Heaven and Patriarchy: Emily Bronte's Feminism In Wuthering Heights

Forgive me if I'm a bit bold on this one. I may have to rework some ideas in this.

In an essay discussing the simultaneous rise of literary women and the novel as a genre, literary critic Nancy Armstrong declares, “the sexual code [of eighteenth century Britain] both authorized women writers and governed the form and content of their fiction.”[1] Borrowing a phrase familiar to social historians, Armstrong sees the emergence of “companionate marriages” as the result of a bargain struck between the sexes in which “the female relinquishes political and economic control to the male in order to acquire exclusive authority over domestic life, the emotions, taste, and morality.”[2] This new gendered contract or sexual code, Armstrong argues, both allowed women’s words, “for the first time in history, a fit matter for literature” and, perhaps more than governed but restricted their voices to a narrow scope of (domestic) life.[3] By the mid nineteenth century and despite the cautions of women like Mary Wollstonecraft, who had warned a half century prior of the debilitating effects of women agreeing to a proper place for themselves, the domestication and culturing of women had become a tool of patriarchy which sought to tame women into ladylike decorum. While women writers like Mary Shelley cast this misogynistic phenomenon in Miltonic terms of a fall from heaven into the hell of patriarchy and submission, in Wuthering Heights Emily Bronte seems to see it not as a fall from heaven but a fall or even a push into the supposed heavenly world of civilization. Both Catherine’s and Heathcliff’s self-destructive desire to inhabit a living hell together physically and spiritually can be seen as part of a larger feminist desire to rebel against the heaven which they have been forced into against their will. More than a Victorian romance the novel and the novelist are often placed in, Wuthering Heights reveals Emily Bronte’s discomfort and confusion with whether heaven or hell is the fallen world for women.

            Before commencing an investigation of whether Bronte ultimately prefers hell to heaven or not, one must recognize the ways in which she attempts to separate and define the two. Throughout the novel Bronte seems preoccupied with illustrating opposites and divisions, even division within a single entity or person, and each distinction seems to correspond to either the heaven of genteel culture, or the hell of something else. One of the earliest ways she demonstrates this technique is in her use of names. Good, civilized, Christian names like Catherine, Edgar, Isabella, and Nelly are contrasted with odd natural or animal names like Hareton, Hindley, and of course, Heathcliff. Later in the novel, Thrushcross Grange and Wuthering Heights are used as opposites to enhance the dichotomy Bronte depends on to achieve her novelistic and feminist goals. However, although it may be tempting to assume the correlation of good with heaven and beastly with hell, one critic appeals to Heathcliff’s aggressive b***h, Juno, which attacks Mr. Lockwood in the opening chapter of the novel, to demonstrate that in this world, “Dogs and gods turn out to be not opposites but, figuratively speaking the same words spelled in different ways.”[4] Bronte applies the same principle to the consideration of heaven in hell; hell can be heaven, and heaven hell.

            Both points are further advanced through the description of Wuthering Heights Lockwood records for the reader. The house that will soon be signified as a painful environment for the inhabitants who live under its roof is initially described as a “heaven” for the misanthropic Heathcliff and Lockwood himself. [5] However, over the course of his visits to the Heights over the first few chapters, Lockwood undergoes a reversal of values and, significantly, before Nelly begins her story, realizes the hellish nature surrounding Wuthering Heights. Similar to the icy desolation Mary Shelley uses to represent hell at the final meeting between Victor and the creature in Frankenstein, Bronte uses a “suffocating” snowfall to arrest Lockwood temporarily at the Heights.[6] Apart from the explicit signs of torment and torture like the dead animals, raw flesh, and hostile dogs that “haunted other recesses” of the house, the female ghost also haunts, the family itself, if it can so be called, of Catherine II, Hareton, and Heathcliff, signifying another way in which this place is disconnected from a peacefully ordered place.[7] Though the three tenants are related, their relations have been strained by violence, greed, and revenge and as a result “these inhabitants of Wuthering Heights seem to live in chaos without the structuring principle of heaven’s hierarchical chain of being…”[8] Unlike Thrushcross Grange, the ties of kinship and lineage which make patriarchy possible has been damaged at Wuthering Heights.[9] However, though Lockwood almost immediately recants his proclamation that the house was a heaven, it seems logical to suppose that a place that substitutes violence for peace, hate for love, death for life, and most importantly disorder and chaos for order and patriarchy, would be something of a heaven to someone so angered by the latter two (order and patriarchy) to rebel against all the other “heavenly” qualities mentioned.

            If Catherine and Heathcliff (and Bronte) ultimately prefer this conventionally fallen world to the cultured one Linton seem to offer, Lockwood’s ghoulish description of the Heights does not contain the reason why. In a figure similar to Mrs. Smith in Persuasion, Emily Bronte creates her own overlooked though humble woman whose narrative contains the secrets to the mysteries the genteel Lockwood cannot know. However, while the sickly Mrs. Smith relays her information to an equally vulnerable woman, Bronte’s humble servant benefits a man with a presumed classical (and patriarchal) education. Though it becomes Lockwood’s responsibility to tell his tale to a wider public, it is Nelly Dean’s narrative that provides real meaning.

            Catherine’s paradise at Wuthering Heights begins with the arrival of what is first called “it” and then, ironically, “the devil.” Though Catherine famously refers to Heathcliff as her own self a number of times during the first half of the novel, and recognizing that this double-self is important to take seriously, one way in which Bronte may wish her readers to consider Heathcliff is to see his arrival at the Heights as Catherine’s living whip she had asked her father to bring back from Liverpool with him.[10] Critics Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar contend that by fulfilling a part of Catherine’s self that was hitherto absent, Heathcliff’s rebellious and powerful attitude is a “complimentary addition to Catherine’s being;” a literal double-self which enables her to gain considerable sway at Wuthering Heights.[11] With Heathcliff always by her side, Nelly tells Lockwood that Catherine became unruly and would not do anything “except what she please.” [12] Despite her father’s virtually dying wish, Catherine takes advantage of the chaos of the Heights and, especially after the death of her mother, assumes the role of child-mistress of the house. Though a mistress, she is not angelic. Some of her authentically hellish and irreligious qualities emerge while a child at Wuthering Heights. She and Heathcliff rebel against the religiousness Joseph advocates and develop a hatred and defiance against the symbol of patriarchy at the Heights, her father, who after asking his daughter “Why canst thou not always be a good lass, Cathy?” is answered by the rebellious remark,  “Why cannot you always be a good man, Father?”

            It is this Lockwoodian hell that seems to be Catherine’s childhood paradise in which, armed with her whip, she wields power and control at her now anti-hierarchical home. However, this paradise does not last. The death of her father and the ascension of her brother, Hindley, to ownership of Wuthering Heights restores the “patriarchal laws of primogeniture” to Catherine’s world and thus her reign as queen of Wuthering Heights comes to an end.[13] However, if Bronte sees women as fallen from a paradise like Wuthering Heights into the hell of something else, this is not that fall. Though she no longer “rules” her home, she is not immediately subjected to the true hell she will eventually inhabit. Before her true fall, Bronte prepares Catherine for what is to come by separating, for the first time, herself from her other self, Heathcliff.  Without him she is helpless against the threats of culture that the twelve-year-old Catherine is exposed to from her increasingly “tyrannical”[14] brother. Frances becomes the first lady that Catherine is exposed to and her “half silly” sense of doom regarding sickness and death foreshadows what the soon-to-be transformed Catherine will later experience.

            Gilbert and Gubar point to another often overlooked point to explain that Catherine’s stay at Thrushcross Grange is the metaphorical fall of women into civilization. They note the importance difference that Catherine did not “go” to the Grange, but rather “the Grange [in the form of a masculine bulldog] seizes her and ‘holds her fast.’”[15] The horrific sexual revelations that the nearly pubescent Catherine is about to learn is anticipated by the symbolic image of the dog “throttled off, his huge, purple tongue hanging half a foot out of his mouth… his pendant lips streaming with bloody slaver.”[16] Catherine has also been captured by her own sexuality.

            Significantly, prior to the attack, both Heathcliff and Catherine catch glimpses of the Grange as a “splendid place carpeted with crimson… and with pure white ceilings bordered by gold,” and proclaim, “we should have thought ourselves in heaven.”[17] Just as the supposed hell of Wuthering Heights was transformed into a paradise, the heavenly Grange will become a hell. Almost everything about the two houses is different. The Heights, Lockwood is told, has no parlor, no carpeted floors, and questionable eatables, where Thrushcross seems a decorative fixture capable of producing and reproducing the hierarchical chain that Wuthering Heights and its former anti-hierarchical and egalitarian ways condemn. It is here that Catherine is taught the social disease of ladyhood, and separated from her resistant double, Heathcliff, permanently falls into patriarchy, madness, anxiety, starvation, and ultimately death by way of childbirth, as if Bronte meant to reinforce the destructive nature of Catherine’s sexuality.

            The separation from Heathcliff enables Catherine’s female education to be administered. Even before deciding what to do with the possibly crippled girl, the Lintons immediately banish Heathcliff and even threaten to hang him. His harsh treatment and subsequent powerlessness during Catherine’s stay at the Grange suggest the typically hyper-masculinized Heathcliff may actually be a rebelling female in a male body. Consider that it is his Sin-like ferocity that is exorcised from Catherine during her transformation. He is reduced to an invisible intruder at Wuthering Heights, which now has given birth to a male heir, Hareton Earnshaw, who will eventually threaten Heathcliff’s residence there. The war he wages against both houses in the second half of the novel effectively, as mentioned before, severs the line of lineage and ownership and fragments order, in an effort to gain revenge on a system that fragmented his self. His elopement with Isabella Linton is a sign of further revenge, as he enters the house that forcibly took his double away from him to tempt another woman to escape “imprisonment.”[18]

While the somewhat effeminate Edgar Linton is often portrayed as the feminized male in contrast to Heathcliff, Edgar does not need to be physically strong in order to get his way; he is the master and father of the house of culture.[19] His bookish and cultured tendencies mark him as the patriarch Heathcliff could never be. Catherine’s death due in part to starvation seems to make it clear that with Heathcliff separated from her, an essential part of her femininity had been taken from her. Both like and unlike Eve’s fall, then, Bronte sees the hell of Wuthering Heights a salvation for those who have fallen into the world of divinely sanctioned patriarchy. 

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[1] Nancy Armstrong, The Rise of Feminine Authority in the Novel, p. 145.

[2] Ibid

[3] I will be using victimization feminism as the main feminist technique during the turn of the nineteenth century England.

[4] Sandra M. Gilbert, Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, p.  259.

[5] Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights, chapter 1.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Madwoman, p. 262.

[9] Though the same fate does eventually await Thrushcross.

[10] Heathcliff’s supposed crushing of Hindley’s gift, a fiddle, foreshadows their relationship.

[11] Madwomen, p. 265.

[12] Wuthering Heights, chapter 4.

[13] Madwoman ,p.  267.

[14] Wuthering Heights, chapter 4.

[15] Madwoman, p. 271.

[16] Wuthering Heights, chapter 5.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Wuthering Heights, chapter 21

[19] Although Nelly does contend that he has enough strength that when he strikes Heathcliff, “any lesser man” would have fallen.

Author's Note

This one needs work as far as style goes. Also, I'm working on expanding this argument further so any ideas would be particularly useful.