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Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
cannibal teeth, his desperate passion for revenge, is he not a "romantic" incarnation of Iago or Vendice (of The Revenger's Tragedy), another Edmund fired to destroy an Edgar, a revenge-motive imposed upon a fairy tale of love and betrayal? He does not require Hindley to flog and beat him, in order to turn stoically wicked, since he has possessed an implacable will from the very first, having demonstrated no affection or gratitude for the elder Mr. Earnshaw, who had not only saved his life in Liverpool but (for reasons not at all clear in realistic terms) had loved him above his own children. Near the end of the novel Mrs. Dean wonders aloud if her master might be a ghoul or a vampire, since he has begun to prowl the moor at night, and she has read of "such hideous, incarnate demons." Her characteristic common sense wavers; she sinks into sleep, taxing herself with the rhetorical question: "But where did he come from, the little dark thing, harboured by a good man to his bane?"—a question that is presumably ours as well. From where does "evil" spring, after all, if not from "good"? And is it sired by "good"? And "harboured" by it? This particular demon is Heathcliff only: Heathcliff Heathcliff, possessing no other name: sired, it would seem, by himself, and never legally adopted by Mr. Earnshaw. (His headstone reads only "Heathcliff" and the date of his death: no one can think of an appropriate inscription for his monument.)
Yet if Heathcliff must enact the depersonalized role of a damned spirit, the "romantic" motif of the novel necessitates his having been a victim himself—not of Hindley or of the "ruling classes," but of his soul-mate Catherine. He is unkillable but may die from within, willing his own extinction, as his "soul's bliss kills his body, but does not satisfy itself." Just as the narcissistic self-laceration of the childlovers cannot yield to so social and communal a ritual as marriage, so, too, does the "romantic-gothic" mode consume itself, and retreat into history: for the fiction of Wuthering Heights must be that we have had Lockwood's diary put into our hands, many years after his transcription of events belonging to another century. We read his "reading" of Mrs. Dean's tale, parts of which seem remote and even legendary. Ghosts are by popular tradition trapped on an earthly plane, cursed by the need, which any compulsive-obsessive neurotic might understand, to cross and recross the same unyielding terrain, never advancing, never progressing, never attaining the freedom of adulthood. Even Edgar, the wronged husband, the master of Thrushcross Grange, soliloquizes: I've prayed often . . . for the approach of what is coming: and now I begin to shrink, and fear it. I thought the memory of the hour I came down that glen a bridegroom would be less sweet than the anticipation that I was soon, in a few months, or, possibly, weeks, to be carried up, and laid in its lonely hollow! Ellen, I've [next page]