‘Wuthering Heights’:

‘It is a moral teething’

We have already dealt with Emily Bronte as a poet (DN 12th Oct, ‘11). Let us now consider her only novel, ‘Wuthering Heights’, for which she is more famous. It has, in fact been called one of the greatest novels written.

WH is unique among 19th century novels of distinction in that its characters do not move within a larger social context as in Jane Austen's ‘Emma’ or George Eliot's ‘Middlemarch'. Its locale is limited to two houses four miles apart in the bleak Yorkshire moorland, the Earnshaw homestead after which the novel is named, and Thrushcross Grange’, the Linton mansion. The interaction among the occupants is the extent of the novel's milieu.

Rich context

Yet this untypical context is richly realised as the provenance of the characters and their destinies. It accounts for Catherine's and Heathcliffe's childhood bonding, the development of their relationship into maturity, her defection to Edgar Linton, her own rapid, and Heathcliff's long drawn-out, deterioration, and the final prospect of a happier outcome in the next generation.

The sense or spirit of place is all-pervading in tne novel. It could be said that, to borrow a phrase from Pasternak, ‘everything that happens happens from the nature of the place.’

The relationship between Catherine and Heathcliff is virtually forged from the ruggedly inspiring landscape they roamed as children.

And this is the subect of the novel, the love relationship between Catherine and Heathclife. Its fortunes are the focus of the story upto Catherine's death, and thereafter its consequences for Heathcliffe and the others. Thus the novel might initially seem to be a type of Gothic melodrama with tragic overtones. In fact, it is more in the nature of a Greek tragedy with powerful moral implications.

Their mutual love is not only romantic, it is creditable. Her befriending this otherwise despised adjunct to the family circle, him reciprocating with fierce devotion.

Their relationship develops into an irresistible need for one another. Each becomes the other's all-in-all.

Refined company

And then the unthinkable happens. Catherine gets acquainted with the refined Lintons, from whose company Heathcliffe is excluded, and becomes conscious of the latter's social limitations. When Edgar proposes, she is at first in a quandary but soon concludes that, marriage to Heathcliffe being impracticable, she must acccept. Yet she cannot renounce her love for Heathcliff. She explains herself thus to Nelly Dean, the servant girl who grew up with them: “.. surely you and everybody have a notion that there is or should be an existence of yours beyond you....My great miseries in this world have been Heathcliff's miseries...my great thought in living is himself. If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger. I should not seem a part of it. My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it, I'm well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff! He's always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to mysef, but as my own being.”

Stirring depths

This, incidentaly, is one of the most influential passages in prose literature. So much literary thinking and expression has been inspired by it in treating of the love relationship, not the least that of DH Lawrence.

And certainly the idea about love taking one out of oneself and having an elemental quality that stirs to the depths of one's being, is a noble one.

Such a love manifests itself is at once unyielding and selfless. Such appears to be the love between these two.

Yet Catherine's choice of Linton, despite the inferior quality of her love for him, springs from as deep-seated an impulse as her need for Heathcliff. We can understand it from the Guru's advice to Mohan in LH Myers’ ‘The Pool of Vishnu'; namely that alongside a woman's devotion to a man and her support of his ideals, she also needs the assurance of security and stability.

We can understand it even better from Sarachhchandra's ‘Maname’, when the princess shockingly betrays her beloved prince to the veddah king who appears to be her only prospect of survival in the forest.

Heathcliff, after he runs away, nurses his love for Catherine along with his desire for revenge upon all else. And though she seems to have settled down with Linton, when Heathcliff returns rich and respectable Catherine's passion for him revives even more powerfully, with little thought for Linton's felings.

This is where we realise the ultimate fate of romantic passion when it is does not submit to higher principles. It loses its uplifting potential and becomes a negative force. It is seen to be not selfless but self-willed and selfish. Incapable of self-sacrifice, it is ultimately uncaring even of the beloved's best interest.

“I wish I could hold you”, she continued bitterly, “till we were both dead. I shouldn't care what you suffered. I care nothing for your sufferings.

Why should't you suffer? I do!” And he: “Why did you despise me? Why did you betray your own heart, Cathy? I have not one word of comfort. You deserve this. You have killed yourself. Yes, you may kiss me, and cry; and wring out my kisses and tears: they'll blight you-they'll damn you.”

After Catherine's death Heathcliff's moral decline begins in earnest. He proceeds headlong in taking revenge on his erstwhile opposers and their innocent dependants. He had resolved as much. “I have no pity! I have no pity! The more the worms writhe, the more I yearn to crush out their entrails! It is a moral teething: and I grind with greater energy, in proportion to the increase of pain.”

Those words, “It is a moral teething”, drive home the true significance of inbridled passion or romantic idolization. Acknowledging no greater authority, it generates its own moral atmosphere and comes eventually to be beyond all moral sense - witness Catherine's unfeeling treatment of her husband and Heathcliff's unspeakable cruelty to both man and beast.

Catherine's death comes halfway through the novel, the rest dealing mainly with the revenge of Heathcliff. This continuation allows Emily Bronte to put the grand passion in perspective. Not only by revealing the full consequences of its ‘moral teething’, but by indicating the positive outcome possibe when romantic love does not extend to idolizing the beloved. This is evident in the relationship that blossoms between Catherine's daughter, Cathy, and the former's nephew, Hareton Earnshaw, both now Heathcliff's dependants. “Earnshaw was not to be civilised with a wish, and my young lady was no philosopher, and no paragon of patience; but both their minds tending to the same point-one loving and desiring to esteem and the other loving and desiring to be esteemed-they contrived in the end to reach it.”

When Heathcliff sees them, despite his efforts to keep them apart, on the verge of achieving the very fulfilment in love he yearns for, he loses his drive for revenge. “Now would be the precise time to revenge myself on (my old enemies’) representatives: I could do it; and none could hinder me. But what is the use? I don't care for striking; I can't take the trouble to raise my hand!...I have lost the facilty of enjoying their destruction... there is a strange change approaching.Ó213

And so the novel ends with Heathcliff's death and the new lovers’ impending marriage. We said earlier that it resembles a Greek tragedy, and so it does, demonstrating the destruction that characters with heroic potential bring upon themselves through their flaws of character. But it is really of Shakespearean scope, combining as it does the romantic quality of Romeo and Juliet, the tragic dimension of Antony and Cleopatra and the pastoral element of The Winter's Tale all in one. Because of it, reader and writer alike have had their understanding enlarged in regard to the potentialities and the limitations of romantic love.