A Peculiar Illusion: Narrative Technique and the Lovers in Wuthering Heights

Abstract

This paper draws attention to a curious but widespread illusion about Wuthering Heights: that Catherine and Heathcliff meet as adult lovers on the hilltop of Penistone Crag. There may be commercial reasons why film-makers promote this image, but many readers of the novel believe that they have read such a scene, and can hardly be persuaded that it is not there in the novel. In fact, we only read of Catherine and Heathcliff alone together out of doors at a time when they cannot be more than twelve years old. I want to suggest that this illusion depends on aspects of the novel’s narrative technique which have such a powerful effect on us that they persuade us that we have ‘seen’ what is not actually there in the novel — the image of Catherine and Heathcliff, as adults, speaking their love to one another on top of Penistone Crag.

keywords:

• hilltop
• lovers
• narrative technique
• Penistone Crag
• Wuthering Heights

Notes

Notes

1 Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights [1847], ed. by Ian Jack (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2008), p. 7. Subsequent references to the novel, abbreviated to WH, are to this edition, embedded in the text.

2 The ideas in this paper were first developed in my book, Brontë Transformations: the Cultural Dissemination of ‘Jane Eyre’ and ‘Wuthering Heights’ (Hemel Hempstead: Prentice Hall/Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1996), and have since been taken up and applied to more recent film examples by Hilar Shachar in her splendid book, Cultural Afterlives and Screen Adaptations of Classic Literature: Wuthering Heights and Company (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

3 This argument about the reversal of normal values derives from Jacques Derrida’s theory that language and value depend on an unstable system of binary oppositions. See my paper on ‘Evading “the Secret Truth” in Wuthering Heights: Film and Visual Illustration in Teaching Critical Theory’, in Approaches to Teaching Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, ed. by Sue Lonoff and Terri A. Hasseler (New York: MLA, 2006). Sarah Wootton, in ‘Emily Brontë’s Darkling Tales’, Romanticism, 22.3 (2016), 299–311, also examines ‘light and dark as coalescing and contradictory “opposites” ‘in the novel (p. 299).

4 Among many other writers, see F. B. Pinion, ‘Byron and Wuthering Heights’, Brontë Society Transactions, 21.5 (1995), 195–201, and Edward Chitham, ‘Emily Brontë and Shelley’, Brontë Society Transactions, 17 (1978), 189–86.

5 It is, of course, notable that these films draw their inspiration from earlier films at least as much as from the novel itself. Linda Hutcheon writes about the intertextuality of adaptation in her A Theory of Adaptation (New York: Routledge, 2006).

6 Hila Shachar writes illuminatingly about how the film versions create a ‘mythical’ version of the natural landscape. Quoting my suggestion that the lovers in Wuthering Heights have come to represent a ‘fantasy of loss’, she argues that this ‘icon of loss’ is also embodied by ‘a poetics of place’ (Cultural Afterlives, p. 193).

7 Maggie Berg, in Wuthering Heights: the Writing in the Margins (New York: Twayne, 1996) notes that although Catherine’s ‘writing in the margins of revered texts could be said to reveal [her] repression by patriarchal society, it also represents her rebellion’ (p. 24).

8 The explicitness of film, as opposed to the ambiguity of the novel, is partly an inevitable result of its visual medium. It is much easier to imply something in words than in a medium where (despite techniques of fading, veiling and so on) the director has to choose whether to represent a certain image or not. Robert McFarlane addresses this question in Novel to Film: An Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). Maggie Berg also concludes that ‘Wuthering Heights is a novel which resists an exhaustive explanation’ (Writing in the Margins, p. 111).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Patsy Stoneman

Patsy Stoneman is an Emeritus Reader in English at the University of Hull (UK) and is Vice-President of the Brontë Society. She has contributed to both the Oxford and the Cambridge Companion[s] to the Brontës, has edited Palgrave’s New Casebook and Reader’s Guide to Essential Criticism, both on Wuthering Heights, and written a monograph, Brontë Transformations: the Cultural Dissemination of ‘Jane Eyre’ and ‘Wuthering Heights’.