Guys i m starting the book wuthering heights and would like some tips as to what expect from it. Just don't give any spoilers but do tell how was ur experience in reading it. Heard a lot bout this book and now finally purchased it to give it a try.
This is something that always confused me since I first read the book.
"About twelve o’clock that night was born the Catherine you saw at Wuthering Heights: a puny, seven-months’ child..."
I still wonder how a baby born at only seven months would survive and thrive, especially since I doubt neonatal care was that great in the 18th century. Is it possible Nelly miscalculated how far along Cathy's pregnancy was or that the second Catherine was just lucky?
My current theory is that if Emily Bronte was writing a second novel, it was going to be a war novel.
I'm basing this on the fact that her two last poems that she ever wrote (that we know of anyway) are in fact two versions of the same poem, both available to read in full here: https://www.annebronte.org/2025/09/14/emily-brontes-final-poems/
The first version (dated September 14th 1846) is a long, complex narrative poem set in her Gondal universe. The second version (dated 13th May 1848) reworks the first into something much shorter, stripping out almost all of the narrative elements. As a standalone poem, I'd rate the second version as much inferior to the first, which means it wouldn't make much sense to do the reworking if it was just for personal quality reasons or for publication in a volume of poetry - but it would make sense if the goal was something that could serve as the frontispiece for a prose novel taking plot elements from the first version.
There is a through line between 1) the character of Quashia Quamina in the Brontes' early Glass Town writings, an African child orphaned by war and adopted by the Duke of Wellington who later leads a rebellion, 2) the character of Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, a mysteriously foreign orphan child adopted by the Earnshaw family whose love and later revenge plot upends the family's destiny, and 3) the girl-child described in the first version of Emily Bronte's last poem, rescued and adopted by the soldier who watched her father die but hating him "like we hate hell". This suggests to me that the subject of intergenerational hatred caused by war was one that preoccupied Emily Bronte throughout her lifetime as a writer.
If my theory is correct, Emily Bronte's second novel would have been extremely gory and violent, even more so than Wuthering Heights - the first version of this poem includes lines describing the stabbing of a child in its father's arms and soldiers' food and drink being stained with blood. If set in any type of real world setting (the Anglo/Ashanti wars that inspired the Bronte siblings' Glass Town universe? the Greek war of independence where Byron, like the narrator of both these poems, drew his "alien sword" to fight "neither for my home nor God"? the French revolution, which had been fought on and off throughout the sisters' lifetimes and was so much of a part of their culture that "Jacobin" was a common general English term for rebel?), it would have been politically incendiary. Especially since her poems here seem to take a strong both-sides-suck antiwar POV. And if its author was known or suspected to be a woman (per this article https://longreads.com/2016/09/01/how-the-brontes-came-out-as-women-2/ the suspicions of female authorship grew long before Charlotte's reveal of the sisters' true identities in 1850), such a novel would have drawn even harsher criticism, both because of Victorian ideas of "coarse" subjects being inappropriate for women and because of accuracy concerns like those raised by the #ownvoices movement today.
Of course, this is all just speculation on my part. As far as I know there is no conclusive evidence that Emily Bronte even was writing a second novel - or does the new Deborah Lutz biography of her provide some answers in that regard? (I haven't been able to read it yet)
Looking back over some of their scenes together in Wuthering Heights, I’ve become increasingly fascinated by Nelly’s relationship with Heathcliff. They have very different values and have treated each other quite, uh, badly at times, but I wanted to focus here on a different, weirder side of their dynamic. Ever since childhood, Heathcliff seems to have had a certain fondness for and trust in Nelly as a confidante. And as much as her traditional values are at odds with his and Cathy’s, I think that Nelly is a lot more like Heathcliff than she’d like to admit. I’m guessing this has something to do with their uncomplaining attitudes; the two of them put up with considerable mistreatment from Hindley, and while Nelly would never seek revenge, she seems to share Heathcliff’s disdain for people who aren’t so stoic—young Edgar, for instance, and Linton especially. It’s fitting that Nelly was initially endeared to Heathcliff through his silent forbearance of the measles, given that both of them later have extremely callous things to say about Linton, who bears his own illness with constant complaints.
Nelly seems to be one of few people whom Heathcliff actually “likes,” in his way; it feels significant, at least, that she and Hareton are the ones he wants at his funeral. What toughness appeals to him in Hareton likely appeals to him in Nelly as well. But Nelly is also someone to whom Heathcliff can divulge his own vulnerabilities, and it seems that much of their relationship can be drawn back to and encapsulated by that occasion of Heathcliff’s childhood sickness. It’s hard to judge the truth of everything Nelly reports as narrator, but if we accept her claim that young Heathcliff “felt I did a good deal for him, and he hadn’t the wit to guess that I was compelled to do it,” this could inform a lot of his attitude towards her at other points. (I’m also feeling some echoes here of Hareton’s view of Heathcliff, but we won’t go off on that tangent.) He does refuse Nelly’s company sometimes, but at others, he seems as desirous of it as the sick boy needing her at his bedside. For all his detachment and valued self-sufficiency, perhaps Heathcliff still feels the vague need for a mother figure; Mrs. Earnshaw refused to fulfill this, and what became of his biological mother is a mystery. Nelly was there when Heathcliff was a vulnerable child, and there is something binding in that shared memory. There were a few moments, in rereading, where I could imagine Heathcliff as the unruly and flippant grown son to Nelly, as the chiding and eye-rolling mother—for instance, the interaction where Heathcliff asks Nelly if he used to look as stupid as Hareton when he was little. (Though, interestingly, both Heathcliff and Nelly have acted as parental figures to Hareton.)
For her own part, Nelly seems to feel an (often self-important) urge to mother, in her way, no matter how fruitless—or opposed to her own values—her efforts may be. Against her master’s orders, she stays up at night to watch for Cathy and Heathcliff’s return to the Heights and let them in. Nor is her aiding of Heathcliff restricted to his childhood; there seems something about him which thrusts Nelly into contradiction with herself throughout her life. On certain occasions she has gone against Edgar’s wishes or social convention in the interest of Heathcliff’s scandalous relationship with Cathy, despite her disapproval of it. Ultimately, she does attend his funeral and goes forward with his demand to be buried next to Cathy, “to the scandal of the whole neighborhood.” And perhaps this event was prefigured by Nelly’s discovering Heathcliff’s hair in the dead Cathy’s locket, and instead of throwing it out, simply intertwining it with Edgar’s.
There’s more could be said, but also more that I haven’t worked out, and I’ve rambled on enough already. For now, have the silly drawings. I’ve had a lot of fun with these, as usual.
In my animal design scheme, Nelly is depicted as a cow. (Somehow that felt right for the name.) As a rural domestic, it was natural that she be some sort of farm animal; this also makes her a fitting housemate for Joseph the donkey, Wuthering Heights’ other longtime servant. Neither are designed as purebreds, and their species are larger and stronger than the other domestic herbivores I’ve featured, the sheep and rabbits representing the Lintons, who are much milder and not accustomed to manual labor. Still, Nelly is aligned with the Lintons in some respects, and will ultimately end up living at the Grange rather than Wuthering Heights. Cows, of course, are also associated with milk—lending well to Nelly’s role as nurse—and motherhood; as mentioned, Nelly acts at various points as mother figure to several characters, especially since Heathcliff, Hareton, and the Cathys lose their biological mothers at an early age.
Nelly’s fur is both brown and white, reflecting her close relationships with both the Earnshaw and Linton families. Her facial pattern has also ended up looking a bit like Cathy and Hindley’s father’s (whose design I have not posted yet); perhaps something of his strict parenting approach was passed on to her. I’ve lately been working on designs for the Earnshaw and Linton parents, and have a few other art pieces in the works as well. So, thanks for looking through, and stay tuned!
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.
This year marks twenty years since I first read Jane Eyre, and I keep being surprised by how much the book changes for me.
The first time through, I was swept up in the Gothic romance of it all: Thornfield, the mystery, the intensity of Jane and Rochester. On rereads, Jane herself has become the center of the novel for me—not just as a romantic heroine, but as someone with an almost astonishing sense of agency, conscience, and courage.
Now I notice different things every time: Jane’s insistence on freedom, the horror of Bertha’s confinement and fate, the religious and moral questions, and just how funny parts of the book are. Rochester pretending to be a fortune-teller will never not make me laugh.
For those of you who first read Jane Eyre young and have come back to it over the years: what has changed for you? What did you love at first that now lands differently? What has become more meaningful, stranger, funnier, or harder to sit with as you have gotten older?
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.
Sad to say, this has worrited me for decades. It doesn't make sense.
First off: why Liverpool? A West Riding farmer would sell his perishable produce - dairy, meat - in the local area, while wool would go to Halifax or Bradford, both about 10 miles away, or less than four hours walk. Yet he chooses to walk 60 miles to Liverpool, conduct his business, shop, and walk 60 miles back, in three days.
We are given exact details of his setting off as the family are at breakfast and returning at 11.00 at night on the third day. Not possible. The internet informs me that the maximum distance a person can walk in a day is 30 miles. Emily, who walked everywhere, would have had a verygood idea of times and distances.
So what's going on? Are we supposed to view this with suspicion? Some readers have concluded that the old man had a second family walking distance away, and that Heathcliff was his natural child. Two factors against that: Mr Earnshaw leaving WH is depicted as highly unusual, and the child he brings back speaks a foreign language. Also - he goes shopping! Everything points to Mr Earnshaw finding a lost child on a one-off visit to Liverpool. Except for the 120 miles in three days.
Any theories? I have one...
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.