'Drag Him Down and Crush Him to Atoms'
Particles in Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights
A few days ago I began a new project: reading Wuthering Heights and recording every instance in which Emily Brontë refers to Nature or the natural world.
I created a simple spreadsheet to help me organize my research and though I am only working through Chapter 3, I’ve already revised my columns to include labels such as: mineral and mud. This morning I am adding: particle.
Emily Brontë conjures elements from Nature all throughout Wuthering Heights but many readers overlook these references. In the first chapters, Brontë writes of wind and snow, firs and hawthorns and her characters shrink icily, growl and heave like a sea.
In my spreadsheet, I have created columns for mentions which are literal, metaphoric or simile; this morning I added: dream (to account for delusion and dream sequences). After a dog-fueled melee in the kitchen of the Heights, Mr. Lockwood falls into a deep sleep and dreams of attending a sermon with Joseph in the Chapel of Gimmerden Sough.1
We came to the chapel—I have passed it really in my walks, twice or thrice: it lies in a hollow, between two hills—and elevated hollow—near a swamp, whose peaty moisture is said to answer all the purposes of embalming on the few corpses deposited there.
This essay is meant to focus on the smallest matter; hollows, hills, swamps and peat will be saved for another day. It is the episode from Lockwood’s Chapter III dream, I am interested in. He tells us he endured an outrageously long sermon, during which Reverend Jabes Branderham discussed four hundred and ninety sins! Lockwood loses his composure and interrupts; he concludes his tirade against the windy reverend by exclaiming:
Fellow martyrs, have at him! Drag him down, and crush him to atoms, that the place which knows him may know him no more!2
I’m bored stiff by this episode in the novel and usually skim it. Yesterday I wondered, what did Emily Brontë know of atoms? I know zero about atomic theory—when were atoms named? Would Brontë have known about atoms?
Atomos
Around 450 BCE an ancient Greek philosopher named Democritus proposed that everything around us is made up of tiny particles surrounded by empty space. He referred to these particles as atomos. Simply put atomos means, indivisible.
His theory was ridiculed, revised and replaced.
It was in 1808 an English Quaker named John Dalton revisited Democritus’ theory. He was already well-known for his research into atmospheric phenomena (bolstered by a penchant for hill-walking in the Lake District) and his investigations into hereditary red-green color blindness.3 Now, he is best known for his atomic theory.
Dalton showed that common substances always broke down into the same elements in the same proportions. He concluded that the various compounds were combinations of atoms of different elements, each of a particular size and mass that could neither be created nor destroyed.4
Fun Fact: John Dalton also dabbled in English grammar, penning in 1801: Elements of English Grammar (or, A new system of grammatical instruction: for the use of schools and academies).
‘[S]he that goeth down to the grave shall come up no more.’
It’s reasonable to assume that a curious and well-read young woman such as Emily Jane Brontë had learned about John Dalton and his investigations. Don’t you think?
Including an episode in which Lockwood suggests someone be crushed to atoms must have been such a delight for her to write; can you imagine? As a young, female author she must have felt so invigorated, casually throwing around atoms!
Also, Janet Gezari explains in The Annotated Wuthering Heights, the statement is clearly an allusion to the biblical Job. Compare Lockwood’s statement with Job’s…
Job remonstrates with God: “As the cloud is consumed and vanished away: so he that goeth down to the grave shall come up no more. He shall return no more to his house, neither shall his place know him any more.”5
Catherine Earnshaw has been dead eighteen years. She has gone down to the grave…
Is Brontë hinting at what’s to come—the return of Catherine Earnshaw to her bed, to her room, to her ancestral home? I think so! Lockwood will not know her…neither will Harteon, nor Cathy. As the cloud is consumed and vanished away…Catherine too has gone away. But Heathcliff sees her, ‘in every cloud, in every tree—filling the air at night, and caught by glimpses in every object by day…’
Only Heathcliff, who is linked with devils and demons and hell and ghosts…Heathcliff, awaits her return. Even after she goeth down to the grave. He will always see Catherine.
sough: a bog or a swamp
see Job 7:9 (KJV): As the cloud is consumed and vanisheth away: so he that goeth down to the grave shall come up no more.
Examination of his preserved eyeball in 1995 demonstrated that Dalton had deuteranopia, a type of congenital red-green color blindness in which the gene for medium wavelength sensitive (green) photopsins is missing ("Life and work of John Dalton – Colour Blindness," BBC News 2017.)
Clouds, of course, are composed of hydrogen and oxygen atoms. The human body is composed primarily of oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen atoms.