CHARLES DICKENS

CHARLES DICKENS- A NOVELIST WITH A PURPOSE

OR

CHARLES DICKENS AND THE HUMANITARIAN NOVEL 

      A GREAT SOCIAL REFORMER. The novels of Dickens belong entirely to the humanitarian movement of the Victorian Age, of which they are indeed, in the sphere of fiction, by far the most important product and expression. He was from first to last a novelist with a purpose. In nearly all his books he set out to attack some specific abuse or abuses in the existing system of things, and throughout he adopted the role of a champion of the weak, the outcast and the oppressed. Humanitarianism was indeed the keynote of his work, and as his enormous popularity carried his influence far and wide, he may justly be regarded as one of the greatest social reformers of his age. 

      THE CHILD AS A VICTIM OF SOCIETY. One kind of character developed by Dickens was that of the victim of society-usually a child. The possibilities of childhood for romance or pathos had been suggested by Shakespeare, by Fielding, and by Blake; but none of these had brought children into the very centre of the action or had made them highly individual. In his second novel Dickens centered his story in a child, Oliver Twist, and from that time onwards children were expected and necessary characters in his novels. Little Nell, Florence Dombey, David Copperfield, stand out in divine innocence and goodness, in contrast to the evil creatures whose persecution they suffered for a time. And further, they represent in a most effective manner the compliant of the individual against society. For with Dickens the private cruelty which his evil-minded characters inflict is almost always connected with social wrong. 

      A WRITER OF HUMANITARIAN NOVEL. The name of Charles Dickens is pre-eminently associated with the humanitarian novel. After the publication of Nicholas Nicklebyand The Old Curiosity Shop, Dickens became a sort of professor* of humanitarianism, and he held this position for nearly thirty years. He turned the light of his knowledge upon a great variety of English scene and character, but especially upon work- houses, debtors’ prisons, pawnbrokers’ shops, hovels of the poor, law offices, dark streets, and dark alleys, the London haunts and hiding-places of vice, crime, and pain. His theme was always the downtrodden and the oppressed; he was their advocate; for them each of his novels after Pickwick Papers is a lawyer’s brief. He did not believe it’s possible for the lower and criminal classes to raise themselves by elective franchise to a higher moral and intellectual plane. To him parliament was dreariest place in the world; so he sought to arouse the conscience of the British public. He accordingly attended meetings of philanthropic societies, visited jails and prisons, holding long conversations with the keepers and went on addressing the ever-increasing audience of his novels. Through him spoke the heart and conscience of Britain which had found no responsive voice in Sir Walter Scott.  

     HIS AIM, TO ROUSE THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE. Pickwick Papers had been attempt at pure humour; it was a series of entertaining episodes loosely strung together.  In the novels that followed Pickwick Papers, Dickens took on the role of the crusader. His aim was to wring the conscience of society by playing upon its feelings and presenting scenes of wretchedness and misery that could be shown as the result of social indifference and callousness. 

    ATTACK ON ORGANIZED CHARITY.As a crusader for the oppressed sections of English society, Dickens first attacked the stony- heartedness of the organized charity. InOliver Twist ______________________________________________________________________________________*that is a propagandist or champion of humanitarian causes

(1838), he showed that the Poor Law Reform Act had only strengthened institutionalism by giving authority to unkindness. In Mr. Bumble all selfish dispensers of public charity stand condemned, and in Oliver Twist their helpless victims find and everlasting symbol. For Oliver to have become a national byword as the small boy who dared to ask for a second helping is a measure of the impact of his story on the well-fed and complacent reading public. 

    ATTACK ON PRIVATE SCHOOLS. Nickolas Nickleby (1839) exposed what was going on behind the doors of private schools. This novel revealed to the public the vulgar and brutal ignorance of a certain class of teachers in private academies. The establishment which represents such private schools in this novel is called Dotheboys’ Hall. After reading this book, parents began to feel ashamed of the schools where their children were being educated; scores of young scholars were taken away; many schoolmasters had to close down their teaching establishments. It is said that, as a result of the opinion this book exerted on the public, schoolboys’ backs were no longer caned, schoolboys’ meat became less tough and more plentiful, and their milk was no longer so diluted with water. 

    A SENSE OF DIS-ILLUSIONMENT WITH AMERICAN SOCIETY. A visit to America in 1842 resulted in a bitter disappointment for Dickens. He had expected too much. There in a free republican country he believed he would met with more natural goodness, equality, and justice than he had found at home. Instead he found disgusting manners, a crudity that repelled him, and a venality disillusionment. American scenes in it gave offence, but the book is memorable for its characters. Sarah Gamp, Tom Finch, Mark Tapley, and that prince of hypocrites, Pecksniff, make the novel a favourite with English readers. 

    ATTACK ON LAW’S DELAYS, LEGAL COSTS, ETC. Bleak House (1853) is a tragedy which was suggested by the legal proceedings arising from the estate of one William Jennings who had died in 1798, leaving property at Birmingham worth many millions. The case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce is a commentary, at once tragic and satirical, on the abuses of the old courts of Chancery, the delays and costs of which brought misery and ruin to the litigants. The novel tells the somber story of hearts worn to despair and minds driven to madness by the inscrutable injustice and the infinite delays of the law. From the physical fog that blots out the city of London, Dickens here passed to the dreadful nights of spiritual darkness that is at its thickest and most terrible in the working of a system of law that had lost touch with human needs. In addition to this theme, there is the shocking case of young Joe, symbolic of utter destitution leading to death by starvation. 

    ATTACK ON INDUSTRIAL EVILS.  In Hard Times(1854), Dickens attacks the industrial evils of his day. Coketown represents all industrial towns, while the Gradgrinds and the Bounderbys serve as the inhuman representatives of the system of enlightened self interest that had only theory to recommend it. 

    ATTACK ON THE CIVIL SERVICE. The target in Little Dorrit (1857) is the unreformed Civil Service with its nepotism and its injustice. Here the dice are loaded against

the circumlocution* offices and the human Barnacles who make the system work but whose selfishness and indifference destroy the soul in the society they serve.

______________________________________________________________________________

THE WUTHERING HEIGHTS 

In Defence of Heathcliff

 The centre and core of the novel.

The centre and core of Wuthering Heights is the story of Catherine and Heathcliff. It is a  story which is told in four stages. The first part, ending in the visit to Thrushcross Grange, tells of the establishing of a special relationship between Catherine and Heathcliff and of their common rebellion against Hindley and his regime in Wuthering Heights. The second part tells of Catherine’s betrayal of Heathcliff, culminating in her death. The third part deals with Heathcliff’s revenge; and the final section, shorter than the others, tells of the change that comes over Heathcliff and of his death. The relationship of Heathcliff and Catherine remains the dominant theme even in the last two sections (after Catherine has died), and it underlies everything else that happens.

 Sensual passion or romantic love.

It is difficult to define exactly the quality of feeling that binds Catherine and Heathcliff. It is not primarily a sexual relationship. The scene at Catherine’s death is proof enough that this is no Platonic passion; yet it would surely be quite inadequate to describe the relationship as sexual. When Catherine is about to marry Linton, she thus expresses her feelings about Heathcliff to Nelly:

 “My great miseries in this world have been Heathcliff’s miseries, and I watched and felt each from the beginning: my great thought in living is himself. If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty  stranger: I should not seem part of it. My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it. I’m well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff! He’s always, always in my mind, not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being.” (Page 103)

And Heatchliff cries when Chaterine is dying: “I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul! What is conveyed to us here is the sense of an affinity deeper than sexual attraction, something which it is not enough to describe as romantic love.

 An affinity taking its rise from rebellion.

The affinity between Catherine and Heathcliff takes its rise from rebellion. Heathcliff, the waif from the Liverpool slums, is heated kindly by old Mr. Earnshaw but insulted and degraded by Hindley. After his father’s death, Hindley reduces the boy to the status of a serf. “He drove him from their company to the servants, deprived him of the instructions of the curate, and insisted that he should labour out of doors instead; compelling him to do so as hard as any other hand on the farm.” The situation at Wuthering Heights is wonderfully evoked in the passage from Catherine’s journal, which Lockwood finds in his bedroom:

“An awful Sunday!” commenced the paragraph beneath. “I wish my father were back again. Hindley is a detestable substitute- his conduct to Heathcliff is atrocious. Heathcliff and I are going to rebel- we took our initiatory step this evening… We each sought a separate nook to await his advent.” (Page 50)

This passage evokes a world far larger than the scene it describes, and evokes it through the very force and concreteness of the particular scene. The rebellion of Catherine and Heathcliff is made completely concrete. They are not vague romantic dreamers. Their rebellion is against the regime in which Hindley and his wife sit comfortably by the fire while Catherine and Heathcliff are relegated to the arch of the dresser and compelled for the good of their souls to read the Broad Way to Destruction under the charge of the hypocritical Joseph.

  Their deep need of each other.

Against this degradation Catherine and Heathcliff revolt, throwing their pious books into the dog-kennel. And in their rebellion they discover their deep and passionate need of each other. Heathchiff, the outcast boy from the slums, turns to the lively, spirited, fearless Catherine who alone offers him human understanding and comradeship. And she, born into the world of Wuthering Heights, perceives that, in order to achieve a full humanity, in order to be true to herself as a human being, she must join Heathcliff totally in his rebellion against the tyranny of the Earnshaws and all that tyranny involves.

 Our sympathy for Heathcliff in the early part of the novel.

It is this rebellion which immediately in this early part of the novel, wins our sympathy for Heathcliff. We know that he is on the side of humanity, and we are with him. Heathcliff is active, intelligent, and able to carry the positive values of human aspirations on his shoulders. He is a conscious rebel. And it is from his association in rebellion with Catherine that the particular quality of their relationship arises. It is the reason why each feels that a betrayal of what binds them together would in some mysterious way be a betrayal of everything, a betrayal of all that is most valuable in life and death.

 Catherine’s marriage to Edgar, a betrayal of Heathcliff.

In spite of that, Cathrine betrays Heathcliff. She marries Edgar Linton wrongly believing that she can keep both men, and then discovering that in refusing Heathcliff she has chosen death. The conflict in Catherine’s case is evidently a social one. Thrushcross Grange embodies the more comfortable and more attractive side of middle- class life and this life tempts Catherine, with the result that she begins to despise Heathchiff’s lack of “culture”. Heathcliff is no good at conversation; he does not brush his hair; he is dirty. Edgar, on the contrary, is not only handsome but rich and he promises to make Catherine the greatest woman of the neighbourhood. And so Heathcliff runs away, and Catherine becomes the wife of Edgar Linton and the mistress of Thrushcross Grange.

  After Heathcliff’s return: a moral contempt for the Lintons.

Then Heathcliff returns as a prosperous man; and at once the social conflict is again brought into focus. Edgar would not like to receive Heathcliff on equal terms, but Catherine insists. From the moment of Heathcliff’s re-appearance, Catherine’s efforts to reconcile herself to Thrushcross Grange are doomed. In their relationship there is now no tenderness; they trample on each other’s nerves; they madly try to destroy each other: But, once Heathcliff is near, Catherine can have no illusions about the Lintons. Catherine and Heathcliff are now united only in their contempt for the values of Thrushcross Grange. Speaking of her grave, Catherine thus taunts Edgar: “There it is, not among the Lintons, mind, under the chapel roof, but in the open air, with a headstone.” The open air, Nature, and the moors are contrasted with the world of Thrushcross Grange. And the contempt of Catherine and Heathcliff for the Lintons is a moral contempt, not a contempt arising from jealousy. When Nelly tells Heathcliff that Catherine is going mad, Heathcliff makes the following comment:

“You talk of her mind being unsettled. How the devil could it be otherwise in her frightful isolation?And that insipid paltry creature attending her from duty and humanity! From pity and charity! He might as well plant an oak in a flower-pot, and expect it to thrive, as imagine he can restore her to vigour in the soil of his shallow cares!“(Page 165)

 Our reaction to Heathcliff’s censure of Edgar Linton.

The moral passion here is intense, and it sweeps us along with it. Heathcliff at this point has committed the first of his callous and ghastly acts of revenge, namely his marriage to Isabella. It is an act so morally repulsive that it would be almost impossible for us to take his attack on Edgar Linton seriously because Edgar has, after all, done no harm to anybody. And yet we do take the attack seriously because of the moral passion with which it has been made.

 The moral force behind Heathcliff’s denunciation of Edgar Linton.

We continue to sympathize with Heathcliff even after his marriage to Isabella because the author is able to convince us that what Heathcliff represents is morally superior to what the Lintons stand for. The feeling behind Heathcliff’s denunciation of Edgar is moral feeling. The words “duty”, “humanity”, “pity”, and “charity” in the above quoted speech have a tremendous force. On the surface it seems paradoxical that Heathcliff should speak of Catherine’s “frightful isolation” when she is in Thrushcross Grange, less isolated, more subject to care and society, than she could possibly have been with Heathcliff. But what Heathcliff is asserting with such strong emotional conviction is that what he stands for, the kind of life he had offered to Catherine is more natural, more social, and mote moral than the world of Thrushcross Grange. (The image of the oak in the above speech is significant as emphasizing the naturalness of his life.) Some people have criticized Heathcliff on the ground that he is unbelievable, or that he is a neurotic character, or that he is merely a revival of the Byronic Satan-hero. But these critics fail to appreciate his significance because they fail to recognize this moral force. And they fail to recognize the moral force because they are themselves, consciously or unconsciously, of the Linton party.

 Neither a reconciliation nor a triumph of true love.

The climax of this inversion by Heathcliff and Catherine of the common standards of middle-class morality comes at the death of Catherine. The stage is all set for a moment of conventional drama. But Emily Bronte rejects the conventional potentialities of the scene; and her rejection of them is a proof of her moral and artistic power. Emily Bronte does not either make Catherine reject Heathcliff or bring about a reconciliation between the two in order to show the triumph of true love. Heathcliff, confronted with the dying Catherine is ruthless, morally ruthless. Instead of easy comfort, he offers her a brutal analysis of what she had done: 

 - You teach me now how cruel you’ve been-cruel and false. Why did you despise me? Why did you betray your own heart, Cathy? I have not one word of comfort. You deserve this. You have killed yourself. Yes, you may kiss me, and cry; and wring out my kisses and tears: they’ll blight you—they’ll damn you. You loved me- then what right had you to leave me? What right -answer me- for the poor fancy you felt for Linton? Because misery and degradation, - and death, and nothing that God or Satan could inflict, would have parted us, you, of your own will, did it. I have not broken your heart- you have broken it; and in breaking it you have broken mine. So much the worse for me that I am strong. Do I want to - live? What kind of living will it be when you-oh, God! Would you like to live with your soul in the grave? (Pages 171-172)

It is one of the harshest passages in all literature, but it is also one of the most moving passages. The brutality here is not neurotic, or sadistic, or romantic. The Catherine-Heathcliff relationship stands for a humanity finer and morally more profound than the standards of the Lintons and the Earnshaws; and therefore this relatiohship had to undergo the kind of analysis and scrutiny to which Heathcliff in this speech subjects it. Anything less would have been inadequate and unworthy. Heathcliff knows that nothing can save Catherine - from death, and that one thing alone can give her peace: a full and absolutely honest understanding and acceptance of their relationship and its implications. There could be no hope of any comfort or any compromise. Any such weakness would have debased them both and rendered their lives and deaths a futile waste. Heathcliff and Catherine, who reject the Lintons’ chapel-roof and the consolations of Christianity, know also that their relationship is more important than death.

  Heathctiff’s rejection of all normal human feeling.

In the next section of the novel Heathcliff continues the revenge which be began with his marriage to Isabella. It is the most peculiar section of the novel, and the most difficult because the quality, of Heathcliff’s feeling here is of a kind which most of us cannot fully understand. He has rejected all normal and healthy human feelings.

  Our continued sympathy for Heathcliff despite his cruel acts.

Heathchff”s whole conduct shows him as a monster. What he does to Isabella, to Hareton, to Cathy, to his son, even to the wretched Hindley, is cruel and inhuman beyond normal thought. He seems to be trying to achieve new refinements of horror and new depths of degradation. And we tend to feel that the revenge, especially the marriage of the younger Catherine and Linton, has exceeded the limits. And yet somehow we continue to feel sympathetic towards Heathcliff. We do not, of course, admire or defend him, but we do give him our sympathy and we do in some mysterious way identify ourselves with him against the other characters. And the secret of this feeling in us lies in the sentence “It is a moral teething”. The secret also lies partly in the gradually clarifying pattern of the novel.

 The moral force behind Heathcliff’s acts of revenge.

Heathcliff’s revenge may imply a pathological condition of hatred, but it is not at bottom merely neurotic. This revenge has a moral force. What Heathcliff does is to use against his enemies with complete ruthlessness their own weapons, to turn on-them their own stardards, and to beat them at their own game. The weapons he uses against the Earnshaws and the Ljntons are their own weapons of money and arranged marriages. He acquires power over them by the - established methods of the ruling class, expropriation and property transactions. He buys out Hindley and reduces him to drunken impotency. He- marries Isabella, and then organizes the marriage of his son to - Catherine Linton, so that the entire property of the two families shall be controlled by himself. He systematically degrades Hareton Earnshaw to servility and illiteracy. “I want the triumph of seeing my descendant fairly lord of their estates! My child hiring their children to till their father’s lands for wages,” he says. And what particularly tickles Heathcliffs fancy is his achievement of the supreme ruling class triumph by making Hareton, the boy whom he degrades, feel deep attachment towards himself. Heathcliff retains our sympathy throughout this dreadful section of the novel because we instinctively recognize a rough moral justice in what he does to his oppressors and because we understand why he is inhuman. Of course, we do not approve of what he does, but we understand it; the deep and complex issues behind his actions are revealed to us. The very force which drove him to rebellion for a higher freedom have themselves entrapped him in their own values and determined the nature of his revenge.

 Not the end of the story.

If this novel were to end at this point, it would still be a great book, but then it would be a thoroughly sombre and depressing book.  Man would in that case be shown as caught up in the meshes of his own making. The limited but complacent world of Thrushcross Grange would then seem a tempting world as against the tragic horror of Heathcliff’s rebellion. The novel would in that case resolve itself into the false antithesis of Thrushcross Grange versus Wuthering Heights.

 The beginning of a change in Heathcliff.

At the moment of his horrible triumph, a change begins to came upon Heathcliff:

“It is a poor conclusion, is it not?” he observed, having brooded a while on the scene he had just witnessed: “an absurd termination to my violent exertions? I get levers and mattocks to demolish the two houses, and train myself to be capable of working like Hercules, and when everything is ready and in my power, I find that the will to lift a slate off either roof has vanished! My old enemies have not beaten me; now would be the precise time to revenge myself on their representatives: I could do it, and none could hinder me. But where is the use? I don’t care for striking; I can’t take the trouble to raise my hand! That sounds as if I had been labouring the whole time only to exhibit a fine trait of magnanimity. It is far from being the case: I have lost the faculty of enjoying

their destruction, and I am too idle to destroy for nothing. Nelly, there is a strange change approaching: I’m in its shadow at present.”(Page 308)

And he goes on to speak of the younger Catherine and Hareton, the latter a personification to him of his own youth. Hareton reminds him of his own immortal love, of his wild endeavor to hold his right, of his degradation, his pride, his happiness and his anguish. When Nelly asks what he means by the change which is approaching, Heathcliff can only answer that he will not know that till it comes because, he says, he is only half conscious of it at this time. Once more the stage is set for a conventional scene, the conversion of the wicked who will in the final chapter turn from his wickedness. But once more Emily Bronte disappoints those who want a conventional ending.

 Heathcliff’s realization of the hollowness of his triumph.

The change that comes over Heathcliff of the novel is a very subtle one. Heathcliff, watching the love of the younger Catherine and Hareton grow, comes to understand something of the failure, of his own revenge. As this Catherine teaches Hareton to write, and stops laughing at his ignorance, we are taken back to the first Catherine. However, Catherine and Hareton are not an easy recreation of Catherine and Heathcliff; they are different people, even lesser people, certainly people conceived on a less intense and passionate scale than the older lovers. But Catherine and Hareton do symbolize the continuity of life and human aspirations, and it is through them that Heathcliff comes to understand the hollowness of his own triumph. The full meaning of his own relationship with the first Catherine comes back to Heathcliff as Hareton comes to this Catherine’s aid when Heathcliff strikes her. It is at this moment that Heathcliff becomes aware that in the feeling between this Catherine and Hareton there is something of the same quality as existed between himself and the first Catherine. From the moment that this Catherine and Hareton are drawn together as rebels, the change begins, because now for the first time Heathcliff is confronted not with those who accept the values of Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange but with those who share, however, remotely, his own wild attempts to hold his right.

 No repentance, and no need of a priest.

Heathcliff does not express any repentance. Nelly tries to make him turn to the consolations of religion. She reminds him that since the age of thirteen he has never held the Bible in his hands and that he has lived a selfish, unchristian life. She suggests that he should send for a priest so that a change should take place in him before he dies. Heathcliff gives the following reply to Nelly’s suggestion:

 “I’m rather obliged than angry, Nelly”, he said, “for you remind me of the manner in which I desire to be buried. It is to be carried to the churchyard in the evening. You and Hareton may, if you please, accompany me: and mind, particularly, to notice that the sexton obeys my directions concerning the two coffins. No minister need come; nor need anything be said over me. I tell you I have nearly attained my heaven, and that of others is altogether unvalued and uncoveted by me.” (Page 317)

One sentence in this speech is more significant than the others. Heathcliff speaks of the manner in which he wishes to be buried. “It is to be carried to the churchyard in the evening.” This shows that the great rage has died in him. He has begun to see the pointlessness of his battle to revenge himself on the world of power and property through its own values. Just as Catherine had to face the full moral horror of her betrayal of their love, he too must face the full horror of his betrayal. And once he has faced that horror, he can die, not nobly or triumphantly, but at least as a man, leaving to the younger Catherine and Hareton the possibility of carrying on the struggle he had begun; and in his death he will achieve again human dignity, “to be carried to the churchyard in the evening”.

 A re-achievement of manhood by Heathcliff.

What gives to the last pages of this novel a sense of positive and unsentimental hope is this re-attainment of manhood by Heathcliff, an understanding reached with no help from the world he despises. This sense is strengthened by the developing relationship of the younger Catherine and Hareton, and the feeling of life reborn

in spring-time. The Catherine-Heathcliff relationship has been vindicated. Life will go on and others will rebel against the oppressors. Nothing has been solved but much has been experienced. Lies, complacencies, and errors have been revealed. A veil has been removed from the conventional face of the middle-class man who has been revealed, through Heathcliff, without his mask.

 The quality of the feeling which binds Cathy and Heathcliff.

Above all, the quality of the feeling which binds Catherine and Heathcliff has been conveyed to us. Their love, which Heathcliff can call immortal, is something beyond the individualist dream of, two soul-mates finding full realization in one another; it is an expression of the necessity of man, if he is to choose life rather than death, to revolt against all that would destroy his inmost needs and aspirations, of the necessity of all human beings to become more fully human. Catherine responding to this deep human necessity, rebels with Heathcliff, but in marrying Edgar she betrays her own humanity. Heathcliff, by revenging himself on the tyrants through the adoption of their own standards, makes, those standards more clear but he too betrays his humanity and destroys his relationship with the dead Catherine whose spirit must haunt the moors in terror and dismay. .

An assertion of life.

Only when the new change has came over Heathcliff, and he again recognizes through Hareton the full claims of humanity, can the dead Catherine be released from torment and, only then can the relationship between them be re-established. Death in this novel is a matter of little importance, because the issues with which this story is concerned are greater than the individual life and death. The death of Catherine and - Heathcliff are surely a kind of triumph because ultimately each faces death honestly, keeping faith. But there is no suggestion that death by itself is any kind of triumph. On the contrary, it is life that asserts itself, continues, and is renovated.

The Personality and Character of Catherine

The principal heroine.

Catherine is the heroine of the novel, or we might say the principal heroine because another heroine, also by the name of Catherine, emerges later in the novel after the first has died. Catherine is the principal heroine because she loves, and is loved by the most dominant character in the novel, Heathcliff. All Heathcliff’s actions are determined largely by the frustration of his love of Catherine or Cathy. The central concern of the novel Wuthering Heights is the Cathy-Heathcliff relationship. Theirs is an immortal love. Cathy loves Heathcliff with the same intensity and the same passion with which Heathcliff loves her, even though Cathy marries another man and tries her utmost to remain faithful to him.

 The wildness in her nature.

We meet Cathy early in the novel when she is still a small girl. There is something wild and untamable about her. This element in her nature is seen in the manner in which, at a slight provocation, she shakes the baby Hareton violently, rebukes Nelly, asking her to get out of the room, and then gives a blow to Edgar with whom otherwise she is very friendly. This aspect of her character is important and has been emphasized in the early chapters of the novel. Nelly, for instance, has this to tell us about Cathy as a girl:

“From the hour she came downstairs till the hour she went to bed, we had not a minute’s security that she wouldn’t be in mischief. Her spirits were always at high-water mark, her tongue always going- singing, laughing, and plaguing everybody who would not do the same. A wild, wicked slip she was- but she had the bonniest eye, the sweetest smile, and lightest foot in the parish.” (Page 68)

Some time later Nelly has this to say about Cathy:

“But she was so proud, it became really impossible to pity her distresses, till she should be chastened into more humility.” (Page 90)

When Cathy returns to the Heights after a brief stay at the Grange, Nelly has this to say about her:               “Our young lady returned to us, saucier and more passionate, and haughtier than ever.” (Page 109)

 In this connection what her father says to Cathy is also noteworthy. Her father, finding her too naughty, often scolds her. On one occasion he says to her:

“Nay, Cathy, I cannot love thee; thou art worse than thy brother. Go, say thy prayers, child, and ask God’s pardon. I doubt thy mother and I must rue that we ever reared thee.” (Page 69)

Her early attachment to Heatcliff.

This side of Cathy’s nature is important in so far as it explains the irresistible attraction which Heathcliff has for her. The affinity between the two can largely be explained by this wild, almost savage and untamable, element which they both share. Cathy takes a liking to Heathcliff as soon as Heathcliff was brought as a boy to Wuthering Heights. While all other inmates of the house hate the strange boy, only Cathy takes a fancy to him (just as her father had taken a fancy to him and had picked him up from a Liverpool slum). Heathcliff and she become playmates and often roam the moors together. Even after the death of Cathy’s father, when her brother Hindley becomes the master and treats Heathcliff as a slave and a drudge, Cathy does not stop playing with Heathcliff and roaming about with hirn whenever he can snatch any  time from his labours in the field. It is in his company that she strays so far as Thrushcross Grange where she is attacked by a dog and is slightly hurt. When, after a brief stay at the Grange, she returns home she looks a more dignified and elegant person than she was before and, on finding Heathcliff as dirty and ragged as ever, mocks at him.

  The nature of her love for Heathcliff.

When Edgar Linton has proposed marriage to Cathy, and she has accepted the proposal, Cathy tells Nelly about it, saying that as Edgar’s wife she will be “the greatest woman of the neighbourhood” and that she will be “proud of having such a husband”. She tells Nelly that she loves the ground under Edgar’s feet and the air over Edgar’s head and everything he touches and every word he speaks. “I love all his looks, and all his actions, and him entirely and altogether.” After making this statement of her love for Edgar, she goes on to talk about Heathcliff. She would have liked to marry Heathcliff but her brother has brought that fellow so low by his ill-treatment that now she finds it socially degrading to marry Heathcliff. It is these words on overhearing which Heathcliff feels so hurt and offended that he mysteriously disappears from Wuthering Heights. Cathy, not being in the least aware that Heathcliff was listening or that he has now left the spot from where be overheard those words, goes on to tell Nelly of the difference between the love she feels for Edgar and the love she feels for Heathcliff. In a speech that is often quoted, Cathy describes to Nelly the great difference between the two kinds of love which she cherishes in her heart. Her love for Edgar, she says, is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it, as winter changes the trees. Her love for Heathcliff, she says, resembles the eternal rocks: a source of little visible delight, but necessary.

And then she adds:

 ”Ne1ly, I am Heathcliff! He’s always, always in my mind.” These words represent a complete identification of Cathy with Heathcliff.

A little before that she has said to Nelly:

“My great miseries in this world have been Heathcliff’s miseries…

My great thought in living is himself. If all else perished  and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger. “(Page 103)

Her feeling of elation, at Heathcliff’s return.

Cathy is filled with dismay and grief at the disappearance of Heathcliff. In course of time, she gets married to Edgar, and then Heathcliff returns after an absence of three years. Cathy’s jubilation and joy at Heathcliff’s return are indescribable.Putting her arms round her husband’s neck; she says: “Oh, Edgar, Edgar! Oh, Edgar darling! Heathcliff’s come back.” And she tightens her embrace to a squeeze.. When, however, Edgar refuses to receive Heathcliff on equal social terms, she is disappointed and she orders Nelly to set two tables so that she may join Heathcliff for dinner at one table and her husband and his sister Isabella may sit at the other, the superior, table. She does not in the least try to hide her feelings of exultation and elation in the company of Heathcliff, and feels not in the least embarrassed. She scolds Heathcliff for having been absent for such a long time and not having informed her where he was.

Cathy, a divided personality, in love with two men.

Cathy now has the feeling that her happiness is complete. She has a husband whom she loves and she has got back the friend whom she loves also. She tells Nelly that the return of Heathcliff has reconciled her to God and humanity. She had risen in angry rebellion against Providence and she had endured very, very bitter misery. But now she is at peace. These words show that internally she has been experiencing the torment of her separation from Heathcliff even though she has been reasonably happy as Edgar’s wife. Shall we say that it is a case of a split personality, and that, with one part of her nature: Cathy loves Edgar, and with the other part she loves Heathcliff? Does it mean that she can be truly happy only with Edgar as her husband and Heathcliff as a friend-cum-lover? She does not, of course, state the case in this specific manner, but everything points to this division in her personality. 

 Cathy’s understanding of Heathcliff’s real nature.

Cathy is well aware of the inhuman or monstrous element in Heathcliff’s nature. That is why she tries to discourage Isabella who has fallen over head and ears in love with Heathcliff. Her analysis of Heathciff’s temperament shows that she has understood him thoroughly. To Isabella, she describes Heathcliff as an unreclaimed creature, without refinement, without cultivation, a fierce, pitiless, wolfish man. Cathy is not being hypocritical here. It is not just that she wants to have Heathcliff’ exclusively to herself; it is that she is really concerned about Isabella’s welfare and happiness and she knows that Isabella is not the sort of person who can be happy with a husband like Heathcliff.

 Her 1ife impossible without Heathcliff as a lover.

The excitement of her angry scene with Heathcliff (after he has been seen kissing Isabella) and the angry scene between Heathclff and Edgar proves too much for Cathy and she falls seriously ill. She says to Nelly: “Well, if I cannot keep Heathcliff for my friend if Edgar will be mean and jealous, I’ll try to break their hearts by breaking my own. That will be a prompt way of finishing all, when I am pushed to extremity” (Page 134). In other words she wants Edgar to tolerate Heathcliff as her friend. What she wants is an arrangement which is best described by the phrase menage a trois1 but this is something abhorrent to the refined Edgar. Nelly tells us that, as a consequence of her disappointment with Edgar, Cathy lay dashing her head against the arm of the sofa, and grinding her teeth. Soon she becomes delirious and, when she comes back to her senses, she speaks tauntingly to Edgar. “I don’t want you, Edgar: I’am past wanting you. Return to your books, l am glad you possess a consolation, for all you had in me is gone,” she says to him in utter desolation. It is obvious that, without Heathcliff, she finds her life barren and meaningless.

 Frustration in love, the real cause of her death.

A couple of months later, when Heathcliff pays her a secret visit, there is a passionate scene between Cathy and Heathcliff. She tells him that he has killed her, while he retorts that she has killed herself by having deserted him and having married Edgar. The two are now locked in each other’s embrace, and Cathy’s condition is critical. This scene proves, if any further proof were wanted, that the love between these two is deep, intense, profound,

and deathless. Cathy dies that very night, giving birth to her child. But she has died a martyr to her love for Heathcliff. It is the frustration of her love for him that kills her.

 Is she a tragic heroine?

We have called Cathy the principal heroine in the novel, and so she is. Her ending is sad and we feel sorry for her. But it would be wrong to call her a tragic heroine in the literary sense. A tragic hero or heroine is a person with a noble, exalted nature, coming to a sad end on account of a flaw in his or her moral nature. Now, there is no doubt that Cathy is otherwise high-minded and that she wins our admiration in a general sense. But the flaw in her nature amounts to a serious moral fault. She marries one man and wants another man as her lover. Psychologically, this position is perfectly understandable to us, and we can sympathize with her. But morally this position is not only unacceptable to us but abhorrent and disgusting. Only a very degraded husband would tolerate such a position; nor can we, with all our advanced ideas about love, defend or justify this position. Cathy’s end is pathetic, but not “tragic”, because tragedy has an uplifting and elevating effect which Cathy’s death does not produce.

 And yet it must here be pointed out that some critics do regard her as a tragic heroine because they think her passion for Heathcliff to be something spiritual and therefore something exalted. In a way these critics are right because they would not like to apply narrow moral standards to this passion. Besides, only if Cathy is looked at as a tragic heroine can we describe Heathcliff as a hero or a hero-villain. If we condemn his and her passion

entirely, then Heathcliff is reduced to the position of a villain totally unredeemed.  

The Character of Edgar Linton

Initial impression not quite favourable.

We meet Edgar Linton when be is still a boy living with his parents and sister Isabella at Thrushcross Grange. We find him standing on the hearth weeping silently, because his sister would not allow him to fondle a young dog of which both of them are very fond. The behaviour of brother and sister (Edgar and Isabella) is very amusing to Cathy and Heathcliff who are watching them from outside through the glass-pane. Thus at this time we do not form a very favourable impression of either the brother or the sister.

  His intimacy with Cathy; and the contrast between him and Heathcliff.

In the course of time, Edgar becomes quite intimate with Cathy. Edgar and his sister now often visit Wuthering Heights to meet Cathy. But they have no liking for Heathcliff. One day when Edgar says something offensive to Heathcliff, Heathcliff throws a plate of hot apple-sauce in his face. Edgar begins to sob at this insult, but Catherine tries to soothe him, saying: “Well, don’t cry. You’re not killed. Don’t make more mischief; my brother is coming; be quiet.” On another occasion, Cathy herself gives a slap to Edgar whereupon he gets ready to leave for the Grange. Cathy, however, tells him not to leave her because she would feel miserable and would cry herself sick. Edgar thereupon becomes reconciled to Cathy and, in fact, the two confess themselves lovers. Nelly thus describes the contrast between young Edgar and young Heathcliff:

 “The contrast resembled what you see in exchanging a bleak, hilly, coal country for a beautiful fertile valley ; and his voice and greeting were as opposite as his aspect. He (Edgar) had a sweet, low manner of speaking.” (Page 92)

Cathy’s love for him.

Later, Edgar proposes marriage to Cathy, and Cathy accepts his proposal, believing that, as Edgar’s wife, she will become “the greatest woman of the neighborhood” and will feel proud of having such a husband. There is no doubt at all that Cathy loves Edgar. She herself tells Nelly that she loves the ground under Edgar’s feet and the air over his head, and everything he touches, and every word be speaks. But at the same time she is in love

with Heathcliff and her love for that man is deeper. She herself draws a distinction between her love for Edgar and her love for Heathcliff by saying that her love for the former is like the foliage in the woods which will change with time, but that her love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks.

 Edgar’s great regard for Cathy.

In any case, Edgar and Cathy get married, and Edgar shows himself to be a loving and devoted husband. In fact Edgar is constantly afraid lest he should in some way offend Cathy or hurt her feelings. As Nelly tells us, Edgar had “a deep-rooted fear of ruffling Cathy’s humour”. If ever he hears any servant answering Cathy in a sharp tone, Edgar would show his displeasure by a frown.

His quarrel with Heathcliff, a result of his self-respect.

 However, Edgar’s happiness as a husband is short-lived. Soon after his marriage, Heathcliff re-appears on the scene. While Cathy goes into raptures at the sudden return of Heathcliff, Edgar naturally cannot share her enthusiasm. In fact, he refuses to receive Heathcliff on terms of equality. This attitude of Edgar’s certainly offends Cathy, but Edgar is fully justified in feeling resentful of Heathcliff’s visits to his house to see his wife. No self-respecting husband will tolerate a situation of this kind. On one occasion, Edgar bluntly tells Heathcliff to stop visiting his house. This is what he says to Heathcliff:

 “I have been so far forbearing with you, sir, not that I was ignorant of your miserable, degraded character, but I felt you were only partly responsible for that; and Catherine wishing to keep up your acquaintance I acquiesced foolishly. Your presence is a moral poison that would contaminate the most virtuous. For that cause, and to prevent worse consequences, I shall deny you hereafter admission into this house, and give notice now that I require your instant departure. Three minutes delay will render it

involuntary and ignominious.” (Page 132) 

Cathy deeply offended with Edgar; Edgar alarmed.

As Heathcliff also uses insulting language to Edgar on this occasion, Edgar feels compeled to give him a blow. Edgar is certainly no coward although he definitely tries to avoid a physical fight with Heathcliff. After giving him the blow, Edgar immediately leaves the room lest the situation should take a more unpleasant form. This action by Edgar offends Cathy who wanted to continue her friendship with Heathcliff and wanted that Heathcliff should continue visiting her. Edgar tries to make Cathy conscious of the extreme undesirability of her continuing to associate with a man like Heathcliff. He asks her in a categorical manner: ‘Will you give up Heathcliff hereafter, or will you give me up? It is impossible for you to be my friend and his at the same time and I absolutely require to know which you choose.” As Cathy now loses her temper completely and begins to ‘dash her head against the arm of die sofa, Edgar feels alarmed. He asks Nelly to bring some water for Cathy, but Cathy would not drink any water. Edgar sprinkles some water on her face, but she pays no heed to him. Thereupon Edgar looks terrified. However, Nelly tries to set his fears at rest. Edgar, shuddering, says that there is blood on Cathy’s lips. Nelly urges him not to bother. It must be admitted that Edgar feels unnerved by Cathy’s plight.

  Edgar, insulted by his wife.

Subsequently, when Edgar comes to know about Cathy’s serious condition, he scolds Nelly for not having kept him informed about Cathy’s deteriorating condition. He tries to speak to Cathy, but Cathy replies to him in an insulting manner. Edgar then asks her: “Catherine, what have you done? Am I nothing to you any more? Do you love that wretch Heathcliff?” But Cathy insults him still further by saying that she does not want him any more.

 Edgar’s attitude to his sister.

As Edgar has always hated Heathcliff, be could never have agreed to his sister Isabella’s marriage to that man. Therefore when he learns that Isabella has eloped with Heathcliff, be accepts the position in a stoical manner and simply says:

“She went of her own accord. She had a right to go if she pleased. Trouble me no more about her. Hereafter she is only my sister in name, not because I disown her, but because she has disowned me.” (Page 148)

 Thereafter Edgar, as a self-respecting man, breaks off all connection with Isabella, and gets reconciled to her only after she has abandoned her husband and gone away to live at another place.

Edgar’s genuine devotion to Cathy.

During Cathy’s illness, when she has developed a brain fever, Edgar looks after her with great devotion. Nelly says:

“No mother could have nursed an only child more devotedly than Edgar tended her. Day and night he was watching, and patiently enduring all the annoyances that irritable nerves and shaken reason could inflict. Be knew no limits in gratitude and joy when Catherine’s life was declared out of danger; and hour after hour be would sit beside her tracing the gradual return to bodily health.” (Page 149)

There is no doubt at all about Edgar’s sincere and deep love for Cathy in spite of the fact that he knows that she is in love with Heathcliff. Nelly tries to discourage Heathcliff from visiting Cathy in future, pointing out to him that Edgar has been able to restore her to health by his “sense of duty” and by his “humanity”. But Heathcliff thinks that Edgar’s love for Cathy is nothing as compared to his own love for her. In fact, Heathcliff speaks contemptuously of Edgar’s love. This is what he says:

 “If he (Edgar) loved with all the powers of his puny being, he couldn’t love as much in eighty years as I could in a day. He is scarcely a degree dearer to her than her dog, or her horse. It is not in him to be loved like me: how can she love in him what he has not? (Page 161)

There is exaggeration in what Heathcliff here says, and his manner of saying it is rhetorical. Isabella contradicts Heathcliff by saying:

“Catherine and Edgar are as fond of each other as any two people can be. No one has a right to talk in that manner and I won’t bear my brother depreciated in silence.”

However, it must be admitted that there is certainly a difference between Edgar’s love for Cathy and Heathcliff’s. Edgar’s love, while sincere and deep, is of the normal kind, while Heathcliff’s love, though equally sincere, is of the tempestuous and vehement kind. Besides, Heathcliff’s love for Cathy acquires a greater magnitude and grandeur because Cathy responds to his love in equal measure, while her love for Edgar is more or less a love based on a wife’s sense of duty towards her husband. If any further proof of the sincerity and depth of Edgar’s love for Cathy were needed, it is provided by the life of seclusion which he begins to lead after Cathy’s death. Life has no longer any meaning for Edgar when Cathy is no more in this world. His grief transforms him into a complete hermit. He gives up his office of a magistrate, stops attending even the church, avoids going to the village, and spends an almost solitary life, his only consolation now being his daughter Catherine who had lost her mother at the very time of her birth.

Edgar’s continued hatred for Heathcliff.

Years pass. Catherine has now grown up into a teenaged girl. Isabella having died, leaving behind her teenaged son, Linton, it becomes Edgar’s duty to bring the boy to his own home in order to bring him up. However, Heathcliff obtain custody of the boy (who is his son by Isabella) without delay, thus depriving Catherine of a suitable playmate and depriving Edgar of the opportunity to bring up the child along sound lines. When, after her first meeting with Heathcliff, Catherine asks her father why he had quarreled with that man, Edgar makes the following statement about him:

 “No, it was not because I disliked Mr. Heathcliff, but because Mr. Heathcliff dislikes me; and is a most diabolical man, delighting to wrong and ruin those be hates if they give him the slightest opportunity.” (Page 223)

Edgar tries to give, as briefly as possible, an account to Catherine of how Heathcliff had ill-treated Isabella and how he had become the master of Wuthering Heights. Nelly at this time says that Edgar still felt the same horror and detestation of his ancient enemy that had occupied his heart ever since Cathy’s death. In fact, Edgar thinks that, but for Heathcliff, Cathy might still have been alive. In Edgar’s eyes, therefore, Heathcliff is a murderer. He then forbids the younger Catherine to go to Wuthering Heights where such a wicked man as Heathcliff lives.

  His attitude to Linton.

Edgar would not mind his daughter getting married to Linton who is, after all, his sister’s son and for whom he feels a natural affection. However, he cannot tolerate the idea of Catherine’s going to meet Linton at Wuthering Heights. He gives Nelly Strict instructions on this point. When Catherine finds herself a prisoner at Wuthering Heights, Edgar is very ill and is almost on his death-bed. Catherine, after having been forced to marry Linton at Wuthering Heights, manages to escape from there and is able to reach her father’s home a little before his death. Father and daughter look at each other with deep affection: “Catherine’s despair was as silent as her father’s joy.” He dies blissfully because he has been able to see his daughter before dying.

 The view of a critic.

Here is a comment by a critic2 on the character of Edgar Linton: “Alone of all the characters in Wuthering Heights, Edgar knows how to conduct himself. His traditions of behaviour are not parochial. His sense of goodness not merely superstititous. He stands for the social and domestic side of man, for the principle of co-operation. Neither is his goodness of a coldly rational order. His morality is not utilitarian. To his capricious and temperamental wife, he is affectionate, attentive, and forgiving. To his daughter, he is devoted; undertaking her education; friendly, and yet thoughtful for her present welfare and her future safety. As his actions and his words come to us through Nelly Dean, we are given the house-keeper’s comments upon - them, and they are always approving and respectful. But all the time, we have the impression of Emily Bronte continually playing him down. We feel that she (Emily Bronte) dislikes what she had to create; but through this inability of hers to overcome her prejudice, she fails to provide a strong enough foil for the over-boosted Heathcliff. This failure sufficiently to animate the character of Edgar means that there is only one other important male figure properly realized. That figure is Hareton; but his whole role is subsidiary.” The same critic also says: “Only in Edgar Linton has Emily Bronte attempted to draw a character consciously aware of virtue, and all she has succeeded in

making of him is a formal type whom she despises”.   

     The Personal and the Social

     Themes in “Wuthering Heights”   

     The Personal theme in the novel. To understand the true inspiration of Wuthering Heights we need to set aside the romantic machinery of passion and revenge and to consider more closely what are in fact the two central themes of the book. These themes, which may be described as the novel's “personal” and “social” aspects respectively, are closely related to each other. The first, the “personal” theme, by which the whole story is illuminated, concerns the love of Catherine Earnshaw for Heathcliff, and of Heathcliff for her. The relationship, between these two is based, no doubt, on the familiar, romantic conception of irresistible passion. Like so many pairs of romantic lovers, Catherine and Heathcliff are dedicated to each other. Each of them feels his or her passion as the consuming reality of existence. What is undoubtedly personal in their relationship is the, peculiar, almost religious intensity with which it is expressed and which perhaps finds its most significant manifestation in Catherine's attempt to explain her feelings to Nelly:

“I cannot express it; but surely you and everybody have a notion that there is or should be an existance of yours beyond you. What were the use of my creation, if I were entirely contained here? My great miseries in this world have been Heathcliff’s miseries..... My love for Linton is like the foliage in the, woods: time will change it. I am well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff. He's always, always in my mind......so don't talk of our

separation again.” (Page l03)  

     A true and genuine emotion. The directness and intensity of feeling which characterize this passage are evident. The spirit which animates this speech is one of concentration from which considerations of sentiment or pleasure have been relentlessly excluded. The phrasing of Catherine's speech focuses the whole weight of feeling upon a relationship almost entirely stripped of the accidents of personality. The whole speech leads up to the simple and the comprehensive affirmation: “I am Heathcliff”, which is clearly the statement of a necessity based upon the true being, the essential nature of the speaker, rather than upon any transitory impulse of desire. There is in this speech a true and genuine emotion whose remoteness from the mere contingencies of romantic passion is reflected in the extraordinary keenness and power of the expression. The statement of passion is here presented in all its bareness, and expressed with a sharp clarity that is its own guarantee of truth. The speaker of these words is concerned with essentials in a way that admits of no distraction or irrelevance.

     The religious quality of Catherine's passion. We could even say that there is about Catherine's passion a quality which can properly be called “religious”. Romantic sentimentality is always self-centred, while her attitude to Heathcliff is based upon a  recognition that the individual is not sufficient to himself, that the individual's experience hungers for completion through an animating contact with another individual who only can satisfy an essentially spiritual craving.

     The contrast between two types of feeling. The spirit in which this novel was  conceived, though absolutely distinct from that of Christian mysticism can nonetheless only be interpreted as a thirst for religious experience. From a profound sense of the finite and dependent nature of man there arises the desire to make contact with a reality which is beyond the self and by which the self may be completed. In the light of this desire the world of mere external presentation appears empty. If we accept the religious nature of the emotion expressed in the above-quoted speech of Catherine, we shall not be surprised to find that its consequences extend to the moral order. Her love for Heathcliff explicitly transcends all that is petty, vulgar, or sentimental. The contrast between Catherine's feelings for Heathcliff and her attitude to Edgar Linton is highly important in this respect. The figure of Edgar Linton may be held, in a certain sense, to symbolize the superficial graces of civilized life, in which Heathcliff is totally lacking. It is perfectly natural that Catherine should feel herself attracted to Edgar. Courtesy, charm and urbanity are all qualities worthy of admiration, and it is on account of these that she is at a certain level of her nature, impeiled to respond to Edgar's affection. But, as she herself recognizes, it is not the deepest part of her nature which is thus involved: “My love for Edgar is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it, I'm well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath a source of little visible delight, but necessary.” The conflict between two types of feeling is here stated with a simplicity which emphasizes the absence of all purely transitory or sentimental considerations. We have here the striking contrast between what is agreeable and what is necessary, a contrast between emotions which serve at best to adorn life and emotions whose absence would mean spiritual death. In this contrast lies the peculiar inspiration behind this novel.

     Common sense versus affinity. The reaction to this contrast has always differed greatly from one reader of this novel to another. There is no doubt that, behind such passionate utterances as this by Cathy, there lies a moral problem of the utmost seriousness. We feel the presence of this problem more clearly when we follow, through the eyes of Nelly Dean, the process of reasoning by which Cathy, is urged to give up Heathcliff.  Reflection, aided by Nelly, presents Heathcliff  to Cathy in the light common sense as what he undeniable: a brutal creature whom she could certainly abandon to marry the young rich, and attractive Edgar Linton. Nelly, guided by her inherent good nature and by her long experience of life, maintains that Edgar is a good match for Cathy, that he is socially speaking acceptable and likely to bring Cathy to normal domestic happiness, whereas (Nelly implies), Cathy’s devotion to Heathcliff can only end in disaster and degradation. All this is surely true but the impressive simplicity of Cathy's' reply is in itself sufficient evidence that it is not the whole truth. By Cathy’s reply the whole issue is raised from the practical to the spiritual plane. “Heathcliff is more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same; and Edgar's is as different as a moonbeam from

lightning, or frost from fire”, says Cathy. In the face of this assertion of necessary affinity, the arguments of common sense  becomesirrelevant.

     The forceful portrayal of fundamental human passions. Cathy's statement, indeed, is the expression of a deep and genuine spiritual concentration. The emphasis here is upon souls and their elemental substance, upon affinities rather than upon the pleasing accidents of personality. It is from this emphasis that the moral problem of the novel arises. For many readers the strange intensity of Cathy's statement will be disagreeable, and in that case they will not feel attracted by this novel. Such an instinctive repulsion would be no more than a straightforward reaction against the bare intensity of feeling which is presented here in  dissociation from normal social conventions. We must here recognize that, there is in the inspiration behind this novel nothing that we can call properly Christian. The, book as it stands, might equally have been written if Christianity had never existed, but the peculiar religious impulse behind it is not without its moral consequences. The force with which the contrast between the agreeable and thenecessary is presented challenges a moral judgment. If Cathy brushes aside the accidental pleasures and even the normal social intimacies of life, it is because she is taken up in a consuming experience that leaves no place for them. That this attitude is open to criticism of a certain kind may be agreed. Concentration rather than maturity is the distinctive quality of this novel. Emily Bronte shows a certain remoteness from the world of contemporary culture and social activity. Hardly anywhere else in the nineteen century are the fundamental human passions portrayed in such a simple and bare manner. Many of the great English novelists of the time – Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot - show moral preoccupations and social interests more explicit than those revealed in Wuthering Heights. No doubt the range of these other writers is wider, and their points of contact with the human scene are more extensive; but it is doubtful whether in any of them the sense of a dominating creative impulse is as sustained as in Emily Bronte or whether they reveal an attempt equally consistent to interpret life in terms of something so close to a religious experience.

     The second theme: the contrast between two houses. In the light of this central passion, it becomes easier to understand the second main theme of this novel, which is the contrast between the two houses - Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange. Wuthering  Heights clearly reflects the character of Heathcliff who owns it. We might, indeed, regard Heathcliff as the human incarnation of this house. Severe, gloomy, and brutal in its atmosphere, there is no place in it for what is strictly necessary. It is firmly rooted in local tradition and in local costume no doubt; but it lacks the civilized adornments of existence and is a suitable background for life of bare and primitive passion which is characteristic of Heathcliff. Thrushcros, Grange which is home of the Lintons, differs completely from Wuthering Heights in every respect. It reflects a conception of life which appears at first sight altogether more agreeable, but which shows clear signs of decadence. Thrushcross Grange also reflects the character of its owners. Judged from a superficial point of view, adopted  by Nelly Dean the Lintons seem to possess refinement, kindness and amiability; but a closer view shows that this is by no meals the whole truth. Beneath the surface of refinement there exist moral flaws which play a most important part in the development of the story.

     The decadence of the style of life of the Lintons. In the beginning of the novel the Lintons and their house are seen from the outside, from the standpoint of external and critical observers. These observers are the young children, Heathcliff and Cathy whose first sight of this strange new world is such as to produce an impression of contemptuous hostility which will always remain with them. They observe that the Linton children (Edgar and Isabella), far from feeling themselves happy in their beautiful and luxurious home, are in fact fighting bitterly over a lap-dog which each of them desires to handle and fondle. The contempt which Heathcliff expresses for the situation is the contempt felt why a primitive soul in whom the fundamental passions are still intensely alive and associated with an equally genuine and primitive moral seriousness because a way of life which claims to be superior is in reality trivial, selfish and empty. Throughout the novel Emily Bronte seems to relate the main theme (which is a spiritua1 conflict) to the presentation of a social contrast. The author deliberately produces an impression of excessive sweetness and decay by means of her emphasis upon the soft and clinging luxury in which the Lintons live protected by dogs and humble servants from the intrusion of the children of the inferior world outside. The sight of so much luxury certainly strikes the two children, Heathcliff and Cathy, from outside as beautiful; but it also rouses in them a feeling of rejection which is only intensified by the behaviour of the inmates.  The gold, the crimson carpets, the chair-coverings, and other adornments, seen through the  eyes of the children outside, point to highly significant contrast. This contrast is an essential part of the main story.

     Selfishness, meanness and cruelty beneath the refinement of the Lintons. When Cathy, now a grown woman, brings to her husband, Edgar Linton, the news of the return of Heathcliff and asks if she may bring him into the parlour, he looks annoyed and says that the kitchen would be a more suitable place for the visitor. To this, Cathy,

responding to her deeper nature, replies by directing Nelly to bring two tables, “one for your matter and Miss. Isabella, being gentry; the other for Heathcliff and myself, being of the lower orders (Chapter 10). In other words the Lintons believe in social distinction which in the eyes of Cathy (and also of the author) are irrelevant. There are a number of other hints in the story to re-inforce this unfavourable impression of the Lintons. Cathy uses such words as “pettish”, “silly”, “whining”, and “envious” for Edgar Linton; and the author is at some pains to relate the these words to the life of pampered luxury which the Lintons are leading. As we come to know the Lintons better, we find beneath their sickly and essentially un formed character a certain refinement, but we also find in them selfishness, meanness, and even cruelty. And it is partly his reaction against the debased civilization represented by the Linton world that induces Heathcliff to adopt a destructive course.

     A clash of ideals within Catherine. It is, however, not enough to see this novel as a contrast between civilized decadence and primitive vitality. There is much more to be taken note of. While Cathy's love of Heathcliff is certainly of consuming importance to her it is also true that there is beneath that love a genuine conflict. The more superficial part of her character is sufficiently attracted by the agreeable aspect of the life of the Lintons for her to marry Edgar and to become part of his family. Indeed, Cathy herself never fails to give the name of love to her feeling for Edgar Linton. Yet this love satisfies only, the more superficial part of her nature. All that is permanent in her character and her emotions is not satisfied with Edgar but impels her to return to Heathcliff. Through the whole of her story we are faced with the contrast between the changing “foliage” and the “eternal rocks”. Yet the foliage represents also a reality which cannot be ignored. For this novel represents a genuine clash of ideals; and it is the clash that gives to the novel its character and its greatness.

     Another manifestation of the clash. This clash can also be seen in one or the most surprising and beautiful passages of the book. In this passage the younger Catherine and the sickly Linton (son of Heathcliff and Isabella) are represented as expressing two different reactions to the beauty of Nature. The younger Catherine is greatly attracted by all that is vital and dynamic in Nature; while young Linton is attracted by the dreamy and tranquil aspects of Nature. For young Linton, life is peace and calm passivity; for the younger Catherine, life consists in active identification with the surrounding world. Yet the fact that the younger Catherine’s emotion is so powerful as to sweep aside the passivity of Linton cannot alter our realization that both emotions formed a part of Emily Bronte's intuition of life. Thus the younger Catherine's identification with the forces of Nature tends as its end towards a peace and tranquillity which, if not that of young Linton, is nevertheless implied in the, type of emotion which inspired this novel. That Emily Bronte herself felt both, emotions and that her own creative impulse depended upon the balance and the continual tension set up between those two emotions is sufficiently clear from this particular passage and from others, in the book. The impulse to unite these two necessities of her nature was another source of the inspiration for this novel.

     The characters in this novel, and the defect in the narrative technique. All this goes to show that this extraordinary novel is essentially religious, though not Christian in character. We may compare it to a work of pagan inspiration, whose characters are seen not as persons but as great figures simplified and dominated by a single passion. The novel as an artistic form is, above all, concerned with the analysis of character through the unfolding of events, but the persons who dominate Wuthering Heights are too simple, too elemental, to lend themselves to an analysis of this kind. Each of the characters here is in reality a passion purged of all accidental qualities, and not a person. For this reason they are all too simply conceived to play their part with complete conviction in a novel the spirit of which approaches rather the severe simplicity of the pagan tragedies of ancient Greece. It is no accident that the construction of the novel all it stands is not altogether satisfactory. The story is narrated indirectly by Lockwood who in his turn repeats what he has heard from Nelly Dean. These devices produce a general effect of complicated confusion which makes itself felt whenever the intense creative impulse, instead of burning clearly, smoulders or dies down. It is at such moments that we feel the defects, which we associate with the novel, the lack of true development which we sometimes feel in its characters and the note of romantic sensationalism which is present in it though foreign to its inspiration. Perhaps these deficiencies would not have arisen if Emily Bronte had been, able to give her conception a form corresponding more closely to that of a dramatic poem; but the writing of novels was the ruling vogue in her time and so she had to adopt the novel-form.

     The Two Principal Relationships in

     “Wuthering Heights” 

     The inner tension of the Cathy-Heathcliff relationship. The central theme of Wuthering Heights is the relationship between Cathy and Heathcliff. However, it is not with the surface appearance of this relationship that Emily Bronte is really concerned. She insists throughout on the inner tension of this relationship. For instance, in one famous speech Cathy says that her great miseries in this world have been Heathcliff's miseries; that, while her love for Linton is subject to change like the foliage in the woods, her love for Heathcliff is like the eternal rocks. In fact, in this speech Cathy identifies herself by saying: “I am Heathcliff. He’s always, always, in my mind.” In another speech, Cathy says: “Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.” And, Heathcliff, on his part, when speaking of the dead Cathy, says: “I cannot live without my life: I cannot live without my soul!”

     Descriptions of Heathcliff’s nature. Cathy's comparing her love for Heathcliff with the eternal rocks is only one example of the imagery in this novel having been abundantly drawn from Nature, and particularly from its sterner elements, especially in the description of Heathcliff. Nelly describes him as being “hard as whinstone”, and when he and the refined Edgar appear together, she says that “the contrast resembled that between a bleak, hilly, coal country and a beautiful fertile valley”. Cathy describes him as “an arid wilderness of furze and whinstone.” At the same time, HeathclifF is presented as being physically quite attractive. Lockwood speaks of his erect and handsome figure, while Nelly refers to his dignified manner: “quite divested of roughness, though too stern for grace.” In so far as Heathcliff is abnormal it is an abnormality that lies below the level of social behaviour. Cathy, for instance, says about him:

“Pray don't imagine that he conceals depths of benevolence and affection beneath a stem

exterior… He's a fierce, pitiless, wolfish man.” (Page 121)  

     Heathcliff relates how be has taught his son to scorn everything extra-animal as silly and weak; and later he says: “'It's odd what a savage feeling I have to anything that seems afraid of me.” And Isabella, his wife contributes to the impression of the non-human element in Heathcliff when she asks: “Is Mr. Heathcliff a man? If so, is he mad? And if not, is he a devil?”

     Heathcliff's desire to possess the two estates, symbolic or his desire to be reunited with Cathy. After Cathy's death, however, what was once hidden now comes to the surface, and Heathcliff is no longer dignified. Nelly tells us how just before Cathy's death, he foamed like a mad dog; and he himself says that he was wild after she died. The balanced relationship between Heathcliff and Cathy is now broken up, and a great contrast between the two is evident. Nelly says that Cathy's hush was one of perfect peace, and that no angel in heaven could be more beautiful than she appeared. As for Heathcliff Nelly relates: “He dashed his head against the knotted trunk; and howled, riot like a man but like a savage beast.” This  contrast persists, by implication till the end of the novel. Heathcliff's behaviour remains weird and unnatural. He now spends all his energies towards bringing under his control the two properties of Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange. This plan symbolizes his desire to be reunited with Cathy because at the former place he himself has lived while at the latter place. Cathy had lived with her husband Edgar. The plan occupies all his attention and he allows nothing to stand in his way. For instance, he shows considerable subtlety and brutality in bringing about the marriage between his son Linton and the younger Catherine to whom Thrushcross Grange will belong on the death of Edgar. The essential clue to his

behaviour is supplied by the younger Catherine who says to him: 

“Mr. Heathcliff, you have nobody to love you; and however miserable you make us, we still have the revenge of thinking that your cruelty arises from your greater misery.” (Pages 277-278)

     Equilibrium and tranquillity at the end. But once this marital union has been brought about. Heathcliff subsides. He goes and takes a look at Cathy's face in her coffin, and he tells Nelly that Cathy has “disturbed him, night and day through eighteen years since inoccently and remorselessly”. He has now a single wish, and his whole being and faculties are striving to attain it. The ordinary physical demands of life have no more interest for him. He moves nearer and nearer towards the unspecified goal: “I'm too happy and yet I'm not happy enough. My souls bliss kills my body but does not satisfy itself.” And finally Nelly rclates: “Mr. Heathcliff was there. His even met mine so keen and fierce. I started and then he seemed to smile... He was dead and stark.” He is buried, as he had desired with Cathy; and the final touch comes with the story of the small boy who has seen the spirits

of Heathcliff and Cathy. The level on which the Heathcliff-Cathy relationship has moved makes it entirely appropriate that it should attain equilibrium and tranquillity only with the deaths of the two persons concerned.

     The differences between the two relationships. The differences between the two main relationships, the Cathy-Heathcliff relationship and the Catherine-Hareton relationship, lie chiefly in the fact that the former is wilder and more Lawrentian3. For instance, Cathy and Heathcliff do not get married. Cathy tells Nelly that her relationship with Heathcliff has no need for sanctions of that kind, and that this relationship is not likely to be affected by her marrlage to Edgar. And the same applies to Heathcliff's marriage with Isabella Edgar's sister. In fact, the Cathy-Heathcliff relationship is handled in neither sexual nor even particularly human terms. On the other hand, the Catherine-Hareton relationship moves on the level of a normal procedure: at the end of the novel they are about to be married. And this distinction between the two relationships is of fundamental importance. The Catherine-Hareton relationship is the projection of the Cathy-Heathcliff relationship into the sphere of ordinary behaviour. The Catherine-Hareton relationship is the expression of conventional social terms of the main spiritual conflict. On the one hand, the anger is furious and the love is fierce, while on the other everything is soft, mild, gentle, and pensive.

     The second relationship a counterpart of the first. At the same time it is to be noted that between Catherine and Hareton there is no such immediate sympathy as there was between Cathy and Heathcliff. The former relationship being a counterpart of the latter, it develops from the outside, Cathy dies in giving birth to Catherine, and, just as from this moment she and Heathcliff are separated and only very slowly re-united, similarly there exists from the beginning a lack of sympathy between Catherine and Hareton which is only slowly overcome. At their first meeting Catherine mistakes him for a servant, and he retorts: “I’ll see thee damned before I be thy servant”. Heathcliff's struggle to unite the two estates involves the marriage of his son Linton to Catherine, and this naturally throws her further apart from Hareton. But once the marriage has taken place and Linton is dead, the intimacy between Catherine and Hareton develops rapidly. And it is in teaching Hareton to read and appreciate her books that Catherine gives impetus to this relationship. As Nelly, says Catherine's sincere efforts acted as a spur to Hareton's industry. It is this relationship which meets with Nelly's approval. Nelly's comments on Cathy and Heathcliff are certainly sympathetic in a fundamental sense, but these comments do also show certain reservations. After Cathy has told Nelly of her feelings for Heathcliff in her famous speech, Nelly tells us that she was out of patience with Cathy's folly; and after Cathy's death Nelly says that there is little reason to think that Cathy is happy in the other world though she should be left alone with her Maker Similarly, when Nelly finds Heathcliff dashing his head against the knotted trunk, the sight hardly moves her compassion. On the other hand this is what Nelly says about Hareton and Catherine:

       “The crown of all my wishes will be the union between these two. I shall envy no one on their wedding-day: there won't be a happier woman than myself in England”.

     The close sympathy between the two relationships. But the union between Hareton and Catherine symbolizes also the final union between Cathy and Heathcliff. The close sympathy between the two relationships now becomes perfectly clear. When Heathcliff dies, Hareton sits by the dead body all night, weeping sincerely and bitterly. The resolution into tranquillity with which the Cathy-Heathcliff relationship ends in paralleled in the Hareton-Catherine relationship. After their marriage, Hareton and Catherine are going to move from the Heights to the Grange, and the move is significant in so far as the first abode has been more turbulent than the second. Lockwood, whose sympathies are now fully engaged, goes to find the graves, of Edgar, Cathy and Heathcliff.  Seeing the quiet of the graves he wonders, how people claim to have seen unquiet ghosts of Cathy and Heathcliff roaming upon the moors. The novel indeed ends on a note of great calm.

     Storm and Calm in

     „Wuthering Heights"  

     The products of storm and of calm. The setting of this novel is a microcosm of the universal scheme as Emily Bronte conceived it. On the one hand, we have the place called Wuthering Heights which is the land of storm. High on the barren moorland, naked to the shock of the elements it is the natural home of the Earnshaw family, the fiery, untamed children of the storm. On the other hand, sheltered in the leafy valley below, stands Thrushcross Grange, the appropriate home of the children of calm, the gentle, passive, timid Lintons. Together

each group, following its own nature in its own sphere, combines to compose a cosmic harmony. It is the destruction and the re-establishment of this harmony which is the theme of the story. The story opens with the arrival at Wuthering Heights of an extraneous element-Heathcliff. He too is a child of the storm; and the affinity between him and Cathy Earnshaw makes them fall in love with each other. But since he is an extraneous element he is a source of discord, inevitably disrupting the working of the natural order. He drives the father, Mr. Earnshaw, into conflict with the son, Hindley and as a result Hindley into conflict with himself. The order is still further dislocated by Cathy who is seduced into uniting herself in an “unnatural” marriage with Edgar Linton, the child of calm. The shock of her infidelity and Hindley's ill-treatment of Heathcliff now, in their turn, disturb the natural harmony of Heathcliff's nature, and turn him from an alien element in the established order into a force active for its destruction. He is not, therefore, as is usually supposed a wicked man voluntarily yielding to his wicked impulses. He is a manifestation of natural forces acting involuntarily under the pressure of his own nature. But he is a natural force which has been frustrated of its natural outlet, so that it inevitably becomes destructive.

     Heathcliff’s destructive acts. Heathclifl's first destructive act is to drive, Hindley to death. Secondly, as a counterblast to Cathy’s marriage, and prompted not by love but by a hatred of the Lintons, he himself makes an “unnatural” marriage with Isabella. This, coupled with the conflict induced in her by her own violation of her nature, is too much for Cathy; and she dies. Heathcliff, further maddened by the loss of his life’s object, becomes yet more destructive, and proceeds to wreck his vengeance on the next generation-Hareton, Catherine (the younger) and Linton (son of Heathcliff and Isabella). These-for Hindley like Heathcliff and Cathy, had married a child of calm-cannot be divided, as their parents were, into children of calm or storm; they are the offspring of both and partake of both natures. But there is a difference between them. Hareton and Catherine are the children of, love, and so combine the positive “good” qualities of their respective parents: the kindness and constancy of calm, and the strength and courage of storm. Linton, on the other band, is a child of hate and combines the negative “bad” qualities of his two parents - the cowardice and weakness of calm, and the cruelty and ruthlessness of storm. Heathcliff acquires power over all the three children. Catherine is married to her natural antipathy, Linton, so that her own nature diverted from its purpose, grows antagonistic to her natural affinity, Hareton. The natural order is thus for the time being wholly destroyed and the destructive principle reigns supreme.

     The re-establishment of harmony. But at this moment the tide turns. From this moment the single purpose which directs the universe begins to re-assert itself, and to impose order once more. First of all Linton dies. Negative as his nature was, it did not have the seed of life within it. Then, freed from the incubus of his presence, the affinity between Hareton and Catherine begins to overcome the superficial antagonism that Heathcliff's actions bad raised between them, and they fall in love with each other. The only obstacle left to the re- establishment bf harmony is Heathcliff's antagonism. Finally this too changes. His nature could never find fulfilment in destruction, because it was not primarily destructive and had become so only because it was frustrated of its true fulfilment a union with its affinity, Cathy Earnshaw. Heathcliff's desire for this union never ceased to torment him. Even at his most destructive, her magnetic power pulled at his heart, depriving him of any sense of satisfaction which his revenge might have brought him. Now that power of hers grows so strong that it breaks through the veil of mortality to manifest itself to his physical eye in the shape of her ghost. The actual sight of her gives him strength at last to defeat the forces that had upset his mental balance. He forgets his rage; he forgets even to satisfy the wants of physical nature; he desires only to unite himself with Cathy. Within two days his wish is satisfied. He dies. His death removes the last impediment to the re-establishment of harmony. Hareton and Catherine settle down, happy and united, at Thrushcross Grange. Wuthering Heights is left to its rightful possessors, the spirits of Heathclift' and the first Catherine (Cathy). The wheel has come full circle. At last the alien element that had so long disturbed it has been assimilated to the body of nature. The

cosmic order has been established once more. 

                                                     II 

     The story, extended to the second generation. The whole structure of this novel suggests a deeper and more compulsive concern with the elements of storm than the above interpretation recognizes. Emily Bronte extends her themes into the story of a second generation of Earnshaws and Lintons. What is most remarkable about this second generation story is the effort it makes to modify the storm-calm opposition in such a way as to eliminate the most violent and troubling elements that give to the first generation story its peculiar intensity. Emily Bronte takes great pains in the second part of her novel to re-introduce her earlier relationship-patterns and to show them with a new kind of emphasis. She substitutes for the violent Cathy-Edgar-Heathcliff

relationships of the first part the milder Catherine-Linton-Hareton relationships of the second; and she alters the earlier savage Hindley-Heathcliff relationship of victimizer and embittered victim into the more temperate Heathcliff-Hareton relationship (in which the tyrant has some feeling for his victim, while: the victim himself remains loving and unembittered). The thoroughness with which she works over the relationships in the earlier parts of the story extends to other situations as well: Hindley's savage and destructive grief for his wife, Frances, and Heathcliff's frenzy at Cathy's death, reappear as Edgar's deep but quiet grief for the same Cathy, and as Hareton's strong grief for Heathcliff - a grief “which springs naturally from a generous heart, though it be tough as tempered steel”. Again, while Emily Bronte replaces the wildness of the first generation story by a quality of energy in the second generation which is more normal and human, she also shows us in the second generation a demoralizing extreme of calm. Thus Heathcliff, the epitome of storm, begets Linton who takes Linton qualities inherited from Isabella to their furthest point of lethargic inaction.

     The two symmetrical arcs described by the novel. Seen in this way, the novel consciously describes two nearly symmetrical arcs. The first carries us on through the violence of Cathy's and Heathcliff's obsessional feelings for each other, and through the stress of their relationships with the Lintons, to end in a mood of doubtful equipoise (because the spirits, apparently united and at rest, lie near the bare moor and in the rain and darkness they still “walk”). The other “arc”, also passing through stress, ends in the quiet of the valley; but the nature of the stress, in this second case, is different and in accordance with it there is a quieter outcome. The two arcs suggest that the novel is an effort to explore and, if possible, to reconcile conflicting “attractions”. It is sufficiently clear that Emily Bronte was attracted towards both storm and calm. In the story of the first generation, the clash of these opposites is worked out in terms of a strong emotional commitment to the values of storm. The second part of the novel examines an alternative commitment and poses another question: if storm-values are dangerous or undesirable, what is the nature of the calm that we must try to accept in the place of storm? For example, are we to accept calm if it implies a  universe like Linton's, in which men and women are

only half alive? The appeal of calm is to the human judgment rather than the human feelings.