WUTHERING HEIGHTS AS
SOCIO-ECONOMIC NOVEL
The novel opens in 1801, a date Q.D. Leavis believes
Brontë chose in order "to fix its happenings at a time when the
old rough farming culture, based on a naturally patriarchal family
life,
was to be challenged, tamed and routed by social and cultural changes;
these changes produced Victorian class consciousness and ‘unnatural'
ideal of gentility." In 1801 the Industrial Revolution was under way in
England; when Emily Brontë was writing in 1847, it was a dominant
force in English economy and society, and the traditional relationship
of social classes was being disrupted by mushroom-new fortunes and an
upwardly-aspiring middle class. A new standard for defining a
gentleman, money,
was challenging the traditional criteria of breeding and family and the
more recent criterion of character. This
social-economic reality provides the context for socio-economic
readings of the novel.
Is Brontë supporting the status quo and
upholding conventional values? Initially the answer would seem to be
"no." The reader sympathizes with Heathcliff, the gypsy oppressed by a
rigid class system and denigrated as "imp" or "fiend." But as
Heathcliff pursues his revenge and tyrannical persecution of the
innocent, the danger posed by the uncontrolled individual to the
community becomes apparent. Like other novels of the 1830s and 40s
which reveal the abuses of industrialism and overbearing individualism,
Wuthering Heights may really suggest the necessity
of preserving traditional ways.
This is not the way Marxist critics see the novel. For
Arnold
Kettle, the basic conflict and motive force of the novel are social in
origin. He locates the source of Catherine and Heatcliff's affinity in
the (class)
rebellion forced on them by the injustice of Hindley and his wife
Frances.
He, the outcast slummy, turns to the lively,
spirited, fearless girl who alone offers him human understanding and
comradeship. And she, born into the world of Wuthering Heights, senses
that to achieve a full humanity, to be true to herself as a human
being, she must associate herself totally with him in his rebellion
against the tyranny of the Earnshaws and all that tyranny involves.
In Kettle's view, Catherine's death inverts the common standards of
bourgeois morality
and so has "revolutionary force." Heathcliff is morally ruthless with
his
brutal analysis of the significance of Catherine's choosing Edgar and
her
rejecting the finer humanity he represents. Despite Heathcliff's
implacable revenge, we continue to sympathize with him because he is
using the weapons and values (arranged marriages, accumulating money,
and expropriating property) of Victorian society against those with
power; his ruthlessness strips them of any romantic veneer. As a
result, he, too, betrays his humanity. Through the aspirations
expressed in the love of Cathy and Hareton,
Heathcliff recognizes some of the quality of his love for Catherine and
the unimportance of revenge and property; he thereby is enabled to
regain his humanity and to achieve union with Catherine. "
Wutherng
Heights then," Kettle concludes, "is an expression in the
imaginative terms of art of the stresses and tensions and conflicts,
personal and spiritual, of nineteenth-century capitalist society."
Writing nearly twenty-five years later, Marxist Terry
Eagleton posits a complex and contradictory relationship between the
landed gentry and aristocracy, the traditional power-holders, and the
capitalist, industrial middle classes, who were pushing for social
acceptance and political power. Simultaneously with the struggle among
these groups, an accommodation was developing based on economic
interests. Though the landed gentry and aristocracy resisted marrying
into first-generation capitalist wealth, they were willing to mix
socially and to form economic alliances with the manufacturers and
industrialists. The area that the Brontës lived in, the town of
Haworth in West Riding, was particularly affected by these social and
economic
conditions because of the concentration of large estates and industrial
centers in West Riding.
Proceeding from this view of mid-nineteenth century
society, Eagleton sees both class struggle and class accommodation in Wutheirng
Heights. Heathcliff, the outsider, has no social or biological
place in the existing social structure; he offers Catherine a
non-social or pre-social relationship, an escape from the conventional
restrictions and material comforts of the upper classes, represented by
the genteel Lintons. This relationship outside society is "the only
authentic form of living in a world of exploitation and inequality." It
is Heathcliff's expression of a natural non-social mode of being which
gives the relationship its impersonal quality and makes
the conflict one of nature versus society. Heathcliff's connection with
nature is manifested in his running wild as a child and in Hindley's
reducing
him to a farm laborer. But Catherine's marriage and Hindley's abuse
transform Heathcliff and his meaning in the social system, a
transformation which
reflects a reality about nature–nature is not really "outside" society
because its conflicts are expressed in society.
However, Heathcliff the adult becomes a capitalist, an
expropriator, and a predator, turning the ruling class's weapons of
property accumulation and acquisitive marriage against them. Society's
need to tame/civilize the unbridled capitalist is handled in the
civilizing of Hareton. Hareton represents the yeoman class, which was
being degraded. In adopting the behavior of the exploiting middle
classes, Heathcliff works in common with the capitalist landowner Edgar
Linton to suppress the yeoman class; having been raised
in the yeoman class and having acquired his fortune outside it, he
joins
"spiritual forces" against the squirearchy. Thus, he represents both
rapacious
capitalism and the rejection of capitalist society. However, because
the
capitalist class is no longer revolutionary, it cannot provide
expression
for Heathcliff's rejection of society for a pre-social freedom from
society's
restraints. From this impossibility comes what Eagleton calls
Heathcliff's
personal tragedy: his conflictive unity consisting of spiritual
rejection
and social integration. Heathcliff relentlessly pursues his goal of
possessing
Catherine, an obsession that is unaffected by social realities. In
other
words, the novel does not fully succeed in reconciling or finding a way
to
express all Heathcliff's meanings.
Eagleton acknowledges that ultimately the values of
Thrushcross Grange prevail, but that Brontë's sympathies lie with
the more democratic, cozy Wuthering Heights. The capitalist victory
over the yeomanry is symbolized by the displacement of Joseph's beloved
currant bushes for Catherine's flowers, which are in Marxist terms
"surplus value." With Heathcliff's death a richer life than that of
Thrushcross Grange also dies; it may be a regrettable death–but it is a
necessary death because the future requires a fusion of gentry and
capitalist middle class, not continued conflict.
Brontë: Table of Contents
October 13, 2011
