![\"by](\"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/48e12f1192f9d512a6a4b638562d9049.jpg\" "\\"Emily")
\n30 July 2018 marks the 200th<\/sup> anniversary of Emily Bront\u00eb\u2019s birth. Her novel \u201cWuthering Heights\u201d (1847) is an amazing, creative challenge to the personal cruelties and oppressions based on class, gender and ethnic background which were being generated by the hardening class divisions of English society in the 19th<\/sup> century.<\/p>\n Emily was one of four Bront\u00eb children to survive into adulthood. Their father was an Irish clergyman, from an impoverished family, who moved to Cambridge to study for holy orders, became a Tory and received an Anglican parsonage on the Yorkshire moors. Three sisters wrote novels, which they first published under male pseudonyms. Charlotte became most famous for her novel \u201cJane Eyre\u201d, Anne also wrote fiction, and Emily wrote poems and just one book, \u201cWuthering Heights\u201d. Their hapless brother Branwell\u2019s claim to fame is a portrait of his sisters, still exhibited in London\u2019s National Portrait Gallery. All Bront\u00eb children died before the age of forty \u2013 Emily was thirty when she perished of TB.<\/p>\n England in the mid-1840s was in the throes of the Industrial Revolution, vividly described by Bront\u00eb contemporary Friedrich Engels in his first book (1845) \u201cThe Condition of the Working Class in England\u201d. Growing up, they would have been aware from the newspapers they read of the devastation of hand-workers, especially the handloom weavers in their region, and the resulting large-scale impoverishment. Haworth, homestead of the Bront\u00ebs, lay near the Yorkshire mill towns, badly hit by the Hungry Forties. Their adult lives coincided with struggles against the Corn Laws, factory reform, strikes and the height of Chartism. Ireland was haemorrhaging from its holocaust, the Famine. All this affected the writings of the Bront\u00eb sisters, filtering through in one way or another.<\/p>\n Emily\u2019s profound understanding of 19th<\/sup> century England, and capitalism, is reflected in \u201cWuthering Heights\u201d. This novel shocked the Victorian reader, and its violence still alarms readers today. At its heart is the story of Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff, a destitute, probably Irish child brought home by Mr Earnshaw from Liverpool. A deep bond develops between the children. Catherine is a tomboy, the opposite of the Victorian idea of a female. Mr Earnshaw protects Heathcliff, and insists he be treated as a family equal. Catherine\u2019s elder brother Hindley detests Heathcliff, and torments him physically and emotionally. After Mr Earnshaw dies, this abuse escalates. Hindley, who had been away for three years, returns with a wife and orders the servants and Heathcliff to stay away from the family living quarters:<\/p>\n Hindley \u2026 won\u2019t let him sit with us, nor eat with us any more; and, he says, he and I must not play together, and threatens to turn him out of the house if we break his orders. He has been blaming our father \u2026 for treating H. too liberally; and swears he will reduce him to his right place.<\/em><\/p>\n Catherine and Heathcliff, however, remain inseparable. Cathy teaches Heathcliff everything she learns. In a key episode, they roam over to Thrushcross Grange, home of the Linton family, the largest capitalist landowners in the area. It is very different to the Heights \u2013 a Victorian mansion furnished in the most expensive style. Mr and Mrs Linton are absent; Edgar and his sister Isabella are seen violently pulling a dog between them for pleasure, a thing Heathcliff cannot comprehend.<\/p>\n When the Lintons become aware of two onlookers outside, whom they mistake to be after the rent money, they let the bulldog loose on them, and it gets a hold of Catherine. When they are brought into the Linton house, Heathcliff is sent away, whereas Catherine is deemed respectable and treated for her wounds. She stays five weeks and returns a young lady.<\/p>\n Increasingly, Catherine is sucked into the prevalent class values, spending less time with Heathcliff and more with the Lintons. Unsurprisingly for the reader of Victorian novels, Edgar asks Catherine to marry him. However, contrary to Victorian expectations, Bront\u00eb makes clear that Catherine\u2019s acceptance signifies her betrayal of Heathcliff, of their absolute loyalty, of their impassioned and classless relationship.<\/p>\n Catherine reveals to the housekeeper Nelly Dean that it would degrade her to marry Heathcliff. Heathcliff overhears this but disastrously does not hear her continue:<\/p>\n He shall never know how I love him; and that not because he’s handsome, Nelly, but because he’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same; and Linton’s is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire.<\/em><\/p>\n Catherine\u2019s bowing to money and convention triggers the tragedy. Heathcliff, devastated, leaves Wuthering Heights, not to return for three years.<\/p>\n The turn of events in the second half of the novel is unprecedented for the Victorian and uncomfortable for the modern reader. Heathcliff has acquired money and an understanding of law. He returns to \u201csettle my score with Hindley; and then prevent the law by doing execution on myself\u201d<\/em>, but Catherine\u2019s welcome rekindles all the old passion. Heathcliff puts into operation a plan that is designed to beat class society at its own game. He gambles with Hindley, taking his property. He marries Isabella Linton in order to gain Linton property. He treats Isabella brutally, as just what she is in terms of Victorian law \u2013 his property. Interestingly Heathcliff tells Nelly about Isabella:<\/p>\n No brutality disgusted her: I suppose she has an innate admiration of it, if only her precious person were secure from injury! \u2026 set his (Edgar\u2019s, JF) fraternal and magisterial heart at ease: that I keep strictly within the limits of the law. I have avoided, up to this period, giving her the slightest right to claim a separation; \u2026<\/em><\/p>\n Edgar makes clear their new relationship: \u201cshe is only my sister in name: not because I disown her, but because she has disowned me.\u201d <\/em>Who disowns whom is a matter for the reader to decide. The institution of the Victorian family as a harbour of humanity is shattered at every level.<\/p>\n Heathcliff becomes master of Wuthering Heights and many years after Catherine\u2019s death forces a marriage between his weakling son Linton, \u201cmy property\u201d<\/em>, and Catherine\u2019s daughter Cathy, again to acquire Linton property. He even imprisons Cathy to do so. Interestingly, Linton immediately turns tyrant to Cathy:<\/p>\n She\u2019s my wife, and it\u2019s shameful that she should wish to leave me. He says she hates me and wants me to die, that she may have my money; but she shan\u2019t have it: and she shan\u2019t go home! She never shall! \u2026. uncle is dying, truly, at last. I\u2019m glad, for I shall be master of the Grange after him. Catherine always spoke of it as <\/em>her<\/em> house. It isn\u2019t hers! It\u2019s mine: papa says everything she has is mine.<\/em><\/p>\n With this action, Heathcliff parodies, in a grotesque way, Catherine\u2019s class marriage to Edgar. In the likely event of son Linton\u2019s death, Heathcliff not Catherine would inherit. Everything is turned into its monstrous extreme.<\/p>\n Hindley\u2019s son Hareton, who resembles both the young Catherine and Heathcliff remarkably, is Heathcliff\u2019s fiercest and most loyal defender. And despite himself and his best laid plans, Heathcliff likes Hareton. Heathcliff treats Hareton and the servants at the Heights without much social difference. They all work, live and eat together. Women coming to the house, such as Isabella and later Cathy Linton, are stripped of their property, by marriage, and of their class comforts. They work for their living.<\/p>\n The only person who enjoys a work-free existence is son Linton, whom Heathcliff despises but has educated. When he is dying, shortly after his marriage to Cathy, Heathcliff comments: \u201cbut his life is not worth a farthing, and I won\u2019t spend a farthing on him.\u201d<\/em> Repeatedly, the reader is shocked at the lack of sentimentality. Over and over, we are confronted with the reality of cash nexus and the law.<\/p>\n Hareton, Hindley\u2019s son, is not educated and cannot read, write or use numbers. Again, this is in keeping with the rules of class society \u2013 why educate a farm worker? Heathcliff has pared down all his dealings to the bare logic of capitalist rationality. There are no frills, no pretences of kindness. Heathcliff\u2019s tenants too are treated roughly. There is no humanity. It is only in this stark, unmasked form that readers realise this is the true nature of their own society. It is hyperbole, yes, but for that reason all the more effective in revealing the essence.<\/p>\n The union of Hareton and Cathy, which concludes the novel, is a rebellion against a world governed by the iron grip of inhumanity. Although they will overcome the property barrier with their marriage, they will accommodate themselves in the \u2018respectable\u2019, \u2018civilised\u2019 Thrushcross Grange. And yet there is hope for a relationship of equality, untypical of the Victorian era.<\/p>\n What remains with the reader, however, is the tragedy of Catherine and Heathcliff whose absolute freedom from all the dictates of class and hierarchy was the essence of their relationship. This kind of relationship is doomed. That is the tragedy.<\/p>\n I often think of Heathcliff in today\u2019s world, as the ruling class increasingly reveals its profoundly barbaric nature. There is ever less pretence of culture and humanity. Education and health care are business, the state extracts itself progressively from a duty of care. Politicians set ever-decreasing value on a shallow veneer of humanity. We are seeing the beast for what it is, perhaps most grotesquely in Donald Trump, but certainly not only in him. The difference to Heathcliff is that Heathcliff cannot reach personal fulfilment by living this way. He wreaks revenge on the class system, but the price is his own humanity, indeed his life. Class society is the root cause of Heathcliff\u2019s inhumanity.<\/p>\n Bront\u00eb does not spell this out in quite these words. Her very clever and innovative narrative ensures that the reader is taken in by the double, prejudiced Victorian class lens of Mr Lockwood and Nelly Dean. Even Isabella\u2019s letter, the only verbatim document apart from Heathcliff and Catherine\u2019s direct speech, quoted by Nelly and filtered again via Lockwood, expresses her class point of view. Therefore, the reader has to do what readers of the bourgeois press must do daily: read between the lines and presume that we are dealing with half-truths, omissions and fake news.<\/p>\n Heathcliff only responds humanely when he is with Catherine, and in his torment after she dies. They can only be together in death, buried beside each other outside the church: \u201con a green slope in a corner of the kirk-yard, where the wall is so low that heath and bilberry-plants have climbed over it from the moor; and peat-mould almost buries it.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n The sides of their coffins are open to each other. Heathcliff\u2019s love for Catherine, is his humanity, and it is a world apart from Victorian class marriage. In their relationship of unequivocal equality Emily Bront\u00eb anticipates a more humane society, one that reaches far beyond hierarchical systems. It reaches into a time when unequal gender difference is replaced by an equality of personhood. In her subtle, utopian vision, Emily Bront\u00eb anticipates a humane society, unrestrained by the class-based laws that Heathcliff reveals to be barbaric.<\/p>\n If the meaning of life is to create conditions that are commensurate with humanity, then Emily Bront\u00eb\u2019s remarkable novel highlights this. Her dream is yet to be achieved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Jenny Farrell discusses \u2018Wuthering Heights\u2019, and its subtle, skilful imagining of a more humane, classless society, where unequal gender difference is replaced by an equality of personhood….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":456,"featured_media":12642,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1661],"tags":[2175],"class_list":["post-12643","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fiction-2","tag-wuthering-heights"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12643","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/456"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12643"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12643\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12642"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12643"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12643"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12643"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Emily](\"images\/culture\/CM_Misc\/CN_pomes\/Emily_Bronte_2.jpg\")
<\/p>\n