At the beginning of
In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust’s narrator wakes up in the middle of the night. Suspended between sleeping and getting up from his bed, he recalls how, for a long period of time, he would go to bed early and fall asleep almost immediately after putting out the candles, only to be awakened again by the thought that it was time to seek out sleep. For a few seconds he was convinced that the book he had put away just before falling asleep was about himself. His reawakened reason is not disturbed by this transference into the realm of fiction, even though this fantasy—exchanging the actual room with the pages of a book—is concomitant with an impediment of his vision. As though he wears blinders, Marcel does not initially recognize that his candle is no longer burning. Only once he detaches himself from the world of his nocturnal reading, which arrests his gaze as though it belonged to Queen Mab’s dream world, does he regain his ordinary vision. Slowly he finds himself no longer confronted with his life as a text; instead, he recognizes with astonishment the darkness surrounding him. As for Shakespeare’s characters, so too for Marcel, the night emerges as a stage and state of mind. Lacking all illumination, this scene of insomnia proves pleasant and restorative because it appears to him to be “a thing without cause, incomprehensible,
a thing truly dark” (3).
Freud speaks of a navel of the dream to designate the spot at which the unconscious plunges into the unknown. A similar claim can be made for Proust’s narrator. Sitting upright in his bed at night, he inhabits a similar spot in the midst of the utter darkness surrounding him. As a link to the incomprehensible, his suddenly reawakened mind forges a path to the point of unfathomability, which is the navel of the waking dream from which the entire novel In Search of Lost Time will unfold. Marcel wakes from his dream to find himself confronting an impenetrable darkness that forces him to adjust his vision; this is comparable to Hesiod’s conception of Nyx. She, too, gives figure to the emergence of the world out of chaos. Suddenly awakening at midnight, Marcel is able to mentally experience the nocturnal room as a return to a perception of true darkness, from which, like the children of Nyx, the shapes and forms of his own fantasy can arise. What follows upon this imagined return to a fathomless and thus incomprehensible true dark, is a creative interplay between sleep and awakening, out of which poetic remembrance can be born. Sometimes Marcel wakes up for only a few moments, so as to consciously savor the darkness that has absorbed his bedroom, before he falls back into oblivion. At other times, he recognizes upon awakening that in his dream he had returned to childhood anxieties emerging from the earliest part of his life. Before reentering the world of his dreams, he tries to extinguish these terrifying memories. Then again, because of an awkward position he has assumed while sleeping, he mentally fashions a woman out of his thigh; a figure of his desire with whom, in his dream, he imagines an intense erotic embrace.
Decisive about all these disturbances of his sleep is the way in which, upon waking, Marcel has recourse to the familiar order of his world so as to orient himself in the dark. Yet at the point of transition between waking and sleeping, this ordinary world again disintegrates. His sense of time and space becomes confused and he no longer knows where he is, initially not even
who he is. As if he had spiritually returned to the beginning of the world, Marcel is overcome with nothing but an elementary sense of existence. He feels himself to be “more destitute of human qualities than a cave dweller” (6), because he has lost all bearings pertaining to the real everyday world. He experiences this disorientation as an enmeshment between past and future. To retrieve him from the dark nothingness into which he has so suddenly awakened, as well as to allow a meaningful cosmos to emerge from the chaos of a consciously experienced midnight, memory images come to him of all the rooms in which he has slept, or might have slept, in the past.
This remaking of the world, so necessary to any orientation in space, soon emerges as a kaleidoscope of familiar bedrooms. In contrast to the children’s bedtime stories with which
chapter 6 began, Marcel does not journey into magical worlds in the opening passages of
In Search of Time Past. Instead, in his mind’s eye, he moves back through the bedrooms of his past, which, blending seamlessly into one another, imaginatively bring different periods in his life, different places and different objects into something of great constancy. Although his thinking lingers “in consideration of when things had happened and of what they had looked like” (6), his bodily memory restores the precise makeup of these bedrooms, as well as the thoughts he used to harbor while falling asleep, only to retrieve them upon waking up again in the middle of darkness. The spiritual journey into the past is possible only as an embodied memory of his earlier bouts of insomnia. The cosmos recovered from chaos, which Marcel is able to produce as the text he will ultimately write, is thus not only predicated on a thing truly dark, experienced as an unfathomable vanishing point and corresponding to an existential feeling of utter exposure; the liminality of this retrieved spiritual orientation also draws attention to the way the night functions as the stage for memory work, from which his search for lost time will gradually emerge. The textually produced world of a past that Marcel will resuscitate on the pages of his novel has, at its navel, the memory images of the rooms he has inhabited, as these intertwine with each other. Furthermore, this textual cosmos is sustained by an experience of the night as a potent reservoir of memory. Owing to the disorientation he continues to experience during the passage from sleep into waking, he is able to recall the locations of past experiences so as to preserve them as narrated memories.
Initially, Marcel is not able to distinguish the individual rooms in which he has slept. During the long reveries that follow upon his awakening, he succeeds “in remembering again all the places and people that I had known” (15). He is able to inhabit an imaginary cosmos, different from his actual habitation in the world. Once he is completely awake, habit is restored. Like the children in the bedtime stories who ultimately fall asleep peacefully in their familiar beds once their nocturnal adventures have come to a close, Marcel also finds himself back in his familiar bedroom. In the dark, his “good angel of certainty” (15) has restored the dresser, the desk, the fireplace, the window, and the doors to their designated places. The haunting that, in the liminal moment of awakening, had brought him a vision of the bedrooms of times past, not as clearly distinct images but as a possible presence, has now ceased. Yet waking up in the middle of the night has set his memory in motion. Rather than go back to sleep, Marcel spends the larger part of the time till dawn consciously turning his thoughts to his former life. He remains mounted on the night, writing his insomnia.
A SPACE FOR PHILOSOPHY
Before turning first to Lady Macbeth, Shakespeare’s dramatic sleepwalker, and then to Emily Brontë’s
Wuthering Heights so as to explore a specifically gothic sensibility of insomnia, it is fruitful to look at the way philosophers have regarded the subject’s refusal to sleep as an existential experience. In contrast to the texts discussed so far, in which nocturnal events were treated as hallucinations in the real, forgotten, or remembered only in fragments upon awakening, insomnia offers knowledge of a different kind. Rather than addressing in ciphered form psychic materials that can only pass the waking conscience’s censorship owing to the disfiguration the language of dreams affords, the visions that come to the insomniac who remains vigilant in the middle of the night move beyond categories of the everyday. They open out to an encounter with what Hegel calls the night of the world in which the self reaches the navel of all coherent self-conceptions, where it has insight into its own unfathomability. Insomnia, calling forth a state of psychic tarrying, transforms the time between dusk and dawn into a poignant nocturnal countersite to the logic of the ordinary everyday. Remaining awake because sleep will not come, or suddenly awakening from sleep, insomniacs inhabit a different night than those who dream or wander about under the cover of darkness. They desperately wait for that sleep from which they hope to receive an invigorating peace, or for the break of day with its busy distractions. Yet they know that neither will be arriving soon. Instead, they are compelled to endure a state of body and mind that severs them from the consciousness of the day, even while making it impossible to work through psychic residues of the past day at that other scene, the unconscious, because they are not able to dream. The French term
nuit blanche indicates that insomnia pertains to an experience of liminality, the psychic inhabitation of a site between sleeping and waking that is still to be filled with definite meaning. As shown for Proust’s narrator, the darkness of the bedroom in which the insomniac must orient him or herself is illuminated. Yet this real dark is so entirely focused on the insomniac that the sleeping world enveloping the one who has remained vigilant appears to be illuminated by a radically subjective spirit. The
nuit blanche allows the insomniac to detect shapes and figures. It is ruled by the power of memory and creativity but also by those phantoms of the past, which the insomniac calls back to his nocturnal vigilant mind.
Insomnia offers a psychic state and stage for an encounter with one’s most intimate desires and anxieties. Like the work of dreams, it has recourse to coded language even though the one who remains vigilant in the dark is not protected by sleep. Instead, the insomniac finds him or herself consciously encountering the psychic material which, having been forgotten or repressed during the day, insists on being heard at night. According to J.-B. Pontalis, insomnia brings together two different logics. Like Proust’s narrator, the insomniac imagines curious things, confusing all kinds of issues. He or she fabricates relations between objects and events that are in fact unrelated, and valorizes insignificant issues. Nevertheless, the insomniac remains attached to the laws of the rational mind. The fact that he or she may not be seeking sleep and the satisfaction of dreaming this affords indicates a different desire. The insomniac yearns for precisely the distance that the nuit blanche offers to diurnal consciousness and to nocturnal unconsciousness. Either the worries of the day preclude an immersion in sleep’s tranquility or the insomniac seeks out a different knowledge than the one available in dreams. To be suspended between waking and sleeping can be agonizing or pleasurable in any case; however, it sharpens the attentiveness of the senses.
Although the bustle of the day and the presence of others serve as distractions, insomnia, based as it is on an increased sense of solitude, encourages a higher degree of concentration regarding the passage of time and the intensity of the inhabited room. We are alone with our thoughts and our bodily experiences, cut off from all the others who are sleeping nearby. Exposed and vulnerable, abandoned to silent darkness, we recognize our singularity. We are completely at one with a nocturnal world that does not intervene in the confrontation with our inner spirits. “The West draws one of its fundamental boundary lines,” according to Foucault, “in waking before the day, in the night vigil that sustains light in the middle of the night and against the sleep of others. It performs a division which begs the question (that leaves a space for philosophy): what does it mean ‘to appear?’” (41). As though seeking to redress this elision, Foucault draws attention to the type of thought and language that withdraws from the primacy of an enlightened reason so as to move in the direction of the night from which it initially emerged. Such nocturnal thinking seeks to explore a scene of philosophy in which our eyes are open, our hearing alert, our spirit attentive, and our words ready for a mobilization that is as yet uncertain, even while drawing its strength from the certainty that the morning is still a long way off.
Embellishing the period that is
not yet morning even while anticipating dawn, the night vigil allows only for a movement that leads the one who has remained awake back to himself or herself. The division that brings with it a spiritual illumination in the middle of the night also encourages a pure existence in the present that is
not yet directed toward working through this knowledge, acting upon, or dominating it. The solitude the insomniac experiences in the middle of the night promotes a conversation with the self and brings with it an intimacy, because the silent darkness surrounding the night vigil offers no distraction. A sense of being fully in harmony with oneself is pitted against the sense of no longer existing. Because the insomniac’s passage into his or her own nonexistence seems to be only a minimal step further, he or she also has a heightened awareness of the transience of the everyday world. Insomnia draws attention to the threshold between ordinary diurnal thinking and nocturnal recognition relentlessly focused on the nothingness subtending all earthly existence. Although human consciousness is forced to accept death as a reality, the person who has fallen asleep can dispose of this certainty, at least for the duration of his sleep. He can even extend the life of a deceased child, if we recall the mourning father in Freud’s
Interpretation of Dreams. Yet even though dreams may be essential as protectors of life, they do not enrich our thinking, not least of all because the knowledge gained is only partially retrieved upon waking.
By contrast, insomnia gives depth to diurnal thinking by allowing precisely the unfathomability to appear that the dream work jettisons off, producing a navel to mark this unplumbable spot. Although sleep distracts from the abyss of nonexistence, because the unconscious does not know death, insomnia allows the boundary of earthly existence to appear. To awaken in the middle of the night does not mean waking up from a dream (as Hermia does in the middle of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream). Instead, the night vigil entails relinquishing the psychic protection from an acknowledgment of human mortality that the dream affords the sleeper. Insomnia consists in allowing oneself to be consciously moved by repressed psychic materials, which in the work of dreams only find a disfigured representation and that can only be recalled as memory traces upon waking. Like the dream, a resistance to sleep must invariably satisfy a desire. In the case of the night vigil, however, at issue is a wish fulfillment that is more important to the psychic well-being of the insomniac than all bodily rest. Does insomnia serve as protection from a deathlike immersion into a state of unconsciousness, even if the dream sleep protects is death-defying? Or is it something else, as Paul Valéry notes in his Diary, that prevents one from falling asleep? An impulse that refuses to be silenced, whose voice will not be extinguished, brought to an end or relinquished.
Whenever we wake up in the morning from a good night’s rest, we have the impression that a new day is about to begin. Sleep has interrupted our experience of the phenomenological shift from day to night and back to day. Our conscious self has been able to use the opportunity sleep affords to withdraw from the concerns of the day, its watchman asleep along with our body. However, when we wake up in the middle of the night, we experience the transition between day into night as a permeable and interminable threshold. Awaking in the middle of the night, we approach a state of anonymous vigilance that Emmanuel Lévinas equates with an insight into the necessity of pure existence, which he calls “there is” (
il y a). Nocturnal vigilance reveals the unbearable weight of existence, which, emerging from an interminable eternity of being, also confirms the necessity of returning to death as the origin of human life. Remaining awake at night, the insomniac not only anticipates the dawn of a new day, but also the equally inevitable destruction of each singular human existence. Sleep allows us to withdraw from the vigilance of this “there is.” By the same token, the return of our everyday consciousness upon awakening serves to protect psychic health, even if this is based on repression. It provides a caesura to the precarious insight into the fragility of existence to which the insomniac was privy. For this reason, Lévinas understands both sleeping and awakening as strategies that help screen out a conscious recognition of the non-being that is the vanishing point of all human existence. Nocturnal vigilance, in turn, gives voice to that desire that prefers to be haunted by the phantoms of the past, that forbids one to deny the mortality one can simply not fail to acknowledge.
LADY MACBETH’S NIGHT VIGIL
Sleepwalking offers a particularly vivid dramatization of the night vigil, blurring the boundary between intimacy and public display, transforming intimacy into an external self-expression. The sleepwalker explicitly uses the night as a stage for the performance of a haunting by inner demons, pitting this embodied revelation against the sleep of others. Rather than slumbering quietly in her bed, the somnambulant Lady Macbeth walks along the dark corridors of her castle at night and uses her body to give voice to a guilt that she can neither publicly confess nor exclusively keep to herself in the private world of her dreams. Her doctor calls the condition tormenting his queen a “great perturbation in nature,” which permits her “to receive at once the benefit of sleep and do the effects of watching” (5.1.8–9). With her eyes open and yet directed solely to her inner psychic theater, Lady Macbeth puts on display for him and her waiting-gentlewoman a gruesome vigilance. Since her husband’s return to the field of war, she performs for these two confidantes a nocturnal spectacle in which she tries vainly to wash the blood from her hands, drawing oblique attention to the murders that prevent peaceful sleep. As embodied memory traces, the imagined bloodstains on her hands offer up a fragmentary reconstruction of the terrible crimes for which she was in part responsible.
She betrays her own treachery with this performance, and indeed, the waiting-gentlewoman asserts, “she has spoken what she should not, I am sure of that” (5.1.39–40). Lady Macbeth’s resistance to sleep, which drives her toward the dramatic performance of her psychic suspension between dreaming and everyday consciousness, can be taken a step further. The overwhelming desire for power that compelled her to commit murder now also seeks to disturb the sleep of others, so as to transfer her anxiety-riddled guilt onto them. Although the doctor is convinced that “infected minds to their deaf pillows will confide their secrets” (5.1.62–63), he admits in the same breath: “My mind she has mated / and amazed my sight” (5.1.66). Precisely because her sleeping thoughts have no audience, Lady Macbeth must wander at night, although fast asleep, if she is to share her terrible deed with others. However, this brief nocturnal appearance also dramaturgically underscores her own psychic vigilance. Neither numbed by sleep nor distracted by the censorship of her diurnal consciousness, her performance demonstrates her awareness of the irrevocable nature of her deeds. Since the murder of King Duncan, she has been claiming to her husband: “What is done cannot be undone.” When, at the end of her somnambulant scene she sends an invisible addressee “to bed, to bed, to bed” she gives voice to two distinct things: She has come to recognize the transience of her vain ambition to be queen and will no longer appear on stage after this scene. She has also, however, taken hold of her doctor’s mind and sight. She is sending him off to bed, in which her ambiguous night vigil will continue to haunt him. For all we know, the play we are watching might be nothing other than a dramatic reshaping of the fragments of a nightmare to which her performance of insomnia gave rise.
WRITING THAT APPEARS IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT
Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth, who wakes up in the middle of the night and with her own body performs the dramatic consequences of her hunger for power, is an example of how insomnia can take on a privileged position regarding textual production. Writing also requires a distance from the ordinary everyday; a willingness to pass over the threshold that leads from a material being in the world into the immaterial existence of pure language. If sleeping means forgetting the night and withdrawing from the powerful depth and the ominous insight it affords, insomnia, according to Lévinas, expresses the desire for an escape from the fixed position one assumes while sleeping. The insomniac is not simply trying to stay awake at night. His or her vigilance makes the night present in all its troubling unfathomability. By refusing to remain in the position of security that sleep promises, the insomniac approaches a suspension of space and time, an absence from the self, an immersion in the infinite. He or she is willing to engage with the night as a pure, perpetual, but also impersonal existence.
This vigilance without purpose also represents an awakening to the radical alterity of the other. It robs one of peaceful slumber, forcing one to take notice of the voice of the unconscious or another person who has taken possession of one’s desires. If the insomniac has turned his or her attention to the unbounded infinity of spiritual existence and is thus indifferent to the ordinary everyday, his or her nocturnal vigilance can also include a responsibility for the other. As Lady Macbeth’s somnambulant performance suggests, allowing what lies beyond the ordinary to appear in the middle of the night may involve a scene of transference. The acknowledgment of traumatic knowledge, from which both the sleeper and diurnal conscience recedes (whether the recognition of the violence of one’s desire, the irrevocable death of a beloved, or the irreversibility of one’s guilt) is passed on to those who share a scene of illumination in the middle of the night and against the sleep of others. The reading of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) with which this chapter closes explores two different tangents at issue in the insomniac’s radical self-exposure to the nothingness at the origin and end of being. Bringing an inner depth to light so as to affect the vision and mind of an external other is tantamount to an unconditional laying bare of human existence. The vanishing point of this revelation may be death or the emergence of a literary text, or both, thereby drawing attention to their mutual implication.
In Brontë’s novel, insomnia sets the stage for all the nocturnal confusions that take place throughout the novel, even while serving as trope for the state of mind haunting both the tragic hero Heathcliff and the different narrators of the text. On a cold late autumn afternoon, Lockwood, the new tenant of Thrushcross Grange, wanders across the foggy heath to Wuthering Heights, seeking the conversation of the man who owns both estates. The recluse Heathcliff is anything but happy about this visit. He rules imperiously over his stepdaughter Cathy and her cousin Hareton, the son of the former owner Hindley Earnshaw. Because it has gotten dark faster than he had expected, Lockwood is forced to spend the night at his inhospitable neighbor’s house. The servant Zillah takes pity on him and leads him into a garret room without letting her master know about it. There Lockwood finds an old-fashioned couch into which, by sliding back its side panels, he can climb as though it were a closet and seal himself off from the outside world. After having placed his candle on the window ledge at its extreme end—a piece of wood that had also served as a writing surface—he discovers that the first name of the former inhabitant of this bed, Catherine, has been carved into the makeshift table along with various surnames.
While gazing at the lettering of this name he falls asleep, only to wake up again a few minutes later under the impression that “a glare of white letters started from the dark, as vivid as spectres” (17). The air seems to teem with the name of Catherine, until he realizes that his candle has fallen on one of the books and that flames have already begun to attack its leather binding. In the middle of the night, Lockwood begins to read the books that had been abandoned on the windowsill, attracted by the fact that the young Catherine had misused all the empty white spaces on the pages of her limited library to keep a diary. Once again he falls asleep while gazing at the handwriting of this mysterious woman. In his dreams, the stories he has read take on a life of their own. Having once more woken up, he again immediately falls asleep, only now he begins to dream about himself in his strange bed. At first it seems to him that a branch is beating against his window. Reaching out of the window to grab it, he notices that he is instead holding the ice-cold fingers of a girl. Not yet having rid himself of the impression of his nocturnal reading, he is convinced that he recognizes the young Catherine Linton, exclaiming: “I’m come home, I’d lost my way on the moor!” (23).
Overtaken by a terrible fear, he initially tries to shut out the spectral figure. However, the loud scream he utters to put an end to this haunting brings Heathcliff to his door. After Lockwood tells him about the nocturnal visitor, his host orders him to leave the bedroom and wait for dawn downstairs. Overcome by intense passion, Heathcliff throws himself on the bed, tears open the window, and in vain calls out to the night wanderer, begging her tearfully to return to him. At the first light of dawn, Lockwood departs from this site of haunting. Unsettled by the strange events of the previous night, he asks his housekeeper, Nelly Dean, to give him an explanation for what transpired at the other manor house. It is evening and he confesses it is not customary for him to go to bed at an early hour. In a twofold sense, the night vigil in
Wuthering Heights thus proves the stage upon which spectral writing can appear. On the previous night, the letters of a woman’s name had emerged from the dark like a white glare, confronting Lockwood so as to haunt him in his waking daydreams with their spectral embodiment. In response to this uncanny event, he now wishes to be kept awake (as though fearing sleep) by being told the story of this night wanderer. Nelly Dean is called upon to create a meaningful narrative order out of the spiritual confusion that overcame him at night in the bed of the deceased Catherine.
The fact that the housekeeper almost exclusively narrates her story at night and resuscitates with her words the spectral figure who disturbed Lockwood’s sleep at Wuthering Heights suggests that he wants to be haunted. Lockwood hopes that the story told by candlelight will shed light on the life of the woman who once inhabited both manor houses. Having received from Nelly Dean the entire history of his neighbor’s family, he will later take up the story and continue as the narrator of the novel. The fact that he does so by imitating her voice and mode of storytelling suggests the degree to which Lockwood has himself internalized this narrative, and with it the specters it has brought forth from the dead. Given that he is the one who commits this ghost story to paper, he now finds himself cast in the depth of a night of writing. The act of narration is meant to screen out the nocturnal threat he experienced at the appearance of Catherine’s glaring white spectral figure while sleeping at Wuthering Heights because it transforms the unknown into a meaningful narrative order. Yet by transcribing what Nelly Dean has told him, he shows precisely that he does not want to avoid the night. The story that he, like Shakespeare’s poet, assigns a fixed place to by shaping it into letters he writes on paper, primarily takes place at night. It tells of dark passions and psychic nocturnality, sustaining the unfathomable vast depth of night.
Born out of Lockwood’s awakening in the middle of the night, his desire for a story resuscitates the phantom of a dead woman who now no longer merely haunts Heathcliff and Nelly, but him as well. His transcription of what Nelly Dean has told him in the manner of a bedtime story precludes precisely the tranquility that the naming of the unknown promises. Instead, it makes present again all the other dead who were part of Catherine’s fate as well. One might fruitfully read Brontë’s novel as a spectral transcription of Shakespeare’s
Romeo and Juliet, given its focus on the strife between two houses and the fateful love of their children who can only be united eternally in death. One evening, Catherine’s father, the former landlord of Wuthering Heights, brings home with him a black-haired boy from one of his trips abroad. Heathcliff soon becomes Catherine’s closest ally and her brother’s archenemy. When the elder Earnshaw passes away, this brother, Hindley, inherits the estate, and soon brings home with him a wife who gives birth to their son Hareton. At this time, Hindley also chooses to degrade his foster-brother to the status of a servant; Catherine is Heathcliff’s sole protector.
The separation of their union, which almost results in the destruction of the entire Earnshaw family, begins when Heathcliff and Catherine decide to pay a visit to Thrushcross Grange, the neighboring estate. They want to see how the inhabitants of this manor house spend their Sunday evening. Because they have come uninvited, Catherine is attacked by the family’s dog and is thus forced to stay with the Lintons for several weeks until her wound has healed. In the meantime Hindley forbids Heathcliff to be inside their house at Wuthering Heights, so upon her return home, Catherine may visit her former friend only at night. She realizes that an ordinary life with Heathcliff is impossible, and for this reason allows Edgar Linton to court her. She ultimately accepts his marriage proposal; however, the following night she tells Nelly Dean (who at the time is almost the same age as she) about a dream. This account serves as a catalyst for the chain of hauntings that many years later will take possession of Lockwood as well. She describes how, in her dream, she found herself in heaven, yet she yearns so passionately for her home on earth that the infuriated angels fling her out. Though her fall recalls Lucifer’s, she finds herself waking up in the middle of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights, sobbing for joy. Her marriage with Edgar, she explains, will make her as unhappy as the kingdom of heaven did in her dream. Yet she has no other choice because marrying Heathcliff, who has been brought so low by her brother, would be tantamount to public disgrace.
Catherine does not, however, intend for her marriage to another man to disrupt her intimate connection with Heathcliff. She compares her love for Edgar with the foliage in the woods. Seeing it as part of the inevitable transformation of everyday life, she says of this love: “Time will change it … as winter changes the trees.” Her love for Heathcliff, by contrast, is comparable to a hidden, permanent spot lying beyond all temporal progression of days and seasons. It “resembles the eternal rocks beneath—a source of little visible delight, but necessary.” Because in spirit Heathcliff is always with her and she thus believes herself to be identical with him, she can claim: “I
am Heathcliff—he’s always in my mind.” This dark side of her love cannot be excluded from her everyday existence as Mrs. Linton. Instead, the marriage of the two houses, Earnshaw and Linton, remains invariably inscribed by Catherine’s indestructible passion for the dark orphan. Like Juliet regarding Romeo, she is the same as Heathcliff in dignity, even if not in social status. She breaks off her confession to Nelly by forbidding her to ever “talk of our separation again—it is impracticable” (82). Unbeknown to her (although her confidante is sensible of his presence), Heathcliff has overheard their conversation. At the point at which Catherine asserts that a marriage to him would degrade her, he noiselessly steals from the room, unwilling to hear more. Although Catherine remains awake the entire night, waiting in vain for him to return, he has long since left the country and will only return several years later.
In contrast to Shakespeare’s tragedy, Catherine is able to return to the nocturnal aspect of human existence that she had come to experience in her love for Heathcliff only after the diurnality of her marriage with Edgar initially wins the day. As though the sleeping potion had not actually done the trick and Juliet had been compelled to marry Paris the next morning, Catherine soon awakens from the delirium she fell into after realizing that Heathcliff has abandoned her and accepts her life as Mrs. Linton at Thrushcross Grange. Then, wholly unexpected, Heathcliff returns to her one evening, just as he had initially come out of the dark when her father had brought him home many years earlier. Illuminated by candlelight, his appearance, as Nelly Dean immediately notes, is transformed. All signs of his previous degradation have been eradicated. During the encounters that follow regularly in the evening, Catherine seeks to assert her spiritual bond with Heathcliff against her marital obligations toward Edgar. After Edgar throws his competitor out of his home because of a vicious dispute, she falls prey to a brain fever. Catherine locks herself into her room and remains awake for three nights, haunted by her anger at the two men who, with their rivalry, have frustrated the happiness for which she had hoped. Her insomnia compels her to experience the terrible burden of her existence as an unbearable awakening.
She describes to Nelly Dean, who visits her mistress on the fourth night, how she woke up from the coma she had immediately fallen into at the onset of her fever attack. By that time dawn had broken, and because she had not yet fully recovered her spatial orientation, she thought she was back again in her old bedroom at Wuthering Heights. In an effort to explain to herself why, upon waking up, she had been overcome by an intense sense of sadness, the past seven years seemed to have been extinguished from her mind. Instead, she found herself transported back to the moment in her childhood when she had woken up alone in her bed for the first time because, after her father’s death, Hindley had forcefully separated her from Heathcliff. Her current experience of being utterly exposed to the bare core of her existence is sustained by this memory image because it marks the primal scene for all subsequent experiences of abandonment. Waking up alone in the dark is a trope for the insurmountable solitude of all human existence, even while it also speaks to her willingness to embrace the state of nonexistence figured as an eternal night of death. Then suddenly, as she explains to Nelly, she becomes aware of her current situation, as though “at twelve years old, I had been wrenched from the Heights, and every early association, and my all in all, as Heathcliff was at that time, and been converted, at a stroke, into Mrs. Linton, the lady of Thrushcross Grange; an exile, and outcast, thenceforth, from what had been my world” (125). Reorienting herself in her current life is poignantly compared to groveling in an abyss.
Compelled like Juliet to recognize that her nocturnal love for Heathcliff cannot be sustained in tandem with her everyday marriage to Edgar Linton, she can only remain in a state of psychic nocturnality. This fourth night of her fever is moonless and the world outside her window covered in misty darkness, and yet her vigilance calls forth a luminance in the dark, severed from the reality of any actual experience of this night. Although all the lights at Wuthering Heights have long been extinguished, she believes she is able to see a candle burning in her former bedroom. This spectral vision introduces the haunting that will serve as an answer to the solitary awakening of her fever-induced insomnia. In her mind, she sees herself buried in the cemetery and calls for Heathcliff to come: “I’ll not lie there by myself; they may bury me twelve feet deep … but I won’t rest till you are with me” (126). Heathcliff will respond to her challenge. The night her delirium set in, he eloped with Edgar’s sister Isabella so as to further his demonic plan of taking possession of
both houses. When he returns, he finds Catherine in the final days of her pregnancy and consistently stalks Thrushcross Grange night after night until she consents to see him one last time. Now they can finally forgive each other because, with her dying body, Catherine gives voice to the existential pain their separation has meant to both of them.
She will not reawaken from the nocturnal bliss of their final embrace. Half-conscious, she gives birth to her daughter Cathy at midnight, only to die two hours later. Heathcliff, in turn, enters a state of constant vigilance, in which he abandons himself utterly to being haunted by her ghost. In desperation, he calls out to the deceased, “Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest, as long as I am living! You said I killed you—haunt me then! . . . Be with me always—take any form—drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! . . . I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul” (167). Neither the tranquility of sleep nor any business interests during the day are to shield him from her spectral presence. He does everything to destroy both the Earnshaw and the Linton families. Beating Hindley in a game of cards, he takes possession of his manor house along with his entire estate. After Hindley’s death he casts his legitimate heir, Hareton, into the same state of intellectual depravity he had been forced to suffer as a boy. He also uses the imminent death of Edgar Linton to arrange a marriage between his son with Isabella and Catherine’s daughter. Once the sickly boy, Linton, dies shortly after his wedding to Cathy, Heathcliff has achieved his goal. As father of the deceased he has finally inherited Thrushcross Grange and is in possession of both houses.
Yet his mourning progressively distances him from all earthly interests, thrusting him instead into a state of aimless perpetual vigilance. In contrast to Lockwood, whose sleep is not disturbed by the stories Nelly Dean tells him to shorten his nights, Heathcliff’s sustained insomnia not only allows him to recognize his indissoluble bond with Catherine; it also allows him to conceive this state of an acknowledged haunting by the deceased as a living hell. On the night Catherine was buried, he dug up her coffin and through the panels felt the presence of her body in the dark. From that moment on, he becomes the willing participant in a spectral scene of torture, exposing himself to the night of impersonal existence. He convinces himself that he can feel Catherine everywhere, almost catching sight of her but never fully apprehending her. Whenever he opens his eyes, whether at night on the heath or in her former bedroom, he believes for a brief moment that he is actually seeing her. Then the self-induced phantasmagoria fades again. With his spiritual and bodily night wandering he wants precisely not to avoid the night, because embracing it during his sustained insomnia is tantamount to reuniting with his dead beloved. In the abyss that these hellish nights represent for him, he seeks above all a reawakening to her.
At Edgar Linton’s funeral, he persuades the gravedigger to open Catherine’s grave and, after shoveling away some of the earth, to remove the panel of her coffin on the side that does not border on that of her husband’s. When he dies, he wants his coffin to be placed next to this opening, to secure in their shared grave the union that was not possible in their lifetime. The sight of her corpse offers relief because it gives substance to the spectral image he has been pursuing for so many years. “I was tranquil,” he confesses to Nelly Dean. “I dreamt I was sleeping the last sleep, by that sleeper, with my heart stopped, and my cheek frozen against hers” (289). His entire existence is now located in a spiritual night, in his responsibility toward the deceased woman whose challenge of haunting he has accepted. Shortly before his own death, he confesses to Nelly Dean, “I get levers and mattocks to demolish the two houses . . . and when everything is ready, and in my power, I find the will to lift a slate off either roof has vanished! . . . I have lost the faculty of enjoying their destruction” (323). His entire world is now nothing more than a reflection of Catherine’s image, which he encounters everywhere; his entire existence is ruled exclusively by a desire for self-expenditure, in anticipation of the eternal night of death he will share with her.
Unlike Shakespeare’s tragedy, Emily Brontë’s novel does not end in a gloomy morning and the spectacle of a double corpse. With the marriage between Hareton Earnshaw and Cathy Linton, the two houses are happily united in the prospect of a joint future. Lockwood, who happens to stop by Wuthering Heights while vacationing in the vicinity some time later, discovers from Nelly Dean that after their marriage the two survivors of the tragic drama of their parents will be moving permanently to Thrushcross Grange. And yet, in the final pages of
Wuthering Heights, several paths lead back into the night. Lockwood furtively gazes at the two young lovers who had been enjoying their evening walk while he had been in conversation with Nelly Dean. Having returned, they pause on the threshold of their home, looking at the moon, “or, more correctly, at each other, by her light” (337) before seeking the protection sleep affords for their dreams, but also from the night. At the sight of their romantic bliss, Lockwood, in turn, flees into the night. Nelly Dean had admitted that a shepherd boy had told her that he thought he had seen Heathcliff and a woman wandering on the nocturnal heath. Although she is convinced that the dead have found their peace, she prefers not to be out alone after dark. Nevertheless, Lockwood, who continues to suffer from insomnia, prolongs his journey home. He seeks out the gravesite of the three deceased characters she had told him about and tarries there under a peaceful night sky. He wonders “how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth” (338). Now he is the one to cultivate a nocturnal vigilance. Significantly, it is not to his deaf pillows that he commits his thoughts about those sleeping in that quiet earth, but in the words he puts to paper, there giving them a form and a habitation. His slumber is now troubled.
