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CHAPTER 2
Where the Wild Wind Blows......
THEMATIC AND STYLISTIC STUDY OF EMILY BRONTË’S
WUTHERING HEIGHTS
“Of all the English novels of the century which are admitted by common
consent to be classics none, perhaps, has provided judgment so diverse as
Wuthering Heights” -----Derek Traversi.
This chapter is an attempt to decipher the mysterious world of Wuthering Heights
by using Thematics and Stylistics as tools and techniques. The first section of this chapter
examines the thematic fabric of the text by analyzing the two major themes according to
their degree of importance in the narrative. The second section examines the various
stylistic devices deployed by Brontë from her linguistic repertoire. An analysis of her
narrative style is, therefore, carried at the lexical, syntactic and rhetorical level.
2.1. THEMATIC STUDY OF WUTHERING HEIGHTS
Themes, as Nicholas Marsh avers, are simply subjects the author is concerned with
(1999:127).The writer weaves his/her themes into every aspect of the text, yet unlike other
elements found in the novel, a theme is not a literal thing created by the author. A text may
contain any number of themes and sometimes the same theme may be called by different
names.
Wuthering Heights presents a complicated lattice of themes, which works on
several levels. Accordingly, it can be viewed as a love story, a novel about forbidden
relationships, revenge, childhood, man-woman relationship, marriage, a saga of two
families and an outsider, property rights, class-division etc. Brontë has so integrated all the
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elements in the novel into a single yet many-sided whole, that to isolate a theme is rather
difficult, for most of the major themes overlap to an extraordinary degree.
A close reading of Wuthering Heights, nevertheless, reveals it to be basically a
love story. There are many kinds of love in the novel. They range from Heathcliff’s and
Catherine’s passion, Lockwood’s trivial crushes, Isabella’s disastrous infatuation, Hindley
Earnshaw’s brief and pathetic love for Frances, Edgar Linton’s real but unsatisfactory love
for Catherine Earnshaw, the puppy love of Cathy and Linton and finally the ‘civilizing’
love between Cathy and Hareton. But it is the love story of Catherine and Heathcliff that
dominates the text. Hindley’s love for Frances is deep but they are separated by death. So
also Edgar’s for Catherine and Cathy’s for Linton. Love in these relationships is tinged
with frustration and grief due to separation by death. The love of Hareton and Cathy is an
echo of the love of Heathcliff and Catherine and is the only one to end in a happy
marriage.
The novel also deals with the childhood of almost all its major characters, hence
these two themes have been chosen for thematic study.
2.1.1. THEME OF LOVE
Romantic Love is a primary subject of Wuthering Heights (Davies 1998:88), and a
major emotion in the novel. Consequently, it is the main source of conflict between
Catherine- Heathcliff - Edgar, forming a love triangle. Oldfield points out that the conflict
occurs due to the choice between the force of reason and emotion (1976:80). Wanting to
be infinitely lovable, Catherine states, “I thought, though everybody hated and despised
each other, they could not avoid loving me” (104). She embodies the need in love, both for
identity and complementarity, claiming Heathcliff as her true self and Linton as the self
that draws her. This contradictory logic of love is asseverated by her in one of the most
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dramatic speeches in the novel, which stresses the centrality of this theme, where
Catherine differentiates her love for Heathcliff from what she feels for Edgar.
“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” (59).
She further tells Nelly Dean to whom she confides, “I am Heathcliff!” (59).
Eros (Love/Desire), according to Aristophanes, in Plato’s Symposium is the
identification and the expression of the individual’s craving for the lost half of his being,
and for the wholeness that its possession would restore. The love between Catherine and
Heathcliff was forged in their childhood rebellion against Hindley. So, their relationship is
a romantic identification of the lover with the loved one as well as a partnership
insurrection against adult authority.
There are two pairs of lovers—Catherine and Heathcliff, and Cathy and Hareton,
whose love can be compared and contrasted. In Wuthering Heights, almost all modes of
communications are in the form of a quarrel, even the interaction between the lovers
which often leads to a crisis. Hence a thematic analysis of love is made by finding out
those areas where there is a conflict /crisis between the lovers. The first task, therefore, is
to select passages which deal with the crisis of love. There are several episodes in the
novel, which are crises of love. The first passage taken for analysis pertains to Heathcliff’s
plan to marry Isabella, much against Catherine’s wish:
“I seek no revenge on you,” replied Heathcliff less vehemently. “That’s not
the plan … You are welcome to torture me to death for your amusement,
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only allow me to amuse myself a little in the same style … If I imagined
you really wished me to marry Isabella, I’ll cut my throat!” (81).
The keyword in this passage is ‘torture’. The idea of lovers torturing each other is very
strong in the novel. Love here is portrayed in terms of anguish, torment and suffering. As
Philip Drew observes, their passion for each other is compounded with jealousy, anger and
hatred that it brings them only anguish and unhappiness (Allott 251). T .E. Apter too
affirms that it is Heathcliff’s love for Catherine which motivates his cruelty. He would not
have minded Hindley’s degradation if Catherine had stood by him; but because that
degradation led to Catherine’s rejection, he must destroy Hindley. He would not have
bothered with Edgar Linton and his family, had not Catherine married Edgar (Smith 209).
In another passage, Catherine says:
“I wish I could hold you,’ she continued, bitterly, ‘till we were both dead! I
shouldn’t care what you suffered … . Why shouldn’t you suffer? I do! Will
you forget me –[ … ] Don’t torture me till I’m as mad as yourself,’ cried
he, [ … ] Catherine, you know that I could as soon forget you, as my
existence! Is it not sufficient for your infernal selfishness, that while you
are at peace I shall writhe in the torments of hell?...’. ‘ I shall not be at
peace,’ moaned Catherine…‘I’m not wishing you greater torment than I
have, Heathcliff! I only wish us never to be parted” (115).
The keywords in this passage are ‘suffering’, ‘forget’, ‘torture’, ‘torments’, and
‘hell’. Unrestricted emotional longing marks the language and actions of the entire book
(Oldfield 81). The lovers are conscious that they are soon to part .Catherine is frightened
that Heathcliff will forget her after she dies, and her speech reveals her fears that the
passing of time will lessen his grief and he will find new consolations, while what she
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feels and wishes him to feel is eternal, unchanging devotion. Her greatest fear is echoed
and reiterated in her question “Will you forget me?”. In response, Heathcliff declares that
time and change will not affect his love. He complains that her words are hurtful, and the
pain will increase after she is dead. Her later speech, ‘I wish I could hold you . . .’shows
that she realizes that their love cannot be fulfilled except through death. She understands
that he suffers as painfully as she does. Her longing to remain united forever is expressed
in the last sentence “I only wish us never to be parted...”. Having already suffered the
pangs of separation in childhood and later as adults, they know that their union can take
place only after death. As Marsh points out, in both Catherine and Heathcliff, the
underlying force which compels their characters is a desire to be together (1999:72).
The idea that their love can attain union only through death is expressed in another
passage too. In her delirium, she dares Heathcliff to follow her through death. “If you do
...I’ll keep you. I’ll not lie there by myself; they may bury me twelve feet deep, and throw
the church down over me; but I won’t rest till you are with me”(92).
Love not only demands more than what is expected, but also places no limit to its
demands-even death. Indeed, love is shown to be more important than life or death to both
of them. They believe in Amor Vincit Omnia ‘love conquers all’. The idea that love breaks
down all restraints and makes extraordinary demands is stressed here. Love and death are
closely bound for Catherine and Heathcliff, but theirs is the self-destructive kind of love
where the romantic lovers consume themselves in feelings which relate only to themselves
and exclude the rest of the world.
Passion is the keynote and both Catherine and Heathcliff are ruled by passion.
Their passion for each other is revealed in the frenzied eloquence of unrestrained emotion
in the final scene between the lovers. They cling to each other, forgetting the whole world.
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Their relationship exists on a purely instinctive level; their exchanges contain only talks of
love, torture, torment, cruelty and betrayal. Passion is seen as a kind of fate, stronger and
more real than happiness, society or morality (Smith 177). The love of Catherine and
Heathcliff is romantic because it is intense, passionate and absolute although Holderness
feels that “it is everything that love generally is not in ordinary life” (1985:36).Their
passionate embrace results in Catherine’s death. Bronte shows how “Desire propelling
itself upward, seeks and finds its own extinction” (Nussbaum 363). The news of
Catherine’s death maddens Heathcliff. He says:
“Two words would comprehend my future – death and hell: existence after
losing her, would be hell”. And in great torment he cries out, “Catherine
Earnshaw, may you not rest as long as I am living!…Be with me always –
take any form – drive me mad! Only do not leave me in the abyss, where I
cannot find you! Oh God it is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I
cannot live without my soul!” (122).
The keywords in this passage are ‘death’, ‘hell’ and ‘torment’. He will love her
even in death, even if it is only her elusive, though tantalizing presence. He asks her to
haunt him to overcome erotic separation. And she does. The exclusion from union with the
beloved object, is to know despair. It is the ultimate expression of the agony of love
denied (Gerin 224). Soon after her death, Heathcliff tells Nelly, “Her presence was with
me ...I felt her by me ...It was a strange way of killing ..., to beguile me with the spectre
of a hope, through eighteen years!” (210-211).
In the very opening of the novel following Lockwood’s terrifying dream of the
child-ghost, one finds Heathcliff breaking down and crying out:
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“Come in! come in!,” he sobbed. “Cathy, do come. Oh—once more! Oh!
My heart’s darling! Hear me this time, Catherine, at last!” (20).
This cry echoes across the whole novel and is connected with Catherine’s last
words:
“Oh, don’t, don’t go. It is the last time! Edgar will not hurt us. Heathcliff, I
shall die! I shall die!” (118).
Polhemus observes, “the mysterious calling and desire that spell love are signifiers
of the lover’s vocation …Through love, they seek identity, even in, and beyond death”
(1987:168-169). In the case of the older pair, the theme of love and death go hand-in-hand.
The theme of love is highlighted in the quarrel between the second pair of lovers,
Cathy and Hareton. Cathy discovers that Hareton has stolen some of her books in his
attempt to learn how to read and thereby tries to impress her, but she ridicules his
illiteracy. She teases him, till in a fit of rage and wounded pride he hits her, throws the
books into the fire and rushes out:
But his self-love would endure no further torment: I heard, and not
altogether disapprovingly, a manual check given to her saucy tongue … He
afterwards gathered the books and hurled them on the fire. I read in his
countenance what anguish it was to offer that sacrifice to spleen-... He had
been content with daily labour and rough animal enjoyments, till Catherine
crossed his path. Shame at her scorn, and hope of her approval, were his
first prompters to higher pursuits; and instead of guarding him from one,
and winning him the other, his endeavours to raise himself had produced
just the contrary results (219).
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The above passage brings out how Cathy and Hareton can hurt each other. The
keywords in this passage are ‘torment’, ‘anguish’, and ‘shame’. There is no word of
affection or love. The narrator, Nelly, tells how Cathy uses her superior education to hurt
Hareton by teasing him about his illiteracy; and he hurts her in the only way he can, by
hitting her. The passage also reveals that Hareton is in ‘anguish’ and in ‘torment’ and
how much Cathy’s approval matters to him and how he feels affected by her scorn. All
these painful feelings are connected with love; Hareton suffers because he is in love. In
this passage, love is portrayed as something painful, as a sort of mental torment.
In the next chapter, Hareton is found sulking. Now it is Cathy who tries to befriend
him, but he is determined not to let himself be scorned again, and so declares, “Nay, if it
made me a king, I’d not be scorned for seeking her good will anymore”. But Cathy is
determined to be reconciled to Hareton. She realizes that it was his pride and not dislike,
so she kisses him when he least expects it:
She returned to the hearth, and frankly extended her hand. He blackened,
and scowled like a thunder-cloud, and kept his fists resolutely clenched,
and his gaze fixed on the ground. Catherine, by instinct, must have divined
it was obdurate perversity, and not dislike, that prompted this dogged
conduct; for, after remaining an instant undecided, she stooped, and
impressed on his cheek a gentle kiss (228).
Cathy, earlier, had tried to conceal her feelings by ‘chewing her lips’, and
endeavoring, by humming an eccentric tune, to conceal a growing tendency to ‘sob’. But
she soon gives up the attempt to conceal her feelings and shows her vulnerability. She
‘wept’ no longer disguising her trouble and then acknowledges her sufferings in words,
“and I was miserable and bitter at everybody” and acknowledges that she had wronged
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him. But Hareton’s behaviour is hostile. He ‘scowled like a thunder cloud’, and Cathy
doesn’t know what else to do, but ‘by instinct’ she ‘divined’ his feelings, and after a
moment’s hesitation, she breaks the normal bounds of behaviour and kisses him. Since this
passage also deals with the crisis of love, the feelings expressed by the characters are
examined. Cathy asks Hareton to be friends, but he rejects all her advances. As her love
for Hareton is an imperative emotion, much stronger than the limits of social convention.
She, therefore, intuitively understands his feelings and goes beyond all the normal ways of
settling a quarrel. Love, as portrayed by Brontë, is a powerful and irrational instinct that
drives people to break down all barriers in their way. As in the case of the other two
lovers, Catherine and Heathcliff, love is the emotional relationship between these two
characters. But unlike the former, their’s is the redemptive kind of love.
The love of the second generation closely parallels those of the first. In fact, the
love relationships of both generations are forged in the shadow of tyranny. Heathcliff
becomes to Hareton what Hindley was to Heathcliff. But the young couples differ
radically from their seniors. Cathy is Catherine’s as well as Edgar’s daughter. Both
Hareton and Cathy are children born out of love. Hareton is a true Earnshaw and belongs
to the Heights, unlike Heathcliff, who was adopted by Mr. Earnshaw.
From analyzing these passages in the text, it is clear that the central complexities in
the theme of love are that people in love are vulnerable so they get hurt, suffer torments
and feel tortured. Love is irrational and respects no restraints; it acts as an ‘instinct’ that
overrides all conventions in uniting the lovers as in the case of Cathy and Hareton, and the
effect of the kiss is such that it unities them. The words ‘torment’, ‘torture’, and ‘anguish’
act as a kind of leitmotif or ‘linking word’, lying scattered across the text and which binds
the various strands of this theme together.
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The next step in thematic analysis is to relate these parts to the text as a whole and
see if this theme of love is expressed elsewhere in the text. One has already seen Catherine
on her death-bed with only one last wish-- ‘not to be separated from Heathcliff’. She says,
“I wish I could hold you …till we are both dead” (115). Heathcliff too says, “I dreamt I
was sleeping in the last sleep, by that sleeper, with my heart stopped, and my cheek frozen
against her”. Heathcliff‘s love is so strong that he bribes the sexton to arrange it that he
will be buried next to Catherine with the sides of their coffins removed so that “by the
time Linton gets to us he’ll not know which is which!” (209). The ethical implication of
the love-sex relationships operates suggestively in the novel. Heathcliff’s passion for
Catherine acknowledges no limitation, not even the separation of death; his desire for her
seems almost necrophilia, as he imagines sleeping with her in the grave, their corpses
dissolving into each other in an eternity of horrifying physical sensuality (Holderness 20).
Love is exclusive for Catherine. As a child, she demanded undivided attention
from her father; as an adult, she demands exclusive attention from her husband Edgar and
from her lover Heathcliff. For Heathcliff, love has always been associated with the pain of
absence, rejection, and separation (Bermen 93). Heathcliff and Catherine share an
extraordinary affinity, the nature of which both finds impossible to express. Catherine
insists, “Whatever our souls are made of [Heathcliff’s] and mine are the same, and
Linton’s is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost” (100). Heathcliff too
claims, “ If [Edgar] loved with all the power of his puny being, he couldn’t love as much
in eighty years as I could in a day...It is not in him to be loved like me, how can she love
in him what he has not?”(182).
The difficulty in specifying the nature of their affinity is underlined by the way
their triangular relationship with Edgar forms a sort of miniature language of the erotic.
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The combined desire for likeness and difference in a mate are presented here. Prohibition
creates desire. For Catherine, Heathcliff is both the forbidden outsider and the forbidden
brother. Herein lies his devastating powers of attraction. Catherine loves Edgar because he
is handsome, rich and because he loves her. Her love for him is romantic but her love for
Heathcliff is a necessity.
Catherine, Heathcliff and Edgar form a disjointed triangle, each denying the other
the right to love. Edgar, instead of recognizing Heathcliff’s love, does his best to separate
them just like Hindley did. He demands that she makes a choice, “Will you give up
Heathcliff hereafter or will you give me up? It is impossible for you to be my friend and
his at the same time; and I absolutely require you to choose” (102). Heathcliff too refuses
to recognize Catherine’s love for Edgar and so Catherine offers Edgar her body and
Heathcliff her soul. Valerie Grosvenor Myer adduces that the novel is about “the damage
done by the denial of love” (1990:130). Catherine realizes that she had betrayed her true
self. Therefore, the only atonement is through death as their love, unacceptable by society,
can be realized only through death. So, both aspire to attain it. In the novel’s climatic
resolution –the union of Catherine and Heathcliff in death is paralled by the union of
Cathy and Hareton in marriage.
Heathcliff and Catherine in seeking union with each other are in fact trying to
preserve the love and primordial social harmony forged in early childhood, when there
was no separation. Catherine tries to express her thoughts to Nelly:
“I cannot express it; surely you and everybody have a notion that there is or
should be an existence of yours beyond you. ... If all else perished, and he
remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were
annihilated, the universe would turn to be a mighty stranger; I should not
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seem a part of it” (59).
After Catherine’s death, Heathcliff tells Nelly:
“…and what does not recall her? … In every cloud, in every tree filling the
air at night, and caught by glimpses in every object, by day I am
surrounded with her image! … The entire world is a dreadful collection of
memoranda that she did exist, and that I have lost her!” (235).
So, when Nelly scolds him for disturbing the dead, Heathcliff exclaims: “Disturbed
her? No! She has disturbed me, night and day, through eighteen
years—incessantly
remorselessly” (209). Besides, he is certain of her presence and so says: “She must be
somewhere at the Heights, I was certain! ...” (210).
The novel also deals with sadism, incest and adultery, all major areas of
transgression. The desire to hurt-physically or verbally through sadism, sadomasochism,
masochism, permeates the whole text (Bloom 166).The strange link between sadism and
eroticism, often appears in the novel. Lockwood says, “Terror made me cruel” (4). Desire
and terror are twin poles of human experience, generated by identical objects (Davies
1998:80). An unconscious incest taboo impedes Catherine and Heathcliff from attaining
normal sexual union and leads them to seek union after death. The thwarting of desire
gives rise to sexually bizarre behaviours like sadism, necrophilia and even vampirism, all
of which are linked to incest.
Incest is a metaphor of both evil as well as pre-lapsarian innocence. So, there is a
psychological and moral manifestation in the inverted image of paradise that is carried
over into the second generation in the form of complex doubling of characters, names and
situations. The eroticism present in the text, shocking though it must have been to the
Victorians, nevertheless shows Brontë’s attempt to project the underlying urge of a free
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self in attaining union with the ‘other’ by breaking social boundaries and limitations of
the body. G.H.Lewes postulates that Brontë’s treatment of the subject of Heathcliff’s
burning and impassioned love for Catherine and her inextinguishable love for him, which
set culture, education, and the world at defiance, show her real mastery (Allott 69).
2.1.2. THEME OF CHILDHOOD
Wuthering Heights proffers a significant study on the theme of childhood,
especially the latter stage and of adolescence with its ‘identity crisis’ and the social and
psychological struggles found during this period of life. Richard Chase emphatically
claims that childhood, in one way or the other, is the central theme of Emily Brontë’s
writings (Gregor 32), a theme reiterated in her Gondal poems and which have historic
links with the novel. The bulk of the story concerns itself with the childhood of its main
characters from both generations. Even as grown ups, they are shown as adults arrested in
childhood. “Wuthering Heights”, observes Davies, “teems with childhood animosities,
allegiances and obsessions…” (1998:162). Indeed, Emily Brontë shows better than her
contemporaries how people mature.
The importance of childhood in shaping characters is a crucial factor in Wuthering
Heights (Gordon 197). Brontë places great importance on heredity and her child characters
in addition to showing characteristics common to children, are also marked by traits
special to themselves. As Cecil points out, one recognizes Heathcliff the child in
Heathcliff the man. The novel, even when it makes complex progression in time, never
really moves away from its preoccupation with childhood. Although it depicts the joys and
sorrows of childhood, the main emphasis is on the burden of childhood, that is, of growing
up without love or care resulting in the distortion of the psyche as manifest in the stunted
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growth of its main characters and which, as Brontë reveals, prevents them from attaining
normal emotional growth.
Experiences of early life leave an ineradicable stamp on the formation of an
individual. The emotional violence in the novel points to childhood trauma and neglect.
Heathcliff, Charlotte Brontë notes, “exemplifies the effects which a life of continued
injustice and hard usage may produce... tyranny and ignorance made him a mere demon”
(Allott 56). All suffer, those loved and unloved, in various ways. Although the novel
expresses the early experiences of the two generations, it is interesting to note that the
paradigm of childhood is suggested by the novelist in unobtrusive ways. The childhood
state, though directly described with relative brevity, is nevertheless, kept continuously
before the reader. So, Emily Brontë’s portrayal of childhood though conducted mainly
through Nelly’s point of view identifies chiefly with the children (Smith 182).
The theme of childhood is voiced by Catherine on her deathbed and it continues to
be the main action in the second half of the book. “I wish I were a girl again”, exclaims the
dying Catherine, “half savage, and hardy, and free; and laughing at injuries, not
maddening under them!” (91). Childhood is that period in the life of most individuals
when life makes no demands, a time when an individual feels close to one’s origin and
experiences a transient vision of innocence and happiness. But for Catherine and
Heathcliff maturity is synonymous with imprisonment, torment and loss (Smith 193).
Consequently, in order to experience the undivided oneness they shared in their childhood,
express nostalgia and seek for a union beyond death. Their innocent vision of childhood
thus has a validity which the harsh rigours of experience cannot displace.
In any thematic analysis, the first task is to find out the keyword/s related to the
theme and see if it is mentioned elsewhere in the text. This helps in finding out how a
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particular theme enriches the thematic fabric of the text. A close reading of the text makes
it clear that Brontë has presented the childhood of almost all the major characters in the
novel. Therefore words relating to ‘childhood’, ‘child’ and childhood experience help to
pinpoint and substantiate the theme being analyzed. Brontë presents a unique view of
childhood by exhibiting a language that renders verbatim the joys and pains of that state.
Besides, she clearly demonstrates how these early emotions and experience have moulded
and shaped the later personality of her characters.
In the first half of the novel, Brontë portrays the childhood of the first generation–
Heathcliff, Catherine, Hindley, Edgar, Isabella and Nelly. The story begins with Catherine,
Hindley and Nelly as children. As a young boy, Hindley is shown to be rather effeminate,
while Catherine is portrayed as a handsome yet willful girl .She allies herself with
Heathcliff in their common rebellion against Hindley’s persecution. Heathcliff, the “dirty,
ragged, starving, homeless black-haired orphan” that Mr. Earnshaw picked up from the
streets of Liverpool, is brought to the Heights when Hindley is fourteen and Catherine
hardly six. The most striking aspect of the family’s reaction to Heathcliff is their
immediate and instinctive hostility. Nelly refers to the child as “it” thereby denying the
child any human status. He has no name, status, property or possession. He is treated with
callous indifference and active cruelty.
Heathcliff as a child is depicted as the recipient of violence. His early life is a
pattern of victimization, violence and injustice. Hindley regarded him as “a usurper to his
father’s affection and to his privileges (26) and therefore showers abuses on Heathcliff by
calling him a “dog’, ‘a gipsy’, ‘a beggarly interloper’ and ‘imp of Satan’ (27). His only
friend was Catherine who treated him as her equal. The rebellious children defy Joseph’s
authority and hide themselves from him by appropriating the dairy woman’s cloak and
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hiding in the moors, under its shelter .The action of the two children is a rebellion that
involves and implies alternative values (Holderness 28). But Hindley’s reaction to this
show of resistance is to divide and separate them. He degrades, discriminates and
humiliates Heathcliff before others. Thus, the seeds of Heathcliff’s plans for revenge
against Hindley are sown here.
Catherine is presented as a child brimming with life and exuberance, who runs
across the moors in the rain with Heathcliff, wild, bare-footed--a half-savage. Heathcliff is
closely attached to her and ever ready to do any of her bidding. She likes to play the little
mistress and uses her hands freely on those who disobey her. Catherine takes great relish
in showing her father how her pretended insolence has more power over Heathcliff than
his kindness. She also enjoys baiting Nelly and turning Joseph’s religious curses into
ridicule. Her father’s failure to understand her and his continual repulsion hardens her.
Marginalized as she is in the patriarchal family order, she shares Heathcliff’s position as a
subordinate under Hindley’s regime following their father’s death. So, when their
misbehavior is brought to Hindley’s notice by Joseph, he flogs Heathcliff and Catherine is
made to forgo her meals. But the children forget all their punishments and sufferings the
minute they are together again. Terry Eagleton opines that “What Heathcliff offers
Catherine is a non- or pre-social relationship as the only authentic form of living in a
world of exploitation and inequality...”(1975:108).
As children, one of their “chief amusements” is to run away from the house and
“scamper on the moors” when life at the Heights becomes unbearable. The moor which is
barely described in physical terms in the first half of the novel is a playground for the
children and a realm of silence and retreat, a balm to the wounded psyche. Apart from this,
other instances of their mutual activity as children that finds mention in the novel are of
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their escapade to the Grange, of Heathcliff setting a trap over a bird’s nest, their rebellion
against Hindley and the visit of the Linton children during Christmas.
The love of Catherine and Heathcliff thus begins as childhood ‘togetherness’, a
closeness that develops into a strange bond of oneness. So Catherine declares “He is
myself than I am.” (57). Even Nelly comments, “She was much too fond of Heathcliff.
The greatest punishment we could invent for her was to keep her separate from him …”
(29).
Identity crisis is clearly an issue in the novel (Burgan 134). The question of who
Catherine and Heathcliff are to each other, lie at the root of their attachment to one
another. In moments of great emotional stress, each refers to the other as the source of
personal being. “I am Heathcliff”, states Catherine (59). One has further evidence of their
affinity with each other when Heathcliff asks Nelly (to whom he relates their adventure at
the Grange) “when would you catch me wishing to have what Catherine wanted?” (33).
For the child Heathcliff, who knows no love except Catherine’s, she is his only security.
He needs her more than she needs him. So, when she deserts him, his emotional resources
built on insecurities distorts into hate and motivates his desire for revenge by having those
things–property and wealth–which had prevented his union with her. The desire for
recognition of self in the other prompts Catherine to envision her identity in Heathcliff.
The first object of desire is to be recognized by the other and it is through language
that the ‘other’ can manifest itself and provide recognition. This is confirmed by Lacan,
who states that the child’s clarification of selfhood is by focusing on another with whom
he can identify “as in a mirror” (Macovki 107). In fact, it is this mirror stage that lies at the
heart of the novel. The novel calls up and articulates a vestigial nostalgia for a narcissistic
mirror-vision of childhood (Stoneman 164). Significantly, all of Catherine’s fantasies as
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an adult are centered on her childhood, the moor and Wuthering Heights. Catherine never
overcomes her childhood longing for Heathcliff as her breakdown following his return
shows. It also reveals her inability to make the transition from childhood to adulthood.
Even her dreams, which she narrates to Nelly, reveal this, “…most strangely, the whole
last seven years of my life grew a blank! …I was a child…” (91). Once she recovers from
the shock of seeing her image in the mirror, she sounds exactly like the ghost of
Lockwood’s dream who “wailed”. Nelly remarks “Our fiery Catherine was no better than
a wailing child!” (152). Like the ghost, she wails for re-entry into the house of her
childhood.
Knoepflmacher comments that Wuthering Heights is about the loss and recovery of
the childhood oneness of male and female halves or it can be seen as the search for a
single ‘spirit within two frames’ or ‘episychye’(1989:34-35). Catherine and Heathcliff
affirm the strange interplay of identities which had developed by the conditions of their
childhood and adolescence. Patricia Meyers Spacks describes the two lovers as two
adolescents who never grew up (1975:176). Catherine’s powerful speech pattern, thus,
expresses frank, uncensored, unmediated personal statements of the heart’s desire with
child-like candor. They also inform the very essence of the novel’s value-system. “I wish I
could hold you…. Till we were both dead! --- Will you forget me--“, asks Catherine in her
last meeting with Heathcliff. All her statements reveal her childlike terror of being left
alone and her utter dependency on his love. She further states” I only wish us never to be
parted…”.Her final utterance reveals the language of naked childhood emotion. The
driving force of Catherine’s life is stated here-- ‘never to be parted’ from Heathcliff---of
‘union of self with other’. She completely identifies herself with Heathcliff. The novel
asserts their likeness but it is never clearly defined in specific terms.
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Naming is a sensitive issue, for names are counters for legal and personal identity
(Miles 56). Heathcliff, a waif adopted by Mr. Earnshaw, has no identity. As a child, he is
referred to with the impersonal pronoun “it”. He is given the name “Heathcliff” but has no
surname, a fact that nullifies his presence in the family genealogy. Loss of self and
dispersal of identity lead to the merging and reunion of identities (Homans 129).
Catherine, as a female, suffers from a sense of being powerless in a patriarchal system.
She can therefore sense and experience his humiliation. One reason in her agreeing to
marry Edgar is that she feels she can help Heathcliff rise out of his position of bondage
under Hindley. “If I marry Linton, I can aid Heathcliff to rise, and place him out of my
brother’s power” (58).
Separation is unbearable to both, and Catherine as an adult claims that in her
dreams, “I was a child; my father was just buried, and my misery arose from the
separation that Hindley had ordered between me and Heathcliff. I was laid alone, for the
first time” (91). The traumatic experience of separation affects her deeply, more so
Heathcliff, as it affects him greatly and distorts his life. As a child he is first abandoned by
his parents, but the more traumatic experience is his forced separation from Catherine in
their childhood and later when Catherine betrays his love by agreeing to marry Edgar. The
Catherine with whom he identifies is the Cathy of his childhood and early adolescence, the
one who has not abandoned him (Mitchell 33). Similarly, Catherine identifies herself with
the Heathcliff of her childhood, her playmate and not the ‘fierce pitiless man’ he has now
become.
Change and displacement following Mr. Earnshaw’s death affect the bond between
them. Catherine’s trauma occurs following her separation from Heathcliff. First Hindley
separates them, then Edgar. As an adult, she longs to re-create their childhood bond of
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oneness and bemoans the confusion of adult life. So Heathcliff asks her, “Why did you
betray your own heart?” (160). He reminds her of the time when, “misery, and
degradation, and death, and nothing that God or Satan could inflict would have parted us”.
Both express the view that heaven is a miserable exile when compared with their
childhood life together. Brontë clearly makes it known that traumatic destruction of
childhood paradise ensures the division of the self. Heathcliff and Catherine suffer the
agonies of a divided self and as adults they struggle to re-attain a harmonious unitary state
(Marsh 1999:74-75).
Throughout the first half of the novel, all the main protagonists—Catherine,
Heathcliff, Hindley as well as Edgar and Isabella express untempered reflexes of
childhood. One interesting thing in the novel is that these characters even as adults behave
and talk like children, their main mode of address being in the form of quarrel. Violence is
another predominant issue in the novel. The tendency to hurt is paramount–either
physically or verbally to imagined or real slights. The desire to retaliate for a slight or
humiliation produces most of the action of the book (Nussbaum 371). In almost every
chapter there are scenes of quarrel either physical or verbal, that are often generated by
bad temper, assault or dispute. As Davies observes, the violent tantrum indulged by the
characters against one another and the profane verbal behaviour clearly have their origin in
the dissatisfactions common to childhood with the provisions and principles laid down by
the elders(Stoneman 170). So, Heathcliff aims a bowl of hot applesauce at Edgar;
Catherine rains blows, slaps even Edgar, pinches Nelly and shakes Hareton. Mr. Earnshaw
gives Catherine a sound blow to teach her cleaner manners which parallels Heathcliff
raining blows on either side of Cathy’s head to teach her to have a civil tongue. Similarly,
Hareton too slaps Cathy to check her saucy tongue. As an adult, Catherine exhibits
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childish tantrums and seems “to find childish diversion in pulling the feathers from the
rents she had made in the pillow”. Even Isabella shows this trait when she escapes from
Heathcliff and the Heights and comes to the Grange. She throws off her wedding ring and
cries out with childish spite, “I will smash it!”. In the same manner, when Edgar tries to
snatch the key to the room from Catherine, she yells, “No, I’ll swallow the key before you
shall get it!”. In the language of her threat lies a child’s spontaneous propensity for
outrageous utterance and violent arguments.
All characters exhibit fits of affection, taunts, threats and physical assaults. Most of
the characters have lost their mothers quite early and this loss is never healed. The voices
in the novel exhibit the childhood terror of a motherless existence. It is the universal cry of
need. But the familial world of Wuthering Heights is controlled at least by a foster-mother
(Nelly) whose practical common sense nullifies the emotional excesses of the other
characters.
The affluent Lintons, Edgar and Isabella, are shown to be spoilt, pampered, and
selfish children. Nelly is a child of the moor and a participant in its childhood experience.
She is “born in one year” with Hindley Earnshaw, and is his foster-sister. A memory of
that sibling relationship comes upon Nelly with “a gush of child’s sensations” as she
passes a signpost on the Gimmerton road, where she sees an apparition of her former
playmate. The shells and pebbles in a hole in the bottom of the old guide post that she sees
is a homely reminder of their lost childhood. This retrospect provides the only glimpse of
Nelly as a child.
The childhood of the second generation is present in the second half of the book.
Hareton’s childhood is similar to that of Heathcliff. His story is that of Heathcliff in the
reverse. As a motherless child, he is neglected by his father and allowed to run wild by
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Joseph and Heathcliff. His response to Nelly, who had come to the Heights, is to pick a
large flint and throw it at her. This is a harsh but immensely eloquent portrait in its
devastating brevity and accuracy of Hareton as a deprived or disturbed child who is
aggressive, defensive, and untrusting. Deprived of education and social refinement, he
grows up to be a ‘boorish’ young man.
Cathy, on the other hand, though a motherless child, has in Nelly a foster mother.
Besides, her father Edgar loves her and looks after her education himself. She, therefore,
has a happy childhood and though spoiled and pampered ultimately proves herself to be
strong enough to oppose Heathcliff. She also undertakes to educate Hareton. Linton is
shown to be a spoiled, pampered, selfish and petulant child, all characteristics of a sickly
invalid and he dies early. Emily Brontë, evidently, confronts the consequences of
inadequate parenting in a realistic manner. Further, she clearly shows what it means to be
alone, isolated and rejected as a child.
2.2. STYLISTIC STUDY OF WUTHERING HEIGHTS
Style is something that emerges in a literary work more or less objectively. The
style of a text is the way in which it is written, the language it uses. The author does not
think consciously of the style he/she has to use for projecting his/her theme. Style creates
meaning (Marsh1987:53). A close look at the fabric of the text, of individual words and
imagery where it occurs is often crucial in revealing the meaning and significance of a
work. The polemical gesture of patterning of language in lexis, in metaphors, imageclusters, symbolism, as well as rhythm and irony in the verbal texture greatly enhance the
range and subtlety of the writer’s prose style. A novel is a constructed image of life in a
distinct medium and in order to understand it, an understanding of the structure of that
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image as shaped in language is necessary. The words, the novelist uses must be
appreciated against a background of other language-choices not made.
Wuthering Heights presents a variety of styles ranging from Catherine’s poetic
discourse, Heathcliff’s verbal violence, Lockwood’s superior literary tone and fashionable
cliché, Nelly’s homiletic rhetoric to Joseph’s biblical Yorkshire dialect and unintelligible
muttering--all producing an interplay of accents and idioms, giving rise to what Bakhtin
terms as “dialogical heteroglossia”. The single most distinctive feature of Wuthering
Heights is its dialogue with Brontë’s emphasis on personal idiolect as she dismantles
language in order to make the language of social behaviour in her fictional world
intelligible to her readers. Thus, the diction used by various characters reveals their speech
style. Although a skilled craftswoman, Brontë, desists from ornate verbal display. Her
linguistic style depends largely on her admirable choice of words, though it is marked by
hyperbolic excess especially in the dramatic speeches of Catherine and Heathcliff. The
directness of Brontë’s style is amply demonstrated in the very opening paragraphs in
chapter one, which is one of the innumerable examples of the direct method of introducing
movement by means of extra accent upon certain focusing words. Each sentence goes
straight as a dart to the impression sought to be conveyed (Allot 143).
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 (2).
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The paragraph conveys a vivid impression of the way the wind blows up on the
heights. Similarly, Lockwood’s entry into the interior of the house is matched exactly with
the action it describes. “One step brought us into the family sitting-room, without any
introductory lobby or passage” (2).
In order to find the most frequent and conspicuous feature in Emily Brontë’s
fiction, consider the following passages:
Catherine tells Heathcliff,
“You and Edgar have broken my heart, Heathcliff! And you both come to
bewail the deed to me, as if you were the people to be pitied! I shall not
pity you, not I. You have killed me -and thriven on it, I think. How strong
you are! How many years do you mean to live after I am gone?” (115).
Heathcliff makes the following reply:
“You have killed yourself. You loved me -then what RIGHT had you to
leave me? What right - answers me – for the poor fancy you felt for
Linton? Because misery and degradation, and death, and nothing that God
or Satan could inflict would have parted us, YOU, of your own will, did it.
I have not broken your heart - YOU have broken it; and in breaking it, you
have broken mine. So much the worse for me that I am strong .Do I want
to live? What kind of living will it be when you- oh, God! would YOU like
to live with your soul in the grave?” (117).
In the above two passages one finds a similarity in their speech patterns as both the
lovers fling allegations at each other for having betrayed their love. Their passion for each
other is so strong that it can be felt in the violence of the words used, so harsh and so
without tenderness. Catherine and Heathcliff as ‘doubles’, speak almost the same
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language. They speak without restraint and their language is charged with emotion. This is
in sharp contrast to the language used by Lockwood and Isabella. The following
illustrations clearly demonstrate it. This is what Lockwood has to say on his first meeting
with Heathcliff:
“A capital fellow! He little imagined how my heart warmed towards him
when I beheld his black eyes withdraw so suspiciously under their brows,
as I rode up, and when his fingers sheltered themselves, with a jealous
resolution, still further in his waistcoat”(1).
Isabella’s comments on Heathcliff show certain similarities:
“Is Mr.Heathcliff a man? If so, is he mad? And if not, is he a devil? I
sha’n't tell my reasons for making this inquiry; but I beseech you to
explain, if you can, what I have married” (99).
The phrasing of words in both expresses sarcasm and irony in their description, though in
Lockwood, it is first abrupt, then leisurely, while in Isabella’s query, it is frantic though
restrained, as she is Heathcliff’s wife.
In another instance, Lockwood makes his address to Heathcliff as:
“I do myself the honour of calling as soon as possible after my arrival, to
express the hope that I have not inconvenienced you by my perseverance in
soliciting the occupation of Thrushcross Grange” (1).
Now compare this with Isabella’s narrative, “I was endeavouring to gather
resolution for entering and taking possession” (104).
Their speech pattern shows certain similarities in its being polite and literary. In
yet another instance, while Lockwood calls Heathcliff’s pack of dogs “possessed swine”
and “brood of tigers”, Isabella in her epistle to Nelly writes of Heathcliff arousing terror in
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her like “a tiger, or a venomous serpent”. Brontë gives Isabella Lockwood’s words and
vice-versa, to suggest similar reaction and characteristic defences. There is a similarity
between them not only in speech pattern but also in their character and experience. Their
usual way of trying to comprehend their situation is through irony. So they act as doubles,
just as Catherine and Heathcliff are doubles of each others.
In fact, it can be stated that the most distinctive single trait in Emily Brontë’s
narrative style is repetition. Every thing in the novel is a kind of double. There are not only
verbal repetitions, but the plot, structure, narrators, and the characters themselves form a
double to each other. There are even two diary accounts, Catherine’s diary forming a kind
of inner text to Lockwood’s diary which forms the outer text. The love story of Catherine
and Heathcliff is repeated in Cathy and Hareton. The triangle of the first generation,
Heathcliff-Catherine-Edgar is repeated in the second, Hareton-Cathy-Linton. The
childhood of Heathcliff is repeated in Hareton. Cathy’s name works in reverse to her
mother’s, from Cathy Linton-Cathy Heathcliff -Cathy Earnshaw, whereas in Catherine’s
case as inscribed by her in her diary, it is Catherine Earnshaw-Catherine HeathcliffCatherine Linton.
Most of the repeated words in the text are content words (Noun, Verb, Adjective
and their derivatives). Words repeated tend to stick longer in the mind. Repetition is
confined not only to words or sentences but extends to include even ideas (images) that
express the theme(s) of the novel.
Quite often a description of a person or setting is repeated in several places in the
novel as if the novelist wants to emphasize the same detail, like in the case of Heathcliff.
He has been variously described as the ‘devil’ and has been endowed with qualities
pertaining to various animals, through out the novel. The emotional turbulence of the first
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pair of lovers is characterized by similar turbulence in nature, a fact often repeated in the
text. Accordingly, while storm, gale, snow, and heavy rain are associated with the first pair
of lovers, sunshine, spring and warm weather are associated with the second pair of lovers,
Cathy and Hareton.
The paramount aim in analyzing the text is to find an underlying and possibly
unifying thought or theme behind various features of style, for which, the overall selecting
factor is that of statistics. Therefore, an analysis of Emily Brontë’s narrative style is made
according to the lexical, syntactic and rhetorical features present in the text, though it must
be admitted that all stylistic features are in fact rhetorical in their effect. Rhetorical
features, of course, in turn will have some syntactic and lexical components too, for all
stylistic analysis, in one way or another is an analysis of language.
2.2.1. LEXICAL ANALYSIS OF STYLE
At the lexical level, the very texture of language, i.e., vocabulary is examined. The
first term, which comes to mind when one thinks of vocabulary and style, is diction or
choice of words. Since style is determined by choices, diction should be a very appropriate
starting point for analysis. Emily Brontë’s range of diction is remarkable. Stevie Davies,
in fact, elucidates that the copious and literary vocabulary in the novel is founded in a
pithy Anglo-Saxon- derived lexis and that the vocabulary is often Latinated and
polysyllabic (1998:100-101).
One is introduced to Wuthering Heights first through the filter of Lockwood’s
language. In the first three chapters Lockwood is the narrator. So the discernible and
distinct features of his language are first examined. An analysis of his lexical style reveals
Lockwood’s fondness for using words of Latin origin. A few examples have been cited:
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“A perfect misanthropist’s Heaven: and Mr. Heathcliff and I are such a
suitable pair to divide the desolation between us” (1).
“I had no desire to aggravate his impatience previous to inspecting the
penetralium” (2).
“…and I began, forthwith, to decypher her faded hieroglyphics” (13).
The most distinctive feature in Lockwood’s speeches is its ‘literariness’. It is stilted,
pompous, mannered, ‘bookish’ and riddled with clichés. Besides, he uses hackneyed and
affected language, like in his description of his sea-side flirtation with “a most fascinating
creature--a real goddess” (3) who was also a “poor innocent”. Further, he speaks of Cathy
as Heathcliff’s “amiable lady”, then of Hareton as the “favoured possessor of the
beneficent fairy” (9). Taking Cathy to be Hareton’s wife, he fantasizes himself to be a
possible seducer of Cathy. “She has thrown herself away upon that boor from sheer
ignorance that better individuals existed! A sad pity…I must beware how I make her
regret her choice” (8). Lockwood’s narration presents the conflict between the literary
genre and the social reality the narrative has moved into; the chasm between his mannered
literary language and the domestic reality at the Heights. His speech is marked by
artificiality due to circumlocutions, use of Latinism, and fondness for ready-made,
bombastic and trite phrases. Lockwood’s diction, thus, shows no variation, as it remains
the same from the beginning of the novel to the end.
Nelly’s language, at times, shows certain similarity with Lockwood’s. A few
examples selected on a random basis have been cited:
“He entered, vociferating oaths dreadful to hear; and caught me in the act
of stowing his son away in the kitchen cupboard” (52).
“As soon as I perused this epistle, I went to the master…” (106).
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“Perceiving me immovable, she essayed another method of showing her
dis-relish for her occupation”(178).
Nelly’s language clearly shows that she never ‘tries’ to do a thing but
‘endeavours’ or ‘essays’, she never ‘leaves’ a room but ‘quits’ it, she never ‘meets’
anybody but ‘encounters’ him.
Lockwood tells Nelly, “Excepting a few provincialisms of slight consequence, you
have no marks of the manners which I am habituated to consider as peculiar to your class”.
And Nelly informs him, “ I have undergone sharp discipline, which has taught me
wisdom: and then, I have read more than you would fancy, Mr. Lockwood. You could not
open a book in this library that I have not looked into, and got something out of also:
unless it be that range of Greek and Latin, and that of French.”(44). Lockwood admires
Nelly’s language because it is compatible with his own. But her language, an educated
provincial Standard English with a slight regional flavour, is far above her station. Both
Lockwood’s and Nelly’s speech share a blandness and fixity. She retells the story in the
same tone with no real variation in it. The emotional range displayed in Nelly’s speech is
extremely limited. As narrators, both are self-conscious though Lockwood more so than
Nelly.
Nelly’s narrative style consists of verbatim dialogue. Much of her narrative is
unfolded in the words of the actual character. The sense of actuality is conveyed by a
series of concrete details. When she speaks for herself, her language is lively, colloquial,
and imaginative by the use of many vivid and precise images, like in her reference to
Heathcliff’s history, “It’s a cuckoo’s, sir – I know all about it, except where he was born,
and who were his parents, and how he got his money at first. And that Hareton has been
cast out like a unfledged dunnock” (24). Similarly, recognizing the young Hareton after
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her vision of the child Hindley, she cries “God bless thee darling!…Hareton, its Nelly…
Nelly, thy nurse…” (79). Thus one finds that Nelly possessess two styles –her style while
talking to Lockwood is indistinguishable from contemporary narrative prose and her own
narrative with its emphatic speech rhythm and plain language which shows almost no
variation.
An investigation of Heathcliff’s speech reveals that his diction shows considerable
variation. His style has a certain development throughout the novel. His first words as a
child are described as “gibberish that nobody could understand” (25), and before he
articulates his last words, there are many modulations in between. As a boy, when he is
caught trespassing at the Grange, he lets out a volley of curses which shock his listeners
and make Mrs. Linton exclaims, “Did you notice his language?”(35)[emphasis mine].On
Heathcliff’s return from his wanderings, Nelly describes his voice as “foreign in tone”.
Marsh authenticates that there are two distinct styles in Heathcliff’s speeches. So, his
speech appears rough and violent when compared with Lockwood’s and Nelly’s.
Likewise, he also parodies and satirizes others’ speech, especially that of Edgar and
Isabella, whose speech he treats with equal sarcasm and with utter contempt (1999:21-22).
In contrast, when he talks to Nelly about Catherine or when he talks to Catherine
especially when she is on her death bed, it is emotionally charged. Almost always rough
and violent, his vocabulary consists of short words and simple physical verbs, yet
Heathcliff can speak politely, even wittily, and near the end of his life they alternate
with tones of weariness. His voice too has an element of unpredictability. A few
examples of Heathcliff’s language as present in Lockwood’s narrative are cited to
illustrate his style of speech:
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“Thrushcross Grange is my own, sir’, he interrupted, wincing. “I should not
allow any one to inconvenience me, if I could hinder it--Walk in!”(1).
“Oh, God confound you, Mr. Lockwood! I wish you were at the--”(18).
“Come in! come in!” he sobbed. “Cathy, do come. Oh do--once
more!”(20).
Heathcliff’s language reveals his nature. His diction expresses violence and
harshness. The only occasion where he is found to soften, becomes more human-like, is
when he breaks down and weeps for Catherine’s ghost to ‘come in’.
Similarly, a few examples of Heathcliff’s language as presented in Nelly’s
narration are also cited. First, as a child: “I shall not: stand to be laughed at. I shall not
bear it” (37), “Nelly, make me decent, I’m going to be good” (9), “But, Nelly, if I
knocked him down twenty times, that wouldn’t make him less handsome or me more so. I
wish I had light hair and a fair skin, and was dressed and behaved as well, and had a
chance of being as rich as he will be!” (39), “I’m trying to settle how I shall pay Hindley
back, I don’t care how long I wait, if I can only do it at last. I hope he will not die before I
do!” (42).
Then as a man: “I’ve fought a bitter life since I last heard your voice; and you must
forgive me, for I struggled only for you!” (70), “Oh, Cathy! Oh, my life! How can I bear
it?” (115, “May she wake in torment …” (122).
As for his wife Isabella, this is what he has to say of her: “She [Isabella]...
picturing in me a hero of romance, and expecting unlimited indulgences from my
chivalrous devotion. …. It was a marvelous effort of perspicacity to discover that I did not
love her…..A positive labour of Hercules,…the passion was wholly on one side; and I
never told her a lie… Now was it not the depth of genuine idiocy, for that pitiful, slavish,
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mean-minded brach to dream that I could ever love her?...I‘ve sometimes relented, from
pure lack of invention, in my experiments on what she could endure” (110).
Heathcliff’s contempt for Edgar is made quite clear in these sentences: “Cathy, this
lamb of yours [Edgar] threatens like a bull” he said. “It is in danger of splitting its skull
against my knuckles” (83), “I wish you joy of the milk-blooded coward, Cathy!”. “I
compliment you on your taste. And that is the slavering, shivering thing you preferred to
me!”(84).
Heathcliff’s diction clearly reveals his propensity in using strong words to express
his feelings. As a self-made man, though almost illiterate, he later manages to speak and
behave in a polished and refined manner. So, there is nothing in the actual spelling or
grammar of the dialogue to suggest any difference between Heathcliff’s speech and that of
the other major characters. By minimizing differences in Heathcliff’s language, Brontë
brings him from the margins to the centre of the fictional world and at the same time the
speeches of all the characters are placed in sharp contrast with Joseph’s dialect so as to
root the story firmly in its locale.
Catherine‘s diction too is not fixed either, though her tone is often imperious. One
first hears of her through her diary which Lockwood reads: “An awful Sunday!...H and I
are going to rebel…we took our initiatory step this evening” (13), to the ghostly voice in
Lockwood’s dream “Let me in! Let me in!. I’m come home: I’d lost my way on the
moor!”(17). Her saucy reply to her father, “why cannot you always be a good man,
father?”(30). Her concern for Heathcliff when they are caught trespassing at the Grange,
“Run, Heathcliff, run!”(34) and when she comes back from the Grange, “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. Well, Heathcliff, have you forgotten me?”(37). Her confessions
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made to Nelly are considered as one of the most dramatic speeches in the novel, especially
when she says, “I am Heathcliff!”. So also when she describes her love for Heathcliff
which she says is different from what she feels for Edgar; her utterances during her
delirium, the final statements she makes before her death when it alternates between childlike terror of being abandoned by Heathcliff and her imperiousness in keeping Heathcliff
close to her even when her husband, Edgar arrives, clearly illustrate Catherines’ speech
style. Her diction vacillates from child-like utterance to passionate outburst.
Hareton’s diction shows a development but one stops hearing his voice as the
book ends. Cathy’s and Linton’s diction reveal them as spoiled children. Joseph’s diction
shows no variation. Like Lockwood’s and Nelly’s, it remains the same from the beginning
to the end of the story. Brontë minimizes language differences, even with its differences,
among her central characters with an intentional fixing of the character’s speech styles
into a ficto-linguistic pattern by contrasting it with the almost unintelligible speech of
Joseph, which helps in making the novel a unified whole. The different voices also help to
trace the important divisions among the characters. Heathcliff, when he was brought to the
Heights spoke “gibberish that no one could understand”. Isabella on being brought to the
Heights as Heathcliff’s bride cannot comprehend the jargon used by the boy Hareton.
Cathy and Linton laugh at young Hareton’s pronunciation which they find so strange. But
most of all it is Joseph’s speech with its pronounced Yorkshire accent that is most
unintelligible. He, in turn, mocks Isabella’s and Lockwood’s polite literary speech.
Wuthering Heights, thus presents a plurality of styles, though the author remains
completely absent from the text. In order to make a lexical study of the text, a web
concordance has been used to find out words with the highest frequency in the text. A text
contains both grammar/structural words and lexical words. In order to find out the lexical
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content of the text, one thousand words have been chosen on a random basis and then
classified into their word classes. The findings have been illustrated with the help of a
graph:
Lexical Analysis of Wuthering Heights
Fig .1
The graph clearly illustrates that Wuthering Heights is noun and verb-founded,
with sparing use of adjectives and adverbs, which make the telling crisp and economical.
Besides, what is remarkable in Brontë’s lexicon is the striking use of her verbs, which
show violent movement and conflict and has momentum and energy which are evident
even in the speeches of her characters. Words wreck vocal violence and since her
characters carry the unmediated emotions of childhood into their adult lives, they are
forever bickering; quarrel being the favoured mode of communication. Some of the verbs
found in the text are : Asseverated, answered, replied, retorted, vociferated, expostulated,
affirmed, declared, remarked, responded, whispered, sobbed, cried, wailed, mourned,
broke out, vow, commenced, shouted, exclaimed, grated out, gasped, muttered, croaked,
snarled, screamed through his nose, observed, ejaculated, hallooed, continued, added,
persevered, persisted, snapped, interrupted, interposed inquired, returned, demanded,
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soliloquized, begged, hold communication with, converse, ventured and abjured.(Davies
101).
“I could not bear the employment; I took my dingy volume by the scroop,
and hurled it into the dog-kennel, vowing I hated a good book. Heathcliff
kicked his to the same place” (14).
The above extract taken from Catherine’s diary contains strong, physical, active verbs
like—‘hurled’, and ‘kicked’.
Brontë presents Cathy’s ideal vision of Heaven in the following manner:
…rocking in a rustling green tree, with a west wind blowing, and bright
white clouds flitting rapidly above; and not only larks, but throstles, and
black birds, and linnets, and cuckoos pouring out music on every side, and
the moors seen at a distance, broken into cool dusky dells;…(180).
In this passage, the choice of vocabulary expresses movements —rocking, rustling,
blowing, flitting, and shows ‘a whole world awake and wild with joy’.
Joseph’s speeches are often expressed in Yorkshire dialect, usually in the form of
cryptic tirade or caustic curses. His speech pattern, therefore, consists of verbs like
croaking, gasping, grating, screaming, and are spoken with nasalization. Nelly’s speech is
the only one which acts as a restraint to all this excess. She neutralizes the explosive
utterances of the other characters with the more common verbs like ‘said’, ‘observed’, and
‘replied’.
The novel also contains verbs of punishment like pinching, slapping, whipping,
beating, and hair-pulling. So, when Heathcliff flings a tureen of apple sauce at his rival,
Edgar’s face is ‘scrubbed’ with a dishcloth. Heathcliff ‘throws’ a knife at Isabella. He
‘boots’ Hindley. There are lots of references to the torturing of cats, hanging of dogs,
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vivisection, crushing skulls, wrenching finger nails, of ‘tearing out heart and drinking
blood’. Drabble, therefore, opines that “the author seems to take a lot of pleasure in
describing acts of violence” (1978: xiv).
Brontë uses highly suggestive language. The characters and their environment are
presented through appropriate diction. Wuthering Heights is described as a place which
experiences ‘atmospheric tumult’. Many adjectives are used to describe Heathcliff.
Lockwood describes Heathcliff as a ‘dark-skinned gypsy’, and as a child, Nelly says he
was a ‘patient’, ‘sullen’ child. Edgar’s character is evoked by using words like ‘soft’,
‘mild’, ‘gentle’, and ‘pensive’. His eyes, according to Catherine, are ‘dove’s eyes’.
Catherine is a ‘wild’, ‘wicked slip’ with the ‘bonniest’ eyes and ‘sweetest’ smile. Cathy is
the ‘most winning’ thing with the Earnshaw’s ‘handsome eyes’ and the Linton’s ‘fair skin’
and ‘small feature’ and ‘yellow curling hair’. Lockwood describes Hareton as a ‘bearish’
young man, while Nelly describes Joseph as a ‘wearisome, self-righteous pharisee’.
Wuthering Heights, no doubt, is one of the most kinetic of English novels, as is
clearly evident not just in the utterance of its characters, but also in their actions and
constant movements between the novel’s two primary settings.
2.2.2. SYNTACTIC ANALYSIS OF STYLE
One of the most prominent features of Emily Brontë’s style is that it is syntax of
excess – of hyperbolic expression, although the syntactic structures contain a lot of
variation. Brontë makes use of long sentences as well as short sentences, and even
fragmentary syntax. David Cecil comments that, her rhythm is a perfect echo of the sense,
the movement of the sentences is modulated exactly to correspond the movement of the
emotion it conveys (1934:151). Her long sentences sometimes form a paragraph in itself,
and she uses it with great dexterity. Her syntactic construction also contains a lot of
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paralinguistic devices which she uses with telling effect especially in the dramatic
utterance of Catherine and Heathcliff, “Oh, Cathy! Oh, my life! How can I bear it? was the
first sentence he uttered, in a tone that did not seek to disguise his despair” (115).
Heathcliff’s syntactic construction is short, fragmentary, revealing the depth of his
pain and anguish at the sight of his beloved so pale and haggard:
“Be with me always—take any form—drive me mad! only do not leave me
in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! It is unutterable! I cannot
live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!” (122).
The last line of this passage shows a parallel construction. The words ‘do’ not and
‘cannot ‘ are italicized, and are negatives, though stressed to reveal the inner turmoil and
anguish experienced by Heathcliff at the thought of losing Catherine. The dashes in the
first sentence instead of commas add to the dramatic intensity of the utterance as do the
italicized words and exclamatory marks:
“If he loved with all the power in his puny being, he couldn’t love as much
in eighty years as I could in a day...He is scarcely a degree dearer to her
than her dog, or her horse. It is not in him to be loved like me: how can she
love in him what he has not?” (108).
The force of Heathcliff’s language is revealed in its savage, biting satire as his rhetoric
gathers momentum into a language of absolute imperative:
“I have no pity! I have no pity! The more the worms writhe, the more I
yearn to crush out their entrails! It is a moral teething…” (111).
The power of Heathcliff’s insistent speech derives from a logic hammered by
parallelism and repetition. The violent images and hyperboles express an impetuous will
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that will not brook opposition. Being deprived of his own humanity, he cannot bear that
others should show human qualities.
Heathcliff’s loosely-constructed sentence seems to convey experience at the
moment when it is lived:
“I thought, once, I would have stayed there, when I saw her face again–it is
hers yet–he had hard work to stir me; but he said it would change, if the air
blew on it, and so I struck one side of the coffin loose– and covered it up—
not Linton’s side, damn him!” (209).
There are twelve phrases in this sentence, all short. Heathcliff begins with the
thought he had before opening the grave, but the sentence is interrupted at the moment
when he sees Catherine’s face. He conveys that moment by interjecting ‘it is hers yet’, but
in the background he is also aware of the sexton’s worries (‘he had hard work to stir me’).
The sexton’s words finally penetrate to Heathcliff, and the result is immediate action, ‘so I
struck one side of the coffin loose’. Heathcliff had intended to see Catherine’s face and
stay with her, but there is a change in his thought process. The semi-colon indicates the
shift. His jealousy of Linton comes to the forefront of his mind and the desire for revenge
fills him. So he decides to defer his death till its completion. The sexton’s words that ‘it
can change, if the wind blew on it’ activates his next action. He covers her body. By the
end of the sentence his emotion undergoes a sea change. It is focused on hating Linton as
indicated in the phrase “damn him!”. A similar conflict in emotion can be observed on his
first visit to Catherine’s grave. Most of Heathcliff’s sentences incorporate complex
situations, so their loose, wandering structure reflects the conflict of feelings and desires.
At the same time, it also reveals Heathcliff’s inability to articulate his feelings in words.
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Catherine experiences similar difficulty in articulating her feelings for Heathcliff:
“I cannot express it; but surely you and everybody have a notion that there is or should be
an existence of yours beyond you... My great miseries in this world have been
Heathcliff’s... my great thought in living is himself. If all else perished and he remained, I
should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe
would turn to a mighty stranger: I should not seem a part of it. 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!” (59).
The passage begins with Catherine’s inability to describe the bond that exists
between Heathcliff and herself. She alludes to it as something that subsists beyond
existence. The pause in the sentence indicates Catherine searching for words to describe
her attachment to him. Her speech then moves on to the romantic language of love, where
the lovers seek total identification in each other. Catherine cannot imagine a world without
the presence of Heathcliff. The stress is on the word ‘he’. She finally confesses her
feelings for Edgar and Heathcliff. She is attracted to Edgar but she also needs Heathcliff.
The sentences clearly express the conflict in her mind as she experiences the conflicting
logic of the pulls between the head and the heart. She finally claims ‘I am Heathcliff!”.
The stress on the word ‘am’ adds emphasis to her assertion of sharing the same identity
with Heathcliff.
The syntactic construction of the passage shows that it contains two ‘If
constructions’ and a parallel sentence construction which offers comparison of Catherine’s
feeling for Edgar and Heathcliff. The passage thus contains parallelism and repetition, and
the subtle alteration of pronouns and possessive adjectives. Personal pronouns are
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combined with abstract words like ‘existence’, ‘creation’ and ‘universe’, so that the final
assertion of identity with Heathcliff seems inevitable: “Whatever our souls are made of,
his and mine are the same; and Linton’s is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or
frost from fire” (57). Catherine’s sentence pattern shows that it contains four swift clauses,
perfect in their balance, alliteration, assonance and rhythm.
Most of Heathcliff’s syntactic style reveals variation in their length and in the
directness of construction. His sarcastic constructions are elaborate and long, but he
controls these with blunt, short and direct statements. His comments to Nelly about his
wife Isabella makes it quite clear. Compared with him, Isabella’s sentences are more
structured and each follows the previous one in a logical way, as if she is trying to explain
herself:
“Had it been another, I would have covered my face, in the presence of
such grief. In his case, I was gratified: ...But it is utterly impossible I can
ever be revenged, and therefore I cannot forgive him;…” (131).
Isabella begins her sentence with ‘had it been’ and the next sentence completes her
deliberate contrast ‘In his case’. So, Isabella follows an analytical style as her conclusion
is expressed logically connected by the conjunction ‘therefore’.
A few of Lockwood’s sentence constructions are cited to illustrate his syntactic
patterns:
“A perfect misanthropist’s Heaven: and Mr. Heathcliff and I are such a
suitable pair to divide the desolation between us... He little imagined how
my heart warmed towards him when I beheld his black eyes withdraw so
suspiciously under their brows, as I rode up, and when his fingers sheltered
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themselves, with a jealous resolution, still further in his waistcoat, as I
announced my name” (1).
Most of the sentences in the passage are Compound-Complex sentences that reveal
Lockwood’s propensity for using bombastic literary expression.
In another example, this is what Lockwood says of Heathcliff:
“[he] is a dark-skinned gypsy in aspect, in dress and manners a gentleman.
That is as much a gentleman as many a country squire: rather slovenly,
perhaps, yet not looking amiss with his negligence, because he has an erect
and handsome figure; and rather morose” (3).
Evidently, this is not a simple straightforward sentence. There are quite a few
qualifications in it. Lockwood seems to be at a loss in describing Heathcliff. The word
‘aspect’ is contrary to the notion of ‘dress and manners’. Words like ‘rather’, ‘perhaps’
and ‘yet’ are followed by ‘because’ and ‘rather’ which create a peculiar situation.
Similarly, the longish phrase “yet not looking amiss with his negligence” is a queer
construction. All the words in this phrase ‘yet’, ‘not’, ‘looking amiss with’ and
‘negligence’ are negative words and stand in constant tension with the motive of the
speaker which is a positive one. Hence, the ambiguity and internal conflict create constant
tension not only in words and sentence structures but even in the whole narrative.
Lockwood’s syntactic construction thus shows that he uses elaborate and educated
sentence construction and writes euphemistically by using a lot of circumlocution.
The number of words in a sentence reveals the syntactic density of a writer’s style.
In order to find out the syntactic style of Emily Brontë, one hundred sentences on random
basis from chapters 1, 15 and 34 have been chosen. The findings have been illustrated with
the help of a graph:
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Syntactic Analysis of Wuthering Heights
Fig. 2
40
35
Frequency
30
25
20
15
10
5
0
Series1
One wo rd
Simple
Co mplex
Co mpo und
Co mpo undco mplex
0
21
15
28
36
Sentence %
The graph clearly illustrates Brontë’s preference for Compound-Complex
constructions.
A few more examples of the Compound-Complex sentences present in the novel
are cited:
“The Lord help us!' he soliloquised in an undertone of peevish displeasure,
while relieving me of my horse: looking, meantime, in my face so sourly
that I charitably conjectured he must have need of divine aid to digest his
dinner, and his pious ejaculation had no reference to my unexpected
advent” (1).
“I lingered round them, under that benign sky: watched the moths
fluttering among the heath and harebells, listened to the soft wind breathing
through the grass, and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet
slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth” (245).
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Her short sentences have an elastic vigour like Catherine asking Nelly, “do you
ever dream queer dreams” (57) or Lockwood exclaiming, “This is certainly a beautiful
country!” (1) or considering Heathcliff “A capital fellow!” (1).
Fragmentary and broken syntax are characteristic of Brontë’s dramatic speeches:
“Where is she? Not there – not in heaven – not perished – where? Oh! You
said you cared nothing for my sufferings! And I pray one prayer – I repeat
it till my tongue stiffens – Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest as long as
I am living! You said I killed you – haunt me, then! The murdered do
haunt their murderers. I believe – I know that ghosts have wandered on
earth. Be with me always – take any form – drive me mad! Only do not
leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! it is unutterable!
I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!” (122).
“I wish I could hold you…. Till we were both dead! --- Will you forget me-Will you be happy when I am in the earth?” (115).
On the whole, these are the most salient features of Emily Brontë’s syntax. Of
course, there might be several more structures, but since salience plays a dominant role in
stylistic analysis, only a few of the important ones have been mentioned here. Still, her
long sentence is definitely a statement of her overall thematic and structural
considerations. Evidently, her syntax is in keeping with her vision whereby she liberates
thoughts. At the same time she also captivates her readers with the swiftness and rhythm
of her prose style.
2.2.3. RHETORICAL ANALYSIS OF STYLE
Brontë’s art finds its best expression in her imagery. Kettle avers that she works not
in ideas but in images (1967:131). In fact, her novel contains a network of images. Images,
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according to Marsh, are comparisons between something the author describes and an idea
the author imagines for the sake of the comparison (1999:78).Through selective use of
striking visual images, Brontë creates a compelling illusion of an actual regional world.
Thus, the book gains its extraordinary power from her manipulation of images whose
unexpected appearance out of apparent context lends them a symbolic life.
On analyzing Brontë’s imagery, one finds that the figurative ideas or images add to
the literal meaning of the story. One of the most striking imagery in the text occurs at the
very beginning of the novel. It is through Lockwood one enters the fictional world of
Wuthering Heights as well as the verbal structure of the same name. This is what he says
about the landscape around the Heights:
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 (2).
Brontë in a very economical manner gives the reader a picture of the scant
vegetation around the Heights. Lockwood has just met Heathcliff, his landlord and Joseph,
the servant. Both are unwelcoming to his neighbourly overtures. He is taken aback by the
lack of warmth displayed by the taciturn Heathcliff and the surly Joseph. The House, like
its inmates, presents a total lack of warmth and welcome. The gate is barred and the doors
and windows shut. This lack is reinforced by the image of the stunted firs and gaunt
thorns. The story of Wuthering Heights reveals that the inmates of the house, especially
Heathcliff suffer from deprivation, which has led to a stunted emotional growth.
Heathcliff, as an orphan child, is picked from the streets of Liverpool and brought to the
Heights by Mr. Earnshaw, who adopts him. But he is unwelcome and it is only Catherine
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who befriends him. Lack of love and care makes them grow up as ‘unruly savages’. Both
are drawn to each other in their joint rebellion against Hindley, who after his father’s
death, degrades Heathcliff to the status of a common labourer, and does his best to break
the bond between them. Naturally, it is a traumatic experience for both, but especially for
Heathcliff who is totally shattered when Catherine agrees to marry Edgar.
For Heathcliff, Catherine like the sun was the only source of light and warmth in
his dark world. All emotions in him get twisted and his mind is filled with revenge against
Hindley and Edgar who has deprived him of Catherine’s love. Betrayed in love and in
friendship by Catherine, the one driving force in his life now, is thoughts of revenge,
which he carries out with a single-minded dedication. From a deprived child to a deprived
adult, Brontë compares Heathcliff to the stunned firs and gaunt thorns found at the
Heights. The image of gaunt thorns seeking alms from the sun, like a beggar seeking
charity, is reinforced when Hindley, who considers Heathcliff as a usurper to his father’s
affection, calls him a ‘beggarly interloper’.
The next step in the analysis is to relate the parts to the whole, that is, to find if this
image or similar images occur elsewhere in the text. By analyzing the imagery, one is able
to make connections between different parts of the text.
Following Hindley’s untimely death due to drinks, Heathcliff, now the master of
Wuthering Heights, becomes the guardian of Hindley’s motherless child, Hareton. He
says:
“Now, my bonny lad, you are mine! And we’ll see if one tree won’t grow
as crooked as another, with the same wind to twist it!”(136).
The image of the strong wind capable of twisting and making a tree grow stunted or
crooked is mentioned once again. Hareton in many ways is a prototype of Heathcliff. His
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mother dies in childbirth and Nelly, his nurse is forced to go to Thrushcross Grange with
Catherine. So, he has only Joseph for company. Hindley takes to drinking and gambling
after his wife’s death and so Hareton grows up as a deprived child without love or care,
totally neglected by his father, who in one of his drunken bouts even tries to drop the child
over the stairs. Heathcliff, now as his guardian, does his best to keep Hareton ignorant and
an illiterate by denying him education and by keeping him as a servant in his own house.
The word ‘beggar’ is also applied to Hareton, “if truth were known, Hareton would be
found little else than a beggar” (135).
The image of thorns appears yet again in another context. Nelly tells of the Lintons’
married life:
“It was not the thorn bending to the honeysuckles, but the honeysuckles
embracing the thorn” (66).
Catherine is compared to a thorn and the Lintons, Edgar and Isabella, to
honeysuckles. Both Catherine and Heathcliff as soul mates exhibit more or less the same
characteristics. Catherine even claims “I am Heathcliff!”(59) and that “he is more myself
than I am” (57).Catherine and Heathcliff are firm and unyielding in their resolve whereas
the Lintons, especially Edgar, who is shown to be mild and yielding. As a husband very
much in love with his wife, he is shown to be indulgent to his wife’s whims and fancies.
Another striking imagery occurs in the passage where Catherine compares her love
for the two men in her life, Edgar and Heathcliff:
“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” (59).
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Brontë makes use of some powerful nature imagery in this passage. ‘The foliage in
wood’ is the image Catherine uses to describe her love for Linton .A foliage is made up of
thousands of leaves, but it lasts only between spring and autumn and has a brief life.. It is
colourful, bright, and light in weight, and high up in the air, above the ground and beyond
reach. But in winter it falls and leaves the tree bare. Brontë through this powerful imagery
seems to imply that Catherine’s love for Edgar is superficial, as she is dazzled by the
Grange and all that it stands for, just like foliages (Catherine tells Nelly, that marriage
with Edgar will make her the most important person in the village). The attraction she
feels for Edgar exists, but she knows it cannot be compared with what she feels for
Heathcliff, whom she sees as her soul-mate (she confesses to Nelly that had not Hindley
brought Heathcliff so low, she would never have considered Edgar as a suitor, but
marrying Heathcliff now would degrade her).
Foliage is associated with summer, but ‘winter changes the tree’. It gives a bleak
picture of a bare tree in a colourless landscape. Catherine then compares her love for
Heathcliff: “they resemble the rocks beneath”. Rocks, as we know are often hidden from
view and found underground and therefore unseen. They are dark in colour, strong,
durable and “necessary” for they hold everything together in place, particularly the tree
which won’t be able to stand upright or grow without the security of the rock to hold it.
They are ‘eternal’ for they endure the passage of time. Catherine then compares the
feelings the different loves evoke in her. One produces ‘delight’ and the other is
‘necessary’. For Catherine seen in the image of a tree, both are necessary. Brontë gives us
glimpses of Catherine’s ‘divided’ self that wishes to hold both men in her life.
Elsewhere in the text this image is reproduced but in a different way. Catherine
warns Isabella against her infatuation for Heathcliff thus:
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“Heathcliff is …an arid wilderness of furze and whinstone. I’d as soon put
that canary into the park on a winter’s day as recommend you to bestow
your heart to him!”(74).
Heathcliff is once again associated with the earth, “furze and whinstone”, which
being arid, is colourless. Isabella is compared to a ‘canary’ which is a colourful but fragile
bird and the image of ‘winter’ is also repeated here. These two images have inter-related
connections with each other and are recurring ideas expressed throughout the novel.
In another passage one comes across Heathcliff making a distinction between his
and Catherine’s capacity for feelings when compared with Edgar’s:
“And Catherine has a heart as deep as I have; the sea could be as readily
contained in that horse-trough, as her whole affection be monopolized by
him” (108).
Heathcliff compares Catherine’s heart to the sea. For him it is ridiculous that Edgar,
whose heart and capacity for feeling is compared to a horse-trough (a limited container),
can ever aspire to win her affection.
In yet another instance, where Brontë makes use of nature imagery, the reader once
again experiences Heathcliff’s contempt for Edgar and his Christian virtues:
“And that insipid, paltry creature attending her from duty and humanity!
From pity and charity! He might as well as plant an oak in a flower-pot,
and expect it to thrive, as imagine he can restore her to vigour in the soil of
his shallow cares!” (112).
Once again the image of a limited container is used though in a different sense. In
both the statements, Edgar’s heart and his capacity for feelings are compared to limited
containers like a ‘horse-trough’ and a ‘flower-pot’, although Catherine is compared to a
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sea and an oak. In the first example one has seen how Catherine sees herself in the image
of a tree.
From the above analysis, it is clear that there is indeed an inter-connection between
the network of images used by Brontë and which appears throughout the text. In fact, such
images provide insight into the character’s relationship with each other.
Apart from the sustained imagery, the novel is also rich in other rhetorical devices
like ‘Tropes’ which are rhetorical devices most commonly associated with fine writing. In
Wuthering Heights, it is used as a structural device. Among rhetorical devices, Metaphor
is probably the trope of the highest figurative appeal, as the connection between the
described entity and the entity which is used to covey that description (i.e., the ground, the
tenor and the vehicle of the metaphor) is hidden from the reader’s eye.
Wuthering Heights is rooted in metaphorical analogies. Mark Schorer asserts that
metaphor colours her [Brontë’s] diction (Allott 151). Nature, animals, and the restless life
of elements –fire, wind, and water are the analogies Brontë uses to exalt the power of
human feelings. In the very first chapter, one is told that ‘Wuthering’ is, a significant
provincial adjective, descriptive of the atmospheric tumult to which its station is exposed
in stormy weather’, and of its impact as manifest in “the excessive slant of a few stunted
firs at the end of the house” and “by a range of gaunt thorns” (2). In the second half of the
novel this application of the landscape to character is made explicit, when Heathcliff says,
“now, my bonny lad, you are mine! And we’ll see if one tree won’t grow as crooked as
another, with the same wind to twist it!”(136).This analogy provides one of the
metaphorical bases of the novel. Literary metaphors are usually those used by Lockwood:
“A perfect misanthropist Heaven” (1); “The herd of possessed swine could have had no
worse spirits in them than those animals of yours” (4). Nelly, on the other hand, uses
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metaphors that are natural. This is what she says of Catherine, “It was not the thorn
bending to the honeysuckles, but the honeysuckles embracing the thorn” (66).
Human conditions and faces are likened to the landscape. So one comes across a
servant who ‘heaves’ like a sea after a high wind (4), Linton’s soul is as different from
Heathcliff’s as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire (57), Catherine’s ‘face was
just like the landscape – shadows and sunshine flitting over it in rapid succession,
Heathcliff’s eyes are the “clouded windows of hell’, and at the end, Hareton shakes off
‘the clouds of ignorance and degradation’, and his ‘brightening mind brightened his
features’.
Metaphors of earth are few when compared with other elements. Twice Heathcliff
is likened to ‘an arid wilderness of furze and whinstone’. Sometimes earth and vegetation
are placed in happy juxtaposition as when Heathcliff says of Linton that, “He might as
well plant an oak in a flower-pot”, or when he threatens to “crush his ribs in like a rotten
hazel-nut”. Heathcliff compares Hareton and Linton using striking metaphors: “one is gold
put to the use of paving stones; and the other is tin polished to ape a service of silver”
(159).
Brontë’s similes are quite ordinary when compared with her powerful metaphors.
To sum up, imagery adds to the total meaning of a text and a study of the imagery used by
Brontë enriches one’s understanding of the novel and of its total aesthetic effect.
2.2.4. EXTRA-LINGUISTIC LEVEL
Brontë makes liberal use of graphological marks, more so in the dramatic
utterance of her central characters. The linguistic narrative structure is marked by dash,
semi-colon, exclamatory marks, and the interrogative mark. The first graphalogical mark
in the text is a ‘dash’. The novel begins with a date followed by a dash. Sentences in the
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great speeches in the novel are linked by dashes, abdicating the nuanced grammar of
comma, colon, semi-colon, and full stop, in which literary language measures the length
and status of its pauses. For example:
“In every cloud, in every tree—filling the air at night, and caught by
glimpses in every object by day—I am surrounded with her image!”(235).
Wuthering Heights is rich in italicization, occurring in speeches of maximum
intensity (Davies 1998:96). Brontë uses italics for added emphasis, even when the
speeches are highly emotional, amounting almost to frenzy and which make the tone
obvious:
“Come in! Come in!...Cathy, do come .Oh do-once more! Oh! My heart’s
darling, hear me this time-Catherine, at last” (20).
“I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!”(122) is
Heathcliff’s anguished cry, following Catherine’s death.
Other punctuation marks add to the richness of her style:
“We came to the chapel. I have passed it really in my walks, twice or thrice;
it lies in a hollow, between two hills—an elevated hollow, near a swamp,
whose peaty moisture is said to answer all purposes of embalming on the
few corpses deposited there”(15-16 ).
The punctuation, the semi-colon and the dash in this passage present a kind of economy
and terseness to the narration that it is almost epigrammatic. “Wuthering Heights is the
name of Mr. Heathcliff’s dwelling”. Then comes the parenthesis - “Wuthering” being a
significant provincial adjective of the atmospheric tumult to which its station is exposed in
stormy weather”.
91
To sum up, language in Wuthering Heights is full of contradictions. Brontë’s
linguistic structure presents the same dichotomy as in the narrative structure. The
linguistic pattern is replete with verbs, modifiers and metaphors that are in constant
tension to produce a reality that is beyond ordinary human understanding, as in the case of
the two narrators- the effete Lockwood and the sensible and practical Nelly Dean. The
specific tensions and paradoxes built into linguistic patterns are noticeable in the wordstructure and sentence –structure, which lend complexity and richness to the text. Further,
even those passages of excessive emotion are controlled stylistically by breaks from past
to present tense, interjected remarks, by broken phrases, and half-expressed ideas which
reveal the psychological state of her characters. Apart from these her powerful imagery
also helps to make her work truly idiosyncratic. Besides, Brontë’s narrative style is
characterized by continual movement which establishes rhythms that are crucial to its
meanings and also mark major shifts in action. Finally, the sparse but vivid description
gives the text a highly emotive texture.