'Locating' the Nineteenth-Century English Middle Class: The
Home and the Colony as Heterotopias in Emily Brontë's
Wuthering Heights and Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone
Christina Flotmann
Abstract
The following paper explores the intersection between space, class, gender and
colonialism in nineteenth-century literature. The particular focus will be on the link
between the home and the colonial spaces evoked in two novels from the Victorian
period, Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights and Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone.
Drawing on Michel Foucault's concept of the heterotopia I propose that the
ideological connection between the Victorian home and the colony helped to
naturalise and perpetuate a patriarchal system at home and abroad.
Key Words: space, heterotopia, Victorianism, class, gender, colonialism,
imperialism, Wuthering Heights, The Moonstone
'The great obsession of the nineteenth century was, as we know, history: with its
themes of development and of suspension, of crisis, and cycle, themes of the everaccumulating past, with its great preponderance of dead men and the menacing
glaciation of the world.'1 This is how Michel Foucault starts his slightly fuzzy but
still useful lecture on heterotopias. The quote also sums up one of the points of
intersection in nineteenth-century 'structures of feeling.'2 Ideologies of progress
were trumpeted in every field, from science and technology to imperial politics,
which posited the importation of English values to other parts of the world as a
necessity for the spread of civilisation. These ideologies were consolidated mainly
through science, since as a seemingly disinterested system of knowledge, science
often works to set up 'norms and laws which make possible judgement and
exclusion on the basis of perceived "deviance" from those laws.'3 Darwin's theories
of evolution, for instance, made it possible to view English men as the apex of
creation,4 cementing patriarchy and colonial rule. The belief in progress was
spectacularly put on display in the Great Exhibition of 1851 where technological
achievements were celebrated which had furthered the Industrial Revolution and
enabled the generation of capitalist society.
However, there was also an underside to this belief in progress at which
Foucault hints in the second sentence of his lecture on heterotopias: 'The nineteenth
century found its essential mythological resources in the second principle of
thermaldynamics [sic].'5 The second law of thermodynamics is preoccupied with
'Locating' the Nineteenth-Century Middle-class
systems striving towards an endpoint in their development, a state in which there is
perfect equilibrium (entropy) between various forces and no progress of any kind is
possible anymore.6 In a structuralist sense, entropy thus means the perfection of
structures, the end of all development and the end of the possibility for life. For
structuralists structure is what produces meaning and propels action and
development. The example of nineteenth-century belief in progress for instance
shows that actual progress and the desire to develop could not have existed without
its underside, a fear of the opposite, of degeneration and devolution. This fear was
crystallised particularly in fin de siècle developments such as the slow decline of
empire and the upcoming women's movement. However, it already set in during
the 1850s, when for instance the so-called Indian Mutiny and all the following
colonial rebellions made English imperialist rule appear precarious and possibly
finite for the first time.7 Victorians feared a reverse evolution, an endpoint to
development where things could go no further and would possibly even deteriorate.
This created a contradiction in Victorian 'structures of feelings'8 as the existing
binaries of progress and degeneration led to a third term, i.e. a certain stasis that
Foucault also expresses with his reference to thermodynamics. Victorians
essentially wanted particular social factors, for example middle-class values to stay
as they were.9 Now, as Foucault contends, the time-factor did not afford people the
kind of security of the status quo, so they needed to turn to spaces instead.
Foucault gives the following definition of the function of heterotopias, other
spaces:
[…] [H]eterotopias […] have a function in relation to all the space that remains.
This function unfolds between two extreme poles. Either their role is to create a
space of illusion that exposes every real space, all the sites inside of which
human life is partitioned, as still more illusory […]. Or else, on the contrary,
their role is to create a space that is other, another real space, as perfect, as
meticulous, as well arranged as ours is messy, ill constructed, and jumbled.
This latter type would be the heterotopia, not of illusion, but of compensation,
and I wonder if certain colonies have not functioned somewhat in this manner.
In certain cases, they have played, on the level of the general organization of
terrestrial space, the role of heterotopias.10
Foucault postulates here that there are spaces, 'enacted utopia[s]'11, created to
compensate for shortcomings in actual society. He specifically mentions the
colony, a space which is supposedly open, untainted and offers the possibility of
inscribing one's values upon it. In reality, of course, nineteenth-century colonies
were no such places. Native people had lived there for a long time, and their ways
of life, values and beliefs clashed with those of the English would-be liberators.
These conflicts perfectly depict the difference between utopia and heterotopia the
heterotopia being a place of projection without eventual gratification. Now in line
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with a structuralist system of thought Foucault holds that the social meaning of
spaces is only created in the interplay between a number of them.12 Thus the
colony alone does not tell us much about nineteenth-century ideologies. We need
to view it in conjunction with another heterotopia which was located in the middle
of English society, the English middle-class home.
The middle-class home was ideologically constructed as a refuge from
everyday worries and cares, guided by the guardian spirit of the "angel in the
house."13 Its threshold served as barrier separating the public from the private and
the sordid life of the streets from a supposedly happy and comfortable interior. 14 In
many Victorian novels dealing with the home the crossing of a kind of threshold
before entering is highlighted, which mirrors Foucault's assertion that a certain
sacred atmosphere clings to the heterotopia and it can only be entered after rites of
purification have been completed.15 In this sense, the middle-class home clearly
serves as a heterotopia of compensation, a shelter from the complexity and opacity
of "true" life. In the well-kept middle-class home order prevailed, every object had
its place and the various people inhabiting it were strictly separated according to
their age, gender and class.16
Strict order and repression very often directly evoke their undersides. The flip
side to this 'angelic' place of harmony and order was never far from the surface: as
in the colonies where English middle-class men ruled over colonial subjects,
English patriarchy was enforced in the home, where women merely served as
caring, child-bearing and decorative accessories to men and servants were there to
do their masters' bidding. The obsession with order and cleanliness hid a lurking
fear of chaos and of potentially subversive forces such as sexuality. Viewed in this
light, the middle-class home not only functions as a heterotopia of compensation
but as one of illusion in Foucault's sense, too, as the house is ideologically
constructed to maintain the semblance of an ordered and manageable world. This
double function is not surprising, given the oppositions in operation within the
home: man/woman, adult/child, master/servant, public/private, reality/pretense. It
also brings us back to the contradiction between the Victorian belief in progress
and the fear of degeneration which the middle-class home enacts: it creates the
illusion of mastery and stability while compensating for a lack of those same traits
in 'real life.'
The link between middle-class home and colony is similarly complex and
contradictory. The working of both depends on the subjugation of people; women
and members of the working class as well as colonial subjects respectively, and in
both middle-class values are enacted. The house with the middle-class family as
the high point of evolution17 serves as the stable centre at home, society in a
nutshell. Matters need to be ordered at home for the colonising mission to work.
However, in proportion to the failures of the English in their various colonies,
problems in Victorian middle-class households, which were set up as examples of
familial propriety, could no longer be denied.
'Locating' the Nineteenth-Century Middle-class
I will argue in this paper that authors of the time first of all saw the close link
between middle-class homes and the colonies and secondly noticed the problems
connected to the ideological engendering of these spaces. 18 Like the heterotopias
described above, literature always has multiple functions, one of them being to
support the ruling ideologies of the time and help maintain the status quo. At the
same time, however, literature has always and at all times also questioned
dominant hegemonic forces and undermined the ideologies of those in power.
Containment and subversion in literature need not be mutually exclusive. Both can
occur and do occur in the literature of the nineteenth century.19 In the following
this will be analysed with regard to two nineteenth-century texts from different
decades and genres which evoke domestic and colonial spaces and create a highly
complex link between them, both to assert and to question middle-class values. The
main focus will be on Emily Brontë's 1847 romance novel Wuthering Heights. In
terms of colonialism it has been less thoroughly researched than the second
example, Wilkie Collins's 1868 detective/sensation novel The Moonstone which
was written at a time when colonial expansion was at its highpoint and which in
contrast to Wuthering Heights treats the subject of imperialism rather openly. The
Moonstone will serve as reference point for my analysis.
Wuthering Heights contains no direct mention of any colonial spaces.
Nevertheless, the subject of imperialism is indirectly evoked in the depiction and
treatment of Heathcliff, who is recurrently described as a 'dark-skinned gipsy'20, 'a
little Lascar, or an American or Spanish castaway' 21 or is associated with the colour
'black'.22 It is also implied in the contrasting of two houses, Wuthering Heights, the
wild and lonely (colonial) place of the title and Thrushcross Grange, its beautiful
and civilised (English) neighbouring estate and counterpart. While some of the
inhabitants of Wuthering Heights are constantly depicted as "savage,"23 the people
living at Thrushcross Grange see themselves as the epitome of civilisation.24
So, one could say that Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange figure as
metaphors for the colonial space and the home. While Thrushcross Grange is the
beautiful and well-kept upper middle-class home, Wuthering Heights is disorderly,
unpredictable and slightly dangerous; all of the latter characteristics were often
attributed to the colonies. 25 By the time Collins's The Moonstone was published at
the end of the 1860s, colonial themes were very much in the focus, especially
because the ideological state apparatuses kept the horrors of the Indian Mutiny, the
Sepoy rebellion of 1857, fresh in people's memories.26 This is one reason why
twenty years after the publication of Wuthering Heights, Collins could make the
connection between mother country and colony more explicit. In the novel an
actual colonial space, India, intrudes upon an upper-middle class English home in
the form of a diamond, colonial booty, which three Indian priests try to retrieve for
a sacred shrine. In this sense Collins much more directly than Brontë invokes the
theme of reverse imperialism and the effects colonialism can have on the mother
country.27 However, it could be argued that Brontë achieves the same by
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metaphorically bringing the colony home to England. In this way she subtly
emphasises the fact that colonialism is not really the expression of an actual
problem between the self and a "dangerous" Other but the expression of a problem
that is located within the self. The paper will try to elucidate how the two novels
finally position themselves with respect to colonialism, class, and gender.
Brontë's stance in Wuthering Heights is ambiguous. The marked differences
between the two houses certainly seem to set Thrushcross Grange up above
Wuthering Heights, cementing the functioning middle-class home as the basis for a
functioning society. The way Wuthering Heights fails to be a sanctuary, however,
simultaneously exposes the heterotopic and therefore compensatory or illusory
nature of the middle-class home and thereby also reflects on Thrushcross Grange.
The varying narrative voices in the text furthermore prevent a straightforward,
uncritical colonial narrative. The first scenes of the novel are a good example.
They show Mr. Lockwood, the new tenant of Thrushcross Grange paying a visit to
Heathcliff, his landlord at Wuthering Heights. The scenes are narrated by
Lockwood himself, who freely expresses his opinions on Wuthering Heights and
its inhabitants. From the outset, the reader gets the feeling that Wuthering Heights
does not conform to the topos of the beautiful orderly middle-class heaven. For
one, Lockwood is not received by a housekeeper but by Heathcliff, the master of
the house himself, who seems to be most annoyed by the visitor. 'The "walk in"
was uttered with closed teeth, and expressed the sentiment, "Go to the deuce": even
the gate over which he [Heathcliff] leant manifested no sympathising movement to
the words.'28 So instead of encountering a civil housekeeper or even the mistress,
Lockwood is faced with wild and unpredictable Heathcliff, who seems to want to
protect his territory against the intruder. For Heathcliff, Lockwood is as
unwelcome as the coloniser is for the natives. The threshold (the gate) is
mentioned, and considering the front garden, which is not very well kept, ('the
grass grows up between the flags, and cattle are the only hedge-cutters'29), one can
assume that the house will not be very welcoming either. In accordance with the
rites accompanying the entry to the heterotopia, it seems that Lockwood has to pass
the grumpy Heathcliff to be able to enter. The "other place" that he encounters
within, however, breaks with all possible conventions and leaves Lockwood
uncomfortable and vulnerable, because his formalised middle-class upbringing
does not help him in his interactions with the inhabitants. 30 The house does not
seem to be the usual middle-class shelter, as Lockwood wryly comments: 'Pure,
bracing ventilation they must have up there at all times, indeed; one may guess the
power of the north wind blowing over the edge, by the excessive slant of a few
stunted firs at the end of the house; and by a range of gaunt thorns all stretching
their limbs one way, as if craving alms of the sun.'31
Wuthering Heights is exposed, subject to the fierce north wind, which can do
with it whatever it pleases. The description of the setting gives us an indication of
the place as being close to nature and subject to the forces of nature, a depiction
'Locating' the Nineteenth-Century Middle-class
that ideologically coincides with that of the colony and its inhabitants. When
Lockwood enters the house he does not find the usual splendidly decorated
Victorian sitting-room or parlour, which normally functions as representative room
guests are taken to and displays the importance Victorians accorded to surfaces. 32
'One step brought us into the family sitting-room, without any introductory lobby
or passage […].'33 Thus already the architecture of the house seems to be wrong.
The chimney and its mantelpiece, usually the pride and joy of a Victorian middleclass household, adorned with all kinds of paraphernalia is here decorated with
'villainous old guns, and a couple of horse-pistols: and by way of ornament, three
gaudily-painted canisters disposed along its ledge.'34 Obviously, here, too, the
house is associated not with "civilisation" but with roughness and wildness. 35 On
his second visit to Wuthering Heights, Lockwood meets what he assumes to be 'the
"missis"'36, who in congruence with the surroundings is decidedly not the expected
"angel in the house" although in outward appearance she conforms to that ideal.37
In contrast to the Victorian middle-class housewife, she is an unwelcoming,
snappish young woman who remains 'motionless and mute'38 in the presence of the
visitor and makes no attempt at playing graceful hostess.39 The Heights and its
inhabitants lack everything members of the Victorian middle-class associated with
civilisation: impeccable manners, a showy display of middle-class values as well as
the rituals that go with receiving guests. In short, what contemporary readers would
have perceived as civilisation is countered by the inhabitants' "authenticity." Some
might go with Lockwood at that point, who after all is the upper-middle class first
person narrator and is supposed to gain the middle-class reader's approval. Others,
however, might remember that first-person narrators are by their very nature
untrustworthy and see Lockwood's superciliousness and prejudices as a
purposefully exaggerated representation of middle-class arrogance. It turns out that
Lockwood is not as perceptive as he believes himself to be. "The missis", for
instance is not the proper mistress of Wuthering Heights and does not have the
power, as a typical Victorian housewife would, to decide how things are run in the
house. Heathcliff himself is master without and within, not the "angel" but
seemingly the "devil of the house," another ideological link with colonial subjects
who were very often demonised.40
The initial scenes from Wuthering Heights thus allow for two different
readings. The first is the one from the point of view of Lockwood, the emblem of
English middle-class propriety who is scandalised at the treatment he receives and
the backward ways of the inhabitants of Wuthering Heights. Ideologically, this is
the point of view of the Victorian Englishman who feels justified in his contempt
for supposedly "lower races" and his civilising missions. This dominant ideology
is, however, subverted by the narrative perspective, which exposes Lockwood as
rather arrogant and makes readers sympathise with those under scrutiny.
Lockwood's approach to Wuthering Heights distinctly resembles an act of
colonisation on two levels. The more obvious one was already outlined: Lockwood
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tries to enter the strange territory of Wuthering Heights only to judge it according
to his own and his class's standards, and Heathcliff and the other inhabitants resist
his curiosity as best as they can. The passage about the wind being able to play
about the house which was quoted before continues and is a good example of the
resilience of Wuthering Heights and its inhabitants: 'Happily, the architect had
foresight to build it strong: the narrow windows are deeply set in the wall, and the
corners defended with large, jutting stones.'41 So in some ways, the house does
fulfil the function of Victorian middle-class houses: it looks like a fortress
sheltering the inhabitants from hostile outward forces such as the aggressive and
imperial curiosity of Lockwood. Once within, he is even attacked by the dogs
which keep watch.42 The place tries to resist the scrutinising and categorising eyes
of Lockwood and thus the dominant discourses of the Victorian middle-class he
brings with him.
The second form of colonialism that Lockwood displays is one that manifests
itself within the mother country. As Nancy Armstrong describes, people from the
South of England became interested in travelling to the North at the beginning of
the nineteenth century.43 Instead of genuine interest for the places and people there,
however, this kind of tourism took the form of anthropology. Northerners were
seen as less civilised curiosities upon whom Southerners could turn up their noses.
Lockwood for instance confesses to his curiosity of 'inspecting the penetralium'44,
by which he means the inside of the house. He uses the term "penetralium" in an
ironic way, as at this point he already assumes the interior to be as rustic as the
outside. A penetralium is a very sheltered sacred place, a term fit to ideologically
encode the 'normal' middle-class house ruled by the female angel. Wuthering
Heights, as the readers learn in due course, has not functioned as a refuge for a
long time, although it could be said that there is an aura of the sacred around it
which manifests itself in the strong passion that developed there between young
Heathcliff and his foster sister Catherine. Lockwood's initially ironic term is thus
peculiarly appropriate for Wuthering Heights. For Brontë, it seems, a space that
holds human emotions, particularly human love, has more of the sacred than a
space that is predominantly ideological.45 It can be seen how by his ironic
comment Lockwood tries to cement the heterotopia of the middle-class home as a
"penetralium," a sacred place apart from real life. He uses the alleged norm to
establish Wuthering Heights as "abnormal." At the same time, however, the
illusion of the middle-class house as the penetralium is immediately destroyed by
the novel's focus on the uninviting interior of the place and the way the inhabitants
treat each other. The readers might ask themselves, whether the safe haven of the
middle-class home actually exists or whether under the showy and glossy surface
of many middle-class homes the families might not be as broken as the one at
Wuthering Heights.
Collins's narrative is similarly ambiguous. He, too, traces the destruction of an
English home through colonialism and he, too, displays the English fear of the
'Locating' the Nineteenth-Century Middle-class
Other and its containment through the demonization of the Indian diamond and by
extension the three Indian characters who try to retrieve it. Betteredge, a servant
and one of the principal narrators of the story makes the following comment:
'[H]ere was our quiet English house suddenly invaded by a devilish Indian
Diamond […].'46 The quote shows Betteredge's prejudices to be similar to
Lockwood's. The sanctuary of the English house is called into question, security is
taken away and the rather inflexible English middle-class characters do not know
how to deal with the new situation. All that which is new or different must needs
be evil as it threatens the status quo. Interestingly, Betteredge frames the
appearance of the jewel and the Indians in terms of "invasion", a label that the
English certainly would not have applied to their exploits in India. Hints at the
delimitation of and fight for territories are thus implied in the statement. The fact
that the house steward Betteredge makes this remark is also of consequence. It
testifies to the effectiveness of the ideology of the 'devilish' Other which not only
justified colonial exploitation abroad but also served to keep down unrest at home.
Betteredge as a servant is in a similar position in relation to the English middleclass as the Indians, as both the working classes and the colonial subjects were
exploited and oppressed. This relationship, however, is ideologically veiled and
Betteredge is made to feel that he belongs to the family.47 The final point that is
remarkable about the statement is that Betteredge refers to the "quiet English
house" rather than the "home." His statement very closely mirrors one by old Mrs
Linton in Wuthering Heights when Heathcliff and Cathy are detected lurking in the
garden of Thrushcross Grange. Trying to categorise Heathcliff she comments that
he is '[a] wicked boy […] quite unfit for a decent house!' 48 Both servant and lady
stress the concept of propriety in relation to the living space and thereby emphasise
the heterotopic nature of the middle-class house. Even more than it was a home, it
was supposed to be a moral statement, a place where the values of English society
were generated and perpetuated. The similarities between the statements further
underline how middle-class masters managed to bring servants to their side
ideologically.
Similar to Wuthering Heights, The Moonstone features multiple narration
which problematises simple dichotomies such as the good English people versus
the evil Indians and the justified English colonial missions versus the 'devilish'
reverse colonialism on the part of the Indians. While the English characters
struggle with colonial guilt, the Indians are portrayed as somewhat more noble. In
their single-minded search for the sacred diamond they are not motivated by greed
or fear, unlike some of the English characters, but by religious faith. I do not think
that the simultaneous destruction of the "penetralium," that is the English middleclass house, and the reconstruction of the Indian shrine is coincidental. Two
different "sacred" places are contrasted, the English home and the religious shrine.
While the latter crystallises cultural values, embraces religious expression and is
completely idealistic, the former is linked to consumerism and repression, for
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instance through the English theft of the diamond for commercial reasons.49 By
having the house invaded and life there at least temporarily destroyed, Collins
exposes the vulnerability and final emptiness of a "sacred" place that is founded on
consumption and ideology instead of true humanistic values. The Indian shrine,
although the diamond has been missing from it for so long, remains exempt from
such criticism and is depicted as a beautiful place of worship and true meaning at
the end of the novel.
Much like Betteredge with the Indians, Lockwood, the mouthpiece of English
middle-class propriety, does all he can to discredit the inhabitants of Wuthering
Heights and cement Thrushcross Grange as a safe haven to which he returns after
each of his "dangerous" forays into "enemy-country." (It is perpetually difficult for
him to negotiate the country around the Heights and he constantly loses his way
when going back to Thrushcross Grange.50) Interestingly, however, the novel also
offers us the outsiders' view on Thrushcross Grange. When Heathcliff and
Catherine run away from the Heights and look through the Grange's drawing room
window to see Edgar and Isabella Linton arguing about a little dog, two things
become clear from their responses to the scene. Heathcliff's first reaction to the
Grange, as he later tells the servant Nelly Dean, was to be impressed by its
splendour. At a first and superficial glance from the outside, everything about the
house seems to be luxurious and wonderful. The heterotopic function of the
middle-class house is emphasised once more here. Certain rooms in middle-class
houses, predominantly its parlours or drawing rooms, i.e. those rooms that were
displayed to the public, primarily functioned to uphold the illusion of the wellordered, perfectly groomed house and by extension of the family inhabiting it.
Thad Logan's analysis of middle-class Victorian decorating practices strengthens
the link between the middle-class home and colonialism as it holds that there is a
'similarity between decorating and marking behaviours' as animals would display
them.51 Logan goes on to say that '[t]he practice of marking in the world of
bourgeois Victorians is clearly related to concepts of territory, possession, and
ownership […].'52 Marking and delimiting space seems to have been of great
importance for the Victorian middle-class to such a degree that it extended to other
countries. Heathcliff later on mimics this English territorialism when he becomes
the owner of the Heights and tries to defend the place against intruders such as
Lockwood. In the earlier scene, however, Heathcliff and Cathy are separated from
Thrushcross Grange's perfect middle-class heaven by the window; the 'savages' are
not part of the scene. They are shown, at least in the case of Heathcliff, that they
will always be kept without the "true light" of middle-class English society. The
invisible barrier of the window is insurmountable. Like Heathcliff, the natives in
the colonies did not have any chance to truly follow the English example, as they
were constantly deemed inferior, metaphorically unfit to truly cross the threshold
of the middle-class house, to pass the rite of passage required to enter the
heterotopia. On closer inspection the perfect middle-class idyll of the Grange turns
'Locating' the Nineteenth-Century Middle-class
out to be just as faulty as that at Wuthering Heights. The Linton children are
arguing. This is where the second reaction of Heathcliff and Cathy comes in. They
feel disdain for the little Lintons, who seem weak, are constantly confined to the
inside and argue about trifles. 53 The future rulers of the empire are definitely not
people to look up to at that moment. It is significant that Heathcliff, the 'native',
reveals his view on the 'colonisers' before he tells Nelly about their predictably
negative reaction to him. The reader gets the outsider's view and sympathises with
Heathcliff. Edgar and his sister are arguing about a little dog which, as Heathcliff
confirms, they have almost 'pulled in two between them.'54 Like the imperial
powers in the nineteenth century, they are thinking in terms of possession and
power. They do not see that the little dog is a living and feeling creature they might
harm, they are only thinking about their own gratification. In the same way
countries and their people became pawns pushed back and forth between the
imperial powers. This fact is depicted much more directly and drastically in The
Moonstone when in the Siege of Seringapatam, Colonel Herncastle, a close relative
to the family living at the English country house where the story is set, murders
three Indians to get hold of the moonstone. Human life is sacrificed for personal
power and gain.
Heathcliff definitely functions as the Other to the English middle-class
propriety represented by the Lintons and Mr Lockwood, inhabitants of Thrushcross
Grange. This becomes apparent in his close relationship to his foster sister
Catherine which also sheds light on the connection between the home, the colony,
women and natives. The ideological relationship between middle-class women and
the colonies was ambiguous and possibly contradictory as women served two
functions at the same time: on the one hand they were closely associated with the
native and his supposedly "childish" and rather "savage" nature. 55 This association
and the fears connected to it, justified the agents of the patriarchal system in the
suppression of women. On the other hand, however, women in their ideological
position as angels who needed to be protected from the dangers of the wild also
served as justifications for colonial exploits. 56 In this way the colonial ideology
managed to suppress both, women and colonial subjects. The alleged similarities
between both (childishness, closeness to nature, irrationality) were abused for
power and control while their true similarity, their joint patriarchal oppression, was
veiled by stressing the danger the natives posed for English women. (This is one
reason why despite its horrors the English ideologically benefitted from the Indian
Mutiny at the time. When Indian soldiers brutally killed a number of English
women and children, this seemed to confirm the danger "wild" and "savage"
natives posed to English innocents.) This double bind in the construction of women
and natives resembles the ideological positioning of members of the working class
with respect to colonial subjects which also served to veil similarities between two
marginalised groups.
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Catherine senior embodies the ideological equation of women and natives. As a
child Catherine is quite as unruly as Heathcliff and Wuthering Heights. The
connection between Catherine and the colonial natives is made explicit by the fact
that Nelly, the housekeeper calls both Catherine and Heathcliff 'savages.'57
Catherine's wild and free spirit is potentially subversive and challenges social
values. Thus it needs to be contained by patriarchal authority. When Catherine
comes into contact with the world of Thrushcross Grange by chance, she is taken
in and 'civilised'58 in the same way as English colonial officers and missionaries
"civilised" the natives in the colonies, because they, too, were feared for their
power of challenging English middle-class values. This power is symbolically
unleashed in Heathcliff, who acquires the "colonisers'" knowledge, rises in society
and subverts the English class-system by depriving the heir of Wuthering Heights
Hareton Earnshaw of his birthright and, as if this were not enough, by turning him
into a "savage", too.59 However, Heathcliff is not only a hazard to the class-system,
he also poses a danger for patriarchy as he is much too close to Catherine. Both he
and Catherine recognise their similarities as human beings rather than their
gender/class differences, which were always preached in Victorian society.60 Both
feel an elemental need for each other. Heathcliff would not have turned Catherine
into a proper "angel in the house." He wants her the way she is, wild and slightly
dangerous, just like himself. Obviously, he and Catherine cannot be allowed to live
together.
It has often been speculated why Catherine chooses the much less interesting
Edgar Linton as her husband when really she loves Heathcliff. One reason is the
novel's own teetering between subversion and containment. As a novelist at that
time one could not just bluntly advocate the equality between men and women, one
had to cater for the ideological tastes of the primarily middle-class readership, too.
Consequently, it might just be Emily Brontë compromising here so as not to
alienate her readers. By having Catherine marry Linton, she contains an unruly
woman and keeps a couple apart that would probably have posed a serious
challenge to Victorian ideology. An alliance between the woman suppressed at
home and the disadvantaged native would have had a severely subversive
potential.61 The scene of Heathcliff and Catherine looking in through the drawing
room windows of Thrushcross Grange embodies this perfectly. It is in fact the last
time that the two children are truly together on their own terms. They have been
roaming the moors, their "sanctuary", the place where they feel safe and can be
themselves. The landscape surrounding Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross
Grange perfectly mirrors their wild spirits and is therefore considered similarly
dangerous and incomprehensible by many of the "civilised" middle-class
characters such as Lockwood.62 Catherine and Heathcliff's shared life at Wuthering
Heights and the surrounding moors emphasises the similarities between the woman
and the "native" outsider. As these similarities cannot be probed any further
because of their subversive potential, Catherine needs to be taken into the world of
'Locating' the Nineteenth-Century Middle-class
the Grange and her difference from Heathcliff needs to be ideologically established
and cemented there. The ideological veiling of the background of oppression
shared by middle-class women and natives finds its equation in the way similarities
between members of the working classes and colonial subjects are obscured in The
Moonstone. Both novels need to obscure this connection so as not to endanger
domestic ideology. In Wuthering Heights, when Catherine comes back home after
her prolonged stay with the Lintons, she immediately shows just how pervasive
and persuasive ideology can be. She is all clean and well-behaved and suddenly
sees Heathcliff in a new light, as the following comment shows 'Why, how very
black and cross you look! and how—how funny and grim! But that's because I'm
used to Edgar and Isabella Linton.'63
The Moonstone similarly links the subjects of the home, colonialism and
women. Rachel Verinder, the female protagonist of the novel, like Catherine
senior, does not conform to the ideal of the "angel in the house", either in looks or
in spirit.64 The fact that she does not completely bend to patriarchal rule aligns her
with the Indian characters, who also undermine colonial dictates to find their
diamond. It is Rachel who inherits the moonstone from her uncle and after her
eighteenth birthday party takes it to her boudoir, where it is stolen by her cousin
Franklin Blake. At the time of the theft, Blake is under the influence of opium and
he commits the deed, as it turns out later, because he is worried about his beloved
Rachel and the legacy her uncle has bequeathed her. Blake's deed reinforces the
ideology of the innocent English maiden who needs to be protected from the
"devilish" Other that is the colonial subject.65 At the same time, however, his
entering her chambers at night also has highly sexual connotations and threatens
Rachel's integrity, because at that point she is not married to Blake. As a matter of
fact, thus, the "English maiden" is much more threatened by her English male
counterpart here than by the Indian 'rogues'.66 That Blake acts out of worry about
the influence the colonial legacy might have on Rachel, shows how, true to Edward
Said's opinion, constructions of the Orient can be much more harmful to self and
other than the actual Other itself. 67 The Indians never threaten Rachel at any time
in the story and so, to a certain extent, Collins exposes colonial ideology as faulty
in his novel.
Brontë manifests similar subversive tendencies in Wuthering Heights.
Thrushcross Grange standing for the civilising power of England simply assumes
that the colonial natives (the inhabitants of Wuthering Heights) want to be
'civilised'. Catherine, who more or less voluntarily enters the walls of Thrushcross
Grange, is treated kindly, though a trifle condescendingly. She needs to be made to
fit into English society (the society of the Grange) as hers is an example of reverse
colonialism. The 'savage' native (woman) enters the proper English home (English
society) and poses a threat to the proper education and ideological indoctrination of
the Linton children (the future of the English middle-class). Heathcliff, who resists
the English attempts at civilising him, is not treated well. Every possible attempt is
Christina Flotmann
made to ostracise him from English society. This very much mirrors English
conduct in the colonies. Everything went smoothly and quietly, as long as the
colonised went along with their subjugation. As soon as the natives rose against
their oppression, the English displayed brute force, as for instance in the case of the
Indian Mutiny alluded to in The Moonstone. It is very hard to get rid of Heathcliff,
too. Even when he has died he seems to haunt the neighbourhood as the spectre of
colonialism still haunts the English today. After he has died, the remaining
inhabitants of the Heights go back to live at the Grange. Wuthering Heights is left
to its own devices, the colony is abandoned. Is this a subtle warning on Brontë's
part about the eventual outcome of colonialism?
Heathcliff also achieves another aim in death. He is united in equality with his
beloved Catherine as he has bribed a sexton to remove the wall of her coffin
before, so that the two of them can lie together. Even after death, Heathcliff thus
remains a disconcerting force resisting the dominant ideologies in English society.
The heterotopia of the colony, it seems, with all the notions the English have about
it as a new outpost of their own civilisation, does not really work and is dismantled
as an illusion as the Heights are left to decay. This is a subversive reading of the
novel which sees the colonising people of Thrushcross Grange, the Lintons and
also Lockwood as arrogant meddlers. This reading is mirrored in The Moonstone
where the quest of the Indians for the lost diamond is treated sympathetically,
whereas the English appropriation of it is condemned as it happens for the wrong
reasons. Both Wuthering Heights and The Moonstone, however, can also be read as
supporting the dominant ideologies of the time.
In Wuthering Heights dominant hegemonic structures are reinforced in the
treatment of Catherine junior, the older Catherine's daughter who is set up as a
counterpart to her mother at the end of the novel. In contrast to her unruly mother
who needs to be contained by patriarchy, the younger Catherine embodies the other
side of the ideological double bind between women and colonial subjects. She
perfectly incarnates all the virtues of an English middle-class woman. Thus, when
she is tricked into becoming the wife of Heathcliff's son, she reveals as very real
the English fear of their pure and innocent angel-women being threatened and
violated by the dangerous Other, represented by the native. She is brought from the
Grange (England) to the Heights (the colony) and suddenly faces a life of abuse
and hardship. Once more, thus, the Grange (England) is ideologically set up as
superior to the Heights (the colonies) as the readers feel pity with the younger
Catherine. She is very obviously marred by her contact with the "savages" from
Wuthering Heights. When Lockwood visits the place he finds her beautiful but
entirely sullen and unpleasant.68 However, at the right moment she remembers
Ruskin's dictum that a true wife takes the home with her wherever she goes69 and
conveniently recollects that once a proper middle-class woman you can never be
completely de-civilised. She begins to continue the civilising mission that her
father and grandparents began with her mother, Catherine senior. In Hareton
'Locating' the Nineteenth-Century Middle-class
Earnshaw, after some initial resistance on his part, she finds a 'native' quite willing
to be civilised, integrated into English middle-class society and indoctrinated by its
ideologies.70 In fact, Hareton used to be a member of the English middle-class
himself, before Heathcliff deprived him of his heritage and started keeping him in
ignorance. The novel seems to confirm in both Catherine junior and Hareton that
true English middle-class values can never be fully exterminated, no matter to
which adverse forces its representatives are subjected. Catherine junior once more
displays the 'benevolent colonialism' of her father and grandparents, which is
obviously held up as the model here. Heathcliff's brutish reverse colonialism is
overcome by her benevolent one. Catherine junior and Hareton eventually return to
live at Thrushcross Grange. Their middle-class values reasserted and reestablished, they are fit to return to the epitome of English middle-class society, the
middle-class home. Thus, while the heterotopia of the colony is questioned and
very nearly destroyed, the one of the middle-class house is kept nearly intact. The
novel thus has subversive undertones but it cannot be denied that the Grange
flourishes in the end while the Heights are left to decay. Although Heathcliff's
spirit remains to question colonial ideologies and the Lintons as well as Lockwood
are exposed as sometimes quite arrogant colonisers, the middle-class and therefore
the colonising spirit are finally still endorsed and even celebrated in the young
couple. The contemporary reading audience will probably also have appreciated
the happy ending after the emotional upheavals of the novel. The final focus is on
Catherine junior and Hareton, who will presumably be more prudent than their
parents and will preserve middle-class ideals in Thrushcross Grange. Still, a grain
of subversion remains, particularly when one thinks of the fact that the novel is
named after the wilder, more 'savage' place which might just have been preferred
by its author.
In The Moonstone the English middle-class house is similarly re-established in
the end. This shows that although Collins criticises its links to consumerist
ideologies and repression, he either does not dare to dismantle it completely, or he
finally believes that its sanctuary should remain intact. Since despite the fact that
there is a substantial number of narrators in the story, the Indians are never allowed
to speak for themselves, it can be said that the novel finally replicates colonial
attitudes towards the Other. Patriarchy is also reasserted as we learn that although
various people tell the story, Franklin Blake has edited their narratives so that they
have finally gone through a patriarchal filter. Both Wuthering Heights and The
Moonstone thus remain within the dominant ideology to an extent. Still, both
criticise the English middle-class house and its ideologically veiled relationship to
colonialism. Wuthering Heights dismantles the home as a heterotopia of illusion
showing the reality of life within middle-class households to be far less idyllic than
the ideology wants to make Victorians believe. The relationship with colonialism is
evoked indirectly though none the less poignantly in the outsider Heathcliff. The
Moonstone makes the connection between home and colonial spaces much more
Christina Flotmann
direct but focuses its criticism on the ideology of the home itself. The home is not a
sacred space but one steeped in consumer-, gender- and class-ideology. In this
sense both novels retain a subversive streak. Like Wuthering Heights, which is
named after the untamed and native place, The Moonstone carries the name of the
enigmatic Indian jewel, which hints at what is truly sacred and forces the English
characters to face their colonial guilt. Reparation is made at the end of Collins's
tale; the moonstone is returned to India and in an instance of poetic justice,
Godfrey Ablewhite, Herncastle's descendent, is killed by the Indian priests when
trying to steal the stone for economic purposes. In Wuthering Heights, a similar
form of reparation is missing. Heathcliff is finally ostracised and the true English
heir of the two places restored. Still, the reparation in The Moonstone only goes
skin-deep as one act of poetic justice can certainly not cancel out tens of thousands
of crimes committed in the name of English colonialism. Finally, it can be said that
both Heathcliff and the moonstone haunt the English protagonists as the spectres of
colonialism that cannot simply be relocated or laid to rest.
Notes
1
Michel Foucault, ‘Des Espace Autres [Of Other Spaces]’,
Architecture/Mouvement/Continuité [1967] (1984): n.pag.
<http://foucault.info/documents/heteroTopia/foucault.heteroTopia.en.html>.
2
Cf. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1977), 128-29.
3
Jeannette King, The Victorian Woman Question in Contemporary Feminist
Fiction (Houndsmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 12.
4
Cf. Ibid., 24-25.
5
Cf. Foucault, 'Des Espace Autres [Of Other Spaces]', n.pag.
6
Cf. Gordon W.F. Drake, 'Thermodynamics', Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2013,
viewed 13 June 2013
<http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/591572/thermodynamics>. Drake
distinctly alludes to the connection between the second law of thermodynamics
and the 'arrow of time' view on history.
7
Cf. Ian Duncan, 'The Moonstone, the Victorian Novel, and Imperialist Panic',
Modern Language Quarterly 55.3 (1994): 305.
8
Cf. Williams, Marxism and Society, 128-29.
9
Cf. also Judith Flanders, Inside the Victorian Home: A Portrait of Domestic Life
in Victorian England (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2003), 5 who
'Locating' the Nineteenth-Century Middle-class
defines the Victorian home as 'a still center […], where things changed as little
as possible.'
10
Foucault, 'Des Espace Autres [Of Other Spaces]', n.pag.
11
Cf. Ibid., n.pag.
12
Cf. Ibid., n.pag. This is a typical structuralist thought. Claude Lévi-Strauss, for
instance, who explores the deep-structural meaning of myth also sees it as being
generated in the interplay between different structural elements (cf. Claude LéviStrauss, 'The Structural Study of Myth', in Structuralism in Myth: Lévi-Strauss,
Barthes, Dumézil, and Propp, ed. Robert A. Segal (New York: Garland, 1996),
121).
13
Cf. for instance John Ruskin, ‘Lecture II: Lilies: Of Queens’ Gardens’ in Sesame
and
Lilies,
Bartleby.com,
viewed
20
May
2012,
<http://www.bartleby.com/28/7.html>.
14
Cf. for instance Efraim Sicher, ‘Bleak Homes and Symbolic Houses: Athomeness and Homelessness in Dickens’, in Homes and Homelessness in the
Victorian Imagination, ed. Murray Baumgarten and H.M. Daleski (New York:
AMS Press, 1998), 34, or John O. Jordan, ‘Domestic Servants and the Victorian
Home’, in Homes and Homelessness in the Victorian Imagination, ed. Murray
Baumgarten and H.M. Daleski (New York: AMS Press, 1998), 80.
15
Cf. Foucault, 'Des Espace Autres [Of Other Spaces]', n.pag.
16
Cf. for instance Flanders, Inside the Victorian Home, 8-9.
17
Cf. King, The Victorian Woman Question, 27.
18
Cf. Savi Munjal, 'Imagined Geographies: Mapping the Oriental Habitus in Three
Nineteenth-Century Novels', Postcolonial Text 4.1 (2008): 9, and Melissa Free,
'"Dirty Linen": Legacies of Empire in Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone', Texas
Studies in Literature and Language 48.4 (2006): 342-43. Both have noticed the
connection between the home and the colonial space but have not gone into
detail in their analysis of this significant relationship.
19
Cf. also Munjal, 'Imagined Geographies', 2.
20
Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (London: Penguin Books, 1994 [1847]), 21.
21
Ibid., 55.
22
Cf. for instance ibid., 58. Susan Meyer also establishes the link between
Heathcliff and the colonial subject (Susan Meyer, '"Your Father Was Emperor of
China, and Your Mother an Indian Queen": Reverse Imperialism in Wuthering
Heights" in Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism: Emily Brontë: Wuthering
Heights, ed. Linda H. Peterson (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2003), 484-85).
23
Cf. for example Lockwood's first impression of Catherine junior and Hareton
(Brontë, Wuthering Heights, 25) or Heathcliff (ibid., 26, 27).
24
Cf. for instance the older Lintons' haughty behaviour on catching Heathcliff and
Catherine in their grounds (ibid., 55-56) when they judge Heathcliff solely on his
outward appearance.
Christina Flotmann
25
Cf. Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism,
1830-1914 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 181.
26
Cf. also Duncan, 'The Moonstone, the Victorian Novel, and Imperialist Panic',
305.
27
Cf. for instance ibid., 309.
28
Brontë, Wuthering Heights, 19.
29
Ibid.
30
Lorraine Sim calls Wuthering Heights 'a disrupted and ideologically hybrid
space [… ].' (Lorraine Sim, 'Wuthering Heights and the Politics of Space',
LIMINA 10 (2004): 33).
31
Brontë, Wuthering Heights, 20.
32
Cf. Thad Logan, Preface to The Victorian Parlour, by Thad Logan (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001), xiv.
33
Brontë, Wuthering Heights, 20.
34
Ibid.
35
Cf. also Sim, 'Wuthering Heights and the Politics of Space', 34.
36
Brontë, Wuthering Heights, 24.
37
Cf. ibid., 25.
38
Ibid., 24.
39
Cf. Sim, 'Wuthering Heights and the Politics of Space', 35.
40
Cf. for instance Brontë, Wuthering Heights, 27 where Lockwood assigns
Heathcliff a 'diabolical sneer' or 45, where even old Mr. Earnshaw who brings
Heathcliff home from his journey to Liverpool comments that the child is 'as
dark almost as if it came from the devil.'
41
Ibid., 20.
42
Cf. ibid., 22.
43
Nancy Armstrong, 'Imperialist Nostalgia and Wuthering Heights', in Case
Studies in Contemporary Criticism: Emily Brontë: Wuthering Heights, ed. Linda
H. Peterson (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2003), 433-34.
44
Brontë, Wuthering Heights, 20.
45
Cf. also Sim, 'Wuthering Heights and the Politics of Space', 47 who reinforces
the link between Wuthering Heights, nature and the divine: 'Rejecting the
Christian version of heaven and transcendence, Brontë posits a secular idea of
salvation that adopts liminal spaces between the material and the spiritual, the
immanent and the divine, and situates human, not Godly, love as the most
powerful and divine force.'
46
Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone (London: Penguin, 1994 [1868]), 43.
47
Cf. for instance Lillian Nayder, 'Robinson Crusoe and Friday in Victorian
Britain: "Discipline," "Dialogue," and Collins's Critique of Empire in The
Moonstone', Dickens Studies Annual: Essays on Victorian Fiction 21 (1992):
215, or Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness, 184.
'Locating' the Nineteenth-Century Middle-class
48
Brontë, Wuthering Heights, 55.
The link between the middle-class house and consumerism is elucidated by Thad
Logan (Thad Logan, 'Decorating Domestic Space: Middle-class Women and
Victorian Interiors', in Keeping the Victorian House: A Collection of Essays, ed.
Vanessa D. Dickerson (New York: Garland, 1995), 210).
50
Cf. Sim, 'Wuthering Heights and the Politics of Space', 42-43.
51
Logan, 'Decorating Domestic Space', 216.
52
Ibid.
53
Cf. Brontë, Wuthering Heights, 54.
54
Cf. ibid., 54.
55
Cf. for instance King, The Victorian Woman Question, 24-25 or LeeAnne M.
Richardson, New Woman and Colonial Adventure Fiction in Victorian Britain:
Gender, Genre, and Empire (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2006),
3.
56
Cf. for instance Ashish Roy, 'The Fabulous Imperialist Semiotic of Wilkie
Collins's The Moonstone', New Literary History 24 (1993): 675.
57
Cf. Brontë, Wuthering Heights, 52.
58
Cf. ibid., 56-58.
59
Cf. also Sim, 'Wuthering Heights and the Politics of Space', 36.
60
When Catherine is terminally ill, she wishes to regain her old willfulness and
independence as they are more true to her real nature. On this occasion she calls
her own younger self a 'savage' and thus cements her eternal connection with
Heathcliff (cf. Brontë, Wuthering Heights, 116).
61
Cf. also Meyer, '"Your Father Was Emperor of China"', 483.
62
Cf. Sim, 'Wuthering Heights and the Politics of Space', 42-43.
63
Brontë, Wuthering Heights, 58.
64
Cf. Collins, The Moonstone, 61-62.
65
Cf. Roy, 'The Fabulous Imperialist Semiotic', 675.
66
Collins, The Moonstone, 43.
67
Cf. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 2003 [1978]), 3. Cf. also
Free, '"Dirty Linen"', 358.
68
Cf. Brontë, Wuthering Heights, 24-26.
69
Cf. Ruskin, ‘Lecture II: Lilies: Of Queens’ Gardens’.
70
Cf. Brontë, Wuthering Heights, 261-63.
49
Christina Flotmann
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Christina Flotmann
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