Riddhi Dey

1910110315
Dr. Teja Varma Pusapati
Landmarks in the Novel Form
04-05-2022

“Wuthering Heights (1847) has always impressed its critics as something of an anomaly
in the English tradition of the novel, and its difference is nowhere so marked as in its
unconventional attitudes toward love and marriage.” Discuss.

Emily Bronte, in writing Wuthering Heights, debunks the domestic and middle-class
ideal of the Victorian period. This novel transgresses the ideological and moral concerns
around marriage, sexual relations, social relation of the time. The most intimate and
passionate love in the novel, that of Heathcliff and Catherine, comes without marriage.
Therefore, the treatment of marriage as though it does not matter in love helps debunk the set
of cultural values that organised social formation of that period which stressed heavily on
marriage and union of unlike selves. It is not surprising then that the early reviews of
Wuthering heights were negative – readers and critics did not know how to deal with a piece
so unprecedented. The Athaeneum described the novel as a “disagreeable story” that is
“eccentric and unpleasant”, while the Atlas wrote that “Wuthering Heights is a strange,
inartistic story” whose effect is “inexpressibly painful” (Lewis 272-274). The novel takes
something natural, like the domestic middle-class ideals around love and marriage, and then
turns it on its head by presenting a “strange”, but “original representation of love”, as Joseph
Allan Boone would put it (127). This essay integrates an analysis of how Emily Bronte
exposes the inefficiencies and drawbacks of the traditional order of the Victorian period in its
way of dealing with love and marriage in the novel.

Susan Fraiman in her essay “The Domestic Novel” highlights the middle-class
companionate marriage, which is between two companionable partners who are
complementary – that is, completing each other with their different characteristics. This
middle-class ideal puts forward notions of the world that married men and women are
expected to inhabit – “productivity and professionalism for men, well-regulated domesticity
for women” (170). This differentiation between the sexes delineates different social roles for
each, where women occupy only the domestic space and men are expected or allowed to
participate in the public or financial spheres. Allan Boone shows us how the cultural ideal of
romantic partnership between the two sexes based on differences plays out quite in contrary
to expectations. Firstly, there is the passionate love between Catherine and Heathcliff who are
barely different from each other, but instead, can be defined as ‘like’ selves. Catherine and
Heathcliff are brought together by the tyranny of Hareton and Joseph, and spend most of their
time together in the moors, evident in the line: “But it was one of their (Cahterine and
Heathcliff’s) chief amusements to run away to the moors in the morning and remain there all
day, and the after punishment grew a mere thing to laugh at” (Bronte 58). This sharing of
experiences brings them so close that Catherine declares to Nelly “I am Heathcliff” (Bronte
104). This assertion ties them together in an intimate bond that is based on “erotic
identification rather than sexual antagonism” which is the accepted ideal for a couple (Boone
129). Moreover, both Catherine and Heathcliff do not fit into the typical description of
“masculine” or “feminine” components of Plato’s Myth of the Androgynous who complete
each other (Boone 129-130).

Catherine and Heathcliff are not sexually defined opposites, but instead nearly
identical personalities. Allan Boones brings our focus to the “defiant, unsubmissive side of
Catherine’s personality that that had led Patricia Spacks to label her “an anti-heroine….”
“(130). This is evident in Nelly’s speech when she says that “His (Mr. Earnshaw’s) peevish
reproofs wakened in her a naughty delight to provoke him: she was never so happy as when
we were all scolding her at once, and she defying us with her bold, saucy look, and her ready
words…” (Bronte 53). In contrast, Heathcliff is feminized due to his lack of autonomy, or
any rights at the Heights, on top of being a victim of oppression in his childhood, that
“replicates the anthropological status of women in patriarchal social organizations” (Boone
130). Therefore, theirs is not a love between two diametrically opposite gendered
personalities, rather it is that of a love between like selves that emerge from shared
experience and intimacy.

Setting in opposition to this sort of union, is the coming together of the conventional
polarity of unlike selves in the social marriage of Catherine and Edgar. While she claims that
hers and Heathcliff’s souls are made of the same thing, “Linton’s is as different as a
moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire” (Bronte 102). This is the marriage that stays
strong only as long as the disparate wills of both parties are kept in control. As soon as
“Edgar decides to wield his legal right as “master,” asserting his legal, cultural and social
power, “he commands that “Catherine choose between himself and Heathcliff…” (Boone
131). This causes dissensions between them as Catherine soon after enters into hysteria,
revealing the fragility of such conventional relationships. The domestic space in marriage
enervates and withers away the vitality of women, shattering them not only mentally but also
physically, as Catherine even refers to her body as a ‘shattered prison’ in her pregnancy, as
she was literally and figuratively dying confined in her room, only wishing to escape to the
moors. It also results in a sense of loss of identity, for Catherine “is unable to recognize her
reflection in the mirror as “Mrs. Linton” (106) because, in becoming Edgar’s wife and
complement, she had lost her true mirroring self, Heathcliff” (Boone 135). In Frances too, we
see a woman who lacks any ethical understanding and totally gives in to her husband’s
demands. For when she was asked to pull Heathcliff’s hair to tame him, “Frances pulled his
hair heartily, and then went and seated herself on her husband’s knee…” (Bronte 26). Then
there is Linton, who according to his father’s claim, “can play the little tyrant well” (348), in
spite of his failing health, even succeeding to subjugate Cathy. This shows how sex defines
certain roles in the middle-class household. Thus, this dominant marriage model of couples
locked in sexual antagonism, is shown to be weak and to be having devastating effects on
women, while exposing the unjust power that men exercise over women. However, Bronte
does not leave her novel at this – the ending reinforces a new type of marriage that goes in
contrast to the accepted ideals.

The romantic relationship between Catherine junior or Cathy and Hareton (Hindley’s
son) is more based on an “opposition” that is “mistaken, not an elementally gendered,
condition” (Boone 141). Cathy’s entrapment and dispossession parallels that of Hareton –
they both have been stripped of their rights as well as rightful identities by Heathcliff. They
both now becomes each other’s avenue to regain autonomy. Because Hareton in uneducated,
Catherine becomes the means of enabling this education, evident when Nelly says: “He
(Hareton) imagined himself to be as accomplished as Linton, I suppose, because he could
spell his own name…” (Bronte 316). This a union that is based on solidarity, that does not
necessarily deny the differences each have. It is quite similar to that of Catherine and
Heathcliff with the only difference that this relationship is more hopeful and likely to end in a
marriage. The novel ends with this new type of marriage which can only be possible if there
is a reimagining of gender roles. Hope and renewal can only come with new identities.

Therefore, Bronte uses the stories of women to bring forth the injustice that is
embedded in the unequal status of women in marriage that prevents them from expressing
their intelligence or freedom. She debunks the Victorian middle-class notion that an ideal
love results only from the merging of two unlike personalities. She shows us that the
monsters are the man of the house (Mr. Earnshaw, Hindley and later, Heathcliff with Isabella
and Catherine junior) who are given power by the social, legal, moral and ideological
structures of their time, and brings to light the suffering brought upon women by these
conventional domestic patriarchal heads of the family, thus undercutting the ideals set around
love and marriage in the Victorian period.

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Works Cited

Boone, Joseph Allan. “Wuthering Heights: Uneasy Wedlock and Unquiet Slumbers.” Emily
Bronte's Wuthering Heights (Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations), edited by
Harold Bloom, 2007, pp 127-146.

Bronte, Emily. Wuthering Heights. United States:Planet eBook. eBook.

Fraiman, Susan. “The Domestic Novel”. Research Gate, Nov 2011, pp 169-184.

Lewis, Alexandra, “Reviews of the 1847 Wuthering Heights”. Wuthering Heights, edited by
Alexandra Lewis. London: W.W. Norton and Company. 2019.