The Navigation of Physical Space Within “Wuthering Heights”

While paranormal hauntings and an enigmatic landscape lend Wuthering Heights its sense of gothic terror, the actions of characters such as Heathcliff extend beyond the merely horrific: their total disregard for convention and civility render elements of Brontë’s text virtually inaccessible to the socialized being. Thematically and symbolically, Wuthering Heights is riddled with margins: images of windows, doorways, thresholds, and gateways heavily inform the text. Traditionally, these symbols entail division, restriction, and change, both in the literal sense and as allegories for the socially constructed parameters of civilization. But the narrative power of Wuthering Heights is largely contingent upon the ways in which Brontë’s characters navigate these physical and metaphorical boundaries: the volatile landscapes and complex architecture within the novel are repeatedly linked to the human body, and can often be read in coded sexual terms. So as the characters of Wuthering Heights engage with the physical spaces they occupy, and specifically with liminal areas such as windows and doorways, they encounter an observable nexus of social and sexual taboos: the characters of Heathcliff and Lockwood respectively embody two opposite responses to this half- civilized world.

Mysteriously orphaned as a child, and described by Brontë as “A dark-skinned gipsy in aspect,” the character of Heathcliff is socially and racially divided from his childhood community of Wuthering Heights. The resulting sense of financial and ethnic separation from the communal masses is reflected clearly in the voyeuristic physical spaces that Heathcliff often occupies. In Chapter VI of Volume I, when the Linton’s dog bites Cathy at Thrushcross Grange, Heathcliff later explains to Nelly: “I refused to go without Cathy…. The curtains were still looped up at one corner, and I resumed my station as spy; because, if Catherine had wished to return, I intended shattering their great glass panes to a million of fragments, unless they let her out” (Brontë, 51). The “great glass panes” in this scene clearly represent a degree of physical separation between Heathcliff and the object of his desire, with the glass creating a tangible but transparent boundary between himself and the world of Thrushcross Grange. But perhaps more notably, the scene demonstrates the way in which physical and social othering can manifest specifically as the realized sense of voyeurism that is routinely experienced by Heathcliff. Identifying himself as a “spy” in the scene, Heathcliff, rather than Nelly narrates this passage: from his isolated positioning behind the window, Cathy is reduced to an object of his gaze, and even when Nelly recounts the story to Lockwood, the language and visual perspective of the scene belong to Heathcliff. The passage is also one of Heathcliff’s earliest experiences with what Pauline Nestor refers to as an “endless deferral of satisfaction” (Brontë, Introduction, XXV), a characteristic of his voyeuristic social positioning with several physical and social consequences. Although he considers shattering the glass, and thereby breaching both the physical and moral boundaries in Thrushcross Grange that separate him from Catherine, Heathcliff ultimately remains passive. In what will prove to be a formative moment in his life (as Cathy meets Edgar Linton, the man who eventually marries her) he remains a perpetual outlier both physically and symbolically, yet clings to this position in order to experience a limited, one-sided satiation of his fixation upon Cathy. Heathcliff, as spectator, retains the ability in this chapter to covertly view an object of his desire, thereby satisfying an emotional need for closeness without ever directly experiencing physical satisfaction or intimacy of any form: a circumstance later echoed in Chapter XX of Volume II when he notes, “My Soul’s bliss kills my body, but does not satisfy itself” (Brontë, 333).

Of course, Heathcliff’s status as voyeur cannot naturally grant him access to the desired physical spaces that Cathy and Edgar occupy: when he enters these spaces at last, he does so in acts of physical and social transgression. In Chapter XV of Volume 2, after acquiring possession of both Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange, Heathcliff “…made no ceremony of knocking or announcing his name: he was master, and availed himself of the master’s privilege to walk straight in, without saying a word” (Brontë, 285). Heathcliff is depicted frequently throughout Wuthering Heights as a bestial, even devilish figure: in accordance with this Gothic imagery, there may be an underlying vampiric, and therefore rape-like, element to such casual and unwanted invasion of feminine- occupied spaces. It is unsurprising, then, that these psychologically violent infringements upon a physical space within Wuthering Heights are routinely accompanied by grotesque disfigurations of the body: of course, this is first hinted at much earlier in the text, when the Changeling representing Cathy’s ghost attempts to breach Lockwood’s bedroom window, but the even more frightening scene occurs in Chapter XV, when Heathcliff violates Cathy’s grave. Heathcliff’s actions, which are fueled by dissonant and perverse bodily desire, are explained in full as he tells Nelly:

“…In the evening I went to the churchyard…. Being alone, and conscious two yards of loose earth was the sole barrier between us, I said to myself—“I’ll have her in my arms again!” …I got a spade from the tool-house, and began to delve with all my might—it scraped the coffin; I fell to work with my hands; the wood commenced cracking about the screws; I was on the point of attaining my object, when it seemed that I heard a sigh from some one above, close at the edge of the grave, and bending down” (Brontë, 289).

In this scene, the effort of opening the coffin, and especially the action of actually breaking the wood with his bare hands, demonstrates Heathcliff’s efforts towards total physical destruction of a barrier between his body and Catherine’s. Furthermore, the act of breaching the coffin is socially as well as physically transgressive: in addition to violating the clear separation that cemeteries establish between living bodies and corpses in human civilization, Heathcliff’s language may even indicate an ongoing sexual desire for Cathy. In other words, Heathcliff may not only harbor desire for Cathy as he remembers her, but also for her present state in the novel, as a corpse: his use of the term “my object” can be read as referencing Cathy’s corpse as an object of affection, or of desire, while his desperation to “have her in my arms again” is an unsettlingly physical and even romantic sentiment to demonstrate towards a lifeless and decaying body. In this scene, Brontë’s diction and Heathcliff’s stated desires both contain a borderline implication of necrophilia: among the most appalling of social taboos. Thus, as Heathcliff begins to engage more aggressively with the physical space around him, he abandons more carelessly the norms and standards of the society that constrained him: the anticlimactic frustration of his voyeurism gives way to a tendency towards transgression, and his bodily desires grow increasingly perverse.

A novel of lingering tensions and oftentimes of profound horror, Wuthering Heights functions, in some ways, as a haunted text. The human tragedy and supernatural horror of the narrative besets the audience—but some of its poison is released through the telling. One of the great paradoxes of Wuthering Heights is the simultaneous necessity and limitations of both physical social boundaries: while Catherine’s strict adherence to societal convention arguably destroys both Heathcliff’s life and her own, the total lack of regard for the parameters of civilized society that Heathcliff demonstrates has horrific consequences of its own. Lockwood, on the other hand, hovers on the threshold between the conventional and the primitive: although a civilized man, he is repeatedly drawn to the seclusion and enigmatic wilderness of Wuthering Heights. Neither rejecting nor wholly embracing conventional society, Lockwood’s consolation in the face of Wuthering Heights’ tragic history is achieved through acts of communication with the character of Nelly. Lockwood often misinterprets what he sees at Wuthering Heights, and Nelly occasionally embellishes or omits information in order to fit her internalized opinion of each character; nevertheless, through lengthy narration the two characters are ultimately able to piece together an imperfect but nuanced understanding of the occupants of Wuthering Heights. In this way, they begin to exorcise the fraught history of the landscape from their own souls. These acts of healing are reflected by the newfound ability of the characters to navigate the physical thresholds of the house: in the first scene of the novel, Lockwood attempts to enter through the gateway of Wuthering Heights, but is apprehended (Brontë, 3). By the end of the novel, having fully recounted the place’s history to the reader, Lockwood is able to enter easily, stating, “I had neither to climb the gate, nor to knock, it yielded to my hand” (Brontë, 307). The ability to navigate the physical thresholds of the landscape seems to parallel the redemptive and cleansing quality of verbalizing and communicating the tragic history of Wuthering Heights; thus, in the souls of both Nelly and Lockwood, the terrors of a haunted past are comprehended, and ultimately mitigated through mutual acts of translation.

Through its characters’ engagements with the literal and metaphorical boundaries of their social spaces, Wuthering Heights demonstrates the ambiguous line between civilized and animalistic, the dissatisfaction of forced and othered voyeurism, the terrifying distortions of the transgressive body, and the catharsis of narrative. Interestingly, though, the reader is placed in a peculiar position by the end of the novel. For while Nelly tells the story to Lockwood, and Lockwood to the audience, the story is not ours to tell—we have no such purgative ability. The audience then becomes the perpetual voyeur, experiencing the novel in a profoundly visceral fashion, while never quite entering the novel’s inaccessible world. The story then lingers with a strange and almost supernatural beauty that the reader consumes, yet struggles to translate. This is perhaps the most extraordinary literary achievement of Emily Brontë’s narration within Wuthering Heights. She creates a world whose history must be told over and over again—leaving our souls affected, our slumbers unquiet.