by Deborah Lutz
Emily probably encountered some of this history and earlier attitude toward creatures in her wide reading. There she discovered a time when animals were afforded a different kind of independent life than they generally were during her lifetime. On the continent from the Middle Ages to the early twentieth century, animals (including insects) that killed humans or ruined crops were put on trial and often sentenced to death. In 1522, for instance, a famous case was tried in Autun, France, against rats that had ruined some barley crops. A distinguished lawyer was appointed to represent them, but the trial was complicated by the fact that the rats would not appear in court, despite being summoned. Their lawyer argued that they wouldn’t come because of their fear of the cats belonging to the plaintiffs. This argument worked for a time, but finally the rats were convicted in absentia. Trials of animals were less common in England, but in 1679 at Tyburn, Middlesex, a woman was hanged for bestiality and so was her canine partner. More informally, dogs or wolves caught killing sheep or poaching were often hanged as punishment (today they are often just shot). Shakespeare alludes to such punishments in The Merchant of Venice, so they must have been common enough for him to believe his audience would understand his reference (as would Emily, who knew Shakespeare very well). Gratiano curses Shylock:
Thy currish spirit
Governed a wolf, who, hanged for human slaughter,
Even from the gallows did his fell soul fleet,
And whilst thou layest in thy unhallowed dam,
Infused itself in thee; for thy desires
Are wolfish, bloody, starved, and ravenous.
While there is something terrible about animals being hanged for crimes, from a certain point of view these trials and punishments show a moral respect toward the animal, a belief that the fellow creature had some basic rights that could be vindicated at law. 4
The Brontës tapped into ancient beliefs about animals and their special powers that survived into the nineteenth century in rural areas like the villages of West Yorkshire. A robin pecking at the window meant someone in the house would fall ill. Songs of wild birds were sometimes interpreted as messages to human listeners. The chaffinch’s song said, “Pay your rent”; the great titmouse sang, “Sit ye down”; and the quail called, “Wet my lips! Wet my lips!” Heathcliff, in Wuthering Heights, is like one of these: he is a “bird of ill omen.” Creatures signaled a future change in the weather, like petrels on the sea, or cats, swallows, owls, cattle, and hedgehogs at home. On Christmas Eve, horses and oxen were said to kneel in their stables, and bees to change their buzz for the special occasion. Bees needed to be told immediately when there was a death in the family, or they themselves might die, or leave permanently in anger. Charlotte wrote a poem around this time about creatures whose presence presaged death in the house. It begins:
Like wolf—black bull or goblin hound,
Or come in guise of spirit fair
With wings and long, wet-wavy hair
And at the fire its locks will dry
Which will be certain sign
That one beneath the roof must die
Before the year’s decline.5
A few years later, Charlotte would give Jane Eyre’s first meeting with Rochester a supernatural air by calling on these same beliefs, specifically that spirits or ghosts could take the shape of horses, mules, or large dogs and haunt solitary ways. Jane sits in the gloaming and hears a horse approach, which brings to mind tales of the gytrash, a shape-shifting goblin. When a “lion-like creature with long hair and a huge head” glides up, she imagines it will have “strange pretercanine eyes.” But it is just Pilot, Rochester’s Newfoundland, who bounds ahead of him. Soon Rochester himself arrives on the black horse called Mesrour, who slips on the ice, beginning the famous romance. Emily, too, infuses the animals in her novel with a strange magic, but one difficult to explain, like when the ashes in the fireplace stir to life as a brindled cat, or when hellish dogs haunt the recesses of the Heights.
There is nothing supernatural about Keeper, however; in fact, the brutal violence of Emily’s punishment of him is all too real. His name evokes the types of dogs whose lives in earlier centuries ended in hanging: mixed breeds, or “mongrel curs,” who belonged to the poor and were often used for poaching. These outsider dogs were even thought for a time to be their own breed, called lurchers, before breeds were codified by the upper classes in the later nineteenth century. (The lurcher breed as it existed then disappeared, like the white terrier, the Great Irish hound, and many others.) Looking at engravings of lurchers from the early nineteenth century, one thinks of the sorts of dogs that Heathcliff keeps, in Wuthering Heights. Dogs in Emily’s novel do get hanged. The little boy Hareton Earnshaw hangs a litter of puppies from a chair back, the usual way to kill unwanted dogs on a working farm like Wuthering Heights. Heathcliff hangs Isabella’s springer, called Fanny, by a handkerchief when they elope together, almost killing the little dog. Heathcliff’s shocking brutality, continued in his treatment of Isabella, is part of his project of revenge against the society of wealth and privilege that he feels has debased him, cast him out, and lost for him the one thing he cares about in the world—Catherine. Even the pampered dog is worth punishing in his mind, as it is part of the fabric of power that has crushed him; he only wishes he “had the hanging of every being belonging” to the families that have taken Catherine from him. While Heathcliff’s plight is in some ways sympathetic, his treatment of animals deeply complicates the simple notion that he is a romantic hero. 6
In contrast to Keeper and his lower-class associations, Anne’s black, white, and tan spaniel named Flossy had an upper-class name and was generally a breed for the rich. He was probably a gift from the children of her employers, the wealthy Robinsons of Thorp Green. Queen Victoria adored spaniels, especially the silky-haired King Charles breed, named after another royal who also kept them. She acquired one when she was still Princess Victoria and called him Dash, dressing him in a velvet collar and sometimes “a scarlet jacket and blue trousers.” The little petted dog was portrayed numerous times by Edwin Landseer, whose fame developed largely through his portraits of the animals of the wealthy, especially the many commissions from the queen and Prince Albert to portray their dogs. In one of his famous paintings, the 1842 Windsor Castle in Modern Times, he included not only the queen and Albert but also Albert’s greyhound Eos, sitting at his knee looking up at him with adoration. The queen’s three terriers—Cairnach, Dandie, and Islay, who is begging on his hind legs—are also in the picture, as is the queen’s eldest daughter, Princess Victoria, at this time a toddler. She is playing with a dead game bird, and strewn about the floor and settee are other dead birds, presumably killed on a hunt from which Albert has just returned. The painting at first appears to be another sentimental portrait of the royal family and their pets, and this is how most contemporaries would have understood it, but the dead birds make the critical viewer stop and think. The stark difference in the treatment of animals—the dogs loved, the birds slaughtered—perhaps signals the steel behind the sentimentality, the human and animal misery that went into the creation of such a large and prosperous empire, upon which, not long after this painting was completed, the sun never set. 7
Dogs like Flossy and other spaniels and terriers were prime targets for the brazen pet kidnappers who had a wide and lucrative market in Victorian London. They would entice a dog away with chunks of meat or with little dogs rubbed in fat, slip the captured creature into a bag or wrap her in an apron, and then offer to return her for a large sum. By mid-century, the list of victims included Sir Robert Peel, the Duke of Cambridge, the Duchess of Sutherland, and Earl Stanhope. The Fancy, a well-known gang of dog stealers led by a man named Taylor, stole Flush, a beloved cocker spaniel that belonged to the young poet Elizabeth Barrett, later Browning, in 1843 (Virginia Woolf wrote a story from the point of view of Flush, based largely on her own spaniel, Pinka). Barrett paid the ransom for the dog, but then he was stolen two more times by the same ga
ng, a common occurrence when the owner paid up promptly. 8
These are all scenes in the drama of the Victorian cult of the pet, with the queen and her family playing central roles. While pet keeping is an ancient practice, it reached new heights in the nineteenth century. Queen Victoria so loved dogs that she collected close to a hundred in her lifetime, most of them living in kennels on the grounds of her castles. When she was dying, her Pomeranians kept her company on her deathbed. The historian Harriet Ritvo puts the count of mid-century London street traders dealing in live animals at twenty thousand, at least a dozen of whom specialized in selling brass collars for dogs. Poems about dogs with human eyes proliferated, as did paintings and illustrations attributing human emotions to dogs, with titles like “Inseparable,” “The Foster Mother,” “The Best of Friends,” “Silent Sorrow,” and “Waiting for Master.” Pictures of dogs dressed up as people doing things like teaching Latin or writing doggerel were a Victorian specialty, as were stories written from the point of view of dogs. Owners had their terriers stuffed, placed in glass cases, and displayed about the home when they died. Queen Victoria passed her dog love on to her children and their children; her granddaughter Princess Victoria had the sheddings of her brown poodle knitted into a shawl. In an even stranger act of memorialization, Charles Dickens had the paw and leg of his cat removed from its body after its death and made into a letter opener, which is inscribed, “C.D. in memory of Bob 1862.” 9
Emily didn’t subscribe to the usual Victorian sentimentalism and idealization of pets. Although she can be called an animal lover of sorts, her relationship to them was more complex than this conventional phrase suggests, as is hinted at in her punishment of Keeper. The Victorian lady fawning over her lapdog, or the naturalist praising the “innate” subservience of dogs with humans as their “natural” masters (Victorians called this “love of Master”): these were all, to her, dishonest views of dogs. Dogs were selfish creatures of basic needs who would fight for dominance if required; as such, they were much like people, whose veneer of culture thinly covered their own animal natures. Yet, Emily felt that dogs were more honest in their expression of their natures and that made them superior to humans. She once argued in a school essay that humans “cannot sustain a comparison with the dog, it is infinitely too good.” In fact, people were most like cats, in their excessive hypocrisy, cruelty, and ingratitude. Cats hide their misanthropy in order to be fed, Emily contended, just as people use politeness to gain what they desire. In their torment of their prey, cats are like ladies who kill (literally) their lapdogs in affection or like men who nurture foxes on their land in order to hunt them down. “The ingratitude of cats is another name for penetration,” she wrote, because they guess the selfish motives that prompt humans to feed them. 10
While Charlotte’s heart opened to helpless animals, Emily’s was drawn to fierce creatures with wild, unyielding natures. Sometimes Emily would show off Keeper’s ferocity, Ellen Nussey reported, by making him “frantic in action, and roar with the voice of a lion.” Those who knew her found her attention to animals—Keeper especially—as a possible way in to her impenetrable character and deep reserve. Dogs opened up a well of emotion in her, something humans rarely did. An acquaintance put this more strongly, opining that Emily “never showed regard to any human creature; all her love was reserved for animals.” While this is probably an exaggeration, it wasn’t wholly untrue. 11
What she cherished was bodily closeness, the contact with fur and tongue, the feel of dog breath on her skin. Keeper would force himself onto Emily’s lap, pushing aside Charlotte sitting next to her, and settle his tawny bulk as best he could on Emily’s slender frame. He would match her stride when she went for walks on the moors, and he lay next to her on the carpet when she read. Emily probably didn’t have intimate contact with other people except, perhaps, her sisters. One can imagine her hunger for touch and the satisfaction of the nearness of a dog’s body. For Emily, animals weren’t pets so much as they were family. 12
Emily’s unbending will made her akin to the hardscrabble dogs she relished tussling with. Charlotte wrote about one of Emily’s angry rampages in an early piece in the speech of the “Young Men,” comparing her not to a dog, but to “a gurt bellaring bull.” Such bullishness appears in a story told about Emily by Haworth townsfolk. Keeper and another powerful dog were once fighting down the lane. A servant went to the house and told Emily, who immediately grabbed the pepper box from the kitchen. She found the two dogs locked on each other’s throats while sundry men stood around, afraid to intervene. Emily seized Keeper around the neck with one arm, and used the other to dredge their noses with pepper. Thus separating them, she drove Keeper before her into the house, the men “standing there thunderstruck at the deed.” 13
Another time, Emily saw a strange mutt ambling past the house, looking ill, with its tongue out and its head hanging. She called for it to stop so she could bring it water. When she approached, the dog snapped at her in a crazed way, cutting open her arm. Worried about rabies, she went directly into the kitchen, pulled one of Tabby’s red-hot Italian irons out of the fire, and pressed it against the bite to burn away any infection. She told no one about the incident until later, not wanting to trouble those of weaker spirit. While this oft-told story is generally cited as proof of Emily’s courageous character—which it is—it is also the advice medical men of the time gave about how to deal with the bite of a rabid dog. Another way of thinking of this is that she treated herself in the same fierce way she treated Keeper: with a refusal to back down and even a desire to fight it out. 14
Emily’s willingness to skirmish with, to be wounded by, and to master difficult dogs exposes her view of intimacy as a difficult grappling with untamed natures. If love doesn’t lead to wounds, then it’s not passionate enough. This is the dark philosophy she brought to her novel, which Charlotte, who found the work to be too coarse and violent, thought was “hewn in a wild workshop, with simple tools, out of homely materials.” Many Victorian critics questioned where this knotty story came from, as have many critics since. How could a well-bred clergyman’s daughter create this tale of raw desire and devilish cruelty? A reviewer for The Cornhill Magazine, the most important journal of its day, expressed a typical sentiment, after Gaskell’s biography had exposed the identity of the Brontës and the novels were being reissued: “It is fearful, it is true, and perhaps one of the most unpleasant books ever written: but we stand in amaze at the almost incredible fact that it was written by a slim country girl . . . who had little or no experience of the ways of the world.” We find sources in her reading, of course: the novels of Walter Scott, Byron’s poetry, Greek tragedy (read in the original Greek), Shakespeare. Local Yorkshire gossip and rustic characters made their way in. But there is another source worth considering: the lessons Emily learned from sparring with dogs. 15
“Four-footed fiends” lurk in the opening pages. In the family sitting room at Wuthering Heights, a “liver-coloured bitch” pointer sits surrounded by a swarm of squealing puppies. She “sneaks wolfishly” up to strangers, with lip curled up and “white teeth watering for a snatch.” A pair of “grim, shaggy sheep-dogs” slip forth from hidden dens, adding to the “absolute tempest of worrying and yelping.” Heathcliff makes it clear these dogs are his working animals, for herding sheep, hunting, and guarding the house. Each dog is “not accustomed to be spoiled—not kept for a pet.” He then punches one with his foot. Later, the guard dogs at the Heights tussle with those from the nearby Grange, leaving the latter limping, heads swollen and bleeding from their ears.
Even at the supposedly more civilized, polite Grange, dogs are not treated kindly, nor are they meant to treat strangers kindly. On young Catherine and Heathcliff’s first introduction to the inhabitants, they peer through a window and see the young Edgar and his sister Isabella fighting over a puppy, nearly pulling it in two between them. The house guard dog, a bulldog by the name of Skulker, hears the two children sneaking about and gets h
is jaws around Catherine’s ankle. Heathcliff tries to thrust a stone down his throat, but the dog doesn’t let go until he’s “throttled” by a servant, and he later sires a pup named Throttler.
This is a savage world where brutality is visited on beasts of all sorts. The put-upon creatures include humans, who often grow up to be as vicious as they were once treated. Mr. Earnshaw picks up Heathcliff on the streets of Liverpool, as we have seen, like a lost dog: “Not a soul knew to whom it belonged.” Heathcliff is an “it,” also called a “thing”—labels that show him to be as unfortunate as any dog in his fellow housemates. After being pulled out of Mr. Earnshaw’s coat, “it was set on its feet [and] it only stared around,” Nelly explains, “and Mrs. Earnshaw was ready to fling it out of doors.” At first, “it” sleeps on the floor outside the room of its “master.” It finally is given a name, although it’s a recycled name, having already belonged to a son who died. Even so, Heathcliff barely sounds like a human name, at least a Christian one. He never has a last name, “Heathcliff” serving for both. When he marries, his wife is called Mrs. Heathcliff, his son Linton Heathcliff, and when he dies, his tombstone reads simply, “Heathcliff.” (If Keeper married, his wife would, presumably, be Mrs. Keeper.) His name a compound of the natural features around him, he seems to emanate from the elements. “An arid wilderness of furze and whinstone,” Catherine names him. Charlotte calls Heathcliff, in what is essentially an apology to readers after Emily’s death for this “fierce and inhuman” being, “a granite block on a solitary moor” from which is chiseled “a head, savage, swart, sinister.” Eventually, “the crag took human shape; and there it stands colossal, dark, frowning, half statue, half rock.” 16