Repetition and the “Uncanny”Looking Oppositely: Emily Bronte’s

Bible of Hell

WUTHERING HEIGHTS

• Lockwood, the naïve and unreliable narrator, attempts to make sense of events by narrating them.

• Establishes the situation of many characters, establishes the reader as an interpreting witness

• Lockwood is inept at reading signs and gathering details; he is overconfident

• boasts about his ability to understand Heathcliff but then admits he is placing his own attributes onto Heathcliff

• mistakes dead rabbits for cats• thinks Catherine is Heathcliff’s wife

NARRATIVE PERSPECTIVE

• Paired oppositions—or another form of the original• Two Catherines are forms of the same Catherine• Heathcliff and Lockwood similar in their exclusion from

Catherine but opposite in their temperaments, sexual powers, and powers of volition

• Three gravestones with each man representing an aspect of Catherine’s double nature

• Stormy and calm weather• Roughness of the Heights vs. civilized restraint of the

Grange• Inside vs. outside• Domestic interiors vs. wild, natural exteriors beyond the

window/wall• Readers vs. book scorners• Strong willed (Heathcliff) vs. weak willed (Lockwood)

REPETITION

• Readers never see the initial unity, only the division that has already occurred

• Separated pairs, differentiations of the same rather than true opposites, tend to divide further and subdivide after that

• Catherine and Hareton marry and will reproduce, but even Lockwood’s words over the three graves prevents the names from dying wholly (Do they survive their deaths or survive only in the narrations of those who remain?)

• Victorian concept of “life” after death

UNITY AND DIVISION

“What is not connected with her to me? and what does not recall her? I cannot look down to this floor, but her features are shaped on the flags! In every cloud, in every tree—filling the air at night, and caught by glimpses in every object by day, I am surrounded by her image! The most ordinary faces of men and women—my own features mock me with a resemblance. The entire world is a dreadful collection of memoranda that she did exist , and that I have lost her!”

UNITY AND DIVISION

• Heathcliff wants the Heights and the Grange because each thing and person reminds him of Catherine

• destroy them to take revenge on those who stood between them and reach Catherine through their demolition

• each sign of her is an avenue to the desired unity with her but also a barrier to getting her –he loves and detests Hareton and young Catherine because they’re like her

• the people’s and houses’ existences are a sign she’s lost, but their destruction is her total absence

UNITY AND DIVISION

“What is heaven? Where is hell? . . . If I were in heaven, Nelly, I should be extremely miserable.”

“. . . that devil Heathcliff”

“Is Mr. Heathcliff a man? . . . is he not a devil?”

“. . . conscience turned his heart to an earthly hell.”

HEAVEN AND HELL

• Is Catherine’s fall that of the archetypal Bildungsroman protagonist?

• innocence to experience• “exile and outcast . . . from what had been my

world” suggests Adam, Eve, and Satan• Catherine falls from hell into heaven, into grace

instead of from it• in this world, hell is energetically delightful,

and heaven is rigidly hierarchical

THE FALL

• The arbitrary “What shall I bring you?”• The children’s hearts’ desires:• Catherine: whip (powerless younger daughter

yearning for power)• Hindley: fiddle (not master of the house but soft-

hearted cultural desire)• Nelly: pears and apples (only sensible request)

• Heathcliff becomes Catherine’s whip, her power to smash the fiddle

• The fantasy replacement of the dead son supplants Hindley in his father’s affections

• Heathcliff and Catherine are Adam and Eve devoid of sexual awareness—she sleeps with her “whip,” her other half

EARNSHAW’S TRIP TO LIVERPOOL

• Caused by her patriarchal past, present, and future

• Begins when bitten by the male bulldog (the guard dog/god—Cerberus?) and is kept at the Grange

• Heathcliff and Catherine’s desired escape from Joseph’s pietistic tortures and their sexual awareness brought by Hindley and Frances

• Running away pushes them to their fate—the Lintons’ home seems like “heaven,” but they discover it’s their hell

CATHERINE’S FALL

Wuthering Heights• Functional (dogs

work as sheepdogs or hunters)

• Raw and uncarpeted

• Open and heated

Thrushcross Grange• Decorative

(lapdogs and ladies)

• Carpeted in crimson

• White light

HEIGHTS VS. GRANGE