The Psychology of Loneliness in 'Wuthering Heights.'

Abstract

As Walter Allen has observed, Wuthering Heights utterly unlike any other novel.(1) Historically, most celebrated aspect of its uniqueness concerns portrayal of character. According to E. M. Forster, the emotions of Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw function differently to other emotions in fiction.(2) But psychological strangeness of these two figures has undermined their intelligibility. Bernard Paris points out several critics who do not regard Heathcliff as mimetic character--that is, one whose function is to represent a person.(3) Similarly, Joyce Carol Oates finds Catherine's unusual fixation on her own childhood inaccessible to analysis: why, as a married woman of nineteen, she should know herself irrevocably `changed'--the novel does not presume to explain.(4) Mr. Lockwood, primary narrator of novel, has also aroused perplexity. David Sonstream judges Lockwood's character to be incoherent because he alternately happy warrior and repressive milksop.(5) Dorothy Van Ghent sees Lockwood's famous nightmare of Catherine's ghost as somehow extraneous to its dreamer and result of autonomous powers of darkness.(6) Ruth Adams argues that nightmare contaminates Lockwood with violence proper to Wuthering Heights.(7) The difficulty of explaining these three characters has led many critics to approach Emily Bronte's fiction with aid of psychological theory. Freud is theorist most frequently invoked(8) but there are several others, as evident for example in Paris's attempt to define Heathcliff in nomenclature of Karen Horney as an arrogant-vindictive personality and in Pratt's Jungian linking of both Heathcliff and Catherine with [d]ying-god archetype.(9) Other critics found explication of character on fundamental oppositions detected in text and corresponding (in most cases) to two households depicted in novel, Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange. Even a short list of these polarities is impressively varied: the land of storm and the home of calm (Cecil), Hell and Heaven (Gilbert and Gubar), the Sexual and the Spiritual (Prentis), classless society and hierarchal society (Winnifreth), disappearing farm culture and emerging Victorian gentility (Q. D. Leavis), savagery and civilization (Reed), patriarchal society and negated feminine authority (Lavabre).(10) Though each interpretation enhances our understanding of novel, none has approached consensual acceptance. Indeed, in 1964 Mildred Christian could already observe that [t]he contradictory judgments on Wuthering Heights are most striking fact in its critical history.(11) More recently, both Miller and Baldridge have insisted that novel lacks any central or formative principle by which its meaning can be comprehensively explicated.(12) Mid such boisterous disagreement, there remains opportunity to combine psychological and polarizing approaches in order to explain Heathcliff, Catherine, and Lockwood in terms of a distinctly Brontean psychology embedded in text and founded on fundamental polarities of their own experience. The prominent role played by Catherine's ghost in lives of both Heathcliff and Lockwood can serve as an introduction. As we shall see, most important afterlife in world of Emily Bronte is life after childhood--the persistence in adulthood of attitude toward love acquired in childhood. Wuthering Heights explores two types of defective love in childhood, each barring path to fulfilling love in adulthood. For reference purposes, they can be named descriptively as Unlove and Overlove. The Earnshaw family of Wuthering Heights is representative household of Unlove where childhood is an experience of neglect, abuse, and rejection. In contrast, Linton family of Thrushcross Grange is representative household of Overlove with its tendency to overprotect and coddle children, treating them as petted things. …