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Infanticide and Sadism in Wuthering Heights

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Wade Thompson
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Extract

This article will offer an interpretation of Wuthering Heights based upon the extraordinary sadism which underlies Emily Bronte's concept of emotional relationships and indicate the significance of her preoccupation with infanticide. Unless one appreciates the importance of infanticide and sadism in Wuthering Heights, one cannot appreciate the nature of the love between Catherine and Heathcliff, a love which I believe to have been frequently misunderstood, nor can one understand the motivation behind Heathcliff's killing of his own son. My chief contention is that Wuthering Heights is basically a perverse book—I use the word without its usual pejorative connotations—and that its power is owing precisely to its perversity.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 78 , Issue 1 , March 1963 , pp. 69 - 74
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1963

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References

Note 1 in page 69 For dates and ages I am indebted to C. P. Sanger's classic essay, The Structure of Wuthering Heights (London, 1926).

Note 2 in page 69 Throughout the novel the reader is given occasional reminders of the lack of motherly love. In the opening chapter, for example, the little puppies get magnificent protection from the huge bitch pointer—the kind of protection that children never get. And sprinkled metaphors carry the same reminder, e.g., “No mother could have nursed an only child more devotedly …” “Never did any bird flying back to a plundered nest which it had left brimful of chirping young ones, express more complete despair …”

Note 3 in page 69 James Hafley argues that Nelly Dean is the arch-villain and that Heathcliff is a kind of Othello who never realizes her treachery. “The Villain in Wuthering Heights,” NCF, xin (1958), 199–215. This argument is absurdly overstated, but it does have the merit of pointing out the ruthlessness of Nelly Dean's stratagems and expediencies. The fact is, however, that Nelly Dean's villainy is the villainy of the corporal who wishes to become top-sergeant and is perfectly willing to manipulate officers in order to gain rank.

Note 4 in page 70 Fanny Ratchford, Gondal's Queen (Austin, Tex., 1955), p. 122M.

Note 5 in page 70 Leicester Bradner, “The Growth of Wulhering Heights,” PMLA, xlvii (1933), 129–146.

Note 6 in page 71 Mark Schorer notes that “Emily Bronte roots her analogies in the fierce life of animals and in the relentless life of the elements—fire, wind, water.” “Fiction and the ‘Matrix of Analogy’,” Kenyon Review, xi (1949), 545. In addition many of her most effective analogies are rooted in pain—cutting, stabbing, and choking.

Note 7 in page 71 Mr. Earnshaw never quite explains why he brought Heathcliff to Wuthering Heights in the first place, nor—and more suspiciously—why he prefers Heathcliff to his other children. “Where did he come from, the little dark thing, harboured by a good man to his bane?” asks Nelly Dean of herself, quite gratuitously, as though to prompt the reader. Eric Solomon has recently noted the “vague incestuous aura over the entire plot of Wuthering Heights,” and adds that if Catherine and Heathcliff are really sister and brother “the tragedy of Wuthering Heights is increased in intensity and inevitability.” “The Incest Theme in Wuthering Heights,” NCF, xrv (1959), 80–83.

Note 8 in page 72 On the subject of Emily Bronte's passion for home, J. C. Smith writes “The love of home is her ruling passion, of the home of her childhood.” “Emily Bronte: A Reconsideration,” Essays and Studies, v (1914), 144. Richard Chase contends “childhood is in fact the central theme of Emily Bronte's writing.” “The Brontes: A Centennial Observance,” Kenyan Review, ix (1947), 505.

Note 9 in page 73 The abnormality of their love is reflected in Emily Bronte's numerous love poems, about which Charles Morgan notes that “no love poems have ever been more free than hers of erotic imagery.” “Emily Bronte,” The Great Victorians, ed. H. J. and Hugh Massingham (New York, 1932), p. 76.

Note 10 in page 73 One suspects some critics of reading this scene with tears in their eyes. Thus James Fotheringham has it that “Heath-cliff pours out his whole passion, edged with irony and a sense of wrong,—Catherine faded, spent, but beautiful, fascinating as ever—Heathcliff struggling between a passionate love and a passionate revolt, cruel and tender in one molten mood of hopeless love.” “The work of Emily Bronte and the Bronte Problem,” Transactions of the Bronte Society, II (1900), 122. This is ridiculous: Heathcliff does not indulge (here) in irony; his sense of wrong is certainly not “edged”; Catherine can scarcely be as “beautiful” as ever; Heathcliff is not “tender,” and his mood is neither “molten” nor “hopeless.”

Note 11 in page 73 Despite the obvious isolation of the Wuthering Heights area from the rest of England, some critics insist on seeing social significance in the “rebellion of Heathcliff.” Thus Arnold Kettle identifies Heathcliff with the working class, “physically and spiritually degraded by the conditions and relationships of this same [Victorian] society.” “Emily Bronte,” An Introduction to the English Novel (London, 1951), i, 154. This seems to me to limit (and to distort) the meaning of Heathcliff's rebellion. Mr. Kettle correctly reminds us that “Heathcliff was not born in the pages of Byron, but in a Liverpool slum” (p. 139). The more important facts are that Heathcliff was born a gypsy and that he very often acts and talks as though he had just put down a volume of Byron.

Note 12 in page 73 In my opinion, Heathcliff as an artistic creation is thoroughly unconvincing. The most effective indictments of Heathcliff have been by Muriel Spark and Derek Stanford, Emily Bronte (London, 1953), pp. 254–256; and by Mary Visick, The Genesis of Wuthering Heights (Hong Kong, 1958), pp. 74–81. The most effective champion of Heathcliff remains May Sinclair, The Three Brontes (Boston and New York, 1912), pp. 244–252.

Note 13 in page 73 Lord David Cecil says that “Emily Bronte's vision of life does away with the ordinary antithesis between good and evil.” “Emily Bronte and Wuthering Heights,” Early Victorian Novelists (London, 1934), p. 154. C. Day Lewis insists that in the novel's “lurid and uncompromising antinomian-ism … passion is substituted for grace as the justification for an over-riding of the moral law.” Notable Images of Virtue (Toronto, 1954), p. 10. See also Ruth M. Adams, “Wuthering Heights: The Land East of Eden,” NCF, xni (1958), 59.

Note 14 in page 74 The intention of this analysis has been, at least partly, to invalidate such interpretations as represented by Melvin R. Watson: “Wuthering Heights, then, is a psychological study of an elemental man whose soul is torn between love and hate … In Heathcliff one looks in vain for Christian morals or virtues; his is a primitive, pagan soul; yet love conquers even a Heathcliff in the end.” “Tempest in the Soul: The Theme and Structure of Wuthering Heights,” NCF, iv (1949), 89–90. This interpretation seems to me to concede far too much to the power of love (in the sense of “Christian morals or virtues”). It implies a purging of evil in Heathcliff's soul. Love conquers hate. To my mind this is nonsense. Heathcliff feels no tug between “love” and hate; he makes no concessions to love or to traditional morality; in the end he simply becomes exhausted. When love does conquer hate—as in the love of young Cathy for Hareton—Victorian respectability triumphs in the form of symbolic emasculation; Cathy polishes and teaches all the roughness out of Hareton. On this point see Dorothy Van Ghent, “The Window Figure and the Two-Children Figure in Wuthering Heights,” NCF, vn (1952), 189–197. But such a triumph is gained at a terrible cost. As Mark Schorer has it: “Moral magnificence? Not at all; rather, a devastating spectacle of human waste; ashes.” “Technique as Discovery,” in Forms of Modern Fiction, ed. William Van O'Connor (Minneapolis, 1948), p. 14. The same point is made by G. D. Klingopulos, “The Novel as Dramatic Poem (u): Wuthering Heights,” Scrutiny, xiv (1947), 284.