In Our Time - Wuthering Heights

Episode Date: September 28, 2017

In a programme first broadcast in 2017, Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Emily Bronte (1818-1848) and her only novel, published in 1847 under the name 'Ellis Bell' just a year before her death. It is the story of Heathcliff, a foundling from Liverpool brought up in the Earnshaw family at the remote Wuthering Heights, high on the moors, who becomes close to the young Cathy Earnshaw but hears her say she can never marry him. He disappears and she marries his rival, Edgar Linton, of Thrushcross Grange even though she feels inextricably linked with Heathcliff, exclaiming to her maid 'I am Heathcliff!' On his return, Heathcliff steadily works through his revenge on all who he believes wronged him, and their relations. When Cathy dies, Heathcliff longs to be united with her in the grave. The raw passions and cruelty of the story unsettled Emily's sister Charlotte Bronte, whose novel Jane Eyre had been published shortly before, and who took pains to explain its roughness, jealousy and violence when introducing it to early readers. Over time, with its energy, imagination and scope, Wuthering Heights became celebrated as one of the great novels in English.The image above is of Laurence Olivier as Heathcliff and Merle Oberon as Cathy on the set of the Samuel Goldwyn Company movie 'Wuthering Heights', circa 1939.WithKaren O'Brien Professor of English Literature at the University of OxfordJohn Bowen Professor of Nineteenth Century Literature at the University of Yorkand Alexandra Lewis Lecturer in English Literature at the University of AberdeenProducer: Simon Tillotson.

This is the BBC. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoyed the programs. Hello, Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, published in 1847 when she was 29, is widely seen as one of the great English novels, to some the very greatest. It's a story of Heathcliff and Kathy on the Yorkshire Moors,

a passion and revenge. Some early readers were struck by its originality and energy, but many appalled by what one called its brutal cruelty and semi-savage love and most diabolical hate and vengeance. This is Emily Bronte's first and last novel. She died the year after it was published. Her sister, Charlotte Bronte, defended what she called the immature but very real powers of the novel,

praising her sister while making it clear that she, the author of Janeer, would not have created a character like Heathcliff. With me to discuss Wuthering Heights are John Bowen, Professor of 19th century literature at the University of York. Alexander Lewis, lecturer in English literature at the University of Aberdeen, and Karen O'Brien, Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford. John Byrne, how much do we know Emily Bronte's early life? In one way, we don't know very much about Emily because she doesn't leave many letters,

there's no manuscript of Wuthering Heights, but we do know about her childhood. So she's born just outside Bradford. Her father is a remarkable man who is born. in poverty in Ireland, and then eventually gets to Cambridge and becomes a minister of the Anglican Church. She's the fifth of six, all born very close together, including the three famous novelists, Charlotte, Anne and Emily. And then they then move when she's two to Howarth Parsonage, which is still there, little mill town in Yorkshire. And then the great tragedy happens when her mother dies when she's three. That's the first great loss. When she's six, she's a

at school, she sent to school, the school that becomes Low Wood in Jane Eyre. And then her two elder sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, are taken ill with TB, and they die too. So it's a childhood like no other, really, with those three great losses. And then the children

then start to write together and play games together, this great kind of creative workshop with the four survivors. And she has some schooling when she's about 16 and then does some teaching. But much of the time, is spent in the parsonage playing these great creative fictional games and writing fictions and little magazines with her siblings.

You said at the beginning of that, John, that there was very little known about her, and yet they read extensively, they're at intensively. Were things deliberately destroyed? Were they lost in the wash? Just quickly, why is so little remaining of people who did nothing much else but right? Yeah, well, they create this fantasy world called Angrier. First of all, all the children together, the four of them. But after a while, the two younger ones start to want to create their own world, which they call gondal. That's Emily Annan. That's Emily and Ann. That's right. And that's a more

kind of austere world in a way, with a more wind-swept, Wuthering Heights-type landscape from the angrier one. But then, it looks like all those manuscripts, apart from Emily's poems, have been destroyed and one or two little diary papers. Was it deliberate? Was it accidental? I'm agitated

by this. Could you just say one thing? We just don't know. All right, that's it. That'll have to. to do. Right. Can you say more about these things she was writing with that, these stories? Yes. It's set in two islands

in the North Pacific called Gondal and Galdine. The only thing that really survives is the poems. So she divides her poems into two volumes, one called Gondel poems, one called other poems. And the gondel poems are often

very like the Wuthering Heights thing, like passionate, very intense. What do you, quickly What goes on in Gondel? Are they lilypushans? What are, what's happening? We don't really know, because the manuscripts don't survive. There are warring kingdoms. I'm going to go off the office. They're going to fall warring kingdoms in these two islands that are at war with each other. But she writes little things like the Galdines are invading Gondall. But they play it as a game. So Anne and Emily play it as a game, even well into their 20s.

They travel to York on the coach, and they're acting out Gondall stories. But it's almost completely not survived. But the basics of all this, thank you by making so much out of so little. But the basis of all this is that she was writing and writing and writing from a very early age, inventing, imagining a world which was full of terrors and vengeance and threats. Yeah, on windstrap landscrapes. So we've got the background there. Karen O'Brien, what did she have been reading in her teens and before she wrote Wuthering Heights?

Generally, what sort of stuff? Well, she was a very extensive reader, even though she was a very extensive reader, even though Charlotte said in her preface to the 1850 edition of Wuthering Heights that she always wrote from the impulse of nature, actually Emily clearly wrote from the impulse of a great deal of reading. The gondle stories, as far as we can tell, oh a great deal to the novelist and poet Walter Scott, and the whole family was steeped in his novels and poems

of borderland, dynastic, violent feuding, fierce, spirited, independent women, and that sense of a residual antiquated past and an oncoming modernity. That's very important. We forget how powerfully influential has got lost. Powerfully influential and poetry as well as novels. It's also very clear that Byron was a very key figure. All of the Bronte Children adored those Byron stories of these outcast, isolated heroes who were violent men in a world of piracy or living in castles in the Alps,

but their redeeming features were often their one love for their lost or still living woman. And I think that Byronic hero idea is obviously very important for. Rochester and for Wuthering Heights as well. Can I pause that for one second? According to John, the remarkable father, who was a perpetual curate at this time. We hear nothing but kindness and goodness from him, teaching assurance and so. Where did these violent people come from? It's really very hard to say.

I mean, the first biographer of Charlotte suggested that some of that kind of explosive temperament came from the father himself, but there's not a lot of evidence for that, in fact. I mean, one assumes that there was a certain amount in the mill town in which she worked, but also I think some of that interest in extremity comes from that reading of Scott and Byron, and also those gothic short stories that the children all absorbed through Blackwoods magazine. There's a lot of that kind of narrative around. There's a third influence I'd like to come on to, actually, which for me is probably the most important, and that's Wordsworth.

The Wordsworth that Emily knew was not the autobiographical Wordsworth, but a Wordsworth of Narrative Poems, like the ruined cottage, where you have a kind of outsider figure who narrates and talks about a world that he barely understands, with which he's sympathetic, but nevertheless somewhat uncomprehending. The Wordsworth that Emily knows also is a Wordsworth who's very interested in the elemental aspects of nature, and it's very clear from Emily's poetry that the group of poems

known as the Wordsworth Lucy poems about a young woman who has died, who has this intense sympathy with nature, were very, very important for Emily, and one of them called A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal Really thinks about that's a wonderful poem It really talks about this fear And yet longing for extinction through death Through the elemental forces of the natural world And that word slumber is virtually the last word

In Wuthering Heights Can we just pause for it? Because Wordsworth is not now thought over As the sort of wild, extreme poet Who had influenced a wild, extreme novelist at the time He's now in a way sadly settled was he that influential, if obviously was that influential, I'd like you to develop it a bit, this is me being a bit selfish, but could you?

Yes, well, I think the cosy Victorian Wordsworth that still somewhat lingers around in our times was not the Wordsworth that the Bronte children knew, but they clearly read him very extensively. I think there is that preoccupation in Wordsworth with creating a window onto very extreme forms of rustic life, forms of poverty, violence, deprivation, consequences of war, seen through the lens of a mediated middle-class perspective. So the long narrative poem that everybody knew the excursion does exactly

that, in a great many places. And I think that for me connects quite nicely with the way in which we encounter Wuthering Heights through Lockwood. Can you tell us how this novel came to be published? It came to be published because initially Charlotte had persuaded her sisters to publish a volume of poems in 1846. It didn't sell. It got one or two favourable reviews. The sisters then decided it was time to get going with some novels. Charlotte dispatched her novel to a publisher. Emily Annan dispatched Agnes Gray at Anne's novel and Wuthering Heights to a publisher called Thomas Cautley Newby, who then sat on the book for a while. Charlotte's book, Jane Eyre came out in October. Newby realized it was a huge success, so out comes a three-decker novel Wuthering Heights and at the back, Agnes Gray, in 1835. 47. So it was almost on the back of Charleston? It was somewhat on the back, yes. Alexander Luce, it's your first time on radio, I'm afraid you get the hard question. You really do. Could you give us a plot of Wuthering Heights? Of course. Well, Wuthering Heights is one of the most powerful and violent novels in the English language. It's a complex story of love, obsession,

and revenge over two generations. The tale is told by housekeeper Nellie Dean and framed by the perspective of visiting outsider Lockwood and in true Gothic style, neither narrator is entirely reliable. Lockwood has a nightmare where the ghost of Kathy appears at the window begging to be let in. Heathcliff begs the ghost to return, and it seems that this nightmare has been gifted to the wrong dreamer. Like the reader, all Lockwood knows at this stage is that there is a complicated history linking Catherine with the names Earnshaw, Heathcliff and Linton. Nellie tells Lockwood how her master brought home an orphan from Liverpool who he raises, along with his own children, Hindley and Catherine. Heathcliff,

is despised by Hindley who mistreats him. Kathy and Heathcliff are inseparable, and they play together on the Moors until Kathy spends time with neighbouring children, Edgar and Isabella Linton. Now, Edgar Linton courts Kathy, and in a pivotal moment, Heathcliff overhears Kathy telling Nellie

that it would degrade her to marry Heathcliff. What he doesn't hear is her declaration that she is betraying her own soul. He's more myself than I am, she says, and she compares her love for Linton to foliage in the woods, deciduous, fleeting, while her love for Heathcliff is like the eternal rocks beneath something enduring and necessary. Heathcliff disappears. Kathy marries Edgar. Heathcliff reappears three years later,

having mysteriously acquired education and wealth. He begins an unrelenting and systematic program of vengeance. Names at this point start to repeat themselves in a convoluted web of trauma. Heathcliff abuses Isabella, who gives birth to a son called Linton, heartbroken. Kathy dies, giving birth to a daughter called Catherine. Heathcliff's violence really knows no bounds, and he exploits everyone over many years. His breathtakingly sadistic behaviour fails to satisfy him, however, and what takes centre stage in this novel

is his obsession with Kathy's ghost and his overwhelming desire for spiritual reunion with her. Now, this might all be somewhat more than Lockwood was hoping for in the view of light entertainment in his convalescence. Visiting the Heights again, Lockwood observes the second Catherine and Hairton's relationship flourish. Hickcliffe finally dies and is buried next to Kathy, and villages claim to have seen their ghosts,

but Lockwood would prefer not to believe, as Karen's already gestured towards, in the possibility of unquiet slumbers. Well, I think a round of applause. Thank you. So there's no doubt what we're talking about. Thank you very much indeed. What was the early critical reaction?

Critics were shocked. Some were genuinely horrified by what they perceived to be the amorality of the brutality and the violence of Emily's novel. What none of them doubted was the powerful originality of the work. So the novel was seen to break both fictional and moral conventions. It was described as coarse, disgusting, loathsome. An interviewer in the Atlas said, the general effect is inexpressibly painful.

We know nothing in the whole range of our fictitious literature, which presents such shocking pictures of the worst forms of humanity. And that really picks up on Charlotte's own response in the preface to the second edition, partly in view of this kind of criticism, she said of Heathcliff, whether it is right or advisable to create things such as Heathcliff, I do not know, I scarcely think it is.

I think Charlotte's apollogia for her sister slightly gets in the way of what her sister was real life, but we might come to that. Even though some of the reviews were, savage, I've read some savage reviews in my time, I've had one to see in my time, but nothing even approaching what was. said about that book.

Even in one or two of the more savage one, it said the last few words of it would be, and yet I was spellbound. Absolutely, and we don't, unfortunately we don't know what Emily made of these reviews. She kept five of them in her writing desk. The Atlas was one of them, the one that you quoted from earlier, Douglas Gerald's Weekly,

with the semi-savage love and brutality was another. And interestingly, they pick up on observations that characters make within the text about Heathcliff questioning, is he a ghoul, is he a demon? Is he mad? Is he mad? Exactly. So we don't know what she thought of those reviews. Unfortunately, she wasn't still alive to read Sydney Dobell's praise-filled review of 1850 in the Palladium,

which is quite brilliant. It picks up on the design, the originality. The thinking out, he said, of some of these passages, make this the masterpiece of a poet, interestingly, poet, not novelist. There's a little collection to be written of artists who died just before they get the first of great reviews on that, only great reviews. There you are on offer. John, John Byrne, let's go straight to Heathcliff. Tell us about him and then maybe talk about what he represents. I'd rather talk about him than what he represents.

Anyway, away you go. He's something else, isn't he? I mean, he's full of mystery all the way through. So his origins are mysterious. All we know is that Mr. Earnshaw finds him starving in the street. In Liverpool. In Liverpool, speaking gibberish, it says. And he's about 14.

Yeah. So we know, other than that, that one act of kindness. No, he's younger than that, I think. He's younger than 14. All right. And then his physical appearance we don't know about. He's dark-haired, he's gypsy-looking. Nelly says from at one point,

you might be the son of a Chinese emperor and an Indian princess. So ethnically, he might be marked in some way. It's a big slaving port, is Liverpool. It's a big port for Ireland, for his Liverpool. So he may have come from anywhere in the world. And then he arrives. And immediately there's jealousy.

I mean, it's a novel full of kind of passionate hatreds and jealousy. And there's lots of disputes between him and Hindley. Hindley being the son of... The son of House and Earnshaw, the true son. Of course, he might be an illegitimate son himself, we don't know. And he and Kathy have this extraordinary passionate relationship, which is almost never described. They just go off onto the Moors together when they're young.

and then when she makes the declaration... And it's not consummated at all? No, they're children. But even as that time goes on? As far as we can tell. Yeah, okay. And then he hears the declaration of Catherine. He overhears it in which he says that she both loves him

and both loves Edgar Linton and she then decides to marry Edgar Linton and he runs away. She's 15, he's 16 at that point. Edgar Linton, it comes from the genteel hives, the really big house, Frush cross Grange, down the valley.

And he's a genteel man, so she's chosen that as well as Heathcliff. Yeah, so the two of them, Cathy and Heathcliff, are running around that they go to Thrush Cross Grange, the dog sees them, she's taken in and pampered, gentrified, he's left to go wild.

So he runs away for three years at 16 and comes back transformed. We don't know if he's been in the American wars, if he's been on the continent, And then he starts to take his revenge. First of all, on Hindley, the one who's brutalised him as a boy, his kind of half-siblings, as it were. No, Anshar's eldest son.

There's an blood relationship, yeah. That's right, yeah. First of all, he revenged himself on him. Then he starts revenge himself on the next generation. And in one way you see there are good reasons for the way he behaved so horribly. On the other hand, constantly this speculation is he a very important. vampire or a ghoul or an a frit. So all the way through he's

carrying out these terrible acts of vengeance against the next generation. I think certain moralists wouldn't say there were good reasons, they might say there were reasons. But there we go. And there's more to say of Hithwickley, but thanks for giving us that kickstart, Karen O'Brien. This novel is told largely by two voices. Emily Bonte investors.

Man Lockwood, who takes thrush grange to come into the country and enjoy the beauty and solace and peace of the country. then he stumbles on Wuthering Heights. Didn't bang for that. And the other is Nellie Dean, who's a housekeeper, and she quickly filled in,

she read a lot so she can tell this story. There are one and two other voices. They tell the story. What does that give to the book? It's absolutely fundamental. So you're right, we start with the Southerner Lockwood. Actually, the next narrative voice we hear is Kathy's diary that Lockwood reads that Strange Night in Wuthering Heights.

And then we go into Nellie's voice, and as you mentioned, there are various other narrative voices as well. but Nellis is the dominant narrative voice and it's quite a gentrified voice for the social class that she comes from. It's very important because we are seeing the tale at one remove. It is, there's something so excessive,

so enormous, so incomprehensible about this fiery passion between Cathy and Heathcliff and the violence that takes place in Wuthering Heights and the violence in the soul of Heathcliff. We haven't yet yet on. You can't really, sorry, you can't really do it any other way. Go ahead. I'm no one to be sorry.

But we're talking about the violent past. Let's just address that now, so people know what you're talking. Can you tell us how the violence of that passion is expressed? It's, as John said, we don't see them, as it were, we don't see it fully articulated. It's done by proxy in the sense that we understand that their relationship flourishes when they get out of the heights and go out onto the moors and run wild, which they do continually. And it's also staked out through a series of contrasts. So Alexandra mentioned this difference between the foliage of the deciduous tree,

and the lasting tree trunk. So that idea that somehow Heathcliff is associated with those elemental permanent forms of nature. And he talks about his own incapacities, Cathy's capacity for enormous passion and enormous love that Linton and others can barely understand and that Nelly herself cannot fully comprehend. She is in some ways quite unsympathetic to that love and regards Kathy as hysterical. Yeah, she's a good voice, isn't she, by tempering for the reader saying, now hold on of it, we're not going along with you there. She is, but one always senses the limitation of what she can understand.

I think another very important point to make about her is that she's not merely an observer, she's a participant. She feels herself to be by proxy, a member of that family. She is by allegiance, close to the Earnshaw line, and very aware that Heathcliff has displaced that heritage and that family and wants to see it reconstituted and is very happy to see it reconstituted at the end. So she's very selective in her sympathies, And she's also, as we learned from her own behaviour in the novel,

very selective about what she tells and who she tells, what she tells to who. So she's an unreliable narrator and an unreliable person as well. So it's a stained glass window onto something that we can barely see and barely understand. She does that terrible thing about not letting Heathcliff know that when Cathy said he was rough manner, uncouth compared with Linton, she then went on to say, but he was wonderful, he was the rock, he was her, so he left by, he stopped eavesdropping by then, but she never

passed her own time. She never passes on the IAM Heathcliff declaration. She also fails to tell Linton that his wife is starving herself to death when she's ill in the Grange. So her behaviour is very selective and it's hard to get to the bottom of her own motivation. Yes. Alexandra, can we just develop this Cathy and Heathcliffe relationship, which for many people is the core, the reason and the great glory of the book. Can you just talk more about it? Certainly. Well, it's a relationship of... When I am, Heathcliff, that Cathy says to Nellie. Yes.

She says I am him. It's a relationship of complete self-identification. So this is not only two characters who declare their complete devotion to one another, slightly undercut by the fact of Kathy going off and marrying someone else, but they declare that they are indeed the other. So precisely that, Melvin, that I am Heathcliff, which is mirrored later in the book by Heathcliff's declaration, I cannot live without my life. I cannot live without my soul. They envisage themselves as utterly necessary to each other's existence. This is why for Heathcliff

after Kathy's death, it's a sort of death in life for him. He begs with her ghost to haunt me, be with me always take any form because I cannot drive me mad, even, he says, I cannot live in this abyss where I cannot find you. So really they're central to each other's psychology, and they're central to each other's understanding of the point of existence, really. And that is convincing, isn't it? In a strange way, you think, you have a, well, you tell me.

I think readers are convinced by this. We've been hearing a bit about the framing tale and the fact that the sort of testimony that we receive is mediated by Nellie Dean and Lockwood. But readers feel as though they have some kind of privileged access to these heightened emotions of Kathy and Heathcliff. which I think in part is to do with the character's real attempt to break through the limitations of language. They're trying to give voice to something that they feel as an embodied passion,

something almost at a cellular level. So Kathy registers the difficulty of giving voice to these passions when she says to Nellie, I'm trying to give you a feeling of how I feel. And she has to use very heightened metaphoric language of heaven and hell, untamed wilderness. Rick, she recounts her dream world in order to try to break through language. She tells Nellie how she was, she dreamt she was in heaven. and that she was very upset there, heartbroken, not as Nelly might infer because she's sinful,

but because she was alone, heartbroken without Heathcliff. She says that dream has altered the way I feel like wine through water. It's changed the colour of my mind. So it's something quite central. There's just one thing I might also add to that, that their love is very much about a regression to childhood. You asked whether we think that passion is consummated. I think there's no evidence that it is because in some ways

it's longing for that undifferentiated moment of childhood where you have no sense of boundary between the self and other. At crucial moments, Kathy can't recognize herself in the mirror. Heathcliff seems unaware of her pregnancy. He seems not to acknowledge her maternity, not to acknowledge her mature sexual femininity. So for me, it's a passion that's actually very much rooted in a kind of pre-adult identification with the other

or an erasure of distinctions of that kind. I would like to come in and just say something about the pros here. John, it's fierce, isn't it? It's extraordinary. She's attacking you all the time. Even when Nellie's doing her rather placid pastoral passages and then and then, there's a bit of a then and then,

he moved back, he moved in, he moved out, that sort of thing. The attack, doesn't a chapter goes by without, she's got you by the throat, some other terrible thing has happened. A dog's been hung. Somebody's been bitten, somebody's been attacked. Some has been attacked. Heathcliff's gone and trying to murder somebody else. Revenge has

sort of taken over the world. It's non-stop ferocity. Absolutely. And what's so wonderful, I think, is the way that she then embeds that in this complicated narration and a very realistic setting. So it's in a domestic kitchen. And it's the way that she takes all those grand passions of romanticism

and then makes them so verifiably realistic almost. And that's the way that she makes it so credible. So that you, a bit like Lockwood, you enter this world and suddenly it seems natural to be so violently expressive of the most kind of elemental passions. The location of taking people's imagination almost as much as anything else. Up there and Wuthering Heights, on the moor, the wild place.

Can you talk a bit about that? Yes, it's so interesting. If you look through the novel for the description of the landscape, you can hardly find a moment of it. But it's kind of irrigated all the way through. It's sprinkled all the way through, both as metaphor, so Cathy will have seasons of happiness or she'll be cloudy,

but also as kind of realistic detail. all the time. And there's a great binary opposition between Threshcross Grange down there, more civilised, with a garden around it and a park, and then the wildness of Wuthering Heights at the top. And the moors are a constant presence there from the moment, you know, when Lockwood treks across them, the snow falls and he's trapped within Wuthering Heights. So the landscape is an active participant in this extraordinary fusion of naturalistic detail and great passion. There's as much about the weather as it's about the moors, isn't it? Yes, absolutely.

I don't know literally, but there is. Yes. It seems to be a lot, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Karen, people are shot in and shut out all the time. Doors are locked, people are penned in, people get prisoner by Heathgift at one stage and so on. Is that just the way she saw the story unbending, or is that saying something else as well? That's a very good observation.

So there are these incredible moments of incarceration, the most extreme. is when Nellie and the younger Catherine are incarcerated by Heathcliff until young Catherine will marry Linton Jr. But also Catherine's original semi-incarceration at the Grange that civilises her. And Cathy's constant sense of being in exile and a prisoner in her own body in these incarcerated spaces. It is redolent of the kind of the gothic novel idea of the incarcerated woman trying to be free. There's clearly a trope there about female psychological and social imprisonment. But I think it's far more than that. far more about the boundaries between these two worlds and the diametrical opposition between

the world of Wuthering Heights and the world of Thrush Grange and the Moors as a bridging distance between them. But those moments of pressure and intensification and incarceration are really crucial vehicles within the plot. Perhaps a slight diversion here, but why do you think that Heathcliff, this man who is full of revenge, savagery, is about to kill several people at a certain time, tortures his wife? I don't know of the word for it with Isabella. and he marries. I think that can be called torture. We can all agree that that's torture.

And on the way is he turned into a romantic hero for so many readers? Well, Isabella, the woman he marries, who is Linton's younger sister, believes that he's a romantic hero, and she's so quickly disabused of that, almost on her wedding night. His resentment towards her is clearly a proxy for his anger towards Linton for marrying Cathy, but it's also an outburst of his growing sadism. there's another aspect to Heathclist character

which we need to mention which Cathy herself identifies which is that he's avaricious part of this long revenge plot and this sophisticated revenge calculation is the knowledge that Isabella and he could be heirs to thrush-cross Grange and ultimately that's what happens

so it's also a quisitive violence that makes it worse with respect why so many people think of him as a romantic hero John you've got your hand up I think one thought is that he's in agony inside. And the reason why he's so horrible to everybody else is that somehow he's externalising

this internal suffering and pain. And that's the sign of his love. So that he's tormented by Catherine, who's dead. And so therefore that's why he has to be so horrible to everyone else. It's because there's fathomlessness of his passion, you mean? Yes. Beyond the grave. Yeah. Yeah. You were going to say something.

I think it's really to do with the fact that there's no intrusive authorial judgment in this text, because it is astoundal the disjunction between his passion for Kathy and the way that that's represented with the suggestions of violence bound up in it. I mean, we've been talking a bit about the lack of eroticism or sexual suggestion

of their relationship, but if we think about their last embrace, the bruises left upon her body. If we think about Heathcliff's necrophiliac tendencies, he's moved twice to dig up the body. First on the day of the burial, he doesn't. He stopped short. He thinks he can feel her breath close by.

18 years later, he wants to open that casket and gaze upon her peak preserved face. So there's the violence sort of towards Cathy and towards Cathy's body. There's also the violence towards Isabella we've been discussing, but we're not left with any kind of authorial or narrative stamp and ethical viewpoint on it. So I think we remember, we register as readers,

the intensity, the immediacy of his desires. So it's Amor, Vinciad Omnia, however, while they are more, is it, John? I think that's right. And it's a sense that it's tormenting in a way, that passion is torment. and it's often with people who are not there. So it affirms erotic desire up to and beyond death without any ethical framework or theological boundaries to it.

It might be thought, I'm just a suggestion, morally awkward, that this is expressed mainly through revenge, and the engine of the book is revenge. Is that right? And if so, how does that square with, and how does anybody square it with this enormous fathomish, love that he undoubtedly have or possession. What is it?

It is a revenge plot and like lots of great Hamlet is a revenge plot too. It's one of the great motors of plot in the Western tradition I think is because it's reciprocal violence. Somebody does something bad to you so you does something back to them. And the novel in a way is asking what could possibly end

that I think? What could bring that to an end? And in the end it's almost Heathcliff relinquishes it that somehow he is so tormented by Cathy that he then, as it were, stops eating. And towards the end of the book, like Catherine had done earlier on, so that he can then join her.

She stops eating too. She stops eating to punish them. Linton isn't, her husband isn't doing what she wants. Heath isn't doing what she wants. So she says, I will break their hearts by breaking my own first. And the way she does that is to starve herself. Yes. It's a kind of utterly lawless,

ruleless, passionate affirmation of your desire. You were talking about reading earlier, Karen. We read that you read the Greeks. There's a lot there, isn't there? Euripides. I think there's a lot about that sense of tragedy and tragic downfall,

overlaid with this idea of the revenge plot and the fact that revenge somewhat overtakes the revenger. There's also, I think, another plot in there which is really about property and dynastic illogismacy and legitimacy and the fact that the property is taken away from the Earnshaw family and ultimately restored to them.

So there are a number of classic plots at work. It's, in a way a highly literary novel. At the same time, for a long time, it's regarded as formless and that being one of its faults. You would dispute that. I would absolutely dispute that. And I think if you, it's very, very carefully dated. As John alluded

to, it starts being set back in the late 18th century. The narrative begins in 1801 and ends in 1802, and you can track very carefully how well Emily Bronte's sows the seeds all the way through of the plot that is to come. Right at the beginning, Lockwood sees the name Herten over the, written on the door lintel of Wuthering Heights,

as though that is the ownership to which we're eventually returning. So it is in terms of that plot about property ownership and re-ownership very well, very carefully done. I think it's also incredibly done in terms of names. So this shuffling around of names that we see at the beginning, Linton, Earnshaw, Heathcliffe. Heathcliff's name actually is the name that the Earnshaw family had given to a dead child but he never has a surname and then he becomes Mr Heathcliff then he acquires the property

then on his gravestone we have only the name Heathcliff so I think that sort of movement between identities is beautifully plotted out in the novel did the fact that it with Alexander I'll turn to you does the fact that it in most people's experience I guess what they're doing is impossible and yet we give it the greatest respected and does that mean that our idea of impossible is pretty limited? Our idea of the

impossible in terms of achieving a romance post-death. In terms of basically in terms of passion, in terms of love, in terms of devotion. That's what I'm talking about. Well, I mean, this comes back to something Karen was saying earlier in terms of the way in which it's figured. I think Kathy's idea of their connection is a little bit more

naive in the sense that she believes she can have both Edgar and Heathcliff in her life and they can coexist. She believes she can marry Edgar, live in the posh house and still have the same relationship with Heathcliff that they've had since children. And that the benefits of that can be brought forward into her life with Heathcliff also. So partly

it's her reaction to their violent exchange when Heathcliff returns. Of course, unhappy with this state of affairs that causes her to have... Sorry, I told her to be the man who boss people. I'm happy that she has got married while he was away for those three years. I led to believe that he expected her to

wait for him and they expected it always to be there for him. Well, he's heard her say that she couldn't marry him. So I think he comes back intent on revenge rather than necessarily on claiming a romance with Cathy. We can't know because we know so little of what happens in his mind during his absence. In fact, we know nothing.

And that's one of the interesting things to me about this book is its gaps and silences, and the compulsive repetitions we've been talking about, but also the way in which it figures memory and trauma, and that's precisely one of the ways in which it does so. Charlotte Bronte felt moved to write to the second edition and felt moved to write a portrait of her sister. moderating some of the charges brought against her by the critics.

Could she thought us about that? Yeah, this is really interesting. This is Charlotte Bronte taking on the role of interpreter of Emily. She said that an interpreter ought always to have stood between Emily and the world. And she does that in the preface where she has very much in mind the horrified reviews of the first edition. The second edition, very interesting. I'll come to this perhaps a bit later that also Charlotte edited and made various changes to, has this interpretive framework that most readers from 1850 and throughout the 20th century encountered.

And in it, Charlotte outlines the way in which, as Karen has already mentioned, Emily was writing from the impulse of nature, which is a rather disingenuous disavowal of her learning and her thinking. She develops before Gaskell had the chance to do so in her own biography of Charlotte Bronte, the Bronte myth about the sort of isolated, uncivilised Haworth setting, which is completely untrue. And she's... No, it's thriving 5,000 population...

in town with good industry. Absolutely. And of course the sisters had travelled extensively and were producing essay work for their teacher in Brussels. So this is completely mythologising in a rather diminishing way. She also has, I think, quite a vexed approach to Emily's talents. She was in great admiration of Emily's genius, but then sought to rein that in terms which would make it more palatable for the 19th century readership.

She sort of babified her, didn't it? She said she was stronger the man and stronger than a man and simpler than a child, is that right? Her nature stored apart. Yes. And nature stood apart's okay, but the other two aren't. So do you think those... Let's not talk about those changes.

Let's talk about this business of the afterlife about meeting as ghosts. I'm giving this to you, John. And away you go. Yes. So just picking up that, Charlotte says, whether it's right to create somebody like Heathcliff, who goes arrow straight to perdition,

who goes to hell. I don't know, she says. But of course, I think it's much more complicated in the book. in a way, you know, it's a revenge book. It's also a novel of ideas in a way because Heathcliff throughout the second half of the book is haunted by the idea of Cathy that she sort of stays with him all the way

and seems somehow in his own mind and we never know this for sure seems to come closer and closer to him so he's almost visibly seeing her. Now part of the power of the book is it never really gets you inside people's psychologists but you see what they do but you never know what their thought processes are.

So with Heathcliff and Cameron, You never know, is this a fantasy? Is this a delusion? Is he genuinely haunted? And the novel has a wonderfully kind of balanced ending about that, in which Lockwood says he can't imagine unquiet slumbers. But we've already seen several people who've seen them walking as ghosts. So whether there are genuine ghosts, whether it's a psychological process, whether it's Heath's delusion, they're all floating there in the conclusion of the book. Do you think this is part of the power of the book, Karen? I do. I mean, I think whatever they're case, this idea of the ghost incorporates the idea that there's something so excessive, so unassimitable that the idea of a kind of continuous life after death really encapsulates that excess

in life. And for the daughter of a clergyman, it is really quite surprisingly heterodox, isn't it? This idea of heaven is not something that you want to go to, but it's a kind of spectral presence on earth. And I think the idea that the dead and the living are somehow interpenetrated all

the time, this is a huge theme in Emily Bronte's wonderful poems and it's a huge metaphysical theme in the book. And as John says, you can't be absolutely sure what the status of the ghosts really is, whether, you know, as with a lot of novels, you're somewhere between something that's material and something that's purely a figure

of the character's imagination. But to put a question to you that I sort of stutter through with John, do you think it's the ferocity and strangeness of what in the end is passion that people, the heights of many people's lives and it's that which excuses, as it were, the brutalities and savagerys and revenge.

Do you think that is one of the reasons why? I wouldn't dichotomize them. I think violence is an energy in the book. It's part of aliveness. It's on a continuum with passion. It's also living in a world that is very clearly approximated to the non-human meaning of the natural world in Wuthering Heights that's constantly alluded to.

As the novel goes full cycle towards the end, we get back into a world of gardens and books. Herten and the young Kathy read books, they cultivate gardens, and they're trying to move their world back into one that's in a very fragile sense cultivated and acculturated. But one should not dichotomize these two things. To come back to the question of the ghosts, the ghost I think for me of Kathy is a manifestation of Heathcliff's trauma. It's his possession in the sense that he can't ever quite access the ghost. And he has almost registered but not experienced

the event. There's that lovely moment, the quiet tableau where Nelly intuits that it's not a moment of apparent grief. It's in fact the point at which Heathcliff says, where is she not dead, not in heaven, where? He can't quite accept the fact that she's gone. And although he sees her in every cloud in every tree, he's driven to open and close his eyes a hundred times a night but can't fully capture the image. So for me, what Emily Bronte is really interested in working out quite ahead of her time before the 50s and 60s and railway trauma is fractured memory and problems. Heathcliff not only wants actively to remember, but he has an unmasual.

manageable pathology of memory. If there's one big thing that can explain is grip on an increasing number of readers all over the place, what would you say it was, John? It's the way that it both deals with the most fundamental, mythical, primal questions of human being about nature and about culture, about civilisation and what's not civilised, and it embeds that in an utterly credible and believable, particularised landscape and action. The landscape, sorry about this, but the landscape roots it, doesn't it in that sense? It does. I think it's bound to be real because it's up there in that place.

Yes, both in space and in time too, so it's got a beautifully organised time scheme to it, which you can date almost everything. The two together make it so strong. Karen, what's your comment on that? My comment is Charlotte said of her sister that Emily never felt she had to explain what she meant. This is a novel that does not feel it needs to explain what it means,

and that's what makes it so compelling. that alone? Not that alone, but it's part of that cutting and focusing on the intense moments and leaving some of the gaps, the narrative gaps, the pedestrian infills, how did Heathcliff make his money, what happened during those three years, unfilled.

And what did they do on the heath? That was terrific. Thank you very much, Karen O'Brien, Alexander Lewis and John Boe. Next week we'll be discussing Constantine the Great, who shifted the religion of the Roman Empire towards Christianity and its centre towards Byzantium. Thank you very much for listening.

And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. So what did we not cover, would you say? What would we miss out most importantly? I wonder about the comedy. I think it's quite funny. You know the bit with Lockwood at the beginning where he's going? Are these, oh, perhaps these are your favourites

thinking that they're puppies and they're part of dead rabbits? And when he keeps getting everybody wrong at the beginning, he thinks he's in a Jane Austen novel and he's not. and I think there's a wild comedy to the book too. I think Joseph is quite a comic film. Yes, that, you know, the kind of Calvinist hypocrite who goes on about how reprobate everyone and how Heathcliff is troubled by his conscience.

And just positioning that, you know, conventional hellfire religion for, you know, for the Victorian bit on the margins of the plot and showing him sort of living through these changes is really quite comical at times. And there is a black comedy to this novel. I agree with that. The instances you've given and want to give more,

when Joseph turns up to claim Little Linton and take him away, all dressed up and so on. But they're completely steamroller. Oh yeah, fine, right? Let's get on with it. That's come on the main thing. Alexander. Well, we discussed Nelly and her unreliability a little bit, but I'd broaden the terms of that debate

to look at the way Charlotte described her as a benevolent nurturer. And then you've got critics coming in later in the 20th century saying she's a villain, one of the most consummate villains in English literature. So really quite diverse few points on. On the grounds that she withholds information, as Karen was saying, on the grounds, though, that she actively engineers and perhaps is sort of jealous in class and status terms of this family.

We tend to forget her age. She's sort of only... Aged of... I'm a certain of an agent of patriarchy. Yeah, that would... When you learn she's 27, I'd forgotten all that. Some long as long as I previously read it,

you think, that young, I kept thinking in her 40s for those days. some sort of, some settled woman of the world, or certainly of that world, not 27, which could be... She's almost like,

you know, one of the children too in a way, it's right. Scheming and jealous herself. And the way that she talks about Kathy's madness is, you know, oh, there are going to be broken bones,

she says a sort of lack of sympathy and she talks at one point about how she's only ever happy when she's in the, you know, a room of, you know, watching over the dead. You know, there's something quite morbid and quite strange about,

well, she says a bit more than that, because she says, when she's watching the dead, It's the expression on their faces. Yes. Not so just that they're dead. She's a hard woman. We can call it that's a given in the mortuary.

It's that they look as if they're at peace. That's what she feels happy about. But she's a hard woman, I think, in some way. Oh, yeah. The other thing I think is the extraordinary complexity of the time scheme. And nobody notices it until the 1920s. And it's an economist who notices a friend of Keynes, who notices just how you can do a very, very detailed time scheme

for the whole novel and these very complicated patternings of the second half and the first half of names and of times. I think that's, there's this wild passion and then this beautifully complicated narrative and time structure in which it fits. Must be terribly frustrating for people like you three that aren't all her preparatory notes, first drafts, must be very frustrated.

Oh, the absence of a manuscript is distressing for editors. I mean, in, you know, making choices. These days, most editors do tend to revert. I've reverted to the 18. 1747 as a copy text, but it's notoriously unreliable, as Karen was saying, and Newby sort of put this out with Charlotte said mortifying punctuation and spelling, but then Charlotte makes wholesale changes to the dialect speech, of Joseph in particular, to the punctuation and the paragraphing in her second edition.

So we can't know sort of what authoritatively Emily would have wanted us to have. Do you think we know about Charlotte's corrections? Do you think that they were beneficial or not? I think the ones to Joseph's speech are clearly not, that there's clearly in it. you know, kind of a lack of trust that the reader can cope with eminor's rendition of Yorkshire dialect. But there's some tidying up, isn't there, Alexandra, of the various mistakes that Newby left in. There's some tidying up of the mistakes,

but she also dispensed with punctuation that I would see as integral to the character's rhythms of speech and the rhythms of the novel. And many of those, I mean, in the Norton edition, which I've just prepared, I've brought them back because so to the dialect speech. Charlotte doubted that Southerners, Londoners, urban-centered readers,

would be able to understand, but isn't that in fact part of the point that Emily wanted us to have a sense of the strangeness that Lockwood experiences Can I say something a bit challenging though? I'm personally not sorry that the gondled stories have disappeared because I mean I think

with Charlotte and Brownwell's angry and glass time one feels slightly swamped by this rather complicated world that is a world of romance and myth and rehearsal really and what you were describing John is that you know that ability to take that world and to place that

in a domestic setting. So to create a Victorian domestic novel out of the raw materials of romance is a phenomenal feat of alchemy. And I don't want to see the workings personally. Really? I feel like that. That's very interesting. So if I said, as it happens in my back pocket, I was rumbling

through, an old antique shop, I don't want to know. Old Chess, Oak Chess, Oak Chess, there was this pine of papers and glum. You'd be a very wealthy man. Are you interested? I'm interested. No, God. Give them away, of course. You wouldn't be interested.

No, not me. Pass them on to John. And also, I think, because the poems... I'll take them out of the ladies' first. The fact that the poems could be so beautifully detached from that dramatic context and acquire this kind of lyric anonymity that they have their extraordinary poems, they're worth a whole other radio program clearly in their own right. The fact that they can stand alone in the way that they do tells us probably something about the pretext that Gondell created for Emily

for a rather different kind of creativity. I'm sure you wouldn't agree, but that's... I'd like to have the manuscript of Wuthering Heights, but I don't think I want to know more about Emily. I mean, she clearly was very reserved. She didn't want people to know about... She didn't want her name even to be known. So you could publish it under Ellis Bell, really,

because I think Emily probably would have been happier. So the fact that she... you know so little about her biography, in a way, just means it's just this one object that she's created. and then you just have to live with the consequences. Sometimes if you know a lot of biography, you explain this away rather than just registering its force. I agree.

Well, that comes back to Charlotte's comment, doesn't it, about the artistic genius being something that strangely wills and works for itself. I absolutely agree in the critical history of the Brontes. We've been mired with biographical debates and questions that detract from the text. So I agree with you on that, Scot-on. Teller, not the tale.

Well... I trust the teller, trust the tale, isn't it? I got it the wrong way around first time, yeah. And we didn't get onto film and TV and other adaptations. Just as well. But there's just a massive time. So I didn't get to say that my favourite is still the Kate Bush song. And I think that's a wonderful.

Yes, I wanted to mention Kate's song. Wonderful rendition of Kathy as this ghoulish child woman. I think it's brilliant, actually. She did that when she was 18, didn't you? Yeah, exactly. She was profoundly in touch with what Kathy was about. And that comes through in the dance and in the music. Well, maybe in this podcast, it'll whirl into her.

around to Kate. She'll be very pleased about that. She should be. Well, thank you all very much. I think the producers coming in to make us enough and we can't refuse. Just offer to your coffee. If you'd like to your coffee? Coffee would be great. Coffee, please. And for more podcasts on

arts and ideas from the BBC. Follow the link on our website to the best of BBC Radio 3's Free Thinking programme.