In a novel rich with Gothic literary allusions and elements, dreams are part of the supernatural forces at work in Wuthering Heights. They are niches in the novel’s multiple and interlocking narratives, setting the tone and mood of a scene or even the setting (Lockwood’s dreams in Chapter 3, for example), and foreshadowing the conflicts to come. Dreams also develop characterisation by associating characters to actions, images and motifs – such as Catherine appearing as a ghost, or being cast into the moors from heaven.
“I’ve dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they’ve gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the colour of my mind.”
To Catherine, dreams are powerful, even sensual experiences. The image of wine and water suggests both fluidity and eroticism, as it employs the sexually charged colour red, embodied in wine, a drink of ecstasy. However, wine also recalls blood, representing her vitality and the violence which surrounds her. The “colour of her mind”, then, is one subject to passions and changes; dreams, volatile things, represent Catherine’s many moods and her own volatility. Arguably, they are a symbol related to her characterisation, in particular regarding her passionate relationship with her adoptive brother Heathcliff.
Ellen’s approach to dreams also helps inform the reader about her character. She mistrusts and even fears them: her immediate outcry against Catherine telling her dreams is that she will conjure “ghosts and visions to perplex us.” Ellen soon after explains her reaction as thus:
“I was superstitious about dreams then, and am still; and Catherine had an unusual gloom in her aspect, and that made me dread something from which I might shape a prophecy, and forsee a fearful catastrophe.”
Ellen, as the first-person narrator for most of the novel, is also an embodiment of the reader’s own consciousness as they interpret the story. Her reacting with superstition to dreams aligns her with readers in Bronte’s time, who were more fearful of prophetic dreams than most modern readers. Given that Wuthering Heights is set in the less educated provinces of 19th Century Yorkshire, and that Ellen is a humble housekeeper, the superstition would be exacerbated. However, her noting of Catherine’s “gloom” gives this passage an ominous tone. Its effect is foreboding, as the reader will now associate Catherine’s dreams with impeding disaster.
Lockwood’s dreams in Chapter 3 contain elements of the Gothic literary genre, most notably in the supernatural appearance of Catherine’s ghost. The sheer horror of the apparition is made clear when the ghost’s hand is described as being “ice-cold”; and Lockwood also refers to the ghost as a “creature” and uses the neutral pronoun “it”, suggesting that he sees the ghost as something devoid of humanity. This dark passage arguably sets the mood for the entire novel. The house in which Lockwood now lives is made grim, from now on apparently haunted by Catherine’s ghost.
The ghost’s voice is described as “mourning” and referred to as a “lamentable prayer”; the religious origins of these terms recall Lockwood’s previous nightmare. In it, a tedious church service is abruptly turned into a violent attack on Lockwood. Both dreams share acts of brutality; they are shocking, and their climaxes are driven by fear and violence. In the dream with the ghost, Lockwood at one point attacks its groping hand:
“Terror made me cruel; and, finding it useless to attempt shaking the creature off, I pulled its wrist on to the broken pane, and rubbed it to and fro till the blood ran down and soaked the bed-clothes.”
The act of slitting the wrist, and the strong image of a vast bloodshed, are both horrifying and at the same time vividly realistic. While ghosts are usually insubstantial, Catherine’s ghost, by being made of flesh and blood, implies that she is reappearing in a more animal form. This connects to her deep bond with the surrounding natural landscape, and to the animalistic language with which Bronte will present Catherine’s impulsive passions.
However, Lockwood’s sudden display of violence towards an otherwise pitiful figure is also frightening. He himself admits that “terror made me cruel”: like in the previous dream, it is fear which incites him to violence. Since this is presented early on in the novel, and since it precedes all the significant episodes of violence in Wuthering Heights, arguably the nightmares foreshadow the shocking scenes which are to come. It is significant that it is Catherine who inspires this violence, foreshadowing Ellen’s recounting of Catherine and Heathcliff’s tempestuous relationship. Though Heathcliff is almost always the character who acts violently, Catherine is the one who originates conflicts.
In the first glimpses that the reader will get to know of her life, through Ellen’s tale, Catherine will still be a child. This ominous dream sequence, like a prologue to Ellen’s tale, sets the mood for the coming scenes and foreshadows Catherine’s progression from a child of Wuthering Heights to her separation from it. It is also exposition for one of Catherine’s most prominent traits: her attachment to Wuthering Heights and her desire to be reunited with the place. In appearing as ghost of her child self, Catherine is returning to her memories, and to the place where she and Heathcliff had the happiest moments of their childhood. Both these characters live in the past in the sense that they value their time as children above all else in their lives; and their extreme desires and passions as adults suggest that they never truly grew out of those days.
Connected to her appearance as a ghost is Catherine’s passionate recounting of a dream to Ellen in Chapter 9. While dreaming of dying and reaching the afterlife,
“heaven did not seem to be my home; and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to the earth; and the angels were so angry that they flung me out, into the middle of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights; where I woke sobbing for joy.”
The tone is different from Lockwood’s dream: Catherine speaks in a single, sustained outburst of a sentence, and she uses intensely emotional and poetic figurative language to describe her extremes of feeling. However, the fundamental idea – of Catherine striving to reunite with Wuthering Heights – is the same. Both dreams consist of a soul losing itself in the afterlife, an element of the Gothic genre. Her fight with the angels likens her to Lucifer’s fall from heaven; indeed, she resembles a nature goddess in her return to Earth and to a patch of heath she has fixed in her memory. Through this dream, Catherine has come into contact with a wilder side of herself; as Ellen puts it, in rejecting heaven Catherine becomes a “sinner.” This foreshadows Catherine’s death and burial “in a corner of the kirkyard, where the wall is so low that heath and bilberry plants have climbed over it from the moor.” Nature is evocatively described here, recalling Catherine’s dream; in death, she is reuniting physically with the moors as she had dreamed. She and Heathcliff are eventually both buried at this spot, uniting them in their status as excommunicates who rest on unconsecrated ground.
By engaging with dreams, these characters come into contact with darker and uncivilised sides of themselves. Almost anticipating the arrival of psychoanalysis and dream interpretation towards the end of the 19th Century, dreams are part of the novel’s exploring of the shadowy side of passion. The natural world as it is presented is another way of coming into contact with primitive human nature. In the liminal and often frightening setting of Wuthering Heights, it is difficult to tell when dreams end and reality begins.
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