David Radcliff
English 395: Junior Honors English Seminar
April 13, 2004
Dr. Boone
Wrestling the Gypsy Devil: Heathcliff as “Other” in Wuthering Heights
Of the many characters who populate the world of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering
Heights, it is Heathcliff who most effectively casts a powerful, and often harrowing, spell
over most readers. A figure of fervently intense passion and drive, he is successful at
inducing varying degrees of both venom and pity, and as the narrative builds, so do his
consumptive desires for social recognition and authoritative identity. In this unique role
as both oppressed but forthright hero and oppressive but romantic villain, Heathcliff is
pressed to the boundary between not only proletariat and capitalist cultures, but also,
symbolically, that which exists between the human and the inhuman. His perpetual
displacement throughout the novel results in the creation of a limbo, an isolatory space of
“otherness”, into which Heathcliff finds himself brought at the beginning of the text and
locked until its conclusion. Driven by his frustrated love for Catherine, Heathcliff makes
an unsuccessful attempt to assimilate into the culture of wealth, respect and romantic
privilege that he sees as being socially encouraged – instead, he finds himself repeatedly
pushed back into this liminal sphere, reminded of his status as “other” and of his marginal
positions in the text.
Heathcliff’s character is rife with the mystery of this “otherness” as early as his
introduction to the world of the Heights. Metaphorically birthed into the novel by Mr.
Earnshaw (who hides the orphan boy within his cloak before presenting him to his new
home), he speaks a language no one can understand, is quickly deemed “hardened,
perhaps, to ill-treatment” by an ostensibly trustworthy narrator, and can provide little
clues as to his history or familial relations (Bronte 79). Most immediately evident,
however, is the degree to which Heathcliff’s outward appearance so dramatically
contrasts with that of the new “family” members with whom he has been placed: he is a
“dirty, ragged, black-haired child” where the Earnshaws are fair-skinned and apparently
well-groomed (Bronte 77). The Earnshaws’ collective response to these fundamentally
aesthetic differences is informed not merely by generic racism – although they are
shamelessly averse to having a dark “gipsy brat” in their house – but also (and perhaps
more potently) by an intense and collective feeling of terror, as Mrs. Earnshaw is “ready
to fling it out of doors” and Nelly herself admits in retrospect to having been frightened
of the boy (Bronte 77). Even Mr. Earnshaw, who is responsible for the adoption of
Heathcliff and treats him with no shortage of favoritism over his own children, adds fuel
to his family’s fears when he says of Heathcliff, “it’s as dark almost as if it came from the
devil” (Bronte 77). This suggestive observation about Heathcliff, coming as early as it
does in the narrative, sets up the two-pronged “otherness” with which Heathcliff must
continually wrestle. Having so quickly been labeled with the pejorative “it”, he can never
truly be a part of the social sphere which the Earnshaws occupy, in spite of his later
efforts to do so, and, yet, as a gift from (or perhaps embodiment of) the devil, his
passions hold the potential to be superhuman and monumentally destructive.
Whatever his nature or origins, Heathcliff’s effect as “other” on these two planes
is important because it makes him a dynamic and discomfiting figure within the walls of
the Heights, efficiently allowing him to disrupt an implied stagnancy and hierarchy.
Critic Walter L. Reed surmises that the nature of “Heathcliff’s mysterious origins…[is]
relatively unimportant to his status as hero. Past deeds of glory or of secret sin do not
interest us so much as the forceful and assertive presence” (Reed 111).
Indeed, Heathcliff’s presence wastes no time in situating itself as an assertive and
forceful one. Early in the novel, he blackmails Hindley into giving up his colt,
threatening to tell Mr. Earnshaw “of the three thrashings you’ve given me this week” if
the young man doesn’t turn the animal over to Heathcliff (Bronte 80). Already, Bronte
makes the reader keen to Heathcliff’s knack for discovering ways to use his “otherness”
to his advantage. Clearly aware that his position as oppressed outsider in the Heights
would win him Mr. Earnshaw’s sympathies in any dispute, Heathcliff demonstrates an
ability to use this oddly vaunted position to take exactly what he wants. Hindley,
however, proves himself no stranger to Heathcliff’s dramatic “otherness”, as he
challenges the manipulative boy to “show [Mr. Earnshaw] what you are, imp of Satan”
(Bronte 80). His statement, like Mr. Earnshaw’s before it, allows Bronte once again
mysteriously to conflate Heathcliff’s status as social pariah with that of something
metaphorically darker and perhaps more powerful.
This fusing of two types of “otherness” helps develop Heathcliff into what critic
Steven Vine labels an “agent of disruption” within the novel, a character whose function
is primarily to aggravate and energize the text as a catalyst for change in those around
him (Vine 341). Heathcliff’s first unexpected arrival at the Heights creates the
aforementioned emotional rift between Mr. Earnshaw and his son Hindley, his second
disrupts the marital union of Catherine and Edgar, and his later role as lord of the Heights
threatens (though never destroys) the affectionate bonding of Hareton and young Cathy.
Heathcliff, Vine argues, stirs the drama of the text without ever developing a firm identity
of his own: he “is an Earnshaw son and not an Earnshaw son, belongs to the Heights and
does not belong to the Heights, is the fulfillment of Earnshaw’s patriarchal desire and
exceeds that desire as an unincorporated other” (Vine 344). Though Vine’s claims here
are undeniably factual, they are nevertheless reductive, as they fail to address the manner
in which Heathcliff’s liminal “otherness” makes him not merely a perpetual social
outcast, but also an expansive and almost otherworldly presence in the text, one so
destructive and magnetic it threatens to consume the other characters. In a sense,
Heathcliff is not merely a hero or a villain, but “a Prime Mover, a principle of creation
and destruction in whose aura life is both conceived and terminated for the other
characters in the novel” (Goff 500). Rather than completely rob Heathcliff of his
identity, his position in the text serves to heighten and intensify his status as fulcrum of
the story to great effect, forever fixing him outside of a “normal” world into which he
cannot break.
Although similar readings of Heathcliff as a supernatural presence have been
supported by critics David Cecil and Dorothy Van Ghent, among others, these analyses
typically tend to overlook the human aspects of his character. Heathcliff’s love for
Catherine, as it is tinged so strongly with emotions of jealousy, grief, and pain, seems not
the stuff of “the raw, inhuman reality of anonymous natural energies” as Van Ghent
posits, but rather an easily recognizable issue of concern at the heart of a human being
(Van Ghent 157). It is through such reminders of this very human aspect of Heathcliff’s
sense of “otherness” that Bronte is able to make the reader relate sympathetically to the
character, even as several of Heathcliff’s acts (such as the imprisonment of Cathy Linton
so as to facilitate her marriage to his son) are viewed as morally deplorable. This
construction of the reader’s sympathy with the “othered” Heathcliff is crucial to the
novel’s ultimate effect – for Heathcliff’s death to carry weight, magnitude and tragedy, it
must be felt as a personal loss to us. Narrowly transcendental readings of Wuthering
Heights, such as those offered by Van Ghent and Cecil, fail to account for this
sympathetic connection because, as critic John Hagan argues, “we do not pity blind
natural or supernatural forces, but only their victims…As we watch the step-by-step
descent of [Heathcliff] into inferno and contemplate the whole ruinous process in
retrospect, our dominant impression is one of “tragic waste” (Hagan 70).
Whatever claims are made about Heathcliff’s alleged “supernatural” attributes,
our comprehension of their validity remains limited by the potentially biased lens of any
of the novel’s several narrators, each of whom “turns misunderstanding into a more
familiar kind of mystery, a romantic cliché: one that people can thrill to, which fortifies
them in their sense of being normal, and enables them to write Heathcliff off as demonic”
(Black 166). A truly thorough reading of Heathcliff’s character, then, is one which pays
due credence to his humanity while still maintaining an awareness that he is, in fact, a
larger-than-life character – one so large he finds a comfortable home in neither affluence
nor the middle-class, childhood nor adulthood, the natural or the supernatural.
In a preface to one edition of the novel, Bronte characterizes Heathcliff as “a
man’s shape animated by demon-life – a Ghoul – an Afreet”. Rather than read her
description as literal, I would assert it is intended as a metaphoric statement, wherein
Heathcliff’s dramatic feelings of distance and otherness are demonized and intensified to
convey symbolically the full and broad effects of his displacement (Kelly 24). Although
there are certainly numerous points in the novel at which Heathcliff is labeled a “ghoul”
or a “beast” or an “it”, the fact that he is “othered” by society is far less important than
exactly what sort of “other” he might be.
This distinction provides us with yet another reason why a strict interpretation of
the character as a wholly supernatural being comes up short – critics intent on reading
Heathcliff only as an inhuman figure or “gothic” monster lock themselves into the
problem of classifying which type of “ghoul” he represents. Such is the case in Giles
Mitchell’s fascinating but flawed analysis of Heathcliff, in which the author
unsuccessfully attempts to categorize Heathcliff by pinning multiple paranormal
attributes to the character. According to Mitchell’s reading, Heathcliff is lycanthropic
(due to “his desire to rend and tear people…with his teeth”), vampiric (as evidenced by
an interest in tearing Edgar’s heart out and drinking his blood), and possibly even Satan
himself (because “one of the prime motives of the Devil is his defiance of the Father
[Hindley]”), though little evidence is provided to support any or all of these claims
(Mitchell 31-32). Perhaps in realization of this problem, Mitchell later essentially scraps
these ideas and presents the possibility of “Heathcliff as a kind of earth force, perhaps
cultural force, trying to renew itself” (Mitchell 33).
The strategy of an argument like Mitchell’s is disjointed and inconclusive
because, while it is determined to prove that Heathcliff is in fact some kind of demon, it
fails to recognize that Bronte does not provide the reader with enough clues with which
to concretely discern its type. By treating Heathcliff’s amalgam of apparent supernatural
elements as symbolic of a more general societal “otherness”, however, we can draw
ourselves closer to the more human Heathcliff and, consequently, to a more relatable
interpretation of the text. When viewed through this lens, the fear that the Earnshaw
family initially exhibits toward Heathcliff can be more clearly construed as a common
fear of cultural difference, an anxiety which Bronte effectively underscores or
emphasizes by way of a suggested supernaturalism that permeates the text. When
Catherine greets Heathcliff into the Earnshaw family by spitting on him, the reader (and
Catherine herself) can be confident that she is spitting at a “starving and houseless”
cultural minority, not the actual embodiment of Satan, or some undefined creature of
myth (Bronte 78).
Our treatment of Heathcliff as a creature of undefined (though human) origins
also allows us to unearth the novel’s treatment of racism – a very identifiable form of
“othering” – particularly as it pertains to Heathcliff’s upbringing at the Heights. Not long
after beginning her extended narration to Lockwood, Nelly unabashedly informs him that
the Heights “we don’t in general take to foreigners here…unless they take to us first”
(Bronte 86). In this respect, and with few exceptions, Heathcliff is treated by residents of
the Heights as the ultimate unwanted foreigner: his first night in the house is spent
sleeping in the stairwell, and the later demands of his physical labors gradually
“extinguish any curiosity he once possessed in pursuit of knowledge” (Bronte 108). Like
an animal or slave, he is hereby broken into a state of submission by an oppressive
authority figure – one who is in this example embodied by the white Hindley.
But the epidemic racial “othering” in the novel is by no means limited to the
Heights. Heathcliff and Catherine’s clandestine visit to the Lintons at the Grange finds
Heathcliff accused of being “an out-and-outer! Very like, the robbers…[who] might
murder us at their ease” as soon as the Lintons catch sight of him (Bronte 90). Although
Catherine and Heathcliff commit the same crime by trespassing onto the Linton property,
she is invited in for an extended stay while he is threatened with a trip to the gallows. It
is not until he gentrifies himself later in the novel, in fact, that Heathcliff finds himself
able to cross into the interior of the Grange.
This ambiguous process of gentrification (which Heathcliff undergoes between
chapters nine and ten) is preceded by his outright disgust at the idea of abandoning his
“otherness”. Rather than betray his true nature, as he believes his kindred spirit Catherine
has done by way of her visit at the Lintons’, Heathcliff announces, “I shall be as dirty as I
please, and I like to be dirty, and I will be dirty!” (Bronte 95). Heathcliff’s nonconformist attitude in this situation can easily be read as a show of defiant pride for his
marginalized social and racial class, a proactive disruption of what W.E.B. DuBois deems
“this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of
others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt
and pity” (DuBois 3). Shattering DuBois’ double-consciousness, Heathcliff makes it
known to Catherine that her pity for his dirtiness is patronizing and unacceptable – “I
shall not stand to be laughed at, I shall not bear it!” – and her response illustrates that she
can no longer embrace his “otherness” in the way she once did: “If you wash your face
and brush your hair it will be all right” (Bronte 94). What is created in this exchange is
the unbridgeable and “othering” chasm of class distinction, one that Heathcliff initially
accepts because, in living at the Heights, his “othered” status has become deeply
ingrained as a pejorative element of his character.
At this stage in the novel, then, Heathcliff’s obstinate nature seems acceptably
righteous, likely winning him a significant degree of sympathy from the reader. In her
Black Looks: Race and Representation, cultural theorist bell hooks describes a
sociological phenomenon wherein “marginalized groups, deemed Other…can be seduced
by the emphasis on Otherness, by its commodification, because it offers the promise of
recognition and reconciliation” (hooks 26). As a weapon against the whitebread Linton
culture, then, Heathcliff’s “otherness” is presented to us as a justifiable and natural form
of defiance, even though a strict adherence to it would prevent any possibility of a
continuation of his former relationship with Catherine.
Just as the reader realizes this quandary, so, it seems, does Heathcliff. As DuBois
might describe it, Heathcliff is initially “shut out from [Catherine’s] world by a vast veil”,
with no apparent interest in attempting to tear it down (DuBois 2). It is only when he
later overhears Catherine tell Nelly “It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff, now” that
Heathcliff finds himself driven toward an attempt to finally abandon his “otherness” in
favor of molding himself into what Catherine seems to want: an upper-crust gentleman
(Bronte 121). Not coincidentally, Heathcliff’s monumental decision in favor of
gentrified conformity is punctuated by his symbolic ties to the supernatural – Nelly tells
us a storm rages outside as Heathcliff disappears into the night in search of his new
identity (Bronte 125).
Upon his return to the text, the new “gentlemanly” figure into which Heathcliff
has transformed himself is so different in outward appearance from his previous
incarnation that not even Nelly can immediately recognize him, and is at first “uncertain
whether to regard him as a worldly visitor” (Bronte 132). The particular staging of his
reintroduction into the narrative, however, suggests that, not only is he the same
Heathcliff, he has become even more ominous and insistent than in his youth. Standing
at the gates of the Grange, Heathcliff (lit by moonlight and dressed entirely in black) tells
Nelly, “I have waited here an hour…and the whole of that time all round has been still as
death” (Bronte 132). This moment, particularly if read in the spirit of a supernaturalist
interpretation like Giles Mitchell’s, carries with it a chilling quality of paranormal
“otherness”, certainly to a greater degree than any single moment in Heathcliff’s
childhood. Through the foreboding, Gothic flavor of this scene, Bronte once again
injects Heathcliff into the text as a catalyst for disruption – a dark “other”. His icy
demeanor, dark wardrobe and sallow cheeks help to usher Heathcliff back into the
narrative with the symbolic promise of dramatic conflict, as well as mystery and danger.
Although he is outwardly changed, we sense Heathcliff remains just as deviant as ever
from the “normal” society that is characterized by the Lintons, and may even have
sinister motives. As his ominous scene outside the gates of the Grange demonstrates,
Heathcliff’s eerie “otherness” cannot be cosmetically destroyed, if only because it “is an
abnormality that tends to lie below the level of social deportment”, as an inescapable part
of his identity (Ford 113).
Heathcliff’s visit to the Grange as an ostensibly upstanding gentleman also clearly
marks his attempt to reunite with Catherine, who is perhaps as inexorably and painfully
linked to Heathcliff’s identity as his sense of otherness. Although during his youth
Heathcliff vehemently swears, “I’d not exchange, for a thousand lives, my condition [at
the Heights], for Edgar Linton’s at Thrushcross Grange”, it is ultimately the potential for
a romance with Catherine that initiates his attempt to exchange his identity as “other” for
a more socially acceptable persona (Bronte 89). Spurred by a belief that Catherine’s
marriage is a fundamental betrayal of their childhood relationship, Heathcliff participates
in his own personal betrayal of character not because he “wants to get into the stream of
history and change, but [because] he must, because he has mortgaged part of his mythical
identity to history by loving Catherine” (Reed 114). Heathcliff’s cry of lament after
Catherine’s death, “I cannot live without my soul!”, illustrates the strength of these
characters’ emotional ties to one another, and introduces the potential for Heathcliff’s
pressing sense of “otherness” to become even more pronounced in her absence than ever
before” (Bronte 204).
Not surprisingly, Heathcliff’s visceral displays of agony following Catherine’s
death are otherworldly and masochistic in their intensity, and where Nelly brushes over
Edgar’s grieving as merely “a subject too painful to be dwelt on”, she allows us to bear
witness to every harrowing detail of Heathcliff’s distress (Bronte 201). Nelly reports that
upon hearing the news of Catherine’s death, Heathcliff “dashed his head against the
knotted trunk; and, lifting up his eyes, howled, not like a man, but like a savage beast
getting goaded to death with knives and spears” (Bronte 201). Triggered by Catherine’s
deterioration and death, the full of emergence of this new and truly savage Heathcliff
renders moot all hope of a return to even passing normalcy. At this stage in the novel, he
is clearly more dramatically “othered” than he has been at any point prior to his attempt
at upward social mobility.
Much of Heathcliff’s deterioration is, ironically, a product of his failed quest for a
secure identity. Having lost his sanity, his love, and any further motivation for social
advancement by the final third of the novel, Heathcliff finds himself situated on a course
of vengeful self-destruction, one by which he “accepts, and lives by, the values of the
people he formerly detested and finds that these values are as empty for him as they were
for the others” (Shapiro 154). Wuthering Heights closes shortly after Heathcliff’s
perpetual status as “other” finally burns him to the wick, Bronte having effectively
brought an end to Heathcliff’s frustrated sense of displacement in this world by
introducing him, via death, to perhaps a more befitting role in the next. Critic Daniel
Cottom offers that Heathcliff’s desires “can be consummated only in imagination or in
brute materiality – only in ghostly visitations or in the commingling of their remains”,
and for a character as dynamic, powerful and thoroughly complex as Heathcliff, his death
at the end of the novel seems appropriate, if not inevitable (Cottom 1082). Whatever his
nature as “other”, Heathcliff’s intense passions ceaselessly prove themselves too
extraordinary to be restrained by the world of the Heights, its social systems and its
corporeal surroundings.