unto itself.' Exactly. The novel's voice is that of a powerful woman observing, celebrating, and contesting with independent strength of will the moral laws and cultural ideologies that made women commanding angels in the house. The closing marriage is inevitable because it represents both Jane's reward and the safe establishment of female governance in the home; its satisfies Jane's need for independence and a culture's need to see women as redeemers. The man will be cleansed, renewed by a feminine spirit. The woman, powerfully independent (in her own perspective), will freely choose to be the renewing agent.
Shirley critiques the ease of this ending, the unstoppable individualism that gathers everything unto itself. The essential social conservatism of the novel's politics, centered on 'the structure of paternalism as a model for class relations,' should not blind us, as Rosemarie Bodenheimer argues, to Brontë's exposure of the fissures and contradictions within this politics. For Brontë, who recognizes how interconnected are 'concepts of class and gender,' 'a dominant social order necessarily creates and conceals an underside of rebellion and a responding violence of suppression.' Brontë's 'social idea' produces her 'social critique.' The marriage plot that absorbs the heroines, who join the workers in voicing the damning criticism, becomes at once escape and admission: a convenience for Brontë, a way to provide closure without resolving the issues raised, and a calculated refusal to articulate any idea of social progress. The marriage plot, and the social order, may silence women's questions. They cannot obliterate the need for answer. There is no moral here.
Villette devotes the first of its three volumes to a woman's need to find work, the second to her desire to participate in conventional -372- romance, and the last to her discovery of «home» in an exceptional romance. Yet the final page, after the courtship and anticipated marriage have promised the kind of closure Jane Eyre provided, reminds readers that such romance is demonic delusion. Lucy Snowe can work as a schoolmaster. Period. Readers' disappointment that there is no marriage, no fulfillment of desire, suggests how wed we are to this plot-and how much Brontë accomplished in saying no to it. Villette is so bleak, and so moving, because this «no» argues that 'escape from a world of patriarchal domination' requires 'severance of all social connection' (the words are Bodenheimer's about Shirley, but they suggest something of the reason why Brontë placed Lucy Snowe in a foreign country). Lucy's 'book of life' is indeed her, and Charlotte Brontë's, 'heretic narrative,' a narrative where a woman does more than patrol the moral territories of home and nation.
Wuthering Heights 'is a fiend of a book, an incredible monster… The action is laid in Hell, — only it seems places and people have English names there.' Dante Gabriel Rossetti's comments of 1854 offer a succinct summary of the critical history of Emily Brontë's novels. For readers from Charlotte Brontë to the present, there is no certain way to read this novel, no certain meaning to any of its characters, no certain social implications except ones so obvious as to be meaningless. Its author, said Victorian critics, is 'a Salvator Rosa with his pen,' her characters are 'savages ruder than those who lived before the days of Homer,' her language is horribly 'coarse,' and the effect of reading her work is 'inexpressibly painful.' Charlotte Brontë agreed and disagreed. In a preface she wrote to an 1850 edition of the novel, she praised the descriptions of the natural world (not offered as background or 'spectacle,' but 'as what [the author] lived in, and by'), worked to find among characters 'spots where clouded daylight and the eclipsed sun still attest their existence,' labeled Heathcliff 'unredeemed,' and-most importantly-said that Emily Brontë imitates no action: 'He wrought from a rude chisel, and from no model but the vision of his meditations.'
Charlotte Brontë's sense that Emily Brontë represented what she lived 'in, and by,' places her work in a metaphysical landscape that few Victorian novels, striving for moral signification and a realism of social - 373- and psychological representation, would seek. Wuthering Heights shows characters undergoing a 'moral teething' amid acts of physical and verbal violence that resemble Shakespeare or Elizabethan revenge drama more than novels of the 1840s, yet it presents its characters and its story through the eyes of two narrators so unsympathetic to the goings-on that those actions seem even more 'real,' whatever that means. One narrator, the aptly named Lockwood, comes from the city to tour the country and look for prospects of nature; he leaves the area with a benediction that is one of the most splendid paragraphs ever to close a novel. Standing by three gravestones, he notes:
I lingered round them, under that benign sky; watched the moths fluttering among the heath and hare-bells; listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass; and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.
The passage shows what a travel writer Lockwood is. It also tells something about his tour of the emotional landscapes in the wild story he has heard. In his perfectly balanced clauses and harmonically sounded vowels, no wayward human energies disrupt the storyteller's power or the listener's satisfaction. Who would think that he had heard a story (in one reviewer's phrase) 'through which devils dance and wolves howl'?
The other narrator belongs to Wuthering Heights by proximity of birth, but belongs even more to the world of Thrushcross Grange by sympathies of class and culture and by modes of storytelling. Nelly Dean is the central narrator, and a wonderful one because she is so observant, and so sure of what she thinks should happen to people. Yet in her desire for household order (she is, after all, a housekeeper), for social order, and for religious tranquillity she expresses Emily Brontë's «genius» (a word also used by Victorian reviewers) in figuring through action and character the issues of nineteenth-century life in ways neither Charlotte Brontë nor any of their contemporaries attempted or thought desirable. Nelly Dean makes possible our understanding of Wuthering Heights as a Victorian novel because in her narration we see the sources and formal moves of Victorian storytelling. Leo Bersani has said that Emily Brontë, in telling the love stories of two generations united by family ties and by the two women named Catherine, presents in the second story 'a conventionalized replay' of the first. Until the death of the first Catherine, 'the voices of Lockwood and of Nelly Dean have had to obey rhythms and tones with which they are deeply -374- out of sympathy; indeed, they seem to be in the wrong novel, they are ludicrous vehicles for the story they tell. But gradually the story begins to obey them… It's as if Emily Brontë were telling the same story twice, and eliminating its originality the second time.'
Emily Brontë does tell the same story twice, and when its strangeness, its originality, is exiled from the novel, Nelly can go to live at Thrushcross Grange and Lockwood can write his balanced periods. He arrives at a 'misanthropist's heaven,' and misreads the nature of everyone he encounters. Yet he has a dream whose violence is so seemingly unmotivated as to alert the reader to the kind of metaphysical universe Brontë has created. Lockwood's dream, Catherine Earnshaw's desire as a child that her father bring her a whip as a gift from the city, Heathcliff's description of the chandelier at Thrushcross Grange ('a shower of glass-drops hanging in silver chains from the centre' of the room): none of this is expected, all is believed. Brontë always chooses the unexpected to make her representations. Nelly, the voice of the Grange (with all the reading of its library to provide sources for her storytelling), first hears about that world from Heathcliff, who is an urban orphan with neither Christian name nor known origin. We as readers first experience Catherine Earnshaw through her diary; she makes her entrance into the novel in her own words, before she enters in Lockwood's dream and then in Nelly's chronological narrative of the 'cuckoo's' history. That diary-'Catherine Earnshaw, her book'-is produced in the margins of a Testament, but it shows no biblical or religious consciousness: 'An awful Sunday… H. and I are going to rebel.' Yet, as Margaret Homans has noted, this writing is produced not simply in rebellion against the Heights and its restrictions, some of which are biblically enforced. Rebellion is also against writing, and against the biblical tropes, household securities, sentimentalized nature, and domesticated culture that it constructs. Catherine wants the moors, wants escape from the inside world of the Heights and, later, from the Grange, wants a freedom beyond any of the conventions that collectively denominate the realistic territories of nineteenth-century fiction-and of domestic life.
Her dream of going to heaven emphasizes this need to exist outside of social and cultural conventions and the narratives that give them power. For her, some dreams 'have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas… altered the colour of my mind.' Thus, in the heaven of her dream: 'I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; -375- and the angels were so angry that they flung me out, into the middle of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights; where I woke sobbing for joy. That will do to explain my secret.' Yet, having had this dream, and declared 'I am Heathcliff,' Catherine marries Edgar Linton and becomes 'the lady of Thrushcross Grange, and the wife of a stranger: an exile, and outcast from what had been my world.' No wonder she says, in a phrase indicating her self-consciousness and her elusiveness, 'I cannot express it… '
Expressing «it» has been, always, the problem readers have with Wuthering Heights. Nothing permits an easy or familiar response. In Heathcliff and Catherine, Brontë offers lovers who, in death scenes, curse and
