Wuthering Heights Chapters 3-11

I know eight chapters seems like I'm going a little fast, but everything was going along rather blandly, until I got to chapter 11, when things became very complicated and interesting. First of all, there are several narrators in this novel. There is Lockwood, the tenant at the Grange, Nelly, the Earnshaw's nanny/housekeeper/soulkeeper, and Catherine I, who speaks from her notebooks (there may be more, I'm not sure yet). They tell the tale in an out of order fashion -- I believe only Nelly tells the story chronologically. Before Nelly starts telling the family history to Lockwood, we hear Catherine tell a version of the story from her journal, in chapter three. This is a very curious chapter. We have heard what Joseph, the groundskeeper, sounds like from his dealings with Lockwood. His charater is written in a sort of English country vernacular, which never changes, whether Lockwood is hearing him speak in the moment, or Cathy is writing in a journal, or Nelly is relating an account of him to Lockwood; Joseph is always written in the same nearly indecipherable vernacular, full of outrageously old (maybe olde) fashioned words and pronunciations that I can scarcely make out. It seems a little strange to me that Bronte always chose to represent Joseph using this vernacular, no matter who is speaking. I mean, would ten year-old Cathy really record Joseph's language in the vernacular form? Nelly, although also a servant, is not recorded in this way, so are we to assume that she doesn't sound abnormal? Heathcliff couldn't speak English before he came to Wuthering Heights and his language doesn't differ from the other normalized characters who do not speak in a dialect. Yet, he and Cathy do speak in a sort of argot, don't they? We never really get to hear their private conversations, and they are always being interrupted. Also, did you notice that quite early, we think of the Earnshaws and Lintons as ORPHANS? I'm getting ahead of myself.


Much like in Moby-Dick we come upon a chapel and sermon scene. Although Bronte's is in a dream sequence, and the experience of Lockwood in Jabes Branderham's congregation is much more personal, and dangerous. There are some ideas in this dream-sermon that I don't really understand, but whether that is because I don't have a critical edition which would tell me if I'm simply not recognizing Anglican jargon, or if in fact this is deliberately confusing dream talk, I'm not sure. After listening an excruciatingly long time to a seemingly endless sermon, Lockwood says he "was moved to rise and denounce Jabes Branderham as the sinner of the sin that no Christian need pardon." Now what in the world is this referring to? An unpardonable sin? Or a sin that simply doesn't warrant pardon? I don't clearly understand. Next the chapter describes Lockwood as telling the reverend that the "sin" he has committed is carrying on too long -- but the catch is that he tells his fellow listeners, "have at him! Drag him down and crush him to atoms, that the place which knows him may know him no more!" I think Lockwood is trying to say that he doesn't have to forgive the Reverend his overlong sermon -- they call it the "first of the seventy-first" which I'm taking to be a reference to the limits of forgiveness -- the first of the seventy first is the final straw upon which afterward it is righteous to carry out retribution against another. It is as if Lockwood, who is kind of a smart aleck, gets exasperated and then gives this clever good-day to the reverend, who then eerily replies that "Thou art the Man!" (who has burned through his chances for forgiveness, and is now up for judgement), and sets the whole assembly on him, saying that "all His saints" have the honour of executing judgement on those who's chances for salvation have run out. Yet I'm left wondering, what is the crime? I think that is a question that the novel consistently asks -- what are these crimes that we are so guilty of that our inmost moral fiber is compromised and we end up deserving of annihilation?

I interpret Father Mapple's sermon to be a sort of warning against trying to live a life on the run, which even Father Mapple has to realize he is doing, in his impregnable pulpit. All of the characters in Wuthering Heights seem to exist on the premise that another person is their undoing. They are on the run from some judgement of their predicament -- Cathy with her two husbands, Heathcliff with his thunderbolts of retribution, Hindely plagued by the loss of his father's favor, Linton, who cannot command respect or enact the violence that would supposedly make him the king of Catherine's heart, and Nelly, who seems to feel that she is a part of everyone's sufferings, and somehow must struggle to control it all.

As the tragic romance develops over the next few chapters, some interesting ideas surfaced about what I've heretofore mentioned as the gaze, especially the returned gaze and feminity. Maybe it was Sedgewick that had a triangle theory? Anyway, as chapter ten winds down, I observed a rather startling line:

I determined to watch his movements.

Nelly, it seems, sees all, or wants to see all, judge all, control all. She is this unwanted, undesirable, awkward thing. She is not permitted to be one of the children, who desires and is respected and looks out for herself. What does she desire? Who does she gaze at? The answer, according to chapter 11 seems to be Hindley. She actually admits her "angelic" moments of conscience are her own repressed desires finding a suitable outlet, appropriate for one who is not allowed to desire:

I've persuaded my conscience that it was a duty to warn him how people talked regarding his ways...I came to a stone...it serves as a guidepost to...the Heights. The sun shone yellow on it's grey head, reminding me of summer, and I cannot say why, but all at once, a gush of child's sensations flowed into my heart. Hindley and I held it a favorite spot twenty years before. I gazed long at the weather-worn block, and stooping down, perceived a hole near the bottom still full of snail shells and pebbles, which we were very fond of storing there..."Poor Hindley!" I exclaimed, involuntarily...this must be Hareton, my Hareton, not altered greatly since I left him, ten months since.

I just about went berserk after reading this! The summer sun shines on a sign that leads her to Hindley, who she regards as her master. She bends down to examine a hole in the stone where she and Hindley used to store things like snail shells and pebbles and perishable things, and then sees her master's son, who she claims as "my Hareton." Now, Hareton's birth mother is dead, and Nelly has been the child's nurse and nanny. But upon reading this passage it appears that Nelly imagines herself a consumater (legitimizing her and Hindley's relationship the same way Heathcliff and Cathy do, outside of the limits of Wuthering Heights and the Grange, in a liminal area like the moor; this spot -- the very line between all known worlds -- is even more provacative), a womb (the hole in the rock), and fertilization (images of nature and hard vs. soft/wet things, chambers, growth, engorgement, slime), and viola!, Nelly sees a child -- Hareton (and claims him as her own). This child, SO much like Pearl from The Scarlet Letter, does not recognize her or the kind of authority that she must think she represents, and he HURLS A ROCK AT HER. His baby features were "distorted...into a shocking expression of malignity." Everything is backwards here: the (presumably) virgin nurse goes through the figurative stages of fertilization and childbirth -- but the baby's expression is not childlike, and it's only real protector is Heathcliff, who is not exactly the mother-type. Nelly get's to remain virginal, and her sexual desire remains unsatisfied, hence by the end of the chapter she has meddled in matters that do not concern her; she is a busybody precisely because she never gets busy.

I have other ideas about this chapter that would be better served with a little more gender theory. I think Heathcliff represents a lot of physical release - he is rather violent. Nelly's physicality is seen in her housework, and she is never to imagine that she is of the same class as the Earnshaws, Lintons, or Heathcliff. She is a servant, and presumably celibate. But what a repressed sexuality! She is passionately loyal to her masters, and even rather in love with Cathy. The possibility that she can express that passion sexually is severely limited, and that energy tends to send her meddling in everyone's affairs. She describes her involvement in the drama as "put[ting] in my tongue," "I commenced a soothing speech," "it urged me to resolve further on mounting vigilant guard," "'Judas! Traitor!' I ejaculated," and when she betrays Cathy's trust to Linton, she relates how livid Cathy looks, and then says, "I made up my mind for broken bones, at least; but she only glared about her for an instant."
She expects a physical altercation -- I almost want to say that this whole chapter is about Nelly's sexual repression, and the ways in which she finds gratification through the violent acts of others (the whole divine retribution thing applies here). Yet, I cannot get over the imagery of the hole in the rock and the baby. It's just smacks of Melville and Hawthorne all over.