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Anne Williams - Natural Supernaturalism - 1985
Anne Williams - Natural Supernaturalism - 1985
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Natural Supernaturalism in
Wuthering
Heights
byAnne Williams
U
TUHERING
Heights-popular, powerful,but enigmatichas always been controversial. Readersagree about its secure position as a "classic,"but not about its meaning, nor
its merits. HerbertJ. Rosengartenhas noted two majortraditionsestablished by the book's critics: the naturalist and the supernaturalist. Some, like Q. D. Leavis, have seen in WutheringHeightsa masterly but orthodox Victorian novel; for others, it is a metaphysical
romance.' And most recently the book has become a star exhibit in
the exemplary post-structuralist gallery of "indeterminate" texts.
ForFrankKermode, Wuthering
Heightsremains interesting chiefly because it is "complexand indeterminateenough to allow us our necessary pluralities."2He finds this indeterminacyprimarilyin the "mingling of generic opposites-daylight and dream narratives--creating
a need, which we must supply, for something that will mediate between them."3
W
(P. 304).
2 Frank Kermode, The Classic (London, 1975), p. 121.
Heights
3 Kermode, p. 129. A debate concering the "indeterminacy"of Wuthering
has recentlybeen conductedin CriticalInquiry.See JamesR. Kincaid,"CoherentRead-
104
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105
Kincaid'sreply, "PluralisticMonism,"CI,
IV (1978), 839-45.
4 The Brontes' (and particularlyEmily's)degree of acquaintancewith the work of
Wordsworthand Coleridge can only be inferred;but there is considerable indirect
evidence that the entire familyadmiredand was thoroughlyfamiliarwith these poets.
In 1834 Charlottegave some advice about reading to her school friend Ellen Nussey:
"Ifyou like poetry,let it be first-rate:Milton, Shakespeare,Thomson, Goldsmith, Pope
... Scott, Byron, Campbell, Wordsworth,and Southey."(TheBrontes:Lifeand Letters,
ed. ClementShorter[repr.of 19o8ed., New York,1969], 2 vols. I, p. 1ii). The Brontes
also bombardedtheir famous contemporarieswith manuscripts.In 1840 Charlottesent
part of a story to Wordsworth,who replied. (Shorter,I, p. 145). Branwellwrote to
Wordsworth,addressing him (in deliberateflattery)"as one whose works I have most
loved in literature,and who most has been with me a divinityof the mind."(Shorter,I,
p. 135). Twoletters of Branwelito HartleyColeridgesurvive. In 1847 Charlottesent a
copy of the sisters' Poemsto Wordsworth(Shorter,II, p. 329). WinnifredG#rinwrites
that the BrontesapproachedMoxon as a prospective publisher because he had published Wordsworth(Charlotte Bronte: The Evolution of Genius [Oxford, 1968], p. 307).
Fanny Ratchfordremarksthat "Charlotteat fourteen was steeped in eighteenth-century and Romanticpoetry"and notes echoes of "Resolutionand Independence"and
"She Was A Phantom of Delight." (The Brontes' Web of Childhood [New York, 1964],
p. 48). Charlottealso sent a copy of ThePreludeto Mrs. Gaskell in 1850, saying she
preferredit to In Memoriam,
which she found "monotonous."(ElizabethGaskell,Lifeof
CharlotteBronte,ed. Alan Shelston [1975],P. 345).
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NaturalSupernaturalism
in WutheringHeights
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NaturalSupernaturalism
in WutheringHeights
Before Nelly has gone far into the tale of the first Catherine, Lockwood remarks, "[people in this region] do live more in earnest,
more in themselves and less in surface change and frivolous external
things."7 Lockwood cannot be taken as an authorial voice-though
by this point (as I shall argue below) he may be a somewhat more
sensitive observer as a result of his nightmare experience at the
Heights. Still, he expresses, characteristically,a commonplace sentiment-which may be seen either as the classical-pastoralpreference
for rural over urban life, or as the Romantic (Rousseauistic) idea
about the more authentic mode of life enjoyed by those who live
"close to nature." Both are versions of that basic assumption about
man, society, and the universality of certain human passions which
had led Wordsworth to choose rural people as his subjects in the
LyricalBallads.
But Lockwood'sremark,though a fashionableclich6, is pertinent to
the story to follow in a way he does not suspect: the aim of Wuthering
Heights,like that of the LyricalBallads,is to reveal "the primarylaws
of our nature" as they may be apprehended through human experience in a wild and isolated setting. Lockwood has much in common
with the narratorof Wordsworth's"The Thom"-a prosaic and literal-minded person who moves to a strange village, listens to a tale
' Emily Bronte, Wuthering
Heights(ed. W. R. Sale), Norton CriticalEdition (New
York,1963), p. 56. All referencesto the text are taken from this edition.
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Anne Williams
of love and death, and finally believes that he has seen the unfortunate Martha Ray. Both Lockwood and Wordsworth'snarratorhave
been widely misunderstood by readers, principallybecause each author eschews any direct analysis or discursive information about the
speaker. One must infer his charactermostly from his speech and his
responses. (Wordsworthadded the biographicaldetail about the narratorof "TheThorn"in the second edition of the LyricalBallads.)This
use of a fallible and commonplace voice reinforcesratherthan weakens the dimension of universality:if so practical,so unimaginative a
person may see, who may not?
Like Wordsworth and Coleridge in the LyricalBallads,Bronte offers the reader, in various portions of her book, two ways of grasping the interrelationship of the natural and the supernatural-by
humanizing the latter, or by using characters'imagination-charged
perceptions to lend an eerie enchantment to the former-and always
to the same purpose of exciting our sympathy "by faithful adherence
to the truth of nature and giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colours of the imagination."8Just as the earlier authors drew
upon two disparate poetic traditions, those of the lyric and the ballad, so Bronte reconciles novel and romance. Those parts of Wuthering Heightswhich dramatize Lockwood's direct experience begin in
the "novelistic";they are also Wordsworthianin that they show an
unimaginative man growing increasingly sensitive to the wondrous
strangeness residing in what first seems to be ordinary,if rather trying experience. This implied education of Lockwood, though not a
continual object of the reader'sattention and hardly the book's narrative core, is nevertheless unmistakablyhinted at; further, it is crucial
to Bront's method of modulating between two realms of experience
(and two genres).
The first three chapters already effect a movement from novel into
romance, from the everyday into the realms of night. Then Nelly's
tale, beginning at the introduction of Heathcliff (Chapter 4), commences with the equivalent of the fairy-tale formula "once upon a
time" (and, as we shall see, with a narrativesituation pointedly reminiscent of one particular fairy tale); it is analogous to the Ancient
Mariner's "There was a ship" (an explict demand for the suspension of disbelief frequently anticipating the intrusion of the supernatural)-it is the point at which the book's "mythic" level can be
8 Coleridge, P. 5.
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NaturalSupernaturalism
in WutheringHeights
glimpsed for the first time. "One fine summer morning,"Nelly says,
"Mr.Earnshawcame downstairs dressed for a journey."Whether or
not the strange events soon to occur do in fact represent an intrusion
of the supernatural remains as it always will in this book-an uncertain matter. (In the Biographia,
Coleridge notes that not the absolute
presence of the supernatural,but merely the protagonist'sbeliefin its
presence is necessary in order to demonstrate the universalityof the
"primarylaws" he seeks to reveal.)
The essential reconciliationof natural and supernaturalsought by
Wordsworthand Coleridge required, accordingto the latter,only one
thing: "Ameditative and feeling mind to seek after them, or to notice
them when they present themselves."9Lockwood'smind does not at
first seem a promising medium for the experiences he is soon to relate to us. As I have already suggested, he arrives at the Grange
plainly shallow and bookishly conventional, posing as a man of feeling, affecting misanthropy as the consequence of a trivial would-be
love affair. Initially he seems an object of gentle satire, reminiscent
perhaps of Jane Austen's Catherine Morland in NorthangerAbbey.
That he actually does encounter baffling "unnatural"forces, serves
Bronte as a powerful way of authenticating and humanizing those
forces for the reader.
Lockwood is eventually educated in things never before dreamt of
in his philosophy, which can be seen when the book's quiet narrative
"frame"returns at the end, seemingly several lifetimes later. (In time
I shall return to that scene for a closer look.) Like the Wordsworthian
descriptive-meditativelyric, WutheringHeightsbegins and ends with
the same landscape described by one speaker. But the two descriptions are subtly contrasting; they show that Lockwood has at some
level changed, and so they provide a measure of his enriched, subtilized final understanding. There u*s truth, we finally see, in his first
conventionally naive description of the moors as "a perfect misanthropist's heaven." In his final words we perceive a Wordsworthian
"charmby thought supplied," a significanceborrowedfrom the mind
as much as from the eye, from a mind now sobered by its new-if
mostly vicarious-experiences.
It is Lockwood's night at the Heights which initiates him forcibly
into this new experience. The occasion is unique for him: "I don't
rememberanother that can at all compare with it since I was capable
9 Coleridge, p. 5.
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Anne Williams
III
of suffering," he says. Yet the events of the night are more than a
mere passive ordeal;they are above all his dreams, and thus evidence
of the potential widening and deepening of his perceptive capabilities. In contrast to the gothic trappings of the conventional prose
romance, all the happenings of that night can readily be attributedto
the interactions of mind and nature arising from "bad tea and bad
temper,"as Lockwood himself says.10Beforefalling asleep he amuses
himself by perusing the various "Catherine's"scribbled on the sill
and the volume of sermons containing CatherineEarnshaw'sjournal.
There he meets Catherine for the first time, speaking in her own
voice, describing her own and Heathcliff's childish rebellion against
their lot.
The first dream, the sermon at GimmertonKirk(a place Lockwood
has seen with waking eyes), is perhaps a mere preliminary to what
will follow; it belongs more nearly to the Coleridgian "fancy"than to
the "Imagination."This lower faculty manipulates "fixitiesand definites" which come from perception and which are linked by association.11Lockwood'ssleepbound "fancy"places himself and Joseph the
religious fanatic on the familiar road. And yet the narrative which
fancy constructs reveals associative principles suggesting Lockwood's
unconscious empathy with the child Catherine. Like her, he is a prisoner of Joseph's inflexible Calvinism. Like her, he is subjected to
a sermon of grotesque length and bizarre content-"odd transgressions that I had never imagined previously" (a clear foreshadowing
of the revelations he will later receive as an auditor of Nelly's tale).
The unfamiliarityof the doctrine forced upon his dreaming self implies early in the book that at the Heights Lockwood is to be introduced to a new and strange "religous" principle. Like the Cathy of
the journal he rebels, and like her, he is chastized. "Thouart theman!"
shouts the Reverend Mr. Branderham. Lockwood awakens to find
that the dream's last element, the noise of the cudgels as the people
attack him, is a natural element, the "pine boughs" tapping on the
window (natural supernaturalismagain). But Branderham'saccusation, the end of the first stage, may most appropriatelybe read in the
10 My reading of the dreams is influenced by Edgar F Shannon, Jr.'sessay, "Lockwood's Dreams and the Exegesis of Wuthering Heights," NCF, XIV (1959), 95-109.
Shannon also insists on the natural causes and psychological plausibility of the
dreams, though he reaches rather different condusions about their thematic significance.
" Coleridge, 1, p. 202.
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in WutheringHeights
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The setting, events, and actors in the story that Lockwood now
hears belong to the novel at one moment, to the romance the next,
existing in a paradoxical duality-in-unity of mode congruent with
the narrative'sthematic "naturalsupernaturalism"(dealing as it does
with both cosmic and earthly love). Place names may seem to belong
primarilyto the world of nature and circumstance,but (though generally lacking the explicit allegory of Spenser's place names) they are
nevertheless subject to symbolic interpretation. It is a commonplace
to note that Thrushcross Grange represents civilization and Wuthering Heights the harsh, intractable aspects of nature and humanity,
but I should stress that these two places are not irreconcilableopposites. Both are farms, though the Grange ("farm,""barn")is a gentleman's estate and the Heights a humbler property. The Heights is
exposed to the elements, the Grange sheltered, but each is a place
of human habitation and cultivation. The places represent abstract
qualities (thus evoking the world of allegoricalromances); they also
designate two kinds of physical environment in which men of different natures may feel equally at home.
13
Shannon, p. 105.
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NaturalSupernaturalism
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Surnames similarlyrepresent the different potentialitiesin the human natures they indicate. The Lintons of Thrushcross Grange are
soft, malleable, susceptible to refinements-"highly cultivated."The
Earnshaws are tough, hardy, unconcerned with society and appearances. The typical Linton vice is a weakness which may become cowardice, but more often is merely quarrelsomepettiness or petulance:
their chief means of survival is adaptability,their chief virtue a capacity for gentleness. The Earnshawfailing is an uncontrollabletemper turning inward or outward to violence; their best quality is the
ability to endure almost anything, and their greatest virtue a steadfast fidelity equal to their hardness. Lintons die of consumption;
Earnshaws of alcoholism or heart attacks. When Hindley's wife dies
young, he dissipates himself in rowdy evenings of brandy and whist
and sporadic violence. When Edgar's young wife also dies, he retreats from the world and languishes in his library,eventually, like
Hindley, dying prematurely.
Thus the systematic combining of names in intermarriageand the
shifting of scene from the Heights to the Grange and back provide
beneath the realistic level of the story a symbolic dramatizationof
the complex interaction in human behavior between heredity and
environment. People flourish or die according to their natures-as
plants moved to a new place. The less hardy souls (Frances,Isabella,
Linton Heathcliff) waste away when transplantedto unsuitable soil.
It is an indication of the first Catherine'sEarnshawnature (and of her
affinity with Heathcliff)that she dies, though more by choice than by
physical necessity, when she goes to the Grange. Others such as the
younger Catherineand Hareton adapt and survive when subjectedto
unaccustomed harshness; the Eamshaw in each aids in endurance
while the gentler heritage of one parent helps them to adapt and
insures them a future of mutual sympathy. The emblem of the younger Catherine's successful cultivation of Hareton is her desire to
have a flower garden at the Heights, and correspondingly,Hareton's
willingness to uproot Joseph's treasured currantbushes. These dramatic workings out of the nature-nurtureproblem, then, though they
would seem entirely at home in a realistic novel of society (such as
Q. D. Leavis finds WutheringHeightsto be), are managed artistically
with a patent symmetry and a quasi-allegoricaluse of names which
keep the romance always luminously visible beneath the novelistic
particulars.
The intimate relation between human heredity and environment
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NaturalSupernaturalism
in WutheringHeights
tency. His entrance into the world of Earnshawand Linton upsets the
balance of nature. Yet Heathcliff is the only characterin Wuthering
Heightsequally in the "novel" and "romance"aspects of the book,
who is prominent in both halves of the narrative, and who seems
to have validity both as "natural"and "supernatural"being.The effects of his presence are equivocal, too, as old Earnshawknew from
the beginning, and his experience of love proves a paradigm of the
book's theme, also much illustrated elsewhere: his frustrateddesire
for Catherine is transformedinto cruelty and vents itself in revenge
on both Linton and Earnshaw, largely through appropriatingboth
their homes. And yet, had he never been adopted, never loved Catherine, never sought to avenge hinself on those who separated him
from her, the paradise regained by the second Catherine and Hareton, a domestic bliss which is "a simple produce of the common day,"
could not have been.
We have been speaking, up to now, mainly of charactersand of
settings. The two successive plots of WutheringHeights (more precisely, two phases of a single plot) can also be read either as novel or
romance, as realism or symbolic abstraction-though the first tends
more to romance, the second to the novelistic. The literallevel of the
whole, being the story of a mother and daughter who lose and find
happiness in marriage,is supported at another, mythical level, by the
familiarromantic spiral pattern of the fall from Eden through a "circuitous journey,"to paradise regained in a transformedversion of the
lost childhood home. 15 A diagramof the movement of the two Catherines would show two spirals which are mirrorimages of each other.
The first Catherine's Edenic childhood is passed with Heathcliff at
Wuthering Heights, "half-savage, and hardy and free." It is lost
when she chooses to marry Edgar and move to the Grange, where
she dies; and she wanders the moors during twenty purgatorialyears
she waits for Heathcliffto join her in death. Only then is her paradise
regained, presumably at the Heights.
The story of the second Catherine reverses her mother's pattern,
but recapitulates its structure. Her Eden is more conventional-a
childhood spent in an endosed garden. (Nelly remarks that she
never left the park alone until the age of thirteen.) This childish paradise is lost when she marries Linton Heathciff and is imprisoned at
the Heights; her mother's place of Eden and Paradiseis a purgatory
15
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We modern readers have learned to see such elements as character, setting, plot, and even genre as working together toward the
achievement of a theme or "vision" of things; theme being for us
the soul or animating principle of fictional narrative. But what is
the "first principle" illustrated by Bronte's complex artistic structure?What are the essential insights which Lockwood, in his night of
trial, is being prepared to perceive?The "supernaturalist"criticshave
usually been content to state that WutheringHeights shows certain
"forces" or "prnciples" at work. To say that the book is "mythic,"
another favorite term of these readers, is both true and inadequate.
We should do well to remember that "myth" and "plot" were subsumed within the same word in Aristotle'svocabulary.The stories of
the two Catherines correspond to, and pointedly recall, two traditional myth-plots in particular:"Tristanand Iseult" and "Beautyand
the Beast."The first of these is a myth in the precise sense; the second is a fairy tale.16 Their common theme is the paradoxicalpower of
human love both to elevate and to destroy, both to transcend human
experience and to sanctify it. According to comparative mythologist
Joseph Campbell, myths and fairy tales are similar kinds which concern (in Wordsworth'sphrase) "the primarylaws of our nature."But
the laws they reveal, though similar and congruent, are relevant to
different contexts of human experience: myths are enacted on a cosmic stage and reveal religious truths-universal insights about the
relation of man to the eternal. Fairytales occur within the domestic,
earthly realms and concern the merely psychological7principles of
self-discovery and adjustment to family and society.1 Tristan and
Iseult are reunited in death, implying love's transcendence of the
16 Goodridge, "A New Heaven and a New Earth,"mentions the first lovers' similarityto Tristanand Iseult, but accepts Denis de Rougemont'sreadingof the myth, as I
do not. (See p. 16 of the text, below.) Elliot B. Gose analyzes Neily's fairy-talebeginning, but reads it as an introduction to the first Catherine'sstory only ("Wuthering
Heights:The Heath and the Hearth,"NCF, XXI[1966],1-2o). Q. D. Leavis regardsthe
faiy tale allusions as juvenile failures of technique.
Campbell,Hero,pp. 37-8.
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in WutheringHeights
NaturalSupernaturalism
natural realm it grows in. Beauty and her Prince Charminglive happily ever after in this world. But each pair is saved through love,
however differently it manifests itself in the two stories.
To embody this ultimate principleof universal order in a love story
is of course to create a metaphor, a synechdoche, though a traditional
one, in which sexual love stands for the ineffable and universal principle. The metaphor has been used at least since the time of the preSocratic philosopher Empedocles. Its history is much too long and
too complex to summarize here, but it is worth noting that the tradition was adopted and adapted by Coleridge in "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"(set at a wedding feast), and by Wordsworthin T7he
Preludeas he struggles to articulatea definition of the power he has
come to perceive as the sustaining force of nature and of man.'8 In
Bronte, the abstract principles remain implicit in the complications
and resolutions of the plot.
The identificationof the "love principle"as the heart of the book's
ethos is supported by a fact surprisingly neglected by critics:sexual
and romanticlove (or attempts at or approximationsor parodies of it)
constitutes the most pervasive plot element in Wuthering
Heights.'9All
the complications, trivialor major,stem from loving or failing in love.
In Bronte'sworld, "sin," the root of all woe, the cause that leads to
expulsion from Eden, is redefined as misplaced or mistaken love.
(These are the "odd transgressions" that Lockwood dreamed of.)20
Lockwood fails the call of love and so rents the Grange. Hindley
slowly destroys himself after the death of his beloved wife, and is
thus vulnerable to Heathciff's machinations. IsabellamarriesHeathcliff, impelled by misguided love and by the mistaken assumption
that she is in love with him.
And Catherine's fall from childhood grace occurs when she
chooses wrongly between two kinds of love, allowing her attraction
to Edgar (which she knows is to the wealth and position he would
give her and gratificationat being loved by a handsome young man)
priority over her fundamental kinship with Heathcliff, so that she
unwittingly wounds both men and destroys herself. Like the Ancient
18 The Prelude (1850), Book 14, 11, 162 ff.
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NaturalSupernaturalism
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Heathcliff and Catherine move plausibly enough among real people, but they also fuffill Campbell'sdefinition of myth, because they
are "largerthan life," and because their deeds are "world-historical"
within the limits of the book: it takes two generations for the effect of
their passion to exhaust itself. Indeed, at the book's conclusion the
local folk believe them to walk the moors still-they have been translated into perhaps the only eternity earthly imagination can grant:
they have been translatedinto myth. Tristanand Iseult were similarly
real people transposed into myth through their own deeds, most fundamentally through their appropriationof the divine prerogativeof
omnipotent love. Bronte'slovers like Tristanand Iseult are drawn to
each other from the moment of meeting. Significantly,however, they
meet as children and their affinity comes not from the magicalLiebestrankof romance but from shared experience, and possibly, shared
heredity. Tristan and Iseult's love for each other, like Cathy and
Heathciff's, ignores the restrictions imposed by society (their marriage to others) and by nature (death apparently cannot separate
them). In this context, one minor theme of Wuthering
Heightscriticism
is elucidated:Nelly's ambiguous role in unwittingly precipitatingcertain catastrophes(which has led some readersto focus disproportionate attention on her "unreliability")at the mythic level recapitulates
the action of the unfortunate Brangwyn, Iseult's maidservant who
unknowingly offers the love-drinkto Tristanand Iseult. (The nurse in
Romeoand Julietis another analogue from the same tradition.)
If my argument is correct, then Denis de Rougemont might well
have discussed WutheringHeightsin his survey of the Tristanmyth,
Lovein the WesternWorld,for Cathy and Heathcliffappear to embody
that experience which he decries, "passionate love at once shared
and fought against, anxious for happiness it rejects, and magnified in
its own disaster-unhappy mutual love."22Judging "Tristan"from
the fixed perspective of Christian morality and theology, de Rougemont insists that the affinityof passionate love and death is perverse.
Freed of this judgment, however, the story may mean something
quite different, and I believe it is part of the myth's effect (and of
Bronte's deliberate intention) to make us question the universal validity of such categories.23Bronte'smanner of telling the tale seems
22 Denis de Rougemont,Lovein the WesternWorld,trans. MontgomeryBelgion (New
York,1940), p. 46.
3 See Joseph Campbell, TheMasksof God:CreativeMythology(New York,1968),pp.
64-5. Campbellargues that such suspension of the conventionalview is demandedby
the original twelfth-centuryversion of "Tristan,"because it represents a new kind of
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carefullydesigned to forestall the application of conventional categories. Lockwood fails comically at such categorizing early in the book
(he mistakes dead rabbits for kittens, fierce watchdogs for pets, and
misapprehends the muddle of relationships among the people at the
Heights). His dream of GimmertonKirkalso emphasizes that the old,
habitual assumptions are no longer valid for these new realms of
experience. As the book evolves, the utter inadequacy of conventional wisdom to grasp experience of certain kinds and depths is
repeatedly plied. This is done largely, though not exclusively,
through the "choral"commentaries of the sensible but essentially
uncomprehending Nelly Dean; and the comic, Calvinistic Joseph,
with his very different but equally conventional view of things, has a
similar function.
Joseph Campbell suggests as an implication of the Tristan myth
that "if one and the same Being is what is beheld in these living
things ... the experience that dissolves the I and the not-I cannot be
false."24The principle of metaphysics which Tristanand Iseult, Catherine and Heathciff, demonstrate by violating the laws of nature (apparently united as they are after death) can also be seen in life within
those laws of nature. Passion is the symbolic (and semantic) mother
"secular mythology,"one in which "the structuringthemes were not derived from
dogma, learning, politics, or any currentconcepts of the general social good, but were
expressions of individualexperience."In other words, the medievalmyth itself implied
that the "supernatural"is derived from the natural and is not an arbitrarymental
hypothesis. "Thusthe mythmakers,"continues Campbell,"wereno longer to be saints
and priests, but men and women of thisworld;and their first requirementis that both
their worlds and their lives should unfold from the convictionsderived from their own
experiences." Hence Campbell'sinterpretationof the Tristanmyth is very different
from de Rougemont's,and shows the myth's naturalaffinities with the later assumptions of Romanticism:
The Celtic hero (Tristan)as though moved by an infalliblenatural grace, follows without fear the
urges of the heart. And though these may promiseonly sorrowand pain, dangerand disaster-to
Christians,even the ultimatedisasterof hell for all eternity-when followed for themselves alone,
without thought or care for consequences, they can be felt to communicateto a life, if not the
radianceof eternal life, at least integrityand truth.
(P. 43)
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122
in WutheringHeights
NaturalSupernaturalism
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Anne Williams
123
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in WutheringHeights
NaturalSupernaturalism
repugnance which Catherine overcomes in a lesson of loving unselfishly. Hareton, Heathcliff'sson in spirit (his "father"remarksthat he
is "a personificationof my youth"), enacts the part of the Beast transformed through love into man and Prince Charming. Beauty must
overcome her repugnance towardthe Beast, her lingering attachment
to her father, and the Beast'spower over her before she can live happily ever after. Cathy faces the same obstacles. Like Beauty she runs
away from the Beast to be with her dying father, indicating the
strength of her attachment to him. But her father and Linton die
within two months of each other, symbolicallyindicating the removal
of this familialbarrierto mature love. About this time Haretonbegins
to show obvious admiration for his cousin and tries to please her
(Chapter XXX), but she rebuffs him, as Beauty refused the Beast's
early offers of marriage. Her education of Hareton (the realisticversion of Beauty's transformation of the Beast) nevertheless begins.
And Heathciff's "immortallongings" start to preoccupy him so that
he fails to note or much care-what is happening between the two
young people; thus the third barrieris removed.
Cathy's experiences at the Heights are not merely an education in
romantic, sexual love, however. She is preparedto recognize Hareton
as her Prince Charmingby stages which serve to enlarge her capacities for empathy and unselfish love. She had loved the unappealing
Linton unselfishly, protesting to Heathciff that "Lintonis all I have
to love in the world, and . .. you cannot make us hate each other,
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Anne Williams
125
devil, and envious like him? Nobodyloves you, nobody will cry for you when
you die!
(ChapterXXIX)
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126
in WutheringHeights
NaturalSupernaturalism
IV
Heathcliff'send is as strange as was his introductioninto the Earnshaw household. And with it comes a modulation from supernatural
back into natural as in the introductory chapters. Heathcliff's increasing preoccupation with the otherworldly, his new attunement
to the ghost of Catherine events in the romantic mode-distract
his attention from what is happening under his nose, the blossoming friendship between Catherine and Hareton, which leads to the
work's "novelistic"conclusion, and the conventional mariage of the
comic ending. When Nelly tells Lockwood the local people believe
that Heathcliff "u*lks,"we are back in the Wordsworthianperspective
of the beginning. She remarksthat the little shepherd boy "probably
raised the phantoms from thinking, as he traversedthe moors alone,
on the nonsense he had heard his parents and companions repeat."
The Wordsworthiancombination of mind and nature is at work to
reveal the "supernatural."Yet now even Nelly refuses to take sides
entirely with rationality:"I don't like being out in the darknow; and I
don't like being left by myself in this grim house." Lockwood is not
the only one affected by the experience this book recounts. And by
this time the reader can hardly presume to rest content with one
mode of experience as against the other.
Lockwood'sfinal visit to the graves belongs, like the opening chapter, primarilyto the novelistic and realistic level of experience. And
yet the supernatural, romantic elements of this world are somehow
present also for him. A view of the lovers' graves concludes almost all
literaryincarnationsof the Tristanmyth,' providing the final evaluation of a detached observer who places their suffering in a broader,
usually historical, perspective. In the medieval romance version of
Tristan, the narratortells of the briar, emblematic of suffering and
desire, which magicallypersists in uniting the two lovers after death,
as if their great and tragic love had imprinted itself on nature but
in so doing supersedes both death and tragedy.30That Catherine is
buried between Heathcliff and Edgar-unique in the tradition-is a
final hint that love is the final cause of this world, for the two couples
were bound together in life as in death by love, however different
Pope's "Eloisato Abelard."
9 Forexample, Romeoand Juliet,Antonyand Cleopatra,
York,
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Anne Williams
127
each union was in degree and kind from the other. (The circularity
completed by this epilogue is also, of course, analogous to that of the
characteristicColeridgian or Wordsworthiannature lyric.)
The concluding emphasis in Wuthering
Heightsis on a reassertionof
naturalharmony, as that implied by Tristan'sbriar.Like Wordsworth's
characteristicshift in perspective at the end of his most poignant
works (the ImmortalityOde, "Michael,""The Ruined Cottage") the
narrator'sfinal view of nature constitutes a kind of tragic catharsis.
Nature, the eternal and impersonal, has begun to restore lost harmony, and the sight is invested with profound significance. Looking
at the graves, Lockwood is aware of "coming autunn storms,"a suggestion of the cyclicalrhythms as characteristicof human passion and
suffering as of nature. For the moment, the tone seems affirmative,
an asserfion of a Wordsworthiannatural optimism:
I lingered round [the graves] under that benign sky; watched the moths
fluttering among the heath and the hare-bells; listened to the soft wind
breathing through the grass; and wondered how any one could imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.
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