Copyright 1999 The Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights reserved.

"I'll Cry Myself Sick": Illness in Wuthering Heights

Susan Rubinow Gorsky
The idealized nineteenth-century woman--pale, passive, reluctant to eat, and prone to faint--seems unhealthy to modern eyes. To her society, and especially to its literature, the delicate woman was healthy; but if, by choice or chance, she failed to live within the confines of the traditional female role, she could expect to fall ill--to suffer a breakdown of body or spirit, develop melancholia or palpitations, enter a decline, perhaps die. 1 In Wuthering Heights, when Catherine attempts to accede to her socially-approved role, she denies her nature and faces personal disintegration; when she violates the rules, she becomes sick. 2 In contrast, the emotional and physical well-being of her daughter, Catherine, helps restore order and bring resolution to the novel. Interweaving myth and mystery with complex, realistic psychodrama, Emily Bront manipulates social and literary stereotypes about women's roles and health, issues that affected her life as well as her characters'. She uses illness as a theme and descriptions of illness as a technique to elucidate other themes, control plot, direct meaning, and define the characters' identity, relationships, and significance. Bront's intimate knowledge of the human psyche, of social pressure, emotional pain, and psychological aberration helps her create a novel that explores the interaction of heredity and environment, the power of love, and the effects of its denial. Beyond the sequence of romantic tangles and doomed loves motivating this complex tale of two generations and two homes lies a novel rich in evocation and significance. Catherine Earnshaw, her alcoholic brother Hindley, and their adopted brother Heathcliff inhabit the wild world of Wuthering Heights; their cousins, Edgar and Isabella Linton, live in the gentility of Thrushcross Grange. In accord with society's expectations, Catherine denies the passionate love she shares [End Page 173] with Heathcliff and marries Edgar. In anger and vengeance, Heathcliff elopes with gentle Isabella. The defining passions and alliances of the first generation threaten to control the second generation as well--Catherine Linton, the significantly named daughter of Catherine and Edgar; her first husband, Linton, son of Isabella and Heathcliff; and her second husband, Hareton, Hindley's son and thus her own first cousin. Poetic and visionary, Wuthering Heights derives some of its techniques and themes from the Gothic--the layers of narration, the pallor of the good man and the darkness of the villain, the exaggerated actions and reactions of impassioned characters. But, denying Gothic stereotypes and insisting on its own psychological reality, the novel balances romanticism and realism to reject the absolutes of either vision and their underlying assumptions. Emphasizing the novel's Gothic heritage is its layered narration, set in motion through a convenient illness. If Lockwood, the initial narrator, had not fallen ill, he would not have heard the story of Wuthering Heights from Nelly, the Earnshaw family nurse. The narrative doubling (and the fact that Nelly is an unreliable narrator) introduces questions about perception, truth, and values representative of the Gothic novel but here imbued with psychological realism. Typical of the novel's subtle complexities, Heathcliff may be as dark and mysterious as any Gothic villain, but golden Catherine is allied with him; he is demonic but she haunts him in life and death; he is overwhelmingly male, but his dying reflects the female. As the novel relies on and alters the Gothic tradition to explore psychological realities and gender roles, so too it relies on and alters other myths and tales (the evil step-mother, the loss of Eden, the story of King Lear), and it creates its own mythic world. 3 Wuthering Heights intrigued and shocked Victorian readers (and can still shock modern readers) with its insistence on attractive demonic characters, unsolvable mysteries, passion, cruelty, and evil. While many readers find the first half of the novel more powerful than the second, according to nineteenth-century medical standards the intensity Heathcliff and especially Catherine display in those pages is unhealthy: Catherine faces ill-health as a consequence of that intensity; and their relationship is doomed. In the second half of the novel, Bront demonstrates how physical health and mental integration can be achieved, and she effects a mythic and psychological resolution. Clearly connecting health and

Copyright 1999 The Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights reserved. happiness, Bront suggests that both, along with an appropriate kind of love, are necessary for the wellbeing of society and the individual. 4 [End Page 174]

Women's Roles, Women's Health

The cult of the delicate woman, idealizing fragility and a restricted social role, reached its peak in the decades immediately following Bront's novel, then waned as the "new woman" gained ascendancy late in the century. Nonetheless, the ideals of passivity and delicacy predated Bront and lingered long after her death, conspiring to undermine the health of nineteenth-century women. The famous neurologist S. Weir Mitchell asserted, "The man who does not know sick women does not know women." 5 For most of the period, given that the normative definition of health was male and that the delicate female was idealized, he was right. 6 Many doctors and patients linked women's illnesses to their reproductive processes, the specifically female condition that in turn defined women's roles and health as it literally and metaphorically confined their lives. Believing women to have more irritable and responsive nervous systems, society and medicine thought they were more vulnerable to physical and nervous (emotional) illness such as declines and the so-called low fevers. Seeing women as manipulative, people thought they faked illness to make excuses or gain attention. Robust health in girls signified an unacceptable hoyden or tomboy; a passionate nature foretold immorality or the significantly named hysteria (from a Greek word meaning womb). Women who violated the norms through seeking to parallel men's education, jobs, or freedom were considered unhealthy as well as unfeminine. Medical beliefs and the powerful myth of womanhood thus fostered the prevalence of "women's complaints." Because society idealized delicacy, it is not surprising that some girls developed symptoms analogous to physical illnesses, including eating disorders and the romanticized "wasting diseases" or "consumptions." 7 Although anorexia (lack of appetite) can be a symptom of other illnesses, such as having a fever or being depressed, anorexia nervosa is an insidious disease, most frequently affecting girls and young women. It often begins in the girls' conscious attempts to control some aspect of their lives, usually but not always their weight or body image. However, without their will or desire, the anorectics' efforts to control food intake can get out of hand, crossing into psychological illness. Eventually the disease controls the girls' behavior and well-being. Though anorexia nervosa (usually abridged as anorexia) was not labeled as such during Bront's lifetime (the disorder received its first clinical description and its name in 1873), anorectic behaviors were a natural outgrowth of the definition of women's health and the idealization of [End Page 175] genteel femininity. With enough money to ensure an adequate and varied diet, middle-class girls and women began to develop peculiar (they would say refined) eating habits. Food preparation was associated with lower social classes and eating with the processes of digestion. A good appetite (especially for rich foods) implied other uncontrollable appetites, such as sexual desire. A contrasting mark of gentility, dainty eating communicated personal fastidiousness and moral restraint. These factors, combined with sexual and behavioral repression and even corseting, created a context for the growth of behaviors mimicking eating disorders: picky eating, secret eating, food avoidance. In themselves, such behaviors are not enough to define a disease, even though they parallel certain manifestations of anorexia nervosa. But some girls progressed from "refined" eating habits to a potentially fatal practice, and some exhibited the psychological distress now associated with the disease. Today we acknowledge the role of social expectation in the development of anorexia nervosa. But even in Bront's time, when neither the link nor the disease had been identified, society clearly had the power to define a physical and behavioral ideal that could lead to ill health. This is the context within which Bront worked, creating in the two Catherines contrasting models of female health and social stability. Moreover, for Bront illness was more than a social issue or a literary motif; it was her life. With tuberculosis, alcoholism, and eating disorders in her family, she knew the power illness grants to the invalid to control her world, and the power it has to wrest control from her. "Almost certainly" suffering from anorexia nervosa, Bront was sent home from school when she was wasting from rejecting food, she left a job as governess for the same reason, she and her sisters intentionally staged a hunger strike to manipulate their father into keeping a beloved servant, and she may even have willed her death by denying herself food. 8 Food avoidance, consciously or unconsciously controlled, was just one symptom of her illness: she was preoccupied with food; she had an unusual need to control her

Copyright 1999 The Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights reserved. environment; she often retreated into a fantasy world she could control, most notably in her poems and her tales of Gondal, the mysterious realm she created and peopled with immense, if flawed, characters. Living more vividly in her imagination than most women (or men) did in reality, she sought refuge from the ordinary by enacting stories from Gondal almost until her death. She displayed intense attachments to a few people, always close to home. Catherine Earnshaw contains a lot of Emily Bront. Suffering from the demands of society and the chaos of her life, [End Page 176] Catherine suffers as well from nervous disorders that contribute to her ill-health and her death. She is anorectic and displays both the helplessness and the manipulative tendencies often associated with anorexia nervosa today. She tries to use her illness to order the world, but finally her illness and her world destroy her. Unable to control her love or her lover, her world or herself, she brings ruin upon herself and others. In contrast, her daughter's physical health and emotional integration foreshadow and make possible the novel's resolution. The health of the male characters bears significance as well. Heathcliff, hale almost to the end, is both foil and parallel to the first Catherine; his son Linton demonstrates through constant illness and food avoidance that he truly is "'more a lass than a lad'" (p. 188); Edgar, weak and effeminate, successfully fathers a child but cannot protect her as a father should; Hareton is the archetypal male, "well-made," "stout and healthy" (p. 167), a savage who, once tamed, is a fitting mate for the healthy second Catherine.

Nature, Nurture, and the Supernatural

Because Bront's characters are larger than ordinary life and because life on the moors is, as Lockwood observes and Nelly confirms, so immense, the world of the novel could slip into pure fantasy, a place ruled by demonic powers, mad obsessions, and ghosts. Many of the characters demonstrate aberrant psychology and passionate intensity. Reflecting the Gothic heritage, Bront also grounds the novel in psychological realism, enhancing its emotional power and offering a more complex interpretation as she examines her characters' actions and reactions, health and illness. She knew, as well as any psychologist today, that the powerful natural forces controlling life include the then-uncatalogued but not unrecognized psychological elements that create human nature. She lets some of her superstitious and uneducated characters speculate on the demonic source of psychological illness, adding a thrill to the novel. But, relying more on realism, she connects psychological illness to emotional causes and to physical illness. Thus Catherine's serious emotional collapses are accompanied by (or defined as) "brain fever" (p. 114). So too Bront denies that Heathcliff is controlled or influenced by Satan. It is Catherine who often instigates the childish misdeeds and adult misbehaviors in which she and Heathcliff indulge; alive or dead, she haunts him, and her spirit draws him to death. The choice between physiology and demons, like the definition of good and evil, lacks the complexity Bront develops in her themes [End Page 177] or her explanations of character motivation and, by implication, human nature. In weighing the relative power of psychological make-up or heredity and child-rearing or environment, the long-standing, familiar debate over nature and nurture, Bront gives only a slight edge to nature. Hindley may find justice for his alcoholism and abusiveness in having been displaced by the adopted Heathcliff, but the behaviors suit his heritage of violence. Heathcliff experiences no love, for even Catherine's feelings are both beyond and less than the ordinary love a child needs, and Nelly traces his abusiveness to his mistreatment, especially by Hindley: it was "enough to make a fiend of a saint" (p. 55). 9 Still, his childhood tendency towards violence suggests he may be predisposed towards negative behaviors. Catherine, bright, energetic, and highly temperamental, copes with a loveless home by escaping to the moors with Heathcliff. Later, forced by one side of herself to deny another, she undergoes serious illness, including depression, anorexia, and hallucination. Acknowledging the power of society, Bront shows how Catherine reacts internally to the external division between a natural free spirit and a trammeled nineteenth-century lady. Suffering from not being allowed to be herself, from conflict with society, and from thwarted love, divided from her soul and her soul-mate, she both acts out and falls ill. But Bront implies that the primary mental "illness" or aberration, however exacerbated by society, may be more fundamental. Nelly says that Catherine "had ways with her such as I never saw a child take up

Copyright 1999 The Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights reserved. before....Her spirits were always at high-water mark" (p. 34). Although this demonstrates how Nelly favors the more genteel manners of Thrushcross Grange, it also suggests that Catherine has a natural--or unnatural--amount of spirit. 10 Catherine's wild mood swings from lively scamp to heart-broken child, exaggerated beyond the contemporary vision of the overly emotional female, may be traced to both the Earnshaws' "'violent dispositions'" (p. 111) and her upbringing. When her father pronounces, "'I cannot love thee,'" it "made her cry, at first; and then, being repulsed continually hardened her"; reinforcing the influence of environment (personal and societal), her father calls her a "'good lass'" only when illness makes her "gentle" (pp. 35-36). Her divided nature is prefigured by the names Lockwood finds scratched in the woodwork (p. 15). First Catherine Earnshaw, she longs to be Catherine Heathcliff, in an impossible marriage or in total identification with Heathcliff; she will finally become Catherine Linton, the wife uneasy with her condition and her name. [End Page 178] The most complex questions about nature and nurture involve the interaction of the Earnshaws and Lintons, symbolized by Catherine's journeying between the Heights and the Grange, two different options for her "place." Abjuring simple contrasts, Bront may allow Thrushcross Grange, with its light and warmth, its intimations of "heaven" (p. 40), to appear as Eden to Catherine and Heathcliff when they gaze at the forbidden fruit through the closed window, but it has its not-so-hidden serpent: the Heights pair first glimpse the Grange pair fighting; and the initial contact between Grange and Heights is violent, when the Linton dog attacks Catherine. Still, the contrast of the two worlds generally works, heightened by the physical likeness of the Grange pair--Edgar and Isabella--and of the Heights children--Hindley and Catherine. The childish natures of these four and of Heathcliff foreshadow their adult ones. Although altered by experience, as Heathcliff is by his abuse and his later separation from the moor, all five are essentially unchanged--unchanged in nature. Heredity plays its role in the next generation as well: Heathcliff and Isabella's son has his ego and her passivity, but physically seems pure Linton; Catherine and Edgar's daughter has her willful passion and his capacity for gentle love. Catherine and Hareton resemble not only each other but also her mother and his aunt, the first Catherine. Catherine breaks from her essential nature, not just from Heathcliff, when she marries Edgar. Wuthering Heights represents passion as surely as does the windswept, barren, moor on which it stands. In sharp contrast to that wild world where natural forces can overwhelm the human is the civilized world of Thrushcross Grange, where passions are controlled and people usually behave with gentleness and gentility. In the mystical Gothic world of the novel, Catherine and Heathcliff can achieve a transcendence of society's rules, including the rules that clearly defined and separated male and female; in the world of realistic fiction (reflecting Victorian society), they revert to stereotyped gender roles that destroy them as individuals and as a couple. 11 Catherine's move from Heights to Grange necessarily leads to her death. Her daughter moves from Grange to Heights and back, but because she differs in nature and nurture, this Catherine is only injured emotionally. Once healed, she can unite the two worlds in herself and for the future.

Disintegration and Illness: Catherine and Heathcliff's Demons

In showing how the first Catherine's life reflects the conflict and need for resolution between the opposing worlds of overwhelming [End Page 179] emotion and social convention, Bront manipulates elements of the Gothic, realism, and psychology and makes significant use of health and disease. Catherine's relationship with Heathcliff is tinged with psychic aberration, yet it creates the compelling emotional center of the novel; it is unhealthy in nineteenth-century terms but gives her more scope to be herself. When thwarted in this relationship, she falls ill. In contrast, society accepts her relationship with Edgar, but she cannot; in fulfilling this relationship, she finds disease. Her search for her place resonates with metaphors of anorexia: when she cannot "stomach" her life or "swallow" the demands a relationship entails, her stomach rebels and she stops swallowing food as well. Connected by passion if not by sex, Catherine may not always like Heathcliff. She does not love him in ordinary ways, but she needs him as he needs her, as two parts of one self. Providing a more normative (if often unreliable) outsider's vision, Lockwood offers the first glimpses of Catherine and Heathcliff. His

Copyright 1999 The Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights reserved. direct experiences reveal Heathcliff's tyranny, his unbridled dreams introduce Catherine's haunting power, and Nelly's stories offer her version of the facts. These three modalities--realism, mysticism, and psychology--teach Lockwood about an intense, mysterious relationship that functions in three worlds: the "reality" fiction creates; the fantasy of ghosts and unconscious dreams; and the psychological world of the mind. Social differences, implicit incest, or their very natures make taboo the love between Heathcliff and Catherine. Practical Nelly, who says Catherine was always "much too fond of Heathcliff" (p. 34), shows a more ordinary reaction to having been raised like a "foster-sister" to Hindley: the only effect is her readiness to forgive Hindley's errors (p. 55). In contrast, Catherine and Heathcliff share far more than their upbringing in a relationship whose intensity is underscored by Catherine's first (perhaps intentional) anorectic behavior: "'I hate him to be flogged! I can't eat my dinner'" (p. 49). Their adult passion, unfettered by the social reality of family and child-rearing, is not a mature or emotionally healthy love. It is the obsessive attachment of two people who feel themselves one. Striking at the psychological heart of their relationship, Catherine says that Heathcliff is "'more myself than I am'" and "'whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same'" (p. 68) and she claims, "'I am Heathcliff--he's always, always in my mind...as my own being'" (p. 70). In turn, Heathcliff calls her his "'life'" (p. 135) and his "'soul'" (p. 138). They could not marry even if circumstances or society allowed, because they see themselves as one self, yet to merge two people violates the selfhood [End Page 180] of both. Bront may have adapted the incest theme from the Gothic novel because it allowed her to externalize the unity between the two, the likeness they feel, or even the taboo they sense against their romantic or sexual union. Despite the intensity of their bond, it begins to tear when they first glimpse Thrushcross Grange. At the Heights, Catherine "had small inclination" to "restrain an unruly nature when it would bring her neither credit nor praise"; to fit in at the Grange, she must "adopt a double character without exactly intending to deceive anyone" (p. 56). Although attracted to the order, calm, and normality the Lintons represent, she is attached to the wild, passionate, freedom of Heathcliff. Her proposed marriage to Edgar suits the veneer with which civilized society covers raw nature, and it fits her socially determined role. It places her in the conventional female world of the valley, away from Heathcliff and his untamed, male world at the top of the moor. But since Catherine's attachment to Heathcliff goes beyond metaphor, she knows in her "'soul'" and "'heart'" that the marriage is "'wrong'" (p. 67): it would betray not only Heathcliff but the part of her he represents. Nelly, using unconscious sexual imagery as she acknowledges Heathcliff's importance, says Edgar will find it "difficult to make an equally deep impression" (p. 55) on Catherine, an apt prophecy. If home is diabolical, she says that "'heaven'" cannot be "'home'" without Heathcliff (p. 68). To marry Edgar, to desert Heathcliff, is to deny her nature and identity, and it will make her ill. Catherine's first serious illness occurs when Heathcliff runs away after hearing she will marry Edgar. Although her subsequent rain-soaked vigil offers a proximate cause, her sickness is equally psychogenic, and Nelly, slow to acknowledge what she cannot comprehend, fears "she was going mad" (p. 75). Her teeth chatter, she is delirious, and she complains she is "'starving'" (a significant archaic and dialect term that means freezing). Her fever may be real enough to kill Mr. and Mrs. Linton when they contract it from her, but it is at least worsened by her emotional state. The doctor treats her as he would a fever patient or a madwoman--remedies differed little--cutting her hair, bleeding her, and feeding her "whey, and water gruel"; but he warns the family that to "cross" her might provoke a "fit" (pp. 74-75). Here Catherine demonstrates the secondary gain illness can provide, as she achieves some control over her world. The attention she garners, however, does not bring Heathcliff back. Recovering as much as she ever will and faced with Heathcliff's absence, Catherine proceeds with the marriage, leaving the home where [End Page 181] her soul resides to move to the conventional world where she will be an uncomfortable visitor. In that world and without Heathcliff, she can, for a brief time, appear relatively healthy and outwardly content. But her passivity reflects the Victorian ideal, not the true Catherine. She remains "subject to depression of spirits" and "seasons of gloom and silence," which Edgar attributes to the earlier illness (p. 78). In that the previous illness revealed her propensity for psychological disease--rage, depression, anorexia, and loss of emotional control--he is right; but internal conflicts fuel what she calls her "very, very bitter misery" (p. 85). Heathcliff's return occasions such

Copyright 1999 The Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights reserved. ecstasy that Catherine can "neither eat, nor drink" (p. 83), a loss of appetite that echoes the anorexia to which she is prone or which she consciously or unconsciously uses for her own ends. Heathcliff's return also causes the emotional climax of the novel, forcing her to realize she cannot have both Edgar and him; in fact, she cannot have him at all. This recognition provides the catalyst that transforms her chronic unhappiness into acute emotional illness, manifested as depression, anorexia, and perhaps unconsciously willed death. Thus Catherine falls ill when she is unable to submerge her needs and personality into society's choice--marriage with Edgar--and she falls ill when she is unable to follow her own choice--life with Heathcliff. In both cases, dis-ease causes disease. Catherine and Heathcliff's mutual obsession is destructive. She needs him as she needs a part of herself she finds attractive, frightening, and essential. She threatens, "'If I can't keep Heathcliff for my friend--if Edgar will be mean and jealous, I'll try to break their hearts by breaking my own'" (p. 100). When Edgar insists she choose, Catherine fasts for three days, seriously undermining her health. Perhaps so distraught she cannot eat, perhaps attempting to exercise control in the one area she can, she contends she could starve herself to death if she wished: she hesitates only because "'to starve,'" if Edgar does not care, "'would be no punishment'" (p. 103). While this sounds somewhat rational, within minutes she underscores her lack of self-command, as, "tossing about, she increased her feverish bewilderment to madness" (p. 104). To achieve individuality requires a measure of control, but Catherine lived at a time when women had little power over their lives. She sometimes claims a surprising degree of emotional control; at others she concedes her lack. Early in the novel she tells Edgar she "'did nothing deliberately,'" then immediately threatens "'I'll cry myself sick'" as if she can will her illness (p. 61). While her inability or refusal to eat may be an indication of her psychological distress, it may also be an attempt [End Page 182] to use food intake to demonstrate (excessive) control, suggesting that she may suffer from anorexia as a primary symptom. When Heathcliff is banished during the Lintons' visit to Wuthering Heights, Nelly agrees that Catherine would be "unfeeling" to eat, and Heathcliff, underscoring his connection to Catherine, "could eat little" (pp. 50-51). Thus Bront associates not eating with normal emotion. But Catherine rejects food to the point of starvation in her doomed attempt to prove her power. Unable to determine her relationship with Edgar or Heathcliff, she cannot even rule herself or her choices. Forced to define herself by choosing between two men and two equally impossible lives, in truth she has no option. That ultimately destroys her. Married and pregnant, Catherine is doubly trapped in traditional roles that deny Heathcliff any significance in her life. His return reminds her of her other self, lost or hidden or even distorted by the shape of her pregnant body. The confrontation among Heathcliff, Edgar, and Catherine, in which the two men quarrel and Catherine realizes she cannot have Heathcliff even as a friend, dramatizes her psychological split and leads her into a state representing her sense of powerlessness and her futile rage. She turns against both men as she turns against herself, deliberately or not. She claims a lack of control ("'I had no command of tongue, or brain'"), yet simultaneously attempts control (she wants to make a statement and regain "command," [p. 106]). Fearing "a fit, or going raging mad" (p. 106), she enters into a fast and illness. Her emotions may be heightened because she is seven months pregnant at the time, but she has always hated any kind of confinement. Reiterating the consistent use of imagery of closed windows, coffins, and prisons, Nelly warns that opening a window offers a chance to catch a "'death of cold,'" and Catherine counters that it offers "'a chance of life'" (p. 107). She may want Edgar's child to die or she may realize that the baby, controlling her even before birth, will be a living symbol of the loss of freedom and of Heathcliff. 12 Catherine insists she can starve herself to death to ensure Edgar's unhappiness, but she lacks such will. She may metaphorically be eating herself up (as literally happens in fasting), but she cannot achieve complete control. Nelly is probably honest in saying she did not understand the seriousness of Catherine's condition, for the illness, with its mixture of volition and helplessness, its physical and psychological elements, was far beyond Nelly's or the doctor's comprehension, and would have been beyond the comprehension of most nineteenth-century physicians. After three days of nothing but water, Catherine's "ghastly countenance, and strange exaggerated manner," her "wasted face" and [End Page

Copyright 1999 The Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights reserved. 183] tangled hair make graphic her despair (p. 103). Yet she regrets when she does eat, linking food to willpower and love, and threatening, "'I will die...since no one cares anything about me'" (p. 103). Some of her symptoms, such as fever and mood swings, typify fictionalized portrayals of insanity; others are more unusual, such as tearing her pillow "with her teeth" and, like Ophelia naming the flowers, arranging the feathers by type. Describing a vision to Nelly, Catherine says she could not recognize her mirrored image, symbolizing her internal division. Having destroyed part of herself in marrying Edgar and another part in rejecting him and their child, she has nothing--she is no one, and the face in the mirror is a stranger's. Wrenched from home and Heathcliff, "'converted, at a stroke into Mrs. Linton...an exile, and outcast,'" she wishes to be "'out of doors,'" to be "'a girl again, half savage and hardy, and free'" (p. 107). Her "actions, and ravings," her "maniac's fury," lead Nelly to speak of her "insanity" and the doctor to fear a "permanent alienation of intellect" (pp. 106-12). 13 Despite Edgar's careful nursing during her enforced passivity and his hope that renewed "bodily health" will bring mental "balance," Catherine, voluntarily or not, displays increasing "despondency" (pp. 114-15). Although her fever dissipates, everyone agrees with Catherine that she is dying. She is "all nerves" (p. 131) and pale, and the "dreamy and melancholy softness" in her eyes suggests she gazes far "beyond" ordinary life (p. 133). In submitting "placidly" to attempts to amuse her (p. 133) or in resting passively, she demonstrates how the traditional female role destroys her essential nature. She throws off that role when Heathcliff visits her, rousing her from listlessness. They share one passionate embrace, one moment of unity, and he claims she is his "'soul'" (p. 138). When Catherine cries that he and Edgar between them have killed her, she is at least symbolically right, but Heathcliff is also right in claiming she killed herself (p. 137). She cannot function trapped in nineteenth-century reality. Echoing the consistent imagery of confinement, she muses, "'I'm tired, tired of being enclosed here'" in the restrictive world of the Grange and the "'shattered prison'" of her body (p. 137). Denying herself food is a way to break free of her body by destroying its walls. Edgar represents following society's rules and Heathcliff represents defying them, but she could not survive with either alone. Her internal conflict and her conflict with society are irresolvable, since denying the rules dooms her, according to society, and denying her self by acceding to the rules equally spells doom. This double irony is heightened by Bront's use of anorexia, for the woman [End Page 184] who starves herself in order to prove that she cannot be controlled by others literally destroys herself. As a final irony, Catherine dies in childbirth, the definitive female act. In death, she looks peaceful, but Heathcliff cannot let her go. He may be the demon several characters suggest (seduced and destroyed by him, Isabella asks, is he "'a man,'" is he "'mad,'" or is he "'a devil'" [p. 116]); but his reaction to Catherine's death reveals a possessed man, not a possessing spirit. Beating his head until he bleeds, he cries, "'I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!'" He wants Catherine to "'haunt'" him (p. 143), and she does, a ghost or a projection of his needs. She remains a vibrant part of the second half of the novel.

Integration, Health, and Resolution

Although Edgar loves and mourns Catherine, his relatively virtuous and, by nineteenth-century standards, normal nature rejects histrionics. Unable to protect his daughter from Heathcliff's machinations, he at least manages to provide a happy childhood, a loving and stable foundation that helps her survive Heathcliff's revenge. Young Catherine may have her mother's eyes, her "capacity for intense attachments," and her "perverse will"; but she has her father's gentleness as well. She is also healthier than either, sick only with the "trifling illnesses...common with all children" (pp. 160-61). All of the second generation revert to the control of Heathcliff, the new patriarch, when their parents die in a series of symbolic deaths: Hindley shows the outcome of abuse by dying of the effects of alcoholism; Edgar reveals his weakness and his effeminate nature by contracting a wasting disease; and Isabella, who remains healthy while she obeys society's rules and stays with Heathcliff, falls ill with consumption

Copyright 1999 The Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights reserved. when she violates those rules, however justifiably, and leaves her abusive husband. Like the first generation, the children represent the tension between nature and nurture. Describing Hareton, Heathcliff suggests that "'one tree'" may "'grow as crooked as another, with the same wind to twist it'" (p. 159), and Linton blames his father's mistreatment for fostering the "'bad nature'" Catherine says he inherited (p. 243). Easily controlling his son and denying Hareton any civilizing or humanizing influences, Heathcliff brings out the worst in both. Neglect and abuse also aggravate Linton's illness, for Heathcliff denies him needed medical help and exacerbates his fears and unhappiness. [End Page 185] Catherine too falls under Heathcliff's control, coerced by him to marry Linton and soon widowed; but healthy and strong, she survives. The process of her survival, her growth into a mature and loving woman, is central to the second part of the novel and leads to the book's resolution. When Lockwood returns after many months' absence, he sees a stunning tableau. Since he also offered the first picture of Wuthering Heights, this provides a frame that underscores how much has changed. Catherine and Hareton sit close together in a warm, light kitchen, depicted with images that reveal their loving relationship and bright future: her voice is "sweet as a silver bell"; his "handsome features glowed with pleasure"; her "ringlets" are "light" and "shining" (pp. 260-61). Nelly explains the implications of this scene as she describes the triumph of love in the novel's literal and psychological resolution. Links to her aunt, Isabella, and her mother help define this Catherine's health and establish the potential resolution. Years earlier, when Heathcliff enticed Isabella into marriage and brought her to the misery of the Heights, bitter cold forced her to seek refuge in the kitchen, lest she "'starve'" (p. 148). When he compels Catherine to marry Linton and immures her at the Heights, Heathcliff sets up the parallel with Isabella: "'I've been starved a month and more,'" Catherine explains when she finally descends to the kitchen (p. 251). Like her aunt, Catherine is "starved" for love as well as warmth. Like her mother, Catherine falls ill when unhappy, in her case because of her separation from her dying father and her forced marriage. Sensing that she may use illness for secondary gain (as he often does), Linton mocks her, saying, "'[S]he may cry, and be sick as much as she pleases'" (p. 237). But here the parallels with her aunt and mother end. Unlike her aunt, she is strong enough to survive. Unlike her mother, she is too physically healthy to let illness control her and she is too emotionally healthy to starve herself. Catherine stops crying, regains her health, and rejoins the family in the kitchen. Her emotional and physical health enable her to establish herself as an individual and to find love. She can eat and cook and even carve vegetable parings. She rejects food only once, in order to confront Heathcliff: in that event, her anger, "her voice and glance," remind him of her mother (p. 229). Spending time in the kitchen, she gets to know Hareton. As she teaches him to read and inspires him to greater refinement in manner and attire, he teaches her to exchange pride for love. Heathcliff, who sees himself in Hareton--and Catherine [End Page 186] Earnshaw's eyes in both--may also see in them the fulfillment of his and Catherine's dream. The changes in Heathcliff by the novel's end may reflect the love he witnesses as well as the pull of his beloved Catherine's real or metaphoric ghost. Although he appears "quite strong and healthy" (p. 275), he separates himself from life, much as Catherine had done (p. 133). Without spiritual redemption or repentance, he, like her, abjures food. Although Nelly believes that his anorexia "was the consequence of his strange illness, not the cause" (p. 285), his death still seems an act of will. As he says to Nelly, "'I take so little interest in my daily life, that I hardly remember to eat, and drink....I have to remind myself to breathe--almost to remind my heart to beat!'" (pp. 274-75). The superstitious groundskeeper, Joseph, sees in Heathcliff's abnormal behavior proof that the devil has "'harried off his soul'" (p. 285). Some readers may also see signs of demonic intervention, but Heathcliff's behavior more clearly aligns him with Catherine, in accord with both the Gothic and the psychological realism central to the novel. Given the prevalent belief that women's heightened emotions enhanced their proclivity for illness and the amplitude of their symptoms, Heathcliff's behavior reflects the feminine, evoking the androgyny inherent in the Gothic and supporting Bront's denial of the current absolutes of gender-based definitions of identity and health. His behavior also links him more closely to Catherine, suggesting the degree of identification between the two and the extent to which illness controls them both. Dying in her paneled bed, a kind of shared coffin, Heathcliff is then buried next to her so that no one can tell "which is which" (p. 244). But the

Copyright 1999 The Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights reserved. end of Catherine and Heathcliff's tale (unless they haunt the moor) is not the end of Wuthering Heights, home or novel. There is resolution to be found in the next generation. The basis of that resolution is a love that derives from and enhances personal health, and that in turn contributes to the health of a wider society. Bront seems to suggest that the root of psychological illness, beyond what is inborn, is the failure to love (one's self and others) and to be loved--not in the wild and untrammeled passion of a Heathcliff and a Catherine, but within the bounds of society. The evil in the novel, if not innate, derives from such failure. The second Catherine taunts Heathcliff with these telling words: "'[Y]ou have nobody to love you; and, however miserable you make us, we shall still have the revenge of thinking that your cruelty rises from your greater misery! You are miserable, are you not? Lonely, like the devil, and [End Page 187] envious like him?'" (p. 244). If lovelessness and inappropriate love lead to evil, the right kind of love can overcome evil. Catherine can stand up to Heathcliff not just because he retreats from reality but because she is strong, healthy, and, ultimately, not alone. Neither Catherine nor Hareton is Heathcliff's descendant; his son cannot truly unite with his beloved's daughter. In fact, Heathcliff is too demonic, too impassioned, too much an outsider to produce a healthy child capable of normal relationships; he may match Catherine in passion and freedom, but he is not an appropriate husband for her. Edgar, the pale hero from the more feminine world of social realism, may not be an adequate mate for her, but Heathcliff represents a threat to society. The triangle started by the first generation reaches completion when Linton, who resembles his mother and his uncle Edgar, marries young Catherine. But that match is doomed by his effeminate illness. Catherine finds her rightful mate in Hareton, as unquestionably masculine as Heathcliff, but psychologically healthy and capable of being integrated into society. The successes in the second generation's relationships derive more from psychology than from external differences. Catherine Linton can unite with Hareton Earnshaw because their relationship fulfills the obligations of social codes and because they are two separate individuals, even if they share Catherine Earnshaw's eyes, a reminder of their kinship. 14 Despite their similarities to the older couple, young Catherine and Hareton are more simply human, and their relationship is less intense--or less abnormally intense. They can study and work and play together, teasing, laughing, and helping each other as is appropriate. The second half of the novel lacks the mythic and romantic force of the first, making it less exciting but also making possible a healthy relationship between the lovers. Neither wild nor tamed against her will and nature as was her mother, the second Catherine can marry Hareton and still be herself. Two major nineteenth-century myths come true in their relationship, for the woman civilizes the man while the man teaches the woman the primacy of love. The pastoral romance Lockwood glimpses suggests that a third myth may also be enacted, for theirs appears to be the pure love that the older generation could not achieve. Loved in childhood, Catherine can enact the traditional female role, albeit painfully at first. She is tamed to care for Linton, strong enough to stand up to Heathcliff (with Hareton nearby), and feminine enough to evoke her nurturing side with her future husband. Thus she can achieve peace and well-being in the role that destroyed her mother. Uniting the families in herself, symbolized by the integration of [End Page 188] her name, Catherine Linton Heathcliff Earnshaw inverts her mother's situation and finds a wholeness that corresponds to the nineteenth-century ideal. The novel begins with three separated names suggesting the first Catherine's psychological split, and it ends with the same names in one complete individual. Young Catherine reverses the sequence and becomes all three, demonstrating personal integration as well as an appropriate resolution for the novel. Hareton is also a complete, psychologically healthy individual, saved from abuse by the power of love. Since his roughness, like the earlier Catherine's tamed self, was a veneer, the "new" Hareton is the true one. Catherine and Hareton balance male and female, natural and civilized. They do not need to defy society to fulfill their true selves, leading in nineteenth-century terms to illness, nor do they need to subjugate their true selves to fit into society, likewise leading (in anyone's terms) to illness. Symbolizing the balance that marks their union, they jointly inherit both homes. Symbolizing the normality of their relationship and society's acceptance of their marriage, they will live at Thrushcross Grange. Wuthering Heights will be

Copyright 1999 The Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights reserved. mostly--though not entirely--closed, but they will bring their experience of the house on the moor into the valley. The first part of the novel, engaging readers through Catherine and Heathcliff's stunning lives and overwhelming love, has more emotional pull than the second, which offers a resolution that is more serene and formal than deeply felt. It does not take much speculation to see that Emily Bront, herself an anorectic and an outsider who came alive in the boundless realm of the imagination, knew the world of the first Catherine in her very being if not in her outward life. Though Bront obviously recognized the value of the second Catherine's universe--a place of health and ordinary happiness--she saw it through a window, like the earlier Catherine. This world of relative peace and ease, not conflict and disease/disease, offers a salvation neither she nor Catherine could stomach, but Bront depicts it as the place where the best resolution--and thus the best health--can be found for her time. Such resolution, formal and credible, befits this symbolic, mythic, and psychologically realistic novel. Susan Rubinow Gorsky is working on a study of women's health issues in Victorian fiction. Among her publications are Virginia Woolf; Femininity to Feminism: Women and Literature in the Nineteenth Century; and, with co-author Benjamin Gorsky, An Introduction to Medical Hypnosis. Formerly on the faculty of Cleveland State University, she is now at the Punahou School in Honolulu, Hawaii.