Liminal, Supernatural Dreams in “Wuthering Heights”

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.

On Physical Gesture in “Wuthering Heights”

(For purposes of simplicity, this essay will refer to Catherine I as “Cathy”)

Wuthering Heights is a novel best known for its depiction of raw, almost uncivilised, passion and conflict. In particular, the characters Cathy and Heathcliff create and participate in most of the conflict in the plot. One of the most powerful techniques Emily Brontë uses to depict their impulsive character is gesture, which is often wordless and violent. Through it, the reader also has a clear insight into the characters’ psychology, such as how Heathcliff’s gnashing suggests his feral and quasi-insane anger and jealousy. However, it also provides a deeper awareness of Cathy and Heathcliff’s relationship and their emotional depth as characters.

In Chapter 7, Cathy pinches Ellen in a fit of rage:

“She, supposing Edgar could not see her, snatched the cloth from my hand, and pinched me, with a prolonged wrench, very spitefully on the arm.”

Though she is a young adult, Cathy’s gestures suggest a small child’s. The verbs of snatching and pinching recall the squabbles of children; the adjective “spitefully” emphasised the immaturity of this action. She also does this when she thinks her suitor is not looking at her, an image which suggests that their relationship resembles that of a father and a spoiled daughter. Cathy’s tantrums, where she is depicted stamping her foot, are also linked to her infantile outbursts of passion.

Her extreme emotions are associated with childish gestures due to her lack of control over them, reminding the reader of a child’s underdeveloped temperament; however, they are also given sinister overtones. Brontë depicts the pinching scene with frightening imagery: Cathy’s fingers are “tingling to repeat the act, and her ears red with rage. She never had the power to conceal her passion, it always set her whole complexion in a blaze,” and Ellen’s bruise is a “decided purple witness.” Cathy’s ferocity is emphasised by the sheer animalism with which she is described. The fact that she could never control such emotions intensifies this; and her fiery flush, given by her red ears and the “blaze” of her face, associate her with bloodthirstiness and anger. The quasi-demonic intensity of this strongly links her to Heathcliff, who is arguably the most physically brutal character in the novel. In particular, the bruise Cathy leaves on Ellen foreshadows the violence and passion of the final meeting between Cathy and Heathcliff, before Cathy’s death.

In that scene, violent gestures are associated more to physical passion than anger. Their vigour is both violent and erotic. In a gesture which recalls Cathy pinching Ellen, Heathcliff grabs Cathy’s arm and

“so inadequate was his stock of gentleness to the requirements of her condition, that on his letting go, I saw four distinct impressions left blue in the colourless skin.”

This aggression is juxtaposed with the fact that Cathy is ill and dying, making it seem the more shocking. It also gives shape to their transcendent passion, one which overcomes the physical barriers of illness, and ultimately, death.

The key paragraph in this scene contains no dialogue: it is pure gesture that is described. The effect is that of observing a pantomime or a film. Ellen, the narrator, is a frightened and passive observer, mimicking the reader’s own shocked response to the passage.

“In her eagerness she rose and supported herself on the arm of the chair. At that earnest appeal, he turned to her, looking absolutely desperate. His eyes wide and wet at last, flashed fiercely on her; his breast heaved convulsively. An instant they held asunder; and then how they met I hardly saw, but Catherine made a spring, and he caught her, and they were locked in an embrace from which I thought my mistress would never be released alive. In fact, to my eyes, she seemed directly insensible. He flung himself into the nearest seat, and on my approaching hurriedly to ascertain if she had fainted, he gnashed at me, and foamed like a mad dog, and gathered her to him with greedy jealousy. I did not feel as if I were in the company of a creature of my own species; it appeared that he would not understand, though I spoke to him; so I stood off, and held my tongue, in great perplexity.”

Language, – and with it, reason, dialogue and civilization – is abandoned entirely. The only thing that is left for the characters to express themselves with, in the wake of such passion, is through physical acts and gestures. Ellen’s remark that she is no longer among humans is in tune with the animalistic image group used in this passage. The gestures of Cathy and Heathcliff’s embrace, springing, catching, clutching each other almost to death, are aggressively erotic. Heathcliff’s flinging himself, in particular, suggests a recklessness regarding his well-being as well as Cathy’s. His animalism is highlighted by his frightening gestures at Ellen: gnashing, foaming and his comparisons to a mad dog. They are intensified by the poignant detail of his holding Cathy close, as if afraid to part with her.

In this passage, violence is also associated to extreme emotional pain. Cathy’s death, which occurs soon after this, is foreshadowed by how she seems “directly insensible”; and Heathcliff’s reaction, a series of extremely violent gestures, seems to foreshadow his torment at Cathy’s death. Interestingly, in the scene where he approaches Cathy’s corpse, his gestures are much more subdued. Perhaps it is a suggestion that he is keeping those emotions, which once exploded outwardly, repressed. In this way, the character’s body language provides a clue as to the psychological conflicts which exist in the subtext.

This insight into Heathcliff’s emotional turmoil allows the reader to further sympathise with a character that otherwise would be read as antagonistic and unsympathetic. Heathcliff takes Cathy’s locket, which contains strands of his rival Edgar’s hair, and “cast out its contents, replacing them by a black lock of his own.” This gesture subtly balances Heathcliff’s powerful jealousy with his emotional attachment: he is angry enough to cast away Edgar’s presence, yet is made tender from the prospect of giving Cathy’s corpse a lover’s keepsake.

Heathcliff’s most explosive emotional gesture is perhaps his bashing his head against a tree after hearing of Cathy’s death:

“He dashed his head against the knotted trunk; and, lifting up his eyes, howled, not like a man, but like a savage beast getting goaded to death with knives and spears.

I observed several splashes of blood about the bark of the tree, and his hand and forehead were both stained; probably the scene I witnessed was a repetition of others acted during the night.”

Outwardly, this description is made to shock, and Nelly is, like the reader, appalled at seeing this. However, the animalistic language here recalls his last meeting with Cathy, where in a similar state he is compared to a mad dog. The effect here is similar: there is extreme physical pain, given by the act of dashing his head and the abundance of bloodstains; yet Heathcliff’s howling, and his repeating the act, suggest a grief which is equally intense.

Heathcliff’s primitive and unrestrained passion is, like Cathy’s, suggestive of his psychological depth. They are complex characters which, in their provincial status, stretch the notions of uncanny and uncivilised behaviour, in contrast to their contemporary rule-bound high society. Their physical gestures allow them to represent primitive impulses which exist not only in the world of the novel but within the readers themselves.