Wuthering Heights and the Enigma of Heathcliff
- Chris Millton
- 5 hours ago
- 21 min read
Heathcliff is an enigma who must and can only remain an enigma. The unknowability of his origins, the instability of his identity, are the whole point. To argue that he is ‘from’ anywhere, or is of this or that race, is fruitless. If he is ‘from’ anywhere, it is hell, and the intention is that he be perceived as a supernatural, demonic being, and it is this that elevates the novel from Victorian melodrama to the Gothic. Wuthering Heights is formed and informed by several different narrative modes, and one of them is the changeling narrative, well-familiar to Brontë through folk tales and her beloved ballads. Heathcliff being named after Mr Earnhsaw’s dead child establishes this changeling trope. With his arrival, the happy household becomes ‘infernal’, and Heathclif becomes “a usurper of [Hindley’s] father’s affections [and] from the very beginning ... bred bad feeling in the house”, as Nelly Dean puts it. Her description of Heathcliff as ‘a cuckoo’, an unwelcome intruder who takes from others in a ‘nest’ what doesn’t rightfully belong to them, is accurate, and tells us how we are to view his function in the narrative. There is no rational explanation for Mr Earnhsaw’s bringing Heathcliff home with him, which suggests beguilement, something compounded by his equally irrational favouring of the boy, for which he remains ungrateful, and rubs in Hindley’ face.
As for Heathcliff’s ‘social status’: he goes overnight from being a homeless starveling, to the favoured son of the second richest landowner in the second largest house in the region, one in which “all the house would be obliged to bend to his wishes”. Following an interregnum, he becomes the owner of both houses. It’s being said that Heathcliff is mistreated for this or that reason in order to characterise him as a victim, but Heathcliff is not mistreated at all by a single character other than Hindley, and this is in revenge for being usurped (a usurpation the begins with Heathcliff’s symbolic breaking of Hindley’s violin, a gift from his father) in his rightful place in the family, and his animosity towards Heathcliff is not without justification, however grand guignol its manifestations.
In the first part of the novel then, it is Hindley who is the ‘outcast’. There is no ‘cycle of abuse’ or ‘generational trauma’, merely Hindley, for a period (and the subject of just a few paragraphs of the book) working out his revenge on Heathcliff. Even that mistreatment has been overstated. He mistreats Catherine, whom he strikes, too, and considering that she is his sister, it’s reasonable to regard his treatment of her as worse. Heathcliff returns for a while to his actual social status, somewhat above it in fact. Rural England at the time was a place of homelessness, indigence, and semi-starvation, and the working-class population of Haworth/Gimmerton were poor, hovel-dwelling hand-loom workers with a high mortality rate. Hindley might easily have shown Heathcliff the door to join the ranks of the rural homeless, and the relowering of his social status is something to which the other servants in the house are also subject after old Mr Earnshaw’s death. Later in the novel when Catherine (from whom the harshest descriptions of Heathcliff come) calls him an “ungrateful brute”, she is being sincere.
Recently, very recently, it has been argued that Heathcliff is non-white, even a ‘person of colour’, and that the novel is ‘about’ race, racism and ‘racial tensions'. It’s time to definitively put pay to this distractive interpretational red herring, which almost has the character of a hoax or conspiracy theory. There are fourteen very brief references to Heathcliff’s appearance. None come from an omniscient narrator, confirming that Heathcliff ‘is’ this or that race; all come from characters in the novel. They are: 1. In the opening chapter, Lockwood describes him as a “dark haired gypsy in aspect” 2. Mr Earnshaw on bringing Heathcliff home describes him as “dark as if he came from the devil” 3. Lockwood describes Heathcliff’s face as being “as white as the wall behind him” 4. Nelly describes the child Heathcliff as “...a dirty, ragged black-haired child”. 5. Mrs Earnshaw calls him “that gypsy brat” and 6. Mrs Linton exclaims “Miss Earnshaw scouring the country with a gypsy!” 7. Hindley calls him a “gypsy” 8. Mr Linton describes him as that “strange acquisition my late neighbour made in his journey to Liverpool, a little Lascar, or an American or Spanish castaway” 9. Joseph calls him a “flaysome devil of a gypsy” 10. Nelly, on his return as a gentleman after three-year absence, describes him to his son as “a tall man with dark hair, and says that his face is covered in dark hair and that his face is sallow” 11. Mr Linton asks if Heathcliff is “the gypsy, the plough boy?” 12. He is described by Nelly as “that dark little thing” 13. Describing Heathcliff to his son, Nelly says he has “black hair and eyes” 14. Placating him as he compares himself to the flaxen haired, milk-skinned Edgar, Nellys says “he may have a father who is an Emperor of China or a Mother is an Indian Queen”.
That’s twenty-two words if we don’t take the sentences as a whole, if we do, it’s still fewer than fifty. Only two make direct reference to his skin, one commenting on its whiteness in a state of fear, the other calling it “sallow”, which means yellowish, and is not a synonym for “swarthy”. Four merely say his hair is “dark”, one says it is “black”. Three say he is “dark” generally, whilst he is likened to a gypsy five times. These descriptions cancel each other out: Chinese, Indian, Spaniard, gipsy and Lascar all have distinctly different physiognomies and sets of facial features, and obviously he can’t look like all of these: if he looks like one, he couldn’t look like one of the others. Apart from Nelly’s consoling words, none of these brief remarks are said to Heathcliff, but about him, in his absence, and none are connected to any action taken against him.
A ‘Lascar’ referred specifically a Malaysian or Indian sailor working for the East India Company. it’s not possible that Emily Brontë ever encountered one – she took the word from de Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater, where it features heavily. But this is not the point, because here the word is used to lampoon old Mr Linton, not to say anything about Heathcliff, and is part of scene clearly intended to mock and satirise the Linton family and, by extension, their class. (Emily had suffered the brief humiliation of being a governess for a family of like status to the Lintons and, being typically lower middle class, despised the poor and envied and held in contempt the upper classes).
Mr Linton calls Heathcliff, who is a small boy, a Lascar, yet it could only refer to an adult sailor, and was not used as a more general racial descriptor. In the same sentence, he suggests Heathcliff might also be an “American or Spanish castaway” or a gypsy, none of whom would have the Asiatic features of complexion of an Indian or Malaysian, thus this is another display of Mr Linton’s ignorant nincompoopery. More importantly, Linton calls him a “plough boy”, as Heathcliff is described as begrimed and as not having washed or changed his clothes for three months - and it is this dirtiness and unkemptness that triggers the contradictory slurs about his appearance.
The word ‘Lascar’ is the only thing – this one word – that makes any reference whatsoever to British colonialism, and it would be excessive to call it even a tangential reference. In recent years, the word ‘colonialism’ has been unaccountably used in reference to Wuthering Heights, though without anyone using it ever being able to identify which scenes, characters iamges or pieces of dialogue relate to colonialism or have any link to it. This is because there is a total absence of any of these in the novel.
It’s this tiny constellation, giving off such a meagre light, that is used to back up the claim that the book is ‘about’ racism, yet it‘s not even a minor theme. The very small number of these references to Heathcliff's appearance and origin also throw into relief just how overstated are notions of Heathcliff's supposed 'otherness'. The notion of colonialism having any bearing on the novel comes almost exclusively from young Americans viewing the novel through 2020s US race politics, informed by a deranged fantasy version of nineteenth century Britain and its demographics.
Jet black hair with brown eyes are features of not only Southern Europeans but also of many Northern Europeans and Britons – Dark Celts - particularly in Britain’s northern counties, Ireland and Wales. All are classed as white. In the Britain of the early nineteenth century, fair skin was a social signifier; it meant that you don't have to work out in the sun so your skin can stay white, whereas working class people (like ‘plough boys’) will tan and therefore be "swarthy”. ‘Black’ at that time meant dark colouring overall, and ‘black’ and ‘brown’ were complexion descriptors regularly used for Britons and Europeans: when the priapic Samual Pepys wrote in his diary of a “very pretty black women” he’d espied, he was talking about a brunette! ‘Black eyed’ was also applied to many characters in British, Scottish and Irish ballads and songs of the eighteenth and nineteenth century (often beautiful, idealised peasant girls), and the traditional song The Nut Brown Maid is about a white British girl.
Gipsy is the slurring epithet most used by characters in the novel to refer to Heathcliff. The rural working class in northern Britain, inhabitants of places like Haworth/Gimmerton, feared and despised gypsies. They were linked to curses, kidnapping children, theft, and the evil eye. ‘Gypsy’ was, and still is, used as a slur: the insult in being likened to a gypsy lies in its betokening dirtiness, poverty, supernatural evil, and criminality. Growing up on the estuarine Yorkshire/Lincolnshire borders ‘gyppo’ or ‘gypsy’ was a common insult, and for a child with black hair and brown eyes to be called a ‘black bastard’was not unusual. I have black hair and brown eyes and was not only called a ‘gyppo’, but also a ‘Paki’, but those using the slur knew very well I was neither, the insult was in the comparison – this is how insults work. It would be no slur to call an actual gypsy a gypsy, it would just be an accurate description. In my 1980s boyhood gypsies would go from village to village on a circuit, collecting scrap on a horse and trap, selling heather and clothes pegs door to door, and for seasonal agricultural work, much of which was still not mechanised (in that area of Lincolnshire, it was mostly potato picking). Children were warned by the adults to avoid them and not to annoy them, and peasanty superstitions about gypsies’ devilish powers were still very much active, and people bought something from them in order not to be cursed.
Lockwood is the first to use the word gypsy of Heathcliff; he says he is a “gypsy in aspect”. ‘In aspect’ means specifically that something or someone resembles a thing, not that it is that thing. His use of the word ‘gypsy’ is different from those of other characters in the novel, as he doesn’t use the word negatively. The literati, upper classes, middle class urbanites, and the intelligentsia, of which the Brontës were a part of, romanticised gypsies in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, not just in Britain, but across Europe, and they feature in many novels, poems, ballads and songs (the book in which they feature most heavily in this romanticised form is Jan Potocki’s 1805 novel Manuscript Found at Saragossa). They were romanticised as free, and close to nature, and there were many idealised ‘portraits’ of them painted. A late iteration of this is D H Lawrence’s 1926 novella The Virgin and the Gipsy (in the 1970s, during the folk revival, there was a resurgence of this idealisation of gipsies and the freedom of gipsy life and in 1970 there was a film adaptation of Lawrence’s book starring an Italian, Franco Nero as the gipsy). Lockwood’s likening Heathcliff to a gypsy when he first meets him is therefore a part of this character’s ongoing comedy of naïve misapprehension.
Lockwood specifies a “dark haired gypsy” because there were other types, gypsies who were not dark. In the UK Romani gypsies are officially classified as ‘white’: the blonde haired and blued eyed Robert Plant is a Romani, as is actor Michael Caine, 70s teenage fap fodder David Essex, and the somewhat darker Charlie Chaplin. The origins of Roma gypsies are in northern India, and they have strong genetic links to the pale Dam people of that region. They left in around 1000 CE, scattered and settled across the Balkans, the Middle East, Persia and Europe, and assimilated with other races, leading to a wide variety of skin tones and hair colouring, first coming to Britain in the mid sixteenth century. They stopped looking phenotypically like Indians over 800 years ago.
The idea then that Heathcliff is ‘non white’, or that the book is ‘about racism’ or ‘racial tensions’ bears no close examination. The only thing that can be said for certain is that Heathcliff is not Anglo-Saxon in origin and has black hair, brown eyes and a sallow or dark complexion. He could be a Dark Celt (a good example of which would be Scottish actor Sean Connery), a gipsy, or a southern European. None of these are regarded as ‘people of colour’ (a phrase that was only coined in the 1970s) or ‘non-white’, or as ‘racial others’. In the mid nineteenth-century the non-white population of the United Kingdom was less than 0.01%. Over one hundred years later, in 1945, it still hadn’t quite reached 1%. Almost all of this near-0.01% lived in port towns and in the portside areas of those towns. They were largely were sailors and dockworkers, with some prostitutes, and many were transient. Not only had most people in Britain not seen a non-white, many had not even seen anyone from the neighbouring town or village by the time they died. When Nelly tells Lockwood that they “don’t take well to foreigners in these parts”, she’s talking about the reception of Frances, Hindley’s wife, who is simply not from Yorkshire. In Yorkshire and neighbouring Lincolnshire people from outside those counties, and particularly those from the South of England, are still strongly disdained, with Londoners held in particular contempt.
In other words, there simply weren’t enough people of other races in the country for race or racism to be an issue, which is why there is not a single record or report of racial tensions or violence in Britain during this period. The first violent incidents around race in Britain (aside from sporadic attacks on Jews over the centuries) were disturbances and small riots in several port towns, including Hull, Liverpool and Glasgow in 1919, in the aftermath of the First World War. These were due to tensions and resentments among dock workers and sailors over their wages being undercut by foreigners. Until this, there was nothing, and the numbers of those involved in these disturbances, whites and non-whites combined, was less than 1000 people.
Some have gone even further, to claim that Heathcliff was, or “could have been” ❋black. Firstly, if Heathcliff were black, how could he have had a blonde and blue-eyed child, as he does. This on its own should be enough. Secondly, if Heathcliff was black, he’d have been referred to as a ‘blackamoor’, ‘Ethiopian’, ‘Negro’ or ‘Moor’ or, if mixed-race, a ‘mulatto’. Thirdly, if Heathcliff had been black, there would have been reference to him having the facial features, hair, and colouring of a black person, but there are none. Fourthly, a well-to-do Yorkshire farmer adopting a black child would have called forth not only radically different reactions from locals and family, but would have been a national cause celebre. Fifthly, if Heathcliff had been black it would, logically, have been impossible for a character to have likened him to a gipsy, Lascar or Spaniard. Finally, if Heathcliff were black there would be no ambiguity as to his origins, one of the core meanings of the narrative.
The fact that Mr Earnshaw goes to and finds Heathcliff in Liverpool (in the capacity of a livestock farmer and trader), and that Liverpool was a centre for slave trading, is cited to back up this daft claim. But it involves a fundamental misunderstanding of the slave trade. Not only was Liverpool not swarming with African slaves, there were none at all present: the slave trade was triangular in structure, and Liverpool was one of the British ports where the goods exchanged for slaves (who were picked up in Africa, then deposited in the Americas or British West Indies) were sold and traded, not the slaves themselves. It’s true that there were exceptions, comprising the black African servants (not slaves) employed by several aristocratic families scattered around the country, but their numbers were less than negligible.
Marxist critic Terry Eagleton argues, not unconvincingly, that Heathcliff could be Irish, but misses the point that a final pinning down of his identity subverts the intentions of the novel, although Irishness is without doubt one of the elements that makes up Heathcliff’s unstable, patchworked identity. In the mid-nineteenth century, someone who looked like Colin Farrell would have been described as ‘black Irish’, and hundreds of thousands of Irish-speaking, completely indigent Irish had disembarked in Liverpool in the 1840s. The Brontë’s father Patrick, who before becoming a clergyman, had been a blacksmith, weaver and school teacher, was Irish, raised in one-room hovel. It’s been claimed that Patrick tried to hide his Irish background, and he did change the family surname from Brunty to Brontë but he, and the rest of the family, spoke with broad Irish accents that they made no effort to hide (what rendered Patrick an eccentric recluse was the death of his wife, from which he never recovered). Whilst it’s true that the family were seen by the poorer residents of Haworth as interlopers, the resentment was class-based. Anyone outside of Yorkshire was considered an outsider, and regarded with hostility – they didn’t ned to be Irish.
The Brontës’ Irish grandfather had been an orphan, like Heathcliff, and their uncle had been discovered as a stowaway on a ship travelling between Liverpool and Ireland, both of whom, consciously or not, must have gone into the creation of Heathcliff. There’s something of her father, too in Heathcliff, and of Jack Sharp, the adopted nephew of her relative John Walker, who took possession of Walker’s estate before eventually being ousted again by his sons: like Heathcliff, this interloper obsessively nursed his revenge, which he took by befriending one of his cousins, Sam Stead, and deliberately ruining him with drink and gambling.
But all of the foregoing is beside the point. For its not a matter of who Heathcliff is, but what he is. This is boldly announced at the novel’s opening when Mr Earnshaw says that is “it is dark as if it came from the devil”. It is the operative word, and the changeling and infernality tropes are later confirmed in Hindley’s “beggarly interloper ... imp of Satan”. Heathcliff is a literary construct, a wordpuppet with so many amalgamated literary and personal sources that he’s worthy of his own The Road to Xanadu treatment. Emily Brontë’s lifeworld was so constrained and remarkably isolated and asocial that the novel is necessarily a book made of books. Influenced strongly by German Romantic Literature, which she read in the original German, particularly the uncanny tales of ETA Hoffman, her protagaonist is also an amalgam of characters found in fairy tales, a malign Dick Whittington or Cinderella, the Demon Lover of balladry and folk tale, the ‘Gipsy Laddie’ of song, of Byron’s Manfred and Conrad and Byron himself, and of Milton’s Satan (Patrick Brontë could recite the whole of Paradise Lost, something extraordinary then, miraculous now).
Emily Brontë’s notoriously severe moral †rectitude precludes the idea of Heathcliff as romantic hero. Though strongly influenced by Milton’s Satan, he has none of his fallen grandeur, and is in fact a very petty demon. Heathcliff is avaricious, pettily vindictive, churlish, morose, violent and vengeful, irreligious, a wannabe adulterer, a domestic abuser, a child abuser, kidnapper, and a sadistic killer of animals - a capital crime for Brontë who loved them and preferred them to humans. All ignoble traits in a man without even a hint of charm, and with no saving graces. All of the natural imagery used for Heathcliff is negative, and based around hardness, barrenness and sterility, and the child that he fathers is sickly, peevish, and short-lived.
Charlotte Brontë, the only person to have discussed the novel with Emily, was correct in her moral judgement of Heathcliff, who “stands unredeemed; never once wavering in his arrow-straight course to perdition ... an evil beast ... waiting his time to spring and destroy”, and about his identity, “he was neither Lacar nor gypsy, but a man’s shape animated by a demon of life – a ghoul”. The more positive perceptions of Heathcliff have been heavily influenced by cinema adaptations intent on turning this grim tale of monomania, hate and revenge, peopled exclusively by maniacs, into a romance. In the second half of the novel, Heathcliff becomes a stock figure of Northern European fairy tale, the paternal ogre who must be defeated by children, “a creature of the northern mists ... a gnome” as Philip Larkin put it. There is a love story in Wuthering Heights, one that is charming, convincing and amusing, whose protagonists, Hareton and the younger Cathy, defeat this ogre, Brontë’s avatar of vindictive hate. The moral and emotional heart of the book is Cathy civilising this Caliban figure with books. Books, for an author for whom literature and reading was a kind of religion, are the novel’s central image, and its punctum is Hareton’s accepting a book from the younger Catherine.
Wuthering Heights is a very funny book – Lockwood, young Linton Nelly and Joseph are all gleefully depicted comic turns. But I include in that comedy the novel’s relentless gloom, and ‡the ‘passion’ between Cathy and Heathcliff, which I find bathetic – melodramatic scenes and speeches of the “you’d have to have a heart of stone not to laugh” variety. And I’m not even sure that this comicality is unintentional on Brontë’s part. It’s certainly not a depiction of normal romantic love, or an erotic attraction between two adults; as Virginia Woolf, who disliked the novel, put it, “there is love, but it is not the love of men and women”.
Cathy is not romantically or sexually attracted to Heathcliff: what she suffers from is nostalgia for her childhood, of which Heathcliff was a part and is a reminder: “I wish I were a girl again, half savage, and hardy, and free” – although she still is a girl, just nineteen, when she dies. It’s significant that Cathy moves away from Heathcliff at the same time as her pubescence, when she becomes intent on seducing and bagging Edgar Linton, of whom she says, “I love the ground under his feet, and the air over his head, and everything he touches, and every word he says, I love all his looks, and all his action, and him entirely, and altogether”. The non-sensual nature of Catherine’s relationship to Heathcliff is not reciprocated, though this is something we have to surmise, as there is a complete lack of sensuousness in the language: it’s an exceptionally chaste novel, and we assume carnality only from the appearance of children.
Catherine’s suggestion to Edgar that he accept Heathcliff as a ‘friend’ to both of them also illustrates the sexless nature of her attachment, and it is to Heathcliff that she expresses her desire to have several sons fathered by Edgar. The only intimate contact we see between Heathcliff and Cathy is when she “bestowed seven or eight kisses on his cheek” on her return from Thrushcross Grange – when she is twelve years old. (It amazes me how a soft porn fantasy could have been extrapolated from so little.) Heathcliff himself disabuses the even half-observant reader of any notion of him as a romantic hero, describing to Nelly the “fabulous notion” Isabella has of him as “hero of romance”, even after she’s watched him hang her dog, as “genuine idiocy” - a misapprehension he brutalises her out of, but which some readers are unaccountably still subject to.
The nugatory so-called love scenes between them are a matter of a very small amount of dialogue and a few short monologues, barely a couple of pages, and we see them together in the novel only a few times, briefly. Vowing, nursing, and carrying out revenge following romantic rejection is pathological, if not psychotic behaviour, and Heathcliff’s conduct during catherine’s illness would in modern parlance be labelled ‘stalking’. Worse, he even wants revenge on his so-called beloved, wishing upon her suffering even after her death: “if you fancy I’ll suffer unrevenged, I’ll convince you to the contrary ... may you not rest as long as I am living”. He then abuses and torments the daughter of his ‘beloved’, and swindles her out of her property. All in all, not a great catch – he’s not even good looking. Catherine is sincere when she calls him an “ungrateful brute” and “a miserable, degraded character”. “Shall I pity you”, she cries”, “not I. You have killed me and thriven on it, I think. How strong you are! How many years do you mean to live after I am gone.” For me this section of the book is the weakest, Victorian melodrama at its shrillest, in part because there’s simply not enough in the foregoing narrative to justify it. Heathcliff dashing his head against a tree trunk and howling like a beast, Catherine bashing her head against the sofa and "biting her pillow to shreds”. Ludicrous.
Heathcliff and Cathy were brought up as brother and sister, and Heathcliff’s obsession with Catherine was in part inspired by Byron’s incestuous love for his half-sister Augustus Leigh, which Brontë had read about in Thomas Moore’s Letters and Journals of Lord Byron with Notices of his Life (1833) which accounts, paradoxically, both for its trangressiveness and chasteness. Cathy’s vague and confused monologue is informed by Shelley’s - in my view preposterous – poem Epipsychidion, in which he posits the ideal lover being a spiritual brother or sister, whose love “fills the universe with glorious beams”. To take seriously Cathy’s “He’s more myself than I am ... he is my own being ... Nelly I am Heathcliff” one would have to take seriously the idea of a mystical union of souls, or, for that matter, souls. Cathy’s expression of her bond with Heathcliff elicits from Nelly the admonishing remark, “I can make no sense of your nonsense, Miss”, quite rightly, for it is undoubtedly confused almost-gibberish. There is though a case for arguing that this is proto-modernist prose accurately delineating the speech patterns of a disintegrating mind, or one entering a state of delirium, which Catherine is doing. Such an extreme self-dentification with another person, even if tenable, would constitute a radical loss of independence, a kind of spiritual self-immolation. You can see, though, how this element of the novel might appeal to certain types.
❋The intention, on the part of some at least, of this artificial racialisation, has little to do with the book itself, but is to imply that Britain has always been multi-ethnic. Classic English literature is of no use whatsoever in bolstering this revisionist myth. The only example its promoters give is Bertha, Rochester’s wife in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847). However, Bertha is white. The misconception about the character comes from a misunderstanding of the world ‘Creole’: Creole was not a synonym for 'mulatto', it meant anyone of European descent born in the West Indies or Spanish America. It never referred to natives, and it has nothing to do with the usage the same word in Southern American states. It would have been unthinkable in any case for a member of the English gentry to have married a native, and there are no records of such: colonists did have sexual relations with the natives, but only via concubinage and rape. Bertha is described as blackened, not black, that is, something has happened to her – her illness. Her brother Richard is described as ‘pale’ and as having ‘white cheeks’, and Bertha comes from one of the leading, richest families in Jamaica, that would have made its money from sugar and slaves. Creole women had a reputation for moral depravity in Britain due to their proximity to and fraternisation with black people, and were seen as tainted, something which informs Bertha's characterisation, so on the basis of this one could still argue that Bronte’s characterisation is racist.
†Brontë was a writer who makes fellow Victorian recluse Emily Dickinson seem like a garrulous gadabout and social butterfly and was, apart from her family, universally, if unfairly, disliked. Her life, apart from brief, reluctant periods away which made her ill, was her family, housework, walks on the moors, her animals (a Merlin hawk, Nero, two geese, a cat, and her dog, Keeper) and, above all, reading and writing. According to her first biographer Mrs Gaskell, Brontë “never showed any regard for any human creature; all her love was reserved for animals”. A great admirer of hers was fellow misanthrope E M Cioran, who wrote of a “solitude that the merest rendezvous is a crucifixion”, a sentiment to which Brontë would have been sympathetic. She rarely left the house, never once stepped foot in the nearby village, and when the postman or delivery boy called, would retire to the back of the house in order not to encounter them. According to the headmaster of the Belgian school she briefly attended and taught at, the Pensionnat Heger, she was “silent and painfully retiring”, and had nothing to do with anyone outside the classroom. When she and Charlotte took tea with their cousins the Dixons in Brussels, Emily refused to say a single word during the whole engagement. Her misanthropy was such that in a French essay she wrote, with an almost de Sadean materialism, that “nature is a vast machine constructed to bring forth only evil”, and she scandalised the school by informing a class of children (whom she treated atrociously) that she didn’t like children, and preferred animals. She certainly never fell in love; it will remain unknown whether she felt any physical attraction for a man; not only did she never so much as kiss a man, she didn’t meet or even see very many in her lifetime, and all her knowledge of love came from books (and the observed rutting of livestock). Emily Brontë was far from progressive. She was a staunch Tory like her father, and an astute player of the stock market, one among several reasons why it’s fruitless to search the novel for social critique (the main one being its total absence). Both she and her father were abolitionists but, both being recluses, it was support from afar and on paper, not a ‘mixing in abolitionist circles’. Like her admirer Cioran, and other writers such as George Bataille, Artaud, Gerard de Nerval, Unica Zurn, and Anna Kavan, I put her in the category of the ‘functional mad’ writer (‘cognate with the functional alcoholic’). Ted Hughes – a Dark Celtic northerner who would have made the perfect filmic Heathcliff – called the Brontës “the weird sisters”, and anyone exhibiting behaviour like Emily Brontë’s today would be unlikely to escape the attentions of intrusive bourgeois lanyard wearers, who would have her medicalised and medicated.
‡Emerald Fennel’s adaptation of the movie, which looks preposterous, has been criticised for sexualising the story inappropriately, and eschewing the second half of the story. But nearly all cinema adaptations have missed out the story of Hareton and the younger Catherine, and both Andrea Arnold’s 2007 film and Yoshishige Yoshida’s 1988 version inappropriately eroticised the story, and Arnold had Heathcliff arrive as a teenager instead of a toddler to better effect this. Yoshida’s version was influenced heavily by Battaile’s reading of the novel in his Literature and Evil (1957), a fascinating book, but one tainted by Bataille’s galloping erotomania. He did at least correctly identify that childhood is one fundamental theme of the novel, and that the bond of Cathy and Heathcliff is based on a “[lost] infantile freedom which had not been amended by the laws of society or of conventional politeness”, though I would add the cavil that this only from Cathy’s perspective, and that Heathcliff too, with his carnal, material intent, also betrays ”the sovereign Kingdom of childhood” for which Cathy yearns during her fatal illness.