Childhood and Innocence in Wuthering Heights

Abstract

In the mid-eighteenth century writers began to deal with the theme of childhood. This interest increased with the rise of the middle class, which considered children as heirs. In Wuthering Heights, childhood plays a large part and pervades the novel with its presence. Many critics, for example, have commented on Catherine's childish love for Heathcliff When the novel was published in 1847, childhood was still associated with inexperience, intellectual unawareness, and moral purity, in short with prelapsarian, before the Fall-of-Man innocence — the heritage of the Romantic Movement. Such a vision still prevailed two years later in David Copperfield by Charles Dickens, and even thirteen years later in his Great Expectations and in The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot.

However, Emily Brontë's vision of childhood has been claimed to stand in sharp contrast with the vision which then prevailed in literature, for its perversion and narcissism, and even has something pathological about it. Recent critics have generally focused on Catherine, who is said to embody such narcissism and perversion. This study, which relies on the theories of the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, actually focuses on the two main female characters, Catherine and her daughter Cathy, and considers whether the latter generation embodies the same kind of relation between childhood and innocence as the former generation and looks at the extent to which lost innocence and narcissism in particular can be considered to be redeemed at the end of the novel.