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What is the literary function of the bodily in two texts?
“The flesh to the spirit”: an Investigation of the Body and Spirit Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the
D’Urbervilles and Emily Brontё’s Wuthering Heights
“She was appalled by the determination revealed in the depths of this gentle being she had
married – the will to subdue the grosser to the subtler emotion, the substance to the
conception, the flesh to the spirit. Propensities, tendencies, habits, were as dead leaves upon
the tyrannous wind of his imaginative ascendency” - Thomas Hardy, Tess of the
D’Urbervilles, 313
The titular quote is from Thomas Hardy’s 1891 Tess of the D’Urbervilles, it calls to question
how well one can know a person from “the flesh to the spirit” (313) when you only have
access to their physical being. This passage mirrors how we read characters, where such
“depths” (Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, 313) go detected or undetected depending on
how accurately their bodily being and actions reflect their spirit. Readers of Hardy’s Tess of
the D’Urbervilles and Emily Brontё’s 1847 Wuthering Heights seem to engage with the texts
through feelings. In our lexicon of expressing how we react to literature the word ‘feel’ is a
kind of turncoat: not only do we feel the moods of Heathcliff, but we also can trace the
physical effort it might take to move around the moors, just as we seem to understand in
almost tactile terms Tess Durbeyfield’s countryside surroundings as much as we sympathise
with her. In this discussion it will be apparent that a great deal of critical ink has been spilled
over philosophising the connection between body and soul. However, this is not to say that
Brontё and Hardy solve the problem, rather we can utilise these theories to understand what
makes these texts so affective and effective as literary achievements. The physical
experiences in these texts, I will argue, are used as a means by which to express in literary
terms what is happening in the soul1 of the characters.
We can begin to understand the nineteenth century fascination with the question of, as
William A. Cohen in Embodied: Victorian Literature and the Senses (2009) puts it, “[w]hat
does it mean to be human?” (xi) by turning to Thomas Carlyle’s Signs of the Times (1829).
Carlyle imagines a philosopher hypothesising that “[t]hought… is still secreted by the brain;
but then Poetry and Religion… are a product of the lower intestines” he goes on, “that ‘as the
jack had a meat-roasting quality, so had the body a thinking quality,’ – upon the strength of
Throughout this discussion I will use terms like ‘soul’, ‘human essence’, ‘mind’ and similar terms
interchangeably, I have taken my cue to do so from William A. Cohen’s Embodied: Victorian Literature and the
Senses (2009) whereby he describes the human essence thusly: “[t]his essence – whether called by traditional,
religiously inflected names such as “soul” or “spirit” or identified with newer psychologically orientated terms
like “mind” and “self” – was almost always imagined [by Victorian writers] as interior to the individual” (xi).
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which the Nurembergers were to build a wood-and-leather man… Vancanson did indeed
make a wooden duck, that seemed to eat and digest; but that bold scheme of the
Nurembergers remained for a more modern virtuoso” (Signs of the Times, 69). Carlyle
defines how the human being cannot be purely described in material or bodily terms: his
comparison to the wooden duck suggests that one might be able to manufacture a material
animal being that “seems” to function, but, he argues, there is something more to humans that
defies simply being a body which “digests”. Carlyle goes on to try to explain this in terms of
“the primary unmodified forces and energies of man, the mysterious springs of Love, and
Fear, and Wonder” (Signs of the Times, 72) a force he dubs ‘Dynamism’ (Signs of the Times,
72). We also encounter Kantianism as described by Mark Johnson in The Body in the Mind:
The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason (1987) where, predating Carlyle,
“[Immanuel] Kant rejected the notion that one could prove the existence of a substantial soul
or mind independent of the body” (xxvii) as Carlyle seems imply, “[Kant]…wanted to make
sense of the… distinction between mental and physical attributes” (xxvii). I agree that the
body and soul are not independent, however I argue that mental and physical attributes
compliment one another in these texts. Both Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Brontё’s
Wuthering Heights are concerned with heightened emotions of “Love, and Fear, and
Wonder” (Carlyle, Signs of the Times, 72), which make them ideal for this reading.
In contention with Carlyle’s theory that there is a ‘Dynamism’ (Signs of the Times, 72) to
human beings that is not material, is Cohen’s2 proposition that “[w]hat is human, [Victorian]
writers were excited and frightened to discover, is nothing more or less than the human body
itself. Embodied experience was the solution that writers in a variety of styles and genres
struck upon in response to contemporary questions about the nature, location, and plasticity
of the human essence” (Embodied, xi). Cohen argues that a human being in Victorian
literature is nothing but their body, which makes sense in terms of what literature is able to
express; Cohen acknowledges that there are problems with “literary representation”
(Embodied, xi), that is to say that “attending to sense perception serves several purposes. In
physiological terms, it provides a mechanism for showing how the world of objects –
including other bodies – enters the body of the subject and remakes its interior entities. In
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What must be accounted for is that while Carlyle and Cohen can be read in conversation, Carlyle is a social
commentator considering real world materialisation and mechanisation of the human experience, whereas
Cohen is considering the literary representation of people. Nonetheless, interdisciplinary reading is the type of
reading that people were doing in the nineteenth century and so for the purposes of this discussion it is not
unreasonable to use Carlyle as a means by which to understand the “contemporary questions” (Cohen,
Embodied, xi) that Victorian writers such as Brontё and Hardy may have been grappling with.
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psychological terms, because “feelings” lie in a grey zone between physical sensations and
emotional responses, somatic and affective experiences can switch, blend, or substitute one
for another” (Embodied, 6). For descriptive purposes in Wuthering Heights and Tess of the
D’Urbervilles bodily experience serves as a concise way of communicating interiority,
especially considering that the narrators of the novels do not always have access to the
protagonists’ inner thoughts and feelings. I would insist that “physical sensations and
emotional responses” (Cohen, Embodied, 6) are not interchangeable as Cohen suggests, but
nor is the body a material prison: instead I am inclined to find that the body and soul are
woven so tightly together in Wuthering Heights and Tess of the D’Urbervilles that it seems
the body is complimentary to the human essence of the characters. That is, the body and soul
do not blur, they match. It is striking how much the bodily and tactile experiences are woven
into moments in the texts which are of “Love, and Fear, and Wonder” (Carlyle, Signs of the
Times, 69); I will first demonstrate this with a specific focus on hands, which are arguably the
primary point of contact between the body and the outside world.
Hands appear at such a time of “Love, and Fear, and Wonder” (Carlyle, Signs of the Times,
69) in Wuthering Heights in the infamous scene in where Mr Lockwood is haunted by
Catherine’s ghost. The ghost of Catherine’s “little, ice-cold hand” (Brontё, 35), is crucial to
this discussion since Brontё alerts us to the fact that ghosts (often thought of as
manifestations of the human spirit) are tangible, tactile and react to the outside world. Here
spiritual anguish is so powerful that the spirit is transcribed back to a physical form by Brontё
in order to articulate suffering. However, heightened emotions are also traced into physical
movements in this text: after Catherine has married Edgar Linton Heathcliff returns, and in
their reuniting moments Catherine “sprang forward, took both [Heathcliff’s] hands, and led
him to Linton; and then she seized Linton’s reluctant fingers and crushed them into his”
(Brontё, Wuthering Heights, 93). This moment is rich with references to an earlier passage
where Catherine wonders if there is any way she and Linton can be married and have her still
keep Heathcliff as a companion (Brontё, Wuthering Heights, 82). It foreshadows a later
episode when Catherine is dead, Nelly entwines both Linton and Heathcliff’s hair into the
locket which Catherine will be buried with (Brontё, Wuthering Heights, 154). Brontё is
staging a strange ménage à trois parody of the bringing together of hands in the marriage
ritual, which not only brings together bodies, but also souls. This is an overwhelming
moment for Catherine, articulated through the use of “sprang”, “seized”, and “crushed”.
Cohen remarks that “mental, emotional, or intellectual agitation, when it reaches a pitch of
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excitement, spills over into physical symptoms” (Embodied, 5): excessive emotions are
expressed by Catherine’s body in order to physically and emotionally unite the two men
whom she loves, and thus readers understand her confusing and conflicting love impulses.
In turning to Tess of the D’Urbervilles, we find that hands, once again, appear in moments of
“Love, and Fear, and Wonder” (Carlyle, Signs of the Times, 69) to similar effect. The
moment where Angel Clare and Tess are “breaking up the masses of curd” (Hardy, Tess of
the D’Urbervilles, 226), is a moment of emotional tention whereby Tess has refused Clare’s
proposal of marriage, but desires him nonetheless. Hardy writes “amid the immaculate
whiteness of the curds Tess Durbeyfield’s hands showed themselves of the pinkness of the
rose. Angel… laid his hands upon hers” (Tess of the D’Urbervilles, 226). This moment of
love and sexual tension is expressed using the union of the hands, similar to Catherine’s
spiritual and emotional union of Heathcliff and Linton where a joining of the hands suggests
an ironic marriage image. The symbolic imagery of Tess’s bright pink hands on
“immaculate” white, underlines how her body is no longer virginal. The use of touch between
lovers makes it seem that Tess is very engaged with her body, whilst she grapples with “the
struggle… [of] her own heart” (Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, 226). Another occasion
where Tess’s hands are engaged with interior tumult is when she and Clare are married and
they “washed their hands in one basin. Clare touched hers under the water. ‘Which are my
fingers and which are yours?’… ‘They are all yours’” (Hardy, Tess of the D’Ubervilles, 277).
By being married to Clare Tess should be bonded to him with her body, however the washing
of the hands is ironic since she cannot be purified nor have they consumated their marriage.
Helena Michie points out in The Flesh Made Word: Female Figures and Women’s Bodies
(1987) that “Victorian novels are frequently about women’s hands: hands that stand for
hearts, and hands that are won and offered by themselves. The hands that are offered with
hearts, that represent in themselves something higher… The synecdotal chain shifts the
burden of female sexuality away from the body as a whole, through the heart to the hand”
(98). It is worth noting how significant hands are to matters of the heart (or indeed the inner
being as “something higher” (Michie, The Flesh Made World, 98)), however I find it
contradictory that the hand stands for the heart and yet Michie suggests that hands are a
shortcut away from the body. I would instead suggest that hands are actually a mode of
expressing the character’s inner desires, including sexuality. What is apparent from these
examples is that experience of the body as written in these novels is matched with the state of
the interiority of the characters. I will now go on to examine four modes in which this is
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explored by Brontё and Hardy: interaction with the dead, love and sexuality, bodily
appearance and bodily illness.
Firstly, there is a key relationship between living bodies and the dead, including dead bodies,
which complicates distinctions of body and soul in these texts. Julia Kristeva points out in
Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1980) that “corpses show me what I permanently
thrust aside in order to live… life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death.
There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being” (3). Kristeva argues that the
corpse presents an unstable boundary between the living and the dead because one is able to
touch it, however the spirit is gone, and so it reminds us of our own materiality. As Cohen
describes, Brontё and Hardy require the souls of their characters to be grounded in materiality
for ease of literary expression. If we are to believe Cohen’s claim that “the body [is] the
source and location of human essence,” (Embodied, xi) then it makes sense for the spirits of
the dead in Wuthering Heights to be embodied, and for Tess’ spirit to be reanimated in the
body of ‘Liza-Lu. Sarah A. William in Possessed Victorians: Extra Spheres in Nineteenth
Century Mystical Writings identifies Spiritualism in the nineteenth century where
“[p]ossessed accounts characterize the most radical and conceptually political uses of the
human body…the roles that radical body uses take include mediumship… and the
transmigration of souls” (2). Of course, in Wuthering Heights no one is possessed, however
William does highlight how there were anxieties and even practices around the intersection
between the human body and human spirits. Brontё’s novel debunks Spiritualist beliefs of her
time since ghosts are surprisingly corporeal in Wuthering Heights. Lockwood can literally
“seize” (Wuthering Heights, 35) the ghost of Catherine Earnshaw, and yet her earthly body
remains in the ground, which Brontё makes the effort to demonstrate when Heathcliff
exhumes her. When Heathcliff is at Catherine’s grave he “heard a sigh from someone above,
close at the edge of the grave... there was another sigh, close at my ear. I appeared to feel the
warm breath of it…so certainly I felt that Cathy was there” (Wuthering Heights, 252). Brontё
shows that Catherine’s soul has a kind of materiality or at least is able to have presence and
warmth in its breath that Heathcliff is able to perceive. This satisfies Carlyle by
demonstrating that the spirit is not encased in the earthly body, however Cohen notices that
“[if] ghosts can bleed, then the border between material and immaterial existence thoroughly
confounded. Human subjects – here in the form of souls and spirits – are thoroughly porous”
(Embodied, 12). Porousness that best describes how the body and soul are able to tie together:
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in Brontё this is explored with no longer living souls deliberately, however in Hardy this is
slightly less obvious.
To understand how a dead disembodied soul can reclaim the body in Tess of the
D’Urbervilles we must account for how in nineteenth century Spiritualist belief there is
utility that a dead soul can find in a living body: “the dead and disembodied could materialize
at a séance, or their words and deeds could be channelled through the mouth and body of a
medium” (William, Possessed Victorians, 3). William’s explanation calls into question how
the body and the spirit can be separate; yet the soul can transmigrate into a different body,
highlighting the importance that Kristeva implies of how one cannot be without the other
while living. At the end of Tess of the D’Urbervilles Hardy describes “a spiritualized image
of Tess, slighter than she, but with the same beautiful eyes – Clare’s sister-in-law, ‘Liza-Lu”
(506). I would argue that although Tess is not literally being channelled by ‘Liza-Lu,
William’s description of mediumship is applicable. Hardy cannot allow Tess to live with her
murderous and sexually transgressive body, and so “[t]he minimal possibilities for language
for the rest of the novel [relies on] creating a living being from dead parts” (Michie, The
Flesh Made Word, 97). Firstly, we never see ‘Liza-Lu until her description here, so Hardy
has found a way to rematerialize Tess’s body and aligns it deliberately with a “spiritualized
image” of her. Hardy has resuscitated Tess’s spirit by casting away the body which was
sexually impure and murderous and gives her a new one. Secondly, Tess’s “words and deeds
could be channelled through the mouth and body” (William, Possessed Victorians, 3) of
‘Liza-Lu. ‘Liza-Lu’s role in the novel is to say the wedding vows and enact the deeds of
being Clare’s wife, participating in the role of a medium for Tess as William defines it. In
both novels we might argue as, Elaine Freegood does in The Ideas in Things: Fugitive
Meaning in the Victorian Novel (2006) that the bodies which the spirits require are objectified
where “[t]he materialism of the nineteenth century… vastly multiplied the entities that could
be described as alive or dead… in which the difference between subjects and objects… is
blurred by the possibility of animation, reanimation…which results in subjects’ becoming too
much like objects: the dead subject… can live or live again” (141). I would concede that
although the body is, as Kristeva stresses, material and thus by necessity is “thinged”
(Freegood, Ideas in Things, 141) in these texts, the subject/object binary which Freegood
asserts lends itself to how bodies and souls need to mirror in order for subjectivity to be
attained and communicated in literary terms. The clash of living and dead souls and bodies in
these texts are used as a means by which to examine “the fleshliness of the soul” (Cohen,
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Embodied, 12) of the characters, whereby the “writers… meditate on the capability of their
own artistic media to convey spiritual contents” (Cohen, Embodied, 12).
This leads us to the second topic of discussion: love and sexuality. Love, according to
Carlyle’s definition of ‘Dynamism’ (Signs of the Times, 72) is in the domain of the soul,
whereas sexuality is of the corporeal. Love is not always entwined to sexuality; however in
these texts the characters seem to have a bodily response to love. Masao Miyoshi in The
Divided Self: A Perspective on the Literature of the Victorians (1969) argues that “[i]n
ordinary human terms, Heathcliff and Cathy are in love, but what to call that “love” eludes
us. It is not specifically sexual… not even particularly sensual… not by any means purely
spiritual (they seem to require physical proximity)… yet the two insist on their oneness”
(213-214). That is to say that Cathy and Heathcliff seem to express their inner feelings in
terms of materiality. Cathy states that “[w]hatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the
same” (Brontё, Wuthering Heights, 81) which marks the soul as something tangible. Cohen
remarks that by doing so “Brontё stages an ongoing contest between material and immaterial
claims for the possiblitity of intersubjective contact” (Embodied, 11). This reminds us of the
subect/object dicotomy that Freegood presents: while Freegood asserts that “difference
between subjects and objects… is blurred” (Ideas in Things, 141) Cohen argues that the
materialisation of the soul in Wuthering Heights is a means of facilitating “intersubjective
contact”: in this case, love. When Catherine is dying Heathcliff visits her and he “had her
grasped in his arms. He neither spoke nor loosed his hold for some five minutes, during
which period he bestowed more kisses than ever he gave in his life before,” (Brontё, 145) at
the end of the encounter Heathcliff has to “extricate himself from his companion’s arms…
holding him as firmly as her strength allowed… she clung fast, grasping” (Brontё, 149). As
Miyoshi suggests they “require physical proximity,” (The Divided Self, 214) however, I
disagree that they are not “not specifically sexual … [or] particularly sensual” given that they
spend five minutes silently embracing. Cohen argues for the importance of touch for the soul:
“organs of sensation, the skin… have evolved from exterior surfaces into vehicles for “alien”
matter to enter… sensory organs, those channels between inner being and surface that lie at
the border of distinction” (Embodied, 4). Sensuality is often associated with gentleness;
however I would argue that the violent desperation to retain touch between them actually
suggests that the sensuality of touch is the only way that are able to be spiritually “porous”
(Cohen, Embodied, 12) to one another to achieve “intersubjective contact” (Cohen,
Embodied, 11).
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Sexuality and love are certainly expressed in physical terms in Tess of the D’Urbervilles:
bodily responses are vital to Hardy in this text. Descriptions of Tess’s affection for Clare are
markedly similar to how Brontё describes in physical terms the affection between her two
lovers. Hardy writes “[h]er affection for [Clare] was now the breath and life of Tess’s being;
it enveloped her… keeping back the gloomy spectres that would persist in their attempts to
touch her” (249). Hardy literalises the affection as something which keeps her body alive,
thus showing how her body and soul are wound tightly together. Similarly, we encounter the
touch sensation where Tess is “enveloped”, but it is also within the realms of possibility that
gloom can “touch her”. However, this is not to say that her body is not sexualised, her
transgression with Alec does not go unpunished by Hardy. Clare laments that he was loving
“[a]nother woman in your shape” (Tess of the D’Urbervilles, 293), which I would insist is a
direct reference to the now known impurity of her body3. Freegood asserts that “desire served
by [nineteenth century writing] requires a world whose form is a relatively loose symbolic
structure, one into which readers can enter and intervene with… ease” (Ideas in Things, 7).
This symbolic structure is clear in Tess’s bodily response where her “cheek was flaccid, and
her mouth had almost the aspect of a round little hole” (Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles,
293): the fleshliness of her face paired with a round little hole is symbolic of Tess’s genitals.
Oliver Lovesey in Reconstructing Tess (2003) notices that while “representation of Tess's
“purity” and the exact nature of her seduction/rape have continued to engage critical
attention” (913) there is “symbolic reconstruction of Tess's virginity, figured in the
recuperative allegory of Tess's mouth and in the person of her sister Liza-Lu… [Which]
establishes a material, earthbound resurrection cantered on a reconstructed Tess” (914). In
other words, for Hardy rescuing Tess’s soul relies implicitly on the material nature of her
body and sexuality, for Lovesey this is specific to her hymen. While Brontё expresses love
through the physicality of Heathcliff and Cathy, Hardy intertwines love tightly with the state
of the body, and sexuality with the state of the soul. This may have the adverse effect of
objectifying these characters to readers as Freegood asserts, however I would suggest that this
is an occupational hazard of not using a first person narrative and so we do not have access to
the focalised characters’ inner thoughts and feelings, thus we can only observe them through
their body.
However, this bodily impurity can only be known in her “shape”: Kant suggests that through touch “feeling all
the sides of a body [we can] form a concept of its shape” (Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798),
34) in terms of its shape in relationship to the outside world, physically, social and emotionally.
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This leads us to consider how the appearance of characters becomes crucial in these texts.
“[I]n the Critique of Pure Reason Kant … maintained that we cognize bodies only as
appearances,” (Vilem Mudroch and Helmut Holzhey, Historical Dictionary of Kant and
Kantianism (2005), 64) as readers we understand bodies by their outer appearance as literary
description allows. Cohen argues that “the eyes… [are] crucial to notions of spiritual depth
and mental penetration… [the] eye and skin are fundamentally contagious… seeing can have
the characteristics of direct, tactile contact” (Embodied, 4). A conflation of seeing, touching
and spiritual understanding is noticeable in the narrative forms of both novels, in particular
Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Lovesey notices “the intensity of the narrator’s obsessively
prodding and probing gaze on Tess’s body nearly renders the narrative a fantasy of
procrastinated rape” (Reconstructing Tess, 914) which I would argue necessitates her
reincarnation in ‘Liza-Lu since her body is so scrutinised. Hardy does not allow us access to
Tess’s body unless she is being looked at, this narrative focus on Tess’s appearance is noted
by Kaja Silverman in History, Figuration and Female Subjectivity in "Tess of the
d'Urbervilles" (1984). Silverman points out that at the initial description of Tess “with the
departure of this imaginary spectator, Tess drops from view… She doesn't reappear until
sometime after the entry of Angel Clare, when he finally looks in her direction” (History,
Figuration and Female Subjectivity, 7). Miyoshi goes some way to explaining why Hardy
takes such pains to show us Tess but largely deny descriptions of inner feelings, arguing that
“[t]he ideal beauty [Clare] sees in Tess is his own creation, having nothing to do with the
person Tess understands herself to be. She is tormented by the discrepancy…” (The Divided
Self, 304). As readers we are invited to understand the subtleties of Tess’s blushes to get hints
at her emotions, however the other characters do not read her body correctly, and so her soul
lacks unstanding that Cohen calls “intersubjective contact” (Embodied, 11). I would argue
that this is why many readers sympathise with Tess and yet are frustrated at the narrative. We
can trace how Tess grapples with this discrepancy throughout the text: at the dance she is
aware of how her body is observed after she is embarrassed by her father: “her pride would
not allow her to turn her head… she thus moved on” (Hardy, 13), but “[b]y the time the spot
was reached she had recovered” (Hardy, 13) because the interpretation of her tears is accurate
to her upset. However, later trauma means she is less able to recover from being observed
because the interpretations of her body become less accurate. While she is milking “she then
became conscious that [Clare] was observing her; but she would not show it by any change of
position… a close eye might easily have discerned that the rosiness of her face deepened”
(Hardy, 192-193). Although movement was restricted in the first instance she could return to
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the dance; now her whole body is restricted, even the flushing of her face is discrete. Tess
instinctively polices her body, so readers can interpret her fear but Clare does not. When
“Clare allowed her to free herself; and in a minute or two the milking of each was resumed”
(Hardy, 194) web see a delayed version of the return to normality in the first episode. Finally,
the last time that Tess’s body is observed is by those who have come to arrest her, “her
breathing was now quick and small, like that of a lesser creature than a woman” because she
is frightened. Her body and mind are so traumatised that it means she cannot calculate her
movements any longer, and she becomes instinctual and animal-like. Instead she says “‘I am
almost glad…I have had enough…’” (Hardy, 505). Tess’s inner thoughts have to be
communicated with words rather than her body because her body, although complimentary to
her, is consistently misread. Eventually, Tess has experienced trauma that means she remains
beautiful to the observer: rape, grief and guilt do not write themselves on any observable part
of her body, and so this failure of “intersubjective contact” (Cohen, Embodied, 11) leads her
to defeat because she is looked at, but never interpreted correctly. However, the reader of the
novel can trace this in the way her body moves, and her relationship to her body as I have
illustrated, showing an eventual decline in Tess’s inner resiliance.
Finally, in Wuthering Heights when there is wastage of the soul, so there is wastage of the
body. Where in Tess of the D’Urbervilles Tess’s traumatised soul and bodily experience
match but cannot be seen by any of the other characters, in Wuthering Heights it is made
obvious, in particular Catherine’s wasting illnesses. Elaine Scarry in The Body in Pain: The
Making and Unmaking of the World (1985) notes how “[p]hysical pain happens, of course,
not several mile below our feet or many miles above our heads but within the bodies of
persons who inhabit the world… and who at any moment be separated from us by only a
space of several inches. The very temptation to invoke analogies to remote cosmologies… is
itself a sign of pain’s triumph, for it achieves… this absolute split between one’s sense of
one’s own reality and the reality of other persons” (4). This, I would argue, perfectly
describes in physical terms what is happening to Catherine’s soul when there is a failure of
“intersubjective contact” (Cohen, Embodied, 11): Catherine is experiencing a failure of
intersubjective contact in terms of how much love (that is vital to ‘Dynamism’ (Carlyle, Signs
of the Times, 72)) she receives from Linton, who does not “inquire concerning his wife’s
occupations” (Brontё, Wuthering Heights, 113). Brontё writes that “she fasted pertinaciously,
under the idea, probably, that at every meal Edgar was ready to choke for her absence,”
(Wuthering Heights, 114) we can infer that she is trying to control her emotional starvation
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through her refusal of food. Michie notices that “[w]omen’s hunger and the attempt to
appease it occupy an important place in the Victorian canon. Heroines can have their hunger
turned against them or turn their hunger into energy to fight for what they want. Hunger is
both dangerous and potentially liberating; it can lead to fulfilment or obsession” (The Flesh
Made Word, 23). Her experience of emotional pain which “split between one’s sense of one’s
own reality and the reality of other persons” (Scarry, The Body in Pain, 4) leads her to cry
“Oh I will die… since no one cares anything about me” (Brontё, Wuthering Heights, 114).
This “spills over into physical symptoms” (Cohen, Embodied, 5). This is why, as Miyoshi
notices, Cathy and Heathcliff require “physical proximity” (The Divided Self, 214). Without
Heathcliff to enact some form of intersubjective porousness she is starved of love as Cohen
and Carlyle define it. We can see this failure of “intersubjective contact” when Catherine is
on her second fatal fever, she tells Nelly “That is how I am loved! ...that is not my Heathcliff.
I shall love mine yet; and take him with me: he’s in my soul… the thing that irks me most is
this shattered prison… I’m wearying to escape into that glorious world… not seeing it dimly
through tears and yearning through the walls of an aching heart” (Brontё, Wuthering Heights,
147). Tess has “had enough” (Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, 505) of her body because of
a breakdown in intersubjective contact, here Catherine does the same. She reconciles that the
love she requires from Heathcliff is in her soul already, and so she rejects her body. However,
the “split between one’s sense of one’s own reality and the reality of other persons” (Scarry,
The Body in Pain, 4) becomes apparent when she confuses the wastage of her soul that
informs the wastage of her body with a desire to be out of the “shattered prison” of her
physical form, but also realises there are “walls of an aching heart” physicalizing her
emotional pain. This shows how her soul and body cannot be divorced, which may explain
why her ghosts are so bodily. Here “the story of physical pain becomes as well a story about
the expansive nature of human sentience” (The Body in Pain, 22).
The narrators do not have access to the interiority of the characters, and so in both texts the
authors have no choice but to match interiority to the outside being of their characters which
they are capable of describing in literary terms. In binding the body and soul for descriptive
purposes the body becomes a literal figure of the state of the interior. Thus Brontё and Hardy
are “[s]taging debates over the fleshliness of the soul… [Meditating] on the capability of their
own artistic media to convey spiritual contents” (Cohen, Embodied, 12). Scarry
acknowledges that “philosophers have habituated us to the recognition that our interior states
of consciousness are regularly accompanied by objects in the external world,” (The Body in
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Student 1105852
Pain, 5) however I would conclude that such objects (at the risk of objectification as
Freegood warns) in Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Wuthering Heights is the human body, and
thus the physical experiences of characters. Whether by direct analogies of the wasting
human body due to a failure in “intersubjective contact” (Cohen, Embodied, 11), correcting
such failure by “grasping” (Brontё, Wuthering Heights, 149), or the body being misread these
texts are undeniably bodily, as much as they are acclaimed for their emotional content.
Ultimately, the body and soul are interdependent and in tandem in these texts, allowing us to
understand and engage with interiority through exteriors.
5,469 words
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Student 1105852
Works Cited
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