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Wuthering Heights and the Politics of Space
Lorraine Sim
This article argues that representations of space in Wuthering Heights
provide a framework for Brontë’s interrogation of several aspects of Romantic
and Victorian ideology. I explore this thesis in relation to three spaces within
the novel: the domestic, the natural and the liminal. The first part of the
paper explores how Brontë critiques the Victorian ideal of domesticity by
presenting the home as an ideologically hybrid space that is repeatedly
disrupted by economic and political struggles emanating from the public
sphere. The second part of the paper considers how Brontë’s representations
of nature in Wuthering Heights engage with eighteenth-century aesthetic
theories of the sublime and the picturesque and provides a commentary on
their social and ethical implications. I argue that Brontë rejects aesthetic
theories that are grounded in universal models of subjectivity, such as those
purported by Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant, by exploring a range
of different subjective relations and responses to nature in the novel. The
final part of the paper argues that Brontë claims liminal spaces in the novel
as sites of transcendence thereby resisting traditional philosophical and
Christian dichotomies such as matter and spirit, self and other, immanence
and transcendence.
This paper explores the thesis that, in Wuthering Heights,
representations of space are integral to the expression of Emily
Brontë’s political critiques and ideological views. The novel
is concerned with literal spaces, such as the home and nature,
ideological spaces, such as the private and the public, and liminal
spaces, such as the transition from life to death. In the novel a
character’s experience is largely determined by their exclusion from,
inclusion or imprisonment within, different spaces or, conversely, the
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dissolution of boundaries. For example, the repression of desire due
to social constraints is symbolised in the novel through a character’s
confinement within or exclusion from a space due to locked doors
and windows, walls, impassable moors, and even the sick body.1
Brontë’s representations of space in Wuthering Heights
also provides a framework for her interrogation of several aspects
of Romantic and Victorian ideology. The present paper explores
this thesis in relation to Brontë’s representation of three spaces
in the novel; the domestic, the natural and the liminal. I suggest
that through representations of domestic space Brontë critiques
the Victorian ideal of domesticity which viewed the home as a
private, feminine sphere separate from the public, male domain. The
‘dwelling’ that is Wuthering Heights is, I suggest, a disrupted and
ideologically hybrid space due to the repeated eruption of economic
and political plots and ‘unreclaimed’ nature2, represented through
the character of Heathcliff, within the domestic sphere. The second
part of this essay explores Brontë’s engagement with eighteenthcentury aesthetic theories of the sublime and the picturesque in
nature. In contrast to aesthetic theories grounded in universal
models of subjectivity, such as those proposed by the British
politician and essayist, Edmund Burke, and the German philosopher
Immanuel Kant, Brontë suggests that the moors surrounding
Wuthering Heights elicit, not one, but several different feelings in
various characters. Brontë therefore interrogates aesthetic theories
grounded in universal models of subjectivity and general standards
of ‘taste’ by emphasising different subjective relations to nature,
and she reclaims the Yorkshire moors as potential sites of spiritual
renewal and salvation. The final part of this essay considers how
Brontë adopts liminal spaces in her novel as sites of transcendence. I
argue that Brontë’s vision of salvation borders, and therefore resists,
traditional philosophical dichotomies such as matter and spirit, self
and other, immanence and transcendence.
Domestic Spaces
Brontë’s representation of domestic space in Wuthering Heights
contests the Victorian ideal of the home as a female domain that
is harmonious, moral, fertile, safe and affectionate. Homes in
the novel are corrupted by economic, political and social affairs
that are traditionally linked to the male, public sphere and it is
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events emanating from the public sphere that determine domestic
structures and relations in the novel. As Diane Long Hoeveler has
suggested, Wuthering Heights’ ‘gothic feminism’ subverts patriarchal
family ideology and interrogates the nineteenth-century ideological
split between the public and private.3 Traditional gothic spaces and
motifs, such as violence, emotional excess and the return of the
repressed other, facilitate Brontë’s critique of Victorian domestic
ideology. The gothic form of the narrative, which is traditionally
associated with fantasy, frivolity and imaginative excess, masques
the realism and ideological critiques that inform the plot.
Lockwood’s opening description of the exterior of Wuthering
Heights in chapter one epitomises the gothic space. The house is
located on barren, inhospitable moors. The wind, which is a motif
for uncontrolled, natural energy throughout the novel, has shaped
the ‘slanted’, ‘stunted firs’ and accounts for the ‘narrow windows’
of the Heights, each ‘deeply set’ in the walls as in a medieval,
gothic castle (1: 26). The narrow windows suggest the Heights’
concealment from the outside world and its prison-like nature for
many of those contained within it at various stages in the narrative.
The opening chapters of the novel describe a series of intrusions and
attempts to cross thresholds by Lockwood, the ghost of Catherine
Earnshaw4 and, later, Heathcliff. Lockwood has difficulty getting into
Wuthering Heights on the three occasions he visits due to locked
doors, impassable moors and unhelpful servants (chs. 1, 2, 32). He
has equal difficulty in his attempt to leave the Heights in chapter
three following his visitation from the ghost-child, Catherine.
Wuthering Heights resists foreign intrusion but is also unwilling
to release its occupants. Thus, the Heights is not a domestic space
marked by invitation, safety or sanctuary. The ‘grotesque carvings’
which mark the ‘threshold’ of Heathcliff’s ‘dwelling’, presents the
Heights as a liminal gothic space that alters those who cross its
threshold. Upon entering the Heights characters are infected with
an endemic form of emotional excess and violence that is linked
to ideas of nature and the primitive. As a domestic ‘wilderness’,
survival within requires a regression into a state of aggressive selfpreservation (10: 101).5
The interior of Wuthering Heights also fails to conform to
codes of the domestic. Definitions of ‘domestic’ refer to the home,
household, family, intimacy; of animals, tame and not wild; of
nations, the indigenous and home-grown. Until the end of the
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novel, Wuthering Heights is the antithesis of such definitions. It is
not intimate, homely or occupied by blood-relatives, most of the
human and non-human animals within are not tame but aggressive
and threatening, and the space is not strictly indigenous due to the
ethnically ambivalent figure of Heathcliff. The interior of the house
lacks all the trappings of the idealised Victorian home. It is spartan,
masculine, utilitarian and old-fashioned (1: 26). On his second visit,
Lockwood is surprised to find the ‘missis’ ‘an individual whose
existence he had never previously suspected’ (2: 30). While under
Heathcliff’s rule the Heights is a classless space which lacks defined
quarters, or clearly delineated social and familial members or roles
rendering Lockwood almost incapable of action in the first two
chapters. Like Isabella in chapter twelve, Lockwood does not know
what to do, whom to speak to or where to sit, as conventional codes
of behaviour are rendered meaningless in this ill-defined space. He
feels himself ‘outside of the family circle’ a reference rendered ironic
as the said family ‘circle’ comprised of Heathcliff, Catherine Linton
and Hareton are not blood-relations (2: 33). On the contrary, Hareton
and Catherine Linton are connected to Heathcliff by oppressive legal
relationships and dependencies which reflect Brontë’s thorough
knowledge of late eighteenth-century family law.6 The three do
not form a harmonious family unit. The family space is one from
which Lockwood feels excluded, but it is also one in which several
members, such as Catherine Linton and Linton Heathcliff, are
unwillingly trapped and imprisoned by Heathcliff whose tyranny
is legally permissible.
The Victorian ideal of femininity captured in Coventry Patmore’s
ideal of the self-sacrificing and passive ‘angel of the house’ is also
absent in Wuthering Heights. In chapter two, Lockwood refers to
Catherine Linton with her ‘flaxen ringlets’ and ‘exquisite little
face’ as Heathcliff’s ‘amiable lady’ and the ‘presiding genius over
[his] home and hearth’ (2: 32-33). Heathcliff renders Lockwood’s
description ironic by the fact that his ‘lady’, Catherine Linton’s
mother, is neither amiable nor a ‘ministering angel’. In life she was
an intractable and selfish person whilst after her death Catherine is a
fallen, exiled being who does not minister over but haunts Heathcliff.
Similarly, her daughter Catherine Linton refuses to conform to
Victorian ideals of femininity threatening the servant Joseph that
she is no ‘angel’ but conversant in the ‘Black Art’ of witchcraft (2:
34). Like Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights is plagued by the absent
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mother, and explores the moral and social implications of the absent
mother as a regulating principle within the domestic sphere. In
both novels, motherhood and maternity are fraught with danger
as childbirth results in the deaths of Hindley’s wife, Frances, and
Catherine Earnshaw (chs. 8 & 16). Wuthering Heights is a domestic
space dominated by patriarchal values and power rather than a
female domain centred on acts of maternity and the development
of the physical, moral and spiritual life. During the reign of Hindley
Earnshaw and following him, Heathcliff, the Heights exists in a state
of social anarchy as these two figures strive for legal possession and
social dominance over the domestic sphere.
Wuthering Heights investigates the politics of slavery through
forms of the gothic return. In eighteenth and nineteenth-century
gothic literature, gothic returns signal the, often violent, eruption
and return of repressed desires. In Wuthering Heights such returns
are presented as the infiltration and disruption of culturally
circumscribed spaces. Anxieties about the repressed other are
explored through the character of Heathcliff, who, as the culturally
ambivalent figure in the text, repeatedly enters into and subsequently
destroys British sites of domestic affluence and social harmony. The
relationship between Hindley Earnshaw and Heathcliff has been
interpreted in the context of social debates about slavery occurring in
the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-centuries. As Maja-Lisa Von
Sneidern has discussed, Brontë would have been familiar with the
social, political and humanitarian issues arising through the British
slave trade from exposure to current events through the Liverpool
newspapers, which were read to the Brontë children by their father
and the oldest child, Maria.7
Heathcliff is a cultural text that cannot be deciphered in the
context of existing imperialist cultural categories. The fear he elicits is
initially due to his lack of history. As the ‘dirty, ragged, black-haired
child’ or ‘it’ who spoke a ‘gibberish’ that no-one could understand,
he exists outside of culture until, as in Blake’s poem ‘Infant Joy’, he
is afforded a name (4: 51). In chapter four the servant Nelly recalls
to Lockwood how the child Heathcliff was found by Old Earnshaw
in Liverpool, the third largest port for slave trading in Britain in the
middle of the eighteenth-century, the time in which the narrative is
set.8 Having ‘picked it up and inquired for its owner’ Old Earnshaw
pities the child’s dispossessed state and decides to ‘take it home
with him’ determining that he would not ‘leave it as he found it’ (4:
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51). Heathcliff’s ethnic origins are ambivalent. He is referred to as
‘a little Lascar or an American or Spanish castaway’ by Earnshaw
in chapter four, and Nelly later encourages him to imagine his
father may have been the ‘Emperor of China’ his mother ‘an Indian
queen’ (ch 7). Nelly refers to him as a ‘gypsy’ and cannot ‘image
some fit parentage’ for the ‘dark little thing’, suggesting that his
bloodline is unambiguously tainted by colour.9 These descriptions
align Heathcliff with a range of dispossessed people of the period
including Jamaicans, Africans, the Irish and Indians.
Heathcliff is also located within the discourses of commodity and
exchange. Initially he is constructed as an object without an owner,
and he later functions as a replacement gift for the ideologically
loaded gifts of a whip, for Catherine, and a fiddle, for Hindley,
which Old Earnshaw looses and breaks during his journey home
from Liverpool. As an adult, Heathcliff views other people, including
Hareton, Catherine Linton and Linton Heathcliff, as ‘gifts’ or pawns
that assume strategic legal and economic value in his revenge plot.10
In Frankenstein, Elizabeth is similarly coded as a ‘gift’ to the family,
but her introduction into the family circle is, by contrast, idyllic as
a consequence of her known origins and Caucasian appearance.11
As the imperialist gifts of the whip and fiddle are lost and broken
in Earnshaw’s journey home with the orphan Heathcliff, the
destruction of these tokens of slavery prophecies the threat of revolt
that this oppressed other will subsequently pose to the Earnshaw
and Linton families. Von Sneidern has argued that Heathcliff’s
rebellion is symbolic of the potential rebellion of the dispossessed
or exploited against the Empire, an anxiety high in British cultural
consciousness in the nineteenth-century following the French
Revolution of 1789. Heathcliff’s usurpation of Wuthering Heights
and Thrushcross Grange can be interpreted as a kind of inverted
colonisation, as the dispossessed subject reclaims the rights and
property monopolised by the landed gentry.12 Wuthering Heights
exploits conflicts between domestic, cultured spaces and natural,
uncivilised spaces, represented through the character of Heathcliff,
in order to interrogate larger patterns of cultural imperialism and
social inequality occurring in late eighteenth and early nineteenthcentury Britain. However, as ‘unreclaimed’ nature threatens to erupt
within the cultural sphere, human nature in the novel similarly
disrupts distinctions between human and non-human nature.
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Natural Spaces
Wuthering Heights evokes a strong sense of the presence of nature,
but as Margaret Homans notes in chapter three of her book Bearing
the Word, very little of the action in the novel occurs out of doors,
and there are very few literal descriptions of nature.13 Rather, they
are symbolic. Brontë uses natural metaphors to describe people’s
appearances, states of mind and feeling, relationships and social
conditions in the novel.14 The strong presence of nature in the novel
is, I argue, a consequence of her refusal to clearly demarcate nonhuman nature from human being and experience. This relates to the
novel’s resistance to the Cartesian view of the mind’s opposition
to and alienation from nature, an opposition contested by other
Romantic writers such as Wordsworth and Coleridge. Through the
characters of Heathcliff and Catherine, the boundaries between
human and non-human nature are presented as permeable in
the novel. As nature affects human experience or functions as a
metaphor for human character in the novel, similarly human beings
and emotions are frequently portrayed as being part of nature. This
process can be illuminated through an analysis of Brontë’s version
of the sublime in Wuthering Heights.
The storms that descend upon the Heights in chapters nine
and seventeen of the novel evoke intense human responses in the
tradition of eighteenth-century theories of the sublime. Edmund
Burke’s aesthetic treatise A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins
of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, first published in 1757,
bore great influence on British and European aesthetic speculation
and provides a useful context for discussing Brontë’s sublime in
Wuthering Heights. In his treatise, Burke describes sublime objects
as those that are capable of eliciting feelings of terror:
Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite ideas of pain, and
danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible,
or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a
manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime;
that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which
the mind is capable of feeling.15
For Burke, the sublime feeling is a combination of pleasurable
and painful feelings. His associative model posits sublime objects
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as those that are terrible, are associated with something terrible or
act upon us like the terrible.16 Burke argued that sublime objects in
nature are those that intimate nature’s power and magnitude, whilst
art can evoke sublime feelings through imaginative renderings
of such landscapes. In order for an object to be sublime and not
simply terrifying, it must be sufficiently distant to intimate danger
but not actually threaten. With this distance, the sublime object
creates a ‘tranquillity that is tinged with terror’, and elicits feelings
of ‘delightful horror’.17 In Wuthering Heights, sublime objects elicit
a similar admixture of delight and terror, desire and resistance.
However, Brontë’s sublime is radically different in that the sublime
object finds its origin not only in non-human nature, but nature
when infused with human presences.
As forces of ‘unreclaimed’ nature, the emotional excesses of
Catherine, Heathcliff and Hindley are the cause of sublime fears
in other characters in the novel including Nelly, Lockwood and
Hareton.18 In chapter nine Catherine tells a reluctant Nelly of her
dream intimating her sense of ontological identity with Heathcliff,
a belief which throws doubts upon her decision to marry Edgar
Linton. Nelly expresses a fear of Catherine’s dreams. The unusual
‘gloom in [her] aspect made [Nelly] dread something from which
[she] might shape a prophecy, and forsee a fearful catastrophe’ (9:
83). Overhearing Catherine’s confession to Nelly that marrying
Heathcliff would ‘degrade’ her, he flees the Heights and a mighty
mid-summer storm ensues (9: 84). The storm symbolises Heathcliff’s
rage in a manner similar to the way in which the storm described in
chapter seventeen symbolises his grief upon Catherine’s death. The
storm in chapter nine elicits sublime terror in both Nelly and Joseph,
who fear it may be a form of divine ‘judgement’; ‘We thought a bolt
had fallen in the middle of us, and Joseph swung onto his knees,
beseeching the Lord to remember the patriarchs Noah and Lot; and,
as in former times, spare the righteous...I felt some sentiment that
it must be a judgement on us also’ (9: 88).19 In contrast to Nelly and
Joseph who cower indoors, Catherine insists on staying outside
in the storm. She becomes consumed - literally drenched - in the
symbolic manifestation of Heathcliff’s anger and pain. Heathcliff’s
suffering is transferred onto Catherine’s body through the storm
and is subsequently manifested as a prolonged period of fever and
delirium that she in turn ‘weathered through’. This is one of several
instances in the novel in which Heathcliff’s departure results in
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the periodic departure of Catherine’s ‘senses’ (9: 90).20 Thus, in the
novel sublime feelings are inspired by human emotions manifested
in non-human nature.
In his Critique of Judgement, Kant outlines two versions of the
sublime being the mathematical and the dynamical. The dynamical
sublime occurs in those objects in nature that evoke a sense of nature’s
might, such as the storm discussed above. The mathematical sublime
refers to those objects of enormous visual magnitude, such as the
pyramids when viewed at close proximity, which resist cognitive
representation.21 Following her death Catherine becomes a sublime
object for Heathcliff in the second, mathematical sense. Heathcliff
sees her image permeating the landscape surrounding the Heights
and within the house and she becomes an omnipresent presence.
For him, her spectral image is a source of Burke’s ‘delightful horror’
producing an admixture of pain and delight; ‘I cannot look down to
this floor, but her features are shaped in the flags! In every cloud, in
every tree – filling the air at night ... I am surrounded by her image!
The entire world is a dreadful collection of memoranda that she did
exist, and that I have lost her!’ (ch 33: 266).22 The ghostly Catherine
is not only a source of sublime feeling but, according to Nelly’s
description, is herself transfixed in a sublime state, caught midway
between pleasure and pain.23 In the final chapter, as Nelly observes
Heathcliff’s reaction to the ghost he perceives, she comments that
‘it communicated, apparently, both pleasure and pain, in exquisite
extremes, at least, the anguished, yet raptured expression on his
countenance suggested that idea’ (36: 271). The relationship between
Catherine and Heathcliff is therefore described in the novel as,
like Burke’s sublime, an admixture of terror and delight, pain and
pleasure, feelings inspired by a sense of each other’s omnipresence
and power; ‘Nelly, I am Heathcliff – he’s always, always in my mind
– not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself
– but, as my own being’ (9: 85).
However, Brontë’s version of the sublime in Wuthering Heights
differs from eighteenth-century accounts such as those proposed by
Burke, Kant and Addison, which were limited to sublime objects in
art and nature.24 Both Burke and Kant argue that the sublime has its
ground in human being. For Burke certain physiological reactions in
the nervous system account for the sublime feeling.25 For Kant, the
sublime is the result of a psychological conflict in which the mind is
incapable of representing an object of excessive magnitude. For both,
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the sublime has its ground in human being, although it is a response
to an object in the external world. Brontë takes this idea of human
beings as the ground of the sublime much further. Human emotion
and the human subject are portrayed as the origin of sublime scenes
in nature and sublime feelings in other characters throughout the
novel. Catherine and Heathcliff form an integral part of the natural
or cosmic economy, in a sense they are nature. Judith Pike has argued
that Mary Shelley offers a new version of the sublime through the
monster’s sublime body.26 In Wuthering Heights human emotion, the
literal body, in the form of Heathcliff, and spectral human body, in
the form of Catherine’s ghost, are sublime objects.
The second major difference between representations of nature
in Wuthering Heights and eighteenth-century aesthetic theories
of nature, relates to issues of ‘taste’ and the nature of aesthetic
judgments. Aesthetic theories of the late eighteenth-century, such as
those of Burke and Kant, bore a strong influence on British aesthetics.
The philosophical preoccupation regarding the relationship between
the mind and nature is reflected in much Romantic literature. Both
Kant and Burke’s aesthetic theories were grounded in universal
ideas of the subject. For example, Burke sought to determine the
laws by which certain properties in things affect the body and
our passions in certain ways. His Enquiry seeks to elucidate the
emotions of the sublime and beautiful, the properties in things that
causes those two passions, and the laws pertaining between those
causes and passions.27 In the Critique of Judgement Kant explores
what the function of judgment is and whether or not it operates in
terms of any a priori principles, that is, principles of cognition that
exist prior to any experience. He argues that the judgment works in
accordance with certain regulative principles and the a priori concept
of nature’s purposiveness, which enables us to think of the world
as a harmonious, purposive unity that is well-suited to our minds.
The pleasure we associate with aesthetic judgments is, for Kant,
a consequence of the harmony or purposiveness such judgments
enable us to read into nature even though those judgments can tell
us nothing about the world as it is in itself apart from our perceptions
of it. The details of Burke’s and Kant’s arguments need not concern
us here, it is sufficient to note that both propose aesthetic theories
that are grounded in a universal theory of subjectivity. In addition,
both Burke and Kant argued that ‘taste’ was not merely a subjective
category but that common standards of taste existed due to certain
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common faculties and regular operations of the mind.28 Aesthetic
experience was theoretically linked to the development of the moral
life for Burke, Kant and Romantics including Coleridge, Shelley and
Wordsworth.29 Romantics understood the beautiful to be morally
uplifting whereas the sublime intimated the transcendent.
Wuthering Heights, I argue, resists universal theories of taste
and seeks to problematise the distinctions between the sublime,
beautiful and picturesque that were central to eighteenth-century
aesthetic discourse. In the context of prevailing aesthetic theories
in Britain, Brontë’s adored moors in Southern England fell outside
of the categories of the picturesque, sublime and beautiful. They
were deemed to be a barren, ugly and inhospitable landscape that
was therefore incapable of evoking valuable moral feelings. The
eighteenth-century landscape writer T. D. Whitaker described the
Brontë’s residence at Haworth Parsonage in Yorkshire as ‘almost
at the extremity of population, high, bleak, dirty and difficult to
access’.30 The southern moors were not, on his view, aesthetically
pleasing or morally significant. I would suggest that Brontë seeks
to overturn the general, and in some cases, universalist frameworks
integral to eighteenth-century aesthetic theory and interrogate the
consequences of positing general standards of taste. She does this, I
argue, by considering diverse responses to the same space of nature
in the novel so as to reveal the ways in which that one space can
assume different aesthetic, moral and existential significance for
different subjects.
For Lockwood, the urban visitor to the Heights, the moors elicit
feelings of gloom and pose a real existential threat. As such, the
moors are not a source of sublime but real terror. At the beginning
of chapter ten, locked indoors and convalescent, he exclaims; ‘Oh,
these bleak winds, and bitter, northern skies, and impassable roads’
(10: 91), a description reminiscent of Whitaker’s above. As a city
dweller, Lockwood cannot decipher the landscape that renders
him incapable of navigating that space. After his night of traumatic
haunting by the ghost-child Catherine in chapter three, he requires
Heathcliff to guide him part of the way back to the Grange across
the snow-covered moors. He gets considerably lost making his way
alone from the park gates to the Grange, a distance of two miles that
takes him four hours to traverse:
the whole hill-back was one billowy, white ocean; the
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swells and falls not indicating corresponding rises
and depressions in the ground – many pits, at least,
were filled to a level; and entire ranges of mounds, the
refuse of the quarries, blotted from the chart which my
yesterday’s walk left pictured in my mind’. [3: 47]
For Lockwood, nature is not just an unreadable text but also one
that resists his efforts at representation. Its surface does not indicate
the ‘corresponding’ meanings, as points of safety or danger, beneath
it. The apparently homogenous appearance of the snow-covered
moors also fails to correspond with the visual image ‘pictured’
in his mind from the day previous. Like Locke’s metaphor for
the mind prior to experience, upon the white moors Lockwood’s
mind becomes akin to a sheet of white paper, an empty canvas
absent of the experience necessary for rational action. William
Gilpin, one of the foremost writers on the picturesque, argued
that the picturesque in nature is a scene which is suited to pictoral
representation.31 For Lockwood the moors fall completely outside
of Gilpin’s definition.32
Nelly is the only character in the novel who describes nature
literally. As she narrates the history of the people of Wuthering
Heights, mapping out the complex lineage between the two families,
Nelly also functions as a veritable tour guide for the area itself. As
Christopher Heywood has discussed, her descriptions of landscape
are closely aligned with the picturesque.33 In chapters ten, eleven,
fifteen and eighteen, Nelly provides descriptions of the landscape
that seek to orientate the reader, as did the various walking tour
guides that proliferated in the late eighteenth and early nineteenthcenturies. For example in chapter ten, following the gothic return
of Heathcliff after a three year absence, Nelly goes up to find Edgar
and Catherine and describes them as follows:
They sat together in a window whose lattice lay back
against the wall, and displayed beyond the garden’s
trees, and the wild green park, the valley of Gimmerton,
with a long line of mist winding nearly to its top (for
very soon after you pass the chapel, as you may have
noticed, the sough that runs from the marshes joins a beck
which follows the bend of the glen). Wuthering Heights
rose above this silvery vapour; but our old house was
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invisible-it rather dips down on the other side. [10: 94]
In the above quotation Nelly paints a topographical picture in the
tradition of the picturesque focusing on aesthetic detail, perspective,
proportion and orientation. Another example can be found in chapter
eleven when she describes the ‘guide-post’ on her way to Gimmerton
that orientates the visitor towards the Grange, the Heights and
the village.34 Heywood argues that Brontë overturned dominant
picturesque theories such as that developed by William Gilpin.
The picturesque was an aesthetic movement connected to the new
cultural practice of nature tours. William Gilpin wrote numerous
essays on picturesque landscape based on his tours to various parts
of England and his ideas exerted great influence on British taste in
natural and artificial scenery.35 The picturesque was associated with
roughness, ruggedness, complexity and intricacy, as opposed to the
beautiful which was, for Gilpin, associated with the smooth and
uniform. Picturesque theory had a strong influence on Romantic
writers such as the early Coleridge and Dorothy Wordsworth,
who, in their notebooks and diaries respectively, sought to describe
natural scenes in intricate detail in a bid to uncover the harmony
intrinsic to the creations of nature. Gilpin argued that the southern
moorlands were non-picturesque whereas the light-drenched
limestone crags and Lake landscapes were picturesque. By contrast,
in Wuthering Heights the limestone caves at Penistone Crag are
frequently obscured by mist or diaphanous light whereas the moors
are a source of life and regeneration. According to Heywood, Brontë
reverses the moral values of Gilpin’s double landscape model.36 The
importance of such reversals is that Brontë suggests that landscapes
represent different things to different people, depending upon
personal experience and what that landscape means, emotionally,
historically, and economically to the viewer. She also highlights the
danger of attempting to construct universal or general aesthetic
categories to nature that imply moral values. A society’s aesthetic
ideologies influence the reception and progress of economic projects
and industrial developments in different landscapes, subject to their
culturally ascribed aesthetic and moral value. As Heywood notes,
in the nineteenth-century the southern moorlands were becoming
increasingly heavily populated as manufacturing increased in these
areas. Such industrial developments disfigured these landscapes and
displaced or disrupted existing rural communities.37
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In contrast to Lockwood who views the moors as barren and a
threat to his livelihood, for Catherine the moors are a source of life.
They signify a life-giving space in contrast to the enclosed, cultivated
parks of Thrushcross Grange. As children, the moors facilitate her
and Heathcliff’s politics of resistance against cultural conventions,
particularly punishment which when in the moors became a ‘mere
thing to laugh at’ (6: 58). For these children, the moors, not the home,
represents a place of safety and sustenance. In maturity Catherine
continues to view the moors as a life-source, a ‘world’ from which
she feels when at the Grange ‘an exile, – and outcast’ (12: 118). In
the midst of her fever in chapter twelve, Catherine understands her
recovery to be contingent upon her physical return to the moors and
her room at the Heights:
Oh, I’m burning! I wish I were out of doors – I wish I
were a girl again, half savage and hardy and free ... I’m
sure I should be myself were I once among the heather
on those hills ... Open the window again wide, fasten
it open! Quick, why don’t you move? [12: 118]
Catherine believes her existence to depend upon her physically
being at the Heights; ‘I’m sure I should be myself were I once
among the heather on those hills’, a further example of the way
in which Brontë confuses ontological boundaries between human
and non-human nature, self and external world. By contrast,
the wind and landscape upon which she feels she existentially
depends in order to be ‘herself’ is viewed by Nelly, like Lockwood,
to be life-threatening. When Nelly refuses to open the window
claiming the wind will give Catherine ‘[her] death of cold’, she
retorts, ‘You won’t give me a chance of life, you mean’ (12: 118).
Thus, in Wuthering Heights the moors are presented as a text that
literally ‘means’ different things to different people, or in the case
of Lockwood, is largely indecipherable. As symbolic embodiments
of nature, Heathcliff and Catherine function as the voices of nature,
articulating its primary importance to their personal survival whilst
contesting the devaluation of such landscapes in popular aesthetic
discourse. Ironically, the moors are not only integral to Catherine
and Heathcliff’s survival during life, but also, in their after-life.
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Liminal Spaces
Liminal refers to initial stages, boundaries or thresholds. Throughout
much of the novel, the resolution of desire is intimately connected
to the crossing of thresholds. This includes literal thresholds, such
as Lockwood’s desire to get into the Heights via the door in chapter
two, and the ghost-child Catherine’s desire for the same through the
bedroom window in chapter three, and the crossing of ontological
thresholds, such as Heathcliff’s desire to leave his living ‘hell’ and
be united with the spirit of Catherine. The primary desire explored
in the novel through the characters of Catherine and Heathcliff, is
the desire for transcendence. In the novel transcendence adopts a
liminal space mid-way between traditional dichotomies of life and
death, the material and spiritual, and the immanent and divine.
Catherine’s passage towards death following her fever in chapter
fifteen and Heathcliff’s ‘transformation’ at the end of the novel,
charts their respective experiences in a liminal space between life
and death. In chapter fifteen Nelly describes how Catherine has
been ‘altered’ by her illness and that the change in her appearance
is one of ‘unearthly beauty’, signalling her movement away from the
material realm. Likewise, her ‘gaze’ went ‘far beyond’ ‘the objects
around her’ and seemed to look ‘out of this world’ suggesting her
progressive estrangement from the material world (15: 141). She
expresses a Manichean sense of entrapment within her body and
a desire to escape its earthly limits; ‘the thing that irks me most is
this shattered prison...I’m tired, tired of being enclosed here. I’m
wearying to escape into that glorious world, and to be always there’
(15: 144). Requiring an ‘interpreter’ to decipher the letter from
Heathcliff, Catherine no longer functions within the symbolic realm
of language, and fails to respond to efforts to entertain her with
books or dialogue (15: 143). However, Nelly suggests that heaven
would be a place of ‘exile’ for Catherine, unless she shed both her
mortal body and ‘character’, a view of heaven Catherine expresses
in chapter nine, when retelling her dream to Nelly; ‘heaven did not
seem to be my home; I broke my heart with weeping to come back
to earth; and the angels were so angry that they flung me out, into
the middle of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights’ (9: 84). The
Christian heaven is not the ‘glorious world’ she desires. Despite a
desire to escape her body and the material objects surrounding her,
Catherine’s heaven nevertheless exists with Heathcliff and within
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nature. Aware that she will not be ‘at peace’ following her physical
death, Catherine anticipates her liminal state upon the moors to be
one of torment, until she is properly reunited with her other ‘self’,
Heathcliff. In death, Catherine’s ghost also adopts a liminal position,
in the sense that it is a disembodied spirit which possesses enough
materiality to bleed over the broken windowpane (ch. 3).
As Catherine anticipates heaven to be a place of exile for her,
Heathcliff deems life will be akin to ‘hell’ without Catherine (15:
143), and in the final stages of the novel, the ‘transformation’ of
Heathcliff maps that of Catherine earlier in the novel. He too has
an ‘unnatural’ and ghoulish ‘appearance’ as he proceeds from ‘the
threshold of hell’ towards his ‘heaven’ (34: 269). Like Catherine, his
‘gaze’ rests on things beyond the material objects before him, and
follows the ‘unearthly vision’ of Catherine around the rooms and
garden surrounding the Heights (34: 271). Situated at ‘arms-length’
from the ‘shore’ he desires, Heathcliff anticipates his movement from
life to an after-life with Catherine on the moors.
The form of salvation that Brontë explores through the union of
Catherine and Heathcliff further suggests the importance of liminal
spaces and ontologies. Upon the moors, Catherine and Heathcliff
transcend the limits of their separate physical bodies yet reaffirm the
ultimate value of human, not metaphysical or divine, love. Similarly,
their transcendence and salvation can only exist within nature,
essentially through a reliving of the freedom they experienced as
children upon the moors. Salvation is, rather curiously, the freedom
to walk with the person one loves in the places one loves, simple
pleasures denied earlier in the narrative due to social prejudices
which obstructed their earthly union (34: 275). Like Romantic writers
such as Blake, Brontë constructs alternative mythologies to those
offered in orthodox Christian discourse, and views nature as the
locus of the divine. Rejecting the Christian version of heaven and
transcendence, Brontë posits a secular idea of salvation that adopts
liminal spaces between the material and the spiritual, the immanent
and the divine, and situates human, not Godly, love as the most
powerful and divine force.
Brontë’s preoccupation with space is integrally linked to her
preoccupation with human freedom in both the political and
metaphysical sense. Wuthering Heights explores the ways in which
ideologies - social, cultural, religious and aesthetic – can function
to compromise the subject’s freedom. Like the narrator of Brontë’s
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poem, 'The Caged Bird', Wuthering Heights traces the forces that keep
its characters locked in various forms of “cold captivity”. The novel,
like the poem, explores the possibility of overcoming intellectual,
physical or spiritual captivity through inhabiting existing ideological
and literal spaces in alternative ways.38
Notes
1
Instances of entrapment or exclusion can be found throughout the novel. For
example, in chapter one Lockwood is kept out of Wuthering Heights by the landscape
and locked doors; Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff are excluded from certain
places and activities for misbehaviour and are ‘banished’ from the sitting-room for
making a noise in chapter six; Catherine Earnshaw locks herself in her chamber in
chapter 12 and Isabella is locked into Wuthering Heights in chapter 13. See Emily
Brontë, Wuthering Heights: Complete text with Introduction, Contexts and Critical Essays,
Diane Long Hoeveler (ed.), Houghton Mifflin, Boston & New York, 2002.
2
Catherine Earnshaw refers to Heathcliff as an ‘unreclaimed creature, without
refinement – without cultivation; an arid wilderness of furze and whinstone’ in an
attempt to dissuade Isabella from pursuing him. See Wuthering Heights, ch. 10, p.101.
All subsequent references to this text will be cited in the body of the paper. I will
indicate the chapter followed by the page number for this edition.
3
Diane Long Hoeveler, ‘Wuthering Heights and Gothic Feminism’, in Wuthering
Heights, Diane Long Hoeveler (ed.), pp.433-446. Hoeveler discusses Brontë’s gothic
feminism in relation to the gothic double of Catherine and Heathcliff and the nature
of their gothic romance.
4
My discussion here focuses on Catherine Earnshaw, the first Catherine and daughter
of Old Earnshaw. I will refer to her throughout as ‘Catherine’. The second Catherine,
Catherine Earnshaw’s daughter to Edgar Linton, will be referred to as ‘Catherine
Linton’.
5
Violence is associated in the novel with unrestrained passion and, paradoxically,
unrealised desires. Brontë explores the implications of unrestrained passion to the
prevailing domestic, social order by contrasting the domestic spaces of Wuthering
Heights and Thrushcross Grange. The former domestic space represents unrestrained
desire, whilst the latter portrays the affects of desire consistently restrained by social
convention. Through the character of Catherine, Bronte suggests that constrained
passion can have equally violent effects on the individual and society, repressed
desire eventually corrupting and destroying the subject from within and the family
without. Despite the fact that Wuthering Heights is a patriarchal space, violent acts
are not only enacted by adult men such as Heathcliff and Hindley. For example,
Nelly threatens Linton Heathcliff with a good ‘boxing’ and ‘shaking’ (ch. 27); Isabella
confesses a desire for ‘violent revenge’ against Heathcliff (ch. 17); the young Hareton
hangs puppies and kills the wildlife for sport; and sickly Linton Heathcliff, according
to his father, tortures cats with pared nails and no teeth (ch. 27).
6
Hareton becomes Heathcliff’s ward following the death of his parents. Catherine
Linton becomes legally bound to and financially dependent upon Heathcliff following
the death of her parents and then her husband, Linton Heathcliff, who is Heathcliff’s
son to Isabella Linton. Thus, both of these characters are connected to Heathcliff by
law, not blood.
7
Maja-Lisa Von Sneidern, ‘Wuthering Heights and the Liverpool Slave Trade’ in
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Lorraine Sim
Wuthering Heights
Heights, Diane Long Hoeveler (ed.), pp.366-390.
8
Sneidern, p.368.
9
ibid., p.369.
10
See chapter 20; ‘my son is prospective owner of [the Grange] and I should not wish
him to die till I was certain of being his successor. Besides, he’s mine, and I want the
triumph of seeing my descendent fairly lord of their estates; my child hiring their
children, to till their fathers’ land for wages – that is the sole consideration which
can make me endure the whelp [his son, Linton Heathcliff]’ (pp.180-181). Heathcliff
terrorizes and manipulates his son in order to procure his revenge against his enemy
Edgar Linton, the owner of Thrushcross Grange and husband of the late Catherine
Earnshaw. Through contriving his son’s marriage to Catherine Linton, following
his son’s anticipated death Heathcliff is entitled to his daughter-in-law’s estate,
Thrushcross Grange. Thus the dispossessed, represented by Heathcliff, ultimately
gains control over the property of the landed gentry, represented by Edgar Linton.
11
Elizabeth is adopted from a poor peasant family by Doctor Frankenstein’s parents
during their ‘excursion’ to Lake Como in Italy. His parents’ ‘benevolent disposition
often made them enter the cottages of the poor’. Of the five children they find in a
poor peasant family, his mother is ‘attracted’ to Elizabeth who ‘appeared of a different
stock’; ‘The four others were dark-eyed, hardy little vagrants; this child was thin, and
very fair’. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, Heron Books, 1963, chapter 1, p.24.
12
Hindley’s treatment of Heathcliff following Old Earnshaw’s death, supports the
thesis that their relationship is representative of that between a slave and his owner,
as Hindley beats the young Heathcliff, condemns him to manual labour, and excludes
him from family spaces and activities. His tyrannical behaviour denies Heathcliff
the opportunity to acquire the kinds of cultural capital which he requires in order
to be accepted within the upper-middle classes.
13
Margaret Homans, Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in NineteenthCentury Women’s Writing, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1986, p.71.
14
For example, in chapter ten Nelly refers to averting a ‘domestic storm’ in the Grange
upon Heathcliff’s return. In her warning to Isabella regarding her infatuation with
Heathcliff, Catherine refers to him as an ‘unreclaimed creature’, ‘a wilderness of
furze and whinstone’; Catherine frequently has moods that are described as seasons
such as ‘seasons of gloom and silence’ (ch. 10); Catherine describes her respective
feelings for Edgar and Heathcliff with reference to natural metaphors; ‘My love for
Linton is like the foliage in the woods. Time will change it ... my love for Heathcliff
resembles the eternal rocks beneath-a source of little visible delight, but necessary’
(ch 9: 85); Heathcliff criticises Linton’s attempts to care for Cathy with reference to
organic metaphors of sterility and constraint; ‘How the devil could it [her illness] be
otherwise, in her frightful isolation ... He might as well plant an oak in a flower-pot
and expect it to thrive, as imagining he can restore her to vigour in the soil of his
shallow cares!’ (14: 139).
15
Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and
the Beautiful, J. T. Boulton (ed.), Routledge, London, 1958, p.39.
16
Walter John Hipple, The Beautiful, The Sublime, & The Picturesque in EighteenthCentury British Aesthetic Theory, The Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale,
1957, p.87.
17
Burke, pp.136, 40.
18
Chapter nine commences with a description of Hareton’s sublime dread of his
father Hindley. According to Nelly, Hareton is ‘impressed by a wholesome terror
of encountering either his [father’s] wild-beast’s fondness, or his madman’s rage’
uncertain whether he will be ‘squeezed and kissed to death’ or ‘flung into the fire’ (9:
78). The rage of Hindley, which is metaphorically linked to ideas of natural wildness
and primitivism, produces what Nelly views to be a ‘wholesome’ and therefore partly
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positive terror within his son, who is uncertain whether his father’s strength and
power will be manifested in affectionate or terrifying forms. By contrast, moments
of real physical threat are made comical in this part of the novel as when Hindley
attempts to make Nelly ‘swallow the carving knife’, Nelly claiming that she was
not ‘much afraid’ instead complaining that ‘it tasted detestably’ of red-herrings (9:
78-9).
19
That the sublime power of nature provides an intimation of the divine is discussed
by Burke (part 2, sect. V, pp.67-70).
20
Catherine is deranged in chapter 12, a condition she attributes to her estrangement
from the Heights (which is, for her, synonymous with Heathcliff). On the eve of her
death in chapter 15, she appears deranged and incapable of dialogue until Heathcliff
enters Thrushcross Grange upon which they enter into a lively, but completely
rational, dialogue. When Edgar returns and enters the house Catherine looses, and
does not regain, her ‘senses’, ie. consciousness (15: 142-147).
21
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, Werner S. Pluhar (tr.), Hackett, Indianapolis
& Cambridge, 1987, see book II, ‘Analytic of the Sublime’. Numerical infinity, Kant’s
mathematical sublime, is also a part of Burke’s theory of the sublime, see his Enquiry,
sections VIII – XI on objects of sight and infinity and section XI on sounds and the
artificial infinite.
22
Nelly associates Heathcliff’s obsession with the ghost of Catherine to his nervous
constitution; ‘I never expected that your nerves would be disordered’ (34: 272). Whilst
the physiology of the nerves was central to nineteenth-century medical discourse,
the physiology of the nerves also assumed a central position in Burke’s theory of
the sublime. Burke argued that the sublime feeling is the result of the nervous fibres
being stretched beyond their normal length when confronted by the sublime object.
Burke argued that this physiological process is slightly painful but pleasurable in a
way analogous to moderate exercise; see his Enquiry, sections VI & VII.
23
Burke makes a distinction between pleasure, as positive pleasure, and delight, as
a sensation that accompanies the removal of pain (part 1, sec. II). Burke therefore
argues that the sublime passion is a mixture of delight and pain, not pleasure and pain.
This distinction, however, is not crucial to my argument. It is sufficient that Brontë
consistently presents the sublime as a mixture of positive and negative feelings.
24
See Addison’s ‘Essay on the Pleasures of the Imagination’ in Addison’s Works, Vol.
III, Bell & Sons, London, 1912; Burke’s Enquiry and Kant’s Critique of Judgement. For
a discussion of Addison and Burke see Hipple, chapters 1 & 6.
25
See his Enquiry sections V-VII.
26
Judith Pike, ‘Resurrection of the Fetish in Gradiva, Frankenstein, & Wuthering Heights’,
in Romantic Women Writers: Voices and Countervoices, Paula R. Feldman & Theresa M.
Kelly (eds), University of New England, London, 1995, pp.150-168.
27
Hipple, p.84.
28
In his ‘Introduction to Taste’, Burke argues that ‘the standard of both reason and
Taste is the same in all human creatures. For if there were not some principles of
judgment as well as of sentiment common to all mankind, no hold could possibly
be taken either on their reason or their passions, sufficient to maintain the ordinary
correspondence of life’. He defines taste as ‘that faculty, or the faculties of the mind
which are affected with, or which form a judgment of the works of imagination and
the elegant arts’, Enquiry, p.13. Kant claims that although aesthetic judgements are
subjective in that they are based on feeling, the ideas of judgement are universal and
this accounts for shared standards amongst people regarding matters of taste.
29
See, for example, Wordsworth’s Preface to the Lyrical Ballads and Shelley’s Defence
of Poetry, both of which discuss the relationship between art, society and morality.
30
Christopher Heywood, ‘Yorkshire Landscapes in Wuthering Heights’, in Wuthering
Heights, Diane Long Hoeveler (ed.), pp.349-365, p.354.
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31
Hipple, p.192.
Lockwood’s inability to read or represent nature can be contrasted with his desire
to decipher cultural texts in the novel, such as Catherine’s bedchamber. In chapter
three, upon noticing her various signatures, Lockwood notes the ‘Immediate interest
kindled within [him] for the unknown Catherine, and, [he] began, forthwith, to
decypher her faded hieroglyphics’ (3: 38). Thus, a contrast is drawn in the novel
between the cultured figures, such as Lockwood, and uncultured figures, such as
Heathcliff and Catherine, and the natural and cultural texts or landscapes that they
are capable of deciphering.
33
Christopher Heywood, ‘Yorkshire Landscapes in Wuthering Heights’, in Wuthering
Heights, ed. Diane Long Hoeveler, pp.349-365.
34
‘I came to a stone where the highway branches off on to the moor at your left
hand; a round sand-pillar, with the letters W. H. cut on its north side, on the east,
G., and one the southwest, T. G. It serves as a guide-post to the Grange, Heights,
and village’ (9: 105).
35
Hipple, p.193.
36
Heywood, p.355.
37
Heywood, p.354.
38
‘The Caged Bird’ in The Brontës Selected Poems, Juliet R. V. Barker (ed), Everyman,
London, 1993, pp.60-61.
32
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