Introduction

The first thing you will notice about Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights—right after you’ve noticed that two characters share a name (Catherine), two have first names that sound like surnames (Hareton and Hindley), and two have names that are used both as last names and as first names (Edgar Linton and Linton Heathcliff), thereby creating a confusion in the reader’s mind—is that it is like no other novel ever written. It reads like the work of someone who had direct access to her unconscious—or, as the New Agers might put it, was able to “channel” her unconscious. Perhaps the most striking triumph of the novel is that although it is a very particular fever dream concocted by one very specific and overheated imagination, it manages somehow to take over and become your own fever dream (which is, in essence, what happens with all great novels), the exact contents of which are hard to recall once you wake up. Should you chance to read it a second or third time, Wuthering Heights comes at you afresh, in part because the novel seems to vanish into its own delirious origins once you’ve finished it, leaving no footprints, and in part because it is a literary force of nature such as you’ve never encountered before. Whether this quality of being intractably unlike other novels—although various influences, especially that of the writer Sir Walter Scott and the Romantic poets (particularly Byron), have been teased out by diligent scholars as well as wildly imaginative critics—is a good or a bad thing is a puzzle that continues to engage the novel’s readers every bit as much as when it was first published in 1847, causing, with a few exceptions, consternation and outright hostility among Victorian readers.

Emily Brontë was twenty-seven at the time she wrote Wuthering Heights. She was the second and least worldly of a triumvirate of immensely gifted writing sisters who had managed to overcome the vicissitudes of their childhood to burst forth, seemingly out of nowhere, with powerful and entirely unconventional works of the imagination. Misfortune lurked in every nook and cranny of the family history: The sisters’ mother died when the oldest, Charlotte, was five, and within the next four years, two elder sisters had died as well, at the ages of eleven and ten, as a result of the miserable conditions at a boarding school that would later be immortalized as the horrifying Lowood School in Jane Eyre. Patrick Brontë, the girls’ father, was the curate of Haworth, a remote Yorkshire village, and his four remaining children, who included a son, Branwell, grew up under strikingly isolated circumstances. Cut off from the local goings on by virtue of their not entirely secure social class (Patrick, who attended Cambridge on a scholarship, had risen from humble Irish stock) and looked after by a spinster aunt and a housekeeper named Tabby, they were thrown mostly on their own company. (Although Patrick may not have been quite the deranged character he was made out to be until fairly recently, when his image was refurbished in Juliet Barker’s exhaustively researched 1994 biography, The Brontës, he was undeniably on the peculiar side—preferring, among other habits, to take his meals alone.) The siblings entertained themselves by creating, in minuscule script on tiny scraps of paper, elaborate fantasy worlds, the most enduring of which were Angria and Gondal. Emily continued to be intensely engaged by Gondal well into adulthood, and the origins of her and her sisters’ literary gifts are clearly to be found in their juvenilia.

Charlotte, whose Jane Eyre appeared the same year as both Emily’s Wuthering Heights and Anne’s Agnes Grey, was the oldest and most enterprising of the three. She virtually dragged her younger sisters out of their cloistered existence—the parsonage in which they lived fronted on a graveyard and looked out in back on the Yorkshire moors—into the light of print by dint of her tireless efforts to get their books published. It is difficult from the vantage point of today to envision the kind of perseverance it took for the sisters to continue with their scribblings in a house where writing, as one Brontë scholar has pointed out, was “very much a male domain” (Alexander, The Early Writings of Charlotte Brontë, p. 227; see “For Further Reading”). It is equally hard to imagine the kind of resistance Charlotte faced in trying to get a reading for her and her sisters’ work. Victorian England in the middle of the nineteenth century was high handedly patriarchal, harboring deep, even irrational, misgivings about female creativity and self-assertion; and not the least remarkable aspect of the Brontë story is that Charlotte persisted in spite of her own anguished doubts and daunting rejections. (Among other people who had advised her against pursuing writing was the poet laureate Robert Southey, to whom she sent some of her poems while she was teaching at a boarding school. Although he conceded that she had “the faculty of Verse,” Southey saw fit to admonish her: “Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life: & it ought not to be.”)

All three sisters published their novels under pseudonyms—they took the intentionally masculine-sounding names of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell—and when Wuthering Heights was republished in 1850 under its author’s real name, Emily was already dead. She had died at the age of thirty, less than three months after her younger brother, Branwell, who had once been considered the family genius, died from drugs and drink. The cause of her death was officially given as consumption, but it is clear to any reader of Emily’s biography that it was a form of passive suicide—that she had helped her end along by willing herself into the next world she so devoutly believed in, frequently exalted, and finally welcomed. Emily steadfastly refused medical care until she finally gave in to her two sisters’ pleas on what turned out to be the last day of her life. The doctor arrived at two in the afternoon after she had already, as Charlotte described it in a letter to her close friend Ellen Nussey, “turned her dying eyes from the pleasant sun” (Frank, A Chainless Soul: A Life of Emily Brontë, p. 261). The death-embracing side of Emily is discernible in her only novel, but it is even clearer in the poems she wrote, in one of which she characterizes life as “a labour, void and brief.”

It was Charlotte who suggested to her own publishers—she had by now “come out” to them as the celebrated author of Jane Eyre—that Wuthering Heights deserved to be reprinted and, as an added inducement, proposed to edit this second edition herself. As part of her program to render both herself and her sister more acceptably modest in spirit and less bold in thought than their fiction might otherwise suggest, Charlotte endeavored to make Emily’s novel more accessible by downplaying its stylistic oddities—standardizing her sister’s idiosyncratic punctuation and abrupt cadences. This second edition also came with a curiously apologetic preface that, advertently or not, paved the way for many apologetic interpretations to come. In it, Charlotte addressed the novel’s many critics by insisting on the untutored quality of her sister’s literary genius (Emily, like Charlotte, was in fact unusually well-educated) while at the same time admitting to her own consternation about the author’s impulses: “Whether it is right or advisable,” Charlotte wrote, “to create beings like Heathcliff, I do not know: I scarcely think it is.” She also appended a biographical note explaining to the reading public that she and her two younger sisters, Emily and Anne, were the authors, respectively, of Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and Agnes Grey.

More than 150 years and many cultural upheavals later, Emily Brontë’s novel remains almost blindingly original, undimmed in its power to convey the destructive potential of thwarted passion as expressed through the unappeasable fury of a rejected lover. To paraphrase Shakespeare, age cannot wither it, nor custom stale its infinite variety. Every aspect of the novel—whether it be the writer’s expert grasp of the laws pertaining to land and personal property, her meticulous rendering of local dialect, or her use of multiple narrators—has been put under microscopic study. And yet, despite the shelf after shelf of books that have been written in the attempt to understand the frail yet flinty-willed young woman—“the sphinx of literature,” as she was called by Angus M. Mackay in The Brontës: Fact and Fiction (1897)—who wrote it, as well as the tragedy-struck, remarkably talented family from which she came, Wuthering Heights still presents a dark and fierce view of the world that is seemingly without precedent.

The book’s autobiographical components aroused interest from the start, especially given the original mystery surrounding its authorship. Lucasta Miller, in The Brontë Myth, gives an often spellbinding account of the ways in which the Brontës’ “lonely moorland lives” (p. xi) lent themselves to the process of mythification even before the last sister had died. (None of them lived to see forty: Anne died within five months of Emily, at the age of twenty-nine, and Charlotte, the only one of the sisters to marry, was in the early months of pregnancy at the time of her death, at the age of thirty-nine.) But unlike Charlotte, who lived long enough to help shape the myth that would grow up around the Brontës, beginning with Elizabeth Gaskell’s landmark Life of Charlotte Brontë, which appeared in 1857 and for which she was the primary source, Emily wasn’t around to answer for herself. “All of Emily’s biographers have had to cope with the absences surrounding her,” Miller notes (p. 193). The baroque conjectures concerning her character were first introduced by Gaskell’s Life, which included scenes that had Emily pummeling her disobedient bulldog into submission with her bare hands and dramatically cauterizing a bite from a strange dog with a red-hot kitchen iron. Gaskell’s two-dimensional portrait of Emily as kind of savage force of nature, “a remnant of the Titans,—great-grand-daughter of the giants who used to inhabit earth,” held sway for decades, drawing admirers like the poet Algernon Charles Swinburne, whose own provocative impulses (which included a well-documented sadomasochistic bent) were stirred by the novel’s almost pagan quality, its disregard for bourgeois niceties.

The efforts to penetrate Emily’s veils grew even more overheated in the wake of Freud, just as the textual analyses would become more and more exotic in the trail of the new French theories of narrative propounded by Derrida and Foucault. One 1936 biographer, who featured herself as having paid “especial and respectful” attention to primary sources, misread the title of one of Emily’s manuscript poems as “Louis Parensell” instead of “Love’s Farewell” in her zeal to bring new light on a hypothesized lost lover, and then went on to unearth another dark secret, proposing that Emily had been “a member of that beset band of women who can find their pleasure only in women” (Moore, The Life and Eager Death of Emily Brontë). There were discussions as to how genuinely close Emily had been to her sisters Charlotte and Anne, or whether she in fact resented the older one and patronized the younger. Was she a domestic slouch, oblivious to all except her febrile imaginings and the wind howling over the moors? Or was she in fact something of a fifties housewife type, sweeping the floors, ironing the linens, and baking bread while her chronically depressed father took his meals in his room and her brother, Branwell, drank himself to death in the Black Bull tavern? Was her consuming interest in food and what was being prepared for meals by Tabby, the housekeeper, as evidenced by the few diary entries that have come down to us, a sign of a robust immersion in daily life or a clue to something more disturbing? (In A Chainless Soul, Frank makes a plausible case for diagnosing Emily as suffering an anorexic’s death by starvation.)

Some of the more unrestrained speculations tended to focus on the elusive genesis of Wuthering Heights. Emily’s ill-fated brother, Branwell, who had been earmarked within the family for artistic glory (money was scraped together to send him to London to pursue his artistic interests) but died ignominiously at the age of thirty-one, a hostage to gin and opium, was at the center of the theories that swirled around the decades-long disputed authorship of Emily’s novel. The controversy began with an article, published in 1867 and written by an acquaintance of Branwell’s, himself an amateur poet, which claimed that the author had once read a manuscript of Branwell’s that contained a scene and characters similar to those of Wuthering Heights (Miller, p. 229). This controversy—or “great Brontë conspiracy theory,” as Miller describes it (p. 228)—was fueled largely by disbelief that a reserved young daughter of a rural clergyman could have written so volcanic a book, but also on the basis of Branwell’s having shown early literary promise as a coauthor of the Brontë children’s joint writing efforts, an all-consuming escapist pastime that Charlotte would later refer to as their “web of sunny air” (Frank, p. 57). It was quickly taken up by other of Branwell’s friends, and although it was eventually demolished in Irene Cooper Willis’s The Authorship of Wuthering Heights (1936), the idea has continued to intrigue scholars and biographers up until the present day.

But by far the most intense (and screwy) psychological scrutiny was reserved for the close relationship between Branwell and Emily. After Charlotte had given up on him as a bad egg, Emily continued to stand by her older brother, calming him down and getting him to bed during his drunken outbursts. This aspect of the Brontë family life led to speculations about a possible incestuous aspect to Branwell and Emily’s relationship, especially in regard to its being the model for the relationship between Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff. (One theory suggested that Heathcliff was in fact the bastard son of Mr. Earnshaw and thus Catherine’s half brother.) Of course, this theory clashed with yet another view that saw Branwell as doomed by his closet homosexuality, which may or may not have emerged during the period he spent as a live-in tutor to a young boy, Edward Robinson; his employment ended in disgrace after Branwell was dismissed with the threat of scandalous exposure if he tried to get in touch with any of the family. Branwell later retailed this scandal as an adulterous affair he was having with his pupil’s mother.

 

The story line of Wuthering Heights is, on the sheer linear level of narrative, full of twists and turns so complex and unlikely as to verge on the tiresomely baroque when it is not being merely confounding. Truth be told, it is hard to remember the novel’s actual sequence of events—the who, what, where, and when—even while in the midst of reading it, just as it is difficult to keep the various Catherines apart. (Early in the novel, when the eerie, otherworldly aspect of the story we are about to hear is made manifest, we are told that “the air swarmed with Catherines” (p. 20). The why of it is, in the first and last analysis, all that really interests the author, and eventually it becomes all that interests the reader. The why—the abiding dark force that is Heathcliff’s motivation—cannot be satisfactorily answered and leads instead to other whys, as whys usually do: Why can’t he let go of Cathy? Why doesn’t Cathy let go of him? And, most important: Why didn’t they go off together in the first place? Once one starts rooting around for reasons, the reasons never suffice, and one ends up frantically questioning everything. Everything swirls around this why; it is the vortex from which the novel erupts. This remains so in spite of the fact that Heathcliff’s consuming animus is fairly implausible from the start—as is Catherine Earnshaw’s equally consuming allegiance—and isn’t elaborated so much as it is asserted as a precondition that informs everything else.

Virginia Woolf, who was a great admirer of both Charlotte and Emily Brontë and whose first published piece was about a pilgrimage she made to Haworth to see the museum of Brontë relics that had been created not far from the parsonage in which the sisters grew up, wrote a perceptive essay comparing Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. In it she concedes that the latter novel requires more than the usual suspension of disbelief on the reader’s part and indicates the gratification to be had from doing so: “He [Heathcliff] is impossible we say, but nevertheless no boy in literature has a more vivid existence than his. So it is with the two Catherines; never could women feel as they do or act in their manner, we say. All the same, they are the most lovable women in English fiction.” (One doesn’t have to agree with Woolf’s verdicts on these characters—I, for instance, would not think of describing either Catherine as “lovable,” at least not in any recognizable sense of the word—to assent to her basic point that they are all cast from something other than lifelike material.)

Still, if one looks at Wuthering Heights from this perspective—the donnée, that is, of the novel’s own unreal reality (“The truth,” as one critic put it, “but not of this world”; see Muriel Spark’s and Derek Stanford’s Emily Brontë: Her Life and Work, p. 235), the plot begins to appear remarkably simple, even primitive. It is, after all, the age-old one of a soured romance, of childhood sweethearts who are foiled by the adult reality they grow into. Boy meets girl; boy falls in love with girl; boy loses girl. And then, if the boy in question happens to be Heathcliff with his “satanic nimbus,” as one writer described it (Spark, p. 255)—the romantic antihero par excellence, the one who sets the standard for all Demon Lovers to come—all hell breaks lose. Whoever stands in the way of this vengeful fellow gets either brutally thrust aside or broken in two. The two exceptions are the “vinegar-faced” servant, Joseph, and the shrewdly self-preserving housekeeper, Nelly Dean, who serves as a (possibly unreliable) narrator within a narrator and through whose eyes we see the grim and twisted—or as one Victorian critic put it, the “wild, confused, disjointed and improbable”—events of the story inexorably unfold (Frank, p. 237). Very little blood is spilled in the novel, but it is full of violent acts and even more violent feelings. And by contemporary standards, the book is modest to a fault, since everyone remains more or less dressed, though it is colored throughout by a kind of erotic hunger—propelled often as not by fury rather than love—that goes beyond the most relaxed of social conventions and the loosest of sexual proprieties.

It is undoubtedly this subliminal theme of unharnessed libid inal energy that alarmed the book’s readers—especially at the time of its original publication, when the pseudonyms of all three Brontë women only fueled speculation as to whether the writers were male or, as some suspected, female. There were reviewers who were willing to grant Wuthering Heights its “rugged power” in spite of its being “coarse” and “vulgar” and others who were content to find it perplexing without perforce issuing a summary opinion: “It is difficult to pronounce any decisive judgment on a work in which there is so much rude ability displayed yet in which there is so much to blame” (Frank, p. 237). Still others reacted with heated ambivalence in the form of radically conditional praise, as though they had been witness to a morally depraved spectacle that was all the more unsettling because its author was so obviously capable of writing about nicer things if he or she only cared to. These critics tended to sound unconsciously patronizing, like stalwart British nannies faced with inexplicably badly behaved charges. “It were a strange and distempered criticism which hesitated to pass sentence of condemnation on Wuthering Heights,” declared one contemporary critic. “We have no such hesitation in pronouncing it unquestionably and irredeemably monstrous” (Miller, p. 224). Another reviewer conceded the book’s mesmeric pull, only to then dismiss it as something to be fended off rather than embraced by the reader: “There seems to be a great power in the book, but it is a purposeless power which we feel a great desire to see turned to a better account. . . . In Wuthering Heights the reader is shocked, disgusted, almost sickened by details of cruelty, inhumanity and the most diabolical hate and vengeance and anon come passages of powerful testimony to the supreme power of love” (Miller, p. 209). And some were nothing short of incensed, such as the female critic in the Quarterly Review who dismissed the author as of “no interest” and the novel as “too odiously and abominably pagan to be palatable even to the most vitiated class of English readers” (Miller, p. 238). Perhaps worst of all was the reviewer who suggested that the writer should have considered killing himself before letting the book complete its natural course, marveling at “how a human being could have attempted such a book as the present without committing suicide before he had finished a dozen chapters” (Frank, p. 237). Even more enlightened readers, such as the young D. H. Lawrence, who warned his girlfriend, Jessie Bernard, off it, approached the novel with a wariness bordering on fear.

Of course, the whole love-hate relationship that raged between Emily Brontë’s novel and its readers can be said to mirror, in its way, the love-hate relationship between Cathy (as the first Catherine comes to be known to us) and Heathcliff. Although the word transgressive is thrown around a lot these days, used to describe everything from Eminem’s lyrics to the ads for Victoria’s Secret, most of us grasp (as undoubtedly many sophisticated Victorians grasped) that there is no accounting for taste. What is irredeemably alien to one person might be perfectly normal to someone else; what is repellent to one may be an irresistible draw to another. In a certain sense it might be said that the transgressive is harder to come by than one might think, even in our morally lax, gender-bending times. Pornography, for instance, is not in and of itself transgressive, because it is an established genre into which words and images for the express purpose of titillation can comfortably find their niche. It seems to me that in order for a cultural artifact to be truly transgressive, to sustain its shock value after the initial jolt, it must venture into uncharted psychological territory, one without signposts except those it chooses to put up as it plunges forward into the darkness.

I would like to suggest that Wuthering Heights remains as disturbing now as it was then—when Charlotte felt compelled to smooth the way for its reception with her explanations of her sister’s unself-conscious and almost unwitting talent—because its instincts are at heart profoundly transgressive ones. It speaks for the individual against the collective, for the claims of unreasonable passion against the rights of all that is civilized and sensible. Against our cherished Enlightenment convictions (so cherished that they are taken for granted as being empirically mandated rather than conjecturally posed) about the workings of free will and the legitimacy of the autonomous self—you choose whom you love, and, in the absence of genuine psychosis, you understand that for all your feelings of having stumbled onto your other half, you and your love object are not one and the same—Emily Brontë sets her beliefs in a relentless, even malign fate and the never far-off allure of symbiosis. How its young author, living quietly with her three siblings and father in a remote Yorkshire parsonage in circumstances that seem impoverished in their lack of distraction even for the first half of the nineteenth century, came to be on intimate terms with the savagely possessive nature of desire (not only does Heathcliff want to have Cathy for himself, he doesn’t want anyone else to have her), is part of the mystery of creative inspiration. Somewhere during her rambles over the stark and solitary landscape of her beloved moors, listening to the wind howl, Emily Brontë conjured up this extraordinary psychodrama of kindred souls, of two selves—Cathy and Heathcliff—who are one (“I am Heathcliff,” Cathy protests, in the novel’s most famous line [p. 82]), and who will not live or die in peace so long as they are separated. It is only at the novel’s end—in its very last paragraph, in fact—after Heathcliff gets his wish in death and is buried on one side of Catherine (her husband, Edgar, whose presence during the novel is faint at best and is almost extinguished by this point, is buried on her other side) that the turbulent atmosphere subsides and something approaching peace—or perhaps it is merely an absence of the unharmo nious and rancorous—descends upon the scene. The sky has turned “benign,” the moths are seen “fluttering among the heath and harebells,” and the wind has become “soft.”

Before we get here, however, there is a harrowing road ahead of us. We will have seen and heard things that brush up against the internal, shockable censor in each of us that says “this far and no further,” anarchic emotions and implacable longings that take no heed of our discomfort or unease with them. It oversteps, it trespasses, this Wuthering Heights. It throws off a strange, elemental light that seems to clarify nothing—indeed, if anything, only adds to the murkiness that underlies our seemingly absolute feelings of love and hate, or indifference. “We are lived,” the poet W. H. Auden wrote in “In Memory of Ernst Toller” (from Another Time, 1940), “by powers we pretend to understand: / They arrange our loves; it is they who direct at the end / The enemy bullet, the sickness, or even our hand.” Emily Brontë, by way of her preternaturally developed, uncanny imagination, has dreamed up a novel the nihilistic forces of which we can only pretend to understand. Whether she herself understood them matters less in the end than that she succeeded in pushing the fictional envelope. The story she has written goes too far, and in so doing it was way ahead of its time—and, perhaps, ahead of our time as well.

 

Daphne Merkin, a native New Yorker, is the author of a novel, Enchantment, which won the Edward Lewis Wallant award for best new work of American-Jewish fiction, and an essay collection, Dreaming of Hitler. She has written essays and reviews for a wide range of publications, including the American Scholar; the New York Times, where she is a regular contributor to the Book Review ; the Los Angeles Times Book Review; Elle; and Vogue. As a staff writer for the New Yorker, she has published personal and literary essays as well as book reviews, and she was a regular movie critic for two years. She is currently at work on Melancholy Baby: A Personal and Cultural History of Depression, based on an article she wrote for the New Yorker called “The Black Season.”