Emily Brontë’s emphasis on the material world has long been noted, of course, by Marxist critics. Patsy Stoneman’s review of the political criticism of Wuthering Heights demonstrates that materialist readings have been nearly as durable as transcendental interpretations. As early as 1947, David Wilson set the novel in the context of Yorkshire’s “West Riding social history,” presenting evidence that the Brontës were intimately aware of the deprivations that industrialism thrust upon their neighboring hand-loom weavers. Wuthering Heights is not only carefully situated in time and in locale, concerned with inheritance and property, attentive to human physical comfort and brutality, and literally crawling with animals, but it also casts the metaphysical back into physical terms. Cathy’s image of heaven is conspicuously earthly; Heathcliff by name and reputation is a piece of nature, “an arid wilderness of furze and whinstone,” and Heathcliff needs Cathy’s physical presence so much that he exhumes her corpse. Even in Lockwood’s dreams, Cathy’s ghost bleeds as if it were embodied. These undeniably spiritual or metaphysical concerns are deeply intertwined with the material elements.
As critics have with increasing eclecticism tried to manage both the novel’s mythic elements and its patent materialism, it has become almost standard to read Wuthering Heights as a disjunct novel. Certainly, on the critical level, Wuthering Heights has frustrated most recognizable ways of reading mid-century British novels, deflecting especially the categories of Gothic romance on the one hand and Victorian social realism on the other. Nancy Armstrong, for instance, argues that the novel poses questions in one genre that cannot be answered by the other. And J. Hillis Miller thinks that Wuthering Heights is constructed to lure the reader further in with false promises of a secret meaning, but finally, and repeatedly, to frustrate those readerly expectations.
Without denying the uncanny repetitions of the text, or the fruitful ambiguity of its generic borrowings, I wish to place Wuthering Heights firmly in the Romantic materialist tradition, which provides a logic for its disjunctions. The late Romantic two-book culture, in which the Brontës participated, specifically features both an intimate interrelationship and an untranslatability between the natural and supernatural worlds. An unexpected twist complicates this otherwise typical Christian dualism: the soul becomes an untrustworthy monitor while the body becomes the site of authenticity and justice. Furthermore, locating childhood as the realm of the bad soul/good body frustrates the common expectation that a nineteenth-century novel should be some approximation of a bildungsroman. Wuthering Heights is not a children’s story, but fully to understand it one must read for the child in it—that is, one must resist declaring the novel ultimately frustrating if child logic turns out to furnish a better explanation of the book than the logic of maturation.
How does one revalue the child’s body, usually considered the inferior husk from which our privileged adult psyche emerges? How do you make the surface into the core? Emily Brontë’s answer is to enshrine the child body in a book. As a Romantic materialist, Brontë doesn’t deconstruct the binary of body and soul, outside and inside, but rather inverts the traditional priority in order to reawaken the strangeness of the dualism. The result is a mythic novel that enshrines within it the healthy child body—“half-savage, and hardy and free”—as well as its material locale, the West Riding of Yorkshire, with its values of fierce loyalty and flat-footed impatience with compromise. The sense of formal unity is, I believe, more than an elaborate illusion; the concentric frames of narrative function to build desire for the core, investing it with value as the central concern of the novel. As Beth Newman writes of frame narratives: “As we pass from teller to teller, peeling back one story to discover another as though peeling an onion, we progress not only through time but also toward some goal that seems the more powerful and important for being so palpably within. What is startlingly original is that the inner experience for which this text provokes desire is not that of the psyche, nor that of transcendental mystery, but rather that of the full, ravenous physicality of childhood.
Janis McLarren Caldwell, "Wuthering Heights and Domestic Medicine: The Child's Body and the Book," in the Norton Critical Editions version of Wuthering Heights
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