HUMANITIES

‘The Secret of the Sphinx’: What makes Wuthering Heights unique in English Literature?

Chaired by Peter Rex Valentine

Peter Foreman

BRLSI Member

16 November 2004

The speaker began by assuring the audience that Emily Brontë had nothing to do with the famous monument in Egypt. The idea that she was the sphinx of English literature originated in the 19^th century due to her Chinese box method of narration, which lends her an enigmatic quality.

Introducing the theme, the speaker then quoted critical comments from the 1840s to modern times. Despite reservations as to its lack of taste and restraint, most critics were unanimous in their view of its originality. The speaker reminded us that similar accusations have been leveled at Melville, Dostoyevsky, and D.H. Lawrence, writers with whom Brontë has affinities, according to E.M. Forster.

The speaker’s ideas were arranged under four headings:

To begin with, it was explained with the help of a handout how Brontë opened her story almost at the end chronologically, but at a pivotal point where the reader is shown a close-up of the situation at the Heights, and is able to look both backwards and forwards in time. The reader soon comes to realize that Wuthering Heights was not conceived as a realistic novel. For one thing, there is an extraordinary pattern of symmetry in its organization, which also extends to the themes. This formal patterning combined with the extreme passions in the story gives the novel its unique atmosphere of wildness and order. It reveals a novelist with a precise, meticulous mind, carefully and skillfully calculating the effects of her art. In short, Brontë was an artist.

Addressing the mystery of why Brontë chose to hide herself behind so many masks; the speaker believed that it allowed her an impersonal presentation essential to her vision. He quoted Q.D. Leavis’s comment that Brontë’s refusal to intrude constitutes the real originality of the novel. Brontë withholds judgment on Cathy and Heathcliff because she sees that they are driven by the forces of nature. They cannot help themselves. For in Brontë’s poetic vision human behavior is a manifestation of the laws of nature and the universe. So instead of direct authorial judgment, Brontë employs a technique of contrast and parallelism, and allows other characters to make moral judgments. In Leavis’s view the whole structure of the book is based on this oblique method.

Turning to symbolism, the speaker listed the contrasts between the Heights and the Grange. Contrasting symbolism is also embodied in the characters: Cathy and Linton

Heathcliff, for example.

The speaker then explained how the underlying theme of the novel arises from the intrusion of the untamed world of the Heights, represented by Heathcliff, into that of the peaceful, civilized Grange. Chaos and death ensue. This was illustrated by a diagram showing Brontë’s idea that the natural order of the universe is a balance or harmony between these complementary worlds. Allowed to exist side-by-side following their own natures, they form a cosmic order. The destruction of this order and its re-establishment is the theme of Wuthering Heights.

So the story is placed within a grand cosmic scheme in which the characters move as manifestations of natural forces diverted from or regaining their proper expression. Brontë’s impersonal telling is essential to this vision. The universe has a single purpose — to maintain its order and harmony. Moral and spiritual conflict arises when this cosmic order is upset. But once the single purpose reasserts itself, unity is restored. The novel is therefore more like a dramatic poem than a traditional novel. Brontë was primarily interested in our relation to the universal scheme we are part of, not in our social, cultural, economic, or psychological aspects. The nature of her vision is poetic and spiritual. And this explains why her novel is so unlike other novels — why, for example, the characters behave so strangely, and why the seemingly disjointed and baffling events are inevitable.

The speaker went on to talk about the ‘religious’ element in Wuthering Heights, defining ‘religious’ as a prophetic faculty that looks not into the future but beyond or behind to something other than what is being presented. E.M. Forster’s claim that in this kind of novel the characters and events stand for more than themselves; they extend themselves towards something universal. This ‘reaching back’ to something behind what is shown to be happening raises this type of novel to the metaphysical plane.

Coming to the final heading, that of the character of Emily Brontë, the speaker described some biographical evidence to show that disturbing forces at work in Bronte were the source of the creative impulse that produced Wuthering Heights. As a child of five, for instance, Emily advised her father to reason with her troublesome brother Branwell, ‘and when he won’t listen to reason, whip him’. When she said this, Emily was wearing a mask supplied by her father, which allowed her to speak freely. In normal circumstances, she was morbidly shy and reticent. The Chinese box method of narration in her novel was no accident; it kept her at a safe distance from the reader. The whip, symbol of cruelty and tyranny, was apt, for Emily could be domineering and sadistic. The speaker cited another incident concerning Emily’s dog Keeper. She beat the ferocious animal as a punishment for sleeping on the beds.

Bronte’s violence is expressed in the brutal scenes in her novel, and in the character of Heathcliff. According to Somerset Maugham, the key to Brontë lies in her sexuality. She appeared ‘masculine’ to the village people, and she may have been a repressed lesbian. Repressing such tendencies would account for her strangeness, her harshness and inflexibility. But as a novelist she could allow her true nature expression behind the cover of several masks. Writing her novel gave her emotional and sexual release.

If this is true, how do we explain the spiritual or ‘religious’ dimension, which lifts a romantic melodrama into a great imaginative poem? One theory is that the novel is a dramatized attempt to reconcile the two warring sides of Brontë’s nature. By externalizing poetically her own duality Brontë produced a great book. She needed the tranquility of wholeness and unity from the contradictions of her own nature. Her creative urge stemmed from the division or ambivalence caused by the tension of the two forces she longed to reconcile. So she created her own symbolic solution to her personal problem, as all great artists do. What gives her novel its distinct and unmistakable originality is this poetic or religious dimension.

As an epilogue, the speaker asked whether in a secular age of mass production and mass taste like ours — an age which many believe to be spiritually moribund and lacking in any real vision — such true originality is becoming rarer and rarer.

Topics of discussion included:

Was Heathcliff a Byronic hero or tragic villain, sinned against as much as sinned?

Hindley’s jealously of Heathcliff was secondary to Mr Earnshaw’s favouritism.

Heathcliff’s origins were not made clear, neither were Mr Earnshaw’s reasons for adopting him. Was he his illegitimate child? He was swarthy but not black, strong and handsome but rough and uncouth. His transformation and education, while away was never explained. He was full of contradictory characteristics and unpredictability, but was given consistency by his undying love for Cathy. Heathcliff is successful in his complex revenge, hates his wife Isabel because she is not Cathy. Cathy herself was unpredictable

Emily Brontë creates an extreme Gothic atmosphere from the beginning, which we accept on her terms. The Narrative is by intermediaries Ellen Dean and Lockwood, in order to avoid direct authorial judgement. This is a precursor of Modernism beyond Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre or George Eliot’s Middlemarch. Unlike Jane Eyre it is pagan and anti religious.

The symbolism of the two households, the Earnshaws and the Linton’s, is the seat of the Manichean conflicts of life itself, in this respect it is not romantic.

The origins of Emily’s pathological outlook, which Charlotte did not understand, were sought in her upbringing. She was sheltered, very shy and repressed with, it was suggested, possibly lesbian tendencies, which may explain her attitude towards Branwell.

The incident where she beats the dog Keeper for going upstairs and lying on the best bed inferred a potential for violence.

Howarth, the Brontës’ home was next to a graveyard.

The Brontës were familiar with death in childbirth, high infant mortality and tuberculosis.

Dr Cunliffe–Jones said he knew the area of Wuthering Heights as a young man and was impressed by its wildness and isolation. The Brontës’ father was not rich, but like many ministers, well educated with an interest in Politics.