wuthering heights: the binding of passion · catherine earnshaw's old diary confirms the...

Wuthkering ieg%ts: The Binding of Passion WILLIAM A. MADDEN

T HE DISORIENTATION produced by the brilliant opening chapters of Wuthering Heights has been frequently noticed. Lockwood's account of his visits to the Heights and of the vivid dreams he experiences there shock us into extraordinary alertness. The house with its stunted firs and slanted thorn trees, Heathcliff's undis- guised hatred of Cathy, the vicious dogs, Cathy withdrawn and full of scorn, Hareton's sullen aggressiveness, the vinegar-faced Joseph, Lockwood's remarkable dreams-these work together to create a sense of urgency and a set of images that profoundly affect our response to the subsequent narrative. Yet, judging by the amount of attention it has received, Lockwood's first dream-concerning his visit to the local chapel that ends in violence-tends to be forgotten by the reader.' Perhaps, as in real dream life, the extraordinary vividness of the second dream concerning Catherine's child-ghost figure at the lattice window, which Lockwood says produced in him "the intense horror of nightmare,"2 displaces the impression made by the somewhat paler previous dream. Yet the placing of the first

1 Studies focusing on the dream are relatively recent. They include the following: Ruth M. Adams, "Wuthering Heights: The Land East of Eden," NCF, 13 (1958), 55-62; Edgar F. Sh-annon, Jr., "Lockwood's Dreams and the Exegesis of Wuthering Heights," NCF, 14 (1959), 95-109; Vereen Bell, "Wuthering Heights and the Unfor- givable Sin," NCF, 17 (1962), 188-91; and Ronald E. Fine, "Lockwood's Dreams and the Key to Wuthering Heights," NCF, 24 (1969), 16-30. The reading offered here coincides at certain points with these varying interpretations but differs from them in orientation and emphasis.

2 Wuthering Heights: An Authoritative Text with Essays in Criticism, ed. William M. Sale, Jr. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1963), p. 30. Citations in the text are to this edition.

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dream suggests that Emily Bronte attached unusual importance to it.

My own curiosity was aroused by the fact that the first dream seems, in retrospect, the one event in the novel which has little to do directly with the story that follows. The characters represented in it, aside from the mythic Jabes Branderham, are Lockwood and Joseph, the one an outside observer, the other a minor figure who fits the misanthropic spirit of Wuthering Heights but who otherwise seems inconsequential, providing at most a note of comic relief in an otherwise exceedingly painful tale. Joseph's prominence in the dream is especially puzzling since it is Heathcliff's personality and presence that dominate Lockwood's experience at Wuthering Heights during his two visits. There is also a problem related to the theme of the unforgivable sin which informs the dream. When Nelly has finished her tale, it is not clear to the reader which character or characters might bear the guilt for such a sin. No one in the novel is entirely guiltless, yet we feel that the nature and degree of guilt among the characters vary considerably.

The following remarks, then, address themselves to questions concerning the significance of Lockwood's first dream. The discus- sion develops in three stages: first examining Joseph's role in the novel, then analyzing the Cathy-Hareton story as a counterpoise to the threat posed by Joseph, and, finally, drawing out the psycho- logical and religious implications of the novel's unusual double plot.

The two chapters leading up to Lockwood's first dream record his shocked response to the violence displayed in the lives of the Wuthering Heights inhabitants. His general impression is summed up in his reference to the "dismal spiritual atmosphere" of the place (21). It is worth noting that Joseph's role in creating this atmosphere is a considerable one. Lockwood's first description of him-"Joseph was an elderly, nay, an old man, verv old, perhaps, though hale and sinewy" (14)-suggests both some difficulty in "placing" him and an exceptional durability. From the time we meet Joseph (his first words in the novel are "the Lord help us!" [14]) he is portrayed as constantly invoking the language of biblical

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piety while abusing or scorning those around him. As a servant he is sullen and stubborn. When Heathcliff shouts for him, Lockwood reports that "Joseph mumbled indistinctly in the depths of the cellar, but gave no intimation of ascending" (16). Image and event resonate in subtle ways: Joseph is "in the depths," he "mumbles," he does not respond. We soon learn that he shares Heathcliff's sin of avarice. When Lockwood attempts to leave the Heights, Joseph cries out: " 'Maister, maister, he's staling t' lantern,' " and calls for the dogs, "'Hey Gnasher! Hey, dog! Hey, Wolf, holld him, holld him! '" (24). When Joseph verbally attacks Cathy, asserting that she is going to the devil, Cathy's response is to label him a "scandalous old hypocrite" and to frighten him off by threatening to bewitch him (34). Our general feeling is that Joseph, who has been at the Heights almost beyond memory, serves as a loci genius and that there is something almost preternatural as well as sinister about him.

Our subsequent exposure to him through Lockwood's reading in Catherine Earnshaw's old diary confirms the initial impression. Lockwood's attention is caught by Catherine's rude but powerful caricature of Joseph in a volume of sermons. Beneath the caricature there is a description of events that occurred at Wuthering Heights some quarter of a century earlier. The account opens with the words, "An awful Sunday," and goes on to describe Joseph harangu- ing Catherine and Heathcliff for "precisely three hours" in what is supposed to be a religious service, calling them "ill childer" for playing on Sunday, and eventually setting Hindley Earnshaw upon them in words that echo his earlier cry when setting the dogs upon Lockwood: "Maister, coom hither! Miss Cathy's riven th' back off 'Th' Helmet uh Salvation,' un' Heathcliff's pawsed his fit intuh t' first part uh 'T' Brooad Way to Destruction!'" (27). The diary entry ends with Joseph asserting that "owd Nick" will fetch Cath- erine and Heathcliff, and Catherine's statement that she and Heath- cliff took refuge in a nook to await the devil's advent. As a result of their experience of Joseph's tyranny they have come to an important decision: "H. and I are going to rebel--we took our initiatory step this evening" (26).

The immediate provocation of the first dream is a red, orna- mented title printed in the volume of sermons containing Cather-


ine's caricature of Joseph. The title of one of the sermons catches Lockwood's attention as he is about to fall asleep: "Seventy Times Seven, and the First of the Seventy-First. A Pious Discourse deliv- ered by the Reverend Jabes Branderham, in the Chapel of Gim- merden Sough." The dream opens with Lockwood journeying through the snow, with Joseph acting as his guide and wearying him with constant reproaches because Lockwood has no pilgrim's staff. Suddenly it appears that they are headed toward the Giminer- ton Chapel, where they are to hear the Reverend Jabes Brander- ham preach his sermon, and Lockwood has an intimation that "either Joseph, the preacher, or I had committed the 'First of the Seventy-First,' and were to be publicly exposed and excommuni- cated" (28).

Two features of Branderham's dream-sermon impress Lockwood -its enormous length and its curious content. It is divided into four hundred and ninety parts, and each part discusses a separate sin-"odd transgressions that I never imagined previously," Lock- wood reports, thereby suggesting that Branderham takes pleasure in seeking out peccadilloes or perversions, perhaps both. Wearied beyond endurance when Branderham has finished, Lockwood rises and denounces him as "the sinner of the sin no Christian need pardon." The preacher counters with the same charge: he has "ab- solved" Lockwood seventy-times-seven times for "contorting his visage" during each part of the sermon, and now the "First of the Seventy-First is come." When he urges the congregation to execute "the judgment written," the assembly vigorously sets upon Lock- wood with their pilgrim's staves, Joseph acting as Lockwood's "nearest and most ferocious assailant." In the general melee that follows, blows fall on everyone alike; and while "every man's hand was against his neighbour," Branderham taps encouragement loudly on his pulpit (29)

How are we to interpret this dream? With regard to Lockwood himself, we recall that he had earlier revealed his moral callousness in his deceitful behavior towards a young woman prior to his com- ing to Thrushcross Grange, a style of behavior, he coinplains, that had given him an "undeserved" reputation of deliberate heartless- ness (15). Thus the dream reveals the character of the dreamer, reflecting Lockwood's sense of guilt, expressed in his fear of public exposure and excommunication. A cold-hearted, shallow, guilt-

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ridden man who suspects everyone is against him and who represses this fear behind a disguise of urbane self-assurance, he is peculiarly vulnerable to Joseph's moral assaults. The dream is more immediately occasioned, however, by the sermon title in Catherine's book and thus recalls Catherinee's caricature of Joseph and the past violence at Wuthering Heights recorded in her diary. In the dream Joseph excommunicates Lockwood from the congregation, just as in real life he had exiled Catherine and Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights. Since- Joseph was equally malevolent in his behavior during Lockwood's recent visits, the dream also expresses Lockwood's subconscious awareness of Joseph's dangerousness and implies a connection between the violence of the past and that of the present, with both of which Joseph is intimately associated.

In what way is this dream prophetic and why does Joseph feature so largely in it? The ironic contrast in the dream between its biblical allusions and the hostility expressed in the congregation's behavior is heightened by the fact that the title of the sermon refers to passages in the New Testament concerning forgiveness, a virtue conspicuously absent in the dream. When asked "Lord, if my brother sin against me, how many times should I pardon him? Up to seven times?" Jesus replied, "I do not say up to seven times, but to seventy times seven times." All three principals of the dream- Joseph, Lockwood, and Branderham-misunderstand the symbolic import of the words, interpreting them literally instead of as a command to practice unlimited forgiveness, thereby converting the text into a pretext for "excommunicating" others. The unforgivable sin referred to in the New Testament is always related to an offense against the Spirit rather than to a particular offense against a brother, and it is mentioned in a context in which Jesus warns his hearers against the spiritual blindness of the Pharisees.

"I say to you every sin and blasplhemy shall be forgiven men, but blasphemy of the Spirit shall not be forgiven. And if anyone speaks against the Son of Man, that shall be forgiven him, but if he speak against the Holy Spirit, that shall not be forgiven him either in this world or in the world to come." (Matthew 12: 31-32)

Although the precise nature of the unforgivable sin has been de- bated, Emily Bronte5 makes it clear that for her the unforgivable sin consists in judging the human offenses of others as unforgivable.


The dream in fact connects the behavior of the entire Gimmer- ton congregation, ostensibly devout but spiritually blind, with the blasphemy against the Spirit which Jesus condemned in the Phar- isees. Joseph's prominence in the dream arises from Lockwood's unconscious recognition, anticipated by Cathy's charge of "hypocrite" and later explicitly formulated in Nelly's charge of "pharisee," that, although not charged in the dream itself, Joseph is the one most conspicuously guilty of the unforgivable sin in reality, both in his doctrine and in his deeds. The dream has its real-life counterparts in Joseph's personal behavior at Wuthering Heights; there is a general willingness on the part of the Gimmerton congregation, of which Joseph is a zealous member, to let their curate starve rather than "increase the living by one penny from their own pockets" (28). It is this penurious, mean, self-serving spirit which Joseph promotes in the Earnshaw household.3

The mythic quality of the first dream may be seen as presenting what Northrop Frye says all myths present, "the main outlines and the circumference of a verbal universe," a relatively abstract schema which the realism of the subsequent story "fills up" with literary detail.4 Seen from this perspective, Joseph becomes as much a usurper as the "cuckoo" Heathcliff, the major difference between them being that Joseph lacks the social status to punish directly and must therefore work indirectly through his several "Maisters," or, when this fails, magically through the avenging Deity to whom he repeatedly appeals. Although his avarice, unlike Heathcliff's, expresses itself in trivial complaints about a stolen lantern, spilled

3 In his perceptive analysis of Joseph's character Jacques Blondel observes that Emily Bronte has Joseph present two faces in the novel: "one lends itself to satire of religious fanaticism such as Emily Bronte had known and the other abruptly opens to us the depths of evil that destroy the souls of Wuthering Heights" ("Two Excerpts from Emily Brontie: Experience Spirituelle et Creation Poetique," trans. Mary Moser, in Wuthering Heights: Text, Sources, Criticism, ed. Thomas C. Moser [New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1962], p. 209). The distinction is important. As a realistic figure Joseph is limited in the direct harm he can do to others by his status as servant, and to that extent he is susceptible to satire; Lockwood, Nelly, and Isabella, the three principal narrators, all feel superior to him and overlook his essential evil. Moreover, in reflecting the ethos of unforgiveness, Joseph is less a conscious, and therefore culpable, moral agent than an unreflecting victim of a pervasive popular theology which he is intellectually incapable of criticizing. It is only in Lockwood's dream that his true significance emerges: his enlargement into a dream figure attaches to him the central burden of evil in the novel, what Blondel calls a "pharisaical fanaticism in which piety has suppressed all pity."

4 Fables of Identity (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1963), p. 33.


porridge, and idle hands, it is symbolically appropriate. As W. H. Auden notes in connection with another hypocrite, Melville's Bil- dad, avarice is often associated with hypocrisy, that is, with a man's identifying himself with God's will; an avarice so rooted becomes a form of spiritual cannibalism.5 Whereas Heathcliff usurps property by exploiting the secular law to his own advantage, Joseph attempts to usurp souls by exploiting the spiritual law.

The linking, through Catherine's diary and Lockwood's first dream, of the caricature of Joseph, the Branderham sermon, the abusive congregation, the past violence of Wuthering Heights, Catherine's and Heathcliff's rebellion, and the present "dismal spiritual atmosphere" of the house, suggests the essential connections governing the action in Wuthering Heights. The symbolic import of the dream, and of Joseph's prominence in it, gives added mean- ing to the events that follow. In Lockwood's second dream, for example, which is provoked by his reading about Catherine's early unhappiness and his sense of her strong and rebellious personality, Lockwood avenges the shedding of his own blood, suffered just prior to the dream, by rubbing the ghost figure's wrist on the broken edges of the window pane "to and fro till the blood ran down and soaked the bed-clothes" (30). More importantly, the second dream presents the consequences of Catherine's alienation from a Wuthering Heights dominated physically by Hindley and spiritually by Joseph. The future of Catherine and Heathcliff, fore- shadowed in the diary, is confirmed by Lockwood's nightmare: Catherine's "excommunication" from Wuthering Heights has en- dured for eighteen years, and Lockwood himself now participates in her exclusion.

The images of hostility and violence that dominate Lockwood's dreams carry over into the events that immediately follow upon his waking. In response to Lockwood's cry of terror which ends the second dream, Heathcliff enters the room and threatens to "turn out of the house" whoever showed Lockwood into the room. Lock- wood promptly names Zillah as the culprit, adding, "I should not care if you did, Mr. Heathcliff; she richly deserves it" (31). Then, echoing Joseph's language in the diary, Lockwood refers to Cath- erine's "wicked little soul" and to the "mortal transgressions" of

5 The Enchafed Flood (New York: Random House, 1950), p. 115.


which she must be guilty. HIe even attributes to Heathcliff a natural kinship with the preacher of the first dream: "Was not the Rever- end Jabes Branderham akin to you on your mother's side?" (31-32). It is a spiteful and inappropriate charge, since it was Branderham's type of hypocritical Christianity, embodied in Joseph, which had originally alienated Catherine and Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights. Yet the remark is symbolically appropriate in a way that Lockwood cannot comprehend: the Branderham fanaticism preached by Joseph has nurtured the unforgiving Heathcliff whom Lockwood has recently encountered.6

Joseph's decisive role in the tragedies that destroy Wuthering Heights is confirmed by Nelly's account of the events with which that history begins. All that we know of the Earnshaw family prior to Heathcliff's introduction into it is that it was a very old one, dating back to 1500, and that at the time of Mr. Earnshaw's de- parture for Liverpool (in the year 1771), he is a kind father in a household that seems stable and content. Although Joseph has long been associated with the family, up to this time he has had no role in its spiritual affairs; Mr. Earnshaw, the master of the house, is an orthodox churchman, and the children are tutored by Mr. Shield- ers, the curate, not by Joseph. When Mr. Earnshaw returns from Liverpool with a dark orphan boy he has adopted on a charitable impulse and presents him to the family with the words "I was never so beaten with anything in my life; but you must e'en take it as a gift of God, though it's as dark almost as if it came from the devil" (38), Nelly reports that at first the rest of the family rejected the orphan child, and that, in part to compensate for this, Mr. Earnshaw quick- ly developed a special fondness for him. This "bred bad feeling" in the house (40).7 Yet when Hindley departs for college soon after,

6 In her fresh and generally persuasive reading of the novel (the analysis of the elder Catherine seems to me the best that has appeared), Q. D. Leavis firmly places Joseph within the context of the social realities of nineteenth-century Yorkshire in a way that is very helpful, but which I do not believe justifies describing Joseph's religion as "true natural piety" (F. R. and Q. D. Leavis, Lectures in America [New York: Pantheon; London: Chatto and Windus, 1969], p. 132).

7 Mrs. Leavis revives the unprovable and, in my judgment, unnecessary assumption that Heathcliff is Mr. Earnshaw's illegitimate son (p. 132). In a paper which I have read since writing the present paper and which I hope will be published, Thomas Stern, a graduate student at Minnesota, makes use of modern French anthropological theory to show that the incest taboo has to do not with sexual relationships but with the imperative need in a society to provide for the sharing of property. Sharing is precisely what Catherine and Heathcliff are incapable of; their "incest" is spiritual, not physical.


Nelly is still hopeful that "we should have peace now" (42). After initially rejecting Heathcliff, both she and Catherine, for different reasons, take Heathcliff's side against Hindley; and Hindley, who is the only one left at the Heights to persecute Heathcliff, will no longer be there. Nelly states her belief that at this point "we might have got on tolerably ... but for two people, Miss Cathy and Joseph, the servant" (42).

It is at this crucial juncture that Nelly registers her definitive judgment of Joseph, repeating the younger Catherine's charge made earlier:

. . . you saw him, I dare say, up yonder. He was, and is yet, most likely, the wearisomest, self-righteous pharisee that ever ransacked a Bible to rake the promises to himself, and fling the curses on his neighbours. By his knack of sermonizing and pious discoursing, he contrived to make a great impression on Mr. Earnshaw, and the more feeble the master became, the more influence he gained.

He was relentless in worrying him about his soul's concerns, and about ruling his children rigidly. He encouraged him to regard Hindley as a reprobate; and, night after night, he regularly grumbled out a long string of tales against Heathcliff and Catherine; always minding to flatter Earnshaw's weakness by heaping the heaviest blame on the last. (42)

As in the sequence of Lockwood's two dreams, Catherine's alienation and rebellion is prepared for by a prior incident showing Joseph at work in his role of "guide," this time to Mr. Earnshaw. Though Nelly mentions Catherine as one of the causes of the disas- ters that followed, she is at this time still basically innocent; despite her mischievousness and a need "to act the little mistress," Nelly is convinced that she "meant no harm" (43).

Thus the turn in the Wuthering Heights fortunes is marked not by Heathcliff's arrival, but by Joseph's growving ascendancy over Mr. Earnshaw. We soon hear the now ailing Mr. Earnshaw echoing Joseph when he tells his son Hindley that he is "naught, and would never thrive as where he wandered" (42), and his daughter Cather- ine, "I cannot love thee; thou'rt worse than thy brother. Go, say thy prayers, child, and ask God's pardon" (43). Catherine's rebellion against her father, like her later betrayal of Heathcliff, springs from an environment corrupted by Joseph's manipulations. Nelly describes its fatal effect: "being repulsed continually hardened her, and she laughed if I told her to say she was sorry for her faults, and


beg to be forgiven" (43). When old Earnshaw dies, there is a moment of peace in which Catherine and Heathcliff comfort one another with what Nelly calls "better thoughts than I could have hit on; no parson in the world ever pictured heaven so beautifully as they did in their innocent talk" (44). But with Hindley's return, Joseph's spiritual dominance over the children is assured, Cather- ine and Heathcliff rebel, and the family will eventually be brought to the condition described in the opening chapters.

Although their rebellion against Joseph's meanness of spirit is heroic and justified, Catherine and Heathcliff allow their natural affinity for one another to be corrupted by their desire for revenge against the society in which Joseph's meanness prevails. Already as children, before her father's death, Catherine had used Heathcliff to avenge her own hurt; she did "just what her father hated most, showing how her pretended insolence, which he thought real, had more power over Heathcliff than his kindness" (43). Accepting Joseph's evaluation of them as damned, Catherine and Heathcliff are convinced that they cannot be unhappier as savages on the moors than they are under Joseph's tyranny. Their love, rather than serving as an antidote to Joseph's blasphemy against the spirit, is shown to be neurotically deranged by it: they are Joseph's victims, not his antagonists.8

Joseph's character in the remainder of the story is consistent with the image we derive of him from Lockwood's dream. It is reflected not only in the uniformly negative reactions of the other characters to him, but more directly in his attempt to exercise the same baleful influence upon the children of the second generation as he had on the first. Although he cannot advise Heathcliff, who is incapable of being guided by anyone but Catherine, Joseph artfully connives with Heathcliff's schemes of vengeance for his own purposes:

It gave Joseph satisfaction, apparently, to watch him [Hareton] go the worst lengths. He allowed that he was ruined; that his soul was abandoned to perdition; but then, he reflected that Heathcliff must answer for it. Hareton's blood would be required at his hands; and there lay immense consolation in that thought. (161-62)

8J. Hillis Miller makes the valuable point that Joseph's importance in the novel stems from his influence upon Catherine and Heathcliff; their acceptance of his judgment sets up the opposition between love and religious duty which first confuses and then alienates them. See The Disappearance of God (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1963), pp. 179-80.


In his own way, Joseph jealously protects what seems to him the "honor" of the Heights; he is almost slavishly devoted to the in- terests of its successive "Maisters." We learn, for example, that he instilled into Hareton "a pride of name, and of his lineage." But the devotion is essentially hypocritical and selfish; he is happy to see Hindley, Heathcliff, and Hareton morally damned so long as the "property" is preserved, their successive tenures serving simply to guarantee his own privileges and security. Had he dared, we are told, he would have fostered hatred between Hareton and Heath- cliff, "but his dread of [the] owner amounted to superstition; and he confined his feelings regarding him to muttered innuendoes and private comminations" (161-62). The radical confusion of values masked by Joseph's self-serving religiosity is conveyed in a sharp vignette toward the end of the novel: having returned from some business transactions, Joseph took his seat in the back-kitchen and "solemnly spread his large Bible on the table, and overlaid it with dirty bank-notes from his pocket-book" (249).

Joseph's essential nature is one of denial, his presence creating a spiritual void. He sees everyone as a "nowt" because he interprets the behavior of others as manifestations of their inherent evil. When Linton Heathcliff appears at the Heights, Joseph at first scornfully regards him as an effeminate "lass" (169); but when Lin- ton later shrieks at Hareton, "Devil! devil! I'll kill you, I'll kill you!" Joseph complacently utters his "croaking laugh," and notes: "Thear, that's t' father.... We've allas summut uh orther side in us" (201). For Joseph the opposite qualities in people are not good and evil, but variations of evil. His rejoicing in evil indicates his basic spiritual need, his "vocation," as Nelly calls it, "to be where there was plenty of wickedness to reprove" (61). Lockwood's dream is prophetic in telling us that a household for which Joseph is the symbolic chaplain is destined for destruction, not because its mem- bers offend one another, but because they are incapable of forgiving one another's offenses. Joseph thus functions as the spiritual center of a world of moral violence, of endless charges and countercharges, in which everyone's hand is against his neighbor.

It has been argued that with Heathcliff's death, Emily Bronte's interest in her work flagged; that the Cathy-Hareton relationship


is handled perfunctorily and represents the imposition of a Victor- ian cliche upon an otherwise great story.9 Yet the care which Emily Bronte has demonstrably taken with the other details of the novel suggests that it is most unlikely that she would be careless in han- dling the plot. The many parallels between the two stories support the opposite assumption. The Catherine-Heathcliff and Cathy- Hareton stories are both set in the narrative frame established by Lockwood and Nelly Dean. Both stories oscillate between the poles of Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange and contain a love triangle. In each triangle the "dark" male is an orphan, ignorant and subject to the power of others; the "light" male is bookish and exhibits the manners of polite society; the woman moves between the attractions of the dark and light male figures, marries the light figure but seems destined for the dark figure. Heathcliff and Hare- ton are degraded; Edgar Linton and Linton Heathcliff are isolated; and Catherine and Cathy are thrown back upon themselves and must confront similar trials by drawing upon inward resources. Emily Bronte obviously had these parallels, repetitions, and contrasts in mind from the outset. The question for the critic, therefore, is whether or not the central moral action of the second story is as compelling as that of the first. I believe that it is, that the second story presents the necessary counterforce to Joseph's malevolence, and that it is essential to see how this is so in order to understand the complex greatness of Wuthering Heights.

Had the novel ended with Lockwood's words concluding chapter 30 after Nelly has brought the story down to the present-"I would not pass another winter here, for much" (236)-there would be some justification for believing that the tragedy of the first generation will be repeated in the second. Zillah reports of the young Cathy at this point: "the more hurt she gets, the more venomous she grows" (236). There might even be some justification for describing the novel as a tale of "all passion spent," the story of a great and passionate love the thwarting of which lays waste both those who

9 Influential essays supporting this view include Richard Chase's "The Brontes, or, Myth Domesticated," Kenyon Review, 9 (1947), 487-506; Mark Schorer's "Intro- duction" to the Rinehart edition of Wuthering Heights (New York: Rinehart, 1950); and Thomas Moser's "What is the Matter with Emily Jane? Conflicting Impulses in Wuthering Heights," NCF, 17 (1962), 1-19.

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experience it and those who come near itj10 'I'here is substantial evidence, however, that such a reading severely distorts the novel. While Heathcliff's rage has been spreading destruction, something else has been happening in the novel that runs counter to his blind aggression, a process involving not the spending of passion but the binding of it. The final four chapters are centrally important because they present the culmination of a restorative action which begins with the birth of the second generation.

The story of the second generation is introduced in medias res, with Cathy and Hareton under the despotic domination of Heath- cliff. At this point their history has reached its nadir; Nelly Dean tells Lockwood, after she hears Zillah's report, that she "can see no remedy" (236). Yet the central developments in the concluding chapters of the novel, Heathcliff's disappearance and the emergence of Cathy and Hareton, are carefully prepared for by events that be- gin with the opening chapters themselves. Lockwood notices, for example, that despite his degradation Hareton's "bearing was free, almost haughty" (19), and reports that on his second visit to the Heights Hareton was the only one to invite him to have a seat (18). When Lockwood seeks assistance in finding his way back to Thrush- cross Grange through the snow, it is Hareton who volunteers, and when Heathcliff intervenes to declare that Hareton cannot go because he must look after the horse, Cathy remarks, simply but tell- ingly: "A man's life is of more consequence than one evening's neglect of the horses" (24). More significantly, at the very outset we see Cathy confronting Joseph, the representative of the destructive element which threatens to condemn the second generation to a repetition of the tragedy of the first.

Characteristically, Joseph attacks Cathy for being idle:

"Aw woonder hagh yah can faishion tuh stand thear i' idleness un war, when all on 'em's goan aght! Bud yah're a nowt, and it's noa use talking -yah'Il niver mend uh yer ill ways; bud goa raight tuh t'divil, like yer mother afore ye!" (22)

Although the reader does not yet know all that Cathiy has been

10 E.g., " . . . Heathcliff at last an emptied man, burned out by his fever ragings, exhausted and will-less, his passion meaningless at last" (Schorer, p. xii).


through, her response (she threatens to bewitch Joseph) is a measure of her intelligence. She sees through Joseph's surface piety to his underlying desire to rule by magic, and she perceives the deep- seated fear and superstition which he conceals under his role of one of the "elect." Yet her response is not vindictive, but rather, as Lock- wood observes, a species of "dreary fun" (23) which is the only way she has to counter her present crushing circumstances. She sees Joseph as comic, not because of his social inferiority, but because she can understand and reject his hypocrisy without passion or rancor, having already successfully withstood the more menacing threats of Heathcliff. We will learn later that this scene is merely the latest in a series of confrontations through which she has main- tained her moral identity by exercising both intelligence and extraordinary courage.

Although at the outset of the novel Heathcliff appears to be in absolute control, by the end of chapter 30 we have discovered that he has in fact suffered a major moral defeat at the hands of Cathy and Hareton. Their story begins with the announcement of Hare- ton's birth at the opening of chapter 8. It is one of the few joyful moments in the book. It occurs "on the morning of a fine June day," and neither the mother's fatal illness nor the father's uneasiness mars the joy of the event (59). After the death of Hareton's mother, Nelly fondly nurses the boy until his fifth birthday, protecting him meanwhile from his increasingly dissipated father. We also learn of Hareton's developing fondness for Heathcliff a few years later, despite the brutalization he undergoes after Nelly has moved to Thrushcross Grange. Cathy's birth, far gloomier than Hareton's, comes at the opening of chapter 16, less than halfway through the novel. Despite its ominous circumstances, Nelly remarks that the following twelve years at Thrushcross Grange, with Cathy as her charge, were the happiest of her life. She describes the second Cath- erine as having a capacity for intense attachments "which reminded me of her mother," the important difference being that the younger Catherine's love is "never fierce," but rather "deep and tender" (155).

The difference in the destinies of the two generations is a result of the opposed quality of the moral actions that govern their respective stories. Like her mother, Cathy has faults; as a child she is


saucy, spoiled, and snobbish. But, unlike her mother, she is deeply attached to her father and to Nelly, and she does not seek mastery over others; her main endeavor in relation to others is to understand them. In her first confrontation at Wuthering Heights, for example, her discovery that "such a clown" as Hareton is her cousin, although it offends her inbred sense of class, also awakens her curiosity: "She did not comprehend it" (162). In her first encounter with Heathcliff, when she is told by Heathcliff that her father had thought him too poor to wed Isabella, that Edgar's pride was therefore hurt by the marriage, and that "he'll never forgive it," Cathy answers: "That's wrong!" and says that she will tell her father so. "But," she adds, "Linton and I have no share in your quarrel" (176). She thus states at their first meeting the principle which in the end will obstruct Heathcliff's desire for revenge, namely, that her generation is not bound by the quarrels of his.

It is precisely Heathcliff's hatred that blinds him to the radical error in his assumptions about Cathy: his belief, for example, that once she discovers Linton's true character, she will "send him to the devil"; or that Hareton's degradation makes him "safe from her love" (176). When Cathy is informed of Heathcliff's terrible history, both her initial and her delayed reactions are revealing. She is "deeply impressed and shocked at this view of human nature- excluded from all her studies and all her ideas till now" (181), but she is shocked into reflection, not anger or judgment. On the evening of the same day, when Nelly finds her alone and weeping, Cathy explains that she is not crying for herself, but for Linton Heathcliff. "He expected to see me again to-morrow, and there, he'll be so disappointed-and he'll wait for me, and I shan't come!" (181).

Cathy's basic moral posture is as consistently other-regarding as her mother's was self-regarding. Her quiet declaration regarding her love for her father is as compelling as her mother's and Heath- cliff's more passionate speeches. "I love him better than myself, Ellen; and I know it by this: I pray every night that I may live after him, because I would rather be miserable than that he should be- that proves I love him better than myself" (187). It is the capacity to evaluate her emotions honestly and to be interested in the welfare of others which distinguishes Cathy from everyone in the novel,


even when, as in the scenies with Linton, the hatred and mutual recrimination of the first generation threaten to engulf the second.

"My papa scorns yours!" cried Linton. "He calls him a sneaking fool!" "Yours is a wicked man," retorted Catherine, "and you are very

naughty to dare to repeat what he says. He must be wicked, to have made Aunt Isabella leave him as she did!"

"She didn't leave him," said the boy; "you shan't contradict me!" "She did!" cried my young lady. "Well, I'll tell you something!" said Linton. "Your mother hated

your father, now then." "Ohl" exclaimed Catherine, too enraged to continue. "And she loved mine!" added he. "You little liar! I hate you now," she panted, and her face grew red

with passion. (192)

In her rage, Cathy pushes Linton's chair, causing pretended serious distress on Linton's part, but after she has had time to reflect on what she has done, she says, "I'm sorry I hurt you, Linton!" (193). The ability to forgive is not finally explainable; like Hareton's devotion to Heathcliff, it is a "grace" that remains a mystery. But it is nonetheless real and powerful, and Emily Bronte's understanding of the nature and consequences of human evil and the means required to overcome it led her to place the capacity to forgive at the very center of her novel.

The effect of Cathy's goodness upon Linton is admirably rendered, one of its notable qualities being that it enables Linton to see himself as he really is.

"Only, Catherine, do me this justice; believe that if I might be as sweet, and as kind, and as good as you are, I would be, as willingly and more so, than as happy and as healthy. And believe that your kindness has made me love you deeper than if I deserved your love, and though I couldn't, and cannot help showing my nature to you, I regret it and repent it, and shall regret and repent it, till I die!" (203)

Cathy co.mments to Nelly:

"I felt he spoke the truth; and I felt I must forgive him; and, though he should quarrel the next moment, I must forgive him again. We were reconciled, but we cried, both of us, the whole time I stayed. Not entirely for sorrow, yet I was sorry Linton had that distorted nature. He'll never let his friends be at ease, and he'll never be at ease himself 1" (203)


Cathy's character, rooted in moral intelligence and sympathetic interest, never in mere pathos or snobbery or egoism, has the power to cause others to be honest, just as Heathcliff's hatred causes others to hate.

Cathy's willingness to sacrifice herself for Linton prepares us for her definitive confrontations with Heathcliff in powerful scenes which dramatize the central moral tension of the novel. The first of these occurs before Cathy fully understands Heathcliff's vindictive intentions. Having decoyed Cathy and Nelly into the house and locked them in, Heathcliff comments, "How she does stare!" when watching Cathy's response, and then adds: "It's odd what a savage feeling I have to anything that seems afraid of me!" Here, as else- where, Heathcliff reveals his ignorance of his own nature, as well as of Cathy's, of why he feels savage when he sees fear in others. Cathy replies: "I'm not afraid of you!" but when she attempts to tear the key out of Heathcliff's hand, he triumphs physically with a "shower of terrific slaps on both sides of the head" (215). Beginning to recognize the depth of Heathcliff's hatred, Cathy admits: "I am afraid now," but for reasons Heathcliff cannot understand: "because if I stay, papa will be miserable; and how can I endure making him miserable" (218). When Heathcliff responds with a cynical, and erroneous, exposition of how her father will interpret her absence, Cathy makes the first of her great responses.

"Mr. Heathcliff, you're a cruel man, but you're not a fiend; and you won't, from mere malice, destroy, irrevocably, all my happiness. If papa thought I had left him on purpose, and if he died before I returned, could I bear to live? I've given over crying; but I'm going to kneel here, at your knee; and I'll not get up, and I'll not take my eyes from your face, till you look back at me! No, don't turn away! do look! You'll see nothing to provoke you. I don't hate you. I'm not angry that you struck me. Have you never loved anybody, in all your life, uncle? never? Ah! you must look once-I'm so wretched-you can't help being sorry and pity- ing me." (219)

It is now Heathcliff who is on the defensive: "Keep your eft's fingers off." Under the influence of this exhibition of Cathy's courage, even Nelly for a moment allows for her own possible share of guilt in the "misfortunes of all my employers" (220).

Cathy's second major encounter with Heathcliff, again resulting in his physical triumph over her, is reported by Linton. He tells


Nelly how, in trying to get a picture of Edgar which Cathy wore in a locket about her neck, Heathcliff "struck her down, and wrenched it off the chain, and crushed it with his foot."

"And were you pleased to see her struck?" I asked, having my designs in encouraging his talk.

"I winked," he answered. "I wink to see my father strike a dog, or a horse, he does it so hard. Yet I was glad at first-she deserved punishing for pushing me: but when papa was gone, she made me come to the window and showed me her cheek cut on the inside, against her teeth, and her mouth filling with blood; and then she gathered up the bits of the picture, and went and sat down with her face to the wall, and she has never spoken to me since, and I sometimes think she can't speak for pain." (223)

The moral violence done to Cathy by Heathcliff's crushing of the picture of her father is deeply felt by the reader, a violence far more terrible than the physical brutality that causes her mouth to bleed. Her self-possession is enormous and impressive and gives to her a moral stature that far transcends mere politeness or the affectionate virtues of domesticity.

A third confrontation occurs after Edgar's funeral, when Heath- cliff comes to the Grange to take Cathy back to the Heights and to Linton, whom he has forced Cathy to marry. Heathcliff warns her that Linton's bitterness over her temporary desertion of him will blind him to her sacrificial love for him. Cathy replies:

"I know he has a bad nature," said Catherine; "he's your son. But I'm glad I've a better, to forgive it; and I know he loves me and for that reason I love him. Mr. Heathcliff, you have nobody to love you; and, however miserable you make us, we shall still have the revenge of thinking that your cruelty rises from your greater misery. You are miserable, are you not? Lonely, like the devil, and envious like him? Nobody loves you-nobody will cry for you, when you die! I wouldn't be you!" (227-28)

Cathy's "revenge" thus rests on her recognition of the causes behind Heathcliff's behavior, not in hatred of him (as with Isabella and Hindley) or in withdrawal from him (as with the elder Cather- ine and Edgar). She is mistaken as to one fact-Hareton (as she discovers later) does love Heathcliff-but her courage and insight in


insisting that Heathcliff's cruelty arises from his misery represents a moral victory of a very high order, a victory not so much over Heathcliff as in spite of him, a victory for herself in maintaining her own moral integrity against Heathcliff's destructive hatred.

Later, in Zillah's report of Cathy's attendance at Linton's death- bed, Heathcliff cruelly asks Cathy after Linton has died:

"Now-Catherine," he said, "how do you feel?" She was dumb. "How do you feel, Catherine?" he repeated. "He's safe, and I'm free," she answered, "I should feel well-but," she

continued with a bitterness she couldn't conceal, "you have left me so long to struggle against death, alone, that I feel and see only death! I feel like death!" (232-33)

Zillah, not a sympathetic observer, adds: "And she looked like it too. I gave her a little wine." But after two weeks of self-confinement in her room, Cathy descends on a Sunday afternoon "donned in black, and her yellow curls combed back behind her ears, as plain as a Quaker" (233). She has confronted death (and murder), has been stripped of any reason to hope, and yet does not succumb or retaliate. Instead, she seeks company and help.

"Thus ended Mrs. Dean's story," Lockwood reports (236). Al- though Cathy is at this point isolated and withdrawn, Emily Bronte has prepared us for the eventual resolution by emphasizing the contrast, despite the similarities in their experiences, between the behavior of the two generations: she has made intelligible Hareton's surprising love for Heathcliff, and, more importantly, she has repeatedly rendered with artistic subtlety and power Cathy's sus- tained moral insight. Even Cathy's desperate admission to Hareton contains an element of hope: "'Oh! I'm tired-I'm stalled, Hare- ton!" (237). Cathy grasps her situation and communicates it as per- ception and recognition as much as complaint. Heathcliff, on the other hand, becomes increasingly a puzzle to himself: "It will be odd," he says, "if I thwart myself" (240).

When Lockwood returns six months later and finds Wuthering Heights much altered-the gate and doors are open-he hears from Nelly of the two major changes that have occurred: the "queer end'? of Heathcliff and the gradual advance in the Cathy-Hareton relationship. Cathy's final encounter with Heathcliff reveals the nature


of these changes. In response to Joseph's complaint to Heathcliff that she and Hareton have torn up a row of his currant trees, Cathy assumes the blame for the act.

"And who the devil gave you leave to touch a stick about the place?" demanded her father-in-law, much surprised. "And who ordered you to obey her?" he added, turning to Hareton.

The latter was speechless; his cousin replied- "You shouldn't grudge a few yards of earth for me to ornament, when you have taken all my land!"

"Your land, insolent slut? you never had any!" said Heathcliff. "And my money," she continued, returning his angry glare, and,

meantime, biting a piece of crust, the remnant of her breakfast. "Silencel" he exclaimed. "Get done, and begone!" "And Hareton's land, and his money," pursued the reckless thing.

"Hareton and I are friends now; and I shall tell him all about you!" The master seemed confounded a moment; he grew pale, and rose

up, eyeing her all the while, with an expression of mortal hate. (252)

It is perhaps the only occasion in the novel that Heathcliff is "confounded." Although Cathy's temptation to use Hareton against Heathcliff is reminiscent of her mother's similar use of Heathcliff against old Mr. Earnshaw, the difference between the two generations is immediately defined in the paragraphs that follow. Nelly reports that when Hareton told Cathy that he wvould not bear hearing Heathcliff abused because he loved him, despite everything, as much as Cathy loved her father:

She showed a good heart, thenceforth, in avoiding both complaints and expressions of antipathy concerning Heathcliff, and confessed to me her sorrow that she had endeavoured to raise a bad spirit between him and Hareton; indeed, I don't believe she has ever breathed a syllable, in the latter's hearing, against her oppressor, since. (253)

Heathcliff's sight of Cathy and Hareton together, their eyes "those of Catherine Earnshaw," not only "disarms" him, as Nelly notes (254), and provokes his comments on the "absurd termina- tion" of his desire for revenge, but also leads him to his first real glimpse of his own nature and predicament. It is not, he tells Nelly, maglianimity that prevents him from carrying through his plan of revenge, but the fact that he has "lost the faculty of enjoying their destruction" (255). Heathcliff is puzzled as to why this should be


so, but if we recall that his enjoyment in being cruel to others was tied to their fear of him, we recognize what has happened. Cathy has proven that she is not afraid, and Hareton irrationally loves him. Heathcliff is therefore unable to achieve his essential aimn: to make them hate as much as he has been made to hate. The effect of this discovery is to cause him to retirn to the source of his futile campaign and to the experiences out of which it arose. He finally recognizes that to destroy Hareton would not be to attain victory but to destroy the representative of the only self-image he has ever cherished, that of Catherine's lover. Cathy's and Hareton's love for one another does not interest him, since he consistently sees them as projections of his own violent emotions; at first as "representa- tives" of his "old enemies" and hence as objects of hate, but now as renminders of his one experience of love. Thus remninded of his past, of its hopes and his love for Catherine, Heathcliff declares, "I can give them no attention, any more" (255), and turns his face towards that other world in which he hopes to be reuinited with that re- membered love.

What light does the foregoing analysis shed on the unusual double rhythm of the Wuthering Heights plot? It has been said that Wuthering Heights is the story of what happened when a foreign evil element, the dark gipsy child, is introduced into the peaceful life of "the gods" who have serenely inhabited Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange for generations." For reasons which I hope are now evident, I would argue instead that Lockwood's first dream reveals that evil, in the guise of Joseph's malignity, existed in that world prior to iHeathcliff's arrival, indeed, for Emily Bronte, is always present in the world. The story of the first generation indicates that rebellion against the radical perversion of spiritual values represented by Joseph is insufficient. Only when his malignity and its disruptive effects are confronted and subdued is peace restored to the individual and to society. The way to channel human energy, most powerfully represented in Heathcliff but present to a greater or lesser extent in everyone, is to provide a healthy binding of that

11 Rebecca West, The Court and the Castle (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1957), p. I10.


energy which will lead to constructive action, a process exemplified in the story of the second generation.

It is necessary to examine the exact nature of this healthy binding process, since Emily Bronte's views on man and nature bear importantly, I believe, on our understanding of Wuthering Heights. If we ask how the demonic energies preeminently embodied in Heathcliff are to be bound, the initial answer must be: not by the kind of repression which Joseph represents. It is significant that Joseph fears the mature Heathcliff, regarding him superstitiously and appealing for protection to the dark god of his fanatical theology and to his own native shrewdness in the ways of securing self- survival. As we have seen, it is precisely the repressive element represented by Joseph which alienates and eventually destroys Cath- erine and Heathcliff, and later threatens Cathy and Hareton. If we reject repression as a solution, there remain two possible ways of escaping the neurotic derangement suffered by Catherine and Heathcliff: one is to return to a state which existed prior to the derangement, the way taken by Catherine and Heathcliff; the other is to confront the demonic forces and to integrate them into a mature, nonrepressed life, the way taken by Cathy and Hareton.

The first way can best be understood, I believe, from the point of view provided by the psychoanalytic concept of the repetition- compulsion, a concept which promises to be useful in that Wuther- ing Heights so emphatically involves repetitions of an elementary kind.12 Freud originally developed the concept in response to his analyses of traumatized children and adults whose games and dreams, rather than expressing wish fulfillment, as Freud had argued earlier all games and dreams do, instead embodied a return to the painful experience which was the source of the patients' neu- roses. The repeated returning to what was obviously painful led Freud to postulate the existence of a prelibidinous instinct which he named the repetition-compulsion. The psyche, disturbed by a shock which it cannot absorb and surmount, is unable to achieve psychic wholeness until the subject relives and retrospectively

12 The potential usefulness of this concept for literary analysis is admirably treated in an essay to which I am indebted for portions of my argument. See Sacvan Berko- vitch, "Literature and the Repetition Compulsion," CE, 29 (1968), 607-15. Berko- vitch's comments on Dante's Purgatorio figures and Dostoevsky's Underground Man are extremely suggestive when read with Catherine and Heathcliff in mind.


binds the excess of emotion that is the cause of his illness. How this "binding" could be achieved Freud did not make entirely clear, but in developing Freud's concept, later psychoanalytic thought clearly distinguished between the traumatic repetition of a painful experience and the restoring of a previous state: "The repetition- compulsion has the effect of not changing anything; the same thing happens over and over again. Restoring an earlier state of affairs, however, is a movement, one of a regressive kind, which changes the present state of affairs into one of a previous period in time." 13

The first half of the double rhythm of Wuthering Heights may be seen as dramatizing a process analogous to the repetition-compulsion and the eventual return to a prior state. Catherine's and Heathcliff's trauma originates in their exclusion from the Earn- shaw family, specifically Catherine's rejection by her father and Heathcliff's rejection by Hindley, events spiritually presided over by Joseph. Constantly assured by Joseph that their alienation is deserved, that in the sight of "heaven" they are "nowts," the children have no appeal beyond the valuation put upon them by this religious spokesman of their society. All they possess, as a result, is their affinity for one another, which they cannot enjoy and develop but can only assert negatively in rebellion against that society. Neither Catherine's later attempt to make use of Edgar to help Heathcliff, nor Heathcliff's acquisition of money and status in order to be acceptable to Catherine, releases them, for they do not master their initial trauma, the conversion of their love into hate. Catherine significantly tells Nelly of having queer dreams, the one she describes being about her expulsion from Joseph's vindictive heaven and her joyful return to the moors (72). Her attempt to re- enter society through marriage to Edgar is, as she half recognizes, an attempt to evade the basic truth about herself, her being wedded to Heathcliff as a fellow outcast from that society. As the only human "self beyond self" that she knows, Heathcliff is inseparably connected in Catherine's mind with her beloved moors "out there" beyond society. A normal relationship with the mature Edgar might have been possible, we feel-for despite his want of spirit and energy Edgar is a healthy person-but for Catherine's prior

13 Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 3 (New York: Basic Books, 1957), 271.


neurotic relationship with Heathcliff, temporarily suppressed after her marriage but which acts as "gunpowder" (81) that sooner or later must explode the attempted relationship with Edgar.

Catherine and Heathcliff are unable to absorb and master their trauma because they have no mythology adequate to counter Jo- seph's repressive one. Their passionate and repeated assertions of having their happiness, their heaven, are rooted in their radical alienation. Their constant accusations of one another for betraying the love which is all they have reveal the dominant feature of that love, namely, that it has nothing to do with "pleasure" in the ordi- nary sense, as both of them testify. "You have killed me-and thriven on it," Catherine tells Heathcliff (132), and Heathcliff replies, "You loved me-then what right had you to leave me" (135). Their rejection causes them to retaliate by repeatedly using their love against others as well as against themselves: Catherine against her father and, later, Edgar; Heathcliff against Catherine's and his own children. We are thus brought back to Lockwood's dream in which the spiritual principle of forgiveness upon which community depends has been denied.

Precisely because their love has become antisocial and amoral, Catherine and Heathcliff seek finally to go back beyond the causa- tive trauma to their initial uncorrupted state. Their strange deaths make sense in this context. In willing her own death, Catherine hopes to recover the pretraumatic world she had had with Heath- cliff; Heathcliff, after eighteen years of fruitless exertion, turns away from a reality he cannot comprehend in order to have his heaven with Catherine in the grave. The "queer end" that Nelly recounts shows Heathcliff's desire for revenge, the negative expression of his energy, reverting to its original affirmative form, his attraction to Catherine. He sees the period following his separation from Catherine as a kind of nonexistence: "as to repenting of my injustices, I've done no injustice, and I repent of nothing" (262). As his lack of a proper surname suggests, he never achieves the social identity and psychic maturity prerequisite to exercising moral judgment. His first moment of tranquility, after eighteen years of enduring and causing suffering, comes just six months before his death as a result of a dream as "queer" as any of Catherine's. He tells Nelly: "I dreamt I was sleeping the last sleep, by that sleeper [Catherine], with my heart stopped, and my cheek frozen


against hers" (229). Like his feeling of being "devoured" and "swallowed" by a single wish (256), the imagery here is regressive. His neurotic emotion can find no satisfaction: "My soul's bliss kills my body, but does not satisfy itself" (262). Catherine, too, as she is dying, sees the years following her separation from Heathcliff as a kind of nonexistence. Even in the relatively happy years with Ed- gar, she is subject to unexplainable moods of depression. Her death marks her final regression to a world that existed before the shock of exclusion and separation, and her death mask is appropriately "angelic." By blotting out everything but her relationship with Heathcliff she hopes to establish herself as "incomparably above and beyond you all" (134), thus fantasizing the mastery and happiness she was unable to achieve in life.

Whereas the first generation undergoes the trauma and eventually succumbs to it, the second generation overcomes it and lives; in circumstances almost identical to those which disrupted the lives of Catherine and Heathcliff, Cathy and Hareton attain the wholeness of being for which Catherine and Heathcliff had yearned in vain. Their initial meeting at the Heights leads to a repetition of their elders' childhood visit to the Fairy Cave on the moors (162), and, as with the first generation, this promising beginning is again shattered by reality. The kicking of books is repeated, with Joseph's "malignant, crackling laugh" as an encouragement (201). The final threat occurs when Joseph's complaining causes Heathcliff to warn Cathy that her love will make Hareton "an outcast, and a beggar" (253), a repetition of Hindley's warning to Catherine. Joseph's ef- forts, however, are this time unavailing because Cathy masters the experience which destroyed her mother. How does she succeed?

As with religious thinkers before and after her, evil seemed to Emily Bronte somehow mysteriously necessary in order that good might exist and be known. Two statements from her prose essays are of great interest in this connection. The first states her view of nature: "All creation is equally insane.... Nature is an inexpli- cable puzzle, life exists on a principle of destruction; every creature must be the relentless instrument of death to the others, or himself cease to live."'4 The second statement expresses an equally grim

14 Five Essays Written in French by Emily Jane Bronte, trans. Lorine White Nagel, with introduction and notes by Fannie E. Ratchford (Austin, Texas: Univ. of Texas Press, 1948), p. 17.


view of man: "if hypocrisy, cruelty, and ingratitude are the charac- teristics exclusively of mean people, this class includes everyone.... " 15 What solution, we might well ask, is possible for someone holding such views on nature and man?

The sermon by a contemporary of Emily Bronte is suggestive. Speaking on the text "Love covereth a multitude of sins" in the year in which Wuthering Heights appeared, Kierkegaard wrote: "Through forgiveness love covers a multitude of sins."

Silence really takes nothing away from the multitude of notorious sins. The extenuating explanation takes away some from the multitude by showing that this or that was not really sin; forgiveness takes away that which still cannot be denied as being sin. So love strives in every way to hide the multitude of sins; but forgiveness is the most outstanding way.16

It is the ability to forgive, conspicuously absent from Catherine and Heathcliff's relationship, which Cathy and Hareton exhibit. The importance of this ability is suggested elsewvhere by Kierke- gaard when he explicitly contrasts the Christian concept of love, based on the law of forgiveness, with what he calls the "poet's" view of love, in a passage which suggests a clue to the difference between the loves of the two generations in Wuthering Heights.

Christianity knows a better answer to the question of what love is and about loving than does any poet. Precisely therefore it knows too that which escapes the attention of many poets, that the love they praise is secretly self-love, and that this explains its intoxicated expression about loving another man better than one's self. Earthly love is still not the eternal love; it is the beautiful fantasy of the infinite. . 17

Because earthly or selfish love swears by itself rather than by the eternal, Kierkegaard argues, it can easily be changed into its opposite: "Hate is a love which has become its opposite."'18 Here, I believe, we are at the very center of the movement in Wuthering Heights, a movement which presents, successively, the two opposite kinds of love and their respective fruits.

Charlotte Bronte observed in her preface to Wuthering Heights

15 Ibid., p. 9. 16 A Kierkegaard Anthology, ed. Robert Bretall (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ.

Press, 1947), p. 318. 17 Ibid., p. 286 18 Ibid., p. 298.


that the exercise of mercy occupied the central place in Emily's religious outlook: "She held that mercy and forgiveness are the divinest attributes of the Great Being who made both man and woman, and that what clothes the Godhead in glory, can disgrace no form of feeble humanity" (11). Lines from the last poem Emily Bronte is known to have written support Charlotte's statement:

I know that Justice holds in store Reprisals for those days of gore; Not for the blood but for the sin Of stifling mercy's voice within.19

"Not for the blood," not for the harmful things we do to others, but for the ultimate sin of "stifling mercy," and what we do as a consequence to ourselves by perverting humanity's "divinest attributes," is what Emily Bronte regarded as punishable, punishable not by man, however, but by Justice. Even if we should encounter someone monstrously vicious, Emily Bronte thought that we should "ishun but not malign" such a person.20 Nelly Dean voices the same view when responding to Isabella's expressed desire to repay Heath- cliff's cruelty with an "eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth." "Fie, fie, Miss!" Nelly exclaims: "One might suppose you had never opened a Bible in your life. If God afflict your enemies, surely that ought to suffice you. It is both mean and presumptuous to add your torture to his!" (148-49). Wuthering Heights itself judges no one; rather, it dramatizes with penetrating insight and objectivity the workings of the human psyche, asserting on the basis of a religious vision of the nature of love that if we can properly recognize our ills, and after recognizing them forgive them, then we are morally mature and healthy.

Wuthering Heights thus presents Emily Bront&'s intuition regarding the psychic need to return to, confront, and transcend the origins of a trauma in order to become humanly free and func- tional. Moreover, Cathy's and Hareton's attainment of wholeness is shown to have social consequences of the most important kind. At the end of the novel the Heights are abandoned to Joseph, who

19 7'he Complete Poems of Emily Jane Bronte, ed. C. W. Hatfield (New York: Columbia Univ. Press. 1941), p. 249.

20 Five Essays, p. 13.


has been exiled by events from the human community, while Cathy and Hareton remove to Thrushcross Grange to reestablish the community which had been temporarily disrupted. The tradition of the Earnshaws and the Lintons is to be restored on New Year's Day in a marriage that is the carrier of all that is healthy in the human race.

But the obverse of the law that the merciful shall obtain mercy is clear: "if you do not forgive, neither will your Father in heaven forgive you your offenses." Justice requires that those who shut up their capacity to forgive pay the price of exile, suffering, and lone- liness, the price paid by Catherine and Heathcliff, Hindley and Isabella, and-in a different and more profound way-by Lock- wood and Joseph. It is appropriate that the action of the novel, which is set in motion by Lockwood's dream presenting Joseph as guide in a society governed by the law of the "first of the seventy- first," should conclude with a glimpse of Lockwood slipping out through the back-kitchen of Wuthering Heights leaving "the sweet ring of a sovereign" at Joseph's feet by way of a bribe against his insinuations. For Joseph and Lockwood nothing has changed, but for the reader the double drama of Wuthering Heights has provided the powerful experience of living twice through the same potentially traumatic circumstances, once ending in tragedy, but the second time with the energy bound and channeled into human wholeness and health through the transforming power of a love that both understands and forgives.

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