Emily Brontë: The enduring enigma of Wuthering Heights

"Whatever our souls are made out of, his and mine are the same." It is her 200 years, Emily Brontë is in the news, and the current commentaries on her lone novel Wuthering Heights, continue to alternately occupy the two distinct poles of adulation and condemnation. While there are some who feel there is inexplicable magic to the book, perhaps embodied by the wild play of passion played out in the rocky landscape of the Yorkshire moors, embedded with elements of gothic, the detractors describe the book as unreadable. However, the chorus on the other end claims, with equal vehemence, that having been anointed a classic along the way, this story of impossible love holds a strange power.

Where, then, does the book get its power?

Emily Brontë's characters are repositories of raw energy that is seductive but also intimidating. Not for her, the propriety and social decorum of the Victorians. Something here needs to be said about her own purported withdrawn nature. The Brontës were a reclusive family, and being home-schooled, the company of the motherless siblings seldom extended to friendships outside the family mould. Branwell, the brother, with his own share of psychological problems, is said to have been once gifted a box of toy soldiers. The many hours of imaginative play with these toys led to the creation of fantasy worlds which transmute in their later writings. These experiences of a cosseted existence in their family home might have led to the two contrasting worlds of Wuthering Heights: The natural/elemental/brutality of Wuthering Heights and the cultured/cultivated/sanctuary of Thrushcross Grange. Therein is the clash of the two worldviews- Romantic and Victorian. This conflict is at the heart of the book.

For all his benign goodness, Edgar Linton can never aspire to the raw energy of a Heathcliff. His hypocrisy is exposed in his cold rejection of his sister Isabella when she marries against his wishes. His attempts to take care of Catherine are attempts to hold on to a sterile marriage, and subscribe to the unimaginative dictum of 'everything in its place and a place for everything.' And while Catherine can get respectability in the manicured confines of Thrushcross Grange, she will forever pine for the effortless vitality of Heathcliff's love. Her recurring bouts of sickness is a case in point. Heathcliff calls Linton out thus: "He might as well plant an oak in a flower pot and expect it to thrive, as imagine he can restore her to vigour in the soil of his shallow cares…"

Heathcliff is the unloved intruder into the Earnshaw family and is shunned as a nomad without pedigree. Additionally, he is seen as a potential usurper. He is the dweller of the shadows and is incessantly eavesdropping. Catherine's love is his sanctuary in a hostile universe. The intensity of their passion is played out in dark stormy nights. Once this is established, it becomes the throbbing energy in the narrative. Heathcliff's universe goes awry when Catherine decides to marry Linton for his money. The lovers, however, cannot help their passion and hereon their acts are not only subversive to the institution of marriage but become obsessive to the extent of becoming selfish and downright evil. There is no justification of Heathcliff's seduction of Isabella to settle scores with Linton. He keeps becoming progressively dark, bringing children into his ambit of revenge. Till it is crime of passion, it is tolerable, but as a crime of humanity, there is no redemption. And this is precisely what the readers have found abominable. The dark hero becomes evil incarnate. It becomes impossible to sympathise with him.

However, two things redeem the book today. One, to see Heathcliff not in the matrix of social respectability but more as a primaeval psyche driven by the desire to be loved. By moving away from the binary of good and evil, Brontë was perhaps prefiguring the thrust on Freudian psychoanalysis. His struggle is the struggle to be loved. He makes himself totally hateful, beyond redemption and just as he is becoming totally dark, he once again tugs at the readers' hearts for being so naïve as to destroy himself in love.

The other is the rebelliousness of young Cathy, the lone voice of sanity in a highly twisted universe. She is the book lover and the one character who stands up against Heathcliff. When she discovers that her books have been burnt, she hence challenges Heathcliff: "But I've most of them (books) written on my brain and printed in my heart and you cannot deprive me of those."

In so doing, Brontë rearranges the thrust of women's writing of the nineteenth century.

The author has been a Fulbright Fellow and teaches English Literature at a college in Chandigarh