[Key Words] Wuthering Heights; Female Gothic novel; devilish characters; nightmares
【摘 要】 《呼啸山庄》是19世纪英国女作家艾米莉·勃朗特的惟一的一部小说，也是世界文学园地中的一朵奇葩，其中展现了大量的哥特色彩。本文立足于欧美文学中的哥特传统研究《呼啸山庄》的创作，作家艾米莉在人物形象和意象等方面都借鉴了哥特传统并有所突破；她凭借超乎寻常的想象力，将现实与象征、恐怖、神秘等哥特手法完美地结合在一起，给陈旧的形式注入了激烈情感和活力，达到哥特形式与激情内容的完美统一。笔者试图从一个新的角度——女性哥特来挖掘出《呼啸山庄》中尚未被挖掘出的一些新的意蕴和内涵。同时也希望通过展示魔鬼式人物和梦魇的超现实主义描写，使我们能够从女性哥特的角度解读这部小说。
【关键词】 《呼啸山庄》；女性哥特小说；魔鬼式人物；梦魇
1. Introduction
In conclusion, Emily Brontë “used the stark Yorkshire setting, not to create suspense and horror, as in the typical Gothic novel, but as a natural part of her story.”[5] On one hand, she carries on the Gothic tradition in her creation of the novel. On the other hand, she has not just employed the mode but promotes some improvements in this old tradition. She used the skill of Female Gothic in her writing of the novel. In the following, the author is trying to make a study on Wuthering Heights from the aspects of the devilish characters and the terrifying nightmares.
2. From Gothic novel to Female Gothic novel
In studying Wuthering Heights from the aspect of a Female Gothic novel, no one can ignore the definition of this term Gothic. To do so, however, one is likely to fall into the trap of ambiguity, for there is no definite and comprehensive way to expound it. As time goes by, the connotation of this term gradually expands from its original meaning into broader sense.
With the passing of time, Gothic is endowed with a new connotation. Around the early eighteenth century, Gothic develops into a genre in literary realm. In particular, “the term Gothic has also been extended to a type of fiction which lacks the exotic setting of the earlier romances, but develops a brooding atmosphere of gloom and terror, represents events that are uncanny or macabre or melodramatically violent, and often deals with aberrant psychological states.”[8] The attempt to define Gothic writings usually follows the method named by Eugenia DeLamotte in Monthly published in 1801. In such kind of works, “some writers set their stories in the medieval period; others set them in a Catholic country, especially Italy or Spain. The locale was often a gloomy castle furnished with dungeons, subterranean passages, and sliding panels; the typical story focused on the sufferings imposed on an innocent ghosts, mysterious disappearances, and other sensational and supernatural occurrences.”[9] Though the plots and themes of Gothic writings are different specifically, they focus on the depiction of a series of weird and simulative events such as murder, revenge, violence, rape and incest, thus endowing the whole work with an atmosphere of suspense, mystery and sense of fear. With its artificial over-ornamentation, its unbridled imagination, its notorious fame of seducing degeneration and corruption, Gothic writings are severely criticized and rejected by mainstream literary genres. “In the history of western literature, there are seas of schools of fiction having made strong impacts. Flourished during the end of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, the English Gothic novel is one of the schools that exerts a tremendous influence and owns considerable uniqueness.”[10]
In 1764,the English writer Horace Walpole inaugurates the Gothic novels with his The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story in his Gothic castle under the setting of Middle Ages. The novel is flooded with evil, violence, and murder in cold blood. And it becomes the forerunner of the English and western Gothic novels. Set in medieval Italy, The Castle of Otranto tells a story about usurpation, conspiracy and morality. The story ends with the good promoted while the evil punished. The novel paves the way for the developing of the Gothic novels: there are secret passages and mysterious abbey, the villainous usurper and the virginal heroine, the upright hero, the display of sadistic and masochistic emotions and the unbridled sexuality and sensuality. It exhibits its rebellious and excessive qualities. The portrayal of unanimated characters and brash plots, the eerie and horrible settings and scenery, the depiction of the institution of cavalier, however, brought it long-term criticism. With the publication of The Castle of Otranto the real history of the word Gothic begins from eighteenth century. And it mainly refers to the following three meanings: barbarous, medieval, and supernatural.
From then on, a large number of Gothic novels come out with the theme sticking to the exploration of human nature and passions in forms of indulgence and irrational excess around 1790s. Examples of Gothic novels are William Beckford’s Vathek (1786), Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), and Matthew Gregory Lewis’ The Monk (1796). The latter two works are considered to be the most outstanding and influential works among the large number of the Gothic novels during Gothic decade. Ann Radcliffe is one of the most famous female novelists whose works touch upon the typical Gothic traditions. By inheriting and developing major features of her predecessors, she attaches much importance to female figures in Gothic novels, endowing her works with new characteristics and preserving their distinct ingredients. Therefore, she is highly praised for the initiatory emphasis on women and their situations within Gothic context besides her great contribution to Gothic traditions. There are typical gothic features, such as ruined castles and abbeys, isolated passageways and dark forests in her novel, as well as some unique features, which cannot be found in male Gothic novels. To some extent, she starts the tradition of the so-called Female Gothic.
Female Gothic, the variant of modern Gothic, first comes out from Ellen Moers’ Literary Women. She defines Female Gothic as “the work that women writers have done in the literary mode”.[13] Getting flourished in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, Female Gothic novels usually focus on a female protagonist who is chased and tormented by villainous gothic figures with unfamiliar settings and horrible landscape as the background. “No Gothic novel is without its suffering heroine, who is both ‘sexualized’ as an object of desire and ‘victimized’ by a powerful aggressor who is also a potential rapist. The first task of feminist criticism was to articulate the problem of the abuse of the female in Gothic fiction and to explore the ways in which female novelists subverted or reinscribed the cultural norms of female sexualization and victimization. ”[14] The Female Gothic aims to socialize and educate its female readers by criticizing patriarchal dominion and serves as an expression of female independence. It “not only marks the introduction of gendered perspective into Gothic studies, but also opens up a new space for feminist literary studies.”[15] In a word, Female Gothic is a form of literature, which expresses the inner secret resistance, fantasy, and terror of the female. Women are under the oppression of men for a long time, and it is high time that women writers should subvert male dominated literary discourse and establish their own writing tradition.
Applying Gothic genre as a platform, the Female Gothic writers are inclined to express their own understanding on women’s conditions and communicate with readers, especially the female. The prominent representatives of Female Gothic novels include Jane Austin’s Northanger Abbey (1818), Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1817), and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Emily Brontë’s employing of Female Gothic “should have an air of being infected by Hoffmann too is not surprising in a contemporary of Poe’s; Emily is likely to have read Hoffmann when studying German at the Brussels’s boarding school and certainly read the ghastly supernatural stories by James Hogg and others in the magazines at home.”[16] Emily “grows up by reading Mary Shelley, Hoffmann, and James Hogg’s Gothic novels.”[17] In Emily’s Wuthering Heights there can be found here and there the influence of the Gothic tradition. In the following, this thesis will analyze Wuthering Heights from Female Gothic perspectives, basically focusing on its devilish characters and terrifying nightmares.
3. Analysis on the embodiment of Female Gothic in Wuthering Heights
3.1 Devilish characters of Female Gothic
3.1.1 Heathcliff: a poor inhuman monster
3.1.1.1 Tenant Mr. Lockwood’s impression on Heathcliff
In Gothic novels, the shaping of the characters is a commonly used vehicle for giving expression to the gothic ingredient. This is particularly true of Emily’s Wuthering Heights. When we open this book, we can see various terrifying characters. The first character is the hero Heathcliff. He seems to be an inhuman monster. Being a son of the storm, his behavior is flooded with Gothic color: cruel, imperious, and he stoops to anything to get what he wants. What’s more, the love between Catherine and him goes beyond the common limit and is quite abnormal compared with love in other works of her age. The entire action of the story takes place within the two houses-Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange and on the moors lie between. The principal character, Heathcliff, around whom all the action revolves, emerges as starkly as Wuthering Heights. He may be thought of as the personification of the house. There is an analogy between his appearance and his character and that of the Heights itself.
When Mr. Lockwood, the tenant of Thrushcross Grange, pays his visit to Wuthering Heights, curious about the brooding quality and crumbing, menacing appearance of the Heights and the inscription over the door- the date ‘1500’and the name ‘Hareton Earnshaw’, Mr. Lockwood would like to ask his landlord about this, but Heathcliff proves to be unsociable, inhospitable, and brusque.
“The ‘walk in’ was uttered with closed teeth, and expressed the sentiment, ‘Go to the deuce’: even the gate over which he leant manifested no sympathizing movement to the words; and I think that circumstance determined me to accept the invitation: I felt interested in a man who seemed more exaggeratedly reserved than myself.”[18]
This is the first appearance that Emily displayed to us. And the first impression of the hero Heathcliff adds the color of mystery and implies to the readers that the man is bound to have a long story. By the brief portrayal of the hero, she creates suspense for the whole story, which embodies the Gothic tradition.
During Mr. Lockwood’s staying at the Heights, he found a diary. The entry regarding the degrading life Heathcliff was forced to lead by Hindley throws some light on the character of Heathcliff as Mr. Lockwood now finds him. For the first time we sympathize with Heathcliff in his anguish, although we are still ignorant as to its cause. Heathcliff has been revealed as a man capable of great emotion, as well as cruelty. The scene still is in the Heights. Declaring that the room is haunted, Mr. Lockwood decides to spend the rest of the night elsewhere. As he is about to leave the room, the odd and horrible thing happens:
“I obeyed, so far as to quit the chamber; when ignorant where the narrow lobbies led, I stood still, and was witness, involuntarily, to a piece of superstition on the part of my landlord which belied, oddly, his apparent sense. He got on to the bed and wrenched open the lattice, bursting, as he pulled at it, into an uncontrollable passion of tears. ‘Come in! Come in!’ he sobbed. ‘Cathy, do come. Oh, do-once more! Oh! My heart’s darling! Hear me this time, Catherine, at last!’ The specter showed a specter’s ordinary caprice: it gave no sign of being; but the snow and wind whirled wilding through, even reaching my station, and blowing out the light.”[19] Heathcliff is alarmed when he hears that Catherine has appeared to Mr. Lockwood; obviously, he believes that her spirit haunts Wuthering Heights and is trying to come to him from beyond the grave. This element arouses the interest and curiosity of the reader and embodies Gothic color a step forward.
With the birth of his son Hareton and the death of his wife Frances Hindley’s final disintegration commerces. This is consistent with the moral weakness he has shown previously. He concentrates his venom on Heathcliff, whom he brutalizes and in whom he tries to stamp out the feeling of worthiness that old Mr. Earnshaw had engendered. Heathcliff, in turn, delights in seeing his enemy destroy himself. It is consistent with Heathcliff’s nature that he encourages his enemies to destroy themselves by their won inner flaws. And readers anticipate conflicts and trouble in the future. From this point of view, he behaves quite cruel and revengeful. To fulfill his revenge on Hindley, he turns little Hareton into a brute with no love or respect for his father, and he has ended his education – just as Hindley did to him. When Heathcliff reappears after Catherine’s marriage, thinking she might show him where his evil ways are leading him, Nelly pays a visit to the Heights. Seeing little Hareton outside the gates, she identifies herself and says she has called to see his father, Hindley. Hareton does not recognize her as his former nurse and greets her with a hail of stones and curses. Nelly asks him who taught him such things and he answers “Devil daddy.”[20] He says his father cannot abide him because he swears at him. He says the curate no longer comes to teach him and it is Heathcliff, whom he loves, who has taught him to swear. Furthermore, he is determined to brutalize Hareton as himself was brutalized. This is evidented by the incident of Hareton’s hanging the puppies. So far, Heathcliff has succeeded in revenging Hindley’s insult on the next generation. His cruelty is easy to feel.
3.1.1.3 Feminized Female Gothic hero
Although the hero Heathcliff is depicted to be a typical devilish character in Gothic novel, he is not the same as those in traditional ones. His nature is softened by his endless love to Catherine and his giving in at last.
Heathcliff comes back to avenge himself on Hindley and then kills himself after three years disappearance. However, having seen her again, he knows he can do nothing to hurt Catherine and is abandoning his vow of revenge. Encounts Catherine he becomes full of tenderness. In particular on the spot of Catherine’s deathbed, though still a monster-like man, his affection to Catherine is engraved on his bones and heart.
“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 appears that he would not understand, though I spoke to him; so I stood off, and held my tongue, in great perplexity.”[25] Here Emily uses the rhetoric of hyperbole to describe the soul-stirring scene, displaying the crazy, brutal, mysterious, and terrifying love between the hero and heroine.
At the end of the story, on the surface it would appear that the old tragedy might be reenacted by the young people of the second generation at Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange. However, while Cathy, Linton, and Hareton show some of the characteristics of their parents, these traits have been modified, and there is hope for a happier solution to the problems presented. Emily has ingeniously designed Hareton, another Heathcliff, whose life is much luckier than Heathcliff; and the same relationship that existed between Heathcliff, Catherine, and Edgar is being repeated between Hareton, Cathy, and Linton. However, the new generation receives a much better ending, and to some extent, a happy one.
Heathcliff is a feminized Female Gothic hero who deserves our sympathy. He has a gloomy childhood, spends most of his life in the dark of revenge, and thus never leads a relaxed life, especially after Catherine’s death. He has been obsessed by the feelings of Catherine’s presence night and day. He feels haunted and thaws himself. His revenge has turned to ashes. After his death, there are changes at Wuthering Heights. The gate is open and flowers fill the yard. The sun is setting and the moon rising symbols of a new regime. The flowers that Cathy and Hareton plant after uprooting Joseph’s blackcurrant bushes are blooming. The old order of vengeance and retribution as represented by Heathcliff and old Joseph, has passed and has been replaced by the spirit of love. All these are the bright sides of this novel and evidently embody Emily’s making use of Female Gothic.
Another key character in Wuthering Heights is the heroine, Catherine Earnshaw. The free spirit of Emily Brontë is epitomized in Catherine, who, as a child, could ride any horse in the stable, and in later years rides roughshod over everyone who tries to stand in her way. Beautiful, wild, arrogant, and willful, Catherine is a fitting companion for the arrogant and vindictive Heathcliff. Her love for him and the moors is the ruling passion of her life. While she may appear heartless when she chooses to marry Edgar Linton, she is naïve enough to think that by so doing she will be able to lift him from the degradation into which he has been thrust by Hindley.
There is one occasion showing Catherine’s wildness. When Nelly refuses to leave her and Edgar in the room alone, Catherine tries to push her out of the room and pinches her arm, leaving an ugly mark. When the baby Hareton complains about “wicked Aunt Cathy”,[26] she shakes him until his teeth rattle, and Edgar tries to intervene. She denies she pinched Nelly, but Nelly shows Edgar the mark. Livid with fury, Catherine boxes Edgar’ ears. Edgar is horrified to see this other side of Catherine, capable of telling lies and becoming violent. Emily uses the description of Female Gothic to show that the nature of human beings has two sides. No one is perfect and one is bound to have his or her ugly side. Although she is married to Edgar, she is clear that her love for Heathcliff is remembered with deep gratitude. “if the wicked man in there had not brought Heathcliff so low, I shouldn’t have thought of it. It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now; so he shall never know how I love him; and that not because he’s handsome, Nelly, but because he’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same; and Linton’s is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire.”[27] Here Emily employs the image of the Nature to symbolize the differences between Heathcliff, Catherine, and Edgar’s nature. In the world of Emily, there is no distinction between the good and the evil. Catherine’s love for Heathcliff is unparalleled. “My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it, I’m well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff! He’s always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being.”[28] The extraordinary love hardly appears in any Gothic novels, in which the love is always condensed or mentioned casually. Compared with the ordinary Gothic characters, the hero and heroine in Emily’s Wuthering Heights own more true feelings and fresh vigor. Catherine’s mixed and conflicted attitude towards her marriage splits and tears her. The anguish verging on collapse and the ravings in morbid state differ from the old Gothic tradition and pave the way for Gothic novels. Emily Brontë observes people from the angle of the feminist portrays her characters from the aspects of Female Gothic, and therefore brings us the shock of supernatural strength as well as the vivid portrayal of the hero and the heroines. The further research for the psychology of the Gothic characters develops the shallow horror-making technique in the old Gothic novels and so softens the primitive, pure terror to some extent. It leaves the readers more room to develop their own thought and enhances the depth of thought and the aesthetic awareness in Gothic novels.
3.2 Terrifying nightmares
The terrifying and mysterious atmosphere forms in the nightmare of Mr. Lockwood. Nowhere else in the book is Emily Brontë’s genius so vividly revealed as in this part. Here, past and present, dream and reality, are melded into a coherent whole. All references tie in together: the books Lockwood finds and reads in the bedroom, the names that are mentioned, and finally, Lockwood’s unbelievably vivid dreams.
“I muttered, knocking my knuckles through the glass, and stretching an arm out to seize the importunate branch; instead of which, my fingers closed on the fingers of a little, ice-cold hand! The intense horror of nightmare came over me: I tried to drawback my arm, but the hand clung to it, and a most melancholy voice sobbed, ‘Let me in-Let me in!’ … Terror made me cruel; and finding it useless to attempt shaking the creature off, I pulled its waist on to the broken pane, and rubbed it to and fro till the blood ran down and soaked the bedclothes; still it wailed, ‘Let me in!’ and maintained its tenacious grip, almost maddening me with fear.”[29] It is here that Emily introduces the supernatural into the story. Catherine is the only ghost in Mr. Lockwood’s nightmare. The nightmare is a masterpiece of suspense.
Nightmare is the common vehicle used in Gothic novels. Most Gothic novels are inspired by dreams. This is particularly true of Emily’s Wuthering Heights. There is one occasion when Edgar confronts Catherine and tells her she must choose between him and Heathcliff, she flies into a rage, locks the door and for two days she remains there, touching no food. Her psychic conflicts rise to the climax. “Tossing about, she increased her feverish bewilderment to madness, and tore the pillow with her teeth … ‘That’s a turkey’s,’ she murmured to herself; ‘and this is a wild duck’s; and this is a pigeon’s’…Bonny bird; wheeling ever our heads in the middle of the moor …This feather was picked up from the heath, the bird was not shot; we saw its nest in the winter, full of little skeletons. Heathcliff set a trap over it, and the old one dare not come.”[30] Catherine’s appalling hysteria and these ravings seem to show that she is in the state of delirium. Actually, the daydream-like surrealistic description unfolds her psychic state of struggle against anguish and fantasy. Her heart has drifted away to the old good days when she and Heathcliff are together. This passage of Catherine’s disordered ravings suggests the heroine has suffered severely from the anguish just right for the occasion. By applying this vehicle, what Emily Brontë feels like expressing is not only to create an atmosphere of terror but also to establish the emotion suspense, and then set up a unique structure for the whole story, which embodies the color of Female Gothic at the same time.
4. Conclusion
It is common that many critics take Gothic novels as black novels. In particular, they hold high prejudice to those who write in this style. There is no doubt that Emily Brontë is regarded as a writer out of the mainstream of the novels in the 19th century. Her style is clear and simple but charged with tremendous vitality. She does not write for moral and social effect as Charles Dickens does. She writes for the rhythm of her sentences and the exact choice of word conveys her meaning explicitly. The style is so condensed, like that of a poet that every word must be read, or some vital point will be missed. The smaller object or snatch of conversation has some part in the whole structure. For her, the use of Gothic is not just to produce a terrifying atmosphere and make readers sick like the Gothic novels, but set up a more perfect structure and then show us the complicated psychology of the characters. By portraying the devilish characters and the terrifying nightmare, Emily Brontë finds a new way to express feelings—Female Gothic. She pays more attention to the nature of protagonists and holds that there is no definite borderline between the good and the evil. Her boundless imagination and realistic depiction serve better for the portrayal of the characters. Inheriting Gothic tradition in her writing, she develops it from her own angle. Her only novel Wuthering Heights is a good embodiment of her Female Gothic technique. The novel may be considered as a great lyric poem for it abounds in imagery. Emily Brontë’s writing is also most effective when