BOOKS OF THE DAY

The Theme of Wuthering Heights

,Wuthering Heights. By Emily Bronte. (Penguin Books. Is.) Wuthering Heights has been reprinted by Penguin Books, and is consequently available to everybody. This fact alone re-presents a problem to literary criticism to which no really satisfactory answer has yet been given. Expressions of admiration for the monumental achievement of Wuthering Heights are plentiful, but most apprecia- tive critics have been content to express their general approval of the 'novel, rather than risk the definiteness of a particular criticism. Both Virginia Woolf and Herbert Read hint at its poetry and -universality, without showing the reader the way in which these responses are derived from the novel itself. It is time to review this assessment and, perhaps, to suggest that it is possible to arrive at a more definite idea of what the novel says and to show how con- ceptions of a general nature emerge from the particular experiences which the writer evokes—to show, in short, that the novel has a theme.

Wuthering Heights makes its most striking impact on the reader in the definition of the Catherine-Heathcliff relationship ; it is towards this definition that Emily Brontë directs her immense resources of craftsmanship. Though it may be possible to accept Richardson or Dickens as primarily novelists of character, it would falsify Emily Bronte's intention to accept Wuthering //eights at this -level. The theme emerges from the love of Catherine and Heathcliff, and as in poetic drama there is no development of the psychologies of the main characters which is not disciplined by relevance to the gradually emerging theme. The love of Catherine and Heathcliff may be described as a life-force relationship, a principle that is not conditioned by anything but itself. It is .a principle because the relationship is of an ideal nature; does not exist in life, though as in many statements of an ideal tis principle has implications of a profound living significance. Further, their love is the opposite of love conceived as social and conventional acceptance, the love that Catherine has for Edgar which has only her conscious approval. What she feels for Heathcliff is a powerful undercurrent, an acceptance of identity below the level of conscious- ness. Catherine's marriage to Edgar is carefully shown to be a merely social acceptance which is by no means complete on the personal plane ; she marries him because "he will be rich, and I shall be the greatest woman of the neighbourhood, and I shall be proud of having such a husband." On the other hand, one striking characteristic of her relation to Heathcliff is that on both sides it is based on complete acceptance. Heathcliff says :

" I never would have banished him (Linton) from her society as long as she desired his. The int-trent her regard ceased, I would have torn his heart out and drunk his blood! But till then—if you don't believe me you don't know me—till then I would have died by inches before I touched a single hair on his head.' "

Catherine, too, can accept, though she knows well what Heathcliff is—" an unreclaimed creature without refinement, without cultiva- tion, an arid wilderness of furze and whinstone.' "

At each stage Heathcliff is a clearer demonstration of the principle than Catherine. Much has been nude by critics of his inhumanity and his ruthlessness, as if such qualities of character in a novel could be considered and assessed on their own. To a certain extent his ruthlessness is an instinctive recognition that the social qualities of the Lintons of Thrushcross Grange, and those of the outside world, cannot be reconciled with his acceptance of his own and of Catherine's identity. They are both opposites and enemies. To accept the principle by which Heathcliff lives would destroy, not only Linton's books and Isabella's fine clothes, but the whole social structure of externals and anybody who lives within its bounds. When Mr. Earnshaw first brings Heathcliff home he says : " ' See here, wife! I was never so beaten with anything in my life, but you must e'en take it as a gift of God, though it's' as dark almost as if it came from the devil.'

And towards the close Mrs. Dean wonders:'

" But where did he come from this little dark thing, harboured by a good man to his bane? '

Heathcliff functions throughout the novel as a principle. He is a gift from God because of his recognition of his real identity, his actual existence beneath the plane of social -living. As a child at " Wuthering Heights " he is hated by Hindley (Heathcliff has taken his place in Mr. Earnshaw's affection); he feels his actual existence to be denied, and the cycle of enmity and revenge is set up. At one level Heathcliff's " badness " is mere revenge for his -maltreat- ment ; on a more profound level it is a statement of the values-of his deepest experience in opposition to conventional sentiment and external allegiance. Heathcliff speaks of his ruthlessness as a " moral teething," for his hatred exists as an opposition of principle.

A passage from one of D. H. Lawrence's letters comes to mind here:

- "But we must grow from our deepest underground roots, out of the unconsciousness, not from the conscious concepts which we falsely -call ourselves."

This is the " moral centre " of the novel, the opposition between the actual inner identity which Heathcliff and Catherine share and accept, and the relatively insubstantial social and conscious existence Which Isabella Linton best exemplifies, and which is typified by Thrushcrost- Grange. Heathcliff is'a principle; a dramatic symbol ; and his relation to Catherine stands for the "life-force," the im- personal essence of personal existence. But just because their rela- tion is this, it cannot exist in life on its own. Some synthesis between it and external social action is necessary ; and this is achieved in the love of Hareton and the younger Catherine, in which the opposite qualities of Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange are reconciled. This relation is the projection into ordinary social life of the Catherine-Heathcliff relationship. Heathcliff joins Catherine in the grave, and the principle exists beyond life—as the ideal of shared individual, reality in life.

Although Catherine is socially acceptable, she recognises the nature of their relationship as clearly as Heathcliff. While ex- pressing her misgivings about marrying. Linton, she interprets- their source:

" I cannot express it, but surely you and everybody have a notion that there is or should be an existence of yours beyond you. What were the use of my creation if I were entirely contained here? My great miseries in this world have been Heathcliff's miseries, and I watched and felt each from the beginning. My great thought it living is himself. If all else remained and he remained I should still continue to be. If all else remained and he were annihilated the universe would turn to a mighty stranger—I should not seem 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! 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.'

" If he were annihilated " is the key phrase. Nothing less than annihilation would sever their coerced unity of principle—" an existence of yours beyond you " necessary as " one's own being." It resembles "the eternal rocks beneath.' It is an extension of the deepest layers of self into another which, assuming its own existence, is, in a sense, indestructible.

Perhaps there is no other novel in English which it is possible to interpret strictly in terms of thematic development. Wuthering Heights is certainly nearer to Elizabethan verse drama than to any- thing in nineteenth-century fiction. Its " unerring unity of concep- tion " is illustrated,' and its effect achieved, by strict continuity of dramatic symbolism, such as the recurrent use of local effects of the Yorkshire Moors to convey subtle variants of tempo and thematic development. The two narrators of the story, Lockwood and Mrs. Dean, are devices for writing the novel without explicit commentary, and for communicating experience direct to the reader without his being conscious of the writer's presence. This, of course, is usually the case in poetic drama. The way in which minor characters, such as old Mrs. Linton and Hindley's wife, die off—almost casually, when they cease to further the main succession of events, is reminis- cent of the supposed crudities of plot in Elizabethan verse drama. The remarkable dramatic economy in development is apparent : Emily Brontë makes no concessions to her readers with any descriptions of character or incident that does not contribute to her main theme. Wuthering Heights has frequently been described as a melodrama ; it is not this because of its controlling moral intention. Devoid of just such a purposiveness the character of Heathcliff, and many of the brutalities of the book, would be artistically unjustifiable. But not only is the story vividly present as experience, and each happening dramatically continuous, but the experiences evoked are evaluated and defined by the emergent theme. It is of interest to note that some of Emily Bronte's poems do, as it were, deal with aspects of the central Wuthering Heights situa- tion, particularly Cold in the Earth, which is reminiscent. of the unrelieved existence that Heathcliff inhabits after Catherine's death.

D. H. Lawrence is perhaps nearest in pre-occupation. to Emily Bronte. His " vitality " theme. is stressed at much the same sub- terranean level, though none of his works is as sure and complete an artistic success as Wuthering Heights. CLIFFORD CoLL1NS.