L - C1 - Evil in Society

Introduction
The Brontës have proved to be some of the most popular English novelists
because of the mysterious and harmonious blending between human feelings and non-
human elements of creation that are illustrated into the fictional story of their lonely and
tragic lives. The theme of death was familiar in the writings of the children as they had
access to the same spring of experiences, growing up near the church and the cemetery
always mourning for a member of the family. The children were used to read romantic
literature which was overwhelmed by the themes of the ruins and of the graves.
The present work illustrates the way in which the three Brontë sisters explored
their lives and inner feelings and created novels, using their own experiences and the
stories they have heard, depicting the degradation of the human being, the aspects of
thwarted love and justice, the humiliation of the lower class by the burgeois, and other
fundamental problems of the nineteenth century Victorian society. The oppressive social
ideas and practices of the Victorian society are presented through the dark sides and the
diabolical aspects revealed by the actions of the characters.
The first chapter tackles the presence of evil in society. The social, religious,
economical and familial barriers depicted in the works of the sisters concern mostly the
degrading of the human being in the burgeois society. Hypocrisy, deceit, selfishness,
physical and moral violence, gossip are only some of the flaws of the society in which the
young and naive men with no experience of life fall into debauchery and embrace a life
full of vices.
Chapter two, entitled “Superstitions”, illustrates how the sisters used the sources
of their stories, that came from their aunt who spoke about faithful knights, princesses
locked up in towers and fights between good and evil and from their father and family
servant Tabby, who used to tell them horrible and scary stories from the Irish and local
folklore that was full of weirdness, witches, elves and ghosts that came to life in front of
the children who listened intensely while the wind blew wildly outside their windows.
These sources represented a strong frame that sustained the eerie backgrounds of the
stories. The presence of the ghosts, the superstitions related to dreams and the influences
of a dark activity like sorcery give the novels a mysterious atmosphere.
2
In chapter three, entitled “Sickness”, the moral and physical degradation of a
person is presented along with the whole process of it, the loss of mental and physical
health and the influences that this has upon the lives of those around. Patrick Branwell
used to sit all day long in a tavern, drinking all his father’s and sisters’ money out and
then returned home with his eyes injected by the quantity of alcohol that he had
consumed. He became a decrepit, a mad-man, a real burden and source of sufferings for
his family and inspired the creation of his sisters’ male characters Heathcliff, Hindley
Earnshaw, Edward Rochester, and Arthur Huntingdon.
Chapters four and five, entitled “The Halls” and “Characters”, deal with spaces
and their occupants. Charlotte described in her novel desolate landscapes, ruins,
supernatural entities and some pieces of phenomenon which contributed to the creation of
a sense of psychological suspense and tension. The succession of steps that Jane Eyre
takes in order to know herself in her quest for love and kinship are placed in different
locations that reiterate the motif of the horrible events of the red room. The traditional
Gothic is present in Jane Eyre and has been noted along the novel from the terror the
main character suffered in childhood at Gateshead and Lowood School to the
mysteriously threatening sights and acts along with the sounds that reveal the presence of
a malevolent spirit.
Wuthering Heights is a place created in such a way that it could sustain the titanic
force of Heathcliff, being submerged in darkness, breathing hatred, fear and horror. The
house and its cold and piercing atmosphere is set in contrast with the wild moors that
surround it. The characters that interested the work are Heathcliff, Edward Rochester,
Bertha Mason and Arthur Huntingdon.
Charlotte Brontë’s novels contain a certain delicacy intermingled with passion
and “the subtle essence of originality which is diffused through the substance of the
emotions”1. Under her own strict discipline, Charlotte turned instinctively to an
expression that revealed herself. Charlotte’s favorite motifs are presented throughout her
novels in a way that bears the mark of her own experiences: the situation of the woman
who has no property, the dreary prospect of becoming a governess and the yearning for
love. Her anguish came from a too deep introspective view.
1
An Anthology of Critical Approaches to the Victorian Novel, Galea Ioana, Craciun Mircea, Cluj-Napoca,
1987. p.85.
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Anne Brontë also used her own experiences at home, with her brother and
sisters, and as a governess. Everyday detail was presented in her writings mingled with
the feelings and reactions of the characters towards it, and this created the plot of her
stories. Her eyes are always upon the story itself, upon the relations that were created
between the characters. As she said in the preface of the second edition of The Tenant of
Wildfell Hall, she is interested in rendering the truth, although the story has to deal with
vicious characters:
“But when we have to do with vice and vicious characters, I maintain it is better to
depict them as they really are than as they would wish to appear.”1
Emily Brontë seemed to have been the target of a malicious prerogative as her
short life was mostly unhappy. Her moral purity stayed intact but her perspectives upon
life and destiny gave her a profound view to the abyss of Evil.
As she rarely left the Yorkshire vicarage which was set at the countryside, in the land of
the heath, her novel depicts the solitary and wild moors as a background for the outbursts
of her titanic characters. It is known that the three Brontë sisters, in the austerity of the
vicarage, lived in a frenzy of literary creativity. Although the sisters were close to each
other, Emily kept her moral solitude in which developed the ghosts of her imagination.
One can imagine her like a ticking bomb that only exploded in literature. Her writings
were the instruments through which she released the darkness and the sorrow from the
depths of her soul and from the abyss from which all her inner feelings burst out in all the
forms of evil and sickness.
The marriages at the end of Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of
Wildfell Hall represent the victory of felling and love over the tragic: “The Brontës’
tremendous displacement of the domestic values toward the tragic and mythical, gives
their work a margin of superiority over that of other Victorian novelists.”2
Chapter 1
1
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Anne Brontë, Penguin Popular Classics edition, England, 1994, p. 13-14.
2
An Anthology of Critical Approaches to the Victorian Novel, Galea Ioana, Craciun Mircea, Cluj-Napoca,
1987. p.103.
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Evil in society
The Brontë family is seen as a social unity with tight bounds between its
members, to which others have no access and which was strongly marked by religious
and social tensions as well as by personal discordances.
As Charlotte Brontë and her sisters lived in the austere rectory at Haworth, her
characters had limited occupations and were not that diverse as those of Jane Austen’s
characters which had many facets and complex personalities. Charlotte’s novels present
pictures of everyday life, whose spirit is contaminated by stings and which pleads for
truth, no matter how unpleasant it was. Anne Brontë shared the same preferences in this
matter and this is best seen, along her novel The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, in the preface of
the second edition: “I wished to tell the truth, for truth always conveys its own moral to
those who are able to receive it. (…) Let it not be imagined, however, that I consider
myself competent to reform the errors and abuses of society, but only that I would fain
contribute my humble quota towards so good an aim (…) But when we have to do with
vice and vicious characters, I maintain it is better to depict them as they really are than as
they would wish to appear (…) and when I feel it my duty to speak an unpalatable truth,
with the help of God, I will speak it.”1 Charlotte Brontë is concerned with revealing the
truth about her own feelings, which are never questioned for this very motif. She can
handle irony whenever she pleases; she constructed a satirical image of the society from
the continent. Like in a recipe, Charlotte adds a tumult of agitated, desolated and feverish
feelings that gives the novel the scent of a secret and mysterious life and makes it appeal
to our senses.
Emily Brontë, on the other hand, succeeded in presenting through her characters
the freedom of the spirit and the independence of the thought, of the need to speak one’s
mind. She finds a way to escape from the sorrows of daily life and from her solitary
thoughts by walking through her beloved wild moors. The moors are the place where all
her mysterious inner thoughts burst out and reshape themselves in the process of a kind
of revenge against the forms of evil from the society, from her family and from religion
as well. Emily often ran away from those around her into the wild moors or on the top of
1
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Anne Brontë, Penguin Popular Classics edition, England, 1994, p. 13-14.
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a lonely hill, surrounded by the sound of nature. For her, the huge gap between the real
world and the imaginary one became a place where both spaces mingled one with
another. Her damned heroes lived their life, loved passionately and died driven by
irresistible forces all of them having a piece of the hidden powers that Emily possessed.
Thus, all their lives were marked by the uncontestable truth of their feelings and beliefs
and if it were for these lives to be painted, they would probably have been colored in
tears and blood. She was interested in the primary elements of life that were not
contaminated by the fever of changes of the world or by the place where it developed. As
she was a solitary person she only needed to keep her eyes and ears open to grasp the
essence, the reality of the social conflicts and sufferings from the local sights.
The passionate love between Catherine and Heathcliff is presented by Emily
surrounded by obstacles that the heroes have to pass over. But these obstacles prove
themselves to be almost impossible to surpass as they consist the sustaining pillars of
society, family and religion. Heathcliff does not have a past to relate to, no name, no
family, no money, and therefore this constitutes an impediment that Cathy herself points
out to Nelly: “It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff, now”. In what concerns the
family, Hindley is the one that tries his best in humiliating him and making the distance
between him and Cathy even larger because he is an intruder, a thief and an impostor:
“<Heathcliff, you may come forward.> cried Mr. Hindley enjoying his
discomfiture and gratified to see what a forbidding young blackguard he would
be compelled to present himself. <You may come and wish Miss Catherine
welcome, like the other servants.>”1
Because all of these reasons and many others, the two lovers find, in the first instance a
place where they can be free from any constrains: in the middle of nature, of their wild
moors. This represents the one sphere where they can operate. After Heathcliff’s return as
a wealthy and well mannered gentleman, suit for Cathy’s requirements, worthy of her, the
reunion between them is again not possible because of her marriage. This bounding of
Cathy, does not leave the two other alternative than to look for another world in which
their passionate love could be free of any constraints. Cathy finds this space to be a
transcendental one as she believes in the immortality of their spirits, that once released
1
Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë, Book’s Friends, Bucharest, 1994, p. 45.
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from the human form, will be free to walk over earth and complete each other wherever
they please.
The values that ruled the society of that time sustained the possibility that a man
can do almost everything he pleases whereas for the women was almost impossible to do
so. From the moment Isabella Linton eloped with Heathcliff, she became bound to him
and to his estate, and finding herself in a desperate and unbearable situation, she made
her way out of the novel by running away from the Heights. Tyrannized by Heathcliff
and rejected by her own brother she finds a place for herself to live the rest of her life and
to give birth to her child. She is remarkable for her courage and strength to run away
from the demonic husband she had and from the world in which she blindly had thrown
herself.
In what concerns Jane Eyre, it is noticeable the fact that she remained faithful to
her moral values, having a young inexperienced spirit, who relied on her own judgement
and her common sense, being exasperated by the injustice, humiliation and hypocrisy
from the Reed house and from Lowood. The character of Jane Eyre is used as a
raisonneuse because she has the spirit of a revolted slave who used her observation
abilities in order to illustrate the workings of a sick society using rationale and natural
arguments.
1.1 Church as a representative of evil
Some of the most dark pages of Jane Eyre were written by Charlotte with an
intense fury towards the place run by reverend Carus Wilson, where so many human lives
were left there. This school was placed in a swamped valley surrounded by a dark and
thick forest. This appearance of the school did not matter as much as the way in which
the girls were treated there. The cold and inanition were used in order to implement a
pious education in the souls of the poor children. The Lowood Asylum that Charlotte
presented in Jane Eyre was mostly inspired by the Cowan Bridge School where she spent
a number of unhappy and miserable years. Her sisters, Maria and Elisabeth, contracted
there the consumption of which they died. This charity school was dreadful for its cruel
ways of teaching the girls, for its humiliating and destroying their bodies through
inhuman conditions of living.
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Throughout the novel, Jane tries to find a way to conceal both the needs of her
body and the necessities of her soul. In Lowood she encounters two of the three main
figures of religion: Mr. Brocklehurst and Helen Burns. Each of these two models of
religion Jane dismays as she develops her own idea regarding faith and religion. Charlotte
Brontë created Mr. Brocklehurst in order to present the hypocrisies of the Evangelical
Movement. Thus he purges the girls of their pride through a rhetoric of Evangelicalism
and through privations (of food, clothes and other basic elements necessary for a girl-s
development) and humiliations, like in the episode when he unjustly punished Jane for
being a liar by leaving her on a stool an entire day without food, rest or a single word
from the rest of her mates:
“This girl, this child, the native of a Christian land, worse than many a little
heathen who says its prayers to Brahma and kneels before Juggernaut – this girl
is a liar!”1
Also, the food was never sufficient for the girls to ease their hunger and even the
small amount of food they received was worse than that given to the pigs:
“I perceived I had got in hand a nauseous mess - burned porridge is almost as
bad as rotten potatoes; famine itself soon sickens over it.”2
Besides this hygiene of an almost exterminating diet, there were also the punishments
meant to educate the girls and form obedient characters out of the growing characters of
the little girls. For all these, the girls had to be very grateful, understanding that each
moment of their meaningless lives depended on the enormous sacrifice of Mr.
Brocklehurst who provided for their needs out of his own “generosity”. Along with the
lack of food there were no clothes and no heat to make that place more endurable for this
was the method that Brocklehust used in order to make the girls humble and submitted to
his principles of piety towards God:
“A change had taken place in the weather the preceding night, and a keen north-
west wind, whistling through the crevices of our bedroom windows all night
long, had made us shiver in our beds, and turned the contents of the ewers into
ice.”3
1
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë, Book’s Friends, Bucharest, 1993, vol. 1, p 75.
2
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë, Book’s Friends, Bucharest, 1993, vol. 1, p. 50.
3
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Thus the girls were never rested, nor healthy, but ever starving and shivering
behind corners. The money the school received from donations was never used in the
purpose they had but always served as a means of enriching Mr. Brocklehurst. His
proscriptions are difficult to follow and even some members of the teaching staff disobey
the rules and act in favor of the girls, as Miss Temple does. His hypocritical support of
his own wealthy family is best seen in the pompous scene where his wife and daughters
visit the school, all dressed in the most luxurious and finest dresses the girls have ever
seen. All these were at the expense of the Lowood pupils and this unjustness is
marvelously illustrated by Charlotte’s weariness of the Evangelical Movement. As he
was a stingy man and eager to have even more money, the children had poor and unfitted
clothes to protect them from the whirling chillness of that area:
“Our clothing was insufficient to protect us from the severe cold; we had no
boots, the snow got into our shoes and melted there; our ungloved hands
became numbed and covered with chilblains, as were our feet (…) it was a
torture thrusting the swelled, raw and stiff toes into the shoes in the morning”1 .
This contributed to the fact that many girls with dry and pale skin, thin ones, got sick and
soon died.
Emily rarely went to church for she was indifferent to religion and even refused to
teach in the Sunday School; this became a reason for the people of the parsonage to
gossip about the parson’s daughter that refused to do these things. Emily perceived the
term of religion in matters that concerned a private relation between God and oneself, for
God hears one’s pray not coming from inside a church but from inside one’s soul. She
reflected this through Joseph, the spokesman of orthodoxy in the novel. His first portrait
is made by Nelly Dean, who was also one of the children whom he had thrown his curses
on:
“He was, and is yet, most likely the wearisomest self-righteous Pharisee that
ever ranksacked a Bible to rake the promises to himself and fling the curses on
his neighbors.”2
He is the one that always punishes the children for their misdeeds in the name if
his religion. He is sure that his strict punishments and sometimes harsh words will make
1
2
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the children fear not to go to hell. In fact his influence over them gets to such an extent
that they do not believe that heaven was made for them because all they hear from Joseph
is that they are doomed for ever for their mischief. Each time that he opens his mouth in
order to speak he does not say a thing without mentioning our holly Lord, or at least some
worthy saints. He considers himself better than any other around him and he even has no
doubt that he has his place reserved in heaven for he spreads the word from the Bible.
Lockwood amused himself by reading from one of Cathy’s filled blank pages of her
books, an excellent passage about Joseph, a rudely one but “powerfully sketched”:
“All day had been flooding with rain; we could not go to church, so Joseph must
needs get up a congregation in the garret; and, while Hindley and his wife
basket downstairs before a comfortable fire – doing nothing but reading the
Bible, I’ll answer for it – Heathcliff, myself and the unhappy ploughboy were
commanded to take our Prayer-books, and mount. We were ranged in a row, on
a sack of corn, groaning and shivering, and hoping that Joseph would shiver too,
so that he might give us a short homily for his own sake. A vain idea! The
service lasted precisely three hours.”1
In his view you are either one of the church devoted people or you are damned to a
terrifying afterlife. For Heathcliff and Cathy religion does not have so much relevance.
They never learned parts of the Bible by heart because they had some sort of inclination
towards it but because they were obliged by Joseph and the parson that came once in a
while to the Heights. The reason why they subdued to such occupations it was because
they had no choice. But there were occasions when, sensing a new punishment coming
from Joseph for one of their mischief, they ran and wandered through the moors. The
terms of heaven and hell were defined in their conscience as states of one’s spirit
regarding the separation from the other.
1.2 Hypocrisy
The bourgeois adopted “an appearance of conformity and decency” as Ileana
Galea writes in her History of English Literature – The Victorian Novel, and this
appearance could be seen as a mask, a symbol of the double. The ugly soul and the
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wickedness and evil that lie inside one, were veiled behind the most decent and soft
canvases. The violent moods of Emily’s characters, along with the language she uses to
describe the terrifying events contribute to the process of revealing the problems caused
by the confusion of what one need in life and by the conflict and divided loyalty between
groups of people.
As Heathcliff is forced to leave Cathy at the Grange, she remains there for five
weeks during which she transforms into a lady and she learns how to control a part of her
anterior unfit behaviors and outbursts. This irreversible process is the starting point of
Heathcliff and Catherine’s drama. Hindley also senses the space that has formed between
the two previous best friends and does everything he can to make it even wider by using
every situation to humiliate him in comparison to his sister. Hindley stresses the fact that
Heathcliff’s place is with the rest of the servants and does not allow him to make any
attempt to get closer to Cathy:
“Keep the fellow out of the room – send him into the garret till dinner is over.
He’ll be cramming his fingers in the tarts and stealing the fruit, if left alone with
them a minute. (…) Be gone, you vagabond!”1
To make the gap between the even bigger, Hingley has deprived him of any means of
becoming educated. During one year, Heathcliff has become unsocialized and his only
value and sense of defining himself in opposition to the others, and even in opposition to
Catherine is his determination of remaining free from the boundaries imposed by civility.
“Then personal appearance sympathized with mental deterioration; he acquired
a slouching gait and ignoble look; his naturally reserved disposition was
exaggerated into an almost idiotic excess of unsociable moroseness; and he took
a grim pleasure, apparently, in exciting the aversion rather than the esteem of
his few acquaintances.”2
Catherine is such a hypocrite when she chooses to show this lady-like character of
hers around the Lintons, denying her real self, and her untamed personality with
Heathcliff, when she speaks to him or to anyone from inside the house:
“In the place where she had heard Heathcliff termed a <vulgar young ruffian>
and <worse than a brute>, she took care not to act like him; but at home she had
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small inclination to practice politeness that would only be laughed at and
restrain an unruly nature when it would bring her neither credit nor praise.”1
As Nelly relates to Lockwood, Catherine was very proud and that she tried many times to
vex her in order to bring down her arrogance and to make her choose between this double
standard in which she lived.
Charlotte also illustrates hypocrisy through the master of the Lowood School, Mr.
Brocklehurst who preaches a doctrine of privation while stealing from the school’s
founds to support his luxurious lifestyle. This aspect is also treated by Charles Dickens in
Oliver Twist and is best seen in the scene where little Oliver is sent to ask from the
masters of the workhouse more food. These are presented by the author sitting at a table
and feasting themselves with the finest dishes and specialties, while in contrast with them
are the starving boys of the house. Mr. Brocklehurst adopts the attitude of a man of God
that preaches His word and who believes himself the one that guides the girls from the
school on the right path to the Garden of Eden by privation of some better conditions of
life for them. His plan is not to “accustom them to habits of luxury and indulgence, but to
render them hardy, patient and self-denying”(page 70). Meanwhile he does not apply the
same principles for himself and for his family as his wife and daughters for their
appearance mesmerized the poor girls of the school:
“They ought to have come a little sooner to have heard his lecture on dress for
they were splendidly attired in velvet, silk and furs. The two younger of the trio
(fine girls of sixteen and seventeen) had gray beaver hats, then in fashion,
shaded with ostrich plumes, and from under the brim of this graceful headdress
fell a profusion of light tresses, elaborately curled; the elder lady was enveloped
in a costly velvet shawl, trimmed with ermine, and she wore a false front of
French curls.”2
1.3 Violence
Among her sisters, Emily Brontë was the one that illustrated and transmitted best
her feelings and beliefs, along with everything she perceived around her. Her only novel
is a through and through spring of evil and violence. The first terrifying scene from which
1
2
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë, volume 1,Book’s Friends, Bucharest, 1993, p. 72-73.
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violence is at its home and to which the reader is a witness is full of superstition elements
presented in contrast with a social and cultural background. It is referred to the first and
also last night that the tenant of Thrushcross Grange spends at the Heights. It was a
surprise and a shock for every reader the way in which Lockwood reacted to the visit of
Cathy’s ghost. His barbaric and violent treatment of the “waif” was a result of a primary
instinct: fear and self-defense.
The action is symbolic in the way in which society makes its point clear that it is
the one that holds tightly the grip of the course of a large ship that is sailing on dangerous
and deep waters. This ship represents our own life and its tumultuous situations that arise
within us complex debates upon the matter of self-esteem, priorities and rules that must
be obeyed. To balance the scale, society acts brutally on nature and on all it stands for: “I
pulled its wrist on to the broken pane, and rubbed it to and fro till the blood ran down and
soaked the bed clothes.”(p. 23). This treatment is echoed also in the scene where
Heathcliff comes at the Heights late in the night after his wanderings on the moors and
finds the doors locked by Hindley who planed to kill “the fiend”:
“(…) he flung himself on Earnshaw’s weapon and wrenched it from his grasp.
The charge exploded. And the knife, in springing back, closed into its owner’s
wrist. Heathcliff pulled it away by main force, slitting up the flesh as it passed
on, and thrust it dripping into his pocket. (…) The ruffian kicked and trampled
on him, and dashed his head repeatedly against the flag. (…) “1
Heathcliff gained access in the house after slitting the flesh of Hindley and after knocking
down the window through which the two had the fight. The brutal force that was required
here is similar to that which Lockwood used to prevent the entrance of the “wife” in his
room through the window, similar to the ferociousness of culture and society over nature.
Violence is found as well in the cultivated milieu of the Grange although it is not
as well embodied in brute force like in the Heights. Violence is represented here through
veiled vocabulary and expressions that are deep cutters once spit out. Old Mr. and Mrs.
Linton were the first ones that attacked Heathcliff the night when the two children
ventured to the Linton estate. Although they commited the same deed, the attitude of the
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Lintons was taken under the prejudices imposed by their rank. The masters of the hall
discriminated the boy because of the color of his skin and because of his features:
“Don’t be afraid, it is but a boy – yet the villain scowls so plainly in his face;
would it not be a kindness to the country to hand him at once, before he shows
his nature in acts as well as features?”1
Another important key factor that determined the old Lintons to apply such a rough
treatment to Heathcliff was also his way of using language. He admitted to Nelly that he
“vociferated curses enough to annihilate any fiend in Christendom” (p. 42), and that after
Mrs. Linton considered him “quite unfit for a decent house” and told him that he is so
“foul-mouthed” he let his mind speak by “grumbling execrations and vengeance”. The
reader is aware of the situation in which Heathcliff found himself and justifies his actions
and his harsh directness because what he perceived there was the aggressiveness of the
Lintons’ language and he knew that the truth was on his side. They managed to transform
and induce all the violence they needed to achieve their purpose and follow their believes
through the sophisticated and socialized language they used.
This scene is echoed later in the novel when Heathcliff returns from his long and
mysterious wanderings through the world and pays a visit at the Grange to the new Mr.
and Mrs. Linton. The reader is impressed by the new status and condition of Heathcliff:
nobody knows how wealthy he is and he is dressed and acts just like a proper gentleman.
We are presented with the idea that culture and social influence has a positive, yet
dangerous, side. As Mengham Rod sustains in his critical outlook Emily Brontë –
Wuthering Heights, “culture’s advantage over nature is the ability to clothe in a moderate
form, what would be too extreme if expressed directly.” (p. 41). In this way Heathcliff’s
appearance at the Grange gives to the reader the false impression that his character is also
changed. But on the contrary, he is even more dangerous than before his departure
because he has learned all he could from the world outside the moors, he has learned to
think like Edgar does. The influence of society over nature is not a genuine one as
Heathcliff uses it to revenge on all those that made him suffer in a way or another. He is a
threat even when he speaks. The tension that rises from the discussion between the three
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persons is stressed also by the differences that arise from the way in which Linton and
Heathcliff use the language:
“Your presence is a moral poison that would contaminate the most virtuous –
for that cause, and to prevent worse consequences, I shall deny you, hereafter,
admission into this house, and give notice, now, that I require your instant
departure. Three minutes’ delay will render it involuntary and ignominious.”1
The way in which Edgar uses language makes one believe that it is only veiled savagery
and violence. The words he uses are of reference to the fact that he is a member of
Justice, a magistrate and are spoken as a sentence to a criminal. Just as old Mr. and Mrs.
Linton used their socialized vocabulary to attack Heathcliff, so does Edgar, by adding a
hint at a possible involvement of a physical action (the threat of throwing the guest out by
force). Heathcliff’s response to this affront is rather blunt but denotes a powerful desire
of defiance and a strong will and determination for getting whatever he wants:
“Cathy, this lamb of yours threatens like a bull! It is in danger of splitting its
skull against my knuckles. By God, Mr. Linton, I’m mortally sorry that you are
not worth knocking down!”
The way in which Heathcliff uses language in here denotes the many aspects of it: he
mocks Edgar in his face by alluding to his weak character; he is sure of his own strength
and spiritual superiority; he knows perfectly well what are his priorities, what is that he
wants; he knows that the power of his words are enough to tame the little “bull” which is
trampled on figuratively by the two lovers who humiliate him:
“<Heathcliff could as soon lift a finger at you as the king would march his
army against a colony of mice. Cheer up! You sha’n’t be hurt! Your type is not
a lamb, it’s a sucking leveret!>”
“”2
Hindley is seen even from the beginning of the story as a social climber. When
old Mr. Earnshaw asks his children what is that they want him to buy for them, Hindley’s
preference is shown toward a violin, a symbol of culture. He is sent to school and returns
home with a wife and with the prejudices of the society that formed him as a gentleman.
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2
15
He was ambitious and wanted to be more than just a boy raised on a farm. But Wuthering
Heights does not become a place where culture dominates even he makes the necessary
arrangements in the hall so as to make it resemble a gentleman’s house. His tyrannical
behavior and the loss of respect for every one else except his wife and sister takes him on
the path of degradation. After the death at birth of his wife he becomes even more like a
suppressor of his own family and employers, in special with Heathcliff to whom he
showed no mercy:
“For himself, he grew desperate: his sorrow was of that kind that will not
lament. He neither wept nor prayed; he cursed and defied execrated God and
man and gave himself up to reckless dissipation. The servants could not bear his
tyrannical and evil conduct long. (…) His treatment of Heathcliff was enough to
make a fiend of a saint. And, truly, it appeared as if the lad were possessed of
something diabolical at that period. He delighted to witness Hindley degrading
himself past redemption, and became daily more notable for savage sullenness
and ferocity.”1
Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre shows a less predominant inclination towards
violence but the scenes where it is present are marvelously described emphasizing the
inner feelings and thoughts of the main character. At Gateshead, Jane was punished so
often by her aunt Reed and humiliated and hurt by her cousin John that she desperately
dreamed of living in one of those wild an wonderful places she saw in the pictures of the
books from the library:
“He bullied and punished me; not two or three times in the week, nor once or
twice a day, but continually. Every nerve I had feared him, and every morsel of
flesh on my bones shrank when he came near.”2
This treatment of John and her mean aunt with appalling cruelty towards the young girl
made her feeling alienated, exiled and ostracized. As she developed a sense of self- worth
and dignity, it is of wonder how she can endure to stay in front of her cruel cousin
knowing that he will finally strike her for an imagined reason. But her need to express
herself when a unjustness was made to her makes its way out in a way or another:
1
2
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë, volume 1, Book’s Friends, Bucharest, 1993, p. 8.
16
“The volume was flung, it hit me and I fell, striking my head against the door
and cutting it. The cut bleed, the pain was sharp and my terror had passed its
climax; other feelings succeeded. <Wicked and cruel boy!> I said. <You are
like a murderer, you are like a slave-driver, you are like the roman emperors!>
(…) I really saw in him a tyrant, a murderer”.1
Later in the novel, when finding herself in the residence of Rochester, she senses the
mysterious and also threatening presence of a person, which she believes to be Grace
Poole. Bertha Mason, the one to whom all the misdeeds belong to, is violence is person.
All her acts have a destructive purpose as her rage is toward oppressive social and gender
norms. She is presented in contrast with Jane and can also be seen as the outward
manifestation of Jane’s inner fire and unexpressed feelings and fears. This is tackled in
the way in which Bertha sets on fire Rochester’s bed and also burns to the ground the hall
– representing a state of submission to which Jane doesn’t want to fall under. Bertha’s
madness and probably her revolt against her family that threw her in a loveless marriage,
makes her attack even her brother, Richard when he attempts to see her.
“<But how is this? The flesh on the shoulder is torn as well as cut. This wound
was not done with a knife. There have been teeth here!>
< She bit me!> he murmured < She worried me like a tigress, when Rochester
got the knife from her. (…) She sucked the blood. She said she’d drain my
heart!>”2
This violent action towards someone so close to her can be explained by her untamed
nature and her need to revenge on those that put her into the situation of being imprisoned
both in the room of the third store – and in the boundaries of her madness - and to
Rochester – or to the institution of marriage.
Violence in Anne’s novel The Tenant of Wildfell Hall springs out of jealousy and
hatred. Mr. Markham reacts aggressively to whoever speaks badly of his secretly loved
Helen even to his own brother which teases him from time to time. As the local gossip
started to make him question the status of his beloved and after a misinterpretation of her
relation with Frederick Lawrence, Gilbert becomes more and more sensitive to anything
1
2
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë, Book’s Friends, Bucharest, 1993, volume 1, p. 246.
17
that could remind him of Helen’s so called falseness and deception. As his own brother
protests, not understating the situation, Gilbert easily unleashes the rage that burns inside
of him on those around him: “The other day he nearly fractured my skull for singing a
pretty inoffensive love song, on purpose to amuse him.”(page 94) The broken hearted
man acted violently even against Lawrence for interfering between the relation he had
with Helen and barely hold his grip on himself.
“I grasped my whip with more determined energy than before but still forbore to
raise it, and rode on in silence, waiting for some tangible cause of offence,
before I opened the flood-gates of my soul, and poured out the dammed up fury
that was foaming and swelling within.”1
He consumed himself, as the author emphasizes his inner thoughts and feelings, and he
exploded like a bomb under pressure by striking his friend down his horse. This action
may be seen as a rightful and deserved one by the supposed false friend of his, but it must
be considered the fact that Gilbert knew nothing about the circumstances in which the
two “deceivers” knew themselves or the status of their relationship (which was one of
brother and sister) and also the fact that attacking Lawrence without notice was a
cowardly thing to do.
“He said no more, for, impelled by some fiend at my elbow. I had seized my
whip by the small end, and swift and sudden as a flash of lightning, brought the
other down upon his head. It was not without a feeling of savage satisfaction
that I beheld the instant, deadly pallor that overspread his face (…)”2
1.4 Social classes

The hierarchy of the late eighteenth century British society had at its top the
royalty, followed by the aristocracy, then by the gentry and last by the lower classes who
consisted of the great majority of the population, as members of the gentry. The
Earnshaws and the Lintons have a fragile social position within this hierarchy because
they held no titles. A man was considered to be a gentleman if he had large estates, many
tenants and servants, horses and carriages and if his money came from land or from
commercial activities. In Wuthering Heights, the characters are often motivated by the
1
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Anne Brontë, Penguin Popular Classics edition, England, 1994, p. 98.
2
18
considerations of class status. The best example is given by Catherine and her decision to
marry Edgar Linton in order to become the “greatest woman of the neighborhood”. The
Earnshaws are a step behind the Lintons, for they are farmers, they have less land than
the Lintons and do not have a carriage.
The shifting nature of social status is best seen through Heathclif’s path. From a
homeless waif on the streets of Liverpool he becomes a little gentleman as he is adopted
by Mr. Earnshaw. Then he becomes a common laborer under Hindley’s domination and
then he mysteriously becomes extremely wealthy and educated. This last status of his as a
gentleman is, in terms of Lockwood only in “dress and manners” for Heathcliff changed
only his appearance and not his character as well. More than this, he came back prepared
to put his plan of revenge in action and was even more dangerous because he assimilated
the workings of society and used them in achieving his purposes. The reason of
Heathcliff’s departure from the Heights was that that he wanted to be worthy of Cathy,
wealthy and educated, so that he wouldn’t “degrade” her, but as she had already married
Edgar in order to be the “greatest woman” from the area, his fortune and knowledge
served him in darker plans of revenge.
Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre tackles the strict social hierarchy of the
Victorian England. The complex situation of governesses represents best the workings of
such a mechanism. Like Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, Jane’s ambiguous class status
is a source of extreme tension for the characters around her, which react differently to her
position.
“Mr. Eshton, observing me, seemed to propose that I should be asked to join
them, but Lady Ingram instantly negatived the notion. <No, she looks too stupid
for any game of the sort!>”1
In that time, governesses were expected to posses the knowledge of the higher classes –
of the aristocracy – because their job was to tutor children in academics as well as is wais
of manners. Jane’s manners, knowledge of etiquette, sophistication and education give
her an air of aristocrat but her place in the social scale is clearly pointed out by other
around her, like Blanche Ingram and other guests at Thornfield Hall, for example. More
than this, as she was paid for being a governess, her status remained equal with that of the
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servants of that house and did not gave her the independency she was looking for and did
not gave her the power she was dreaming of having over her life and actions. She
becomes aware of the fact that she is Rochester’s intellectual equal but not his social
equal as she has no fortune and that through marriage, Rochester would need to
condescend to her level. In the end, Jane is opened a door through the inheritance from
her uncle and is able to marry Edward as his social equal.
1.5 Evil and meanness

The relationship between Heathcliff and Hindley is from the beginning described
as one of hatred. The first of them would probably turn out right if it weren’t for
Hindley’s jealousy and fear that his position might be taken away from him. He saw
Heathcliff as a thief that stole away the love of his father and the money he possessed.
From there on, the treatment of Hindley to Heathcliff was one of an oppressor towards
his slave, for this is what he made of the “waif”: a servant around the house. Heathcliff
did not complained to such harsh treatment for his first motivation has seeing and
spending his free time with Cathy and second his conviction that he will take his revenge
sometime. The first significant scene between the two lads from which the hatred of one
and the patience and dealing of the matter of the other is best seen is the one of the
exchange of horses initiated by Heathcliff:
“<Take my colt, gypsy, then!> said young Earnshaw. <And pray that he may
break your neck; take him, and be damned, you beggarly interloper! And
wheedle my father out of all he has; only afterwards show him what you are,
imp of Satan! And take that – I hope he’ll kick out your brains!>”1
Later on, after the death of old Mr. Earnshaw, as Hindley returned home from school
with his wife and became the master of the Heights, he immediately acted against
Heathcliff and treated him worse than the other servants of the house. His old hatred
came out with even more strength than when he was a boy and Heathcliff’s too
developed another side which made him plan his revenge for not one but two generations
of the family.
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“ (…) Hindley became tyrannical. A few words from her [Hindley’s wife],
evincing a dislike to Heathcliff, were enough to rouse in him all his old hatred
of the boy. He drove him off their company to the servants, deprived him of the
instructions of the curate, and insisted that he should labour out of doors instead,
compelling him to do so as hard as any other lad on the farm.”1
Later in the novel the reader witnesses an exchange of the social positions of the two
enemies: Heathcliff managed to subdue Hindley by lending him money for his debts at
gambles, money for which Hindley guaranteed with the hall. Thus, Hindley’s social
position was equal to zero not only because he has lost his right to his estate but also
because of his degrading, loss of his wife, alcoholism and bad temper. He does become
useless but his hatred for the one because of which his life has no sense, reaches a climax
with his vain attempt in killing the “ruffian”. This becomes his only goal in his miserable
life along with a small hope that through the killing of Heathcliff, his estate will be
returned to him and later to his son – mainly that it will all remain into the family and not
into the hands of an impostor and thief. One might consider Hindley to be right when
thinking things through his perspective; who wouldn’t condemn and try to push aside an
intruder in the harmonious circle of a happy family? Emily Brontë emphasized here also
the inner feelings and thoughts of the characters and it is clear that Hindley became
desperate and mentally and physically consumed by the loss of his family, wife and
estate.
“<Look here!> he replied, pulling from his waistcoat a curiously constructed
pistol, having a double-edged spring knife attached to the barrel. <That’s a great
temper to a desperate man, is it not? I cannot resist going up with this every
night, and trying his door. If once I find it open, he’s done for! (…) it is some
devil that urges me to thwart my own schemes by killing him (…) Oh
damnation! I will have it back, and I’ll have his gold too, and then his blood!
And Hell shall have his soul! It will be ten times blacker with that guest than
ever it was before.”2
After Cathy’s death, Heathcliff unleashed his plan of revenge even with more poison than
before and no one escaped unharmed in a way or another. Most of the scenes regarding
1
2
21
this period bear the mark of his brutality and the violence with which he treats those
around him are either verbal or physical or both. As Hindley received most of his part of
revenge through the fact that he had no land or house to claim to be his own, nor had he
the son he wanted because Heathcliff instructed the little child to be a little devil himself
and vociferated curses each time he opened his mouth. The only major violent scene that
occurred between the two presented the strength of Heathcliff which apparently was
coming from an ardent murderous desire to knock out Hindley but not to kill him.
“The ruffian kicked and trampled on him, and dashed his head repeatedly
against the flag. (…) There he tore off the sleeve of Earnshaw’s coat, and bound
up the wound with brutal roughness, spitting and cursing during the operation as
energetically as he had kicked before.”1
Also the wild and proud young Catherine Linton gets her part from Heathcliff’s overflow
of malignity and evil. Young, stubborn, naïve and spoiled, Cathy listens to her heart
rather than to her father’s advice and gets herself trapped in a cob web from which she
can no longer escape. She learns on her own how to respond evil and meanness and often
stands Heathcliff up driving him mad with her hysterical:
“Catherine was too intent on his fingers to notice his face. He opened them
suddenly and resigned the object of dispute; but ere she had well secured it, he
seized her with the liberated hand and pulling her on his knee, administered
with the other a shower of terrific slaps on both sides of her head, each
sufficient to have fulfilled his threat, had she been able to fall.”2
Charlotte Brontë created a bildungsroman and focused on the psychological

development and the construction of beliefs and principles in Jane Eyre’s inner self. This
leads to the fact that violence is not that much tackled here like in Emily’s Wuthering
Heights. Jane becomes almost alienated from the world of Gateshead where she receives
a bad treatment from her aunt despite the fact that the letter made a death-bed promise to
raise Jane as her own child. After the tormenting and terrible episode with the red room
the reader can draw some lines regarding the character of Aunt Reed but the real deep
hatred she felt for the girl is seen only in the scenes of her last days. Jane is capable of
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forgiveness and breaks her promise of never returning to Gateshead in order to comply
with the wish of her sick aunt and tries to patch things up with her. Though through
delirium, the old woman is still full of hostility toward her late husband’s favorite:
“<I have had so much trouble with that child than anyone would believe. Such a
burden to be left in my hands and so much annoyance as she caused me daily
and hourly, with her incomprehensible disposition and her sudden fits of
temper! (…) I was glad to get her away from the house! (…) She, however, did
not die; but I said she did. I wish she had died!>”1
Also her cousins, with their never-ending spring of evil and meanness treat her with
appalling cruelty. The partiality of the servants is mostly in the favor of the lady of the
house but there are also cases when she receives a kind word from Bessie Lee who is
kind to her and tells her stories and sings her songs. The hardest thing for Jane is to
endure the everyday punishments of her cousin knowing that she has no one on this
world to care for her and that she is dependent on her cruel aunt.
“All John Reed’s violent tyrannies, all his sisters’ proud indifference, all his
mother’s aversion, all the servant’s partiality, turned up in my disturbed mind
like a dark deposit in a turbid well. Why was I always suffering, always
browbeaten, always accused, forever condemned?”2
Thus Jane feels like she does not have a place to call home or a feeling of true home and
flees Gateshead in a search of “kindred spirits”, autonomy and freedom. Later in the
novel, after Jane’s dreadful experience at Lowood, it is pointed out that there are
repercussions to this bad treatment she received during her life and that she is rather
accustomed to be treated rudely and with no consideration than with courtesy and warm
embraces. She shows herself timid and ashamed when meeting for the first time Mrs.
Fairfax who treats her like an honorable guest and finds herself at ease meeting the rider
and his black dog, who speaks coldly and dismisses her urgently.
“If even this stranger gad smiled and been good humored to me when I
addressed him, if he had put off my offer of assistance gaily and with thanks, I
1
2
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should have gone on my way and not felt any vocation to renew enquiries. But
the frown, the roughness of the traveler set me at my ease.”1
The episode in which Jane recounts the visit of a group of friends of the master illustrates
the inner mechanisms and the deceitful shade that the upper classes possess. The position
of a governess in a house was seen as equal to that of the rest of the attendants and
servants. Charlotte explored and wrote from a critical perspective about the strict social
hierarchy of the Victorian England. Some of the guests – Blanche Ingram and her mother
to be more precise- treat Jane with disdain and cruelty and amuse themselves and the
audience by mocking the position and fade character of all the governesses, making a
strong allusion to Jane herself.
“<You should hear mama on the chapter of governesses Mary and I have had, I
should think, a dozen at least in our day; half of them detestable and the rest
ridiculous, and all incubi – were they not, mama?> (…) <My dearest, don’t
mention governesses. The word makes me nervous. I have suffered a
martyrdom from their incompetency and caprice. I thank Heaven I have now
done with them.>”2
As the entire society is bathing itself in evil and meanness through the behavior
and dirty thoughts and deeds of its inhabitants it is of no wonder that the entire novel is
dealing with Jane’s quest for a balance between her moral duty and the needs of her
body. The society in the middle of which she found herself rejected her and did not
recognized her qualities for it was driven by strict rules based on the principle of owning
money, power and a social position. After fleeing Thornfield, she finds herself bound to
the nature around her as to a mother and if it weren’t for the needs of her body – meaning
hunger and thirst – she would have overflowed with joy in the middle of this freedom,
fresh air, outside the vicious and full of evil circle of society:
“Nature seemed to me benign and good; I thought she loved me, outcast as I
was. And I who from man could anticipate only mistrust, rejection, insult, clung
to her with filial fondness.”3
1
2
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë, volume 1, Book’s Friends, Bucharest, 1993, p. 204-205.
3
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Anne’s almost overly polite and innocent novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall,
treats the aspect of evil and meanness through the means of the gossip that arises and
spreads itself among the so called elite groups of society. These are mostly lies with a
malicious content made up in order to have something to talk about, something to amuse
oneself or just to find some excuse in order to prevent the access of one or another to
different opportunities. As Mrs. Graham took the tenancy of Wildfell Hall and gave no
details about the life she had before this, the ladies in special of the vicarage and of the
town began to plot in their minds about a possible scenario upon which they could
discuss and entertain themselves as their lives gave nothing special of the sort. As the
story is told from the perspective of young Mr. Markham, who is attached by the new
lady, it is no surprise the way in which he reacted hearing these pieces of gossip.
“Meantime, my brain was on fire with indignation and my heart seemed ready
to burst from its prison with conflicting passions. I regarded my two fair
neighbors with a feeling of abhorrence and loathing I scarcely endeavored to
conceal.”1
The meanness of the ladies, or at least the evil that comes from the one lady from
which all the gossip seems to spring, is generated by envy, jealousy and her inner bad and
filthy character. Miss Eliza turns out to provoke a series of stories that make Helen the
talk of the town. The many parties and dinners that were given from time to time by one
family or another served as a means to exchange new information and gossip as much as
it could, until the problem or matter was turned and analyzed from each angle. This
process had as a result a fierce look, some harsh words, indifference, rejection and even
humiliation, all being practiced – including the “vile slander” – and circulated throughout
the company of the circle, in the very presence of the “victim”.
“Had the poison of detracting tongues already spread through all? And had they
all turned their backs upon her? I now recollected having seen Mrs. Wilson
edging her chair close up to my mother, and bending forward, evidently in the
delivery of some important, confidential intelligence. And from the incessant
wagging of her head, the frequent distortions of her wrinkled physiognomy, and
winking a malicious twinkle of her little ugly eye, I judged it was some spicy
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piece of scandal that engaged her powers and from the cautious privacy of the
communication I supposed some person then present was the luckless object of
her calumnies.”1
Self-possessed, surrounded by secrecy and having her small son with her, it is not
long before Helen finds herself the victim of the local slander. Stories about her arise as
fantasies, scenarios with different criminal shades, condemns of depravity and even
stories related to her religion. As even the priest of the town listens to these calumnies, it
is of no wonder that gossip has a major power in that society. Thus Helen receives an
unjust preach from Mr. Wilson after which she felt even more rejected and stressed out
than when she only perceived what happened behind her back. She is confining the story
of her secret life and confessing her inner feelings and her convictions to Gilbert, who is
one of the too few people that believe in her innocence:
“(…) it is not pleasant to be looked upon as a liar and a hypocrite, to be thought
to practice what you abhor, and to encourage the vices you would
discountenance, to find your good intentions frustrated, and your hands crippled
by your supposed unworthiness, and to bring disgrace on the principles you
profess.”2
There is one more remark to be done here and that is referred to the fact that one
needs to posses a natural skill or a very good aptitude in dissimulation in order to spread
an interesting and yet disturbing piece of gossip without the “victim” to get to know it.
The falseness that emanates from Miss Eliza’s chattering and the “sidelong glance -
intended to be playfully mischievous – really brimful and running over with malice”
( page 95), is perceived by the male narrator who becomes really disgusted by all the
poisonous tongues that unjustly and with no evidence for the matter tackled the need of
Mrs. Graham to be a decayed woman.
“<Oh, Mr. Markham!> said she, with a shocked expression and voice subdued
almost to a whisper, < What do you think of these shocking reports about Mrs.
Graham? Can you encourage us to disbelieve them?>” 3
1
2
3
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There seems also that there might be a shade of hope to this situation of spreading gossip
and participating to the talk of the town in the fact that there are some characters who are
completely against this activity and who rely on their own knowledge and contact in what
regards Mrs. Graham, until the opposite is demonstrated to them through facts.
Chapter 2
Superstitions
The six brothers were united pretty soon by an uncommon imaginative ability.
They imagined and told stories and amused themselves greatly when these stories opened
new horizons beyond and far away from the walls of the parish. Other sources for their
stories were those that came from their aunt who spoke about faithful knights, princesses
locked up in towers and fights between good and evil. Also their father used to tell them
horrible and scary stories from his native places. The Irish folklore was full of weirdness,
witches, elves and ghosts that came to life in front of the children who listened intensely
while the wind blew wildly outside their windows. Tabitha Aykroyd, or Tabby, as the
children called her, was the family servant who often told reverend Brontë’s children
local stories and ballads. She developed in the children a special taste for a supernatural
world dominated by fairies and elves. “Certain of Tabby’s stories seem to have been
27
echoed in the circumstances of Wuthering Heights”1 as she seems to have been the one
that influenced the creation of the fictional character Nelly Dean, the main narrator of the
happenings of Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange. The similarity between the
two lies in the fact that both posses the ability of capturing the audience with stories and
local knowledge that occurred long before the time of the narration. This gave the novel
an air of mysticism that was made even more concentrated by the addition of supernatural
elements.
2.1 Superstitions
The events from the red-room marked Jane profoundly and this scene is
remembered many times along the novel as she finds herself in the need of taking an
important decision for her life. Once locked in the room Jane starts to think about the
reason for which she was imprisoned, both physically and mentally. Thus, she remembers
her Uncle Reed’s last wish that she would be raised by his wife with the same love and
attention that she gave to her own children. Her thoughts take her further in remembering
some sayings from Bessie according to which dead people, whose death-bed wishes were
not accomplished, use to wake up from their graves in order “to punish the perjured and
avenge the oppressed”. Jane’s belief that her uncle would rise before her in the room is
nothing but the result of believing in such superstitions like the rising of dead people
from the graves. The folklore and the local stories had a major influence on her and she
proves herself to be superstitious along the novel.
After she endures terrible and harsh conditions of living at Lowood Asylum and
the cruelty of Mr. Brocklehurst, Jane begins her career as a governess at Thornfield Hall.
Another moment in which she recalls some of the stories told by Bessie Lee was in the
scene of her first encounter with Rochester, not knowing that he was her master. As the
night and darkness was falling quick she immediately made the connection between some
1
Emily Brontë- Wuthering Heights, Mengham Rod, Penguin Critical Studies, 1988, England, p. 3.
28
Gothic and evil figure of the North of the country and the horse-rider that was
approaching her on the solitary path.
“I remembered certain of Bessie’s tales, wherein figured a North-of-England
spirit, called a <Gytrash> which, in the form of a horse, mule, or large dog,
haunted solitary ways, and sometimes came upon belated travelers, as this horse
was now coming upon me.”1
During the engagement period while at Thornfield, different events signal to the
reader that the tension in the Hall rises, and that the moment when the mystery is to be
revealed is approaching. The thunder that splits the chestnut tree into two is a warning for
the reader to know or to suspect that the couple will not last and that they must be set
apart. The same thing is signaled by the tarring of the veil into two by Rochester’s wife.
This is an act of bad omen and it stands as a proof that the first marriage of Rochester is
still valid and that a second one cannot take place. More than this, Jane dreams of little
children crying in her arms several nights in a row and she remembers that this is also a
bad omen for her as it was for Bessie too when she dreamed of babies and then her sister
died. Thus, she is certain of the fact that something is wrong or is going to be wrong as
there are so many signs and symbols of the mistake she is about to do.
The relation Jane has with her cousin serves for her as a model of another way to
be subdued by the power of men and religion. As St. John is ambitious and a model of
Christian glorified behavior Jane is urged by him to marry him in order for her to fulfill
her moral duty towards God. Just when she was on the point of saying “Yes”, a phantom-
like voice is heard by Jane, calling her desperately out, in the dark night. As an electric
shock went through her body in recognizing her beloved Rochester’s voice, she runs into
the garden crying back to him:
“<I’m coming!> I cried <Wait for me! Oh, I will come! (…) Where are you?>”2
She believes something fateful has occurred and as there is no reply to this, she
realizes it was part of a superstition and the hand of Mother Nature: ”Down superstition!
(…) this is not thy deception, not thy witchcraft, it is the work of nature.” (page 234).
This voice that she heard in the middle of the night may be considered as well as a sweet
dream of our Jane, a need for a wish to come true or maybe it would be better to say that
1
2
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë, Book’s Friends, Bucharest, 1993, volume 2, p. 233-234.
29
it is a caress of her longing and suppressed desires. This preternatural experience with the
voice of Rochester made her realize that it is also important and vital to follow her heart
as well as her mind. If we are to see this happening as a dream, we have to consider the
dreamer that is a nineteen year old woman, conscious of her moral superiority and
intellectual quality.
The main narrator of the happenings of Wuthering Heights is more or less a

superstitious woman and in some situations she relies on her instincts rather than on her
strongly formed principles. She tried to detach herself from the chaos and violence that
was unleashed by Heathcliff and even the drunk Hindley, as not to go mad herself. But
she was no heartless woman and worried for those around her, in special for her
childhood playmates Cathy, Hindley and Heathcliff. She receives a sort of a sign that she
believed to be a superstition she had to follow trough. Finding herself at the crossroads of
the Heights and the Grange, a flickering image of her young playmate Hindley sort of
shaped itself from her memories.
“I gazed long at the weather-worn block, and, stopping down, perceived a hole
near the bottom still full of snail shells and pebbles, which we were very fond of
storing there with more perishable things; and, as fresh as reality, it appeared
that I behold my early playmate seated on the withered turf (…) It vanished in a
twinkling, but immediately I felt an irresistible yearning to be at the Heights.
Superstition urged me to comply with this impulse. Supposing he should be
dead! I thought – or should die soon! Supposing it were a sign of death!”1
This specter of her imagination, to say so, cannot be seen as a ghost while Hindley is still
alive but it can certainly believed to be a sign of his need to have someone close to him or
maybe a yearning for better and tranquil days.
2.2 Dreams
In Jane Eyre, the heroine‘s strange and fearful symbolic dreams are not
nightmares, but the outburst of her subconscious where the tension of the engagement,
the stress of the wedding-day and the departure from Rochester have gathered. She has
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one terrible dream in which Thornfield is a dreary ruin. She does not know how to
interpret this and it only makes her wonder if this is really the home she wanted. Other
dreams come but these are different because she sees herself carrying a baby each time.
This makes her believe this to be premonitory of bad things, as she believes in some
superstitions told by the servant of Gateshead when she was little:
“When I was a little girl, only six years old, I one night heard Bessie Leaven say
to Martha Abbot that she had been dreaming about a little child; and that to
dream of children was a sure sign of trouble, either to oneself or one’s kin (…)
the next day Bessie was send for home to the death bed of her little sister. Of
late I had often recalled this saying and this incident; for during the past week
scarcely a night had gone over my couch that had not brought with it a dream of
an infant (…).”1
When trying to have some rest under the roof of the Heights, Lockwood has two
dreams. The first one is easy to recover from and the guest has no difficulties in believing
himself awake from it. But the second dream on the other hand, shakes Lockwood to the
very core of his being. This episode of the novel is symbolic because it reveals the
useless power of the imposed belief that the world of instincts and natural forces has been
shut out from his life. It is much more than this revelation; it is about the fact that such
forces exist deep down in every human being’s nature. This is also the reason why Emily
has chosen Lockwood to have this dream and not other character; he is the least likely
one to have it; as he comes from another social background where such events are
considered a subject of amusement, when in fact here, the irrational has overcome his
wall of resistance.
The brusque and terrifying event with Cathy’s appearance also shows us that the
least civilized and well mannered part from a man can be annihilated by one of the most
primary instinct, that is fear. He is an outsider invaded by the irrational, by the world of
the moors and what it stands for. The physical effects of his experience with that form of
existence that made its presence strongly felt are a sign or an example of how ferocious
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culture can be (here represented by Lockwood) with nature, in order to regain control
over the conscience.
“<> I muttered, knocking my knuckles through
the glass, and stretching an arm out to seize the importunate branch, instead of
which my fingers closed on the fingers of a little ice cold hand! The intense
horror of nightmare came over me; I tried to draw back my arm, but the hand
clung to it, and a most melancholy voice sobbed: <<Let me in! Let me in!>.(…)
Terror made me cruel; and finding it useless to attempt shaking the creature off,
I pulled its wrist onto the broken pane, and rubbed it to and fro till the blood ran
down and soaked the bed clothes; still it wailed, <<Let me in!>> and maintained
its tenacious gripe, almost maddening me with fear.”1
From this illustrative paragraph one may also notice the fact that we pass from
what is considered to be a dream to a state where the guest is awake without being able to
point out the moment when this passing took place. We know that the character was
awake because of the intensity of the emotions that went through him like an electric
shock and because the circumstances were more real than imaginary. The character
seems to muse over an aspect of his dream, that is also a hint to the fact that the creature
that paid him the visit was after all real, and that is the reason of why the “waif”
proclaimed herself as Catherine Linton and not Catherine Earnshaw: ”Why did I think of
Linton? I had read Earnshaw twenty times for Linton.” (page 23) .
Later in the novel, the reader witnesses a scene in which Nelly Dean reveals the
fact that she believes in superstitions. In her attempt to find out the reason why Cathy is
so agitated after the visit that Edgar Linton paid to her, Nelly immediately regrets the fact
as Cathy reveals the content of her heart through the account of a dream she had had. She
was afraid of dreams, “she held to an undogmatic country religion which made her
equally at home at the kirk or at <the Methodists’ or Baptists’ place (I cannot say which it
is)>, but she feared to <shape a prophecy> from the telling of a dream.” 2 She nervously
tries to stop Cathy from her telling but it is all in vain as the young girl already recounts
1
2
The Oxford History of the English Literature – The Victorian Novel, Alan Horsman, London, 1990, p.
167.
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the dream and interprets its meaning, not knowing that Heathcliff is listening hidden
behind the back door of the kitchen.
“I was superstitious about dreams then, and am still, and Catherine had an
unusual gloom in her aspect that made me dread something from which I might
shape a prophecy, and foresee a fearful prophecy.”1
The passionate note that Cathy adopted frightens Nelly in the first instance but after
listening to her she gathers herself and helps Cathy, through objective and direct
questions to find out what is that she really need and want from her life. This is the
moment in which Cathy becomes conscious of the oneness that she and Heathcliff
represent and that their love is possible in a timeless space, an unearthly one.
2.3 Ghosts
“(…) if ghosts have been mentioned, if the country people swear that Heathcliff
walks, we can, with Lockwood at the end, affirm our skepticism as to <how
anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet
earth>”2
The first encounter that the reader has with a so called ghost in Wuthering Heights
is through the lost tenant of the Grange during a stormy night when he was obliged to
shelter himself under the roof of the Heights. Catherine’s ghost appears to Lockwood at
the window and scares him in such a way that he screams in terror. This ghost might as
well be seen as part of a nightmare the stranger has had as we are not able to determine
where his dream stopped and when he was awake. But Heathcliff’s response to this event
is a clear illustration of his belief in such entities like ghosts; he begs for Cathy to return
to him and to come inside the house but, as always, the ghost showed herself to be
playing around and did not answered to his desperate call. Having a cultural background,
Mr. Lockwood tried to find an explanation for this occurrence and finding none, he
passed to accuse the lack of hospitality of his master and his servants and his way of
entertaining himself on the expense of his guest.
1
2
In An Anthology of Critical Approaches to the Victorian Novel, Galea Ioana, Craciun Mircea, Cluj-
Napoca, 1987, p. 110.
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“I suppose that she wanted to get another proof that the place was haunted, at
my expense. Well, it is swarming with ghosts and goblins! You have reasons in
shutting it up, I assure you. No one will thank you for a doze in such a den. (…)
If the little fiend had got in at the window, she probably would have strangled
me! I’m not going to endure the persecution of your hospitable ancestors
again!”1
Whether or not the ghost is real, it symbolizes a presence of the past in the
present, a way in which memories regarding the lost person linger near people and
involve in their day by day life. As Lockwood refers to it, the “ancestor” is present at the
Heights as expecting something or somebody. One may question why the spirit of
Catherine appeared as a young girl and not as a woman all in all. This can be explained
through the fact that Cathy was really happy only in those times when she was a wild,
untamed and free girl who could wander through the moors with Heathcliff, unrestrained
by social, religious and family boundaries.
“<I’ll never let you in, not if you beg for twenty years!>
<It is twenty years.>mourned the voice <Twenty years, I’ve been a waif for
twenty years!>”2
The urgent and desperate need of the ghost to get inside the house is explained
through the anguish and longing of the tormented soul of hers to return to the house of
her childhood. When still alive and on her death bed, Cathy wanted to feel the wind that
was coming down from the moors, from Wuthering Heights and wanted so bad to find
herself in her room, and in her own bed, that she began hallucinating that she was already
there, looking at the light of her window. Emily Brontë described and analyzed the inner
thoughts and torments of the souls of these two titanic characters in a wonderfully and
deep bound of their strings attached to them.
Emily Brontë believed in the immortality of the soul not only in the way
Christians do, but also on earth, in this world. As Galea Ileana mentioned about this
aspect in An Anthology of Critical Approaches of the Victorian Novel, “the spiritual
principle of which the soul is a manifestation is active in this life: the disembodied soul
continues to be active in this life.”(p. 124). In Emily’s view, death is not a full stop, an
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end of the road, but a custom, a filter that allows the soul or spirit to continue its previous
preoccupations under another form of existence. Catherine Earnshaw dreams that her
spirit goes to heaven but there she realizes that she isn’t happy and begs the angels to
send her back to her beloved Wuthering Heights. This may be seen as a kind of prophecy
because when Cathy actually dies her spirit does not go to heaven but returns to the
grounds of the Heights.
The memorable scene between the dying Cathy and Heathcliff reveals to the
reader the unnatural feature of these two characters through the fact that both believe in
the existence of ghosts and trust themselves to be united for ever in another world.
Cathy’s statement “I shall not be at peace!” (p.130) leaves a mark on Heathcliff’s mind
and after her death, he prays a non-orthodox prayer that she may not rest until he will join
her. The severe pain makes him look like an animal, like a demon, and this may be seen
as mirroring of his torn-apart soul. He feels himself so hollowed that he is presented in
connection to a living corpse: “I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my
soul!” (p. 136). For eighteen years he derived his strength from his memories of her and
making patiently plans of destroying his enemies. He becomes strangely happy and
absent of any other human activities from the moment he believes he had an encounter
with “a specter of hope”. He yearns to be with his beloved Catherine and he only opens
his soul to Nelly who listens to him frightened:
“I have a single wish and my whole being and faculties are yearning to attain it.
They have yearned toward it so long and so unwaveringly that I’m convinced it
will be reached – and soon because it has devoured my existence, I am
swallowed in the anticipation of its fulfillment. (…) O, God! It’s a long fight. I
wish it were over!”1
As it has been said before, it seems that Catherine’s spirit is effectively active,
passionately haunts Heathcliff and influences him in all his actions and his physical state
of being as she herself has predicted that she would: “I shall not be at peace!” (page 130).
After her death, the one thing that makes the reader believe the ghost to be real is
Heathcliff’s unorthodox prayer that she may not rest. He curses her for the pain she has
caused him and, in the fever of her last words that marked him and that were burned deep
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into his mind, e pleads with her soul to haunt him all the rest of his days. When little, the
greatest punishment for one of them was to be separated from the other, so now, it is of
no wonder that the death of Catherine caused an unearthly pain to Heathcliff for she has
removed herself from him and his being can no longer be considered a whole. The doom
and despair that dominate Heathcliff in the moment after Cathy’s death makes his
features distorted and his appearance wild, like that of an unearthly creature. He curses
her soul to wander the earth after her death so that she can be with him, this contrasting
the claim of Nelly that Cathy rests with God.
“Where is she? Not there, not in heaven, not perished, where? Oh! You said you
cared nothing for my sufferings! And I pray one prayer. I repeat it till my
tongue stiffens: Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest as long as I am living!
You said I killed you. Haunt me then! The murdered do haunt their murderers. I
believe, I know that ghosts have wandered on earth. Be with me always, take
any form, drive me mad! Only do not leave me in this abyss where I cannot find
you! Oh God! It is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live
without my soul!”1
We have no information about the ghost of Catherine as the time of the narration
skips eighteen years. After Heathcliff becomes the owner of the two mannors and after
his enemies’ death, his revenge is almost fulfilled (the end of it being making Cathy’s and
Hareton’s lives miserable). He starts acting strange as sometimes he suddenly appears to
focus upon an empty spot around the house or outside the window as if there would be
someone waiting for him. Later on he confesses to Nelly that the strange appearance that
he feels near him belongs to his beloved Cathy. Heathcliff feels both happiness and
despair as the ghost does not show itself but only makes its presence felt.
“<I looked round impatiently – I felt her by me. I could almost see her, and yet I
could not! I ought to have sweat blood then, from the anguish of my yearning,
from the fervour of my supplications to have but one glimpse! I had not one.
She showed herself as she often was in life: a devil to me!>”2
His love and yearning for Catherine eroded his lust for revenge and ceased in oppressing
the two, and instead he occupied his time by wondering through the moors searching for
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Cathy’s spirit and even opening her grave in his despair in order to see her. The entire
period of time in which the two have been separated, Heathcliff only entered in a state of
being in which his titanic energy began to fade, little by little, until he consumed the last
“fuel” burning up in a state of blissful euphoria.
”Heathcliff stood at the open door; he was pale and he trembled; yet, certainly,
he had a strange joyful glitter in his eyes that altered the aspect of his whole
face.”1
The process of separation of the world in which he lives is accelerated by the fact that
Heathcliff became alien to any human habit: he does not need to eat or sleep and he has
lost track of time and of those in whose presence he finds himself. It is clearly, from
Nelly’s perception of him that his body may be found there but his spirit and mind are far
away, searching for the entrance in the world in which Cathy is:
“Last night, I was on the threshold of hell. Today I am within sight of my
heaven. I have my eyes in it, hardly three feet to sever me!”2
This apparition that seems to communicate with Heathcliff and which Nelly or
anyone else is not able to see, is acting in a reverse way than when the reader and
Lockwood first encountered it. The ghost only showed herself to Lockwood thus driving
Heathcliff mad or just tormenting him, but is showed herself later only to him as he was
surely heading towards the “sight of heaven”. The main characters in Wuthering Heights
regret the fact that they die only in the aspect of temporal separation from those whom
they love. Emily Brontë was a genius, an artist in presenting this supernatural world that
was in fact, for her, a very natural one. For her, happiness and the feeling of fulfillment
could only be gained through a bound between man and nature. The last mentioning of
the presence of a ghost was reported by some villagers who claim to have seen Heathcliff
and Catherine’s ghosts walking through the moors. These are seen by the narrator as
mere superstitions as the earth above their tombs looks so peaceful and quiet.
“But the country folks, if you asked them, would swear on their Bible that he
walks. There are those who speak to having met him near the church, and on the
moor, and even within this house. Idle tales, you’ll say and so say I. yet that old
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man by the kitchen fire affirms he has seen two on ‘em looking out of his
chamber window, on every rainy night since his death.”1
Charlotte Brontë also developed the presence of such supernatural entities in her
novel Jane Eyre. The character only believes in the existence of ghosts in childhood as
she is influenced by the local and of folklore inspirited stories that the servant Bessie Lee
told her. The narrator, a grown up woman at the time of the telling of the story of her life,
recounts every detail of the terrible scene from the Red Room and is able to see the
supernatural things that she believed to be the features of her late uncle’s ghost, in a
different perspective. Though at that time she was overwhelmed by the amount on
sensations, her mint troubled in tumult and her heart in “insurrection” Jane is capable of
finding a simple explanation for the phantom as being, “in all likelihood, a gleam from a
lantern carried by someone across the lawn” (page 17).
As the Gothic genre became popular in England, more and more novels adopted it
and this novel is no exception. Charlotte described supernatural experiences and
mysterious occurrences that create suspense atmospheres and fearful situations. The
mystery of the novel is given by Jane’s encounter with ghosts and dark secrets. The
factors that contributed to her fainting with fear were the recalling of some stories about
dead men who were troubled in their graves for the breaking of their last wishes and who
used to rise from their resting places in order to revenge the wrongs, and, of course, the
darkness of the Red Room itself.
“(…) prepared as my mind was for horror, shaken as my nerves were by
agitation, I thought the swift-darting beam was a herald of some coming vision
from another world. My heart beat thick, my head grew hot, a sound filled my
ears, which I deemed the rushing of wings. Something seemed near me. I was
oppressed, suffocated…endurance broke down.”2
2.4 Sorcery
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As Jane first only hears the approaching of a horse she suddenly thinks of the
Gytrash spirit that takes the form of a horse or a huge dog in order to scare solitary
travelers like her. As the night is approaching, she distinguishes the form of a dog but
immediately her fears vanish and the uncanny moment ceases as the horse she has heard
earlier seems to have a rider. This rider’s identity is revealed as Jane arrives at the Hall
and finds that her master has returned and that he is the same man that sprinkled his ankle
earlier on the hill. Mr. Rochester is abrupt and cold towards Jane and little Adele and
even accuses Jane of being a witch that put a spell on his horse and made him fall off
him.
“<When you came on me in Hay Lane last night, I thought unaccountably of
fairy tales and had half a mind to demand whether you had bewitched my horse.
I am not sure yet (…). Did I break through one of your rings, that you spread
that damned ice on the causeway?>”1
He might have thought of Jane to be a witch because of her small stature and her
mysterious appearance as her eyes were very expressive and in that moment still in a
possible on guard look for the attack of the northern spirit. Even later in the novel,
Rochester does not renounce his assertion that Jane is little witch or a vanishing and
vaporous spirit.
Mr. Rochester, as a mysterious and well equipped man in matters of knowledge
about how to entertain his guests, disguises himself into a Gypsy fortune-teller and makes
his entrance at the Hall by requesting the presence of all the ladies, wooing them into a
deceitful arrangement. He combines pleasure with necessity and utility as he need to
make sure that Blanche only wanted his money and to find out the true feelings of Jane
towards him. The presence of such a figure at the hall stirs debates upon whether to
receive it or not:
“<What is she like?> enquired the Misses Eshton, in a breath.
<A shockingly ugly old creature, miss; almost as black as a crock.>
<Why, she’s a real sorceress!>”2
. Curiosity and a need of amusement make the guests to react differently: some remained
silent, some “looked a little frightened”, some didn’t dare to venture in the game and
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some, like Blanche Ingram rose firmly and faced the provocative challenge launched by
the gypsy. When Jane’s turn comes, she is rather calm, skeptic and is not that impressed
by the gypsy like the other ladies from the hall. She finds ways to reveal the sources from
which the witch might found things about her. This is one of the scenes that reveal Jane’s
character in which there is a fight between passion and reason, as Rochester in disguise
tells to her:
“The forehead declares: Reason sits firm and holds the reins, and she will not let
the feelings burst and hurry her to wild chasms. The passions may rage
furiously, like true heathens, as they are; and the desires may imagine all sorts
of vain things; but judgement shall still have the last word in every argument,
and the casting vote in every decision.”1
Rochester saw deep inside her soul the same fight that is taking place in his own soul,
saw the same struggle and anguish in her eyes, the gates of the spirit. The differences
between them are considerable as he lacks Jane’s determination and self-awareness in
doing what is right and thus to become free. The differences between genders are also
relevant because the status of the woman in society was not valued and Jane needed to be
an independent woman with an equal status as Rochester’s.
Emily Brontë did not used sorcery in her novel as much as to constitute an
important aspect but the scene referred to can be relevant in the way in which it shows
how religion is seen by the new generation. Through the eyes of the tenant of the Grange
the reader is presented with a tense situation inside the Heights. Young Catherine seems
to have found her own weapons against the preaches of Joseph and also reflects the fact
that she accepts no other religion but her own, inflicted on her by her late father. As the
life at the Heights is miserable and as she was treated cruelly, she shows no mercy
towards any of the members of the house. After the death of her father and of her young
and ill husband she confesses to Heathcliff that she feels and sees only death. She finds
amusing and also useful to pretend she is a witch in order to dismiss Joseph and his
never-ending preaches and evil assertions.
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“<I’ll show you how far I’ve progressed in the Black Art. I shall soon be
competent to make a clear house of it. The red cow didn’t die by chance and
your rheumatism can hardly be reckoned among providential visitations! (…)
Be off, or I’ll hurt you seriously! I’ll have you all modeled in wax and clay and
the first who passes the limits I fix, shall – I’ll not say what he shall be done to –
but you’ll see! Go, I’m looking at you!> The little witch put a mock malignity
into her beautiful eyes, and Joseph, trembling with sincere horror, hurried out
praying and ejaculating <wicked> as he went.”1
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Chapter 3
Sickness
Patrick, also called Branwell, was the only son and thus the male heir of the
Brontë family. He was the joy of his parents, the light of the family and so, he was
spoiled by all his sisters. After a love deception, Branwell started to decay by consuming
alcohol and opium. The entire Brontë family has a moral dignity, a sense of reserve and
decency that Branwell stepped upon. He appeared as a spot on these principles that the
other members of the family hold on to. This looser, in the real sense of the word, who
was thought to be the real genius of the family, became the one who allowed himself to
be dominated by all the weaknesses and the vices that the others did not permitted to
themselves and mostly despised. He used to sit all day long in a tavern, drinking all his
father’s and sisters’ money out and then returned home with his eyes injected by the
quantity of alcohol that he had consumed. He becomes a decrepit, a mad-man, a real
burden and source of sufferings for his family. His delirious crises after awakening from
the state of drunkenness were as awful and consuming as those when he tried to get more
money from his much-to-loving father.
All the six children of pastor Brontë died young because of diseases that spread
quickly or different illnesses. Elisabeth and Mary died first of consumption and fever,
when they were only twelve and eleven years old, after a very bad treatment that they
received at the school where they were sent. Their drunkard brother died after a long time
of sufferings and torments that he gave to his family and only three months after him,
Emily followed. She caught a cold in the rainy day of her brother’s funeral and refused to
be treated because she accustomed herself not to care about her physical pain. She gave a
lot of grief to her sisters and father because she did not speak to them and refused any
help, longing, just like Catherine, to be free from the world that brought her only misery
and no lasting happiness.
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Only a year after pastor Brontë buried his fourth child, Anne got sick; unlike her
sister Emily, she wanted to recover and listened to all the indications of her doctor and
even went to the seaside believing that it would make a difference. But she was weak and
her body didn’t respond to the treatment. She faded away quickly, in one morning, and
Charlotte buried her there, thinking that her father could not bear to witness another
funeral for one of his children. The numerous family was reduced to just Charlotte, who
was stronger than her sisters and brother but sickness dealt with her too. She died
pregnant at the age of thirty nine, leaving her husband Arthur in great sorrow. The Brontë
sisters criticized through their novels the way in which those without a social status and a
strong financial support were seen as inferior and despised, all being framed in events
from their own lives, like their experience as governesses, the torment they lived through
with their drunkard and degraded brother and the setting of Haworth.
3.1 Degradation and drunkards

While Charlotte and Anne were in Roe Head, teaching, Emily remained home and
witnessed her brother Branwell’s degradation as he fell into the vice of alcohol; he
became morally and intellectually useless as Emily watched him decay.
Hindley character reflects best that of Branwell. In Wuthering Heights, Hindley’s
wife, Frances, dies shortly after giving birth to Hareton because of the strain of childbirth
that aggravated her consumption. Hindley’s sorrow was of that kind that he would not
lament, nor cried. He just cursed everyone that stood in his way and defied the existence
of God. His tyrannical treatment of the servants, especially that towards Heathcliff and
his evil conduct were a sure sign of his decay. As he lapsed into alcoholism, gambling
and dissipation Heathcliff’s pleasure at seeing this was greater and greater. Hindley takes
no interest in the child but at his sight he turns out even more violent thinking that
because of the child his wife is dead and also because there were few persons on which
he could pour his venom.
“He entered, vociferating oaths dreadful to hear, and caught me in the act of
stowing his son away in the kitchen cupboard. Hareton was impressed with a
wholesome terror of encountering either his wild beast’s fondness or his
43
madman’s rage; for in one he ran a chance of being kissed and squeezed to
death and in the other of being flung into the fire and dashed against the wall.”1
The child learns even from that age that his father is no father to him as he spends
no time with him and even when he does, Hareton is confused not knowing how to react
to his father’s words and eventually remains mute and holds still.
“Kiss me, Hareton! Damn thee, kiss me! By God, as if I would rear such a
monster! As sure as I’m living, I’ll break the brat’s neck.”2
Nelly Dean, as she was in charge with the raising of the child, was also a target of
Hindley’s violent acts but she was not afraid of his outbursts. He is enraged at every
movement or activity that doesn’t seem appropriate to his state of mind and even when
everything is at peace he invents something on the spot his mind being blurred and fixed
upon the need to revenge his great pain. “But with the help of Satan, I shall make you
swallow the carving knife, Nelly!” (page 61) - The entire scene seems morbidly hilarious
as Hindley tries to make Nelly swallow a knife and she, seeming very calm and having
the situation under control, mocks his action by saying she preferred other knife instead
of the one he had in his hands.
He becomes an easy pray for Heathcliff who encourages his bad habits and
eventually gets his hands on the estate and also on his son who immediately becomes
fond on him.. From the moment he had lost even his house and the entire inheritance,
Hindley looks for a way to get them back for himself and for his son. The narration of the
story was mostly focused on the events that occurred between Heathcliff and Catherine,
and Hindley was only remembered from time to time as his activities were resumed to
only one in particular: swallowing gin or brandy by “tumblerfuls”. The dreadful event
told by Isabella to Nelly reflects in what measure did the alcohol subdued his senses.
After his attempt to kill Heathcliff fails under the latter’s strength and ferocious rage,
Hindley almost passes out from his injuries but recalls nothing the moment he recovers
from his sleep. Six months after his sister’s death, Hindley followed her drunker than he
could ever be, as Mr. Kenneth tells to Nelly:
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“He died true to his character: drunk as a lord. Poor lad! I’m sorry too. One
can’t help missing an old companion though he had the worst tricks with him
that ever man imagined.”1
Nelly drew a comparison between him and Edgar Linton for both of them have
lost their beloved wife and both loved their children and she is bewildered at the fact that
the road was not the same for both of them. Emily distinguishes here between two
possible scenarios having the same theme. It seems that the difference was made through
the character that one or another showed in this situation: Linton had the courage of a
“loyal and faithful soul” and he moved on, trusting God and made the raising, loving and
protecting of his daughter the purpose of his life. Hindley has weaker than Edgar and he
despaired and submerged into a semi-conscious state that would make him forget how
miserable and decayed he was.
Charlotte Brontë wrote her novel as a bildungsroman and her references to

drunkards and such vices are made in connection to Rochester’s past or to John Reed. As
Rochester himself declares to Jane in their debates upon redemption and sins he had
decayed under the irresistible attraction of the vices of his age. He became disappointed
and deceived by the falseness of the faces around him and he was repulsed eventually by
the world in which he almost got trapped.
“My memory was all right then, limpid. No gush of bilge water had turned it
into fetid puddle. (…) but owning, I verily believe rather to circumstances than
to my natural bent, I am a trite, commonplace sinner, hackneyed in all the poor
petty dissipations with which the rich and worthless try to put on life.”2
Rochester is aware of the fact that he is not worthy of Jane and this also he admits
to her by placing himself on the same level as other degraded people. As if this was not
enough, Bertha Mason stands as a reminder to him of his sinful past and his preference
for alcohol, gambling and lust, spending the money of the family around the world in the
search of the ultimate beauty and state of blissfulness.
John Reed was created after the character of Charlotte’s brother Branwell who
gave a hard time to his family with his spoiling of the few family’s money on alcohol and
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gambling. Just as Branwell, John found himself a group of so-called friends with which
he spent most of his time. It is all in those that accompanied him and as there was
impossible for all of them to be sober at a time, one of them would implicitly attract the
others into this vicious circle. As he was accustomed that every wish of his was
accomplished in no time and unconditionally, as his mother spoiled him without measure,
the boy grew up mean, selfish and of course with an inclination towards gambling and
drinking. Jane was not present so see all the sorrows and the anxieties he gave to his
mother nor his process of decaying. The reader is informed about the state in which he
got himself and how he had chosen to live a life in moral and physical degradation. The
alcohol blinded him to see that he had to give his life a purpose and to go further to
another level, progressing and contributing to the fame of his family name. Even when he
got himself to jail and after his mother bailed him out, he was not able to realize that the
cobweb to which he kept returning over and over again would finally kill him.
“He could not do worse: he ruined his health and his estate amongst the worst
women. He got into debt and into jail. His mother helped him out twice, but as
soon as he was free, he returned to his old companions and habits. His head was
not strong; the knaves he lived amongst fooled him beyond anything I have ever
heard. He came down to Gateshead about three weeks ago and wanted Missis to
give up all to him. Missis refused; her means have long been much reduced by
his extravagance. So, he went back again, and the next news was that he was
dead. How he died, God knows! They say he killed himself.”1
Charlotte did not insisted on this problem for long in the novel but focused on
constructing the character of Jane who shows herself to be able to forgive her cruel aunt
for making her childhood so miserable and terrifying.
Anne Brontë had an amazing strength, against her humble and soft character, in
daring to tackle the social status of the woman by turning against the Victorian
resignations of the women and against the ideas and principles of that century. The
English critiques emphasized her moralizing tendency in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall,
considering that the falling of a man through vices is a moral lecture for her brother
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Branwell, who disgusted her with his show of physical and spiritual deterioration. The
character of Mr. Arthur Huntingdon is like a mirror of her brother as well as what
concerns his physical aspect and his prejudices in marriage. As simple as it can be, Mr.
Huntingdon is a man who enjoys drinking and becomes a drunkard. He finds it
entertaining to indulge himself in improper behavior. As a bachelor, Arthur used to spend
his evenings and nights with his friends in a club, drinking, gambling, telling jokes and
vulgar stories and spending his money on women also. As Helen observes, there are also
good qualities in him but these are completely overshadowed when his mind is blurry
because of the excess of alcohol.
Upon his marriage, Arthur decides to retreat with his wife at the countryside, at
Grassdale, and to be a good husband to her and a good father to his future children. As
beautiful as this sounds, it does not last because suddenly, he finds himself with to much
free time and started to make trips to London, first with Helen, then alone as he always
invented excuses for her not to accompany him. As he renews his bounding with his old
friends, these trips to the city are prolonged each time with a month, time during which
Helen continually hopes for the returning of her husband.
“I could not clearly understand how that should keep him in town a fortnight
after me. Still less can I now comprehend how it should keep him, and no signs
of his return as yet. In every letter he promises to be with me in a few days and
every time deceives me."1
Her trust in him begins to fade as he returns to him old habits and she wishes that
there were something that would occupy his mind or his head a few hours a day. His
partying with his friends at London, lead to behaviors that only embarrassed Helen or
impeached he character among those present in his circles. He gets to the point where he
threatens Helen of drinking even more than he already has if she continues with her so
called sermon of morality: “If you bother me with another word, I’ll ring the bell and
order six bottles of wine and, by Heaven, I’ll drink them dry before I stir from this
place!” (page 201). The novel treats the subject of marriage mostly but it illustrates in a
major part how falling into the vices of alcohol and gambling can destroy one’s mental
and physical health, along with the relation he has with his family.
1
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Anne Brontë, Penguin Popular Classics Edition, London, 1994, p. 177.
47
“His appetite for the stimulus of wine had increased upon him, as I had too well
foreseen. It was now something more to him than an accessory to social
enjoyment: it was an important source of enjoyment itself. In this time of
weakness and depression he would have made it his medicine and support, his
comforter, his recreation, and his friend - and thereby sunk deeper and deeper –
and bound himself down forever in the bathos where he had fallen.”1
His behavior does not seem to improve and verbally abuses Helen, who is driven
away from him and who eventually shifts from love to hate and disgust for her husband.
The circus, to which she is witness when Arthur invites to her home some of his friends
and their wives, is a clear image of how low alcohol can degrade a man. After finding out
that her husband, besides being a drunkard and a verbally abusive man, is having an
affair with one of the ladies present in her house, her slightest hope that all will turn out
right is destroyed and she plans her escape from the marriage.
Arthur even tries in corrupting his own child, just for the fun of it. Helen uses the
time when her husband is away in order to restore the moral principles back into her
child’s mind and finds a way to make him sick at the very smell of alcohol thus ruining
every fun that Arthur might have on the expense of the child. Further more, he finds out
about her plans to flee Grassdale with his son, and in his access of furry destroys all her
paintings, palette, paints and brushes – her own source of money. Helen becomes so
miserable and full of hatred towards the drunkard of her husband that she cries he sorrow
out but does not give up.
“Oh! When I think how fondly, how foolishly I have loved him, how madly I
have trusted him, how constantly I have laboured, and studied, and prayed, and
struggle for his advantage; and how cruelly he has trampled on my love,
betrayed my trust, scorned my prayers and tears, and efforts of his
perseveration, crushed my hopes, destroyed my youth’s best feelings, and
doomed me to a life of hopeless misery – as far as man can do it – it is not
enough to say that I no longer love my husband – I hate him!”2
Together with Mr. Lowborough, Arthur drinks excessively and even gets to the
point when he drinks early in the morning in order to vitalize himself. Set in contrast with
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Lord Lowborough, who becomes aware that he has a problem and overcomes his
addiction through his willpower, Mr. Huntingdon does not believe that drinking is a bad
thing or a problem to him and sinks into this vice until his health is destroyed and his
family not around him. Lord Lowborough and Mr. Hattersley each reform their lives as
they both realize that alcohol and a bad influence from their friends is not good for their
health and image. They stop acting like buffoons; Mr. Lowborough opens his eyes and
punishes his adulterous wife and Mr. Hattersley becomes a happy man when he decides
to stay away from the city. Mr. Grimsby, finding himself in contrast with his two friends,
continues to live an intemperate life, gambling and drinking and eventually dies in a
brawl. The same abrupt and painful ending awaited Arthur, by an internal injury caused
by a fall from his horse and by his alcoholism. As his body was already in a bad
condition, he was no longer able to recover and soon died. The message Emily tried to
send to her readers through this novel is crystal clear: overindulgence in alcohol leads to
ruin, loneliness and death, whereas moderation or abstinence leads to happiness, respect
and love from those around you.
3.2 Delirium
When Heathcliff hears the discussion Nelly and his beloved Catherine have in the
kitchen regarding the fact that the latter’s marriage to him will only degrade her, he
decides to leave the place where he grew up and where he thought he had a soul mate in
search of something that will make him worthy of Catherine’s love. He shows through
this action that he is no longer able to endure that façade and proves to the reader that in
what concerns Cathy, he can be less selfish than she is.
His departure provokes a complete breakdown in Catherine. She is faced with the
real separation from Heathcliff and from that moment on she falls into some kind of
uncontrollable sadness and depression. As Nelly told Lockwood, the only way of
punishing the two children for their mischief was to separate them for a while; only the
threat of this action was suffice for Cathy to think twice before dragging herself and
Heathcliff into some trouble. This is why the departure of Heathcliff marked her like a
red iron on the skin. Her tortured spirit affected her mental and physical state: she had
high temperature and was delirious a long time. Her body was not able to stand such a
49
titanic grief that consumed her inside and became unable to respond properly to different
situations. Her recovery was slow and as time passed, she attached herself, in a way, to
the two Linton brothers, Edgar and Isabella, who made all her desires fulfilled. Catherine
became more and more aloof as Nelly said as a personal comment; “it was nothing less
than murder, in her eyes, for any one to presume to stand up and contradict her” (page
74). This first outburst of Catherine made the reader notice the instability of her emotions
and the fact that her mind is deeply shaken by the inner conflicts and by her consuming
herself in trying to solve those conflicts.
Catherine falls ill again after Heathcliff’s return over an absence of three years.
The reason of this new state is marked by her acknowledging of the impossibility of the
existence of a place in which she could live with both Edgar, her husband, and Heathcliff,
her true love. The two are presented in the novel in antithesis: Edgar is like ice, as Cathy
herself characterizes him:
“Your cold blood cannot be worked into a fever – your veins are full of ice-
water; but mine are boiling, and the sight of such chillness makes them dance”1
He is calm and rationale while she needs all to be in a state of complete
movement and agitation. This agitation and need for things to be lively and vivid around
her is inherited by her daughter as well. Heathcliff is in connection with one of the
primordial elements: fire. His passionate feelings for Cathy seem to take their energy
from a never-ending flame. The supreme power with which they burn is emanated
through him and affect everyone around him.
With the hope of living with both these men in one world disappeared, Cathy is
slowly torn apart between the two. As they are opposed to each other their demands seem
to be part of two different worlds and Cathy finds herself in the impossibility of fulfilling
them:
“After constant indulgence of one’s weak nature and the other’s bad one, I earn
for thanks, two samples of blind ingratitude, stupid to absurdity. (…) A
thousand smiths’ hammers are beating in my head!”2
After the process of her tearing her apart has commenced, she understands that
she has to choose between the two worlds that these men represent. Catherine chooses to
1
2
Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë, Book’s Friends, Bucharest, 1994, p. 95-96.
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follow her passion and she becomes so desperate to be with Heathcliff that she kills
herself slowly. She will be Heathcliff’s but not in this world in which she lives, as here
she is forbidden to be married with one and passionately live with another:
“And Nelly, say to Edgar, if you see him again tonight, that I’m in danger of
being seriously ill. (…) I want to frighten him. (…) Well, if I cannot keep
Heathcliff for my friend, if Edgar will be mean and jealous, I’ll try to break their
hearts by braking my own.”1
The drama of the two lovers started from the moment in which Cathy changed
herself during those five weeks spent at the Linton estate but the change was not a
complete one as she had not succeeded in changing her passions as well. She was so
deceitful with all those around her and her duality was so plain in Nelly’s eyes that the
latter does not believe her mistress’ illness to be real. Cathy is devastated by the fact that
after two days of remaining ill in her chamber her husband didn’t even come to see her
and she falls into some kind of a state of mind where she desperately wants her death to
come quicker:
“She sank back on her pillow again, clenching her hands and groaning. <Oh, I
will die!> she exclaimed < since no one cares anything about me. (…) No, I’ll
not die – he’d be glad – he does not love at all – he would never miss me! (…) <
Among his books!> she cried, confounded <And I am dying! I am on the brink
of the grave! My God! Does he know how I’m altered?> “2
The fight that takes place inside her makes her even confused in recognizing
herself in the mirror. Her mind is so shaken and her spirit so invaded by opposed feelings
and strong emotions that she believes herself trapped between two worlds, one in which a
terrifying supernatural creature is about to come near her and one in which she feels
suffocated and burning alive.
“< Do you see that face? >she required, gazing earnestly at the mirror. And say
what o could, I was incapable of making her comprehend it to be her own; so I
rose and covered it with a shawl. <It’s behind there still!>she pursued
anxiously, <And it stirred. Who is it? I hope it will not come out when you are
gone! Oh! Nelly, the room is haunted! I’m afraid of being alone!> Exhaustion
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of body had entirely subdued her spirit, our fiery Catherine was no better than a
wailing child.”1
From here she needs desperately to escape outdoors. The world of the Grange is
worse than a prison for her and she reacts as a person affected by claustrophobia. The
reaction has another layer of tension represented by her passionate love for the moors and
her anguish of not being “a girl again, half savage and hardy”. She does not care or it is
simply that the pain and torture of her mind and spirit overpass the sufferings of the body.
Physical suffering is nothing beside mental anguish for both Heathcliff and Catherine.
This signals the inhuman features that both posses, the magnitude of their love that is of
such a titanic force that it does not fit into the corporeal forms of their body and needs to
be released from it. This idea of their bodies being irrelevant is signaled also in the scene
where Heathcliff smashes his head to the trunk of a tree as a sign of his suffering for
Cathy’s death.
“He dashed his head against the knotted trunk, and lifting up his eyes, howled,
not like a man, but like a savage beast getting goaded to death with knives and
spears. I observed several splashes of blood about the bark of the tree and his
hands and forehead were both stained. Probably the scene I witnessed was a
repetition of others acted during the night.”2
Emily Brontë emphasized throughout the novel the difference between the way in
which people are psychologically and spiritually consumed by an illness in the remote
place of the Grange and the Heights and the way in which people physically endure the
weaknesses of an illness when they have a cultural background. This difference is also
regarded in the matter of the mark that society leaves over nature. In the memorable last
scene together, the two lovers are seemingly trying to be one with another, to complete
each other in a transcendental level, beyond their bodies. Their two human and spiritual
forms can be resembled to two unique pieces of puzzle that once put together, they form
an invincible amulet; together they could even rise against Satan’s army and win. They
surpass the state of desire and conclude to a desperate need to unite, in terms of the
“oneness” of which Cathy was speaking about and get to act violently one with another:
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“< Don’t torture me until I’m as mad as yourself>cried he, wrenching his head
free, and grinding his teeth. The two, to a cool spectator, made a strange and
fearful picture. Well might Catherine deem that heaven would be a land of exile
to her, unless with her mortal body, she cast away her mortal character also. Her
present countenance had a wild vindictiveness in its white cheek and a bloodless
lip, and scintillating eye; and she retained in her closed fingers a portion of the
locks she had been grasping. As to her companion, while raising himself with
one hand, he had taken her arm with the other, and so inadequate was his stock
of gentleness to the requirements of her condition, that on his letting go, I saw
four distinct impressions left blue in the colorless skin.”1
As nature is implacable, one cannot deal with respecting the rules of both of
them. Thus, her need to be separated by her present state turns into a “full scale-illness”
and often drowns herself into some kind of daydreaming, of delirium, seeing herself at
the Heights or wondering free on the wild moors.
“I thought as I lay there, with my head against that table leg and my eyes dimly
discerning the grey square of the window, that I was enclosed in the oak-
panelled bed at home. And my heart ached with some great grief which, just
waking, I could not recollect. (…) I was a child, my father was just buried, and
my misery arose from the separation that Hindley had ordered between me and
Heathcliff. (…) I lifted my hand to push the panels aside; it struck the
tabletop.”2
It is as if her body remained in her bed at the Grange and her spirit began to
detach from it thus finding the way in which she could be bound to the place that she
loves and to her other half that will complete her: Heathcliff. As Mengham Rod explains
her illness in his book Emily Brontë – Wuthering Heights, “In her delirium the seven
years that separate her from her childhood simply disappear, and she rediscovers with a
pang the strength of her original attachment to Heathcliff, who is once more <my all in
all> while the terrible unnaturalness of life at the Grange is summed up as being <the
wife of a stranger, an exile, an outcast, thenceforth, from what had been my world>”
(page 43). Thus, she finds a way to be with him, a way in which no one can interfere, a
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way in which they would be above everything: the immortality of their souls. Her plan is
set up and she is certain of it as she already imagines herself wandering through the
moors along with Heathcliff:
“(…) and we must pass by Gimmerton kirk, to go that journey! We’ve braved
its ghosts often together, and dared each other to stand among the graves and
ask them to come… But Heathcliff, if I dare you now, will you venture? If you
do, I’ll keep you. I’ll not lie there by myself; they may bury me twelve feet
deep, and throw the church down over me, but I won’t rest till you are with me.
I never will!”1
Jane Eyre learns from the coachman of Gateshead that her cousin John had killed
himself and that her aunt had a stroke caused by his death. Nearing death, she wishes to
see Jane, who complies. Jane feels pity for the weak and tormented woman,
understanding the hard times she has had with the troubles that her son has given to her.
Charlotte inspired the character of John Reed from her drunkard brother and the effect of
his actions consisted in great pain for his sisters and father and disappointment towards
what he could have become if he were a stronger man.
John Reed was raised as a spoiled child and thus he was not able to find a
purpose in life for himself and always rallied on his mother’s money. With the wrong
companions, he decayed in alcoholism and lust and even got himself into jail. The pain
and sorrow of a loving mother and the care for the little fortune that remained after the
extravagancies of her only son, consumed her. The news of her son’s death provoked her
a stroke from which she could no longer recover because her body was already weakened
by stress, fear of his son’s menacing with killing himself and her and terrible nightmares.
Jane finds her in a state of delirium. Sarah Reed was shifting from states in which she
recognized those around her and states in which she didn’t. The encounter between Jane
and her aunt provokes another rupture in Sarah’s mind to which Jane easily adapts:
“<Are you Jane Eyre?>

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<A strange wish, Mrs. Reed. Why do you hate her so?>”1
Their discussion went on in this rhythm, Sarah believing herself to confess her
reasons and circumstances of hating “the little beggar” to someone else that Jane. It
seems to be impossible for her to grasp the notion of her only son to be dead and she
denies this reality. She is thus enclosed in a bubble where she muses over the
circumstances and her torments before hearing this terrible news. As there seems to be
some reason for summoning Jane at her bed, that keeps stinging her, she returns to those
days when she was forced by her dying husband to raise her niece like her own child.
After closing her deals with the now stranger – now Jane Eyre person beside her Sarah
did not recovered from that state and continued either delirious or lethargic with her
tormenting memories.
“She was fast relapsing into stupor, nor did her mind again rally. At twelve
o’clock that night she died. (…) there was stretched Sarah Reed’s once robust
and active frame, rigid and still. Her eye of flint was covered with its cold lid;
her brow and strong traits wore yet her inexorable soul.”2
3.3 Sickness and illness

Heathcliff’s departure from Wuthering Heights, in the night when Cathy
confessed to Nelly her decision to marry Edgar Linton, provokes a complete breakdown
in her. She is faced with the real separation from Heathcliff and from that moment on she
falls into some kind of uncontrollable sadness and depression. Her body was not able to
stand such a titanic grief that consumed her inside and became unable to respond properly
to different situations. As the realization of the fact that Heathcliff might have heard her
dismissal of a possibility to marry him, sinks in, Cathy desperately calls for him to come
back. She cannot conceal with herself to stay indoors and the effects of the time spent
searching for him during a cold and stormy night are immediately seen.
“<What ails you, Cathy? You look as dismal as a drowned whelp. Why are you
so damp and pale, child? (…) She is ill!> said Hindley taking her wrist. ”1
As Hindley terribly declares his being tired of so much sickness in the house, it
seems that the family is often shadowed by the Black Lady. Nelly was in charge of
looking after her and she was overwhelmed by the wild outburst of Cathy’s pain and
rage. The consequences of her wanderings in the cold night in a dangerous blending with
the torments of her mind made Kenneth declare her in a severe state of depression that
could end either in her slow recovery or with her suicidal actions.
“I thought she was going mad; it terrified me. And I begged Joseph to run for
the doctor: it proved the commencement of delirium. Mr. Kenneth, as soon as
he saw her, pronounced her dangerously ill: she had a fever. He bled her and he
told me to let her live on whey and water gruel, and take care she did not throw
herself downstairs or out of the window.”2
Her recovery was slow because her mind could not grasp such an abrupt rupture
from Heathcliff. This first outburst of Catherine made the reader notice the instability of
her emotions and the fact that her mind is deeply shaken by the inner conflicts and by her
consuming herself in trying to solve those conflicts. When Heathcliff left the Heights, she
decided to leave it too as there was nothing that could make her feel better and the
memories of her childhood had a small comfort on her at that time.
After this breakdown she became in time peaceful and sort of happy with her
husband and her sister-in-law. This apparent harmony in which they live is hardly secure,
although the family seems to be preoccupied with some daily amusements and passing-
times like playing the piano, walking through the large park, sewing ok playing some
society games. It all relies on Cathy’s nature remaining hidden. The reader is aware of the
fact that peacefulness is not in Cathy’s nature, as she herself recognizes this. Her real-self
is there none the less, as well as Wuthering Heights is there, although kept out of sight.
There can be made an analogy with powder and fire, like in Shakespeare’s Romeo and
Juliet: Catherine resembles powder while Heathcliff is the fire that can set it to flame.
The powder is harmless like sand while no fire comes near to explode it. This is what
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happens when Heathcliff returns to her: she explodes, radiantly and then turns into a self
consuming flame as she cannot live loving one and belonging to another.
“There she lay, dashing her head against the arm of the sofa and grinding her
teeth, so that you might fancy she would crash them to splinters. (…) I brought
a glass full, and, as she would not drink, I sprinkled it on her face. In a few
seconds, she stretched herself out stiff and turned up her eyes, while her cheeks,
at once blanched and livid, assumed the aspect of death."1
After a few moments spent with Heathcliff, Cathy has laid bare the reality behind
the peacefulness of her marriage with Edgar. There is only agony and “bitter misery”
because she is not able to conceal both God (her vows in front of Him in the ceremony of
the matrimony) and man (her eternal and passionate love for Heathcliff). The rupture that
takes place inside of her seems to be permanent and deadly. The mental anguish
surpasses her perception of material existence around her once she had realized that it
does not contain her real home. Her distant looks and vague references to the reality into
which she felt trapped in pointed out her determination of leaving that life and breaking
all bounds to her human form. Her state of mental burning, like ignited powder, makes
her longing for her untamed character from childhood and savagely springs to the
window to feel the wind of the moors, that represented a sign of her freedom and a
tendency of laughing at injuries and not maddening under them. Madness can be taken
into consideration as she swiftly changes her moods from violent and savage exhilaration
to a complete peacefulness or moroseness.
“A minute previously she was violent. Now, supported on one arm, and not
noticing my refusal to obey her, she seemed to find childish diversion in pulling
the feathers from the rents she had just made, and ranging them on the sheet
according to their different species.”2
What all commenced as a mere quarrel ended up in being a calamity. Cathy had
her nerves irritable and her shaken reason made her mind filled with all sort of “strange
ideas and illusions”. The flame of her soul was consuming the last fuel it had on her way
to a place where her passionate love for Heathcliff would not be forbidden. She was still
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beautiful although the marks of the illness and the pallor of death were visible on her
drained of power body.
“Her thick, long hair had been partly removed at the beginning of her illness,
and now she wore it simply combed in its natural tresses over her temples and
neck. (…) The flash of her eyes had been succeeded by a dreamy and
melancholy softness. They appeared always to gaze beyond and far beyond –
you would have said out of this world. Then, the paleness of her face – its
haggard aspect having vanished as she recovered flesh – and the peculiar
expression arising from her mental state, though painfully suggestive of their
causes, added to the touching interest which she awakened. And, invariably to
me, I know, and to any person who saw her, I think, refuted more tangible
proofs of convalescence and stamped her as one doomed to decay.”1
Her exhausted anguish was coming to an end while detaching from the world that
had no place for her titanic love and thus she had her plan ready, just waiting for
Heathcliff to follow her: “But Heathcliff, if I dare you now, will you venture?” (page
104). But he does not get sick of torment and pain for her lost. His only hope and driving
force for living on is that she will haunt him. This blissful dream keeps him in a state of
high voltage during eighteen years. His revenge takes time but is not completed because,
apparently, the relentless ghost of Cathy has had enough waiting and calls for him. The
rest of the family believe him to be going mad as his strong body could not be touched by
any severe illness. He also detaches himself from his human form as it is “unutterable too
much for flesh and blood to bear” (page 268).
Death spread itself along the entire novel: the series of funerals began early in the
novel with the death of old Mr. Earnshaw and followed by that of old Mr. and Mrs.
Linton. As Heathcliff engages his diabolical plan of revenge after the death of his
beloved Catherine the great majority of the characters leave earth for a better place. It
may be believed that Heathcliff cursed all of them or it may be because of their weak
physiognomy, stress, pain or despair that illnesses and consumption had enclosed these
characters into a cocoon. Shortly after Cathy’s death, her alcoholic brother Hindley
followed her and his wife Frances to the grave. Isabella Linton faded away because of
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poor conditions of living and a poor health, just like her selfish and spoiled son, Linton
who died to just after his marriage to young Cathy. His weak and kind nature made Edgar
not that resistant to his sorrow, loneliness and troubled mind and just before Linton he
passed away. The feeling that surrounded the Heights is best reflected by Cathy’s
affirmation: “I feel and see only death! I feel like death!” (page 236).
Some people used to get sick because of the weather conditions or maladies that
spread like the wind and took many souls with them. The new tenant of the Grange finds
himself lost on the moors and searches for some shelter at the Heights. On his way to the
Grange, his condition gets worse and a full scale illness sets in. his house keeper, Nelly
Dean, looks after his health but his recovery is slow.
“Four weeks’ torture, tossing and sickness! Oh, these bleak winds and bitter
northern skies and impassable roads and dilatory country surgeons! And, oh,
this dearth of the human physiognomy! And worse than all, the terrible
intimation of Kenneth that I need not expect to be out of doors till spring!” 1
Lockwood’s terror comes from the fact that he is an active man that has come to
the country in order to see nature and spend his time with some new faces and nice
neighbors. Although the time he had spent under the roof of the Heights was not
beneficiary to him at all and gave him chills on his back and fever to his head,
(considering the incident with the dogs and the terrible shock of fear that the ghost of
Cathy gave to him) it had no bad followings to his state of mind except of interest and
curiosity towards his landlord’s story.
The Cowan Bridge School where Charlotte studied for a short time was placed in
a swamped valley surrounded by a dark and thick forest. Jane Eyre quickly learns that life
at the school is harsh and the girls are overworked, underfed and obliged to stay unmoved
during the unending sermons. In the spring her mood seems to become happier along
with the blooming of the trees and the warming of the trees. The girls that survived
through the coldness and harshness of winter were now attacked by a new threat. The
damp forest dell in which the school was placed was the perfect place for a malady to set
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in and soon the children began to die either of consumption or of the typhus fever. With
the warm temperatures in a continual rising half of the girls fall ill with the diseases that
breed in each corner of the building. Their health already shaken and their bodies
penetrated by the dense mist and cold of the area, it was just a matter of time until the
number of graves increased.
“Semi-starvation and neglected colds had predisposed most of the pupils to
receive infections: forty-five out of the eighty girls lay ill at one time. Classes
were broken up, rules relaxed. (…) Many, already smitten, went home only to
die; some died at school and were buried quietly and quickly, the nature of the
malady forbidding delay. While disease had thus become an inhabitant of
Lowood, and death its frequent visitor; while there was gloom and fear within
its walls; while its rooms and passages steamed with hospital smells, the drug
and the pastille striving vainly to overcome the effluvia of mortality, that bright
May shone unclouded over the bold hills.”1
The cold and inanition were instruments of education for the poor girls and along
with the negligent treatment led to the weakening of their resistance to diseases. But these
diseases are not the only body sufferings that Charlotte describes as experiences for the
development of Jane’s character. Her maturity stage at Thornfield is marked by
mysterious and violent forces. Bertha Mason is a threat for everyone around her who
does not disarm her or keeps a distance from her.
The episode of Mason’s stabbing by her own sister brings a lot of questions in
Jane’s mind but the answers are only given to her and the reader also only after the
impediment of the marriage by Mason himself. As Rochester asks for her help in curing
the ills inflicted by Bertha, Jane complies and finds herself alone with a man on the verge
of dying and only a door away from the terrible and murderous creature who she believes
to be Grace Poole. The time passes slowly while Rochester fetches the doctor and Jane
finds solace in God.
“I cried inwardly as the night lingered and lingered – as my bleeding patient
drooped, moaned, sickened; and neither day nor aid arrived. I had, again and
again, held the water to Mason’s white lips; again and again offered him the
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stimulating salts; my efforts seemed ineffectual: either bodily or mental
suffering, or less of blood, or all three combined, were fast prostrating his
strength. He moaned so, and looked so weak, wild and lost, I feared he was
dying and I might not even speak to him.”1
Jane had a strong character and will and her body was the same. She remained
healthy during the typhus fever that settled in at Lowood and was also not faint-hearted.
The only thing that brings her down is the ruining of her hopes of finally finding a place
to call home and somebody who loves her and the lack of some money to sustain herself
a few days until she would find a new place to live and work. Jane feels torn as she does
not want to leave Rochester into further sorrow and misery and also because he is the first
man that loved her for who she really was. But her conscience tells her that she must flee
temptation and respect herself by doing what she believes to be right. She is forced to
sleep outdoors and during the day she begs for food or a job in a town
“But it will be very dreadful with this feeling of hunger, faintness, chill and the
sense of desolation – this total prostration of hope. In all likelihood, though, I
should die by morning.”2
She mused over the responsibilities of her life, all its requirements and pains
while she coveted for a piece of bread. In the throe of true despair, exhausted in her
condition of isolation from those of her kind, she “wept in utter anguish” the approaching
of death on the doorstep of a house. St. John takes her inside the house al along with his
sisters, he looks after her. From his saying, all that she needed was for her system to
“sleep torpid a while”, and indeed, after three day in bed, Jane recovered her strength and
began a new stage of development in her character. She finds herself on the threshold of a
loveless marriage and decides to follow her heart’s desire and return to Rochester, not
that she has her own fortune and she gained her independency.
Returning to Thornfield Hall, Jane finds out about Bertha’s burning to the ground
of the mansion and about Rochester’s terrible sufferings, both mentally at the loss of his
love and physically from his accident in attempting to save his wild and mad wife.
“<He was taken out from under the ruins, alive, but sadly hurt: a beam had
fallen in such a way as to protect him partly, but one eye was knocked out and
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one hand so crushed that Mr. Carter, the surgeon, had to amputate it directly.
The other eye inflamed. He lost the sight of that also. He is now helpless indeed,
blind and a cripple.”1
He was infirm and dependent on Jane’s guide and readings. This accident and his
injuries might be seen as a punishment for his sinful past and a way through which Jane
could come back to him, now that he was physically incapable of mastering her. Jane
finds herself equal with Rochester not only because of his decayed state but also because
she became independent and aware of her own self and her limits.
Chapter 4
The halls
A man from Haworth had to take a pretty hard road to the parish house if he
wanted to see pastor Brontë with some problems. The gray cube of stone was situated up
the hill, in wuthering heights and in winter time, along with the difficulty of the climbing,
one hat to front the violent and wild winds that even took one’s breath. All the children of
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the pastor grew up in a puritan and sober atmosphere which was influenced also by the
frequent visits to the church and by the immediacy of the churchyard. Thus the cemetery
and the ever winded moors were part of the universe of the children from their childhood.
But in the region in which the remote house was situated people lived “more in earnest,
more in themselves” showing the essence of their passionate hearts.
4.1 The red-room

Jane Eyre draws a great deal of its stylistic inspiration from the Gothic novels.
Charlotte described in her novel desolate landscapes, ruins, supernatural entities and
some pieces of phenomenon which contributed to the creation of a sense of psychological
suspense and tension. Gateshead and Lowood are constructed as symbols of closed
spaces in which Jane is oppressed and restrained from her natural outbursts as she is
proud and rebellious. Lowood is presented as an exile place situated in a damp valley; the
position of this dungeon-like building is not appropriate for a charity school for poor
girls:
“That forest dell, where Lowood lay, was the cradle of fog and fog-bread
pestilence; which, quickening with the quickening spring, crept into the Orphan
Asylum, breathed typhus through its crowded schoolroom and dormitory, and,
ere May arrived, transformed the seminary into a hospital.”1
Jane was a survivor of that wave of fever and consumption even if she was trapped in that
prison and witnessed how hope and life deserted many of her school mates, including her
dearest Helen Burns.
Gateshead is also a closed space from which our heroine wants to escape as soon
as possible. This is rendered by her usual escapes behind the curtains of the windows
where she sits, sometimes with a book in her hands, and contemplates the nature outside.
From here and from the rest of the novel it is revealed one of the driving forces of Jane
Eyre, that is her need to be free from any boundaries and limits. The window is here the
symbol of a gate to another world that could overwhelm her with her diversity and
splendor.
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At Gateshead, Jane Eyre’s childhood was marked by humiliations and a harsh
treatment by her Aunt Reed and her spoiled children. All of them wanted her to be
extinguished, to become equal to zero and tried through every means to destroy her spirit
and therefore her body. When Jane is locked up in the red-room by her cruel aunt, she
experiences there the most horrible and shaking happenings. She becomes frightened to
her very deep core and even thinks she has gone insane at the sight of her uncle’s ghost.
This scene is emblematic for the novel for it is represented through other scenes as an
echo of Jane’s terrible visions, hallucinations and maddening fear that made her lose her
conscience:
“No severe or prolonged body illness followed this incident of the red-room: it
only gave my nerves a shock on which I feel the reverberation to this day.”1
The entire novel follows the pattern of this red room. The succession of steps that
Jane takes in order to know herself in her quest for love and kinship are placed in
different locations that reiterate the motif of the red room. Her need to escape from the
enclosure of these places is presented along with her need to belong somewhere. The
escape and her intense need for freedom and independency is tempered by her sense of
belonging to community. The red room can be viewed as a symbol of what Jane must
overcome in her fight for happiness and a kindred spirit.
Mrs. Reed holds Jane responsible for the scuffle between her and her evil cousin
John and punishes her for her misbehavior by sending her to the red room. The terror on
the little girl’s face and her struggle to escape from the grasp of the two family servants is
explained by Jane through the story of the frightening chamber in which her uncle Reed
died. The girl describes the chamber, its furniture and its air:
“A bed supported on massive pillars of mahogany, hung with curtains of deep
red damask, stood out like a tabernacle in the centre, the two large windows,
with their blinds always drawn down, were half shrouded in festoons and falls
of similar drapery. The carpet was red. The table at the foot of the bed was
covered with a crimson cloth. The walls were a soft fawn colour, with a blush of
pink in it. The wardrobe, the toilet-table, the chairs were of darkly polished old
mahogany. Out of these deep surrounding shades, rose high and glared white,
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the piled-up mattresses and pillows of the bed, spread with a snowy Marseilles
counterpane.”1
Seeing her ghastly face in the mirror she began to muse over her miserable
condition in that house. Remembering her uncle’s death-bed wish that his wife should
raise her as her own children, Jane recalls some folk stories according to which the dead
rose from their resting places when their last wishes were not fulfilled in order to hunt the
perjured. The room was chill because it was on rare occasions that somebody made a fire;
it was silent because it was situated in the most remote part of the house where the noises
of the kitchen and from the nursery could not get to it; it was “solemn” because it was not
used by anyone in the house except of the rare occasions when guests came to Gateshead;
and above all, the room was dark because Jane had no candle with her and no chance to
receive one.
“What a consternation of soul was mine that dreary afternoon! How all my brain
was in tumult, and all my heart in insurrection! Yet, in what darkness, what
dense ignorance was the mental battle fought!”2
She suddenly has the feeling that her uncle’s ghost is in the room and she
imagines that he has come, like Bessie said, “down the chimney and fetch her away” or to
take his revenge on her aunt. The eerie sounds of the wind outside and the impossibility
of getting out of the room contributed to the girls already too excited nerves, which,
along with the imagination of the presence of the ghost, broke down. She cries out in
terror but her aunt believes her to be a “precocious actress” and ignores her pleas. This
cruelty pushed Jane’s mental capacities to their limit and she fainted in exhaustion and
fear. While trying to uproot Jane’s bad propensities, Mrs. Reed gave her some “fearful
pangs” of mental sufferings: “(…) my racked nerves were now in such a state that no
calm could soothe and no pleasure excite them agreeably.” (page 20).
All of Jane’s life was placed under the mark of the terrible experience she lived in
the red room. Lowood is a variant of this room as she feels like in a prison from which
she cannot escape because there is no other place where she can go. Her need of
independency and her urge to run away from this confined place is an echo of her
desperate cry to get out of the red room.
1
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë, Book’s Friends, Bucharest, 1993, volume 1, p. 12-13.
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“(…) for I never forgot the -to me– frightful episode of the red room in detailing
which, my excitement was sure, in some degree, to break bounds. For nothing
could soften in my recollection of the spasm of agony which clutched my heart,
when Mrs. Reed spurned my wild supplication for pardon, and locked me a
second time in the dark and haunted chamber.”1
Both Thornfield Hall and Morton House are representatives of the red room
because Jane feels subdued and under the power and will of Rochester Edward and John
Rivers. Thus Jane becomes what she wants, a free, independent and wealthy woman who
has learned that the voice of her heart is also important and not only that of her mind. She
is free to marry Rochester only after she learns that he has lost his wife (freedom from
social, legal and religious bounding) and after Thornfield, the symbol of her previous
imprisonment and dominance of Edward over her, is burned to the ground. This would
have been sufficient for Jane to return to him but that fact that Edward is now an infirm,
makes him completely dependent on her.
In the red room, Jane’s status as an exiled and a slave becomes clear. Although
her enclosure in the red room was a real and palpable one, Jane feels herself emotionally,
intellectually and emotionally imprisoned even after her release from the chamber, when
her independence and power of self expression are constantly threatened. Jane is a victim
of social hierarchies that influences her personal growth and contributes to her sense of
exile. At Thornfield Hall, this abyss between the social classes is best seen in the way
some of the guests treat a governess. She is situated between the upper class for her
knowledge and behavior and the lower class that is constituted there from servants. She is
again and again excluded from any kind of love or kindness except for the very rare
occasions when Bessie told her stories at Gateshead or when Miss Temple looked after
her and Helen Burns at Lowood. She is financially trapped and is socially banned and
mistrusted after she flees Thornfield.
The room appears as a terrible memory whenever Jane has to make an important
decision or when she finds herself at crossroads. She makes a connection between this
room and the place where she found herself by associations of situations and states. Thus
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she remembers the room when she is unjustly punished by Mr. Brocklehurst or when
Edward proposes to her to become his mistress. Her sense of self respect and the voice of
reason always take her back to the feeling of imprisonment and submission. At Morton
House she is threatened with emotional and intellectual imprisonment as St. John asks her
to marry him as to serve God and a higher religious purpose. Only after gaining her
financial independence and after she had found a family to call her own (the Rivers), does
Jane return to Edward and marries him. This union with the man that she loves gives her
the independence and love she looked for all her life.
4.2 Thornfield Hall

The third phase of her story takes place at Thornfield Hall where she received a
post as a governess for a young girl named Adèle Varens. As her trip was quite long, she
arrived at the hall late in the evening when there was already dark and she could
distinguish nothing from the house’s architecture and façade which was laid in shadows,
but she found the interior “cosy and agreeable”. She did get a better look though the next
morning when she was still accommodating with her new situation. The etymology of the
name of the mansion is given by the wild thorn trees that grew up in the surroundings of
the house, as she saw in the shinny light of the morning sun.
“Its gray front stood out well from the background of a rookery, whose cawing
tenants were now on the wing. They flew over the lawn and grounds to alight in
a great meadow, from which these were separated by a sunk fence, and where
an array of mighty old thorn trees, strong, knotty and broad as oaks, at once
explained the etymology of the mansion’s designation.”1
The remoteness of the hall resembles in this writing with the seclusion of pastor
Brontë’s house at Haworth. Charlotte was inspired by the architecture of the few
buildings that she observed during her visits to her friend Ellen Nussey and to other
places. While she was a governess at the Sidgwicks she visited Norton Conyers outside
Ripon, where there was a mad woman closed up in chamber at the third floor, and from
here she created the eerie and mysterious third floor of Thornfiled. An imaginary
combination between these and other houses with crenels dating perhaps from the fifteen
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or sixteen century gave birth to the architecture of Thornfield Hall. The quiet and lonely
hills that embrace Thornfield surprises Jane who believed the place to be more lively as it
is located near the “stirring locality of Millcote”. Mrs. Fairfax is the one that presents the
house, its surroundings and its occupants to Jane. She shows herself a pleasant woman to
talk to and a very sociable person who has been alone with the rest of the servants in such
a big mansion.
“I’m sure last winter (it was a very severe one, if you recollect, and when it did
not snow, it rained and blew), not a creature but the butcher and the postman
came to the house, from November till February, and I really got quite
melancholy with sitting night after night alone.”1
The third story impresses the girl very much because of its antiquity but, also as
with the rest of the mansion, she feels reluctant and a chill passes through her as she
imagines that all these features are in connection with the haunting of a bad spirit. The
gallery into which the bedroom doors opened seemed to her as belonging to a church
because of the cheerless air and solitude atmosphere. Like in Cathy’s bed in Wuthering
Heights some of the bedroom at Thornfield had panels which permitted the enclosure into
a more intimate place. For Jane, these bedrooms carried a dense air that could mesmerize
the mind and steal the eyes in a world of ancient times. The opulence and grave features
of the gallery and its bedrooms is suffocating for her as she suddenly feel a tension at
Mrs. Fairfax’s saying that if Thornfield was haunted, that place would be “its haunt”:
“(…)and some of the third story rooms though dark and low, were interesting
from their air of antiquity; (…) and the imperfect light entering by their narrow
casements showed bedsteads of a hundred years old. (…) stools still more
antiquated, on whose cushioned tops were yet apparent traces of half-effaced
embroideries, wrought by fingers that for two generations had been coffin dust.
(…) I liked the hush, the gloom, the quaintness of these retreats in the day; but I
by no means coveted a night’s repose in one of those wide and heavy beds; shut
in, some of them, with doors of oak; shaded others with wrought English old
hangings crusted with thick work, portraying effigies of strange flowers, and
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strange birds, and strangest human beings – all which would have looked
strange, indeed, by the pallid gleam of moonlight.”1
With its thick walls, the entire mansion is presented like a vault; it is a secluded
place again, a new prison with a sinister past. The gallery and the narrow stairs are
impregnated with a heavy and chill air that contribute to the aura of mystery that
surrounds Thornfield Hall. Jane is hovering over the suspicion of a ghost that might haunt
the hall and tries to find in Grace Poole an answer for the terrible shrieks and demonic
bursts of laughter during the soundless nights.
The mystery is held up as a constant presence by Rochester’s behavior too. From
what Jane found about his character from Mrs. Fairfax, his visits to his house are very
rare, short and unexpected. Once he got to see Jane, his urge to leave the place that kept
hidden his sinful past is tamed by the need to know her and then by the need to love her.
Some fractures of stories, always concerning themes of sin and redemption, give some
details about the house, but as Jane is very perceptive, she caught the sight of his glares to
it: detestation, disgust, pain and shame. That gave away much about how he felt about his
abode and also gave nothing as the mystery related to it was not revealed to her.
“<Come where there is some freshness, for a few moments!>he said. <That
house is a mere dungeon. (…) The glamour of inexperience is over your eyes
and you see it through a charmed medium. You cannot discern that the gilding
is slime and the silk draperies cobwebs; that the marble is sordid slate and the
polished woods mere refuse chips and scaly bark.>”2
He did liked the house, its façade but he shuddered away from it because of what
it hided: his lunatic wife, his sinful past and his capital error from Jamaica whose
consequences followed him through his life and tinted all his existence. The house is a
clear and more than obvious reminder of the arrangements of his father and brother for
him, of his foolish and lustful youth and of his marriage to a madwoman who dragged
him through all the hideous and degrading agonies. His freedom from his past and
present condition, of being bound to a mad woman who appeared to have a strong enough
frame as to life at least as long as he will, comes with Bertha’s burning down the mansion
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and her death in those flames. Fire is presented here in its role of purification of the place
and of the man.
“The lawn, the grounds were trodden and waste, the portal yawned void; the
front was, as I had once seen it in a dream, but a shell-like wall, very high and
very fragile-looking, perforated with paneless windows; no roof, no battlements,
no chimneys – all had crashed in.”1
4.3 Wuthering Heights

Emily Brontë focused her attention on the inner conflicts and on the workings of
one’s mind under tension and also under different circumstances of the life. Although the
world in which the story is set is a secluded one, away from the agitated tumult of the
cities, the feelings lived here are intense and hardly with limits imposed. The title of the
novel sets the setting of the plot and also, from what we find out through Lockwood’s
perspective, this is also the name of his landlord’s residence.
“Wuthering Heights is the name of Mr. Heathcliff’s dwelling, <wuthering>
being a significant provincial adjective, descriptive for the atmospheric tumult
to which its station is exposed in stormy weather. Pure bracing ventilation they
must have up there at all times, indeed. One may guess the power of the north
wind blowing over the edge, by excessive slant of a few stunted firs at the end
of the house and by a range of gaunt thorns, all stretching their limbs one way,
as if craving alms of the sun.”2
Emily’s entire vision of the world of Wuthering Heights, is colored in shades of
black and white and is set in deep contrast with the set of values of Thrushcross Grange,
which is brightly and vividly colored. This contrast makes the passionate whirlpool more
credible and creates a perfect setting for the outbursts of passion and hate, for the scenes
of quasi-madness, for the nightmares and the haunting of the ghosts.
The novel presents the story of two families, the Earnshaws and the Lintons. The
Earnshaws dedicated their life to the farm and they were an old family dated to the
sixteenth century:
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“Before passing the threshold, I paused to admire a quantity of grotesque
carving lavished over the front, and especially about the principal door, above
which, among a wilderness of crumbling griffins and shameless little boys, I
detected the date <1500>.”1
Wuthering Heights is situated high up the hills of Yorkshire, in the middle of the
wild moors, exposed to stormy weather and harsh winds. Opposed in position to the
Heights, the luxurious Thrushcross Grange is situated in a sunny valley and surrounded
by a large park in which its inhabitants often take long walks. The worlds presented in
these spaces are very different one from the other because of their way of earning their
existence. The Earnshaws loved nature and as they were farmers they grew animals; this
heritage is taken further by Cathy who has a wild passion for her moors and for all the
things that come from nature. Hindley, on the other hand, has higher aspirations and
wants to be educated in order to achieve something important in life, to climb higher on
the social hierarchy. The major contrast between there two residences lies in the fact that
Wuthering Heights, with its climate and landscape had to be terrible in order to support
such a devastating force like Heathcliff’s, whose human nature is questioned along the
entire novel.
“About midnight, while we still set up, the storm came rattling over the Heights
in full fury. There was a violent wind, as well as thunder, and either one or the
other split a tree off at the corner of the building. A huge bough fell across the
roof and knocked down a portion of the east chimney-stack, sending a clatter of
stones and soot into the kitchen fire.”2
These violent outbursts of the weather over the Heights reflect the eerie air of the
place which seems to be assonant with Heathcliff’s pain and rage over the impossibility
of having Catherine’s love just for himself and over all the obstacles that appear in his
way. The most important events at the Grange take place in the kitchen (taking for
example Catherine’s confession of her oneness with Heathcliff or the skirmish between
Heathcliff and Hindley, before Isabella’s departure from the Heights). Being used and
raised in this place, Heathcliff and Catherine are both mesmerized by the opulence and
splendor of Grange’s inside. This environment leaves a mark on Cathy after her spending
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some more than a month in the company of the Lintons and this is why the contrast
between the wild and free Cathy and the white-handed and clean Cathy is so shocking.
After returning home she is disoriented and confused and does not know how to treat her
best friend; the civilized and socially marked environment of the Grange represents a
contrasting world to that of the Heights:
“<And should I always be sitting with you?> she demanded, growing more
irritated. <What good do I get? What do you talk about?> (…)
<You never told me before that I talked too little or that you disliked my
company, Cathy!> exclaimed Heathcliff in much agitation.”1
Mr. Lockwood takes the tenancy of Thrushcross Grange hoping to spend some
quiet time at the country, away from the agitated world he came from. He finds the house
undergoing a lapse in its fortunes and he is determined to make it bright again. The reader
first hears about the Grange through Heathcliff’s account of his and Catherine’s
wanderings through the moors, where they could be themselves. As they got a glimpse of
the light coming from the Grange, they decided to venture near that hall from pure
curiosity. Lockwood was the one who introduced us to Wuthering Heights and now it is
Nelly Dean that, through Heathcliff’s telling of the event, presents us the glimpse that the
two children caught to the Lintons life-style. The house was luxurious and bright,
presented in vivid colors, set in contrast with the aspect of the Heights and belonging to a
completely different world.
“We crept through a broken edge, groped our way up the path, and planted
ourselves on a flower-pot under the drawing-room window. The light came
from thence; they had not put up the shutters, and the curtains were only half
closed. Both of us were able to look in by standing on the basement, and
clinging to the ledge, and we saw – ah! It was beautiful – a splendid place
carpeted with crimson, and crimson-covered chairs and tables, and a pure white
ceiling bordered by gold, a shower of glass-drops hanging in silver chains from
the centre, and shimmering with little soft tapers. Old Mr. and Mrs. Linton were
not there. Edgar and his sister had it entirely to themselves; shouldn’t they have
been happy? We should have thought ourselves in heaven! And now, guess
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what your good children were doing? Isabella – I believe she is eleven, a year
younger than Cathy – lay screaming at the farther end of the room, shrieking as
if witches were running red-hot needles into her. Edgar stood on the hearth
weeping silently, and in the middle of the table sat a little dog shaking its paw
and yelping, which, from their mutual accusations, we understood they had
nearly pulled in two between them.”1
Along the novel, everyone moved between Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross
Grange. The first ones to move were Heathcliff and Catherine in an attempt to escape
Joseph and Hindley, by going to the Linton’s house to see whether the other children
were treated the same way. Then, Edgar Linton has ridden across to the Heights to see
Catherine as a suitor and Heathcliff has ridden to Grange to see Catherine and Isabella as
a suitor for the later. Later on, young Cathy ventures over the moors to see her cousin
Linton and gets to be heart broken by trying to return to the Grange. The clash between
the world of the Heights and the one of the Grange is even more noticeable from
Isabella’s letter to Nelly.
“<How did you contrive to preserve the common sympathies to human nature
when you resided here? I cannot recognize any sentiment which those around
share with me.>”2
After Heathcliff became the owner of the house, this started to decay from its
formerly cheerful aspect because of neglect. Isabella partook herself to the pervading
spirit of neglect as the dreary, dismal scene of the house crashed upon her eyes and her
perceptions, so accustomed with the luxury and opulence of the Grange. Submerged in
darkness, breathing hatred, fear and horror, the house and its cold and piercing
atmosphere is set in contrast with the wild moors that surround it.
Emily Brontë inserted the arrival of the letter to the Grange and other events that
it produced as to offer the reader a new perspective in which to see the situation in which
the two ladies were imprisoned. Both of them feel trapped inside a place in which they do
not belong and feel like strangers. Catherine is grieving over her exchange of the Heights
for the Grange and Isabella longs to back again to her beloved mansion where she grew
up. In her letter, Isabella described the Heights as a miserable place with conditions so
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poor that she could not even find a decent room for her to stay. She was even more
grieved by the way in which she was received in her new house. Little Hareton welcomed
her with a few words he had learned from Heathcliff and she realized that every person
and thing was bearing her husband’s influence, even the little child:
“<Shall you and I be friends, Hareton?> was my next essay at conversation. An
oath and a threat to set Throtter on me if I did not <frame off> rewarded my
perseverance.”1
Catherine Earnshaw’s old room. The old closet-bed with its window, described as
a “large oak case” is very significant for the novel as it is the place where a part of the
most intense outbursts take place or are related to. Lockwood is the first one we hear of
having a terrifying experience in Catherine’s bed, it is hard to tell whether he is still
dreaming or if he is awake and the ghost real:
“ I muttered, knocking my knuckles through the
glass, and stretching an arm out to seize the importunate branch, instead of
which my fingers closed on the fingers of a little ice cold hand! The intense
horror of nightmare came over me; I tried to draw back my arm, but the hand
clung to it, and a most melancholy voice sobbed: <Let me in! Let me in!>(…)
Terror made me cruel; and finding it useless to attempt shaking the creature off,
I pulled its wrist onto the broken pane, and rubbed it to and fro till the blood ran
down and soaked the bed clothes; still it wailed, <Let me in!> and maintained
its tenacious gripe, almost maddening me with fear.”2
After Lockwood’s horrible shriek we are witnesses, through his eyes, to the
passionate and desperate call of Heathcliff through the broken window. Shaken to his
very core of his being by Catherine’s death, Heathcliff unleashes a permanent storm and
chaos that for a normal human could not take for long as time heals every wound. For
Heathcliff, this state of being lasts for years after her death and does not even slow down
in its intensity. His rush after Catherine’s material being after death is a clear proof of his
violent, boundless and absolute love that goes beyond God and Satan.
1
2
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“He got on to the bed, and wrenched open the lattice, bursting, as he pulled at it,
into an uncontrollable passion of tears. < Come in! Come in! >he sobbed.
<Cathy, do come. Oh! Do once more! Oh! My heart’s darling! Hear me this
time, Catherine, at last!>”1 .
Later in the novel, finding herself at the Grange, in her delirium, Catherine thinks
herself back in her bed at the Heights and begs to have the window open as to take a deep
breath of fresh air. From here she needs desperately to escape outdoors. The world of the
Grange is worse than a prison for her and she reacts as a person affected by
claustrophobia. The reaction has another layer of tension represented by her passionate
love for the moors and the freedom and wildness they represent.
“<Oh, if I were but in my own bed in the old house!>she went on bitterly,
wringing her hands. <And that wind sounding in the firs by the lattice. Do let
me feel it – it comes straight down the moor – do let me have one breath!>”2
Eighteen years later, young Catherine escapes through the window of her mother’s bed
and runs over the moors back to her father’s death-bed. She used the same fir tree that
disturbed Lockwood’s sleep, to get down to the ground.
We can trace a resemblance between Cathy’s own bed and her coffin. This
resemblance comes from the fact that Heathcliff bribes the sexton to make loose one of
the sides of Cathy’s coffin as for him to have a way of blending with her in the after life.
Nelly is terrified by this idea but it all makes sense if we think of the nature of fierce love
between the two and of the way they believe in the immortality of their spirit. Finally, we
are presented to a horrible image in Heathcliff being found dead in that bed, under the
opened window:
“(…) I ran to unclose the panels, for the chamber was vacant; quickly pushing
them aside, I peeped in. Mr. Heathcliff was there (…) I could not think him
dead – but his face and throat were washed with rain; the bed clothes dripped,
and he was perfectly still. The lattice, flapping to and fro, had grazed one hand
that rested on the sill; no blood trickled from the broken skin, and when I put
my fingers to it, I could doubt no more – he was dead and stark!”3
1
2
3
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The closed panels and the dead person inside them make us believe this to be a coffin-
like bed and the resemblance to Cathy’s coffin is doubtless. The open was left open from
the same reason Cathy wanted it opened when she laid ill in her bed at the Grange:
communication with the world of the moors, a world where passion and freedom are at
home.
Emily Brontë spent almost all her life in her father’s parsonage in Yorkshire and
she was a solitary genius. In that remote place, her life, like Galea Ileana mentions in her
Anthology of Critical Approaches to the Victorian Novel, was cut off from all the
influences of the big cities, was a “primitive life of confined interests and unbridled
passions, of simple earthly activities and complex demon-haunted imaginings;”(p. 118).
She was not at all moved by the events surrounding her and, as she was not a very
sociable person, she communicated with nature but not in the sense that she was talking
to it but in the sense that there was an exchange of energy and feelings between the two.
Her life was as unchanged as the windy moors and the lonely and silent valleys and this
landscape was explored in its full potential by all her senses. The connections between
the nature from that place and the characters of the novel are best seen in Heathcliff and
Cathy.
Heathcliff is an inexorable character who emanates a feeling that one should stay
away from him. This is relevant also through the fact that the house itself has his
character impregnated in its walls. Each detail of the Heights is in a certain extent similar
to Heathcliff’s violent nature. When Lockwood enters in the Heights he describes it in
terms of attack and defense: the corners are “defended” by dogs and the kitchen “is
forced to retreat”. The entire house is given an aura of mystery and unknown through its
shadowy features, just as its owner gives the reader the impression of something terrible
hidden, something dangerous.
The remoteness of the house, as a correspondence to Emily’s house at Haworth, is
presented here by her through Heathcliff’s apparently apologizing answer to Lockwood
who seemed to have had difficulties in getting to the master of both the Heights and the
Grange because of the stormy weather and freezing wind that penetrated everything it
touched.
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“Guests are so exceedingly rare in this house that I and my dogs, I am willing to
own, hardly know how to receive them.”1
But it was not the difficult path and sometimes dreadful weather that kept the
visitors away from Wuthering Heights, but the fact that actually there weren’t any. The
single person who could have come to the Heights would have been Nelly Dean,
interested in the lives of her old playmate from childhood, who was now as “rough as a
saw-edge and hard as a whinstone”, and of Cathy and Hareton. But these two are of no
interest for Heathcliff when he speaks to Lockwood about him receiving the guest. The
two cousins are seen as mere objects of his revenge, hands of work in the household and
having a lower status that his own dogs. The dogs that Heathcliff is “willing to own” are
hold in check by him, but their natural violence is revealed when they attack the guest
coming out from “hidden dens”.
“<What the devil, indeed!> I muttered. <The herd of possessed swine could
have had no worse spirits in them than those animals of yours, sir. You might as
well leave a stranger with a brood of tigers!>“2
The entire experience of Lockwood at the Heights makes the reader eager to
know what happened in that place dominated by instincts and if the place is haunted by
evil spirits as the house, as a whole, is a monument of terror. The second attack of those
damned dogs resulted in Lockwood being injured in his attempt to leave the hall. The
visitor witnesses the adding of brute force to the violent nature of the animals that
protected the house. Even old Joseph shows him that he is not welcomed there and
summons the dogs on him for the guest borrowed his lantern to find his way at the
Grange. The whole place is full of instinctual features and Heathcliff seems to the one
who is closer to these instances than any other character present at that time in the house:
he contents himself by growling “in unison” with the dogs.
The novel’s happy ending is not possible until Heathcliff’s death. As time passes,
he becomes more and more obsessed with his dead love and feels that he is surrounded
by her image everywhere: in clouds, trees, in the air of the night, in every object that he
rests his eyes upon. As he anxiously and impatiently waits for his reunion with Cathy in
the afterlife, Catherine and Hareton fall in love and plan their lives together. This love of
1
2
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theirs redeems the misery of the past. As his name is carved over the entrance, surely by
another Hareton sometime around the sixteenth century, Hareton represents a renewal of
the hall, the beginning of a new era once Heathcliff is dead and the estate returns into his
rightful hands. Together, Hareton and Catherine represent the union of Wuthering
Heights’ passion and power, without its cursed inflictions, with the civility and kindness
of Thrushcross Grange without its cowardice and violence in speech.
4.4 Wildfell Hall

Anne Brontë’s novels are characterized by naturalness and preference for the
outspoken truth. Although she was not that appreciated during her lifetime, some
critiques placed her in the same line with Jane Austen who delicately and patiently
observed the complex structure of life. Anne’s entire work is penetrated by a sense of
equilibrium, of supremacy of balance and respecting the moral conduct. She believed that
in spite of all adversities everyone could find a way to happiness and spiritual peace. The
Tenant of Wildfell Hall tells the story of a shattered marriage, where Arthur
Huntingdon’s drinking and degradation bring him his death and his wife’s bitter life and
sorrows. Helen Graham, or by her real name Huntingdon, takes the tenancy of Wildfell
Hall after running away with her son from her drunkard and violent husband. The
community thinks bad things of her and undeservedly accuse her of having an immoral
conduct.
Gilbert Markham presents the reader and his friend Halford with the mysterious,
abandoned and thus almost in ruins mansion from the hills of the area.
“Near the top of this hill, about two miles from Linden-Car, stood Wildfell Hall,
a superannuated mansion of the Elizabethan era, built of dark, grey stone,
venerable and picturesque to look at, but doubtless, cold and gloomy enough to
inhabit, with its thick stone mullions and little latticed panes, its time-eaten air-
holes, and its too lonely, too unsheltered situation – only shielded from the war
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of wind and weather by a group of Scotch firs, themselves half blighted with
storms, and looking as stern and gloomy as the Hall itself.”1
Enclosed with stone walls, the house had a garden that, due to the lack of a
caretaker or some occupants in the house, was abandoned to the overgrown weeds and
grass. The house seemed in deed to lay in ruins as even the once magnificent gateway
with its stone carvings was sprouted in such a way that it had rather a “goblinish
appearance”.
As well as the appearance and structure of Wuthering Heights anticipated the
chaos that was created by Heathcliff, so does the ruined structure of Wildfell Hall
resemble the tempest and ruins of Helen’s young spirit. Gilbert often presents the
surrounding area and the different shades of the mansion while going up the hill in his
visits to Mrs. Graham. He perceives the house a “dark relief against a sky of clear silvery
blue” which can be an analogy of her crushed hopes, betrayed trust and miserable life in
such an early stage of her youth and best feelings.
The grim old hall was seen as comfortless home by the loving Gilbert who hardly
resisted let Helen return in the silent house that “frouned” before them. It is always
presented rising in sight as a clear obstacle between him and Helen, an obstacle against
their union as lovers because the house is a reminder of Helen that she was obliged to
hide in its “cavernous gulfs” from her husband’s humiliations and violence and to protect
her son. The ruinous mass and its desolate court were left behind by Helen and her son
only after the object of her sufferings, to which she remained faithful, faded away. Arthur
Huntingdon died because of his debauchery and degradation nursed by his wife, in spite
of his ill-treatment and shameless behavior. This is the moment when she becomes free
from the man that destroyed her youth and a new step in her life begins, with new
prospects.
1
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Chapter 5
The characters
The three sisters have created a world in which man’s desperate attempts to
escape the conventions of time and civility are presented through passionate outbursts of
emotions. The range of feelings that dominate the characters from the novels is very
large: from sublime happiness to anger and hatred to death and even to such passions and
possessive nature that they might be considered of titanic dimensions and strength. We
find in these heroes the dark side of their personality, and their psychological insight
reveals to us the drama that marks them under the pressure of the clash between feelings
and reason.
Emily Brontë’s characters are made of elemental high lines and they are those
which give the novel a thick aura of mystery, strangeness and anxiety. She was untamed
in her spirit, she was a wild person who looked upon things not with resignation but with
a rebellious eye scrutinizing towards a superior will. This emanation of such complex and
deep feeling might have one of the simplest reasons: the main characters seem to have no
bounds to keep them tight to the society and its civilized habits and ways of thinking. As
we find out from Mr. Lockwood’s experience at Wuthering Heights, even the forms of
intercourse are not the same with those appropriate to the environment from which he
comes.
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Emily Brontë’s characters are seen not through the relations that are between
them but through the relation that they have with nature. She was happy and playful like
a child when she founded herself on top of a hill, in the middle of a meadow or walking
on the moors. But after the death of two of her sisters and her depraved brother, the light
inside her faded away slowly and she began to fight with the darkness of her own being.
As it was in her character to be cold with those around her she released the passionate
inspiration, her half-told regrets and her rage in her writings. The characters’ inner
thoughts are scrutinized to their very depth and what is revealed to us is the essence of an
emotional and spiritual life. Emily found herself between nature, with its untamed
elements and the burning nature of her spirit and made a strong connection between these
two instances by contesting the dominance of death over the world: her spirit was free
and immortal. The characters are not concerned with the problems that make de routine
for the rest of the individuals that live outside the sphere of the moors, but with the
transcendence, with the relation to death and destiny.
In Wuthering Heights there are presented before our eyes unusual characters and
situations by the conscience of not one, but two narrators who recreate the story. Thus,
there is a huge contrast between the extraordinary characters and their passionate
experiences and the world in which the two narrators live. Mr. Lockwood was looking for
some peace, quietness and friendly neighbors in the remote place of moors of Yorkshire,
and he was all of a sudden thrown into a world of madness and passion.
Ellen Dean, the most basic narrator here, is the old family servant, a simple but a
profound and realistic woman. She, with her “fatalistic way of looking upon things”1 is
set in contrast with both the tenant of Thrushcross Grange and the two titanic characters:
Catherine and Heathcliff. The thematic dimension of the novel is enlarged by the views
of the two narrators. Mr. Lockwood is amazed by the treatment with which he is received
at Wuthering Heights and fears Heathcliff’s madness to which he had fallen. The balance
that is created is between a simultaneous triumph and failure and we constantly have the
feeling of restlessness, agitation that whirl around irony and ambiguity.
The characters from Wuthering Heights do not evolve; they are equal from the
beginning to the end. The only thing that does change is their status in social class, as
1
In An Anthology of Critical Approaches to the Victorian Novel, Ileana Galea, Mircea Craciun, Cluj-
Napoca, 1987, p. 11
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some of them decay (Hindley) and others climb up like Heathcliff does. There is no
process from which the characters can learn something. Their character is set from the
beginning of the novel and does not change permanently. Edgar and Isabella Linton die
out of pain and not understood by those which they loved because they were weak and
kind, while Heathcliff and Catherine are strong and destroy, just like a hurricane,
everything that stays in the way of their love. The relation between Catherine and
Heathcliff can be illustrated through an analogy with Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet
(act 2, scene VI):
“These violent delights have violent ends

And in their triumph die, like fire and powder,
Which, as they kiss, consume.”
The passion of their love goes beyond the limits imposed by their condition as
human beings, surpasses the power of flesh on their bones and longs to be free from this
physical prison. Charlotte Brontë’s characters in Jane Eyre do change along the novel as
it is a bildungroman, and the love between Jane and Rochester, although they are also
representatives of fire, does not destroy in any way the others around them. Jane’s
determination to do what is morally correct and her need to find a balance between her
passions and reason, stops the plot in becoming so consuming and breathtaking as the
love between the titanic characters of Wuthering Heights.
5.1 Heathcliff
Emily used the awful experience of her brother Branwell as an inspiration for
both Heathcliff and Hindley Earnshaw, characters in her only novel Wuthering Heights.
The reader’s first encounter with Heathcliff is significant because he is presented first as
the landlord of Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange by his tenant at the Grange
and then as the passionate lover by the old family servant Nelly Dean. As his name
suggests, Heathcliff has a daemonic character that is associated with the beloved moors
of Emily. The wildness of the heath and the threat that it represents whenever a storm is
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unleashed upon the cliffs of Yorkshire is in connection with Heathcliff’s harsh and
violent nature.
Heathcliff was created as a demonic character whose aim was carefully planned
out of revenge. Heathcliff is surrounded by an aura of mystery, of unknown; from the
moment in which Mr. Earnshaw brings him at the Heights and he introduces him, we are
given only uncertainties regarding his being: his origins remain unknown as nobody
claimed him on the streets of Liverpool; he has no name and is given one related to the
wild moors where the hall is situated; he utters words that nobody can understand, his
features are “as dark as if he came from the devil”. All these mysteries and his
appearance makes one believe him to be some kind of primitive energy that accumulated
itself in a concentrated mass and that exploded with a terrible effect.
“<Do you know anything of his history?>
<It’s a cuckoo’s, sir. I know all about it, except where he was born, and who
were his parents, and how he got his money, at first.>”1
The deep contrast between old Mr. Earnshaw’s statement that he was “a gift of
God” and Heathcliff’s actions and the fierce hurricane he unleashed upon his enemies
sets out the fact that he could have been a good child and later a good man. The mystery
surrounds even his character because he was quiet and endured humiliation and pain with
no words of complain. He showed himself hardened to ill-treatment, as Nelly tells to
Lockwood, because he seemed to have as much patience as all of them had together; he
could stand Hindley’s blows without crying out or fighting back but were surely marked
in his mind and soul and paid them back ten times harder.
“(…) he was as uncomplaining as a lamb, though hardness and not gentleness
made him give little trouble.”2
He also has no prospects for a life in the social world, outside the place where he
and Catherine were king and queen. He had everything he wanted if there was just
Catherine with him. Along with these aspects and the fact that he looked like a gypsy,
Heathcliff is presented as a dark creature, “almost as if it came from the devil” and
almost all the characters wonder if he is a devil or a man. Heathcliff cannot be copied by
any other character. He is the only romantic hero with a mysterious origin that entered in
1
2
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the family rather in unpleasant ways for each member, even for little Cathy. The author
does not stop in presenting him in a dark, mysterious aura, having a bad-omen. His
satanic nature is involved in each scene because influences all those with which he comes
in contact. “Fiend”, “imp of Satan”, “devil uf a gypsy” are some of the names that come
out from most of the characters when speaking to him or about him. The darkness of his
physiognomy, soul and mind leaves a mark also on the interior of the Heights.
“<I’d not exchange, for a thousand lives, my condition here, for Edgar Linton’s
at Thrushcross Grange – not if I might have the privilege of flinging Joseph off
the highest gable, and painting the house-front with Hindley’s blood.>”1
The reader is inclined in taking his part and sympathize with him when he is
powerless and abused by Hindley, but he becomes a demon, a villain, after his return at
the Heights over an absence of three years. He appears in the posture of a real gentleman,
educated, with knowledge of culture and proper manners. The most striking and, of
course, mysterious thing among all would be the means through which he managed to
become wealthy. His plan of revenge consists in succeeding to become the owner of the
estates of his enemies and to give their children and heirs the same treatment as he
received. Thus, he manages to make everyone act at his command, obey his rules and he
became a manipulator, an oppressor and a devil indeed. The death of Catherine drives
him crazy and his hatred for the Lintons and the rest of the Earnshaws deepens as he
transforms into a monster. His malevolence proves so great and never drying out that it
cannot be properly explained either as a desire of revenge.
“(…) it looked intelligent, and retained no marks of former degradation. A half
civilized ferocity lurked yet in the depressed brows and eyes, full of black fire,
but it was subdued. And his manner was even dignified quite divested of
roughness, though too stern for grace.”2
This demon master of this world has nothing in his heart but two passions: hatred
and vengeance for those who humiliated and abused him (Hindley, Edgar Linton and
their children) and passionate love for Catherine. These two mix themselves when, at his
return, Heathcliff finds Catherine married to the blond and kind Edgar Linton. The
frenzy of their passion is to ravishing for them as to hide it and the reunion between them
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shakes Catherine’s mind. She knows him better than any other character in the novel and
her quarrellings with Isabella reflect her knowledge that Heathcliff is no good man, and
even if he seems to have improved his manners and way of dressing, he still is a “fierce,
pitiless, wolfish man” (page 85). His eyes, like “devil’s spies”, have a diabolical sneer
that reveal a desire for revenge that has a greater element of gloating in it, now that the
means of achieving his desire are closer to hand. “In seeking to oppress those in his
power, he is adding one more link to a chain of suffering in which he himself is
implicated as victim as well as tyrant. He is never finally accepted in his new position of
social superiority, just as he was never completely reduced to the rank of servant.”1 A
man with such a quality as s “half-civilized ferocity” makes it almost impossible to place
him on a social scale. While taking Isabella from the Grange, the first thing that he does
as a sort of repayment for her commitment to him, is hanging her dog. This act of
shocking cruelty is followed by their elopement. Isabella, who is imprisoned at the
Heights by Heathcliff who tries to conceal his heart through sinister behaviors, is shaken
by the conditions of living there, and thus she turns her blind love for him into hatred.
“<Is Mr. Heathcliff a man? If so, is he mad? And if not, is he a devil? I shan’t
tell my reason for making this inquiry, but I beseech you to explain, if you can,
what I have married.>”2
As he himself points out, his abuse of Isabella is purely sadistic, as he finds
entertaining to see how much she can take from him. He treats her as if she were an
object over which he had power because she represent one of his pawns in the plan of
revenge. Her love turned into deep hatred in a split of a second in the moment she
realized that her self respect was higher than her deceived love:
“He is ingenious and unresting in seeking to gain my abhorrence! I sometimes
wonder at him with an intensity that deadens my fear, yet, I assure you, a tiger
or a venomous serpent could not rouse terror in me equal to that which he
wakens. (…) I do hate him! I am wretched – I have been a fool!”3
The most horrifying side of his actions is that the law is on his side. Once Isabella
married him, she had no freedom beyond what he allowed her. His marriage to Isabella
1
Emily Brontë – Wuthering Heights, Mengham Rod, Penguin Critical Studies, London, 1988, p. 65.
2
3
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for a material benefit had its purpose not only in hurting Edgar, but also in showing
Catherine what he believes of marriage.
There are two generations affected by Heathcliff’s character. The first generation
is centered in a “mythological romance” because of the fact that the love between
Catherine and Heathcliff surpasses the level and understanding of any other form of
love;. The second generation is marked by Heathcliff’s revenge and it involves two other
romances of a smaller magnitude. One is the childish love between Linton and Cathy that
is perverted by Heathcliff, and the other is the profound and healthy love between Cathy
and Hareton which is not harmed because of the fading energy of Heathcliff. As he is the
bounding element of the two generations we may distinct between his two states,
meaning the fact that he is “a demon-lover in the first and a paternal ogre in the second”1
Heathcliff and Catherine are violent figures which are part of nature, of rock and
heath. They try to identify themselves as humans, but they long for an inhuman kind of
relation between them that finally destroys them. The two do not stop or do not repent
their destructive deeds because it is their natural way to be, it is in their blood, so one can
try to understand these passions as being good. The passionate love that consumes both
of them is best seen in the last scene in which they are both alive. The reader is
overwhelmed by the burst of emotions of these two titanic characters in specially
Heathcliff’s. They try to break their human form and evaporate themselves in the air,
blending with nature:
“His eyes wide and wet at last, flashed fiercely on her; his breast heaved
convulsively. An instant they held asunder, and then how they met I hardly saw,
but Catherine made a spring and he caught her and they were lucked in an
embrace from which I thought my mistress would never be released alive – in
fact, to my eyes she seemed directly insensible. He flung himself into the
nearest seat, and on my approaching hurriedly to ascertain if she had fainted he
gnashed at me, and foamed like a mad dog and gathered her to him with greedy
jealousy.”2
1
In An Anthology of Critical Approaches to the Victorian Novel, Ileana Galea, Mircea Craciun, Cluj-
Napoca, 1987, p. 111
2
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He became aware of the fact that his only way in achieving his revenge was to
enslave those around him. Heathcliff is like a tornado; he is a destroyer of peace and of
family bounding. He has subjected Isabella to the same brutalizing ill-treatment, abuse,
denial of affection and violence that he himself was treated by Hindley. One might
question how things would have worked out if Hindley weren’t envious on him and
didn’t hated and humiliated him.
“(…) the young master had learned to regard his father as an oppressor rather
than a friend, and Heathcliff as an usurper of his father’s affections and his
privileges, and he grew bitter with brooding over these injuries.”1
His inhumanity goes that far into transforming little Hareton into an untamed
devil. His offences against Hareton and the other members of his generation, are the most
perverted and unforgivable of his violent acts.
“(…)the stone struck my bonnet; and then ensued, from the stammering lips of
the little fellow, a string of curses, which, whether he comprehended them or
not, were delivered with practiced emphasis, and distorted his baby features into
a shocking expression of malignity.”2
After the death of Hindley, Hareton becomes dependent of his father’s enemy.
The relation between the two is a strange one as both of them feel for each other a kind of
affection and hatred at the same time. But Heathcliff wanted to wreck his life only for the
sake of his vengeance. Hareton is a strong and healthy boy in comparison to Heathcliff’s
son, Linton, who is always ill. The poor boy comes to fear his father so much that that
even when Heathcliff is absent, his menacing power is constantly felt.
“With streaming face and an expression of agony, Linton had thrown his
nerveless frame along the ground; he seemed convulsed with exquisite terror.”3
Heathcliff turns Hareton into a labourer on the Heights and even keeps him away
from the books, prevents him to become educated in a way. This is an echo of the
treatment that once Hindley applied to him, when old Mr. Earnshaw died. He deprived
Heathcliff of the instructions of the curate so as to make the difference between him and
Cathy even more obvious. Heathcliff turns from his antipaty shown towards any form of
1
2
3
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culture into a total rejection of it. As Heathcliff keeps him under his surveilance and
constant influence, Hareton does not feel the need to know how to read until he meets
young Cathy and she humiliates him for his illiterateness.
This relationship between the two lovers that is set in the middle of the novel, can
be contemplated from different points of view. “On the one hand to see Catherine’s
perversity and confused motives (…) and on the other hand to hate what Heathcliff did in
revenge, but to try to understand him, despite the self-centred defiance of his faded
rhetoric”1.In spite of everything, he has done, Heathcliff has traces of kindness and
tenderness in him. As Mengham Rod sustains, “it is in fact his capacity for feeling that is
gradually killing him” (page 71). Both Hareton and Catherine resemble too much with his
Cathy and suffers a lot, finally loosing his interest in destructing the two. His last words,
which he speaks to Nelly, regard his own nature and her doubts show that his idea of
being a devil humors him.
“ he said with his dismal laugh. <Something
too horrible to live under a decent roof!>”2
His love and yearning for Catherine eroded his lust for revenge and ceased in
oppressing the two young lovers, and instead he occupied his time by wondering through
the moors searching for Cathy’s spirit and even opening her grave in his despair in order
to see her. The process of separation of the world in which he lives is accelerated by the
fact that Heathcliff became alien to any human habit: he does not need to eat or sleep and
he has lost track of time and of those in whose presence he finds himself. It is clearly,
from Nelly’s perception of him that his body may be found there but his spirit and mind
are far away, searching for the entrance in the world in which Cathy is. His death was
strange, wild and had no rational explanation while his belief in ghosts and such visions
was fed by his resuscitated spirit. His appearance resembled his inner exhilarated state
and this is why Nelly had another shock in finding him dead.
“I combed his black, long hair from his forehead, I tried to close his eyes, to
extinguish, if possible, that frightful, life-like gaze of exultation, before anyone
1
The Oxford History of the English Literature – The Victorian Novel, Alan Horsman, London, 1990, p.
168.
2
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else beheld it. They would not shut. They seemed to sneer at my attempts, and
his parted lips and sharp white teeth sneered too!”1
5.2 Edward Fairfax Rochester

Through the eyes of Jane, the reader can perceive the double facete of the English
society in those times. The beauty, richness and elegancy of the guests at Thornfield are
doubled by selfishness, meanness and compromises. This class of people, who considers
itself honorable and noble, is illustrated in a series of events that reveal the opulent,
extravagant and suffocating conventions that a class of people adopt, loosing their
authenticity by becoming mere caricatures. In trying to get himself detached from such a
society, Mr. Rochester wanders in search of some kind of perfect beauty but all his
journeys ended up by making him even more disappointed by the world in which he
lives. He is surrounded by mystery throughout the novel, until his past is revealed to Jane.
His character resembles that of a romantic hero of Byron’s described by Jane as being
“dark, strong and stern”, but also proud as coming from such a social background that
Jane detests. Their first encounter takes place during twilight, nearly dark, when Jane is
unaware of his identity. As the night and darkness was falling quick she immediately
made the connection between some Gothic and evil figure of the North of the country and
the horse-rider that was approaching her on the solitary path. She traces his general
features of his body but lingers more on the features of his face.
“He had a dark face, with stern features and heavy brow. His eyes and gathered
eyebrows looked ireful and thwarted just now.”2
As the frown and the roughness of the traveler made her feel comfortable around
him, she felt the need to get closer to him. His harshness comes from his status as a
damned man tormented by a dark past. He is presented of having a strange behavior and
with an inclination towards changing his moods with no notice. After getting to know
1
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him a little bitt better, Jane realizes that his changes of mood had nothing to do with her
or with any other servant from the house. Their reasons were buried deep down his soul
and mind, they formed the mysterious and dark aura around him. As Mrs. Fairfax
describes him to Jane, Rochester’s peculiarity is rather hard to decipher:
“I don’t know – it is not easy to describe – nothing striking, but you feel it when
he speaks to you; you cannot be always sure whether he is in jest or earnest ,
whether he is pleased or the contrary; you don’t thoroughly understand him, in
short – at least, I don’t. But that is of no consequence, he is a very good
master.”1
In spite of his stern and severe manners and his not so beautiful physical features,
Edward wins Jane’s love and eventually her hand because she sees in him one of the
kindred spirits she was looking for. The thing that attracts Rochester to Jane is the fact
that he also finds in her a resemblance to him: the same passionate spirit that dominates
both of them. He is the first person who assures Jane with a place to call home and
unconditioned love. But this passion is restrained by the conventions of society and by
the reason of doing the right thing. In the Victorian period men were considered to be
superior to women and here, Rochester is presented as Jane’s superior in what concerns
the social position and his economic welfare. They are equal, though, at the intellectual
level. There are several evenings when he would ask for the presence of the governess in
order to speak with her.
“When I was as old as you, I was feeling fellow enough, partial to the
unfledged, unfostered, and unlucky; but fortune has knocked me about since:
she has even kneaded me with her knuckles and now I flatter myself I am as
hard and tough as an india-rubber ball.” 2
Their debates were concerning concepts of sin, forgiveness and redemption and
even Jane’s relationship with him regarding her servitude. Rochester regrets his former
life full of lust and degrading behaviors and shows himself disgusted by the mere view or
heard story regarding such vices. From his experiences he has learned that life is hard and
plays tricks on humans to test their resistance. After being an outcast of the family and
after he got himself into a loveless marriage for material purposes, he founded himself
1
2
90
alone with a maniacal wife and a huge fortune. He left his wife closed and under
surveillance at Thornfield and traveled through the world in search of a woman to love,
and when this experience turned out to be disappointing, he sank into debauchery. The
pain of his bitter life is metaphorically expressed to Jane as the best way in which the
matter can be better explained, as both of them are equal on the intellectual level.
“(…) your soul sleeps. The shock is yet to be given which shall waken it. (…)
But I tell you – and you may mark my words – you will come some day to a
craggy pass in the channel, when the whole of life’s stream will be broken up
into whirl and tumult, foam and noise. Either you will be dashed to atoms on
crag points, or lifted up and borne on by come masterwave into a calmer current
– as I am now.”1
Mr. Rochester is transcendental Branwell, Charlotte’s drunkard brother. He
presents some theatrical but sincere remorses and some coarse bygone amours all
sustained by a virile thundering. Charlotte symbolically embodied the character of
Edward Rochester with a masculine élan. Rochester is not so much as a man as it is a
symbol of virility and manhood; it is her dream of a man that is not handsome but
remarkable.
. Jane is drawn to Edward with a strange fascination and yet she seems to reject
him for his demonism. Charlotte reflected through Edward a part of her brother’s
character and the life he was taking. His decaying into alcohol, gambling, lustfulness and
other vices are shortly told by Rochester to Jane, along with his great disappointment
with his mistresses, who were “the next worse thing in buying a slave” (page 110).
Though these activities turned to disgust him and made him change his life, they still
made Jane protest and dislike Rochester for his unfit behavior. She finds herself having
ambivalent feelings for Edward that also give one of the major themes of the novel: the
clash between passion and reason. She wishes to marry him, yet she cannot. She is nearly
enthralled by his tenderness and kind spirit but fears his “falcon eye” and his declaration
of guilt of lustfulness. As she cannot conceive to accept that a man and a woman live in a
free companionship, there are two wais of behaving: “meek submission or a flirtatious,
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91
gently sadistic skirmishing designed to keep her love at bay and finally her sense of
duty”1 that does have the strongest power over Jane.
Although he regrets his sinful past, Edward has proven himself to be weaker in
many ways than Jane. In his attempt to have a happy life, from the moment he fell in love
with Jane, Rochester chooses bigamy and proposes Jane to marry him. After the long
expected revelation of the mysterious past and of the true origin of the eerie laughter in
the Hall, Jane feels now the flood of water of live that Rochester has mentioned to her
earlier in the novel. His choosing to live in bigamy seems to be justified in his eyes, as
terror goes through him only at the mere presence of Mason’s unexpected visit at the
Hall.
“As I spoke he gave my wrist a convulsive grip, the smile on his face froze.
Apparently, a spasm caught his breath. (…) <My little friend!>said he ”2
She knows that living with him as his mistress would mean the loss of her self-
respect and dignity but Edward is decided to do whatever is necessary to keep his love
with him. He would lose nothing but Jane, on the other hand, influenced by her
passionate love for him and her need of protection, could become degraded and submitted
to Rochester. Charlotte Brontë’s fantasy has an uncompromising nature by the fact that
the proud man is struck and punished. Thus Rochester becomes, at the end of the novel,
half blind, with his manor burned down and almost helpless. This is a symbol of the
woman’s triumph in the battle of genders: Rochester becomes dependent of Jane, he
became weaker and needs her constant presence, while Jane became stronger,
independent.
In a letter addressed to W. S. Wlilliams, on the fourteenth of August 1848,
Charlotte made a clear distinction between Rochester’s character and that of Huntingdon
from Anne’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and of Heathcliff from Emily’s Wuthering
Heights: “Mr. Rochester has a profound mind and a sensible heart. He is neither selfish,
nor indolent. He is badly raised and makes mistakes; when he does make a mistake, he
1
Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë – An Authoritative Text. Backgrounds. Criticism, A Norton Critical Edition,
New York, 1971, p. 466.
2
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makes it out of lack of thought and experience. For some time he lives in the same way
too many men live, but being fundamentally better than any of them, he dislikes that
degrading life and is not happy living with it. Mr. Rochester learns from the harsh lessons
of experience and possesses as much mind as to become wiser after going through them.
Years make him better. The effervescence of youth has faded away but the best essence
of him remains. He is like a good wine: time cannot make it sour, but it just gives it a
little more sweetness.”1
The last, brief stage at Ferndean, takes place after Jane’s discovery of the ruined
Thornfield and of the story of Bertha mason’s fiery death. He was physically infirm and
dependent on Jane’s guidance and readings. This accident and his injuries might be seen
as a punishment for his sinful past and a way through which Jane could come back to
him, now that he was physically incapable of mastering her. The fire that was set by
Bertha, can be seen as symbolic to a process of purification of the place and washing of
the sins of the past. There had to be made some sacrifices which are presented in
Rochester’s injuries and loss of property. Jane finds herself equal with Rochester not only
because of his decayed state but also because she became independent and aware of her
own self and her limits. The recounts of an inn-keeper present Rochester’s sufferings
after Jane’s departure from Thornfield.
“<(…) and for all Mr. Rochester sought her, as if she had been the most
precious thing he had in the world, he never could heard a word of her; and he
grew savage – quite savage on his disappointment. He never was a wild man,
but he got dangerous after he lost her. he would be alone too. (…) He would not
cross the door-stones of the house, except at night, when he walked just like a
ghost about the grounds and in the orchard, as if he had lost his senses – which
it is my opinion he had.>”2
5.3 Bertha Mason

The great mystery of all the noises, demonic laughter and the reason for which
Grace Poole has a special status in the hall, gives the plot and atmosphere suspense,
1
The Brontës: Their Lives, Friendships and Correspondence, ed. T. J. Wise and J. A. Symington, 1932,
volume 2, p. 244-245.
2
93
tension and terror and is only revealed by the master after the impediment of the
wedding. Until then, Jane firstly considered the tragic and preternatural laugh to belong
to a ghost that haunted the hallways of the Hall always during nighttime. As Mrs. Fairfax
tells her that the strange noises come from Grace Poole who doesn’t seem to “remember
directions”, Jane becomes more tranquil but this does not stop her from feeling chills on
her skin whenever the eerie laughter bursts out or when strange noises are heard outside
her door.
“The clock, far down in the hall, struck two. Just then it seemed my chamber
door was touched as if fingers had swept the panels in groping away along the
dark gallery outside. (…) A dream had scarcely approach my ear, when it fled
affrighted, scared by a narrow-freezing incident enough. This was a demoniac
laugh; low suppressed and deep-uttered, as it seemed, at the very keyhole of my
chamber door. (…) Something gurgled and moaned. Ere, long steps retreated up
the gallery towards the third story staircase.”1
For years, Mr. Rochester has kept his lunatic wife closed in a chamber of the third
floor of Thornfield Hall, in the care and supervision of a servant named Grace Poole.
Rochester’s mad wife represents the woman who has given herself blindly to a man for
the principle of sexuality and intellect. Rochester was sent to Jamaica in order to marry
Bertha, who had inherited a large amount of money. She was a beautiful Creole and
although he had not spent time with her to know what she was like, in his ignorant youth
married her. Short after this Rochester found out his mother-in-law’s story, who was a
mad and a drunkard woman closed in an asylum, and the perverse and violent outbursts
of his wife only proved to him that he had bound himself to a notorious family of mad,
violent and idiotic people. Bertha’s coarseness, her unhealthy behavior and other
excesses led to her maddening condition.
Rochester found himself alone with a huge fortune and a maniacal wife and
resolved to lock her in Thornfield Hall, under the secret surveillance of Grace Poole. No
one else knew about the woman from the attic, not even the kind Mrs. Fairfax. As her
keeper had one of the worst vices – liquor – Bertha succeeded many times to escape her
room and wander through the hall. Always at night, those were the times when the house
1
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echoed her demoniac laughter; in her madness she put on fire the bed in which her
husband was sleeping. She can be seen as Rochester’s remnant of his youthful libertinism
and mistakes and also as a symbol of the imprisoned Victorian wife, who is expected not
to leave the house and dedicate her life to her husband, raising children and looking after
the house. A wife’s frustrations and troubles of the soul had no outlet and so, these
feelings turned back deep inside the conscience of her, sometimes provoking maddening.
Bertha’s maddening can be seen also as a warning for Jane, of what might happen to her
if she completely subdued herself to Rochester in marrying him.
The one person that knows about Bertha is her brother, Richard who, in spite of
Rochester’s warnings, cannot help himself going to see his sister at night. The terrible
scream that startled Jane and the rest of the guests at Thornfield is explained by
Rochester as a mere nightmare of one of the servants.
“Good God! What a cry! The night – its silence – its rest, was rent in twain by a
savage, a sharp, a shrilly sound that ran from end to end of Thornfield Hall. My
pulse stopped, my heart stood still; my stretched arm was paralyzed. (…) I now
heard a struggle, a deadly one it seemed from the noise, and a half smothered
voice shouted: <Help! Help! Help!>”1
Bertha’s attack upon her brother is a clear sign of her rebellion against her family
that forced her into a marriage with a man for his social status. The injured man was
paralyzed with fear from Bertha’s fierce and violent attack and the pale and bloody scene
that Jane was brought in front of, made her shiver with fear. The thing that she appears
not to be able to withstand is the thought that she was separated only by a door from the
murderous Grace. All these gothic elements contribute to the atmosphere of terror and
striking horror. Bertha’s character proves to be animal and diabolic. The doctor had a
terrible shock when discovering that Mason wound was as well as cut as it was torn apart
with teeth and the fear-paralyzed victim explained her rage in some supernatural and
diabolical terms.
“<She sucked the blood! She said she’d drain my heart!>”2
Bertha’s actions shudder even Rochester who shows himself with an expression
marked by disgust, horror and hatred that distort his features.
1
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95
One could also see Bertha as a manifestation of Jane’s subconscious feelings related to
Rochester. Jane longs for freedom and by marrying Rochester she submits herself to him,
in a relation of responsibility and commitment to a person who is superior to her. She
feels the need to rage against the imprisonment that this action could bring her to, and
this leads to Bertha’s outrageous action of tearing the bridal veil into two. Rochester and
Jane do not think firstly of the tearing of the veil as a sign of bad omen but are concerned
with the identity of the person that did it. Bertha’s features are ghastly too look at, as they
are a mirror of her soul and troubled and diabolical mind :
“< At that moment I saw the reflection of the visage and features quite distinctly
in the dark oblong glass>
< And how were they? >
< Ghastly and fearful to me, sir, I never saw a face like it! It was a discolored
face – it was a savage face. I wish I could forget the roll of the red eyes and
fearful blackened inflation of the lineaments! >
< Ghosts are usually pale, Jane. >
< This, sir, was purple: the lips were swelled and dark; the brow furrowed, the
black eyebrows widely raised over the blood shot eyes. >”1
Her few but terrible actions are means of exploring the conscience of the heroine.
This relation between the two could be an explanation of why this madwoman did not
touched or harmed Jane; her revolt seems to be against the institution of marriage.
Rochester finds himself relieved by the course of this happening and only shudders to the
thought of what could have happened. Bertha’s existence is also the reason why the
wedding is stopped from going forth. The incident with the mad woman from the attic is
the most representative from the entire novel.
“What it was, whether beast or human being, one could not, at first, tell. It
groveled, seemingly on all fours; it snatched and growled like some strange wild
animal; but it was covered with clothing and a quantity of dark, grizzled hair,
wild as a mane, hid its face and head. (…) The maniac bellowed; she parted her
shaggy locks from her visage and gazed wildly at her visitors. (…) The lunatic
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96
sprang and grappled his throat viciously and laid her teeth to his cheek. They
struggled.”2
This description of the mad woman from the attic illustrates the degradation of the
body and of the angelic features of a beautiful woman in accordance with the degradation
of the mind. Her spirit is somewhere lost and disoriented. As Rochester explains later,
that was the only embrace he could receive from his maniacal wife and her imprisonment
was necessary for everyone’s safety. One interpretation of this action might be easily sees
in an opposite relation where the years of imprisonment have made Bertha violent and
consequently insane. Thus, the “mad woman in the attic” could represent the aspects of
Victorian life of the wives that suffocated and isolated by their husbands, lost their
mental stability. This horror of marriage in the Victorian times has also other
interpretations like Bertha’s position as a double for Jane as it has been said before. This
symbolism of Bertha must not be taken as a sole justification for her creation as a
character. She is also a source of stress for Jane and a very important gothic element that
gave to the novel tension and mystery. When Thornfield becomes the place where Jane
could be submitted and her freedom and self-respect threatened, Bertha burns it to the
ground and seems to be the outward manifestation of Jane’s character dominated by fire,
just like Rochester’s. Her death is not through flames. In her distorted workings of her
mind, she throws herself from the roof of the hall in an attempt to be released from her
cage, just like a bird that longs for her freedom and finally flies away.
5.4 Arthur Huntingdon

Anne Brontë was always a quiet presence, radiant and kind, who devotedly
completed her small mission. She depicted the sufferings that alcohol and other vices that
trapped young people caused to the family and even to the community. Anne used the
image and experiences of her brother in order to create the character of Arthur
Huntingdon. The English critiques emphasized her moralizing tendency in The Tenant of
Wildfell Hall, considering that the falling of a man through vices is a moral lecture for
her brother Branwell, who disgusted her with his show of physical and spiritual
deterioration.
2
97
After a love deception, Branwell started to decay by consuming alcohol and
opium. He used to sit all day long in a tavern, drinking all his father’s and sisters’ money
out and then returned home with his eyes injected by the quantity of alcohol that he had
consumed. He became a decrepit, a mad-man, a real burden and source of sufferings for
his family. His delirious crises after awakening from the state of drunkenness were as
awful and consuming as those when he tried to get more money from his much-to-loving
father.
As a bachelor, Arthur used to spend his evenings and nights with his friends in a
club, drinking, gambling, telling jokes and vulgar stories and spending his money on
women also. As Helen observes, there are also good qualities in him but these are
completely overshadowed when his mind is blurry because of the excess of alcohol.
Upon his marriage, Arthur decides to retreat with his wife at the countryside, at
Grassdale, and to be a good husband to her and a good father to his future children. As
time passes by, he becomes more and more bored and he renews his bounding with his
old friends and travels to the city in order to spend his time in a pleasant company and
entertaining himself. As time passes by, he invites some of his friends and their wives at
Grassdale where Helen gets accustomed with witnessing her husband’s degradation. The
circus that takes place every night in her house is deplorable and after considering that
she had fulfilled her duties as a host, she retreated along with other ladies also ashamed
of their husband’s behavior, like Millicent Hattersley.
“The next object of assault was Arthur, who sat opposite, and had, no doubt,
richly enjoyed the whole scene.
<Now, Huntingdon!> exclaimed his irascible friend, 
<Oh, Hattersley!>cried he, wiping his swimming eyes, <you’ll be the death of
me!>
<Yes, I will, but not as you suppose. I’ll have the heart out of your body, man, if
you irritate me with any more of that imbecile laughter! – What! – Are you at it
yet? – There, see if that’ll settle you!> cried Hattersley, snatching up a footstool
and hurling it at the head of his host; but he missed his aim, and the latter still
98
sat collapsed and quaking with feeble laughter, with the tears running down his
face; a deplorable spectacle indeed.”1
He just enjoys drinking and becomes a drunkard, never considering his
dependence to be a problem to him. His degrading behavior only embarrasses Helen in
front of those present in his circles. The tense and deteriorating relationship between the
two is accelerated by his adulterous relationship with Lady Lowborough and his double
standard. Arthur strongly affirms that he loves her but at the same time he applies to her a
very ill-treatment and indifference.
“He was particularly ill-tempered to me. Everything I did was wrong; I was
cold-hearted, hard insensate. My sour, pale face was perfectly repulsive; my
voice made him shudder; he knew not how he could live through the winter
with me, I should kill him by inches.”2
Helen’s love and worry for her husband turned into hatred once she came to
realize that he trampled over her heart and her hopes of a happy life. The only reason why
she stayed with him was because of her simple status as his wife and because of her child.
But the little boy is corrupted by his own father, just for the fun of it.
“So the little fellow came down every evening in spite of his cross mamma and
learned to tipple wine like papa, to swear like Mr. Hattersley, and to have his
own way like a man, and send mamma to the devil when she tried to prevent
him. To see such things done with the roguish naïveté of that pretty little child,
and hear such things spoken by that small infantile voice, was as peculiarly
piquant and irresistibly droll to them as it was inexpressibly distressing and
painful to me.”3
This episode is one of the many others that Anne created being inspired from her
sister Emily. In Wuthering Heights, Nelly Dean pays a visit to the Heights in order to see
Hindley and encounters outside the house his little son who apparently does not
remember her and vociferating some curses, throws a stone at her. Ellen’s shock comes
from the fact that the little fellow that she raised not long ago could spell out such
dreadful words, whose meaning she was not sure that the child was aware of. Arthur
1
2
3
99
Huntingdon enjoys himself drinking and wanted to make his son to have some fun too,
and at the same time to entertain himself and his friends. It is hard to think of what Helen
felt all those moments when she watched helplessly how her son followed his father’s
steps. Helen used the time when her husband was away in order to restore the moral
principles back into her child’s mind and found a way to make him sick at the very smell
of alcohol, thus ruining every fun that Arthur might have on the expense of the child.
Although she is firmly against Huntington once they are estranged and as her
marriage was ruined, she decides to leave her husband and sustain herself and her child,
with the money she would gain by selling her paintings, only in the moment when she
believes her child to be in danger. Unfortunately Arthur finds out about her plans and
calmly at first asks for the keys of her cabinet, desk and drawers. The storm followed the
calm as he proceeded to a “confiscation of property” and threw all her painting materials
into the fire and took all her money that she succeeded to gain for her departure. This
discouragement did not stopped her from trying again to leave and she succeeded in
doing that.
His body degraded into such a state that he turned ill. His friends left him alone
and all his mistresses abandoned him. Out of loyalty toward the vows she had made when
she married Huntingdon and persuaded by her “own sense of duty”, Helen returns home
to nurse her husband when all others have abandoned him. The “wretched sufferer’s
temper” was not improved by his calamity but it got even worse and insupportable. His
need of alcohol was as fierce as ever and this brought him again in such a state that he
could hardly get well.
“The first of these communications brought intelligence of a serious relapse in
Mr. Huntingdon’s illness, entirely the result of his own infatuation in persisting
in the indulgence of his appetite for stimulating drink. In vain had she
remonstrated, in vain she had mingled his wine with water. (…) at length, on
finding she had covertly diluted the pale port that was brought him, he threw the
bottle out of the window, swearing he would not be cheated like a baby, ordered
the butler to bring a bottle of the strongest wine in the cellar, and affirming that
he should have been well long ago if he had been let to have his own way, but
she wanted to keep him weak in order that she might have him under his thumb
100
– but by the Lord Harry, he would have no more humbug – seized a glass in one
hand, and a bottle in the other, and never rested till he had drunk it dry.”1
His childish behavior clearly shows how alcohol puts a veil around a man’s mind and
obstructs the realization of the fact that liquor is pure poison for his physical health and
mental stability. While drinking always made him feel great and revived him, Arthur is
under the impression that it will help him get well, as it seemingly did other times.
1
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Anne Brontë, Penguin Popular Classics Edition, London, 1994, p. 340-341.
101
CONCLUSIONS
The Brontë sisters criticized through their novels the way in which those without
a social status and a strong financial support were seen as inferior and despised, all being
framed in events from their own lives, like their experience as governesses, the torment
they lived through with their drunkard and degraded brother and the setting of their house
at Haworth. Evil and sickness dominate their entire works, in specially Emily’s only
novel, which is a real spring of violence, diabolical characters and illness. The range of
feelings that dominate the characters from the novels is very large: from sublime
happiness to anger and hatred to death and even to such passions and possessive nature
that they might be considered of titanic dimensions and strength. We find in these heroes
the dark side of their personality, and their psychological insight reveals to us the drama
that marks them under the pressure of the clash between feelings and reason.
The bildungsroman plot of Jane Eyre and Charlotte’s criticism of the oppressive
social ideas and principles of the nineteenth century Victorian society, is doubled by the
gothic element. It gave the story an atmosphere of horror, suspense and fear as Jane
encounters ghosts and dark secrets. Along with these, the spaces in which she develops
her self-conscience are places of spiritual, intellectual and emotional imprisonment.
The characters from Wuthering Heights do not evolve; they are equal from the
beginning to the end. The only thing that does change is their status in social class, as
some of them decay (Hindley) and others climb up like Heathcliff does. Emily’s damned
heroes lived their life, loved passionately and died driven by irresistible forces all of them
having a piece of the hidden powers that Emily possessed. Thus, all their lives were
marked by the uncontestable truth of their feelings and beliefs and if it were for these
lives to be painted, they would probably have been colored in tears and blood.
In a century when the image of a married woman was that of a submissive one,
Anne crashed down that status by showing that a woman like Helen Graham could leave
her degraded and drunkard husband in order to become independent and raise her child
102
alone and in peace. This story of a shattered marriage shows how debauchery and alcohol
can ruin a man’s health and the happiness of those around him.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
 Emily Brontë. Wuthering Heights. Book’s Friends, Bucharest, 1994.

 Charlotte Brontë. Jane Eyre. Book’s Friends, Bucharest, 1993, vol. 1-2.
 Anne Brontë. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Penguin Popular Classics Edition,
London, 1994.
 Mengham Rod. Emily Brontë – Wuthering Heights. Penguin Critical Studies,
England, 1988.
 The Brontës: Their Lives, Friendships and Correspondence, ed. T. J. Wise and J.
A. Symington, 1932, volume 2.
 A Norton Critical Edition, New York. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë – An
Authoritative Text. Backgrounds. Criticism, New York, 1971.
 Galea Ioana, Craciun Mircea. An Anthology of Critical Approaches to the
Victorian Novel. Cluj-Napoca, 1987.
 Horsman Alan. The Oxford History of the English Literature – The Victorian
Novel. London, 1990.
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Introduction

1.4 Social classes

1.5 Evil and meanness

Charlotte Brontë created a bildungsroman and focused on the psychological

The main narrator of the happenings of Wuthering Heights is more or less a

3.1 Degradation and drunkards

Charlotte Brontë wrote her novel as a bildungsroman and her references to

3.3 Sickness and illness

4.1 The red-room

4.2 Thornfield Hall

4.3 Wuthering Heights

4.4 Wildfell Hall

“These violent delights have violent ends

5.2 Edward Fairfax Rochester

5.3 Bertha Mason

5.4 Arthur Huntingdon

 Emily Brontë. Wuthering Heights. Book’s Friends, Bucharest, 1994.

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