LATER CRITICAL RESPONSE TO WUTHERING
HEIGHTS
Initially Jane Eyre was regarded as the best of the Brontë
sisters' novels, a judgment which continued nearly to the end of the
century. By the 1880s critics began to place Emily's achievement above
Charlotte's; a major factor in this shift was Mary Robinson's
book-length biography of Emily (1883). In 1926, Charles Percy Sanger
worked out the chronology of Wuthering Heights by closely
examining the text; though other critics have since worked out
alternate chronologies, his work affirmed Emily's literary craft and
meticulous planning of the novel and disproved Charlotte's presentation
of her sister as an unconscious artist who "did not know what she
had done." Critics are still arguing about the
structure of Wuthering Heights: for Mark Schorer it is
one
of the most carefully constructed novels in English, but for Albert J.
Guerard
it is a splendid, imperfect novel which Brontë loses control over
occasionally.
Despite the increasing critical admiration for Wuthering
Heights, Lord David Cecil could write, in 1935, that Emily
Brontë was not properly appreciated; even her admirers saw her as
an "unequal genius." He countered this view by identifying the
operation of cosmic forces as the central impetus and controlling force
in the novel. He was not the first critic to perceive cosmic forces in
the novel; Virginia Woolf, for
one, had earlier written of Emily Brontë and her novel that
She looked out upon a world cleft into
gigantic disorder and felt within her the power to unite it in a book.
That gigantic ambition is to be felt throughout the novel–a struggle,
half thwarted but of superb conviction, to say something through the
mouths of her characters which is not merely "I love" or "I hate," but
"we, the whole human race" and "you, the eternal powers..." the
sentence remains unfinished.
Nevertheless, Cecil's theory that a principle of calm and storm
informed the novel was a critical milestone because it provided a
comprehensive interpretation which presented the novel as a unified
whole. He introduced a reading which later critics have generally
responded to, whether to build on or to reject. Cecil premised that,
because Emily was concerned with what life means,
she focused on her characters' place in the cosmos, in which
everything–alive or not, intellectual or physical–was animated by one
of two spiritual principles: the principle of the storm, which was
harsh, ruthless, dynamic and wild, and the principle of calm,
which was gentle, merciful, passive, and tame. The usual distinction
between human being and nature did not exist for her; rather, for her,
they were
alive in the same way, an angry man and an angry
sky both literally manifesting the same spiritual principle of storm.
Cecil
cautioned that
in spite of their apparent opposition these
principles are not conflicting. Either–Emily Brontë does not make
clear which she thinks–each is the expression of a different aspect of
a single pervading spirit; or they are the component parts of a
harmony. They may not seem so to us. The world of our experience is, on
the face of it, full of discord. But that is only because in the
cramped condition of their earthly incarnation these principles are
diverted from following the course that their nature dictates, and get
in each other's way. They are changed from positive into negative
forces; the calm becomes a source of weakness, not of harmony, in the
natural scheme, the storm a source not of fruitful vigour, but of
disturbance. But when they are free from fleshly bonds they flow
unimpeded and unconflicting; and even in this world their discords are
transitory. The single principle that ultimately directs them sooner or
later imposes an equilibrium....
Because these principles were neither good nor evil but just were, the
novel was not concerned with moral issues and judgments; rather, it
presented, in Cecil's view, a pre-moral world.
Just as Brontë resolved the usual conflict between
the
principles of storm and calm into equilibrium, so she resolved the
traditional opposition between life and death by allowing for the
immorality of the soul in life as well as in the afterlife. Cecil
extrapolated, "The spiritual principle of which the soul is a
manifestation is active in this life: therefore, the disembodied soul
continues to be active in this life. Its ruling preoccupations remain
the same after death as before." In other words, the individual's
nature and passions did not end with death; rather, death allowed their
free expression and fulfillment and so held the promise of peace. This
was
why Catherine's spirit haunted Wutheirng Heights after her death.
Cecil's theory is one of the twentieth century
outpourings of interpretations trying to prove the novel had a unified
structure. Surveying these myriad efforts, J. Hillis Miller challenged
the assumption that
the novel presents a unified, coherent, single meaning: "The secret
truth
about Wuthering Heights, rather, is that there is no
secret truth which criticism might formulate in this way... It leaves
something
important still unaccounted for... The text is over-rich." He suggests
that
readers and critics should push their reading of or theory about the
novel
as far as they can, until they can face the fact that their
interpretation
fails to account for all the elements in the novel, that the novel is
not
amenable to logical interpretation or to one interpretation which
accounts
for the entire novel.
Perhaps F.R. Leavis penned the most quoted (most
infamous?) modern interpretation of Wuthering Heights when he
excluded it from the great tradition of the English novel because it
was a "sport," i.e., had no meaningful connection to fiction which
preceded it or influence on fiction which followed it.
Brontë: Table of Contents
March 9, 2011
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