Wuthering Heights: A Level York Notes

‘Wuthering Heights’ portrays a society that is in profound conflict with its ideas about how people can and should relate to each other. Central to an understanding of the text is our response to the question about what is proper and what is not. Where we stand on this simply articulated conflict determines how we will respond to the disturbances of the uncanny, how we will respond to the violations of the family, and how we will react to the choices that Catherine makes and the consequences of those choices for herself and the other characters in the novel.

From the beginning of the novel, Catherine, who is described as ‘headstrong and domineering’ by Nelly, challenges all our certainties about boundaries and convention. She appears to us first as a palimpsest, a series of self-contradictory written names in the flyleaf of a book. She appears not in person, but in name: the power of the word evokes her. And when we do encounter her, Brontë presents her as a frightening little child ghost: ‘a changeling’, a ‘wicked little soul’ who haunts the property of Wuthering Heights, longing to be loved, longing to be ‘let in’ almost as though she is asking to be let into the interior narrative of the novel. Right from the start, Brontë encourages us to see Catherine, the central figure of love interest in the novel, as disruptive, disturbing and possibly violent.

The critic C. P. Sanger has written extensively on the structure of ‘Wuthering Heights’ and suggests that it is a book of ‘remarkable symmetries’ and precise topographies. It is noteworthy then, in a novel where the author has taken such care to get the structure and setting so absolute, and so strictly accurate, that there are so many discrepancies or conflicts which disturb our readings of this love story and the relationships within it.

Catherine is ‘wilful’ and ‘wild’ and she has a ‘fierce temper’ yet she nevertheless feels compelled to marry not for love but for propriety. The novel may have at its heart a love story, but it is one fraught with violence and Gothic terror. And those who are educated (Lockwood, Edgar) are no better at reading the world of the novel than those who are ‘wild’ or ‘unreclaimed’ (Catherine, Heathcliff).

One of the central conflicts between the characters in this novel is between those who belong and those who do not. This is exemplified in the contrasting accounts of the two narrators: Lockwood, the outsider, and Nelly Dean, the garrulous but shrewd interior narrator. Lockwood’s accounts are superceded by Nelly’s and so his assumptions about character and landscape, are therefore overwritten and refined by her corrective versions. His assumed intellectual and social superiority is exposed through this method as being baseless and self-serving. It is tempting to scoff at Lockwood’s inability to read the social language of the novel, but Brontë suggests that we are just as prone to misreading as he is, and that even Catherine will fall to the temptations of understanding the world in conventional rather than authentically truthful ways.

Catherine chooses to marry Edgar over Heathcliff, because ‘he is handsome, and young, and cheerful, and rich’ but she declares only a few paragraphs later ‘In my soul and in my heart, I’m convinced I’m wrong!’ Both Marxist and feminist readings of this choice have focused on the social limitations under which Catherine is operating as she makes her decision. But Catherine is clear, she knows that there is a moral conflict at the heart of her choosing. And because this is a moral conflict, Catherine is also clear about its consequences: when she makes it she will not be fit for heaven.

Something similar inflects the relationship between the lover and her beloved in Carol Ann Duffy’s poem ‘The Love Poem’. This is a poem which is written around the impossibility of expressing love: love can be known by heart, learned like a prayer but ultimately whether it is something best expressed in the mind or by the pen, it becomes lost in half written, half remembered lines.

Like Brontë, Duffy uses the literary device of the palimpsest to layer up and disturb singular meanings. She quotes other lines, articulates into her poem great love poems from other eras, to try and express love, but love she avers is annihilating of language, and ultimately annihilating of the self. The desire Duffy describes in the poem is not just the commonplace desire of the moth for the flame, but for something otherworldly, beyond time and space, something that burns far more brightly than a flame. Both writers suggest that love goes beyond the normal realm, and extends beyond what can properly be articulated in language.

This expression of a love which is beyond the normal realm of experience, which is not subject to the constraints of the ordinary, extends right back to Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 which begins ‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds. Admit impediments.’ In Brontë’s novel, however, the marriage of true minds, in other words, Catherine’s and Heathcliff’s, would have been beset by impediments, not least the reduction of their social status to destitution. Like Shakespeare, Brontë posits a love that defies time, a love that is borne even ‘to the edge of doom’, a love that is understood in terms of the sublime, but for Brontë this love is in conflict with the social mores of the rather narrow rural Victorian community of the novel.

A feminist critic might point out that for Shakespeare, love comes unconflicted by social mores and unmoved by either natural phenomena or the laws of physics. Both Brontë and Duffy recognise aspects of this love in their writing, but both of them express the suffering that comes from recognising such a love but being unable to fulfil it within the constraints of their different social and literary environments. In different ways they express those conflicts in terms of the supernatural, or ghostly echoes from other eras. For Brontë, love is transgressive, intense and demonic; for Duffy, it is annihilatory, overlaid by other expressions, other approximations and declarations of desire, but truly and finally, only to be experienced as an incendiary consummation of the self.