Education and Bronte

Perhaps one of the most interesting cultural aspects of Wuthering Heights is it’s connection to education.  Many of the characters’ lives are bound up with education, or the lack thereof, and it seems to have direct collation to their personalities.  Without exception, the educated are fairly decent people– or as decent as one can find among such low mimetic characters– while the uneducated are rough and ill-tempered.

Edgar Linton, a properly well-educated gentleman, may be pampered and weak, but he is jovial and kind.  The Earnshaw’s maid, Nelly Dean, has read nearly every book in the grand library at Thrushcross Grange, and is therefore not only surprising well-spoken, but also well-mannered and good-natured.  Heathcliff, who is originally surly, seems to improve a little during his period of education.  When education and reading are stolen from him by his adopted brother, Hindley, he becomes more volatile and ill-tempered than ever.  Similarly, Harenton, Hindley’s son, is denied all education, and is therefore one of the most gruff and dislikable characters in the entire novel.  When he is taught to read by Cathy, his demeanor is remarkably improved.

Perhaps the only character in whom a direct collation between education and relative goodness is not readily apparent is Cathy herself.  She enjoys reading, and is well-taught, but she still mocks poor Harenton.  However, one deeper examination, even this seems to have some connection to education because the books she loves to read are taken away from her.  This deprivation of favored reading material seems to be the catalyst for her major faults, for when the books are inadvertently returned to her by Harenton, whom she finds trying to read them, her treatment of him begins to slowly improve.

Emily Brontë clearly meant to say something about education, and especially about books, that was an important statement during a time when only wealthy and middle-class men were permitted to have any formal education to speak of.  However, her statement was more important than she realized, for though the reasons have changed, it is still very valid today.

Nature and Culture in Wuthering Heights

One of the most obvious devices used in the novel Wuthering Heights is that of the coellation between the weather on the moor and the residents of the manor that shares the book’s name.  Specifically, the Earnshaw family seems to have an amazing effect on the elements, as the weather seems to match their personas.  (For example, the gloomy, stormy weather when the protagonist, Lockwood, meets Heathcliff, and the pleasant weather when he later finds love-struck Catherine and Harenton reading together.)

These atmospheric metaphors, as well as other ecospheric ones, were not chosen by coincidence, for if one looks more closely, one can see that one of the themes of Wuthering Heights is Nature versus Culture.  Consider the Earnshaw’s, with whom the famously unpredictable moorland weather always seems to agree; they are a family of passionate and often impulsive people.  Hendly savages Heathcliff’s humanity, and Heathcliff revenges himself cruelly on Harenton, Hendly’s son.  In both cases, the spite and hatred of the men seems to be boundless and untamed.  They’re natures have not been curbed by culture– until, perhaps, the end when Heathcliff relents somewhat.  Similarly, in the latter part of the book when Harenton is socialized by Catherine, the unruly gardens around Wuthering Heights manor are symbolically tamed.  In this way, the gardens act as yet another metaphor for nature, which is later moderated by culture.

The Linton family, by contrast, is almost too cultured.  Edgar, for example, is wealthy, well-educated, kindly, and rather spoiled.  He is very nearly the epitome of an early nineteenth-century gentleman, but he is too delicate and too docile for his own good.  When Heathcliff sweeps back into his life like a force of nature, he is helpless to protect himself and his family.  Like any civilized man faced with a typhoon, he is easily overcome. 

Lockwood, though not a Linton, is another example of this sort of highly-cultured character.  He is financially secure, and very gentlemanly.  He is so preoccupied with propriety that he invites himself back to his landlord’s house, even after he has been given clear indications that he is unwelcomed, because he wants company and, at that time, a gentleman who owned a manor like Wuthering Heights was always supposed to receive a visiting gentleman graciously.  The idea that anyone might do differently never occurs to Lockwood, even when he is faced with obvious evidence to the contrary.  Likewise, he is too cultured to have any practicality.  When he returns to visit Wuthering Heights manor, he becomes completely lost on the moor despite the fact that he lived in the area for a year.  Near the beginning of the book, during his second visit to Heathcliff, he is so frightened and upset by being chased my dogs that he gives himself a nosebleed.  It appears as if overexposure to culture makes characters like Edgar and Lockwood weak.

Emily Brontë almost seems to be arguing for moderation in her novel Wuthering Heights.  She seems to point out problems with both the wild and egocentric ways that are natural to human kind, and the overly-protected, impractical ways of the elite class of her Victorian world.  It is one of the interesting and thought-provoking themes that set Wuthering Heights apart from many other Gothic novels of its time.

Ghost Stories and Brontë's Wuthering Heights

Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights can be described as many things: a gothic novel, a classic, and even a romance.  Along with these things, however, it is also a ghost story.

I have long held the belief that myths, fairy tales, and ghost stories hold great importance for society.  They are the telling-tales: stories spoken around firelight, generation after generation, that gather listeners together in communal wonder.  They help to bind groups of people together, and each has a particular important purpose.  If fairy tales serve to “tell us that dragons can be beaten,” as G. K. Chesteron acknowledged, then ghost stories exist to remind us to look back.  For, amid the thrills and chills of a ghostly tale, there is always a different sort of narrative: a story about someone’s life.  There is nearly always a description of how someone lived, or a guess about who someone was, that seems to offer some reason for the haunting in the tale.

After all, although Catherine’s ghost only appears once in Wuthering Heights, and appears to have possibly been a figment of the protagonist Lockwood’s imagination, it is that apparition which drives his investigation into the past of the manor house forward.  If the ghost had not appeared, Lockwood’s other discoveries– a diary, and three names written on a wall– would have been curiosities to consider, but nothing more.  It was the ghostly turn of events that really pushed him to scrutinize beyond idle pondering the lives of the house’s departed dwellers.

That, of course, is the importance of ghost stories.  While histories make us curious about great personages and events, ghost stories make us curious about regular people and daily life.  Without them, very often the past would stay buried along with the dead.

Some Thoughts on Literary History and Gender Segregation

“Mr. Davis says it is as useful to educate a woman as to educate a female cat.”

                                Amy March in “Little Women” by Louisa May Alcott

Male and female literature has nearly always been divided.  You aren’t likely to see many girls reading the latest Halo novel, nor are there likely to be numerous guys reading Twilight.  The distinction between gender-appropriate books, however, was once far more ridged than it is now.  If I were to go out today, purchase a copy of the Brooks Brothers manual How to be a Gentleman, and read it in a public place, I might get some funny looks.  Someone might even make a pointed remark.  Serious retribution, however, would not be likely to occur.

At one time that wasn’t the case.  At one time a woman could get into serious trouble– sometimes even prison– just for reading a book that was deemed to be too masculine.

Than isn’t news to most people, and in fact most could probably name at least one nation where such literary rules are still firmly enforced today, but we tend to think of such notions as being problems found only in far away places.  In Medieval Japan, for example, where privileged court women, living lives of excruciating boredom, were only allowed to read things that were deemed to be safely trivial.  Or in ancient Greece, where woman weren’t allowed to read for themselves at all, and had to content themselves not only with mundane reading material, but also with the literary services of educated slaves.  But that sort of thing couldn’t be part of Western history, right?

Wrong.  The history of   Don’t forget that Mary Wollstonecraft rocked Britain when she argued, in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, that women should be educated.  Don’t forget that Jane Austen had to be educated by proxy through her brothers and father.  Later she had to publish her works anonymously because women were not permitted to publish books– especially books in which well-read female characters often outwitted male characters.  In Victorian America, dime novels aimed at middle-class women were viewed as inappropriate and even dangerous.  Believe it or not, some of our female ancestors wouldn't have been allowed to walk into a bookshop and purchase any tome they wanted.

That thought makes you feel very privileged, doesn’t it?  It kind of makes you want to go read something just because you can.