there never were such good children. I used to think them spiritless, they were so different to any children I had ever seen. In part, I set it down to a fancy Mr. Brontë had of not letting them have flesh-meat to eat. It was from no wish for saving, for there was plenty and even waste in the house, with young servants and no mistress to see after them; but he thought that children should be brought up simply and hardily: so they had nothing but potatoes for their dinner; but they never seemed to wish for anything else; they were good little creatures.
This ‘fact’, when Gaskell put it into print, was objected to by Patrick. Evidence, from servants and the local butcher, was dug up to contradict the Wright/Gaskell allegation of vegetarian tyrannies at the parsonage. The contradictions are persuasive.
It’s an interesting canard, however, and bears a little examination. Patrick was an intellectual – Cambridge had left that mark on him. And, we can safely surmise, he was interested in the various energies and ideas coursing through the branch of evangelical Anglicanism he had affiliated himself to.
Forty miles away, in Manchester – workshop of the world – one of the most innovative breakaway movements was introduced by William Cowherd (1763–1816), with his ‘Bible Christians’.
Spiritually restless, Cowherd – originally a Swedenborgian – set up his own chapel in Salford in 1809, splitting from the Church of England in which he had been ordained. Cowherdism took, as its main tenet, vegetarianism. Congregants were not admitted unless they had abstained from meat for three months.
Cowherd believed it was God’s will that man not eat animal flesh (otherwise, he suggested, it would grow on trees, or in the ground). Adam and Eve were vegetarians, until they sinned. Cowherdism was an extension of the temperance movement and the larger moral reforms brought in by ultra-evangelical enthusiasm. Abstinence from meat lowered aggression and temptations to other dissipations. Meatlessness was next to Godliness.
Cowherd set up a medical centre and a library and distributed vegetable soup to the distressed classes of Manchester. Despite Lancashire’s love of meat (‘hot-pot’, ‘tripe and onions’, etc.), Cowherd’s Christian vegetarianism took off. More vegetarian eateries were set up in Manchester than in any other city. He and his ‘Cowherdite’ disciple the Revd Joseph Brotherton are seen as the founders of what became, in 1847, the British Vegetarian Society, and of (via Brotherton) the early vegetarian movements in the US.
All this was happening in Haworth’s vicinity. Clergymen would certainly have been aware of what one of their most enterprising brethren was doing. What one can plausibly surmise is that Patrick was sufficiently curious to at least think about curbing the exuberance of his offspring (and possibly himself) by meatlessness. He may even have wondered if it was the religious thing to do.
Whatever was served on the table, and in what amount, the idea of vegetarianism was in the air at Haworth Parsonage. To that degree, Martha Wright’s testimony can be believed.
Footnote
1. See Ann Dinsdale, ‘Mrs Brontë’s Nurse’, Brontë Studies (November 2005).
VILLAINY
Notwithstanding that there are those who see something heroic in Heathcliff, to ask who the villain is in Wuthering Heights seems equivalent to asking who is the bad guy in whatever James Bond volume, from Le Chiffre onwards. Nonetheless, greater works of literature than Ian Fleming’s have inner enigmas as to moral judgement, or who should wear the black hat. It’s what the greatest of 20th-century literary critics, Frank Kermode, called those works’ ‘patience’. They throw back different answers at different times and to different generations of reader.
Every generation of critics, for example (often in open, Oedipal rebellion against the previous ‘paternal’ generation), interprets Shakespeare differently. Sometimes radically so. Who is more in the right? Samuel Johnson or Professor James S. Shapiro (winner of the 2006 Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction).1
For those who lived through the 1950s and early 1960s, those decades were the era of what was called ‘deep reading’. Irony was uncovered everywhere. Great literature was conceived of as a casket, or a safe: you ‘cracked’ it, and found, secreted inside, the unexpected meaning. Eureka!
A kind of ingenious perversity ruled. The villain in Hamlet? Hamlet. Don’t ask. The founding example was Edmund Wilson’s reading of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw. There were no ghosts: it was all a fantasy of the governess. The villain of the piece wasn’t Quint (a distant descendant, one might think, of villainous Heathcliff) but the deranged ‘guardian’. She, it was, who corrupted and killed poor little Miles.
As regards Wuthering Heights, deep reading reached its most profound – some would say absurd – in James Hafley’s 1958 article in Nineteenth-Century Fiction (the voice of critical authority in the field). Hafley unmasked Nelly Dean as ‘one of the consummate villains in English literature’: a veritable ‘Iago’ in the kitchen.
The thesis runs against the grain of the novel, as it appears on the surface; but, once you open the mind, an argument can be posed. Nelly’s first appearance in the drama is as a mother figure, ‘nursing’ Lockwood. We can almost imagine her spooning her medicinal soups into her employer’s lips and telling him a bedtime story about high drama at Wuthering Heights, the house which has terrified and almost killed him. Nelly’s name itself throws back a warm echo.2
But is Nelly Dean, via whom the bulk of the story is delivered, that elusive thing, ‘a reliable narrator’? And the other narrators: Zillah; Isabella, in her letter, retailing the facts about the Heathcliff she discovered after marriage? Are they reliable?
Is Lockwood, even, that stupid, shallow man, reliable. And, if trustworthy, are these eyewitnesses who mediate the text, conveying it and quite plausibly blurring it, perceptive enough to understand (as the ‘deep reader’ can) what their eyes witness? Do they have distorting interests of their own which distort and obscure?
The casting of Nelly as the black hat in the novel pivots on something that runs against common sense (as does the casting of Bertha Mason as the heroine of Jane Eyre – see above, ‘Attic Matters’, page 6) – namely that the novel was universally misread until, 110 years later, an enlightened generation of readers happened to come along and look at it the right, topsy-turvy way.
Overlooking that unconvincing fact, so unflattering to what Samuel Johnson and Virginia Woolf called (approvingly) the ‘common reader’, what is the evidence? First is the fact we know nothing about Nelly’s origins, other than that her mother (since deceased) was wet nurse to the Earnshaw children. Her father? Unknown. She is, perhaps, illegitimate. Was she one of Earnshaw Snr’s by-blows (as it is sometimes suggested Heathcliff is)?
Nelly is impressively literate (see above, ‘Vampirology [1]’, page 173). She is not, like the other two named servants in the house, Joseph and Zillah, Methodistical, but, we deduce Anglican – one of the Gimmerton Kirk congregation. It was the kirk’s Sunday School which, perhaps, educated her. That and books she found lying about, and in the Grange’s well-stocked library.
She has a forename and surname, unlike the other servants, indicating hierarchical superiority in the domestic world. And she has a career. Nelly is, in time, a housekeeper at Thrushcross Grange. A senior position, earning her the honorific title ‘Mrs Dean’ (what Lockwood calls her). It’s a courtesy title. There is no evidence Nelly has a husband, or children; nor do we know of any romantic interest in her early years.
There is one convincing piece of evidence for the ‘consummate villain’ thesis. When the young Heathcliff is brought back, hissing like a demon child, it is Nelly who takes the initiative. Hindley and Catherine will have nothing to do with their new, adoptive, sibling. They refuse to share their bed with ‘it’. Or even have ‘it’ in their room. ‘I,’ Nelly tells Lockwood,
had no more sense, so I put it on the landing of the stairs, hoping it might be gone on the morrow. By chance, or else attracted by hearing his voice, it crept to Mr. Earnshaw’s door, and there he found it o
n quitting his chamber. Inquiries were made as to how it got there; I was obliged to confess, and in recompense for my cowardice and inhumanity was sent out of the house.
When she returns she is not a quasi-daughter of the household, but a servant. This demotion, it is suggested, explains her decades’ long revenge.
There are throwaway remarks, which may be thought to support this reading. ‘Hindley hated [Heathcliff ],’ she says, ‘and to say the truth I did the same.’ Nelly has complicated feelings – apparently jealous feelings – about Cathy, her infant equal (did they not suck at the same breast?), now her mistress:
She [Cathy] did turn out a haughty, headstrong creature! I own I did not like her, after infancy was past; and I vexed her frequently by trying to bring down her arrogance: she never took an aversion to me, though.
Social demotion is a regular event at Wuthering Heights. When he inherits, Hindley demotes Heathcliff from a son of the house to the lowly status of a ‘groom’. A stable boy. Heathcliff, in turn, demotes the bloodline son of the house, Hareton, to the condition of a loutish peasant. He takes pleasure in the degradation. These ups and downs are serious matters.
Hafley and other sharp-eyed readers pick up on such things as Nelly’s withholding the fact that Cathy, her mistress, is at death’s door. ‘I kept it to myself,’ she says, ensuring that her mistress goes through the door all the quicker. Cathy, on her part, comes out with the accusation ‘Nelly is my hidden enemy’. Hidden no more.
But is she (a ‘consummate villain’, that is)? There is a moment in the action in which Nelly reflects on her actions. This is a key piece of evidence – a mea culpa almost – in the prosecution case:
I seated myself in a chair, and rocked to and fro, passing harsh judgment on my many derelictions of duty; from which, it struck me then, all the misfortunes of my employers sprang. It was not the case, in reality, I am aware; but it was, in my imagination, that dismal night; and I thought Heathcliff himself less guilty than I.
The 1950s are long gone. But contemporary readers may find a quaint pleasure in rereading Hafley, with its ‘Ha! I have you now, you dastardly housekeeper; you didn’t think you could throw the dust in the reader’s eyes forever, did you, you consummate villain!’.
Footnotes
1. For 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare.
2. Originating in folk music, the name evokes what became a popular music hall song: ‘There’s an old mill by the stream, Nellie Dean/Where we used to sit and dream, Nellie Dean’.
WHITHER WUTHER?
Ask yourself: have you ever heard anyone use the term ‘wuthering’, other than in reference to Emily Brontë’s novel?
Would a TV weather forecaster, for example warn us about ‘wuthering winds coming in with a low pressure system building up over the West Riding of Yorkshire’?
The Oxford English Dictionary, that normally omniscient fount of etymology, semantics and usage, is in a rare state of bamboozlement about the word. It can’t find, honestly, any usage of the verb ‘to wuther’, and its present participle anywhere in the deepest recesses of the English language. The entry founders in the quagmire of Middle English, e.g.:
Forms: ME quhedir, quhethir, qwedyr, ME–15 quhidder, 15 quhiddir.
It’s not terribly enlightening. Even less so is our reminding of the Old Norse *hviðra ‘(compare Norwegian kvidra)’. There are also some dubious Scotticisms cited (to ‘whudder’, for example).
To be honest, the first genuine usage the dictionary can find is Emily’s and the best definition Lockwood’s (as much a stranger to the word as us, the readers):
Wuthering Heights is the name of Mr. Heathcliff ’s dwelling. ‘Wuthering’ being a significant provincial adjective, descriptive of the atmospheric tumult to which its station is exposed, in stormy weather.
I have a strong suspicion that Emily made it up. Wuthering Heights. It’s as much a confection as Edmund Lear’s great Gromboolian plain. I expect a torrent of email from the West Riding putting me right on the matter.
What is odd, however, is that having been put into current knowledge so spectacularly, no one uses it in everyday speech. It is Emily Brontë’s word, and hers alone.
WINDOWS
I’ve lived professionally with articles in learned journals for 60 years – consuming and producing them en masse. Relatively few of mine or anyone else’s have had lasting effect: most are scholarly noise, proof of scholarly life, like the mist on the mirror held to the lips of a dead-or-alive person. Hum of the academic hive.
As regards the Brontës, a genuinely thought-changing article was published in Nineteenth-Century Fiction (December 1952), a premier journal, by a scholar of less than (then) premier eminence. Dorothy Van Ghent published relatively little during her, sadly short, career. Van Ghent’s criticism, gathered into monograph, drily entitled The English Novel: Form and Function, in 1953, is a high point of what was called ‘New Criticism’ in the US, ‘Practical Criticism’ in the UK, and ‘close reading’ by those not in the academic world. It amounted to picking up and shaking the text vigorously to see what meanings would drop out.
Van Ghent’s seminal NCF article was called, again drily, ‘The Window Figure and the Two Children Figure in Wuthering Heights’. Ask what is the most disturbing scene in the Brontës’ fiction, said Van Ghent (uncontroversially, I suspect), and it would be the ghost scene at the beginning of Wuthering Heights. Lockwood has been put to bed, by Zillah’s mistake, in Cathy’s old room – her shrine, as Heathcliff regards it, awaiting her return from the other side.
The bed, coffin-like in its curtained compactness, is one of the old-fashioned ‘closet’ variety, joined as a fixture to the window wall (God knows how Zillah tucked the sheets in). After a bedtime reading of the sermons of Jabes Branderham, Lockwood falls into troubled slumber and, eventually, full-blown nightmare. A spectral figure wakes him, scratching at the window pane, inches from his face and the now guttered-out candle. Moonlight. He opens the latched window reaches through and holds the thing’s (‘its’) frozen paw:
‘Who are you?’ I asked, struggling, meanwhile, to disengage myself. ‘Catherine Linton,’ it replied, shiveringly (why did I think of Linton? I had read Earnshaw twenty times for Linton). ‘I’m come home: I’d lost my way on the moor!’
As it spoke, I discerned, obscurely, a child’s face looking through the window. Terror made me cruel; and, finding it useless to attempt shaking the creature off, I pulled its wrist on to the broken pane, and rubbed it to and fro till the blood ran down and soaked the bedclothes; still it wailed, ‘Let me in!’ and maintained its tenacious grip, almost maddening me with fear.
In modern times Emily could challenge Stephen King as a writer of horror. Who knows if her lost second novel developed that genre.
That Lockwood (the name, etymologically, means ‘close the door’, ‘keep it out’) should commit this act of gratuitous violence, scraping a little girl’s wrists on jagged glass, is as horrific as it is out of character.
Van Ghent reminds us, this is the swinging open and shut window at which, a couple of years on, Heathcliff, reaching his hand into the world outside, will die. The crucial point, Van Ghent argues, is that this scene, along with four other key scenes in the novel, is centred on the metaphor – the topos – of the window.
Window glass is the transparent membrane between opposing realities: between the dream world and the outer world; between the domestic ‘real’ world and the terrifying alien world of the external ‘other’. It is materially there and not there.1 The window lets vision through, but obstructs physical passage. All the Brontës, it’s worth remembering, were acutely short-sighted and saw the world through glass. If, that is, they wanted to see the world clearly.
The window’s second significant entry into the novel comes when the young savages Heathcliff and Catherine, peeping Toms both of them, wonder at the civilised world of the Lintons at Thrushcross Grange: ‘a splendid place carpeted with crimson’. Heathcliff rejects what h
e sees through the window; Catherine is seduced and is ‘taken in’, in both senses. She goes through the window.
The third window scene has Catherine at death’s door (or death’s window), trying to escape through the obstructing glass (now imprisoning her) back to the moors, Wuthering Heights and Heathcliff. Defying Nelly and her doctors – not to mention common sense – she throws open the window to the cold air outside, hastening her death and (what she wants) re-entry into the wild ‘other’ world outside. If death is required to get there, so be it.
And, of course, Heathcliff ‘catches his death’ at a window at the conclusion of the novel. Much of the power of this most powerful novel is contained in the ‘window figure’, Van Ghent argues. Convincingly. My copy of The English Novel: Form and Function, which I read as an undergraduate, is black with marginal comment.
My academic generation had, soon after, to learn new tricks. ‘New Criticism’ was old hat by the 1970s. ‘Theory’ (an offshoot of French philosophy) had replaced it as the interpretative vehicle of choice for younger scholars. But it is pleasant to note that the classic text of the newer, theoretical, criticism, Roland Barthes’ S/Z, which broke down narrative into its five intermingled ‘codes’, has an interesting resemblance to Van Ghent’s old-hat close reading.
Barthes’ study, with a group of his like-mindedly clever postgraduates, dismembers Balzac’s short story Sarassine. It opens:
I was buried in one of those profound reveries to which everybody, even a frivolous man, is subject in the midst of the most uproarious festivities. The clock on the Elysée-Bourbon had just struck midnight. Seated in a window recess and concealed behind the undulating folds of a curtain of watered silk, I was able to contemplate at my leisure the garden of the mansion at which I was passing the evening. The trees, being partly covered with snow, were outlined indistinctly against the grayish background formed by a cloudy sky, barely whitened by the moon. Seen through the medium of that strange atmosphere, they bore a vague resemblance to spectres carelessly enveloped in their shrouds, a gigantic image of the famous Dance of Death. Then, turning in the other direction, I could gaze admiringly upon the dance of the living! a magnificent salon, with walls of silver and gold, with gleaming chandeliers, and bright with the light of many candles.
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