<< BARDOLATRY QUESTIONED, HUZZAH! | Front Page | "I Re-wrote Those Motherfuckers From Scratch" >>
Saturday, January 02, 2010
Cathy & Heathcliff xoxoxox, NOT!
During last year’s bruhaha over Cornel West’s sublime and funky as-told-to autobiography Michael Bérubé offered a side comment (115) that caught my attention: “Which reminds me. Could people please stop speaking about Wuthering Heights as if it were a romance novel, and about Heathcliff as if he were some dark Byronic hero? The book and its central character are profoundly creepy and unsettling and all-around chthonic.” He’s right, of course, both in his presupposition (that the book is often romanticized) and in his assessment of the book itself. Which leads me to this question:
How did Wuthering Heights ever come to be thought of as a paradigm of intense romantic love that, alas, could not be fulfilled?
My first inclination would be to blame it on the movies. I vaguely remember seeing one in which Olivier played Heathcliff; but all I remember of the film is that it stopped halfway through the book, with the death of Catherine. I’d assume that Hollywood removed the violence and the perversity as well.
But I’m not sure that Hollwoodification is the answer. After all, the book itself still exists and is taught in both secondary schools and college. How was the book received in the 19th century? Did 19th century reviewers look squarely at the book’s violence, which includes spousal abuse and near-murder, not to mention animal cruelty?
Comments
If they are representative of the reception, the reviews contained in the Norton Critical Edition suggest that, like _Jane Eyre_, the novel was problematic and troubling.
My students ask the same question every time I teach it. It’s a disturbing book containing no end of horrible characters.
Now that I think about it, I can’t think of any references in novels to characters reading the Brontës in the same way that we see characters reading Austen all over the place.
Romance novel heroes are creeps, though.
The assumption here is that romance (by which I imagine Bill means eros and not, say, romanticism) is not possible alongside violence. I think that’s precisely where the novel’s enduring eroticism emerges, in the frission between the overt boy-girl dynamics and the constant threat of violence.
I think it’s what some old fashioned readers called “passion.”
I’m fairly sure that I read it because it was assigned to me in high school—I know I read it, and I know that I would never have gotten through it if there weren’t a grade hovering over me—and I’m also pretty sure that it was given as an example of “romantic” literature. I found it emotionally inaccessible and generally pointless. Only in the last ten years or so have I finally discovered that my impressions weren’t really wrong: I think it was the Four Bitchin’ Babes that first publicly opened that line of inquiry for me. Seriously.
Isn’t the problem, fundamentally, the shifting meaning of “romantic” over the last two centuries? I think it’s quite clearly romantic in the Byronic sense: intense, primitive, disturbing, blood and soil, etc. At some point, though, the name stuck even as the word narrowed to its present meaning.
Violence is no mere threat in this story, Luther. Heathcliff beat his wife and, once Hindley’d attacked him, Heathcliff came close to killing him. And then we have the hanging of puppies.
I got a request a year or so ago from someone who had stumbled across my blog and wanted me to recommend a specific passage from Wuthering Heights to read at his wedding. I believe the first part of my reply was along the lines of “Have you actually read any of the novel yourself?” and a recommendation he try, well, really almost any other 19th-century novel instead, if he was in fact hoping to launch his married life on a happy note. The myth is very potent. WH was voted the greatest love story ever in some UK poll, as I recall. I assume it has something to do with Laurence Olivier, and something to do with love lasting beyond death (ignoring uncomfortable details like wrists rubbed on broken glass).
Good point, Bill; my phrasing wasn’t the best. So I’ll simply say that it’s naive to think that eros and violence aren’t often linked, that one necessarily negates the other thematically or affectively in a work of literature. I sort of thought *The Iliad* settled that for us a while ago, with the brilliant scene in which Aphrodite drags a nearly killed Paris off the battlefield and forces a humiliated Helen to make love to him.
There’s a reason why Aphrodite cheats on Hephaestus with Ares.
Okay, guess where this happened-
‘ a woman, seeing her lover slain, screeches like a banshee and stoops down to lap up his spilt blood’
1) 18th Century Ireland. Bram Stoker knew about it and those clever people at ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ reference it continually in the character of ‘Angel’.
2) 19th Century Yorkshire.
3) Fucking SoHo
Answer- urm, it’s the Irish thing. Bronte, Ireland yadda yadda yadda.
But England was full of this ‘demon lover’ business. Hey, England originally had a Celtic hermeneutics.
Look at Richard Rolle and compare with a ‘natural’ like Margery Kempe.
Actually, this country hasn’t changed that much. Not everybody talks with a posh accent y’know.
Luckily, we can also turn to some contemporary reviews of the novel to see how it was viewed upon its release:
http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/novel_19c/wuthering/contemp_rev.html
From one clipping found in Bronte’s possession but untraced to an original source, we read:
“[In the novel] will [the reader] have ample opportunity of sympathising,–if he has one touch of nature that ‘makes the whole world kin’–with the feelings of childhood, youth, manhood, and age, and all the emotions and passions which agitate the restless bosom of humanity. May he derive from it the delight we have ourselves experienced, and be equally grateful to its author for the genuine pleasure he has afforded him.”
In another:
“Wuthering Heights is a strange, inartistic story. There are evidences in every chapter of a sort of rugged power–an unconscious strength–which the possessor seems never to think of turning to the best advantage. The general effect is inexpressibly painful. We know nothing in the whole range of our fictitious literature which presents such shocking pictures of the worst forms of humanity...” (Atlas, January 22, 1848)
Wuthering Heights ought to be remembered as a novel of revenge. The plot has a number of similarities to The Count of Monte Cristo — Byronic anti-hero; his lover married another; he disappears for years and returns with a fortune which he uses to systematically destroy everyone whom he believes wronged him—and the dates make it possible that Emily Brontë had read Dumas.
A note on chronology. Heathcliff was born in 1764, Catherine in 1765. They met in 1771 when he would have been seven and she six. Cathy became estranged from Heathcliff in 1777, when he was 13 and she 12. Was their relationship EVER erotic in any but the psychoanalytic sense where libido is all?
Vivek: Yes, there is a dial in, say, the George Eliot Story Engine that’s set to, say, 5. That same dial is set to 8 in the Emily Bronte Story Engine. If it had been set to 9, Wuthering Heights would have been a gothic horror story.
It is indeed a good question. Patsy Stoneman in “Bronte Transformations” is insistent that Heathcliff and Catherine’s love is Lacanian and so the kissy-kissy love story is irrelevant.
But then how many general readers understand Lacan enough to apply it to the novel? When Catherine talks to Nelly about the love she feels for Heathcliff and how it differs from the love she feels for Edgar, she’s still talking about love, so the general interpretation will be romantic love.
“my love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath - a source of little visible delight, but necessary.”
and: “Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.”
She’s about 15 or 16 at this point in the novel, I think, so their love can be seen as a type of ‘romantic’ love (romantic in the modern sense of the word). Even in ‘romantic’ love, isn’t there a possibility you could feel like that too? Like when people talk about finding their ‘soul mate’?
I tend to agree with Stoneman and the Lacanian reading, but I think it’s a Lacanian self-identification which, as the characters hit puberty, turns into ‘romantic’ love.
I recently read “The History of Matthew Wald” and it’s a prototype “Wuthering Heights” in some ways - Emily Bronte made it more passionate.
As for the violence in “WH”, you should read Charlotte Bronte’s “The Foundling”, which is part of her juvenilia - she was 17 when she wrote it. There is a very disturbing scene where a man makes naked children dance and do somersaults in a scalding pan until their flesh falls off and they die. It’s really horrific! Hanging a dog seems quite mild in comparison.