knmilu VrittAtt,ri

MYSTTRY AND MISUNDERSTANDING:

TI{E AMBIGUITY OF IMAGES, IDEAS
AND INTIMATIONS IN EMILY BRONTE'S
WUTHERIATG HEIGIITS

Kamila Vrdnkood

The earth that wakes one human heart to feeling

Can centre both the worlds of Heaaen and Hell.t

Introduction

The dramatic potential of Wuthering Heights does not consist in its intricate
plot but in the feeling of uncertainty, which surrounds all events and
permeates the minds and utterances of both the narrators and the
protagonists. In accordance with Edmund Burke's aesthetic conception 2 this
feeling becomes a crucial source of the sublime in the novel and the
"sublimirtal"3 atmosphere is further supported by the traditional devices of
Gothic and Romantic literature. The disruptive nature of the unexplained and
inexplicable increases through the references to the supernatural or the
irrational, which results in repeated dispersion and multiplication of
particular meanings.
ln Wuthering Heighfs, the multiplicity of meaning corresponds with the
ambiguous nature of the title image, embracing all the levels and aspects of
the story. It can be viewed as a unifying symbol, drawing the various strands
of the narrative together.

Emily Bronte, "Stanzas," 19-20, in wuthering Heights, ed. w.M. Sale, Jr., and R.J. Dunn, A
Norton Critical Edition (New York and London: w.w. Norton and Co., Inc., 1990),2g1.
In Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our ldeas of the Sublime and ihe Beautiful
(1756), Edmund Burke associates the sublime with "the ideas of pain and danger," with power,
vastness, infinity and magnificence. Its main effects on the beholder are terror, astonislment,
awe, admiration and reverence.
The expression "subliminal" as a literary term and an adjective derived from the noun
"sublimity" is considered by J.B. Twitchell in his Introduction to Romantic Horizons
(Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1983,1-23), drawing on the Latin roots of the word
and their etymological meaning: "sub" - "under," "up from underneath,,, ..below;,, ,,-limel-
liminal" "threshold" (limen), "boundary" (limes), or "a sidelong vision,' (limus),
corresponding with Greek "lekhrios" ("the process of slanting, of being diagonal"), (Z). These
Latin and Greek roots suggest the "upward and outward" movement but also the movement
"down and in" (3). According to Twitchell, "this contradiction gives the essence of
'sublimity"' by describing "the process of physically transcending external limits while
 In accordance with the assumption of Tzvetan Todorov that the
supernatural appears against the backdrop of the natural,a the word wuthering
is introduced as"a significantproaincial adjectiae" in the name of a local farm
house. It produces a notion of a particular physical and common-sense reality
(Yorkshirl moors, country life, farmwork...), voiced in the language of the
narrators. The concern with the realities of everyday life reflects the tendency
characterized by Virgit Nemoianu as "the domestication process," "the
taming of romanticlsm," the connection of "the original vision" with
"practical and domestic values," typical of the English literary scene after
18L5.5
The ambivalence of this domestic world, however, is manifested in the
ambiguity of social and individual position of the protagonists as well as in
the fact that it provides the locus for mystery and terror. Since its beginning,
the narrative seems to strive for the reestablishment of the rational but, like
Lockwood lost in the snow-drifts, it continues to be affected by the 'other.'
The natural explanations, in the words of Paul H. Fry,6 correspond to and
encourage the Romantic illusion.
Accordingly, the expression "wuthering" turns out to reflect a distinctive
Romantic, especially Shelleyan,T in-fluence. The theme of wind, representing
an important dynamic element in the novel, permeates throughout the story
and remains incessantly present, even 1f not explicitly mentioned. It
symbolizes a free, reviving spirit, an eternal movement inviting us to deny the
finality of anything that exists (the visualisations of heaven in the novel) as
well as the atmosphere of hostility and horror, which accelerates the
fulfilment of fate (the "aiolent wind" accomPanying Heathcliff's
disappearance) or awakens the feeling of the supernatural (the " grt! wind"

Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic, trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca, N.Y. and London: Cornell
University Press, lg75), 25. Cf. Paul H. Fry, "The Possession of the Sublime," Studies in
Romanticism, 26.2 ( I 987): I 99.
Virgil Nemoianu, The Taming of Romanticism (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard
University Press, 1984).
In Paul H. Fry', study "The Possession of the Sublime" (Studies in Romanticism, 26.2
of the
[1987]:187-207),the theory of the sublime is discussed with respect to the development
concept of individualism and the experience of alienation.
ln Withering Heights, a number of images and ideas echoing Shelley's work can be traced"
Except for the parallels to the "Ode to the West Wind" (a rediscovery of one's identity through
the eiperience of wild and free natural forces), a reflection of "Epipsychidion" (1821) may be
considered. Like Shelley, Emily Bronte draws on the motif of prison, using it both literally and
metaphorically (the concept of the soul separating from its imprisoning body), and in the
central story of Wuthering Heights we can discern an expression of the unity in love echoing
the imagery of Shelley's poem: "One passion in twin-hearts [...] / One hope within two wills,
one will beneath / Two overshadowing minds, one life, one death,/ One Heaven, one Hell, one
immortality,i And one annihilation [...]" ("Epipsychidion", 11. 585-88, in The Oxford
Anthologt of English Literature, ed. John Hollander and Frank Kermode, 2 vols. fl-ondon:
Oxford University Press, 19731, 2:457). The Shelleyan elements in Emily BrontE's work are
dealt with, for example, by Winifred G6rin, Edward Chitham or Patsy Stoneman.

63
Kamila Vrdnkoud

ambiguity' drawing
announcing the spectral image of the child-ghost). This
concern with inner
also on biblicai irr'rug"ry, is equivalent to the authol's
best expression in the
contradiction, complJ*iiy and paradox, which finds its
depiction of landscaPe.
a universal
The title imuge, referring to a concrete place by evoking
(outside and
natural scenery, anticipates the conflict of symbolic oppositions
inside, above and beltw, far and near...) ut well as
the crucial dichotomy
also said, between earth
between the elements of air and. earth,8 or, it can be
and heaven.
that can be traced
Emily Bront6's references to landscaPe echo the attitude
in the English Romantic poetry ur,d ari of the period' while the
eighteenth
Dutch and
century was marked by the influence of the seventeenth-century
picturesque details
Italian painters and their sense of overall atmosphere and
(Constable' Turner'
(Lorrain, Rosa, Poussin), the nineteenth-century artists
Friedrich) contributed to the development of landscape
painting by "throwing
and. beyond' and
the main interest of the landscap" i.tto the background"e
Wuthering Heights' as
turning the picturesque to the ,rbli*". In the scenery of to
well as in Constable or Shelley, nature is "the boundary attempted
This concern does
transcend"l0 and the attention is directed to the horizon'
changeable: it also
not only turn the physical reality into something fluid and
merge one into the
opens a space *fr"rl particular opposites can meet and
and unites earth and
other. In other words,lust as tfre n&izon both separates
between the
sky, the natural and the heavenly, "the -sublime mediates
conscious and the mystical. "ll ln fru.thering Heights,
it points to the theme of
the unknown, which is suggestively echoed in the fundamental
question:
,,where is she? Not there - not in heaven - not perished - where?"\Z The
problems of the
language of spatial references is used. to introduce existential
through natural
human being, and ideas and' feelings are communicated
imagery.

s In his "stones of wuthering Heights" (Philologica, | 11970]: 8), Zdendk vandura makes a
"opposites"
connection between these "two fundamental
and their "human counterparts"'
Catherine and Heathcliff. Other detaileJ analyses
imagery of air, earth, water and f,rre in
oitft.
De Laar',s Inner structure of
Emily Bronte's novel are carried out in Eliiabeth Th.M. van
wuthering Heights (The Hague: Mouton, 1969) and in
Mark schorer's "Fiction and the
' AnalogiCal Matrix'," Keny on Review, 2
(19 49)'
, This idea of S.T. Coleri dge (Biographia Literaria, l8l7) is discussed in J'B' Twitchell's
Romantic Horizons (9), Jhere it ls related to the analysis
of the correspondence between
several poems and paintings of the English Romanticism'
Horizons, 8'
'o Twitchell, Romantic
", ibid., ix. University Press' 1995)' 167 "
Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights,ed- Ian Jack (Oxford: Oxford
edition' Further page references are
A1l quotations from Wu"theriig Heights follow the above
in brackets after each quotation'
 My stery and Misunder st andin g

The Setting and the Self

The story of Wuthering Heighfs unfolds in accordance with the changing roles
of the landscape, which is presented as a source of both horror and idyIl. The
paradise-like place turns repeatedly into a trap where not only human life
(Lockwood) but also human soul (the child-ghost) can be lost. These
contrasting functions of natural background correspond with extremes in the
states of mind (coldness - passiory identity - nothingness, unity - alienation,
faith - doubt, chaos - order), and this connection is reinforced by the fact that
the most impressive landscapes in the novel arise from the individual
characters' imagination and from dreams.
The motif oi snow-covered roads and hills hidden by mist in Chapter 1 (3)
evokes the sublime sensation of emptiness and echoes the crucial feeling of a
loss that initiates the development of the narrative. The introductory
confusions, intensified by the uncanny personification of written names
(prosopopeia), reach their climax in the nightmare encounter and allow us to
ctnsider th" follo*ing text as a quest story centred on the theme of uprooted
identity. It ranges between the effort to achieve self-coherence ("I am sure I
should be myself t...] among the heather on those hills [...]" 126) and the
failure of this effort ("I'd lost my way on the moor" 23), between the
recognition of unbreakable ties ("^y love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal
rocki beneath [...]" 82) and the feeling of ultimate estrangement ("every cloud
that
[...], every tree [...] the entire world is a dreadful collection of memoranda
she did exist, and that I have lost her" 324), between disorder (the
correspondence between stormy evenings and uncanny "phantoms" 337) and
the deiire for harmony (the connection of a "benign sky," "quiet earth" and
the peace of the dead,33B). Descriptive references of landscaPe are employed
to characterize a human personality (" un arid wilderness of ftxze and
whinstone" 102) and another notable parallel between the elements of nature
and individual identity is hidden in the choice of names (Heathcliff, Hareton,
Lockwood). Throughout the novel, natural images seem to function as
objective correlativei of individual emotional or spiritual experience. As Fred
Botting puts it, "the vastness [...] glimpsed in the natural sublime" becomes
"the mirror of the immensity of the human mind."13
Accordingly, Lockwood is initiated into a " dreary" stoty through his
choice of a particular environment, and his misinterpretations of that
environment anticipate his inadequacies as a narrator, his inability to create
completely developed pictures of both characters and situations. The ordered
and carefully chronological scheme of introductory passages, focusing on the

13
Fred Botting, Gothic (London: Routledge, 1996), 40. The chapter entitled "The Sublime"
discusses John Baillie's Essay on the Sublime (1747) and other works reflecting the
development of attitudes to the relationship of art and nature.

6s
Kamila Vrdnkoad

realistic description, is undermined by the importunity of Romantic and

Gothic imagery.
The stoiy of Wuthering Heighfs is built upon the feeling of bewilderment,
springing frlm the irrational connotations of a marginal question-: "(Why did I
tfri* of linton?)" (23). A disquieting notion of the supernatural, permeating
through the questiory is put aside )abeingformally separated by brackets, and
Lockviood's inquisitiveness regarding the involved protagonists reflects his
effort to weaken the power of the mystery by naming and explaining its
sources. The hesitation between a natural explanation and the idea of
supernatural causes brings us, in the words of Tzvetan Todorov, to the very
heirt of the fantastic: the person experiencing an extraordinary event can be
either "the victim of an illusion of the senses" or else the event is "an integral
part of rcallty;" "the reality controlled by unknown 1aws."15 ln Wuthering
Heights, the uncertainty concerning the ambiguous vision is emphasized by
the description of two (Lockwood's and Heathcliff's) contradictory responses/
and it is further evoked through the development of the narrative.
The distorted memory and desire projected into the landscape of
Wuthering Heights and shaped into the child-ghost image is to be settled by
Lockwood's return to Thrushcross Grange and, especially, by the precise and
distinct memory of Mrs Dean. It is repeatedly revived, however, by Mrs
Dean's narrative itself, as a memory within a memory, in the reemerging
voices of Heathcliff and Catherine. What is marginal in Lockwood's comment
on his grim nocfurnal experience becomes central in Mrs Dean's story of the
protagJnists' mutual relationships. The supernatural, moreover, is indirectly
reverted to in Catherine's hallucinatory recollections of childhood, drawing
on the crucial image of Lockwood's nightmare ("[...] that wind sounding in
the firs by the lattice" 124; "[...] the branch of a fir-tree that touched my
lattice, ur ih" blast wailed by" 22) and it returns with a renewed intensity in
the spectral visions at the end of the novel.
Ltckwood's and. Catherine's statements mentioned above point out the
motif of "the lattice,"to the threshold, symbolizing a loose boundary
separating the familiar from the unknown, the natural (the fir-bough) from
thl supernatural (the ice-cold hand)r, or, it can also be said, the past from the

to..[...] reading it (the written name) often over produced an impression which personified itself
when I had no longer my imagination under control" (26)'
,s
In Todorov's definition of thi fantastic, the text "must oblige the reader to hesitate between a
natural and a supernatural explanation," and there must be a duration of this uncertainty: to
choose one answer or the other is to "leave the fantastic for a neighboring genre, the uncanny
or the marvelous" (The Fantastic,25).
15
A detailed analysis of the motifs of doors, windows and gates in Wuthering_ Heights can be
found in Dorothy Van Ghent's English Novel, Form and Functioz Qrlew York: Holt, Rinehart
and Winston, 1953) or in Vandura's "stones of Wuthering Heights."
,, To use Todorov's terminology, it can be also interpreted as a dividing line between the
uncanny (a mystery that can te explained with respect to the forces of the subconscious,

66
 My stery and Misunderstanding

future. The twisted temporal relations paradoxically help to establish the link
between the two references, and the child-ghost scene, followed by the
description of preceding events, may be understood as a mirror image of
Catherine's haunting dreams from Chapter 1 (12). At the same time, a
premonition concerning Heathcliff's death (as well as the concluding images
of the novel) is hidden in the discussed scene. The events of the past are
inextricably bound up with those of the present and the future, being
arranged next to each other rather than in a sequence. The oak-closet of
Wuthering Heights becomes a point of intersection where the notions of time
and space mingle with that of eternity and infinity and through the moments
of escalated tension the temporal is transformed into the timeless.
The antithetical principles explored inWuthering Heigltts can be discerned
at the heart of the Gothic fiction as well as in the dichotomies of Kant's
Critique of Pure Reason. A certain parallel is reflected in the references to the
mystery of the origins. According to Kant, " llire world has a beginning in time,
and is also limited as regards space," but also "the world has no beginning,
and no limits in space, it is infinite as regards both time and space."18 The
story of Wuthering Heighfs opens with the.date of Lockwood's visit (the first
word of Chapter 1 [1]), it begins to unJold after the change of the narrators in
Chapter 1 (4); and other examples of possible starting points can be found in
Chapter 1 (3) (the child-ghost scene, Catherine's diary) or again in Chapter 1
(1) (the date "L500" above the door of the farm house). Each particular point
of the story may suggest both the beginning and the ending, the reverse
succession of causes and consequences confuses the categories of 'before' and
'aftet,' and what seems to be limited by particular temporal referencesle
becomes endless. In the combination of the linear time (Lockwood's dating)
and the cyclic (natural) time, the linear time becomes subordinate to the circle
of returns and repetitions, and through the variety of recurring kinds of
experience the possibility of overcoming the transitoriness of an individual
life is evoked.
In this circular movement, time is both carefully structured (the cyclical
order of seasonal changes, harvests, full moons...) and unnervingly warped.
Some temporal allusions, for example, the reference to "twenty years" in
Chapter 1 (3), are more puzzlingthan explanatory, and an alien nature of time

including Freudian neurotic experience), and the marvellous (a mystery without the possibility
of explanation). (Todorov, The Fantastic, 4l). The correspondence between Todorov's
fantastic and the conception of the sublime is analysed by P.H. Fry in "The Possession of the
Sublime," 199-200. He makes a parallel between Todorov's "hesitation" and Burke's "fear,"
pointing out, however, that the mystery "explained" need not be less startling.
't lmmanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A 426,8 454, (1781), trans. Norman Kemp Smith
(London: Macmillan Press Ltd., 1929),396.
re
According to A.S. Daley's calculation, there are more than six hundred temporal allusions in
the novel and of the novel's thirty four chapters the openings of twenty two establish time ("A
Chronology of Wuthering Heights," in Wuthering Heights, ed. Sale and Dunn, 349).

67
Kamila Vrdnkoad

manifests itself in the form of spectral recollections, misinterpreted mirror

reflections or anxieties about future. The ambiguity of time is closely related
to the ambiguity of space and a remarkable connection between the
perceptior, oi time and the notion of space is implied, for example, in
Catherine's hallucinations, where the image of childhood is mixed up with
that of death through the visualization of Gimmerton Kirk and the
surrounding landscape.
The spal e of Wuihering Heights (like time) both yields and does not yield
to limits.io It do"r not only surround the heroes but is experienced by them.
Self and nature are interiused, and the boundaries between man and his
natural environment are fluid and indefinite. In Heathcliff's description, the
surrounding world is viewed as an extension of Catherine's being (Chapter 2
t19]) and the same feeling is expressed in the passage where Catherine
recognires in Heathcliff the analogue of her universe (Chapter 1 [9]). Thus the
sepaiation of the two protagonists is accompanied with the visions of an
alienated landscape ("the threshold of hell" 328), with the disjunction between
the inner and the outer worlds, or, in the words of Twitchell, between subject
and object.21 For the Romantic artist, as Twitchell points out, the experience of
the sublime was a "way to span" this "abyss," "to reconcile subject and
oylect," to reach the moment when "the comparing faculties cease, and unity
at last may result."22
It is tire loss of this unity and the search for reunion that become the
central themes of Emily Bront€'s novel. They permeate through all encounters
and confl icts,2i being reflected in all the scenes of the conclusion: in the
marriage of the yo,r^g". Catherine and Hareton as well as in Catherine's and
Heathcliff's supernatural apparition. And also in the motif of "the three head-
stones" (g37) connecting the stories of the three main protagonists, and
families, of Wuthering Hei ghts.

'0 Cf. the attitudes of Lockwood (his repeated attempts to measure the spatial environment) and
Catherine (e,g., her rejection of physical limitations in her effort to discern Wuthering Heights
from the window of Thrushcross Grange).
2'
Twitchell, Romantic Horizons, 11.
22
Romantic Horizons,ll-12. According to Twitchell, the objects initiating the experience of the
sublime are "those most beyond the constraining power of the intellect: the vastness of the
skies, the expansion of the iea, huge mountains" (12).At the same time, this interfusion of
subject and object echoes, in fact, a medieval man's relationship to nature, as it is described,
for example, by Aron Gurevich in his Categories of Medieval Culture, trans. G.L. Campbell
(London, Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985).
,, df. Cath.rine's response to Heathcliff s return: "The event of this evening has reconciled me
to God and humanity" (102). This event, characteristically, initiates a chain of new
misunderstandings, and perfect harmony seems impossible.
 My stery and Misunder standing

Thresholds of Identity

In Emily Bront€'s novel, time and space are experienced as dreamy and
boundless, as well as in their particular links to the social reality of the period"
Accordingly, the central setting of the novel, Wuthering Heights, is marked
by the tension between the limited (a space defined by ownership relations; a
prison-like space, linked to the theme of injustice and deprivation) and the
limitless (a magic space, an image of a temple, corresponding with the search
for kansgression, liberation and fulfilment). The same tension can be
discerned in the play of power and powerlessness, in particular, in the effort
to exercise individual power by both rejecting and establishing the limits.
The relationships between particular characters are,, in fact, described
against the background of a Gothic story, inspired by the plot of The Castle of
Otranto (1764)" Heathcliff's manipulations of marriages and property drive
him close to the type of the Gothic villain; the younger Catherine's experience
reminds the reader of the persecuted Gothic heroines; and, as an
inconspicuous thread winding throughout the novel, there is the story of
Haretory "the ruffian" and "the brute" but also a new descendant of the
disguised Gothic heroes: the "noble peasants" who were wrongfully deprived
of their legal rights, and whose dignity and honesty helped them to regain
justics.z+ At the same time, the bonds that establish Heathcliff as the villain of
Wuthering Heights (Heathcliff - Hindley, Heathcliff - Haretory Heathcliff -
Isabella, Heathcliff - the younger Catherine) paradoxically complicate the
interpretation of Heathcliff's personality as purely villainous. Through
allusions to conventional patterns the characters are created that transcend
any imaginable scheme and disturb the traditional conception of the villain's
and the victim's parts.
The disquieting atmosphere created by the characters of Heathcliff and
Catherine is not tempered by the interference of the 'civili zed and cultured'
Lintons: on the contrary, Cecil's "children of the calm"25 contribute to the
escalation of conflicts, their seeming passivity conceals their tendency to
violence, which is realized indirectlp through orders given to other people
(Isabella's father or the men summoned by Edgar during the encounters with
Heathcliff)" In the stories (as well as the names) of Edgar and Isabella, the
adventure plots of traditional romances are suggurt"d, rewritten and
parodied.
Questions concerning the identity of individual protagonists and the
limits of their selves surround the portraits of all the characters, including the
narrators. Each of them is more or less aware of insuperable boundaries and
barriers, and at the same time appears to be capable of anything, harbouring

'o See, for instance, the typology developed by Eino Railo in The Haunted Castle: A Study of the
of English Romanticisz (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1927).
-.Elements
2s
Lord David Cecil, "Emily Bronte and Wuthering Heights- llel+1, in Emity Brontd,92-gB.

69
Kamila Vrdnkoaa
It
the gift for both good and evil, tend.erness and cruelty, life and destruction'
over the
is iripossible to identify the villain of the novel: Heathcliff's power
others cannot be exerted without their own assistance and his
words
to the fates of
addressed to Catherine, "yru did it" (1,61), can be applied also
other characters. Each of them has his greatest enemy in himself'
which
further contributes to the theme of eitrangement and the feeling
of
doubleness. The crisis of merging identities finds its expression
in the tension
gentleman's
between a conscious will und'r,Jtrral impulses:' in a respectable
regless into mindless violence (Lockwood't resPonse to the
child ghost) or in
thE revenge-obsessed hero's saving the child_of his enemy.
confusions arising from the individual characters' behaviour
are
concepts, which is suggested' for
- of particular
intensified by the amfiguity
example, in Heathcliff's disturbing interpretation of power-oriented
t turn against
relationships: "The tyrant grinds down his slaves and they don
him, they crush tlose beneath them" (112). It is the recognition 9f
powerlessness that is expressed. in the definition of power.
At the threshold
th:-
point where emotions urrd id"u, unexpectedly turn into their opposites,'u
'the best" all
motives of individual decisions can be at once 'the worst' and
regarding
characterizations yield to unpred'ictable shifts and the uncertainty
that
particular individlals' roles persists to the end. It is the same uncertainty
i, ,rgg"rted by the Kantian question "What man is in himself when deprived
of all the external supports that channel ordinary exPerlertce?"27 and
that
instils existential anxietY.
In Wuthering Heighis, the emphasis on the con{licting aspects of human
effort of
nature results ii tf,e laradoxical ambivalence between the Romantic
as defined
the self to extend one's limitations (the experience of the sublime
by Longinus2a) and the acknowiedgement that one's identity can U9
most vivid
reconstituted against the experience o] otherness and loss. The
description of Lanscend.entil experience appears in the motif
of the unity
with ithat glorious world" (160); which, *ot"o,"t, almost explicitly echoes

z6ln {ryuthering Heights, human passions are always seen as coexisting with their opposites'
which allows critics to consider the affinities with the sensibility of Blake
(Raymond

Williams, Inga-Stina Ewbank, Cecil W' Davies)'

,, The links between Kant's epistemology and the concerns of Romantic and Gothic fiction are
observed by Marshall Brown in "Philosophical View of the Gothic
Novel," Studies in
Romantic is m, 26.2 (1987 ):27 5 -3 0l'
,t e".orAing to Longinri th" sublime can be felt during an individual experience -of
transcendence, whiJh lifts man "far above mortal stature,"
and it is linked to the "desire for
(on sublimity' trans' D'A'
anlthing which is great and, in relation to ourselves, supernatural"
of Longinus on Romantic
Russell [oxford: ilarendon Press, 1965], 36.1). The influence
in his references to the so called
literature is pointed out, for example, by Raimonda \f9{1ano
o.romantic sublimei, (,.Humanism and'the Comic Sublime," Studies in Romanticism, 26.2
(1953) (New York: W'W' Norton
lt9sll:2aland by tni.tt. Rbrr-s: The Mirror and the Lamp
and CompanY, 1958), 72-78.

70
 My st ery an d Mi sun der s t an din g

Plotinus's notion of a "better and higher world" and "the most glorious life."ze
This visiory however, is associated with an oppressive image of " a rough
journey," filled with sadness and suffering and surrounded by graves. As in
Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the experience of horror and despair
pushes the conflict to its resolution, and in the face of misery and death there
is a strong sense of the intensity of life.so
The subliminal atmosphere of Wuthering Heights is strengthened by the
theme of irreconcilable choices and various perceived solutions, which is
illustrated in the development of two central stories as well as in a number of
peripheral plots. Incompatible ways of life may result in violence, insanity
and lifelessness or in fulfilment and gratification. It can also be said that
Wuthering Heights tells the same story twice: the balladic and Gothic story in
the first part is, in the second part, reenacted by the younger generation as a
domestic romance. Although this romance unfolds in accordance with
Heathcliff's gradual withdrawal from the centre of attentiory the disquieting
notion of his and Catherine's influence continues to lurk behind the
undisturbed narrative (the references to the significance of the younger
Catherine's and Hareton's physical appearance, Heathcliff's mysterious
wanderings...) to mingle with it finally in the ambiguously delineated ending.
Wuthering Heights draws on a double conception of individuality. The
assertion that "there is an existence of yours beyond yot)" (82) leads both to
the feeling of liberation from external constraints and to the annihilating
notion of one's soul "in the grave" (1,61). Echoing and modifying Shelley's and
Byron's version of the titanic myth, Wuthering Heights is concerned with the
"meaningful articulation of subjectivity" as well as with its
"deconstruction."3l
On one hand, restrictions and alienating conflicts result in a real or
symbolic deattu and the universe is viewed as " a mighty stranger" (82). On
the other, the notion of individual identity is never completely rooted out. The
story of Wuthering Heiglrfs reaches its full circle by its final connection with the
names Hareton Earnshaw and Catherine Earnshaw, referring back to the
stories of the older generations. To use the words of Kant, "in all change of
appearances the substance persists."az The marriage of Catherine's daughter

2e
Plotinus, as quoted by Karl Jaspers in his Way to Wisdom: An Introduction to Philosophy,
trans. Ralph Manheim, (London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1951).
30
In this respect, Wuthering Heights is closer to Kant's conception of sublimity - the experience
of the sublime does not result in the "humiliation" of the "humanity in our person" (Immanuel
Kant, Critique of Judgment 11790), trans. J.H. Bernard [New York: Hafner, 1951], 101) -
rather than to Burke's emphasis on helplessness and inaction at the moments of terror.
3rMartin Proch6zka, "Titanic Myth and Discourses
of Subjectivity: Prometheus {Jnbounil,
Byron's Manfred and May by K.H. M6cha," in Romantic Discourses. Papers Deliverul eil tlk,
Symposium on the Bicentenary of the Birth of Percy Bysshe Shellel,, Stuclicn zur Englirchen
Romantik, Bd. 7, ed. Horst H<ihne (Essen: Die Blaue Eule, 1994), I 14.
32
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A 182.

7t
Kamila Vrdnkoad

and Hareton completes the "remarkable symmetry" of this "tempestuous

book,"33 which can be seen in Sanger's pedigree portraying the family
relations of the three generations in the history of Wuthering Heights.e+ This
"absolute symmetry,"3s however, is distorted by the mutual identification of
Catherine and Heathcliff: their refusal to accept the limited identity imposed
on them, and their constant transgressing the bounds of possibility engender
the haunting atmosphere of the last chapter, undermining any ultimate
closure.

Conclusion

On the surface, the beginning and the ending of Wuthering Heights rnay
remind us of traditional patterns, in particular, of the "chtonotope of idyll."z6
As the first passages of the novel suggest, the images of tranquility are
grounded in Lockwood's delusions, and his misinterpretations are only
seemingly corrected by Mrs Dean: the 'inJormed' narrator's efforts to offer
explanations constantly clash with the harrowing persistence of the
inexplicable. Through the increasingly multiplied number of narrators, the
final authority of all individual interpretations is doubted or even denied. The
feelings of uncertainty and hesitation are never suppressed but intensified to
reach their climax in the conclusion, where both narrators, finally, give up
their attempts for explanations. Mrs Dean believes that "the phantoms" are
"raised from thinking" but she does not like either "berng out in the dark" or
"being left in this grim house" (337). And the last of Lockwood's comments
points out the feeling of "wonder" (338), the feeling of disbelief mixed with
bewilderment, which revives unanswered questions (Heathcliff's "Where is
she?f' Mr Dean's "Do you believe such people arehappy in the other world?")
and suggests new uncertainties regarding the immense variability of
individual conceptions of heaven and hell, and the links between the earthly
and the other worlds.
Does the connection of a happ/, peaceful scene and a haunted stormy
landscape represent the "balance and reconciliation of opposite or discordant
qualities,"37 or the confirmation of their irreconcilability? Nevertheless, as the
domestic romance and the Gothic tale are brought together towards the

33
C.P. Sanger, "The Structure of Wuthering Heights" (1926), in Emily Brontd, T 5-89 "
'o ibid., 7g.
3s
ibid.
36In Bakhtin's terminology, this chronotope defines the conception of time and space in
traditional adventure plots: the exciting stories do not disturb the harmony of the beginnings
and endings; when the adventure is over, peace and order are renewed (M.M. Bakhtin, Romdn
jako dialog [Dialogic Imagination, 19757, trans. Daniela Hodrov5 fPraha: Odeon, 1980]).
" S"T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (1817), ed. James Engell & W. Jackson Bate, 2 vols.
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 2:l 6.

72
 My stery and Misunderstanding

ending, the vision of a tempestuous darkness is completed by the image of

"the soft wind breathing through the grass," arrd the notion of disorder is
juxtaposed to that of idyll. In the words of Karl ]aspers, "honesty must
recognize the untruth both in the ideas of harmony of being and nihilistic
chaos," since "both embody a total judgement" resting upon "inadequate
knowledge."ss Wuthering Heights, with its Play on duplication, with its
reversal of classic oppositions, escapes the bounds of total judgements in the
final rejection of limitations. The doubling of interpretations deepens the
mystery, and the conciliatory tone of the conclusion can contribute to the
intensification of the sublime.

38
Karl Jaspers, Way to l4/isdom: An Introduction to Philosophy, trans. Ralph Manheim (London:
Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1951), 8i.

IJ
Litterarla
Vol. 14 27 2004

Pragensia