English - Love in Wuthering Heights
What types of love are at work in Wuthering Heights?
“Yet each man kills the thing he loves,
By each let this be heard.
Some do it with a bitter look
Some with a flattering word.
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword” - OSCAR WILDE
Agape - All encompassing love, wondering expectation. Love or awe for a God.
Eros - Physical love, God of love.
Philos - Brotherly love. The love you would have for a friend.
Love - That state of feeling from recognition of attractive qualities, from sympathy or
from natural ties, and manifests itself in warm affection and attachment.
- An instance of affection.
- In religious use, applied to the paternal benevolence and affection of God, to the
affectionate devotion due to God from his creatures.
- Strong predilection for or devotion to something.
- The personification of sexual affection (Eros/Cupid).
- The sexual instinct and its gratification.
- A beloved person.
- A game of guessing the number of fingers held up in a quick movement of the hand.
A child could explain the concept of love, it is something straightforward and simple.
Love “is”. However, as we grow older and things become classified, love becomes
something incredibly complex and incomprehensible. It becomes purely a part of
uncontrollable emotions, with its own wild beauty. That is the one thing that everyone
will agree on, that love can be beautiful.
Emily Bronte (1818-48) was intense in her treatment of love and passion. Wuthering
Heights (1847), her only novel, deals with two generations of the Linton and Earnshaw
families in Yorkshire, and how their lives are affected by the ferocity of Heathcliff, who
was brought into their lives as a boy found in the streets of Liverpool. “The love between
him and Catherine Earnshaw is all-consuming, destructive and yet immortal. Wuthering
Heights which has been called a dramatic poem, is full of the most violent emotions,
paradoxically made even more intense by the perspective in which they are placed by the
narrators of the story.” As in Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte, the settings are important:
the interiors of the houses, the Yorkshire moors, and the changing seasons.
The stark, passionate world created by Emily Bronte, has become one of the most widely
read books in the English language. As a love story it appears to run more along the lines
of Romeo and Juliet, rather than Mills and Boon, where the desperate passions of the
characters, necessarily ends in death. It is typical of the Romance Genre for the characters
to experience a moment of self knowledge, an epiphany, whereby the characters come to
know themselves better through the love or actions of another person. Virginia Woolf has
described her view of Emily Bronte’s creation:
“There is love, but it is not the love of men and women. The impulse which urged her to
create was not her own suffering or her own injuries. She looked out onto a world cleft
into gigantic disorder, and felt within her the power to unite it into a book.”
In her novel admittedly there are many of the characteristics of love, but they appear
twisted as if seen through a bent looking-glass on a hall of mirrors. Passion turns to
violence. Here even civilised, educated people appear to loose the veneer of society,
revealing, perhaps some of the more deeply buried emotions and tendencies. How can
such a thing be explained, when the repressed side of the characters, appears to have been
magnified and more than human. Heathcliff, to the reader, appears inhuman, his violence
is paramount, and yet so is his love. This is apparently what happens when there is
something that you want, but can never posses. An example of the veneer of the Linton’s
as opposed to the wild natures of Cathy and Heathcliff, is shown by something described
by Nellie Dean:
It was not the thorn bending to the honey-suckles, but the honey-suckles embracing the
thorn.
One example of an extreme violence, by a person who would otherwise have been
characterised as a gentleman, was Lockwood’s actions, towards Cathy’s ghost, during a
dream he had while staying at Wuthering Heights:
As it spoke I discerned, obscurely, a child’s face looking through the window Terror
made me cruel; and, finding it useless to attempt shaking the creature off, I pulled its
wrist on to the broken pane, and rubbed it to and fro until the blood ran down and soaked
the bed-clothes: still it wailed, ‘Let me in!’ and maintained its tenacious grip, almost
maddening me with fear.
This example of Cathy’s ghost returning, as a child can be seen as an example of the
child-like love she portrays. For her the dreams of happiness are located in youth (Freud
characterised this as the polymorphous perversity of the infant). We can see that Cathy
wanted to have everything, showing a child-like greed. She did not want to have to
choose between her love for Linton and her love for Heathcliff. In a similar way her
child-like approach to life proved that she was capable of the narcissism of the young,
imagining herself universally loved:
“But I begin to fancy that you don’t like me. How strange! I thought, though everyone
hated and despised each other, they could not avoid loving me - and they have all turned
to enemies in a few hours.”
Cathy’s love differs for Heathcliff and Linton. Of Linton she says:
“I love the ground under his feet and the air over his head, and everything he touches,
and every word he says - I love all his looks and all his actions, and him entirely , and
altogether.”
This however proves how shallow her love for him is, because she does not seem to love
him, rather she loves all that is around him. Her love for Heathcliff is fundamental and
unchanging, whereas her feelings for Linton are as changeable as the seasons:
“My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods. Time will change it, I’m well aware,
as winter changes the trees - my love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff - he’s always,
always in my mind - not as a pleasure any more than I am always a pleasure to myself but, as my own being.
However there is more than just the love between man and woman shown in Wuthering
Heights. We can also see the love that Nellie Dean had for the infant Hareton, as perhaps
a mother might have loved a son, although as everything in the novel, her love was not to
be long-lived:
“I kissed Hareton goodbye; and, since then, he has been a stranger, and its very queer to
think it, but I’ve no doubt, he has completely forgotten about Ellen Dean and that he was
ever more than all the world to her, and she to him!”
The main feature of the novel, however is clearly the fundamental love which existed
between Cathy and Heathcliff. It has been said that in Wuthering Heights we appear to
have hit the wilder shores of love. As Cathy says:
“If all else perished and he remained, I should still continue to be, and if all else
remained and he was annihilated, the universe would turn into a mighty stranger; I
should not seem a part of it.”
It can be seen that the novels intensity and the escapism that we can find in its romance,
is caused by its acute psychological understanding of the characters and how they
communicate to each other. As the introduction to the Penguin Classics edition to the
novel says: ‘On one level the novel appears to celebrate a transcendent love which
surpasses the bounds of authority, mundanity, even death’.
There is a desire to be in unity with our fellow creatures, something which is already a
powerful principle in human nature. The social state is so natural, so necessary, and
habitual, that except in some unusual circumstances, or by an effort of voluntary
abstraction, he never conceives himself otherwise than a member of a body; and this
association is riveted more, and more, as mankind are further removed from the state of
savage independence. Both Heathcliff and Cathy left the savageness of their upbringing
to try to be equal to the people around them, and to learn the graces of society. At times it
is clear to see that this is not necessarily their natural state, they both long to return to
their natural state, to be able to run free on the moors, regardless of others. As John Stuart
Mill wrote:
“All action is for the sake of some end, and rules of action, it seems natural to suppose,
must take their whole character and colour from the end to which they are subservient.”
This is directly relevant to the characters of Wuthering Heights. From early on in the
novel we watch the families, and we can feel disaster approaching. Everything which
occurs in the novel only leads us closer to that final end, where we see Cathy, Heathcliff,
and Linton in their final rest. Dylan Thomas wrote something which can be seen to
connect strongly to this theme:
‘Though lovers be lost, love shall not,
And death shall have no dominion.’
It is only in death that their contrasting forms of love are combined, to leave a lasting
peace. It is only in death that they are reconciled. The novel ends with a sense of peace
finally having arrived to the participants of this painful love triangle. As Lockwood looks
at the graves he describes what he sees:
I sought, and soon discovered, the three head-stones on the slope next the moor - the
middle one, grey, and half buried in heath - Edgar Linton’s only harmonised by the turf,
and moss creeping up its foot - Heathcliff’s still bare.
I lingered round them, under that benign sky; watched the moths fluttering among the
heath, and hare-bells; listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass; and
wondered how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers, for the sleepers in the quiet
earth.
Perhaps in death they all found peace. After all, does heaven not offer eternal love and
forgiveness?