Women Writers and the Hero of Romance

J. Wilt

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137426987
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

Women Writers and the Hero of Romance studies the nature of the hero and his meaning for the female seeker, or quester, in romance fiction from Wuthering Heights to Fifty Shades of Grey. The book includes chapters on Wuthering Heights, Middlemarch, The Scarlet Pimpernel, The Sheik, and the novels of Ayn Rand and Dorothy Dunnett.

1

Wuthering Heights: A Romance of Metaphysical Intent

The reader completes Catherine’s and Heathcliff’s unrealized romance … in his or her desiring imagination. The unwritten erotic romance exists in our passionate experience of Wuthering Heights.

Gavriel Reisner¹

This chapter begins my “appreciation” of women’s novels in the romance tradition with a novel that both consolidates and innovates the fundamental fiction of the hero of romance, although the chapter’s origins are double. I have an argument to undertake, but also, like the heroine of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight (2005) at the beginning of her journey, having already read the novel on her own, “I decided to read Wuthering Heights – the novel we were currently studying in English – yet again for the fun of it” (34). For I have been reading and re-reading Wuthering Heights for decades. My first lecture on the novel at Princeton in 1973 tried unsuccessfully to answer the question: Catherine and Heathcliff, what ARE they to each other, really? My latest experience was facilitating a discussion (spring 2012) at Boston College’s Women’s Resource Center on the “Twilight” vampire romances as a re-writing of Emily Brontë’s novel, climactic baby daughter and all, a comparison to which I will return along the way.

There are essays in the critical tradition that are almost as fun to read as the novel itself. I think of C. P. Sanger’s classic treatment of the psycho-genetic makeup of “Earnshaw” and “Linton” and the way the Catherine wheel spins, the rogue gene “Heathcliff” turns, through the story’s generations. There is Ellen Moers’ recognition of the Frankensteinian strand in Emily Brontë’s hero, Mary Shelley’s brew of “incest, infanticide, and patricide … transformed into a phantasmagoria of the nursery” in the later novel (Moers 1976: 99), a connection picked up by Gilbert and Gubar and amplified into a view of the novel as a “metaphysical romance,” with the hero as the female protagonist’s “whip” (1979: 293). There are Terry Eagleton’s portrait of the Irish strand in Heathcliff and the Great Hunger (1995), foregrounding the damaged and damaging hero’s emergence from the émigré port of Liverpool, and Maja-Lisa Von Sneidern’s historicist reading of the lovers as colonial mistress and bond slave, also published in 1995. Rachel Ablow offers a different view of a psychological hunger in The Marriage of Minds (2007), where the hero’s gift to the female protagonist is actually the starvation, the “lack,” that clarifies the “more myself” for which she has always hungered (49). The stance of New Criticism allowed J. Hillis Miller to be sure he had found the key to the novel in 1963’s The Disappearance of God, while in 1982’s deconstructionist Fiction and Repetition he concedes that every paragraph of the novel can yield such a key, condemning the reader-critic to an endless hermeneutic task that yields no final mastery (63). Nancy Armstrong has written several times about Lockwood’s dream of Catherine “and yet I feel it still eludes me,” she asserts in a 1992 essay (251). All perspectives “work.” Nothing is enough.

In the paradox of that phrase, its entanglement of rest and restlessness, lies the magic of Emily Brontë’s novel and its hero of romance, a nameless hero trailing echoes of the epic hero and the hero of western courtly love but also, as a figure in a “metaphysical romance,” inviting us in his very mystery into the epistemological and ontological speculations of Enlightenment scientists and Romantic poets. What can we know, what might we be, and what is the role of “loving,” Heathcliff seems to ask, in a universe whose very “matter” is being theorized as romance, as “attraction” and “bonding” and the mysteriously sundering and suturing sweep of “force”?

In the plotlines of Wuthering Heights there are many who speak for the adaptability of the human heart to its ignorance of the answers to these metaphysical questions, but not the central protagonist and the hero she conjures up: Catherine and Heathcliff, in classic style, will burn down the world and break all hearts, including their own, to get at the answers. “Stronger than a man,” in the words of her sister’s Preface, and “simpler than a child,” Emily Brontë deploys her Maiden and her Hero to experience both fusion and fission in the traditional tangles of romance, and to push past both self and society in the attempt to contact “the Universe.” Grounded experimentally in each other – “I am Heathcliff,” “Do not leave me in this abyss” – they confront the Universe as “a mighty stranger” and in some ways humanize it, in other ways partake of its inhumanity. In obscurely ceding/capturing the “I” that is Heathcliff, Catherine leaps toward a plastic universe that, as Nietzsche would say, “looks back at” her, “familiarly,” in its two aspects of matter and energy – Heathcliff as, as well as in, the “abyss.” But Heathcliff is also, I want to suggest, the mirror of her intuited “Preternatural” self, as Nellie Dean sees when she is especially aroused (113). It is a self that is postmoral, immortal, instinct with understanding, integrated among all its parts and passions. Both of them are human, but Heathcliff also undergoes an enlarging reduction: he is Catherine’s symbol as much as her “playmate,” hyphen and hinge between the tentative human and the dreamed post- or pre-human.

From the “Glassland” narratives of Emily’s childhood to the “devoirs” written in the Brussels schoolroom of M. Constantin Heger, Emily pictured a universe in violent flux, with consciousness, and life itself, no stranger to that condition. The creative consciousness of all four of the Brontë children was first sparked by their father’s gift of wooden soldiers: Winifred Gerin draws attention especially to the way this kind of play, “making alive again” the soldier-casualties of successive battles, communicated the sense of “magical powers” to the story-making of the 8-year-old Emily (1971: 15). In Sue Lonoff’s collection-translation of essays written for their teacher, an assignment on “the hero” evokes from Charlotte an essay docile to M. Heger’s European political preferences, but Emily resurrects the last English Saxon monarch for a passionate and original psychodrama. As a king in peacetime, Harold is “a luxurious slave” to banal comfort and servile courtiers, the teenager theorizes, but facing the battle of Hastings he becomes his posthuman self: “what a difference! Harold is no more a man: his passions bubble up, but shedding their egotism … the stroke of death is the stroke given to the slave, to liberate him and set him free” (1966: 106).

“No more a man.” To Wuthering Heights through the available door of the Gothic comes the post- or para-human Heathcliff, “afreet” or “vampire” to the common folk, “devil” to the Christianized. Two interesting recent readings take up the notion of Heathcliff as post-human, echoing the novel’s ontological ambitions. Recalling the centrality of the wooden soldier to the young Emily’s imagination makes surprisingly persuasive Robin Morgan’s The Demon Lover (1990), which sees him as the deathless because already dead soldier, the “homme fatale” of ancient epic and modern romance, but with a feminist twist: this particular hero is Patriarchy’s figure of resistance to the “natural” ways of both the Maiden and the Mother. The grown-up and now maternal Morgan writes the book in the struggle to understand her own early Maiden enthrallment, Patty Hearst–like, to the “terrorist hero” of the revolutionary 1960s, gun toters who projected an enviable and paradoxically immortalizing passion for a freedom “so fierce it can be consummated only in the grave” (1990: 112). In the heat of Morgan’s feminist hermeneutic, Joseph Campbell’s approving exegesis of the Hero’s act – “the successful adventure of the hero is the unlocking and release of the flow of life again into the body of the world” – is unmasked as a kind of womb envy. “I must digress for a moment here,” seethes Morgan, to note that “at the moment of this writing, and the moment of your reading, 300,000 women are hunched over in labor … This is not regarded as an adventure. This is not termed the mission of the hero. This is merely ‘natural’” (1990: 68).

Morgan argues that the women writers who took on and took over the romance tradition early in the nineteenth century did not merely internalize this hero of the “unnatural” but maternalized him, wrote their way not just into but “through” the figure (1990: 113). Frankenstein, Jane Eyre, and Wuthering Heights, she argues, all acknowledge the attraction of the “terrorist hero,” but name him as a usurping monstrosity of male creation who must be “mothered,” re-ordered by suffering like the Rochester of the last chapters of Jane Eyre, or by time and generation like the savage men tamed by the reading of the “second edition” of Catherine Earnshaw, her daughter. Thus the necessary “two Catherines” of Wuthering Heights, the frantic virgin and the motherly daughter. This is persuasive, but Not Enough, as Charlotte noted in her Preface, to really account for Heathcliff. He may be baffled, in both senses of the word, by his daughter-in-law, but it is his surrogate son Hareton who accepts the mothering. Like the Harold of Emily’s vision, especially when he returns from conquering the all-world a second time, Heathcliff is no longer a man but a diamond-hard “I” without the wound, the vulnerability, of egoism.

In a densely argued, sometimes puckish essay entitled “I Think, Therefore I Am Heathcliff,” Daniel Cottom calls Descartes the first Gothic novelist, calls the modern “cogito,” or thinking-I-Am, an implicated partner with the demonic anti/un/post-humanity of the Gothic misanthrope. In this analysis, Wuthering Heights is the brilliant culmination of the Gothic’s outing of the role of romantic love in the constitution of modern “identity,” as it dramatizes in the “inhumanity” or “itness” of art that “inability to draw a clear distinction between others’ existence and one’s own” that is “the defining promise and distress of humanity” (2003: 1073). As “I think, therefore I am” releases to consciousness the perilous recognition that “I only think I am,” and “only I think I am,” a sickening “itness” appears in identity itself, manifesting in the terror/pleasure either of constructedness – I am a thoughted machine, a work of art – or of Otheredness – I am [only when I think I am] Heathcliff, a work of Love.

Two critics, then, call attention to the “excess” and “itness” of Brontë’s hero, making use of his symbolic potency in accounting for a new development in the pan-cultural DNA of the Hero of romance. As a figure strobing in and out of symbol-hood, he is a powerful demonstration of what Andrew Von Hendy (2002) called the aporia between the symbol as apprehended in the flick of an eye, and the symbol as distributed over narrative. Intimate of the mind’s eye, he is hard to see. So available is he to the eyeblink of symbol – slave/master, love/death, earthy/unearthly, “my Heathcliff”/your Heathcliff – that it takes some effort to remember that he is also his own Heathcliff, a lost and found little boy, an adolescent subject to a playmate and then a religious hegemony and a class system, a man with a “plan” of revenge on mortality that requires an intelligent and opportunistic manipulation of human beings over several decades.

Further, Emily Brontë cagily distributes over the narrative not only the Heathcliff of symbol and the Heathcliff of the Bildungsroman, but also the “ego” of narrative itself, obscuring her own wound-vulnerable “I” within the eager “I” of other storytellers, scattering Lockwood’s Wuthering Heights and Nelly’s, Joseph’s and Zillah’s, Isabella’s and the younger Cathy’s, to produce the maze whose center is the romance of Being, coupled with the specter of Loving. At the center of this maze, Heathcliff is “placed” first as the Carlylian Hero of Being and then as the equivocally Byronic/Shelleyan Hero of Loving by two Catherines, one writing, one reading, who are among other things avatars of those magnetic poles that spark that other romance, the one between writer and reader.

Or rather, I think there are three Catherines. The chronologically “first” Catherine is the creator; another is “descended” in human generation but offered on equal terms, reading terms, as a “second edition of the mother” (140). The third Catherine, most deeply heterodox, is sketched in the novel by implication but left unanimated on the table, like the female who should have mated with Frankenstein’s Creature, a writer’s incentive to the reader. Her image is inherited, I want to argue, from the Christian imagination of the Preternatural, and was most recently sparked to life in the last book of the most widely read Gothic fiction of the last decade, the Twilight series’s Breaking Dawn.

Run Heathcliff, run!

A Yorkshire man of property and lineage goes to the city on business, promising presents to his 14-year-old son and 6-year-old daughter, but when old Earnshaw returns he has lost Cathy’s whip and crushed Hindley’s fiddle in the struggle to carry home a 7-year-old stranger from the streets, “because he was determined not to leave it as he found it” (51). This curious rhetoric, legitimate to an act of charity but hinting too at some deeper instinct in old Earnshaw, and in the novel, to disturb the status quo, underwrites the process by which the boy becomes the patriarch’s “favorite” under the name of a dead eldest son. The novel here hints at one social level of the story familiar in many fairy and folk tales representing the transition of western culture from purely feudal to more modern forms: here is a second or bastard son, or a scheming servant – will he cheat the heir and dethrone the traditional family at the center of the story of Property? In a similar register, this originating episode suggests that the reader may be in for a version of a key eighteenth-century French fairy tale: has the father contracted a debt that Beauty will have to pay to the Beast?²

In this register, it is the job of the romantic hero to appear as the beast and then morph into the lover: in Cathy’s phrase, he enters as the representation of the universe-as-a-mighty-stranger and then sits down at the table as “familiar” after all. Something of this is available in the relationship of Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw, perhaps, but Brontë’s steadfast de-humanizing (pre-humanizing, post-humanizing) of Heathcliff blocks it, to be picked up in the “second edition” of her story, the story of Catherine Linton Heathcliff. It is the job of the rival son or scheming servant to expose the fault lines in the family before he either destroys or restores it – also available in the two editions of the story of “Cathy.” Emphatically a mighty stranger – a racial, linguistic, and moral Other – Heathcliff enters the tribe at Wuthering Heights carrying both these plot lines and one metaphysical one, ontological as well as social. In Nelly’s phrase he is Cathy’s “playmate” (68, 74). As Claire Raymond develops it in a fascinating chapter about female “self-elegy,” Heathcliff is also the trigger for the heroine’s “Child’s Play.” He seems conjured up by the writing-child Cathy as the waif-ghost Cathy seems summoned by the reading Lockwood, to evoke and preserve the text that inscribes the fierce autonomy and authority, the metaphysical “fullness” and paradoxical virginity, of the Maiden (2006: 107).

The game the Maiden plays with Heathcliff has the ecstatic volatility of elemental “tag”: the metaphysical “itness” of Heathcliff makes him always “it.” Even when his gender freedom and strength seem to put him in what one anthropologist of “play” calls the “favored” position of the one in flight, his trajectory is always constrained by the need to pursue his playmate.³ Catherine’s cry to him to be her proxy in flight – her “Run Heathcliff, run!” when the bulldog of Thrushcross Grange appears (60) – contains its counter-order, vocalized dreamily as she approaches her death: “Find a way then. You always followed me” (119). In play as adolescents and adults, Emily’s central characters live under the signs both of shared identity and of hierarchy, leader to follower, with the property owner’s daughter the leader in the register of class and the aggressive male thrust forward in gender hierarchy, to take the lead and to take the blame. She is the leader too in the metaphysical romance: doing her “bidding” (55) is his testimony of sublime superiority to everything but her, while standing up for/standing on him is her way of uniting the unmoved and the always in motion, matter and energy, the stone and the wind, as part of the “more than myself” she intuits she is.

Some read Cathy/Heathcliff in their twinhood, their playmatery, as Brontë’s idea of Plato’s androgynous/gynandrous being: if it is, it is good only for an eyeblink before the complexities of this symbol’s distribution in narrative overwhelm the image.⁴ We guess their untroubled twinship from casual remarks by the family’s fostering/scheming sister/servant Nelly Dean about outdoor rambles and naughty revenge plots against indoor authorities. But we know it through three key scenes of its troubling, as Cathy and Heathcliff, prodded, vexed, enabled, and filtered through the novel’s only too reader-friendly storytellers, finally speak for themselves. As the children move to adolescence a biological narrative develops them to boy- and girlhood, while the writer’s narrative (Emily’s and, visibly, Catherine’s) imposes a corresponding psycho-mythical enhancement to hero and heroine, functioning simultaneously to engage the biological development and to override it.

In the first key scene, Catherine Earnshaw makes a riveting debut as a 12-year-old writer and a 20-years-long ghost, her authority established “oppositely,” as Gilbert and Gubar (1979) note, as a counter-script to the role of the Christian printed up for her in the “good books” (39) of the self-appointed “chaplain” of the household, the Non-Conformist man-of-all-work Joseph.⁵ A generation later, the bored and sleepy gentleman Lockwood lays hands on the abandoned printed “Testament” in whose white spaces Catherine has been writing her life with her companion Heathcliff. In Brontë’s reader’s place, Lockwood, “wandering” between the girl’s “manuscript” and the masculine print of the Testament, transfers and transforms for us the story of antique heroism Catherine is telling to and of herself. Her passionate rhetoric, borrowed and inverted from the Testament and other tracts she has been assigned to read, figures a composite “tyrant,” domestic and religious, against whom “H and I are going to rebel” (38–39). The composite tyrant is Joseph and the suddenly elevated brother Hindley, whose usurpation of authority from dead father and father God has been made possible by books, Hindley’s college education in the proper hierarchies of class and gender, and Joseph’s cellar classes in “The Broad Way to Destruction” and other interpreters of the “Testament” – texts from which Hindley’s college texts now exempt him.

Catherine’s writing offers a counter-hermeneutic to the frozen print of “testaments” to both the broad way to destruction and the narrow way to salvation. Morally speaking, it is a heterodox poem to that kind of fairness or “...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: In the Place of a Hero
• 1 Wuthering Heights: A Romance of Metaphysical Intent
• 2 Middlemarch: A Romance of Diffusion
• 3 Exotic Romance: The Doubled Hero in The Scarlet Pimpernel and The Sheik
• 4 The Hero as Expert: Ayn Rand’s Romances of Choice
• 5 The Hero in “Gouvernance”: Family Romance in the Novels of Dorothy Dunnett
• Conclusion: Kingdoms of Romance in Twilight and Fifty Shades of Grey
• Bibliography
• Index