damn each other. In Edgar Linton, she presents a husband who locks himself among his books to escape his wife's insane need for Heathcliff-yet he goes to the Heights to bring her the golden crocuses he thinks she needs for life, as it were-and who refuses to have himself buried in Linton family vaults, choosing instead to be buried near Catherine, on her moors. In Heathcliff, Brontë presents a figure who describes the wonders and foolishness of a materially refined world only to become a conventional villain who conquers that world and then finds it useless because it lacks Catherine. In him she also presents a lover whose feelings, like Catherine's, lie outside the tropes of language: 'The entire world is a collection of memoranda that she did exist, and that I have lost her!' Then Brontë offers a second Catherine and an Earnshaw heir who, through moderation of feelings and the powers of civilizing education, inherit the world-that is, inherit the Grange and the Heights. And they have language in abundance to describe their feelings. The point where the second Catherine contrasts her 'most perfect idea of heaven's happiness' with Linton Heathcliff's tells us much about the ways of nineteenth-century fiction: 'He wanted all to lie in an ecstasy of peace; I wanted all to sparkle, and dance in glorious jubilee.' The power of language to create and control, and to propose as models, worlds of domestic order and serenity resides with those who inherit this earth, and in Nelly and Lockwood who tell their story.
But of course, all their language does not explain 'it,' does not tell us finally why Wuthering Heights has continued to command readers' attention and to attract some of the most compelling criticism written about any Victorian novel. From the moment when Elizabeth Rigby called Catherine and Heathcliff 'the Jane and Rochester animals in their native state,' and Charlotte Brontë wrote her illuminating if -376- uneasy apologia for her sister's 'strange production,' readers have provided keys to interpretation that finally suggest more about their own critical and cultural alliances than any certainty about Wuthering Heights. Q. D. Leavis saw in the novel 'a method of discussing what being a woman means, and a tragedy of being caught between socially incompatible cultures.' This reading required a Catherine 'hardening into a fatal immaturity' and a Heathcliff reduced to a story device 'wheeled out' in order to articulate certain thematic emphases. It required a celebration of the second Catherine because of the moral education she acquires (and her mother refused), and it required affirmation of Nelly Dean's essential views of the story (even as it noted her limitations).
For other readers the trials of the first Catherine focus 'what being a woman means' by exposing the deadening confinements of patriarchal culture (we should remember that Catherine dies in childbirth). Joseph Boone, discussing 'love and the form of fiction,' sees in Brontë's handling of the marriage plot an insistence on 'the harrowing effects of wedlock on female identity.' 'In contrast to the traditional female bildungsroman, in which the heroine's acquisition of mature identity is confirmed by marriage, the trajectories of courtship and wedlock forming the narrative of the two Catherines become the means of raising profoundly disturbing questions about the social institution of marriage.' Other readers treat Catherine as profoundly narcissistic, solipsistic, and destructive in her selfish determination to satisfy her desire for Heathcliff and her social need for Linton, and as profoundly amoral in her destruction of her marriage. Her 'I am Heathcliff' serves at once as the grand statement of a passion not to be articulated through metaphor, and as the sign of an indifference to 'human domesticity' profoundly frightening in its implications. Leo Bersani has noted that the identification of Catherine and Heathcliffwith the moors 'dramatizes the potential eeriness, the dehumanization, of a closeness to the land or to nature, a closeness usually spoken about in more sentimental terms as a richly humanizing influence.' The result is 'a kind of restless immortality': 'Death is the most appropriate metaphor for that radical transference of the self to another which Emily Brontë dramatizes in Heathcliff and Catherine.'
Heathcliff has for contemporary critics been the site of the novel's most searching investigations into issues of class and sexuality, and into the meaning of form in fiction. For Terry Eagleton, Heathcliff is 'both -377- metaphysical hero, spiritually marooned from all material concern in his obsessional love for Catherine, and a skillful exploiter who cannily expropriates the wealth of others.' Armstrong notes that 'Heathcliff can retain his role as the hero of the tale so long as he remains virtually powerless.' He is the hero only in connection to his feeling for Catherine, only in the power of their need for each other. He becomes the conventional melodramatic villain when he secures power and begins to expropriate the Earnshaw property. For Armstrong, this change in Heathcliff marks the point where capitalism replaces 'a brutal feudalism as the chief source of villainy,' and where we experience the social implications of the move from the Heights to the Grange. The change also signals a reversal of Brontë's narrative procedures. 'Out of the pieces of earlier fiction comes a new kind of narrative art where value no longer resides in the claims of the individual but rather in the reconstitution of the family.'
Thus the narrative begins, as Bersani said, to obey Nelly Dean and Lockwood and their desires for domestic order. The clichéd goldenhaired heroine, the second Catherine, brings language and book learning to the brutalized orphan Hareton Earnshaw. Their reward for recognizing and restoring domestic order: property, marriage, and a promised happy-ever-after. And Nelly Dean-to some readers the novel's villain, to others the complicit agent of patriarchy, to still others an example of the insidious work of class ideology-presides over the eradication of the first Catherine and the nuptial anticipations of the second. More importantly, the woman servant who loves the spatial and temporal world of Thrushcross Grange tells the story of the woman who longed to escape it ('What were the use of my creation if I were entirely contained here?') and who said, 'I have only to do with the present.' Nelly, who early on tried to remove Heathcliff from the Heights as an alien 'it,' sees in the deaths of Catherine and Heathcliff and in the marriage of the second Catherine providential signs of the soundness of her interpretation ('I believe the dead are at peace') and of her social alignment. Narrative, the providential plot, and middle-class domestic order are indeed inextricably connected. Nelly's belief in religion focuses on its serenity and on its promised justice for the 'good.' Her belief in Thrushcross Grange focuses on the ways it represents an ideal society that rewards those who are good and who serve it with a peaceful domestic life. There is indeed no 'happier woman than myself in England' when Catherine Linton and Hareton Earnshaw marry. A sad tale is not best for Nelly's winter; a domestic love story is.
Yet Brontë does not leave the reader at ease with this Macaulay of -378- Thrushcross Grange. After all, it is she who says, when Heathcliff reenters the married Catherine's life: 'Well, we must be for ourselves in the long run; the mild and generous are only more justly selfish than the domineering.' It is this obvious ethic of «just» selfishness-of protecting what is ours from those who are not like us-that makes Nelly (and the novel) disturbing, and indicates the ways her narrative mirrors the cultural work of Victorian fiction. Charlotte Brontë may hate the selfish; her narratives punish the egoists. Yet they all exile from the territories of the heroine those who differ from her, whether by class or religion or perception of the heroine's independence. The work of creating fellow feeling does not allow for much dissent. Nor does the story of Wuthering Heights as Nelly Dean and Lockwood tell it.
Yet unlike its chief narrators, Wuthering Heights as a novel, Eagleton reminds us, 'confronts the tragic truth that the passion and society it presents are not fundamentally reconcilable-that there remains at the deepest level an ineradicable contradiction between them which refuses to be unlocked, which obtrudes itself as the very stuff and secret of experience.' For Bersani, the social and financial comfort of the Grange, 'as Catherine finally sees, is also a bondage; it encloses her in the oppressive security of the family.' This security is for Nelly Dean the liberating necessity of life, its preservation the justification of selfishness, its story the foundation of her narrative of exile and homecoming.
Emily Brontë does tell the same story twice. The second time she writes a Victorian novel. Charlotte Brontë saw this, saw the value and feared the meaning of Emily Brontë's 'meditations.' Charlotte Brontë does in Villette free her protagonist from the marriage plot and from the smothering society of England. Yet she accomplishes this freedom by exiling Lucy Snowe and allegorizing feeling, making a woman's desires the buried life of the text, not the substance of her working life or her communion. For Emily Brontë, communion and work are beside the point. They may offer characters, male or female, local habitations and a name. But they are simply knowable; they are not what one is. To Nelly Dean, that 'cool spectator' in whom Charlotte Brontë found a 'specimen of true benevolence and homely fidelity,' Catherine and Heathcliff make 'a strange and fearful picture,' and ruin a good story. Yet the questions they repeatedly ask, because they escape the confinements of Victorian realism, haunt the history of the novel, urging us to remember how uneasy English fiction has been with what does not exist, domestically and politically, by the nation's hearths. -379-
Charlotte Brontë asks for woman to have the power both to express her desire through choosing its domestic enclosure, and to patrol the moral territories that encircle it. Emily Brontë sets the limitation of this choice: 'I cannot express it; but surely you and everybody have a notion that there is, or should be, an existence of yours beyond you. What were the use of my creation if I were entirely contained here?' Catherine and Heathcliff are indeed 'the Jane and Rochester animals in their native state'-before they entered the patriarchal story of inclusion
