u/VVest_VVind

Idk why it took me literal ages to get round to reading Andrea Dworkin’s piece on Wuthering Heights, but I’m glad I did. Highly recommended read for anyone who’s interested but hasn’t read it already. You can find it in a chapter of Dworkin’s Letters from A Warzone.

One of the key reasons why the essay is magnificent is that Dworkin is one hell of a writer. Whether we’re talking about academic/journalistic/professional or hobbyist/amateur literary criticism the ability to put the words together in a dazzling way is exceptionally rare, which is why so much criticism reads dry, forgettable and voiceless. Love or hate Dworkin, agree or disagree with her on this issue or that (I’m firmly on the love side, with some disagreements), it would be disingenuous to deny she had such a way with words. There is a unique voice and a literary quality to her writing. A good way to notice how much good writing matters in art criticism is to contrast two critics who interpret a piece of art in the same or similar way with the only difference being that one can write exceptionally well, while the other’s writing skills are merely mediocre. You’ll be able to find plenty of WH pieces essentially saying the same as Dworkin, only less compellingly. Which is not to say the opposite problem doesn’t happen in art criticism, the eloquence of a charismatic writer and/or speaker can mask banal ideas, lack of in-depth knowledge coupled with blindness to the limitations of one's knowledge and/or poor interpretative skills, but I’d say this happens less often. Sadly, if you look at the online art discourse indiscriminately, you’re mostly likely to predominately find the worst of both worlds - banal ideas, shallow knowledge without self-awareness and poor interpretative skills coupled with poor writing.

Here is the full quote from the title, possibly the best written part of a generally well-written essay:

>Nothing can explain it: a worldly, obsessed novel of cruelty and love that surpasses, for instance, the best of D. H. Lawrence in both sensuality and range; an act of passion as well as a work of intellectually rigorous art; a romantic, emotionally haunting, physically graphic rendering of sadism as well as an analytical dissection of it; a lyric and at the same time tragic celebration of both love and violence.”

And here are more passages from the essay to further highlight how good the essay is.  

>[Emily Bronte] showed how sadism is created in men through physical and psychological abuse and humiliation by other men; and she wrote about femininity as a betrayal of honor and human wholeness. She was indifferent to sex-roles per se, the surface behaviors of men and women. Instead, she exposed the underbelly of dominance: where power and powerlessness intersect; how social hierarchies emphasize difference, fetishizing it, and repudiate sameness; how men learn hate as an ethic; how women learn to vanquish personal integrity. She anticipated contemporary sexual politics by more than a century; and, frankly, I don't think there is a contemporary novelist, man or woman, who has dared to know and say so much. There is nothing to explain her prescience or her prophecy or, for that matter, her radical political acumen; except to say that Emily Bronte seemed to share with her monster creation, Heathcliff, a will that would neither bend nor break.

> The love story between Catherine Earnshaw and the outcast child, Heathcliff, has one point: they are the same, they have one soul, one nature. Each knows the other because each is the other. "'Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same;...'" says Catherine. Each knows the other because each is the other. This is not altruistic, self-sacrificing love, Christian self-effacement and self-denial; instead, it is greedy and hard and proud, the self not abnegated but doubled, made stronger, wilder, more intemperate. Together, they are human, a human whole, the self twice over; apart, each is insanely, horribly alone, a self disfigured from separation, mutilated. They are wild together, roaming the moors as children outside the bounds of polite society, vagabonds, lawless. They sleep as children in the same cradled bed. The social distinctions between them mean nothing to them, because to each other they are the world: the whole world, mental, emotional, material. This is a love based on sameness, not difference. It is a love outside the conventions or convictions of gender altogether.

>Being dirty, dark, a gypsy, black-haired, having a black humor, all are synonyms for a virtually racial exclusion, a lower status based on skin and color: this racism is the reason for Heathcliff's exile from the civilized family. The dirt and darkness become his pride and his rebellion, also the hidden source of his pain, the hidden trigger of hate. […] He is forced out of the house into hard labor, treated like an animal because he is presumed to have an animal nature, savage and dark. The social conditions create the nature. Education and language become useless to him. He sinks into a rough, hostile silence, animal-like; and Cathy betrays him. […]Heathcliff overhears her say that to marry him would degrade her, and he runs away, to return later, an adult, educated, rich, still dark, filled with hate and wanting revenge. She chooses white: fair, rich Edgar Linton. The great love is in sameness, not difference. This true love is destroyed by the divisive imperatives of a racist hierarchy that values white, fair, rich, and despises dark, poor.

 

>In betraying Heathcliff, [Cathy] betrays herself, her own nature, her integrity; this betrayal is precisely congruent with becoming feminine, each tiny step toward white, fair, rich, a step away from self and honor. She slowly becomes a creature of social beauty and grace. She repudiates the ruffian renegade, physically strong and fearless, who roamed the moors: not Heathcliff; herself. She does kill herself: she destroys her own integrity and authenticity. The gowns, the gloves, the whitened, useless, unused skin, are emblems of her contempt for honor, self-esteem. She becomes a social cipher; she is no longer a wild will in a strong body, whole in her own nature and whole in love.

>Heathcliff is but one of many male tyrants in Wuthering Heights; but he alone has the self-conscious perspective of one who has been powerless and humiliated because he is dark, dirty. Because his humiliation is based on race, he cannot escape the powerlessness of childhood by growing into dominance: white, fair, rich. The pain he inflicts when he has power is never the accidental, careless dominance of the privileged. His self-consciousness, rooted in race, is necessarily political, foreshadowing The Wretched of the Earth, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed: '" The tyrant, '" he says, '"grinds down his slaves and they don't turn against him; they crush those beneath them'"20 He is the revolutionary exception, consecrated to revenge; he crushes up, not down. He will destroy those who hurt him, or those who are the descendents of those who hurt him: the family, the class, the kind, the type, anyone whose status is white, fair, rich. '

>Using narrative, Emily Bronte wrote a psychological and physical profile of the power dynamics of the English ruling class, gender male: how boys, treated sadistically, learn to take refuge in a numb, orthodox dominance, insular, hermetically sealed against vulnerability and invasion. A more familiar example might be the socializing rituals in elite English public schools: how ruling class boys are put through sadistic humiliation and physical abuse.

 

>The sadist cannot accomplish transformation or change toward justice or equality. He and the ruling class have too much in common: each is remorseless; each is incapable of empathy. Heathcliff has learned power's main lesson to its own: feel no empathy. This is a parable of the revolution failed, another coup d'etat just like the last one; the Terror rampant in one oppressed-turned-oppressor's heart.

Her calling him "a parable of the revolution failed" particularly gets to me because I half-thought I was the only one who thought of Heathcliff exactly like this because I never heard or read anyone else say it so concisely before, though obviously this idea pops up in one way or another a lot, particularly in Marxist readings of text. A lesson in humility, one rarely has any original thoughts, especially on near 200 old texts.

>In the narrative itself, Bronte warned against misreading Heathcliff. Isabella, his wife, stands in for the bad reader—a brilliant, ironic political point in itself. The bad reader is the sentimental reader of romance novels when life, love, and art demand a confrontation with the politics of power. The bad reader romanticizes the sadist and reads the rapist, the abuser, the violent man, as a romantic hero: tortured himself, despite proof that he is the torturer. […]Isabella is ordinary, the way most of us are: taught to be bad readers of men, kept ignorant of the meaning of dominance and sex, in rebellion against the conventional wisdom—the conventions—of the family; the dangerous man is the route for those who must mix ignorance with rebellion. […] Heathcliff's contempt for Isabella has in it, again, a stunning lucidity, this time a moral lucidity. She has seen his sadism--she has seen him torture her dog, she has let him do it […]Isabella's pleading for it and then doing nothing to save it, because she inferred that Heathcliff wanted to hang " every being belonging to her, except one: possibly she took that exception for herself." […] Cathy has warned Isabella of her "'deplorable ignorance of his character... He's not a rough diamond—a pearl-containing oyster of a rustic: he's a fierce, pitiless, wolfish man.” Her love does not depend on bad reading; she knows Heathcliff.

Now, I have to say that over the years, I’ve grown increasingly wary of paternalism disguised as feminism, despite at one point in the past leaning towards that point of view myself. The most banal version of the argument put forth by Dworkin here ends up with pseudo-feminist pear-clutching and lots of self-righteous, condescending attitude towards women over relationships they enter and/or art and media they engage with and how they engage with it, the latter similar to the equally eye-roll-worthy “video games make children violent and/or stupid” and “will my child start sacrificing animals or people in Satanic rituals if they like a band with a dark aesthetic and lyrics?” nonsense. But, at the same time, Dworkin is not making a banal version of that argument here. Additionally, Dworkin  gives one of the most fair and accurate readings of Isabella’s character, not minimizing her suffering or misreading that there is a subtext in which she’s secretly masochistic (Joyce Carol Oats and Emerald Fennell both misread the text like that, with Fennell saying she thinks that’s the most transgressive part of WH even nowadays, which further pushes her from a subjective interpretation to misreading of this particular part of the text), but also not pretending Isabella functions in the novel as merely a poor victim and/or sympathetic heroine, ignoring the novel’s obvious critique of genteel femininity and its complicity in hierarchies of power through her character.

>Charlotte Bronte, trying to defend her sister because Emily had written a rude, untamed book, wrote: "Having formed these beings she did not know what she had done.” I think she did; and that we have not yet faced what Emily Bronte knew and said and showed. I want us to read her when we read Fanon and Millett; when we think about race and gender and revolution; when we discuss questions of violence and sadism.

I’d say Fanon and Firestone, but Millett works too. Sexual Politics is an interesting read even today and Millet too was a good literary critic.

The only part I have a bit of a disagreement with Dworkin’s reading is this one.

>Heathcliff's is a radical, violent revolution incarnated in a socially constructed sadism that appears to have the force of nature: it levels everything before it. Bronte's feminist genius was to show how this sadism was made; how and why. Her political wisdom, a grounding in a profound though not effortless humanism, led her ultimately to disavow radical violence, though her creature, Heathcliff, was so mesmerizing, so grossly misread as a romantic figure, that the author’s repudiation of Heathcliff’s cruelty and violence has been overlooked or taken as insincere.

While it's a fair reading of the text, I think it also underestimates how appealing and liberating a by all accounts maladjusted (complimentary) female author living in a highly repressive society could have found writing a violent revenge and/or revolution fantasy, even if she writes it through a male character rather than a female one. That in no way negates being aware of the darker sides of these impulses.

Thanks to a poster on this sub mentioning it, earlier this year I read Emily’s essay The Cat for the first time and fell in love with it. It is two paragraphs of pure, delicious, irreverent misanthropy, with some well-placed mockery of sentimentality, conventional morality and the English genteel class. I’ve quoted it here many times before, but it bears repeating. Here it is in this totality:

>I can say with sincerity that I like cats; also I can give very good reasons why those who despise them are wrong.
A cat is an animal who has more human feelings than almost any other being. We cannot sustain a comparison with the dog, it is infinitely too good; but the cat, although it differs in some physical points, is extremely like us in disposition.
There may be people, in truth, who would say that this resemblance extends only to the most wicked men; that it is limited to their excessive hypocrisy, cruelty, and ingratitude; detestable vices in our race and equally odious in that of cats.
Without disputing the limits that those individuals set on our affinity, I answer that if hypocrisy, cruelty, and ingratitude are exclusively the domain of the wicked, that class comprises everyone. Our education develops one of those qualities in great perfection; the others flourish without nurture, and far from condemning them, we regard all three with great complacency. A cat, in its own interest, sometimes hides its misanthropy under the guise of amiable gentleness; instead of tearing what it desires from its master's hand, it approaches with a caressing air, rubs its pretty little head against him, and advances a paw whose touch is soft as down. When it has gained its end, it reseumes its character of Timon; and that artfulness in it is called hypocrisy. In ourselves, we give it another name, politeness, and he who did not use it to hide his real feelings would soon be driven from society.

>"But," says some delicate lady, who has murdered a half-dozen lapdogs through pure affection, "the cat is such a cruel beast, he is not content to kill his prey, he torments it before its death; you cannot make that accusation against us." More or less, Madame. Your husband, for example, likes hunting very much, but foxes being rare on his land, he would not have the means to pursue this amusement often, it he did not manage his supplies thus: once he has run an animal to its las breath, he snatches it from the jaws of the hounds and saves it to suffer the same infliction two or three more times, ending finally in death. You yourself avoid the bloody spectacle because it wounds your weak nerves. But I have seen you embrace your child in transports, when he came to show you a beautiful butterfly crushed between his cruel fingers; and at that moment, I really wanted to have a cat, with the tail of a half-devoured rat hanging from its mouth, to present as the image, the true copy, of your angel. You could not refuse to kiss him, and it he scratches us both in revenge, so much the better. Little boys are rather liable to acknowledge their friends' caresses in that way, and the resemblance would be more perfect. They know how to value our favours at their true price, because they guess the motives that prompt us to grant them, and if those motives might sometimes be good, undoubtedly they remember always that they owe all their misery and all their evil qualities to the great ancestor of humankind. For assuredly, the cat was not wicked in Paradise.

In the second paragraph especially, we see the seeds of what in Wuthering Heights would evolve into the portrayal of the Linton family in general and the socially-constructed genteel femininity in particular, whose pernicious effects on women are examined in different but complementary ways in Wuthering Heights though Isabella and Catherine(s) Linton.

Out of the surviving essays collected in The Belgian Essays: A Critical Edition (edited and translated by Sue Lonoff), The Cat is the best. But many others come close, offering a glimpse into Emily’s sense of humor and her signature unconventional and non-conformist ways. You will also recognize those seeds of ideas she would further develop in Wuthering Heights in most of these essays.

 After The Cat, my personal favorite is Letter (Madam). I’ll quote that one in its entirety too.

>Madam,
Tomorrow, there will be a small musical party at our house, to which I am directed to invite you. The execution of that order gives me great pleasure, because I can assure you that the pieces are well chosen, that most of the musicians are skillful, and therefore, that you will spend some pleasant hours here. Beyond the pleasure of seeing you, your friends expect from your hands a [contribution] to the evening's amusements. Thus I hope that you will not refuse to come, since that would be a deprivation, both for you and for them.
I am, Madam,
your respectful student

>Dear Miss,
It would have been, in truth, a great pleasure for me had I been able to accept your invitation; but in a life like mine, our inclination cannot always be followed, and unfortunately the day of your party is, of all the days of my week, the busiest. Thus I find myself obliged to give up the pleasure of seeing my friends and of contributing whatever I could to their amusement. But when I suffer a disappointment, I ordinarily seek some compensation in return; and at present, I console myself with the thought that if I am denied the opportunity to exhibit my small talent, at least, I will not undergo the mortification of witnessing the poor results of my work with you; because I have heard that you are to play a piece on this occasion, and forgive me if I advise you (out of pure friendship) to choose a time when everyone is occupied with something other than music, for I fear that your performance will be a little too remarkable.
Still, I would not want to discourage you. Good day, and good luck with all my heart.

It reads hilarious on its own but even moreso when you remember that in Brussels there was a British ex-pat family who asked Emily to give their daughters classes. She agreed on the condition that they worked around her schedule. The family found her selfish and arrogant for this. One of the daughters later became friends with Charlotte but couldn’t stand Emily. Emily, the queen that she was, probably didn’t care at all. Deborah Lutz’s new biography recounts this incident. But this essay makes me think of another incident Lutz mentions at another point in her book. Namely, Lutz quotes Charlotte complaining about Emily not wanting to socialize more (not in Brussels, in general). But she counters it by a letter from Mary Taylor, one of the two most prominent friend characters in Bronte stories, alongside Ellen Nussey, in which Taylor says “Imagine Emily turning over prints or ‘taking wine’ with any stupid fop and preserving her temper and politeness!” Taylor was very likely right and had Emily humored Charlotte, I'm sure she would have eventually mortified her more people-pleasing sister by saying something inappropriate or offensive in polite society. After first ignoring the said people by not speaking to them at all probably.

The Palace of Death is another interesting essay. In short, Death wants to appoint a Prime Minister. Some Deadly Sins offer their services. At the end, Civilization appears, gives the most convincing speech and is chosen by Death. This obviously feels very Emily and very Wuthering Heights. Girl had a life-long feud with civilization it seems.

The Butterfly is also very Emily and very Wuthering Heights in its pessimistic outlook which can be summed up with a line she would later give to Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights - "the tyrant grinds down his slaves and they don’t turn against him, they crush those beneath them." In The Butterfly there is this powerful line:

>Nature is an inexplicable problem; it exists on a principle of destruction. Every being must be the tireless instrument of death to others, or itself must cease to live, yet nonetheless we celebrate the day of our birth, and we praise God for having entered such a world.

The ending of the essay is optimistic and transformative, at least on the surface, but something just feels off. I thought it was primarily my own tendency towards pessimism that was influencing my reading there. But Lutz in her biography shares that she reads the ending of the essay as ironic and ambiguous, which hasn’t occurred to me. Though ambiguous is exactly where I landed with the ending of Wuthering Heights when I recently reread it and, taking Lutz’s comments into consideration, it fits well for The Butterfly too. Lonoff also mentions that most modern readers find the ending of The Butterfly unconvincing and cites several examples of scholars who’ve previously written about why it feels so off. Some speculate that the constraints of Hegar’s assignment are maybe why the essay had to end like that. almost making to many concessions to religious optimism. Which kinda mirrors how we don’t know if the publishing trends played any role in why Wuthering Heights has a seemingly happy ending, though undermined by ambiguity. But Emily being Emily, even when/if she compromises and works under constraints, she still finds a way to not compromise too much and still do what she wants.

(Letter) From one brother to another and Portrait: King Harold before the Battle of Hastings are beautifully written and you’ll recognize the Emilyness and WHness in the style and themes there too. Contemplative and emotional at the same time, they have past appearing in the present, characters stripped of their social status to find a more authentic self, loneliness caused by shallow, unsatisfactory connections and a complicated longing for a kindred soul (imo one of the consistent features Emily's writing that resemble P.B. Shelley's and possibly one of the reasons why she liked him, other than their shared interest in a more androgynous concepts of gender and gender relations and social justice), etc. These three passages from the Letter read particularly moving:

>I have crossed the ocean, I have traveled in a number of countries, I have been the poorest of the poor, ill among strangers, without the power to offer the work of my hands in exchange for the bread that I was eating. Also, I have delighted in riches and all the pleasures that they can provide for their possessor; but always alone, always friendless, enough to flatter me, but no one to love me.

>Nonetheless I never dreamed of being reconciled with you; I did not wish to enjoy again that erstwhile harmony of souls which formed the happiness of our childhood, or if the thought came to me sometimes I chased it away as an unworthy and degrading weakness.

>At length my body and my spirit were weary of wandering; my bark was tossed by storms, I longed to come into port. I formed the resolution to end my days where they were begun and I directed my course toward the land and the house so long abandoned.

The Siege of Oudenarde has a possible Mary Wollstonecraft reference in the following line,

>Even the women, that class condemned by the laws of society to be a heavy burden in any situation of action and danger, on that occasion cast aside their degrading privileges, and took a distinguished part in the work of defense.

Apparently, this was Emily’s response to Mr. Hegar wanting a more sentimental and conventional outlook on the role women during battles from his students.

(Letter) My dear Mama feels like Emily trying a perspective she doesn’t often write from. Lonoff notes that too and comments we can maybe see the seeds of Linton Heathcliff here in its delicate child character.

Filial Love is so and so. Conventional topic, Emily makes it darker and less conventional. But still not that interesting. She does much better with this topic in WH.

All the essays are short and worth a read if you’re interested in what Emily wrote in Brussels. Lots of Charlotte essays are accessible in this collection too, more of hers survived than Emily’s. Worthwhile reading is also the intro by Lonoff with a section dedicated to a lengthy explanation of Mr Heger’s teaching methods . Both the original French version and the English translation of Emily’s and Charlotte’s essays are provided, including their first drafts and corrections by Heger available alongside the editor’s comments further explaining the context of the essays. One part of the intro I found funny was when Lonoff cites a very phallogocentric-sounding Lacanian* interpretation of Emily's life by David E. Musselwhite and pushes back against it (too politely for my taste, lol) while still acknowledging Musselwhite's better insights.

*No hate to Lacan and Lacanians implied, I have more patience for Lacanianism than for many other psychoanalytical and psych theories that are prominent in the psychology-driven and unfortunately often psychology reductivist and insidiously misogynistic, racist, classist, etc. lit interpretations. Speaking of which, other than the rightfully famous work of Foucault and Fanon that challenge these perspectives, I'd like to shout out Dušan Bjelić, who challenges Western psycho(analytical) discourse in the context of Balkan studies, which is not immediately relevant for Emily or her writing but it does cover the dark sides of the development of Western psychology that reach back to Emily's Victorian times. And in addition to the famous French trio of female psychoanalytic feminists who reworked Lacan, within the generally more psychoanalysis-critical second wave of Anglo-American feminism, I think the work of Shulamith Firestone reads interesting and challenging even today and some of her ideas are a good interpretative lens that can be brought to Wuthering Heights.

One of my favorite discoveries on my latest reread was just how often the text links Hareton to both Cathy and Heathcliff. I knew there was a reason I liked that kid.

The most indirect example of it is also the one I like best. When Nelly comes to visit WH for the first time after a while of living at TG, the following exchange takes place between her and child Hareton:

>‘Daddy cannot bide me, because I swear at him.'

>'Ah! and the devil teaches you to swear at daddy?' [Nelly] observed.

>'Ay—nay,' [Hareton] drawled.

>'Who, then?'

>'Heathcliff.'

>'I asked if he liked Mr. Heathcliff.'

>'Ay!' he answered again.

>Desiring to have his reasons for liking him, I could only gather the sentences—'I known't: he pays dad back what he gies to me—he curses daddy for cursing me. He says I mun do as I will.'

>'And the curate does not teach you to read and write, then?' I pursued.

>'No, I was told the curate should have his—teeth dashed down his—throat, if he stepped over the threshold—Heathcliff had promised that!'

Nelly of course disapproves, but I love it. Little Hareton is anti authority and anti religious and/or educational indoctrination. He loves Heathcliff because he embodies those values. And it’s very reminiscent of when Cathy questioned Mr. Earnshaw’s authority:

>'Why canst thou not always be a good lass, Cathy?' And she turned her face up to his, and laughed, and answered, 'Why cannot you always be a good man, father?

And when she flung Joseph’s Bible away:

>I took my dingy volume by the scroop, and hurled it into the dog-kennel, vowing I hated a good book. Heathcliff kicked his to the same place. Then there was a hubbub!

Hareton also echoes younger Heathcliff’s desire for vengeance here. Child Heathcliff too wanted revenge against Hindley for his abuse, much to Nelly’s disapproval.

The first more direct Cathy-Hareton reference shows up when Isabella comes to WH. When she sees him for the first time, she comments:

>By the fire stood a ruffianly child, strong in limb and dirty in garb, with a look of Catherine in his eyes and about his mouth.

This resemblance will much later unsettle Heathcliff. In chapter XXXI, he says:

>'It will be odd if I thwart myself,' he muttered, unconscious that I [I=Lockwood] was behind him. 'But when I look for his father in his face, I find her every day more! How the devil is he so like? I can hardly bear to see him.'

The resemblance is emphasized again two chapter after than when Heathcliff walks in on the younger Catherine and Hareton reading together:

>They lifted their eyes together, to encounter Mr. Heathcliff: perhaps you have never remarked that their eyes are precisely similar, and they are those of Catherine Earnshaw. The present Catherine has no other likeness to her, except a breadth of forehead, and a certain arch of the nostril that makes her appear rather haughty, whether she will or not. With Hareton the resemblance is carried farther: it is singular at all times, then it was particularly striking; because his senses were alert, and his mental faculties wakened to unwonted activity. I suppose this resemblance disarmed Mr. Heathcliff:

Nelly being Nelly can’t resist being hypocritical about Cathy. The younger Catherine didn’t just look arrogant because of her mom’s nose. She was an arrogant classist bully after being raised exclusively by saint Nelly and her insipid angel Edgar. She never questions if their upbringing played a role in how she turned out. Just like she never questions if her insipid angel Isabella played a role in how Linton turned out despite her being his only caretaker for 13 years but only blames Heathcliff. Anyway, Heathcliff is a step ahead of her, knows what she’s thinking and says:

>In the first place, his startling likeness to Catherine connected him fearfully with her. That, however, which you may suppose the most potent to arrest my imagination, is actually the least: for what is not connected with her to me? and what does not recall her? I cannot look down to this floor, but her features are shaped in the flags! In every cloud, in every tree—filling the air at night, and caught by glimpses in every object by day—I am surrounded with her image! The most ordinary faces of men and women—my own features—mock me with a resemblance. The entire world is a dreadful collection of memoranda that she did exist, and that I have lost her! Well, Hareton's aspect was the ghost of my immortal love; of my wild endeavours to hold my right; my degradation, my pride, my happiness, and my anguish—

This is of course not the first time Heathcliff draws a parallel between Hareton and himself. He pretty much does that throughout the second generation part of the book. But what differentiates this paragraph from the earlier ones is that with Hareton being so much like both him and Cathy, it’s almost like Heathcliff here can see a child they never had. Except, in my opinion though probably not Heathcliff’s, it’s much better in a way. The power of WH and Cathy and Heathcliff is in the transgressive, which nuclear family is decidedly not. And Hareton is Heathcliff’s adoptive and spiritual son if not biological. But he’s also kinda Joseph’s adoptive son. He takes care of him as much as Nelly takes care of the younger Catherine. Not that the biased Nelly will ever say anything positive about that. She gives little to no grace to characters she dislikes.

Younger Catherine and Nelly disrupt Heathcliff, Hareton and Joseph’s unconventional pseudo family unit, but Hareton being the biggest sweetheart in the book tries to make peace and harmony. When the younger Catherine tries to turn him against Heathcliff in defense of herself and the property Heathcliff took from them (some critics try to spin this as purely “feminist,” but it’s that very much mixed with landowner class entitlement, with the only excuse for the younger Catherine being that she doesn’t know neither Heathcliff nor her mom ever had any land or property they could self-righteously demand like she can), Hareton shuts that down and the younger Catherine stops trying to turn him against Heathcliff. Self-righteous Nelly tries to put a negative spin on Hareton’s bond to Heathcliff and praises herself and Catherine for Hareton’s character, casting Heathcliff and Joseph as negative influences. But the text tells another story. And Hareton even ends up sticking up for Joseph. He moves his plants on younger Catherine demand but once he realizes Joseph’s upset he says he’ll put them back. In the end, younger Catherine’s flowers are moved so they can co-exist with Joseph’s plants. Of course, there is a Biblical joke here with a woman upsetting an ultra Christian sin-obsessed man’s garden and him having to put up with it. But she did also replace a working class man’s edible plants with decorative flowers, as a privileged idiot woman would. Again, some critics trying to spin this as awesome feminism is reductive. And it just ends up making WH seem like a work that champions bougie feminism which successfully inserts itself into Victorian domesticity and insipid middle class values. WH and Emily Bronte are better than that. (Re: WH academic criticism I have issues with, I have to acknowledge some Marxist critiques are at times really bad on gender and sexuality. But at least they will question inadequate feminist readings. On the flipside, even great feminist readings will sometimes underperform on class and postcolonialism. But hey, if it's an old academic text I realized I need to give some grace to pioneering academics pretty much ushering these perspectives into the literary academia.)

In short, Harteton is great and I fully approve of him walking around the moors. Younger Catherine I’m not sure I’d invite to the moors given she fails to convince me her transformation from Catherine Linton into Catherine Earnshaw is successful. She remains a pale imitation of her mom. But Hareton likes her. Heathcliff eventually softens on her and encourages Hareton to spend time with her. Ghost Cathy probably approves of her too by the end. It’s only after younger Catherine and Hareton are united and Heathcliff loses interest in his revenge that Heathcliff is able to not just see Cathy everywhere but also talk to her. Though it's also worth noting Cathy and Heathcliff have questionable character judgement at times. They like Nelly more than I do and confide in her. I’d rather be hanging out with the only actually sensible servant in the story, Zillah. She wouldn't preach any type of Christianity or conventional morality at me. We could just bitch about the rich together and exchange financial advice. And I'd rather listen to Joseph's preaching than Nelly's. At least he's so extreme that he's entertaining. So long as he doesn't make me keel on a sack of corn in a cold room while he preaches for three hours, like he did to Cathy, Heathcliff and the poor ploughboy who just happened to be there. Living with a Joseph is less entertaining than reading about a Joseph.

One of the ideas I wanted to test out in my most recent WH reread was how convincingly - though somewhat reductively, as is inevitable when boiling any text down to one major theme - it reads as primarily being about the tension between freedom and social conformity, with the conflict dramatized through the two Catherines and, by extension, their love interests. I chose these terms over the more traditionally used “nature” and “culture” because they are partially synonymous to them but also more precise.

The very first thing Lockwood and, consequently, the reader learn about the older Catherine is her identity crisis. Catherine Earnshaw. Catherine Heathcliff. Catherine Linton. Written in that exact order. But her daughter’s identity goes exactly in reverse. Catherine Linton. Catherine Heathcliff. Catherine Earnshaw. It’s a full cycle.

For the older Catherine, Heathcliff is her connection to her more authentic self, free from social demands and constraints, and the moors an illusory space of unrestricted freedom. Illusory because Cathy and Heathcliff can run around moors as children but obviously can’t actually live there. At least not in their mortal human shape. Additionally, they seem to start spending more time on the moors as a direct result of Hindley making WH a hostile place for them, which wasn’t the case under Mr. Earnshaw.  In Catherine’s diary, subversively written on the margins of her Bible, which Lockwood reads, she writes:

>'All day had been flooding with rain; we could not go to church, so Joseph must needs get up a congregation in the garret; and, while Hindley and his wife basked downstairs before a comfortable fire—doing anything but reading their Bibles, I'll answer for it—Heathcliff, myself, and the unhappy ploughboy were commanded to take our prayer-books, and mount: we were ranged in a row, on a sack of corn, groaning and shivering, and hoping that Joseph would shiver too, so that he might give us a short homily for his own sake. A vain idea! The service lasted precisely three hours; and yet my brother had the face to exclaim, when he saw us descending, "What, done already?" On Sunday evenings we used to be permitted to play, if we did not make much noise; now a mere titter is sufficient to send us into corners.

>[…]

>'Saying this, [Joseph] compelled us so to square our positions that we might receive from the far-off fire a dull ray to show us the text of the lumber he thrust upon us. 

>[For the sake of space, I’m cutting out the part where she flings Joseph’s Bible and Heathcliff follows. But it’s absolutely one of the best passages in the book.]

>'Hindley hurried up from his paradise on the hearth, and seizing one of us by the collar, and the other by the arm, hurled both into the back-kitchen; where, Joseph asseverated, "owd Nick" would fetch us as sure as we were living: and, so comforted, we each sought a separate nook to await his advent. I reached this book, and a pot of ink from a shelf, and pushed the house-door ajar to give me light, and I have got the time on with writing for twenty minutes; **but my companion is impatient, and proposes that we should appropriate the dairywoman's cloak, and have a scamper on the moors, under its shelter. A pleasant suggestion—and then, if the surly old man come in, he may believe his prophecy verified—**we cannot be damper, or colder, in the rain than we are here.'

However, it’s important to note that much though Wuthering Heights under Mr Earnshaw is a space of blurred hierarchical boundaries and with some degree of freedom and transgression allowed and Mr. Earnshaw looks great in comparison to Hindley as the patriarch of WH and also in comparison to the other farther of his generation we meet in the text, the greedy, classist, racist, sexist Papa Linton, Mr Earnshaw ultimately creates conditions that set the tragedy in motion. His favoritism of Heathcliff feeds Hindley’s resentment. He doesn’t write a will to leave anything to either Heathcliff and/or Catherine and protect them from Hindley. To Catherine I doubt whether he would have even wanted to leave anything given he doesn’t seem like her much because she doesn’t fit his image of a “good girl.” Mr. Earnshaw doesn’t seem to like Hindley very much either, but he’s a man so he still gets to inherit everything.

Once the Lintons enter the picture, papa Linton promptly lectures Hindley on how inappropriate it is for his sister to be running around with the g-slur boy. Hindely and Frances decide they need to do a better job separating Cathy and Heathcliff. Cathy is semi-culpable in this separation given she is tempted by the newly found easy, “refined” Linton lifestyle but external pressure is also put on her to continue transforming into a proper lady. That’s what the Lintons want to transform her to and Hindley does as well, especially given her marriage to the Linton would raise his status too. The Earnshaws are gentry but poorer and of lower status than the Lintons.

After Frances dies, Hindley falls into depression and alcoholism and becomes more abusive. It’s then when Cathy makes the pragmatic decision to marry Edgar, admitting to Nelly that more than for her superficial love for Egdar, which she knows is superficial and won’t last long, she’s making that choice to improve both her and Heathcliff’s position:

>I see now you think me a selfish wretch; but did it never strike you that if Heathcliff and I married, we should be beggars? whereas, if I marry Linton I can aid Heathcliff to rise, and place him out of my brother's power.'

>'With your husband's money, Miss Catherine?' I asked. 'You'll find him not so pliable as you calculate upon: and, though I'm hardly a judge, I think that's the worst motive you've given yet for being the wife of young Linton.'

>'It is not,' retorted she; 'it is the best!

>[…]

>'If I can make any sense of your nonsense, Miss,' [Nelly] said, 'it only goes to convince me that you are ignorant of the duties you undertake in marrying; or else that you are a wicked, unprincipled girl. But trouble me with no more secrets: I'll not promise to keep them.'

What Nelly sees as wicked and unprincipled is just the economic basis of marriage for women living under patriarchal laws laid bare. And yet even though Cathy has made her decision, it’s chance and miscommunication that play a big role in her actually going through with it. She also says to Nelly:

>'[Heathcliff] quite deserted! we separated!' she exclaimed, with an accent of indignation. 'Who is to separate us, pray? They'll meet the fate of Milo! Not as long as I live, Ellen: for no mortal creature. Every Linton on the face of the earth might melt into nothing before I could consent to forsake Heathcliff. Oh, that's not what I intend—that's not what I mean! I shouldn't be Mrs. Linton were such a price demanded.

A bit later, Cathy also says to Hindley:

>'I never saw Heathcliff last night,' answered Catherine, beginning to sob bitterly: 'and if you do turn him out of doors, I'll go with him. But, perhaps, you'll never have an opportunity: perhaps, he's gone.' Here she burst into uncontrollable grief, and the remainder of her words were inarticulate.

Had Heathcliff not heard the worst part and left, the story might have played out differently. But it didn’t because the civilization represented by Thrushcross Grange first to be infiltrated, next rejected and then finally partially appropriated and altered.

Cathy’s story as a mortal human ends with delirium and death. Instead of it reading as merely tragic and/or self-destructive, these chapters are incredibly alluring. Cathy’s madness has lucidity in it and her complete rejection of society and traditional heaven brims with subversive energies. No marriage plot can compete with that. Had the novel ended with Cathy’s death, as the proponents of the two volume theory (Emily’s latest biographer, Deborah Lutz, being one of them) think it was originally meant to, it still would have been a mighty one. Maybe even moreso, as it would have given no respite of a seemingly conventional happy ending to either a Victorian reader or a modern one. But we wouldn’t have had Heathcliff on full revenge mode, ghost Cathy and the interesting ambiguity of the second generation.

The younger Catherine is born into the Linton ladyhood. She more privileged, more pampered and safer than her mother ever was at WH. Yet, she’s also more restricted and yearns for freedom, as is empathized by many references to her wanting to leave the confines of TG. Places that she is drawn to are the moors, Peniston Craig and Wuthering Heights, all places where her mom found some degree of freedom. She first finds herself inside WH on her way to Peniston Craig and Nelly notes:

>I entered, and beheld my stray lamb seated on the hearth, rocking herself in a little chair that had been her mother's when a child. Her hat was hung against the wall, and she seemed perfectly at home, laughing and chattering, in the best spirits imaginable, to Hareton—now a great, strong lad of eighteen—who stared at her with considerable curiosity and astonishment: comprehending precious little of the fluent succession of remarks and questions which her tongue never ceased pouring forth.

She more than comfortably occupies her mom’s position and starts off on the right foot with Hareton. However, because she was raised a Linton, once she leaners about Hareton’s lower status, she tries ordering him around like a servant and objects to learning Hareton is her cousin.

>'Papa is gone to fetch my cousin from London: my cousin is a gentleman's son. That my—' she stopped, and wept outright; upset at the bare notion of relationship with such a clown.

The love triangle with the spirted lady torn between the “brute” and the “gentleman” plays out again, but differently, with the interference of vengeful Heathcliff and ghost Cathy. Once younger Catherine starts gravitating towards Hareton, Heathcliff starts pulls away from his revenge (won't dwell on this, I already did in this post) and also starts communicating with ghost Cathy, which he was unable to before, before finally joining her in death and ghosthood. In the most optimistic reading of the second generation, we end in a transformed, utopian world. The second generation has figured out how to live in society without being completely mastered by it. Catherine Linton becomes Catherine Earnshaw again and the Thrushcross Grange that the younger Catherine and Hareton inhabit will be different to that that of the Lintons. Subversive energies of Cathy, Heathcliff, the Earnshaws and WH are not defeated by the hypocritical, repressive, oppressive civilization of the Lintons but are appropriated and transformed by it. Cathy and Heathcliff are also free to merge in grave, wander the moors and finally inhabit their home, WH, together. They are probably not sleeping peacefully, like Lockwood would prefer them to, but maybe they are finally happy though mischievous ghosts.

And yet, I’m not fully happy with this interpretation. Younger Catherine almost breaks the novel for me or pushes me towards a reading of the ending that is pessimistic or at least ambiguous and open-ended. In one of the better pessimistic readings of the novel, Martha Nussbaum says, “[Y]oung Cathy, her father’s daughter, spoiled and petulant, has none of the first Cathy’s demonic intensity of spirit” (from Nussbaum’s essay The Romantic Ascent: Emily Bronte) and I partly agree with her. However, I will say in the defense of the younger Cathy that she’s almost as alluring as her mother when we see her though Lockwood’s eyes. When he describes her she’s not just conventionally physically attractive, but also a bit wild and untamable in nature. She even pretends to be a witch to spite Joseph, echoing how her mother used to annoy him. Furthermore, there a reference to P.B. Shelley that Lockwood makes when contemplating the possible likeness of the mother and daughter. It’s very, very open to interpretation, but one way to read it can be as a signal that the spirit of Shelleyan rebellion resides in both of the Catherines.

Maybe the younger Catherine seems unimpressive not because she’s too much of her father’s daughter but because of Nelly’s narrative voice? Nelly is biased and motivated by the fact she wants Lockwood to marry the younger Catherine. She has more than one reason to try to paint her as more conventional and angelic that she is, an interpretation of younger Catherine contested by both Catherine’s own words and actions in the novel and Lockwood’s perception of her. Additionally, though Lockwood in the final chapter says, of younger Catherine and Hareton,

>“'They are afraid of nothing,' I grumbled, watching their approach through the window. 'Together, they would brave Satan and all his legions.'”

And this is significantly less powerful and subversive than when Heathcliff earlier says of himself and Cathy:

>“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.”

That’s also just Lockwood speaking and he is possibly just as wrong about this as he is about Cathy and Heathcliff sleeping peacefully. Neither of our two narrators is malicious but both are conventional and limited in their own ways. Cathy and Heathcliff are too much for them to grasp and maybe Catherine 2 and Hareton are too.

However, there is still the fact that the older Catherine shared both what she learned with Heathcliff and his physical labor in the field:

>“Heathcliff bore his degradation pretty well at first, because Cathy taught him what she learnt, and worked or played with him in the fields”

But younger Catherine only does the former with Hareton, ultimately offering a version of heterosexual union both less subversive and less radically egalitarian than Cathy and Heathcliff did.

I thought this reread would help me figure out if I lean more towards the pessimistic or the optimistic readings of the second generation. Instead, this time round I end in between, on ambiguity and open-endedness. But that’s not necessarily a flaw of the novel, maybe it’s its strength, as it introduces the possibility of transformation but doesn’t fully endorse it nor does it offer closure in a way that would have maybe read too optimistic and unrealistically utopian.

Lutz’s recently published Emily biography starts with an obvious but necessary disclaimer - the scarcity of surviving texts by Emily make her a figure onto whom her readers project and of whom her biographers cannot write without being speculative. Speculative though this biography often is about Emily-related things that simply cannot be known for sure, it is also backed by a lot of historical research that makes the Bronte house and Haworth come alive on its pages. At times, it also reminds the reader of the realities of Victorian England and the British Empire and shows how they impacted lives of the Bronte family and people they knew, as well as how these issues showed up in what they are known to have read, what they might have read and, consequently, what they wrote throughout their lives.

On the literary side of things, the book offers a lot of insight into Emily’s writing process. Again, some of it is speculative, but some is based on historical documents available. Lutz also brings in Emily’s poems and what can be reconstructed of her and Anne’s Gondal saga. A little bit of textual analysis of Wuthering Heights and speculations about the inspirations behind it are there too, leaning on some of the best academic writing on Emily and her work done so far. Emily literary influences and the love that some influential female artists that came after Emily had for her is also brought up. As are fascinating women Emily has met, chiefly the bold, free-thinking famous Bronte friend Mary Taylor, which the book paints as Emily’s kindred spirt of a sort. At one point Lutz suggest Emily could have met Anne Lister/Gentleman Jack/an important figure in lesbian history, given they lived near each other and possibly took walks in the same area. This reads as highly speculative, wishful thinking. But hey, not impossible and it certainly would be cool if they had met.

The portrait of Emily Lutz paints is of a misanthropic free thinker, drawn to all things dark, morbid and violent but with a profound love of nature and animals in all of their aspects and an interest in justice and equality. That sounds fair to me, it is more or less how I imagine Emily was probably like based on her works and the little info on her that we do have from her and other people. It’s also not a brand new or particularly controversial take on Emily. In certain sections of Emily scholarship and fandom, the idea of a dark, wild, radical Emily has long replaced the Charlotte-started myth of wild but innocent genius Emily who didn’t really know what she was doing when she wrote one of the best and most subversive novels in the current English canon.

Speaking of Charlotte, radical Emily school of thought within Bronte devotees sometimes feels the need to contrast her to a narrow-minded, conservative Charlotte, who tries to alter and control her sister’s legacy and literary works because she doesn’t get and/or doesn’t approve of her sister’s iconoclastic ways. This is not all that Charlotte is in Lutz’s biography. Quite the opposite, Charlotte often emerges here as a complicated, interesting figure in her own right. But at the same time, some subtle and not so subtle Charlotte vilification does appear, especially in the epilogue. And it’s not the acknowledging of the conservative streak that Charlotte did have that is the problem. Nor is it treating these women and their relationship as complex. I’d argue treating women as angels who live in harmony with each other always is more dehumanizing. It’s more that Charlotte is sometimes not given any grace and her actions are interpreted as mean-spirited when other explanations could be offered. The most annoying Charlotte indecent in this book for me was the part where Lutz speculates that the famous feminist passage in Jane Eyre might have been inspired by Emily. Furthermore, since Villette reads more misanthropic to Lutz, she speculates that tone was thanks to Emily too. If Charlotte ever had a cool idea in her life, it must have come from Emily, apparently. That’s just really unfair to Charlotte and I’m not even a huge Charlotte fan.

Anne appears in the book a lot less, even though Lutz does acknowledge the deep bond and creative partnership she and Emily had, sometimes in quite a poetic language. I thought it was probably because Anne historical data is almost as scarce as Emily historical data, so trying to write about Anne would have been more work for Lutz. But then I heard her say in an interview that she’s just not personally that invested in Anne. Which, fair, I guess. It’s not an Anne biography after all. However, in one paragraph Lutz showers some praise on The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, but it’s so unconvincing to me. It’s essentially “realist novel about the real life of a middle class woman artist, so subversive.” Yeah, no. Mid 19th century is too late to be that generous to middle classes, their worldviews and their preferred artforms. And I know that some Anne fans make similar arguments, but I think Lutz could do better. She certainly does a better job selling the subversives of Emily and Mary Taylor.

Other members of the Bronte family and famous characters in the Bronte story get a fair shake, I’d say. They are all fun to read about in their own way. But my favorite characters in this biography are Emily’s many animal friends. Lutz goes into detail about Emily’s fondness of animals, how she brought many of them, domestic or wild, into her household and took care of them. It’s quite endearing. Never absent is of course also Emily’s love for her dear moors.

Coming from a background more focused on textual analysis, intertextuality and historical context, some biographical info here was new to me though it might not be new to readers more well-versed in Bronte biographies. But it’s overall a fun and informative read that I would recommend. If I get round to it, I might do kind of a part 2 of this review in a much lighter tone because there are some funny bits in this book that I would like to highlight in case somebody else finds some amusement in them. Plus, Lutz and I both agree that Emily had a wonderful, dark sense of humor and I’d kinda like to acknowledge that in a way with a post that is more focused on the humorous anecdotes from Brontes’ lives.

ETA: Clarity, grammar, I suck at proofreading.

I'm a bit less than halfway through Deborah Lutz's This Dark Night: Emily Bronte, A Life and it's been a fun and informative read so far. My favorite parts highlight the unconventional female figures that the Bronte sisters knew or read and that could have inspired them, daring literature they read and/or could have read (there is a part where Lutz wonders if Emily could have read De Sade but then concludes she wouldn't have had an easy access to his writings though she would have had access to and probably did read other books that had very dark, violent and/or erotic content) and how they made sense of religious and political teachings they got at home and/or read about in newspapers and books. Given my long-lasting interest in the influence of the younger Romantics on Emily (especially P.B. Shelley, whose influence on Emily has been less written about by scholars than either Byron's or Wordsworth's, but I'm glad to see that there seems to be a growing Bronte scholarship dealing with the influence of both of the Shelleys on all of the Brontes; for example, a more recently published paper I came across, Post-Romantic Relations: Percy Bysshe Shelley and Emily Bronte by Sarah Wootton**,** mentions that Charlotte's fictionalized portrayal of Emily in Shirley was possibly deliberately Shelleyan, which would make a lot of sense), I particularly liked this bit:

>[Emily] drafted two pictures of women around this time, both probably copied from engravings. The first, a pencil drawing of a stern woman wearing a tiara, calls to mind the Gondal queen Augusta. In the second, a watercolor called “The North Wind,” a young woman appears to be rushing off, her blue cloak and hair blowing behind her. She glances back at what she leaves behind. Or perhaps she just moves with the wind, as a tree would. The original, found in editions of Byron’s biography and poetry, was of Iantha, Byron’s nickname for the eleven-year-old Lady Charlotte Harley. The Iantha picture shines with youthful innocence, but Emily’s has shrewder eyes, radiating intelligence instead of empty purity. Perhaps she illustrated a Gondal story, or she may have been envisioning the Ianthe in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s radical poem Queen Mab, who is shown a vision of the past, present, and future by a fairy.

I can definitely imagine both Emily wanting to alter the patriarchal, conventional images of women that emerge from Byron's works and Emily being fascinated by Queen Mab. I do ultimately think that what Emily was doing in Wuthering Heights was somewhat similar to what Shelley was doing in Queen Mab, i.e. trying to envision a transformation to a more just and egalitarian utopian world, which is why a happy ending in WH is only possible after injustice and hypocrisy have been thoroughly exposed and examined.