Wuthering Heights and the New Apartment

I read Wuthering Heights for the first time about a year ago, when we were first moving in to our current place. I tried to reread it again in like 2 hours. This is what I discovered: 

• In the introduction to my edition (a 1961 Holt edition) Mark Schorer suggests that Bronte set out to persuade us of “the moral magnificence of such unmoral passion” (x) but that as she wrote the novel, she was compelled to see that this moral magnificence is only “a devastating spectacle of human waste: ashes.” Charlotte Bronte, in her 1850 preface, apologizes for the horror of her sister’s characters: “Having formed these beings, she did not know what she had done . . . if it was complained that the mere hearing of certain vivid and fearful scenes banished sleep by night, and disturbed mental peace by day, Ellis Bell would wonder what was meant, and suspect the complainant of affectation” (xxxiii). She also points out the moral characters of Nelly Dean and Edgar Linton (“some people will think these qualities do not shine so well incarnate in a man as they would do in a woman, but Ellis Bell could never be brought to comprehend this notion,” Charlotte says, which might be helpful for thinking about some of the gender differences in her own novels).
• But does Emily Bronte want us to come away from Wuthering Heights with a clear moral judgment of Heathcliff and Cathy’s passion? I find Heathcliff and Cathy pretty horrifying; I had nightmares when I first read Wuthering Heights that Heathcliff had trapped me in my house and was torturing me with loud noises from the street; but surely we’re supposed to sympathize with their passionate identification with each other! That’s what people like about this novel, right? I’ve been reading both Brontes this year with Twilight in mind, so maybe I’m biased—but I grew up with the understanding that it was a great love story, and was actually pretty horrified when I realized what really happened.
• The framing story: What are we supposed to think about Lockwood? He listens to the story of Heathcliff and Cathy mostly for his own amusement—which is what we’re doing, I guess, and what any listener does in any framing story, so why should we judge him? But he’s so callous in so many other ways that I think we are supposed to judge him, even as we identify with him as a reader/auditor of the story, but also as a more cosmopolitan, educated reader than the other characters in the novel. How much of a transformation does he really undergo, when he returns to the house to tell Heathcliff he’s leaving and kind of tries to help bring Cathy and Hareton together? When he comes back and learns about Heathcliff’s death? What are we supposed to make of his final comment: “I . . . wondered how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers, for the sleepers in that quiet earth” (358)? It seems sentimental and patently untrue, given what we know about the sleepers.
• Disciplining the reader: Lockwood is one character who stands in for the reader in the novel, and who represents our inability to read Wuthering Heights accurately; Isabella Linton is another. When Isabella starts falling in love with the brooding Heathcliff, her sister-in-law Cathy tries to warn her that what you see is painfully what you get: “Pray, don’t imagine that he conceals depths of benevolence and affection beneath a stern exterior . . . I never say to him let this or that enemy alone, because it would be ungenerous or cruel to harm them, I say—‘Let them alone, because I should hate them to be wronged’: and he’d crush you, like a sparrow’s egg, Isabella, if he found you a troublesome charge” (108). This seems like a message to the reader who might be making the same assumptions—who might, like other characters in the novel, think Heathcliff’s cruelty might be redeemed or softened by his love for Cathy, or his natural instincts, or his ability to make small talk. Characters are constantly underestimating how evil Heathcliff is: “you’re a cruel man, but not a fiend,” Cathy II says to him. And Nelly thinks to herself “Poor wretch! . . . you have a heart and nerves the same as your brother men! Why should you be anxious to conceal them?” (177). The reader is continually tempted to sympathize with Heathcliff and is continually jolted from that sympathy by his violence and cruelty. In the end, does Cathy II turn out to be right that Heathcliff’s not a fiend? She lives to see some evidence of him softening, but only after a lot of suffering and forced marriage and ear-boxing.
• Cathy’s ghost: One of the most upsetting and famous scenes in the novel is one where Lockwood is very much engaged—passionately, violently engaged—in the story of Heathcliff and Cathy: after reading Cathy’s diary-like notes in her old books, and seeing different versions of her name carved into the bed, he has a terrifying nightmare/vision of her return to Wuthering Heights. Catherine begs to be let in:
        As it spoke, I discerned, obscurely, a child’s face looking through the window. Terror made me cruel; and finding it useless to attempt shaking the creature off, I pulled its wrist on the broken pane, and rubbed it to and fro till the blood ran down and soaked the bedclothes; still it wailed “Let me in!”

This is by far the most violent image we’ve encountered so far in Wuthering Heights, and it’s Lockwood who’s doing the violence, not Heathcliff. In a way this violence—and torture—might make Heathcliff’s violence and cruelty less surprising; Lockwood’s motive of “terror” isn’t the same as Heathcliff’s motive of revenge, but the violence he does is more arbitrary and strangely casual—terror maybe makes us desperate, but does it make us “cruel”? The intensity of this vision helps to explain Lockwood’s intense interest in the family story, but again, that interest feels strangely casual to me.

• other upsetting images:
• Heathcliff banging his head against a tree until it’s bloody on the night of Cathy’s death
• Heathcliff hanging Isabella’s dog in front of her
• Heathcliff beating Hindley almost to death after the knife folds back on Hindley’s wrist
• Heathcliff contemplating opening Cathy’s coffin
• Linton coughing up blood in agitation
• The nest Cathy and Heathcliff found as children “full of little skeletons” (130)
• Cathy’s writing: The scene before the nightmare, when Lockwood reads Cathy’s diary entries, and the different versions of her name, is also really interesting, of course. Cathy’s compulsive writing/carving of her name on the bed makes me think of Jane Eyre idly writing on her piece of scratch-paper; the different configurations, all of which become the name of some character in the novel, hint at the strange iterability of names and people in the novel. Too many Cathys, too many Heathcliffs, too many Lintons, too many Earnshaws; reflected also by Lockwood’s inability to understand the relationships between the characters at Wuthering Heights (is Cathy Heathcliff’s wife? Is Hareton his son?) Also Cathy’s own indecisiveness/identity crisis. And the compulsion to repeat behavior.
• Is Cathy a real ghost? There were a lot of clues in the bedroom before Lockwood went to sleep. But the “I’ve been a waif for twenty years” and the ghost calling herself Catherine Linton (“why did I think of Linton? I’d read Earnshaw twenty times for Linton”) suggest that she’s really there, and that Lockwood’s rational explanations for the event—and his suggestion that the graves must be quiet—are suspect.
• Heathcliff’s anguish. “Come in! come in!” sobs Heathcliff after Lockwood tells him the story of his dream. “Cathy, do come. Oh do—once more! Oh! my heart’s darling! Hear me this time—Catherine, at last!” Heart-rending moments like this make the reader want to think good of Heathcliff, just as they make Isabella and other characters sympathetic with them. But we and they get punished for it. But they’re still moving.
• Heathcliff’s sympathy with Hareton in particular. Heathcliff saves Hareton as a baby “by a natural impulse,” and then regrets it; later he likes him even though his goal is to make Hareton one instrument of his father’s destruction; at the end Hareton carries all this symbolic weight for Heathcliff: “Five minutes ago, Hareton seemed a personification of my youth, not a human being . . . [his] aspect was the ghost of my immortal love, of my wild endeavours to hold my right, my degradation, my pride, my happiness, my anguish—” (343). So there’s this sense both that Heathcliff has natural instincts that get betrayed by a more artificial, intellectualized desire for revenge; it’s also interesting that the characters Heathcliff ultimately feels some kind of sympathy and kindness towards are those we sympathize with as well—Hareton, young Cathy, and Nelly Dean. Well, I don’t sympathize with Cathy I much, and Charlotte Bronte apparently sympathized with Edgar Linton; but it’s interesting that Hareton, Cathy II, and Nelly are the characters whose underlying good nature Heathcliff can’t destroy or pervert—it’s as if he’s some kind of horrible, violent test of character.
• Cathy and Heathcliff as a unit. Both Cathy and Heathcliff explain over and over that their relationship isn’t merely (or even?) love, but total union and identification: as children they’re inseparable, and in Cathy’s diary entry she’s constantly using the pronoun “we”; she says “Nelly, I am Heathcliff” (86). Since I’ve been rereading Jane Eyre alongside Wuthering Heights I’m wondering to what degree Cathy and Heathcliff’s intense closeness mirrors Jane’s and Rochester’s, which by the end is symbiotic (and Jane’s love of Rochester, like Cathy’s description of Heathcliff as “an existence of [hers] beyond [her]”, verges on idolatry.) But of course Cathy and Heathcliff start out more closely united and are separated, while Jane and Rochester . . . well, that happens a little bit, too, but her total union with Rochester isn’t until the end. One scene in Wuthering Heights that echoes one in Jane Eyre, and that really gets at the difference between Jane’s solo hero’s journey and Cathy and Heathcliff’s doubled self, occurs when Cathy and Heathcliff spy on the Linton family through their lighted window. In Jane Eyre Jane has a similar experience looking in on the Rivers family; but while Jane is alone, friendless, and starving, Cathy and Heathcliff are smug and pleased with themselves—although the act of spying results in their separation. What does it mean to write a novel in which the hero and heroine almost don’t have single separate existences? It certainly does something strange to character; this novel can’t be a Bildungsroman, it can’t show us the life and development of a single consciousness. It is much stranger!
• Heathcliff overhearing Cathy: He hears “It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff” but not “so he shall never know how I love him” (85). The fact that this last phrase would have genuinely ameliorated the first seems to get at something crucial in the Heathcliff/Cathy bond, which is certainly not about marriage; compare to Jane Eyre’s problematizing of marriage.
• More about Hareton and Cathy II: Heathcliff sympathizes with them, and they’re also the characters who remind him the most of Cathy—particularly Hareton, who is a more distant relation from Cathy than her daughter, and also a man. It could be just that Heathcliff hates Lintons, and also hates himself; but he also hated Hindley Earnshaw, Hareton’s father. What is it about Hareton? Is being native to Wuthering Heights Cathy’s main attribute? Is Hareton’s relationship to that sacred place more significant because his name is over the door, even if he can’t read it (at first)?
• Wuthering Heights itself is obviously very important.
• Heathcliff’s death. It’s hard not to read this as redemptive, even as it’s ghoulish. The wasting away, the rapturous smiles, transform Heathcliff, even as they’re unsettling. The sense that he fears Cathy—“By God! she’s relentless. Oh, damn it! It’s unutterably too much for flesh and blood to bear, even mine” (355)—makes it more unsettling still—do we read this as a kind of punishment for Heathcliff? Even for Heathcliff, haunting would be unsettling?