rambling post about Wuthering Heights

During the last week or so I read Wuthering Heights online. It's been quite an interesting read. I couldn't help but remember some comments I'd read earlier, explaining how many critics for several years claimed that WH must have been written by Branwell Bronte, as they couldn't conceive of a woman -- especially one who had been so secluded most of her life -- could possibly have written such a passtionate book. One even claimed that Emily, if she did write it, must have been an 'unsexed female' to be capable of something like this. At the time, I laughed to myself and thought, "Silly people, thinking that women are uncapable of passion! Little do they know ..." Well, when I read the book, I almost agreed with them! It wasn't the passion necessarily that surprised me, but the violence (which, in her day and age would have been referred to as passion). Wow.

And then, the whole way through the novel, I kept asking myself, "What the heck is wrong with these people? They've got major issues!" It wasn't just Heathcliff, but everyone else too: Catherine Earnshaw, Edgar and Isabella Linton, Hindley ... they all had such issues, and I just couldn't help but wonder what kind of freaks they were and how they got that way. Certainly, a lot of it has to do with the society they grew up in and the circumstances imposed on them: Catherine was spoiled from childhood, which makes her temper more virulent; Heathcliff usurps Mr Earnshaw's love from Hindley, which makes Hindley more jealous and cruel. But it seems that all of their flaws existed in each character before these external forces were inflicted on them -- what makes Catherine passionately tempermental in the first place? what disposes Hindley to jealousy and cruelty to begin with?

But one of the things that has really bothered me more than anything is the classification of Lockwood as an unreliable narrator. This really irks me, and I'll tell you why: it's because all the assertions of Lockwood's unreliability seem to rest on faulty reasoning.

One paper claimed that "Since both narrators [Lockwood and Mrs Dean] speak from their own, subjective point of view, they are necessarily unreliable." This is just plain absurd. This would mean that literally any first-person narrator is automatically unreliable, which is not the case. And we can even extend it to claim that any third-person narrator is also automatically unreliable. Of course, there's always an amount of unreliability in any narration -- narration is itself a subjective activity, and merely by choosing to tell us a particular story, or to tell us certain things about a certain character, or to note an otherwise un-noteworthy event, is a reflection of any narrator's subjectivity. But unreliability in a narrator is more than just subjectivity -- it is a question of whether or not the things presented in the text are believed by the reader to have actually happened, and to have happened as the narrator presents them. The narrator of Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is not unreliable merely because he is a first-person narrator (and thus, speaks subjectively), but because the reader learns that he has intentionally obscured facts from the reader. Furthermore, unreliability must depend on the actual text of the narration to create this doubt in the reader's mind. It is entirely conceivable that a reader might conclude that Jane, the first-person narrator of Jane Eyre, is deranged or delusional, and that nothing in the text ever really happened to her, but that she is in reality a warped, embittered old maid living by herself in her old age and pretending that all these things really happened to her. That's any reader's right to make such conclusions. But because such a doubt is not introduced in the text itself, Jane is not considered an unreliable narrator. There is no textual evidence to make the reader question the truth of what Jane tells us, although we know that it is all told from her 'own, subjective point of view'.

One commentary (by Cliffsnotes, even!) claims that Lockwood is unreliable because:

he mentions twice that Heathcliff does not extend a hand to him, yet Lockwood still considers Heathcliff a gentleman.

But, in these times (which by the way, are not Victorian times, but Enlightenment times, although they certainly reflect on Emily Bronte's Victorian society) a person's status as a gentleman really had nothing to do with their manners. It was a social position, determined mainly by the criterion of ownership: if you owned land, and especially if you owned lots of money, you were necessarily a gentleman (or a lady). Certainly, gentlemen and ladies were expected to behave in a more refined manner than other people, but that wasn't the main criterion. You could be the worst, rudest person in the world, and everyone around you could hate you, but they would still refer to you as a gentleman. So, Lockwood's conception of Heathcliff as a gentleman is entirely accurate, despite Heathcliff's obvious lack of courtesy.

The next point annoys me even more, since it is entirely text-based (as opposed to the last, which is based more on schemata and semantics). Cliffsnotes goes on to claim Lockwood's unreliability because:

Lockwood also notices that “grass grows up between the flags, and cattle are the only hedgecutters” but erroneously assumes that Heathcliff has a “whole establishment of domestics.”

But this is not at all what Lockwood has assumed. Look at the actual extract, from Chapter 1 of WH:

[Heathcliff] sullenly preceded me up the causeway, calling, as we entered the court, - 'Joseph, take Mr. Lockwood's horse; and bring up some wine.'

'Here we have the whole establishment of domestics, I suppose,' was the reflection suggested by this compound order. 'No wonder the grass grows up between the flags, and cattle are the only hedge-cutters.'

In other words, Lockwood has inferred, from Heathcliff's compound order, that Joseph is the only servant, 'the whole establishment of domestics'. This is a perfectly natural assumption for Lockwood to make, since if there were a whole score of servants at the Heights, Heathcliff would presumably order one servant to take care of the horse, and another to get the wine. Come on, Cliffsnotes! -- you're a published and respected establishment, please at least make an effort to get it right once in a while!

(NB: I should point out here the possible argument that Lockwood still seems to believe there is a score of servants at the Heights, since in Chapter 2 he repeatedly asks whether he could get a 'lad' to take him home to the Grange, and then send him back the next day. However, this is also a natural assumption for Lockwood. Since his conjecture about Joseph being the only servant, no one has explicitly told him how many servants there are -- indeed, it would be rather odd if someone did tell him. And, in addition to this lack of explicit knowledge, he has now seen Zillah (the 'lusty dame' in Chapter 1), and her presence there obviously contradicts Lockwood's previous assumption that Joseph is the only servant. Also, when he returns to the Heights in Chapter 2, Lockwood is introduced to Hareton Earnshaw, and he conjectures that the lad might be another servant, though he can't decide this for sure. All of this evidence seems to support what would no doubt be Lockwood's default assumption about the servants: namely, that a place as large as Wuthering Heights, with a master as rich as Mr Heathcliff, probably would have several servants.)

Again in the Cliffsnotes commentary, Lockwood's reliability is questioned on the basis of several of his actions, including the following:

[I]n an attempt to make polite conversation, Lockwood misidentifies a heap of rabbit pelts as pets and misidentifies the woman as Heathcliff’s wife. After being corrected by Heathcliff, Lockwood then mistakes Hareton as Heathcliff’s son. Lockwood’s inability to read people and situations make his narration suspect.

Once again, however, these misidentifications are not an indication that Lockwood is unreliable: there is no textual evidence that these things did not really happen, and merely being mistaken about someone or something does not mean that you are necessarily unreliable, no matter how many times you are mistaken. Rather, to me, Lockwood's mistakes in this chapter are an indication, not that he is unreliable, but that Wuthering Heights is an utterly incomprehensible place to him, as are its occupants. These blunders are not so much a reflection on Lockwood's character as they are on the character of Wuthering Heights and all who live there. This seems, to me at least, to be precisely what Emily Bronte was going for in the opening of her novel: she sets up a place and its inhabitants as being completely incomprehensible, and then proceeds to tell us their history so that at the end we do comprehend why they act in this strange way.

Of the two main narrators, I consider Ellen 'Nelly' Dean to be far less reliable than Lockwood. It is clear, for instance, that she wants Lockwood to marry Cathy Linton Heathcliff and take her away from Wuthering Heights. This desire may well drive her to present characters less reliably, in order to make Lockwood think that Cathy would be a desirable wife. The very fact that she does desire it, though, also seems to contribute to her unreliability as a narrator: I would expect, after all she has seen of the people at the Heights, that Nelly would know that such a marriage is hardly likely, considering Heathcliff's calculated plans for revenge, and his deceitful and powerful manipulation of so many others. If Lockwood ever did try to start up a courtship of the girl, Heathcliff would immediately be aware of it, and would never allow the marriage to take place (although he might possibly encourage the courtship, as a means to drive Hareton more passionately in love with Cathy in the face of jealousy, in the same way the he used Linton). Nelly's inability to foresee the consequences of her desire makes me wonder what other things she has had difficulty connecting. Is it possible that she is completely unaware that many of her own actions have encouraged some of these terrible events to proceed, or that Heathcliff had a calculated design in taking over Wuthering Heights, or that Cathy would inevitably fall in love with Linton purely on the basis of her not being allowed to see him? If she fails to see these connections, then it is entirely possible that she has drawn false assumptions about the causes and effects of events in the narration.

Furthermore, Nelly displays major hypocrisy throughout the narrative: she hates Heathcliff when he first comes to Wuthering Heights, then she begins to like him in comparison with Edgar Linton, then she prefers Edgar and despises Heathcliff when he returns after his three-year absence, then she seems to like him again at the end of the story when she is again housekeeper at the Heights; she first helps Cathy Linton to be naughty, allowing her to go out riding (where she first encounters the Heights) when her orders were to keep by her at all times, then she betrays Cathy's secrets by telling Edgar of her love letters to Linton and her visits to the Heights. This kind of inconsistent action on Nelly's part appears again and again througout the story. First she claims that it is not her place to meddle with anyone's affairs, and then she turns around and meddles with them all! This inconsistency may partly be due to a desire to make herself look good in Lockwood's eyes (after all, she is his housekeeper), or it may simply be due a terribly dual nature that makes her unable to decide where she stands, or to stand there when she has decided. In any case, though, it leads the reader (or at least it did me) to wonder whether she might not be displaying similar inconsistencies in her narration: maybe she's being more harsh to Catherine Earnshaw after her death than she was during Catherine's life; maybe she's being nicer about Linton in retrospect than she would have been in the present. Who knows? There is no absolute, definite point at which Nelly's narration is called into question (as there is, for example, in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd), but you still have to wonder whether everything she tells us is really how it all happened in the first place.