'The Spectre of a Hope'
Volume II: Chapters XIV-XVII (28-31)
Welcome to Week Eight of our Wuthering Heights read-along…
This week’s assignment is Volume 2: Chapters 14-17, (or, 28-31)
Characters in our Week Eight reading assignment include: Zillah • Ellen “Nelly” Dean • Hareton Earnshaw • Catherine “Cathy” Linton • Edgar Linton • Linton Heathcliff • Minny • Kenneth • Green • Lockwood • Joseph • Heathcliff
What Happens in This Week’s Assignment?
It is still 1801, and Cathy Linton is now, Catherine Heathcliff. Zillah has returned to Wuthering Heights and is surprised to discover Ellen Dean alive—rumours around Gimmerton have her drowned in the Black Horse Marsh…
‘She cries so I can’t bear it…’
September 1801
Again, it is harvest-time.
One year has passed since Edgar Linton caught a cold walking with his daughter among the reapers. We find ourselves at Wuthering Heights within a day of the full Harvest Moon. Heathcliff’s housekeeper Zillah has returned from her pleasure trip and she is delighted to discover neither Nelly Dean nor Cathy Linton are drowned in the Blackhorse Marsh (as that has been the rumour swirling around!).
Sadly, we learn Catherine Linton has indeed been forced to marry Linton Heathcliff. Nelly finds him alone by the hearth, lying on a settle, ‘sucking a stick of sugar-candy.’ When she attempts to discover Cathy, she is threatened by Linton. Despite his frail condition, Linton uses his father to inflict fear in others. Nelly gives him a dressing down and he gives it right back—Linton, it seems, has adopted a worse attitude than in the previous chapter.
Linton cannot stay with Cathy, he tells Nelly, “She cries so I can’t bear it. And she won’t give over, though I say I’ll call my father.” Linton uses the threat of his father’s wrath to manipulate others. “I did call him once,” he tells Nelly, “and he threatened to strangle her, if she was not quiet.” The threat is enough to quiet her: “…she began again, the instant he left the room…”
In another instance, Linton has taunted Cathy so unmercifully about the fact that she no longer has any possessions—everything hers now belongs to him—pulling a locket from her neck, she breaks its hinges and divides it, thrusting one half (an image of her mother) at Linton and retaining the image of her father for herself. Heathcliff appears, having heard the teenagers’ scuffle. He seizes the image of Catherine for himself and demands Cathy surrender the other half of her locket to Linton. When she refuses, he strikes her. Hard. Heathcliff wrenches the broken charm off of its chain and crushes Edgar’s image beneath his foot. Heathcliff is becoming unhinged.
Only when Cathy shows Linton her mouth, filling with blood, does the boy take pity on her and even still, he maintains his arrogance and a bolstered air of misogyny. He claims, “She’s a naughty thing for crying continually; and she looks so pale and wild, I’m afraid of her!”1
Linton’s compassion surfaces when he helps Cathy escape the Heights and she is able to return to Thrushcross Grange. At three o’clock in the morning Cathy appears not a minute too soon. Kissing his daughter’s cheek and murmuring: “I am going to her, and you, darling child, shall come to us,” Edgar Linton dies.
We learn at the end of the chapter that Green—the lawyer—has ‘sold himself to Mr. Heathcliff.’ In other words, Heathcliff has bribed him to delay his visit to Thrushcross Grange. Immediately after Edgar’s death Green arrives at the Grange and orders every servant to quit, save for Ellen Dean. She tells Lockwood:
“He would have carried his delegated authority to the point of insisting that Edgar Linton should not be buried beside his wife, but in the chapel, with his family. There was a will, however, to hinder that…”
‘I have a strong faith in ghosts’
Edgar Linton is buried beside his wife Catherine, ‘on a green slope, in a corner of the kirkyard.’ Catherine has now been dead for eighteen years, deceased at age nineteen.
Heathcliff arrives at Thrushcross Grange the evening after the funeral, and his foster-sister Ellen Dean is reminded of the night eighteen years prior,2 when he was ushered into the same room: ‘the same moon shone through the window; and the same autumn landscape lay outside.’
“Heathcliff advanced to the hearth,” she tells Lockwood, “Time had little altered his person…there was the same man, his dark face rather sallower, and more composed, his frame a stone or two heavier, perhaps, and no other difference.” Heathcliff is now thirty-seven.
This is the very year Lockwood arrives to rent the Grange…
In two months he will meet Heathcliff, Joseph, Zillah, Hareton and Cathy at Wuthering Heights—but in this moment (in this chapter), Edgar has just died and Linton is still living. Cathy is being retrieved from the Grange to care for her dying husband and Heathcliff is being haunted…
In a future essay I will certainly focus on Victorian burial practices. For the purpose of this section, I’m going to discuss only Heathcliff’s dialogue regarding his grief and his feelings for Catherine.
Heathcliff has bribed the sexton, who was digging Edgar’s grave, to remove the earth off Catherine’s coffin lid. And, he has opened it. “I thought, once, I would have stayed there, when I saw her face again—it is hers yet—he had hard work to stir me;
The place of Catherine’s interment is where the wall is so low that heath and bilberry plants have climbed over it from the moor; and peat mould almost buries it.
Catherine is preserved. But while gazing upon her Heathcliff learns, she will ‘change,’ if oxygen reaches the corpse. He covers her, but not before loosening one side of her coffin. When he dies he intends to be buried beside her, his specially built coffin will have one side removed—he has bribed the sexton to abide by these wishes—and the two will, ‘dissolve’ into the earth together.
“You are very wicked, Mr. Heathcliff!” Nelly exclaims, when she learns of this, “Were you not ashamed to disturb the dead?”
“I disturbed nobody, Nelly,” he replied; “and I gave some ease to myself. I shall be a great deal more comfortable now; and you’ll have a better chance of keeping me underground, when I get there.”
This is Emily Brontë really embracing the Gothic, right? What could be more dark and macabre than unearthing a corpse? Not to mention, his casual assertion if he’d not prepared for his own burial in this way, he may walk the earth, a ghostly spectre.
I will confess, I’ve underlined and annotated this entire chapter. Let’s begin at the beginning…
Heathcliff is a foundling. Discovered on the streets of Liverpool at seven-years-old, or thereabouts, he was carried to Wuthering Heights and thrust in front of (at least) four people: Mrs. Earnshaw, Hindley Earnshaw, Catherine Earnshaw and the housekeeper (or, housekeeper’s daughter?), Ellen Dean.3 We know Mr. Earnshaw preferred him to his own son, but we are given no reason. Hindley was well-behaved enough to earn a fiddle as a souvenir, yet by the time he is college-aged, the curate suggests he be sent away to school. We also know Catherine, ‘was much too fond of Heathcliff.’
How many years were Catherine and Heathcliff alone together without the abuse of Hindley? We must assume, perhaps three years? When Mr. Earnshaw died, Catherine was twelve and Heathcliff, thirteen.4 They had grown up as foster-siblings and until the incident at Thrushcross Grange, and Catherine’s abrupt ascent, the two were one.
“I am Heathcliff,” declared Catherine at fifteen. “I cannot live without my soul,” cried Heathcliff, at twenty. Emily Brontë need not provide readers with any explanation for their everlasting devotion, we simply accept it as truth.
When Heathcliff unearths Catherine and admits he expected she might already have begun to decompose, we continue reading, as if what he’s just disclosed is not even odd. He tells Nelly he’s happier still, claiming, “I’m better pleased that it should not commence till I share it.” I wonder if Brontë is making the point that if his soul has been buried these eighteen years, but he still walks the earth, Catherine cannot begin to dissolve until he is buried alongside her?
Do you remember when Catherine died? Heathcliff was wild—he admits this to Nelly. He prayed from ‘dawn to dawn’ for her to return to him—her spirit—“I have a strong faith in ghosts,” he confesses, “I have a conviction that they can, and do exist, among us!” Brontë adored ghost stories, she was brought up on them. And so she (and I) and Heathcliff have every faith in what he next shares with Nelly:
“The day she was buried there came a fall of snow.” Do you remember this? “In the evening I went to the churchyard. It blew bleak as winter—all round was solitary; I didn’t fear that her fool of a husband would wander up the [hollow] so late—and no one else had business to bring them there.” Remember: Edgar visited during the day, Heathcliff, at night. “Being alone, and conscious two yards of loose earth was the sole barrier between us, I said to myself—‘I’ll have her in my arms again! If she be cold, I’ll think it is this north wind that chills me; and if she be motionless it is sleep.’
Emily Jane now shares with us, a ghost story.
“I got a spade from the toolhouse, and began to delve with all my might—it scraped the coffin; I fell to work with my hands; the wood commenced cracking about the screws, I was on the point of attaining my object, when it seemed that I heard a sigh from some one above, close at the edge of the grave, and bending down—‘if I can only get this off,’ I muttered, ‘I wish they may shovel in the earth over us both!’ and I wrenched at it more desperately still.”
“There was another sigh close at my ear. I appeared to feel the warm breath of it displacing the sleet-laden wind. I knew no living thing in flesh and blood was by—but as certainly as you perceive the approach to some substantial body in the dark, though it cannot be discerned,” he insists, “so certainly I felt Cathy was there, not under me, but on the earth.”
When you were reading this, did you recognize this is what was happening when Hindley and Isabella were discussing retaliation against Heathcliff? Hindley was determined to retain possession of the Heights and Isabella wished to be free.
Heathcliff recalls returning from Catherine’s grave to find the door bolted at the Heights. “I remember stopping to kick the breath out of [Hindley],” he casually acknowledges, “and then hurrying upstairs to my room, and hers.”
“The ruffian kicked and trampled on him, and dashed his head repeatedly against the flags, holding me with one hand, meantime, to prevent me from summoning Joseph. He exerted [super]-human self-denial in abstaining from finishing him completely; but getting out of breath, he finally desisted…” -Isabella’s account5
Consider: Eighteen years ago Heathcliff was capable of exercising constraint (well, at least constraint enough to avoid killing Hindley). Now we know that when this scene took place, Heathcliff had just encountered what he believes to have been Catherine. Her spirit—her ghost. Remember, his prayer: “Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest, as long as I am living! You said I killed you—haunt me, then!”6
It was a strange way of killing, not by inches, but by fractions of hair-breadths, to beguile me with the spectre of a hope, through eighteen years!
“When I sat in the house with Hareton, it seemed that on going out, I should meet her; when I walked on the moors I should meet her coming in. When I went from home, I hastened to return she must be somewhere at the Heights, I was certain! And when I slept in her chamber—I was beaten out of that—I couldn’t lie there; for the moment I closed my eyes, she was either outside the window, or sliding back the panels, or entering the room, or even resting her darling head on the same pillow as she did when a child. And I must open my lids to see…”
Heathcliff has anticipated meeting Catherine on earth for almost two decades. He has practiced restraint to (legally) attain his goal of possessing both Wuthering Heights as well as the Grange, and now he owns them both. He can tick the box. Now, lifting the lid from Catherine’s coffin he is pacified—a little. His soul still remains underground. She has not yet dissolved.7
He requests Catherine’s portrait be removed to the Heights and demands young Cathy return with him—to care for her husband, Linton—Heathcliff’s pawn—who is dying.
‘He’s safe, and I’m free…’
October 1801
In the third chapter of this week’s reading assignment we hear the story from Zillah. A narrative, within a narrative, within a narrative. In one month, Lockwood will rent Thrushcross Grange and call at Wuthering Heights.
Nelly tells Mr. Lockwood, “I had a long talk with Zillah, about six weeks ago, a little before you came…and this is what she told me:”
Cathy is seventeen-years-old, the wife of Linton Heathcliff (six months younger) and has recently lost her only parent. She has been removed from Thrushcross Grange to the Heights for two reasons: Heathcliff wishes to let the Grange and Linton is dying. Heathcliff tells her: “His life is not worth a farthing, and I won’t spend a farthing on him.” And he does not. Cathy Linton asks for intervention multiple times and she is denied. Finally, late one evening, Linton Heathcliff, born an, ‘ailing, peevish creature,’ dies with only Cathy by his side.
When Heathcliff is ousted from his chamber by the ringing of the bell, he arrives in Linton’s room, verifies the death and asks his son’s teen widow, “How do you feel?”8
Remember: eighteen years ago Heathcliff was furious that Edgar nursed Catherine out of duty and humanity. “He’s safe, and I’m free,” replies sullen Cathy. “I should feel well—but,” she continues with a bitterness (toward her father-in-law) she cannot conceal, “you have left me so long to struggle against death, alone, that I feel and see only death! I feel like death!”
Zillah agrees: Cathy ‘looked like it, too!’ We learn Joseph was pleased by the death of Linton and kind-hearted Hareton, ‘seemed a thought bothered;’ but more enamored with Cathy, he gives the loss little attention.
Cathy stays in her room a fortnight and after the funeral Heathcliff visits her only to show her Linton’s will, a document proving the boy bequeathed the whole of his and what had been her movable property to his father.9
‘Too fine for Mr. Hareton’
Autumn 1801 - Winter 1802
At the end of the chapter in which Linton dies, Catherine Heathcliff is penniless and alone. Chilled to the bone, she begrudgingly leaves her chamber and comes down into the kitchen, where she meets Zillah and Hareton. Hareton is delighted.
Zillah acknowledges to Nelly, “You happen think your young lady too fine for Mr. Hareton; and happen you’re right: but I own, I should love well to bring [Cathy’s] pride a peg lower.”
While her reunion with her cousin is not ideal—he forgets his manners and strokes one of her yellow curls—we do learn Hareton asked Heathcliff to permit him to sit with Linton. He wished to relieve Cathy of the burden, but her father-in-law would not permit it. Hareton admits this, but sadly, his confession does little to change her opinion of him.10
Do you remember meeting Cathy in our first reading assignment?11 She was haughty and rude, arrogant and apathetic. Now we know, she has learned to behave this way;12 ‘the more hurt she gets, the more venomous she grows.’
The chapter ends and Lockwood informs us of his plan to visit the Heights. It is the second week of January 1802 and the tenant of Thrushcross Grange intends to leave and return to London—a six month stay.
‘How dreary life gets over in the house!’
Do you remember when I shared that I struggle to pay attention during the second half of the novel? I am always wondering, Where is Heathcliff? The petty arguments between Cathy and Hareton bore me. My mind wanders to the moors—is Heathcliff rambling alone across the landscape?
Also, as a trained educator, I feel uncomfortable when I read the episodes in which Cathy mocks Hareton’s intellect. I wonder if these episodes are drawn from Emily Jane’s childhood? I suspect so—she was miserable when she was sent to school. She wished to ramble at liberty…and so, I think these tense, stifling and uncomfortable interior scenes are intentional.
Cathy ‘carves figures of birds and beasts out of the turnip parings in her lap,’ admits to wishing she could be ‘riding Minny down there,’ or ‘climbing up there’ (Penistone Crags?). She accuses Hareton of taking away her reading material, and likens him to a ‘magpie [gathering] silver spoons, for the mere love of stealing!’
Finally, Heathcliff returns—from wherever it is that he goes—and Lockwood, who has arrived unbidden at the Heights is out of Heathcliff’s line of vision. He overhears him remarking:
“When I look for his father in his face, I find her every day more! How the devil is he so like? I can hardly bear to see him.”
He is talking about Hareton, the young man he refers to as, “my lad.” Hareton is the very image of Heathcliff’s beloved, Catherine Earnshaw. At sixteen, Heathcliff saved the boy’s life and he became Hareton’s sole caregiver when the boy was orphaned at six-years-old. Hareton Earnshaw is the amalgamation of (his aunt) Catherine and (his foster-father) Heathcliff.
There is a strange change approaching and Heathcliff is in its shadow…
Next week’s assignment includes three chapters (Volume 2: Chapters 18-20, or 32-34). Lockwood returns. Nelly relocates. Hareton plants a garden. Joseph gripes. Cathy is engaged. And…Heathcliff walks. Our read-along of Wuthering Heights concludes. ♡
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It’s reminiscent of eighteen-year-old Edgar’s reaction to Catherine after she pinched, bruised, and slapped Nelly: “You’ve made me afraid, and ashamed of you. I’ll not come here again!” Edgar cried, just before proposing marriage to her (Volume 1: Chapter 9).
Volume 1: Chapter 10
Was Nelly’s mother in service at Wuthering Heights when Heathcliff arrived?; we know she lived ‘till eighty’ but, it seems Nelly (solely) nursed both Earnshaw children and Heathcliff.
Hindley had gone to college in the Autumn of 1774; Catherine was 9 and Heathcliff 10.
Volume 2: Chapter 3 (or, 17)
Volume 2: Chapter 2 (or, 16)
“If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be,” declared Catherine in Volume 1, Chapter 9.
Heathcliff and Catherine grieved old Mr. Earnshaw together—‘comforting each other with better thoughts…no parson in the world ever pictured heaven so beautifully as they did.’ Hindley grieved Frances by inflicting terror on everyone and drowning his sorrows. Edgar, in his grief, was consoled by the books in his library and walks on the moors and Heathcliff dashed his head against a tree and howled like a savage beast.
Have you noticed Heathcliff only manipulates men in Wuthering Heights? Hindley allows his gambling debts to be paid by his foster brother. Edgar does not fight for custody of Hareton (his wife’s legal nephew), or Linton (his legal nephew). Linton is wholly intimidated, and not until he allows her to escape to her father’s bedside, does he ever warn or protect his cousin.
Heathcliff has been able to use his wealth and knowledge of the law to attain property; he understands the law and manages men. Women (frustratingly) prove unmanageable.
Catherine proved she could ‘break his heart.’ Isabella Linton threw a knife at Heathcliff and fled with her unborn child. And young Cathy Linton? She never backs down; not even when she is physically assaulted. Well played, Emily Brontë.
Compare Cathy’s treatment of Hareton to her mother’s treatment of Heathcliff in Volume 1: Chapter 8. Do you remember when Cathy remarked: “It is no company at all, when people know nothing and say nothing.”
Volume 1, Chapter 3
Not unlike, Heathcliff.