Wuthering Heights

At the age of three, Emily Brontë had already lost her mother and was growing up in memory of her two missing little sisters, Maria and Elisabeth. Her aunt raised her, Charlotte, Anne and Patrick (called Branwell from her maternal surname) with Wesleyan methodism, in family reunions a common theme was the account of uplifting deaths. The father was Irish, the mother from Cornwall, more than English they were Celts, and this legacy of myths and folklore, combined with the wild nature in which they grew up, enhanced the imagination of the siblings.

Emily (1818–1848) was a long-armed, springy-footed girl with a regal figure, even when she ran across the moors whistling at dogs. In the portrait of her that Patrick Branwell made of her,

“the eyes are nocturnal, eyes that make one uncomfortable, that do not accept the solar reality and do not reject any dark horror” (introduction to Wuthering Heights, Garzanti 1965)

As Charlotte (the author of Jane Eyre) states: “My sister was not naturally sociable, circumstances favored and fed an inclination to loneliness: except to go to church or to take a walk in the hills, she rarely crossed the threshold of the house. “

His brother Patrick was a painter and poet, dedicated to alcohol and opium, the perfect incarnation of the Byronic hero. He and Emily were very close, they wandered on the moor, happy to be together; he died alcoholic in ’48 in Emily’s arms. She did not survive him, or rather she did not want to survive him, she surrendered to the consumption that had been corroding her for some time. She caught cold during the funeral, began to cough, did not want to be treated, died three months after her brother. At the head of the funeral procession walked Keeper, the wild bulldog that she alone could tame. After her death, Charlotte destroyed all her writings that could have compromised her reputation but also enlighten us on the origin of her lines and her novel.

“Wuthering Heights” (1847) is a work, as Praz defines it, “among the most tumultuously romantic in all of English literature”. Wuthering is a regional variant of the Scottish adjective whither, a word that indicates the atmospheric turmoil to which the Earnshaw house is subject. The landscapes and the meteorology are exasperated, as are the characters of the protagonists. More than a novel, “Wuthering Heights” is a tragedy, an epic poem. The philosophy underlying the work is that all creation, animate and inanimate, psychic and physical, is moved by two principles, the ruthless-savage and the sweet-passive, represented by the two poles, the two mansions, Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange with their inhabitants, the Earnshaws and Lintons. But there is a second generation, where the contrast between the children of the storm and the children of calm is blunt, overlapping until they become confused, to find a form of redemption.

Heathcliff and Catherine are the two main characters, titanic and granite, made of the same substance as the nature in which they live. For them, hate and love, passion and revenge, are the same thing. Heathcliff and Catherine compensate for each other, like Emily and Branwell, they grew up together, brothers / lovers. Heathcliff is often described with terms that are more reminiscent of wild nature than human beings, he is the hero cursed with evil laughter. Cathy is a woman but also a ghost, embodied in a cursed progeny.

“I am Heathcliff,” says Catherine, in a powerful unforgettable statement that embodies the very essence of romantic love.

“My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks that lie underground: a little visible but necessary source of joy. Nelly, I am Heathcliff! He is always, always in my mind; not as a pleasure, as I am not always a pleasure for myself, but as my own being. “ (p. 95)

According to the decadent poet Swinburne, Emily paints “love that corrodes life itself, devastates the present, destroys the future, with its devouring fire.” It is obsessional, romantic, transcendent, violent and unstoppable love.

The ordinary antithesis between good and evil does not apply to the characters of Emily Brontë. They do not repent of their destructive impulses. Forced to deviate from their natural course, like a river coming out of its banks, they devastate innocently what they encounter in their path. Their ruthless acts, their wickedness, in a word the evil they do and represent, are part of creation, have a reason for being and a position in the cosmos. As Praz argues, “Emily Brontë’s point of view is not immoral but premoral”. The contrast is not the Victorian one between good and evil, but between similar and dissimilar.

“He is more than myself. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are alike; and Linton’s soul is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire.” (p. 93)

This concept of premorality, of good and evil as part of a single divine plan, will also be the constant of Anne Rice’s novels today, which derive much from the gothic, romantic atmosphere of “Wuthering Heights”. Like the sexless, yet erotic, vampiric bite, traditional sex has little to do with the inexorable attraction that unites Heathcliff to Catherine and which is close to the underground forces of nature, to the tides they drag, to currents, to magma.

“Where is she? Not there, not in heaven, not dead: where is she? (…) And I pray, I repeat my prayer until my tongue can pronounce it: Catherine Earnshaw, may you never rest until I live! You said I killed you … haunt me then! I believe the slain haunt their killers. I know of spirits that have wandered the earth. Stay with me always, take any shape, drive me crazy! Just don’t leave me in this abyss where I cannot find you! Oh, God; it is unspeakable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul! (p. 183)