#it's probably i've just read so many essays now i more flippant about the ideas that don't make sense to me

[dahlia-coccinea]

I reread Patsy Stoneman’s essay, “Catherine Earnshaw's Journey to Her Home among the Dead: Fresh Thoughts on Wuthering Heights and 'Epipsychidion,” and my feelings towards it pretty similar to how I feel about J. Hillis Miller’s essays. I enjoyed reading it but I don’t agree with 85% of it. I haven’t reread any of Miller’s takes (since there are a plethora of metaphysical interpretations it would be so repetitive) and that probably allows for me to still appreciate his essays as much as I do...I think rereading Stoneman’s essay was a bad idea because reading it a second time made it much less enjoyable and I read it much more critically.

There are a lot of similarities between the metaphysical and Romantic love narratives, and they also share a lot of the same failings. They tend to be very selective about what scenes are analyzed and they aren’t put into a larger context, and they tend to be the most poetic scenes. Typically these arguments cannot place the meaning of the 2nd generation into the context of the novel either. I’ve already said quite a bit about the metaphysical arguments, so I’m going to try and discuss just the points in this specific essay. Sorry parts may be a little repetitive because critics often bring up the same quotes and ideas again and again. And this will be very long.

First, Stoneman identifies that there are two popular theories about Catherine and Heathcliff’s relationship: “One is the myth of star-crossed lovers, who are cheated of marriage by social forces,” and then the metaphysical argument which, “presents Catherine and Heathcliff’s love as of a kind which is in itself incapable of social consummation.” She then volunteers a third option that is based on concepts of free love and/or “twin love” that can found in Romantic literature.

It is interesting, but I’m pretty sure Catherine also thinks she betrayed her own heart? She does tell Nelly she knows in her heart and soul she shouldn’t marry Edgar, and on her deathbed, she says “If I’ve done wrong, I’m dying for it.” I know some take it to mean she thinks that she didn’t do what was wrong to her, but she does add “You left me too” so I think she does agree with Heathcliff that she, in a way, left him. 

There is ample room in the novel to compare Heathcliff and Edgar as there are few similarities between them. The society in which they live is violent and hierarchical and that never seems to be questioned by any character - I think that is an important backdrop and allows for commentary on class, race, and gender. I don’t think this particularly has to do with how we view exclusive relationships. And based on the reasons Catherine gives for why she would marry one and not the other, I think Catherine understands she is limited by this society. Her reasons for marrying Edgar are all very practical.

Instead of any fulfillment, from the start, Nelly says Catherine struggled and had an “objection to her two friends meeting at all.” Catherine is aware they dislike each other from the start and this makes things more difficult for her as Hindley wants her to marry Edgar, Heathcliff is more and more remote, and the two of them are stuck suffering Hindley’s cruelty. Nelly even says during this time, “I’ve had many a laugh at her perplexities and untold troubles, which she vainly strove to hide from my mockery.” If what Stoneman says is true she would have to be beyond naive, if not utterly foolish, to think that a relationship with both Edgar and Heathcliff would be desirable for spiritual fulfillment after Heathcliff’s treatment at the Grange, or his throwing applesauce on Edgar (which this scene brings her to tears and she blames Edgar for Heathcliff’s resulting punishment). 

Stoneman does attempt to reconcile the Catherine confiding in Nelly that she knows in her heart and soul she is wrong to accept Linton’s proposal - she says this statement is negated by her insistence of never being parted from Heathcliff and that therefore means her love for him must simply be different and Romantic, rather than romantic/marriage-oriented. I’ve written a lot about this already but so I’ll just say that is pretty selective of the whole conversation with Nelly. 

Stoneman says, that from this scene and how we see Catherine greet Heathcliff this shows, “No sense of tragic irony seems to enter into her consciousness, nor any foreboding of difficulties.”? Seems to be a bit of an overstatement when you consider that Edgar’s proposal brings Catherine to tears because she feels she isn’t meant to be with him. She doesn’t excitedly tell Nelly that she loves them both, and she doesn’t seem very optimistic when she says Edgar, “must shake off his antipathy, and tolerate him, at least.” While idealistic in thinking Edgar would help Heathcliff she is still pragmatic in understanding how few options she has. She fears Heathcliff listening to this conversation and will be hurt by this, or him finding out how much she loves him. Is her "delirious” joy upon Heathcliff’s return really a sign of her lack of conformity and utter loss at understanding their jealously? Or is it more likely because she thought he might be dead for those three years? She also tirelessly spends the next 3 months balancing Heathcliff’s dislike of Edgar (which I believe also spurs her to continue concealing her feelings towards him), Edgar’s jealously, and a new fun problem: Isabella’s infatuation with Heathcliff. 

I won’t go into too much detail in this because it’s so similar to the metaphysical argument, but Stoneman notes that in Shelley’s ‘Epipsychidion’ there isn’t just the concept of free love but of “twin love” between 2 of the 3 person triangle, so it assumes that Catherine/Heathcliff could more platonic or at least asexual. 

In this interpretation Catherine “revises the traditional masculinity” of the “Romantic lover:” 

“Shelly’s experiment depended on women’s readiness to be generous and co-operative, and Catherine’s similar plan founders on the combative notion of masculinity endorsed by our culture. Attempting to ‘divide’ her love between men who seem to her too different to be rivals, she finds them transformed into the ‘chained friend’ and ‘jealous foe’ of convention.”

I don’t agree with the idea that Catherine sees them as too different to be rivals? She does compare them which casts them as two men vying for the position of her husband. Also, she based her decision to marry one and not the other on socioeconomic advantage, not who she loves more, or how they differ as people and might give her different kinds of love, although she points out her changing/more superficial and limited love for Edgar compared to the love she has for Heathcliff which are like the “eternal rocks beneath.”

Her love for Edgar is full of stipulations - she would “only pity him—hate him, perhaps, if he were ugly, and a clown.” Heathcliff’s degraded state does nothing to change her love, which is why I say her love for them is unequal. I honestly think saying she loves them equally yet differently, or that she is totally unaware of their jealousies is so preposterous based on the text, I don’t understand how so many critics, that have written extensively on the book all parrot it? Yet Stoneman continues to assert Catherine is “innocent” and “baffled” by their jealously. With almost everything she says about Catherine I find myself thinking, “well yes, but no?” For example, with this idea: 

“Catherine’s apparent self-destruction has to be seen, not as willful egotism, but as a despairing response to her two lovers’ failure to love her enough to share her attention”

I do think this is mostly true. It is not willful egotism, and she is upset that they can’t tolerate each other - but Catherine’s illness is a long-running problem that is closely associated with her relationship with Heathcliff and his absence that began after he first runs away. Through the next three years, she says she “endured very, very bitter misery.” I’d say it has nothing to do with her feelings towards Edgar who she has been making herself distant during this whole time while telling Heathcliff (in spirit since he isn’t actually in the room): “If I dare you now, will you venture? If you do, I’ll keep you.”

Again I do somewhat agree with Stoneman’s interpretation of Catherine telling Heathcliff, “you and Edgar have broken my heart,” which Stoneman says, “can only be explained if we accept that while Catherine still relates to both her lovers, Edgar and Heathcliff have broken her heart by defining love as exclusive.” I think they do break her heart by their selfishness over her, and I think she never intends to hurt either of them. She has at different times suffered to protect one or the other. But this still doesn’t change her stronger, unconditional, yet socially unacceptable and thwarted love for Heathcliff. Her issue isn’t the loss of Edgar, they broke her heart by both behaving in a way that cast Heathcliff from her company. Divorce was not really an option for her - the most dysfunctional couple in the novel, Heathcliff and Isabella, never legally separate even. So why wouldn’t she try to keep the peace between them to be near Heathcliff? The Romantic love interpretation is difficult to reconcile with her rejection of Edgar which happens on a few occasions and most apparent when she tells him, “What you touch at present you may have; but my soul will be on that hill top before you lay hands on me again. I don’t want you, Edgar: I’m past wanting you. Return to your books. I’m glad you possess a consolation, for all you had in me is gone.” 

As the essay went on I felt it got weaker. Stoneman says Catherine’s haunting of Heathcliff must be read as an “appeal against his failures of generosity.” Not because she wishes she was never parted from him, as Catherine herself said? Catherine doesn’t seem to die with any animosity towards Heathcliff - she forgives him for leaving her, asks for forgiveness, and tells him, “You never harmed me in your life.” 

**** EDIT *** I just meant that he goal isn’t to punish Heathcliff, since before her death she makes it clear she doesn’t want to parted from him. I do prefer the theory that she she haunts him in part to call him off his revenge and harming those she loves and to bring him back to her. I don’t think her ghost is static or simply a “reward” for Heathcliff despite all the wrong he did. I think she does become “incomparably above and beyond” them all and remains a force as she was in her life. Or she could be not a ghost at all and he encounters with could be proof of Heathcliff’s madness and later becomes a simple old folktale and superstition. (I’ll admit I like to view the ghosts are real and I think there number of references to them by other characters do suggest that we are meant to read them that way). ***

After Catherine’s death, Stoneman says, “There is, after all, something in the haunting which the usual readings of the novel fail to explain. If the ghost of Catherine wails to be let in, and Heathcliff begs her to return, what is it that keeps them apart?” I think we’d have to all agree that what Lockwood saw was actually a ghost, and I have seen this interpreted a million times? Stoneman says it is Heathcliff’s own “implacable obsession with revenge, which effectively shuts her out of his consciousness.” Which I could agree if we are reading it assuming the ghosts are real...but then she says that Heathcliff reaches his heaven only as he abandons his revenge against Edgar and “at last he ‘comprehends in his person’ the preposterous simultaneity of her loves.” This made no sense to me. I don’t see any reason for thinking he begins to accept Catherine’s love for Edgar, which he kind of already had? He tells Nelly that he doesn’t physically hurt him for that reason, he just also believes she loves him more. And I would say he does defeat Edgar and Hindley? Just because he can’t also destroy Hareton and Cathy II doesn’t negate that in his lifetime he outlives his enemies and has control of everything and everyone at Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange (which he never shows signs of regretting his actions). It might not have gone as far as he originally planned, but I would say he does sort of win. And his abandonment of revenge isn’t ever associated with Edgar? Heathcliff does give some insight to what causes him to lose interest in his plot, an aspect of it being the connection to Hareton. In a discussion between him and Nelly he tells her she may think he’s insane “if I try to describe the thousand forms of past associations and ideas he (Hareton) awakens or embodies.” It is because of this intense association with him that he says, “his society is no benefit; rather an aggravation of the constant torment I suffer: and it partly contributes to render me regardless how he and his cousin go on together. I can give them no attention any more.” I believe the last time Heathcliff mentions Edgar is right after his death and he tells Nelly that, “I wish he’d been soldered in lead,” and goes on to describe yet another plot against Edgar by having his and Catherine’s graves opened on the side nearest each other so that they don’t have any barriers between them and then, "by the time Linton gets to us he’ll not know which is which!” So the idea he softens towards Edgar or becomes more willing to share Catherine in any way is...improbable to me. 

The theory also suffers (like so many others), in ignoring the ending when forming the narrative. Stoneman mentions the three graves and says that the people seeing Heathcliff and Catherine’s ghosts are basically country folk who are inclined to sympathize with “Heathcliff's final possession of his 'woman’” and also most readers fall into these same “hegemonic constructions” by not considering that the "the sleepers in that quiet earth” are at peace together. I agree with @princesssarisa that it doesn’t quite fit into the fact that many of the people that see the ghosts didn’t support or even know of Heathcliff and Catherine’s relationship - the young shepherd boy doesn’t seem to know who Catherine even is. To also say that the reader is projecting their desired ending doesn’t feel right because the ending is something that Heathcliff and Catherine have been foreshadowing through the whole book. Catherine says, “I’ll not lie there by myself: they may bury me twelve feet deep, and throw the church down over me, but I won’t rest till you are with me. I never will!” She doesn’t refer to Edgar, who she says can be buried anywhere, it doesn’t matter to her (poor Edgar). She also tells Heathcliff, “I shall not be at peace,” and “I only wish us never to be parted,” as well as other similar quotes implying that she will be waiting for Heathcliff to come to her. I don’t like the view that Catherine is so lacking agency in her relationship with Heathcliff either - I’ve never thought that he “possesses” her. She’s the one who makes the demand that he leave the world behind and join her - the end does seem to be him finally following her, as she says he always does. 

And then, what of Cathy and Hareton? How do we reconcile the narrative with the features of the second generation? It would seem, if we assume Catherine has a differing yet equal love of the two men, and wished for a relationship where they can be peaceful together, and then the only scene we have of them together is in their graves, it feels pessimistic. Our one Shelleyan model is dead and buried with two people incapable of overcoming their jealousies and possessiveness. When considering the ending with Hareton and Cathy, would we have to conclude this a cautionary tale of Catherine’s naivety? Stoneman does make almost this suggestion and says it could also be because Emily had watched Branwell and Charlotte get hurt by love married people, so it could be showing what tragedy befalls if love is selfish and possessive. Though there is nothing to suggest that Hareton and Cathy love isn’t any of those things? 

I must be terribly boring because I think the easiest way of describing Catherine and Heathcliff is that they are, “star-crossed lovers, who are cheated of marriage by social forces.” Obviously, that is simplistic and glosses over their more spiritual aspects and certainly, they are not how the 1939 film interpreted them, which Stoneman rightly says, “recasts the novel in class terms as 'the story of the stable-boy and the lady’” - but I still think its closer than saying they are models of Freudian psychology, siblings, celestial beings, or Shelleyan. There certainly is spirituality and complexities in their love, and throughout the plot, as well as other characters, but it is still very much possible to read too deeply into double meanings and what is left unsaid.

My end take - some lyricism of Epipsychidion is echoed in quotations from Catherine and I would have much preferred to compare and contrast the two works rather than the attempt to shoehorn the rest of the story into a similar narrative. I think if you made a comparison to just the part after Heathcliff returns, a really interesting and strong argument could be made about how Catherine does try to create a similar relationship as described in Shelley’s work. I don’t think the situation was ever her ideal, but she certainly has no desire to be cunning or vampish - that’s not in her nature, and her relationship with Heathcliff doesn’t necessitate them having sex. She does try to put into practice a semi-Romantic love triangle but I don’t think she harbors any delusions of Edgar’s and Heathcliff’s animosity. Rather than a bohemian approach, it is her forcefulness and controlling that keep them both at bay. Tellingly she tells Nelly, “I believe I might kill him (Edgar), and he wouldn’t wish to retaliate.” She feels confident in her sway over him to get what she wants and she wants to be able to continue her relationship with Heathcliff in any way she can. It’s not necessary to revise and add new narratives to situations in the novel that are clearly able to be discerned from the text - such as Heathcliff’s failing desire for revenge or people seeing their ghosts at the end. I don’t think Epipsychidion is a terribly good lens to read Catherine through as her love can also be jealous, selfish, and possessive. There are too many aspects of Catherine’s character that conflict with the ideas Epipsychidion expresses.

#wuthering heights #heathcliff #catherine earnshaw #emily brontë #wow that ended up being real rant-y #it's probably i've just read so many essays now i more flippant about the ideas that don't make sense to me #thoughts