3 - The House of Trauma: A Reading of Wuthering Heights

Summary

While Wuthering Heights is a book resisting interpretation, Wuthering Heights is a house barring out trespassers:

A perfect misanthropist's Heaven – and Mr. Heathcliff and I are such a capital pair to divide the desolation between us. A capital fellow! He little imagined how my heart warmed towards him when I beheld his black eyes withdraw so suspiciously under their brows, as I rode up, and when his fingers sheltered themselves, with a jealous resolution, still further in his waistcoat, as I announced my name. (WH 1)

Language in both house and text signs a two-way contradiction. ‘Walk in!’ snarls Heathcliff. ‘The “walk in” was uttered with closed teeth and expressed the sentiment, “Go to the Deuce!” ’. Where ‘come in’ means ‘clear off ’, perversity becomes a new norm. For ‘Go to the Deuce!’ is a come-on to Lockwood, who is disposed to take inhospitality as an incentive.

The building's paranoid architecture parallels the pathological defensiveness of the host, parodied by the loquacious Lockwood's pose as hermit. The narrator's gaucherie meets a pathology evinced in the ‘withdraw[al]’ of the host's dark eyes, his fingers that ‘sheltered themselves, with a jealous resolution, still further in his waistcoat ’: Heathcliff seems to be coming apart from himself, but all the parts are in flight. The visitor, gaining entrance to the house, registers a vista of recession from outsiders: ‘the kitchen is forced to retreat altogether’ (WH 3). Black chairs ‘lurk’ in the background shade, while dogs ‘haunt’ recesses, and the careless reader may be forgiven for muddling chairs with dogs. The owner of this establishment, at once so substantial and so secretive, ‘keeps his hand out of the way’ and loves and hates ‘under cover’, as Lockwood speculates. Beyond the house, a panorama of weathered barrenness declares a landscape of universal need and exposure, ‘a range of gaunt thorns all stretching their limbs one way, as if craving alms of the sun’. Spiritual beggary predominates. Deepset windows are ‘defended’ by ‘large-jutting stones’.

House, territory, and owner represent a landscape of buried and inhering trauma: affliction so deep as to be repressed, unintelligible, untellable, beneath a mantle of domesticity. And the symptoms of trauma, including Heathcliff's manic control, suggest not primarily aggression (which is secondary) but plain fear. Heathcliff's instinct is to hide.