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Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
I've been very happy with my little Cathy.... But I've been as happy musing by myself among those stones, under that old church, lying, through the long June evenings, on the green mound of her mother's grave, and wishing—yearning for the time when I might lie beneath it.11 Considering his late wife's vehement rejection of him, this is an extraordinary statement, and Edgar goes on to say that, to prevent Heathcliff's victimization of his daughter, he would "rather resign her to God, and lay her in the earth before me." Nothing is learned in the older generation; the ease of death is preferred to the combat of life. The wonder is that so strong-willed a personality as young Catherine can have sprung from such debilitated soil.
So with the perpetual childhood of myths, fairy tales, legends, and gothic romances, which, occupying a timeless "present," relate to no time at all. Being outsized and exemplary of passions, their characters cannot be human: they are frozen in a single attitude, they are an attitude, and can never develop. Only young Catherine undergoes a change of personality, and, in willfully altering her own fate, transforms the Heights itself. She alone resists Heathcliff; she nurses her invalid husband in his final sickness, and nearly succumbs to death herself. When Heathcliff somewhat uncharacteristically asks her how she feels, after Linton has died, she says: "He's safe, and I'm free.... I should feel well—but ... you have left me so long to struggle against death alone, that I feel and see only death! I feel like death!"12—a speech that allows us to see how very far Catherine has come, within a remarkably brief span of time.
In another sort of novel Heathcliff would assuredly have been drawn to his widowed daughter-in-law, if only for sexual, or exploitative purposes: but Wuthering Heights is fiercely chaste, and none of its characters gives any impression of being violated by a sexual idea. (The fact that Catherine is pregnant, and that her pregnancy is advanced, during the final tempestuous love scene between her and Heathcliff, is never commented upon by anyone: not even by the unequivocal Mrs. Dean, whose domain is the physical world and whose eye is presumably undimmed by romance. One must be forgiven for wondering if the pregnancy—the incontestably huge belly of Catherine Linton—is not acknowledged because it is so blatant a fact of physical life, so absolute a fact of her wifehood, which excludes Heathcliff; or because, given the Victorian strictures governing author as well as characters, it cannot be acknowledged. Perhaps there is simply no vocabulary to enclose it.)
Young Catherine, however, has not inherited her mother's predilection for the grave. She soon exhibits an altogether welcome instinct for self-knowledge and compromise—for the subtle stratagems of adult life—that have been, all along, absent in her elders. Where Heathcliff by his nature remains fixed and two-dimensional, a character in a bygone drama, until his final "change" draws him so unresistingly to death, Catherine's nature is bound up with, and enforced [next page]