding back the panels, or entering the room….” (Wuthering Heights, p.257). He finds her in all

things even in everyday objects. Inanimate things also seem to come alive given a kind of

afterlife by Catherine’s presence. The windows or the two old balls in a cupboard, one marked

“C” and the other “H” is all invested with Catherine’s afterlife presence. In this way Catherine

begins to surround everything around Heathcliff so much so that he is filled with a fatalistic

desire of his own death!

 This belief that an afterlife shimmered through objects or animals was part of ancient folk

customs. J. Hillis Miller rightly points out that the end of Wuthering Heights is part of the long

tradition where love is a private religion. Interestingly the recounting of the love romance

narrative almost begins as a postmortem. Lockwood enters Wuthering Heights and our novel

narrative begins. By that time, Heathcliff is extremely bereaved and not in the most stable state

of mind. Nelly begins to tell Lockwood the story of Wuthering Heights and almost in the

beginning we know that Catherine has died young. In the final illness, Catherine and Heathcliff

embrace each other with Catherine saying: “I wish I could hold you, till we were both dead!”

(Wuthering Heights, p.168) Yes, Catherine and Heathcliff are aware that their romance can only

have an afterlife. Both Heathcliff and Cathy threaten not to rest in their graves if their wishes

concerning their burials are not honored. Cathy declares that she will walk if Heathcliff is not

with her, and Heathcliff threatens to haunt Nelly Dean if she doesn't make sure he is placed by

Cathy's side. In Chapter 29 of the novel, Heathcliff carries this odd notion still further: he modifies

Cathy's coffin and his as well so that they can lie in a single grave so by the time Linton got to

them, Heathcliff opined, the former will not know who is who! In an afterlife, their bodies will

be united. Once Edgar banished Heathcliff from the Grange, Catherine locks herself and starves

herself for three days falling ill. Heathcliff later enters the Grange to see Catherine and then she

asks:

How many years do you mean to live after I am gone? ... Will you forget
me – will you be happy when I am in the earth? Will you say twenty years
hence, ‘That’s the grave of Catherine Earnshaw. I loved her long ago, and
was wretched to lose her; but it is past. I’ve loved many others since – my
children are dearer to me than she was, and, at death, I shall not rejoice that I
am going to her, I shall be sorry that I must leave them! (Wuthering Heights, p.160)

Catherine is afraid that in death, she will be forgotten by the living Heathcliff. Yet when she dies, Nelly

comments that no angel in heaven could be more beautiful than her. In death, she achieves calm. In death
Catherine feels peace that she had not in her life.

When death had been imminent, Catherine was unable to recognize herself as she saw

herself in the mirror and the mirror itself became a sign of premonition for her death. Emily as

mentioned earlier was growing up in Haworth where forty per cent of the population died by the

time they were six years. Patrick Bronte, her father, from 1820 on presided over more than 111

deaths annually. From 1824 to 1830, the number of deaths rose to 140 per year, in just this small

rural area of Haworth in northern England (Barker, p.101). Naturally death and afterlife is a

recurring theme that keeps coming to the works of Emily. In her brief life she wrote more than a

hundred poem out of which about thirty happen to be on death and afterlife. Then to suggest that

Emily’s only novel Wuthering Heights was reflective of her upbringing and belief on notions of

life, death and afterlife should not sound far-fetched.

Works cited:

1. Barker, Juliet. The Brontes, The Overlook Press: New York 1997. Print.
2. Bronte, Emily. Wuthering Heights, New Delhi: Fingerprint Classics, 2016. Print.
3. Gibert, Sandra and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: the Woman Writer and the
Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, Yale:Yale University Press, 2000. Print
4. Gilmour, Robin. The Victorian Period: The Intellectual and Cultural Context of English Literature
1830-1890 , London: Longman, 1993. Print.
5. Regis, Amber K. & Deborah Wynne. Charlotte Brontë: Legacies and After lives, Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2017. Print
6. Tennyson. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems. Web accessed on 10th Feb., 2018
7. Wilson, A N. Insanity. Beatings and a brother's forbidden passion. As a lost book by Charlotte
Bronte is auctioned, the truth about literature's oddest family; Mail Online: 12th Nov.,
2011. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2060600/The-Brontes-ultimate-taboo-As-lost-
book-Charlotte-Bronte-auctioned-truth-literatures-oddest-family.html#ixzz5B9j5M3V2. Web
accessed on 10th Jan., 2018.

References:
1. Barker, Juliet. The Brontës: A Life in Letters. London: Penguin, 1997.
2. Colby, Vineta. The Singular Anomaly:Women Novelists of the Nineteenth Century. London:
Athlone, 1970.