The Incest Theme in Wuthering Heights Eric Solomon Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 14, No. 1. (Jun., 1959), pp. 80-83. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0029-0564%28195906%2914%3A1%3C80%3ATITIWH%3E2.0.CO%3B2-I Nineteenth-Century Fiction is currently published by University of California Press.

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fiction. "Veterans' Ranks," on the other hand, is merely a description of a parade; the sentiments are conventional, the style reveals the hurried hand of an undistinguished journalist. Even with Crane's "The Gratitude of a Nation" before us it seems rash to say-as Gullason does-that the existence of an article on Decoration Day and a warlike description of a Harvard football game "imply that the writer's close study of America-not, as most critics insist, the novels of Tolstoy ( Ww and Peme, Seuastopol) and Zola (Le De'bdc1e)-served him well when he created his masterpieces of war fiction, beginning with The Red Badge."Yt is simplistic indeed to assert but a single source for almost any literary work, and particularly fo,r one so complex as The Red Badge of Courage, in which influences of several kinds are synthesised into an original expression with a unity of effect which almost successfully disguises the diversity of its origins. In my introduction to the Harper's edition I have traced the indebtedness of Crane's book, in point of treatment, aesthetic creed, ethical coherence, and certain metaphors and structural elements, to Seuastopol, Le De'bdcle, and Kipling's The Light That Failed. T o assert Crane's affiliations with these works of foreign literatures neither impugns his own originality nor makes negligible the role of his native American experience in forming his sensibility. I prefer to maintain that Crane in T h e Red Badge of Courage brings together the martial and religious strains in his own family heritage, and, drawing on the crucial event in our national history, he combines fictional treatments suggested by European models with an individualism and concern for death traditional in American literature.'

'

Gullason, p. 160.

"offman, "Introduction" to The Red Badge.

Swarthmore College

. . (1957),

p. xv.

DANIEL G. HOFFMAN

THEINCEST THEME IN Wuthering Heights According to two recent critics, much of the power of Wuthering Heights stems from the inevitability of the tragedy. Richard Chase considers that it is impossible to imagine such a stormy, undisciplined pair as Cathy and Heathcliff ever settling down to a normal life of domesticity.' Dorothy Van Ghent goes further to point out that the

'"The

BrontEs: A Centennial Observance," The Kenyon Review, I X (Autumn, 1947), 496.

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81

foster kinship "provides an imaginative reason for the unnaturalness and impossibility of their mating."%ight not the tragic fate that envelops the lovers be even more inevitable? Might not Heathcliff and &thy be brother and sister? One need not follow the dark Freudian lines of the Emily-Bramwell relationship-which have been fully explored by the author's biographers-a to prove Emily Bronte's familiarity with the concept of incestuous connections. Echoes of Byron and Byronism exist throughout her poems; to a writer familiar with the life of the lover of Aurora Leigh and the works of the author of Manfred, the incest motif would hardly be unknown. Eighteenth-century fiction certainly provided numerous examples of the theme-incest is a plot device in Moll Flanders, T o m Tones, Humphrey Clinker, and Evelinu, among others. External evidence is rarely of much value in a consideration of Emily Bronte's fiction, however; nor does the dark poetry of Wuthering Heights call for a gloss from the standpoint of logical coherence and careful motivation. Still, Emily Bronte's technique is not haphazard. The manipulation of time sequence and angle of vision is carefully handled. Why, then, is there such confusion and mystery surrounding Heathcliff's entrance on the scene? At first glance, the discovery of Heathcliff might appear to be the pbvious way to introduce a strange child whose birth is to remain a mystery, who may be gypsy or prince, animal or devil. Old Earnshaw travels to Liverpool, notices a child wandering the streets, and, overcome by pity, brings the boy home with him. But this section of the novel is strangely unsatisfactory, leaving many questions unresolved. In Nelly Dean's narrative, no reason is suggested for Earnshaw's visit to Liverpool, and this in a passage where Nelly describes not only the distance, "sixty miles each way,"\nd the fact that he is going to make the journey on foot, but also the gifts-a fiddle and a whipto be purchased for Hindley and Cathy. These details are presented clearly, but Nelly never so much as indicates why Earnshaw is maka "The Window Figure and the Two-Children Figure in Wuthering Heights," NineteenthCentzwy Fiction, VII (Dec., 1 9 5 3 ) ~196. See, for example, Romer Wilson, All Alone (London, 1928) or Norma Crandall, Emily Bront?: A Psychological Portlait (Rindge, N . H., 1957). ' A l l citations to Wuthering Heights refer to chapter iv of Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights (Oxford, 1931) [ T h e Shakespeare Head Bronte]. Italics in passages quoted are mine.

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ing this arduous trip, whether in connection with the farm, legal matters, or personal reasons. Earnshaw returns with a mysterious dirty child whom his wife "must e'en take as a gift of God." H e gives a vague and illogical report of finding the homeless and starving child in the Liverpool gutters. Earnshaw's rationalization of the adoption seems weak: Not a soul knew to whom it belonged, he said, and his money and time, being both limited, he thought it better to take it home with him, at once, than run into vain expenses there; because he was determined he would not leave it as he found it.

Even in an eighteenth-century provincial slum, the waif must have had some protector. Mrs. Earnshaw considers her husband to be mad, and the narrator, tart Nelly Dean, expresses doubts through her manner of recounting the tale. She informs Lockwood that Earnshaw "tried to explain the matter; but he was redly half dead with fatigue . . . all that I could make out.. . was a tale of his seeing i t . . ." The brief picture of Mrs. Earnshaw presented here would certainly supply an added motive for concealment of a child who could possibly be Earashaw's illegitimate offspring. She "was ready to fling it out of doors"; she grumbles and berates the exhausted traveler. How would such a woman have reacted to any honest admission of sinful adultery?' Earnshaw could only bring a by-blow into the family by devious means, as long as his wife was still alive. In addition, Heathcliff soon becomes Earnshaw's favorite, more cherished than his own children, an unnatural occurrence surelyunless this is a natural child. Nelly has her suspicions. Earnshaw, she comments, "took to the child strangely," this "poor fatherless child, as he called him." Hindley, for his part, sees Heathcliff "as a usurper of his parent's affections." There can be no doubt that Emily Bronte casts a vague incestuous aura over the entire plot of Wuthering Heights. Heathcliff marries his lost love's sister-in-law; his wife's son marries her brother's daugh' I t m i g h t be objected at this point that Earnshaw hardly seems the type o f m a n w h o would have a clandestine affair to conceal. O n e can, however, derive Emily Bronte's belief i n heredity f r o m the strong family resemblences displayed by her characters. T h e second generation o f Heathcliffs and Lintons markedly show the parents' characteristics. Since Cathy and Hindley, Earnshaw's legitimate children, display the wild and drunken natures that their author assigns t h e m , m i g h t not this indicate something about her view o f the parent, something not incommensurate w i t h siring a n illegitimate child?

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ter; Cathy's daughter marries her brother's son. An unconsciously incestuous love between the two leading characters would not run counter to the tone of a novel filled with violent and savage scenes, such as the sadistic rubbing of a wrist over a broken window-pane, Cathy's fierce delirium, or the sight of Heathcliff smashing his bloody head against a tree. Certainly Wuthering Heights can be read without any such theory of Heathcliff's birth. Yet this view supplies an answer to some of the novel's ambiguities. If Heathcliff and Cathy were-even unknowingly-brother and sister, they obviously never could marry on earth, however violent their passion might be. Despite her powerful vision of moral decay, Emily Bronte could not overthrow all traditional canons of taste. Again, Heathcliff, as Earnshaw's real son, would have an increased motivation for his bitter insistence that Wuthering Heights must belong to him. Above all, the tragedy of W ~ t h e r i n gHeights is increased in intensity and inevitability if Heahcliff and Cathy are seen not only as the products of their own wilfully destructive natures, but as the victims of a fate beyond their control. When Cathy cries out that she is Heathcliff, does she mean that they are of one flesh as well as one spirit ? ERICSOLOMON Harvard University

From Jane Austen to Joseph Conrad From 1914until his death in 1956,~JamesTheodore Hillhouse was a member of the Department of English at the University of Minnesota. Respected and admired for his own scholarly publications (chief among them his indispensable T h e Waverley Novels and Their Critics), he also won the affection of students in his classes in British drama and a sequence of seminars in the British novel. Tn From lane Austen to loseph Conrad (University of Minnesota Press: $5.75), Robert C. Rathburn and Martin Steinmann, Jr., have .collected as a memorial twenty essays originally solicited to honor Hillhouse upon his retirement. By limiting contributions to essays on British novelists of the nineteenth century, the editors have avoided the usual diversity of a