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“Out of My Brother’s Power”:

Gender, Class, and Rebellion in
Wuthering Heights
a
Abbie L. Cory
a
University of California , San Diego
Published online: 15 Aug 2006.
To cite this article: Abbie L. Cory (2004) “Out of My Brother’s Power”: Gender, Class,
and Rebellion in Wuthering Heights, Women's Studies: An inter-disciplinary journal,
34:1, 1-26, DOI: 10.1080/00497870590903469
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00497870590903469
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Women’s Studies, 34:1–26,
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DOI: 10.1080/00497870590903469
“OUT OF MY BROTHER’S POWER”: GENDER, CLASS,

Women’s
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AND REBELLION IN WUTHERING HEIGHTS
ABBIE L. CORY
University of California, San Diego
As part of the move toward New Historicist scholarship in recent

decades, literary criticism of Emily Brontë’s novel Wuthering Heights
has often sought to ground the text in contemporary historical
events. Terry Eagleton, for example, in his 1995 Heathcliff and the
Great Hunger, has linked Wuthering Heights to the Great Irish Famine
and concurrent political insurgency.1 This historicizing trend
extends through Christopher Heywood’s recent argument that
the text participates in the anti-slavery discourse of early nineteenth
century Britain.2 These critical works seek to demonstrate that, in
Diane Long Hoeveler’s words, “literary works are not produced in
vacuums but are reflections of the author’s life, culture, and ideo-
logical beliefs” (Introduction 7). Eagleton describes the character
Heathcliff as an “insurrectionary” who rebels against his place in
the social hierarchy. Heathcliff represents “revolution from below”
and “condens[es] in his own person the various stages of the Irish
revolution [of the 1840s]” (20, 19). In this article, I want to expand
upon Eagleton’s ideas, situating Wuthering Heights, not just in the
revolutionary era of 1840s Ireland, but also in the England of that
period—the site of industrial militance, massive Chartist demon-
strations, socialist experimentation, and other forms of radicalism.
Brontë’s novel captures in a microcosm many aspects of the radical
sociopolitical movements of this period, both metaphorically
and literally disrupting dominant structures of power. The social
movements and Wuthering Heights both suggest the need to recon-
figure those structures. And while the revolutionary elements
of the text are not ultimately successful in effecting significant
Address correspondence to Dr. Abbie L. Cory, University of California, San Diego,

Department of Literature, 0410, La Jolla, CA 92093-0410. E-mail: acory@ucsd.edu
1
See also Eagleton’s “Myths of Power: A Marxist Study of Wuthering Heights.”
2
See the 2002 Broadview edition of Wuthering Heights, edited by Christopher
Heywood.
1
2 Abbie L. Cory
change in the relations of force in the community, neither are

those elements entirely contained by the novel’s conclusion.
Michel Foucault describes particular historical periods as
“moments of fracture,” periods when resistances occur in “the
strategic field of power relations” and possibilities for shifts in
those relations of power open up (96). The late 1830s and 1840s
exemplify one of these moments. Britain was in a state of turmoil
during these decades as many of the social and political structures
that constitute the capitalist, patriarchal state were threatened by

various kinds of militance and social movements.3 In this macro-
cosm of radicalism, two of the major organized vehicles for resis-
tance to British state power were the Chartist and the Young
Ireland repeal movements. Chartism, though rooted in earlier
reform movements such as that preceding the 1832 Reform Bill
and working-class agitation against the 1834 Poor Law, officially
began in November 1837 with Feargus O’Connor’s founding of
the Northern Star newspaper. This publication, crucial to the Chartist
movement, helped greatly to unify local agitation into a single,
nationwide movement with the goals of universal male suffrage,
the secret ballot, payment of members of Parliament, abolition of
property requirements for MPs, equal electoral districts, and annual
parliaments. Together, these goals were known as the Six Points.
The first People’s Charter, a petition to Parliament advocating
these changes, was presented in May 1838; national conventions,
strikes, and mass demonstrations in support of the Six Points
occurred periodically throughout the 1840s. Many Chartist leaders
were arrested in confrontations with police during the spring and
3
I use “capitalism” in this essay to refer to the economic system which developed
from the sixteenth century and coalesced as industrial capitalism in the early nineteenth
century, and which is characterized by the centralized ownership of the means of produc-
tion and the system of wage-labor (Williams 50–51) as well as by a hierarchical division of
labor and the production of commodities. “Patriarchy” refers to a gendered system of
power relations which is “male-dominated, male-identified, and male-centered” (Johnson
165); conversely, women and most things “feminine” are devalued. In a patriarchal system,
most aspects of society fall within male control, and women are frequently subordinated
under male positions of power. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,
these systems became intertwined in various ways so that, for example, particular types of
labor were allocated to men and others to women. Access to political, social, and economic
power and resources was then allotted along a hierarchical arrangement whereby (usually
white) upper- and middle-class men dominated, while the access of women (especially
working-class and non-white women) to such resources was much more limited and was
achieved largely through their relationships with men.
“Out of My Brother’s Power” 3
summer of 1848 and the movement never fully recovered; the

goals of the Chartists were not obtained till decades later.4
Chartism was remarkable for the number of women involved.
Many communities (such as Bradford and Elland, near Law Hill,
and Keighley, near the Brontë family home in Haworth) had sepa-
rate women’s Chartist groups, and in those without separate
groups women played an important and often highly visible part.
Women were involved in gathering signatures for the petitions
presented in Parliament; they held tea parties at which attendees

of both genders discussed issues and strategies and kept up
morale5; they raised funds; they organized and participated in
“exclusive dealing,” whereby only those shopkeepers sympathetic
to their cause were patronized; they participated in and frequently
led the mass demonstrations, carrying banners, singing songs, and
shouting down police.
Because by the midnineteenth century, the ideology of sepa-
rate spheres for men and women was relatively well-entrenched,
Chartist women often justified their involvement in the ostensibly
public sphere of politics by appealing to their positions as wives
and mothers. For example, the women Chartists of Bethnal Green
argued that
Woman can no longer remain in her domestic sphere, for her home
has been made cheerless, her hearth comfortless, and her position
degrading [. . .] Woman’s circle has been invaded by hired bands of
police ruffians—her husband dragged from her side to the gloom of a
dungeon—and her children trampled under foot—and this, for no other
crime than that Labour cried for its rights, and Justice for its due [. . .]
now, when she beholds nothing but despair on the one hand and cold-
blooded cruelty on the other, she feels it to be her duty to step into the
arena of political strife, and agitate for the claims of liberty and humanity.
(Northern Star, July 8, 1848; cited in Schwarzkopf 98)
4
Information in this section regarding the Chartist movement and women’s involve-
ment therein is taken primarily from The Chartists: Popular Politics in the Industrial Revolution
and Outsiders: Class, Gender and Nation, both by Dorothy Thompson, and from Women in the
Chartist Movement by Jutta Schwarzkopf.
5
“Gender” in this article refers to the socially constructed and hierarchical system of
the binary identities “man” and “woman” (or “masculine” and “feminine”). “Gender” is dif-
ferentiated from “sex,” a biological term. In patriarchal society, one’s gender determines
one’s place in the hierarchy and thus one’s access to social, economic, and political power.
4 Abbie L. Cory
This type of discourse, as Jutta Schwarzkopf observes, blurs the

boundaries between public and private and creates a space for
women’s involvement in the political (99). At the same time, how-
ever, it reasserts the division between the two spheres by implying
that women’s venture into the public is only a temporary aber-
rance. Other Chartist women more clearly refuted the ideology of
separate spheres, relating it distinctly to the economic system.
The women of Keighley believed that the system of relegating
women to the private was a device employed by “the government

and money mongers of this country” to keep the women “igno-
rant and divided” and thus unable to participate fully in the chal-
lenge to the class system. The Keighley women observed that
It is therefore, brethren in toil, […] alike the interest as well as the duty of
every working man and woman to declare their political sentiments publicly,
in order that both the country and the government may be acquainted with
the wants and grievances of the millions of our oppressed countrywomen.
(Northern Star, Oct. 12, 1839; cited in Schwarzkopf 97)
The Keighley women call upon Chartists to defy the entwined

economic and gender hierarchies via their actions and their
words, by stepping into the public and voicing their dissatisfac-
tion. Moreover, both the Keighley and the Bethnal Green women
write that it is their “duty” to challenge the boundary between
public and private by speaking out and “agitat[ing]” for their
cause. This is a radical appropriation of one of the primary terms
used in the language promoting domesticity. Within that dis-
course, it was a woman’s “duty” to remain in the private sphere
caring for her home and family. The women Chartists, however,
use the term to argue the opposite—women must move into the
public in order to properly carry out their responsibilities, which
now include “political” as well as “domestic” activities.
Women also fought against the hegemonic power structures of
the state via the Young Ireland Movement for the repeal of the 1800
Union between England and Ireland, in which the Irish Parliament
was dissolved and legal and political control returned to London.6
6
The majority of this information is taken from Gearoid O’Tuathaigh’s Ireland Before
the Famine 1798–1848 and The Young Ireland Movement by Richard Davis, as well as directly
from the pages of The Nation.
Young Ireland had its roots in Daniel O’Connell’s Society for the
Repeal of the Union, founded in 1830. Yet O’Connell’s efforts
achieved little, and in October 1842 the mouthpiece of Young
Ireland, the newspaper The Nation, was founded by Thomas Davis,
Charles Gavan Duffy, and John Blake Dillon. During the summers
of 1843 and 1845, “monster meetings” rallying for repeal drew
hundreds of thousands of people, and the subscription rate to
The Nation grew dramatically. In 1846, the Young Irelanders split
from O’Connell’s group, largely over O’Connell’s adherence to

the failing strategy of alliance with the Whigs in the British Par-
liament. Failure of the Whigs to adequately manage the effects
of the Famine led to further support of Young Ireland. Yet after
the mid-1840s, neither the O’Connellite branch nor the Young Ire-
land offshoot of the Repeal Movement could garner much sup-
port from the Irish population, possibly because of the
devastation wrought by the famine. In the spring and summer of
1848, several Young Ireland leaders were arrested and trans-
ported for sedition, and the failure of a tiny rebellion in July
ended the movement.
Though women were not as prominent in the Young Ireland
Movement as in Chartism, several women voiced radical opinions
in the movement’s newspapers, albeit under pseudonyms. “Sper-
anza” (Jane Francesca Elgee, later Lady Wilde, the mother of Oscar
Wilde) attempted to arouse patriotism among the Irish and
encouraged action with lines such as “Be it blood of the tyrant or
blood of the slave,/we’ll cross it to Freedom, or find there a grave”
(“Courage,” The Nation, April 22, 1848). “Eva” (Mary Kelly) urged
Irish people to “arm themselves” in preparation for rebellion
against England, while “Mary” (Ellen Downing) advised that “a
little blood-letting caused small pain” in the service of the nation
(both cited in Davis 156). “Eva” extended the call for insurgence
specifically to women when she exclaimed, “Can the land be free
if its women strive not? Impossible! [. . .] It is not unfeminine to
take [up] sword or gun, if sword or gun are required” (The Nation,
March 25, 1848).
These two movements, Young Ireland and the Chartists, thus
challenged the ruling middle and upper classes through their
calls for a more equitable distribution of socio-political power.
Emily Brontë would have been well aware of these movements
through widespread coverage in the press as well as through word
6 Abbie L. Cory
of mouth. The Brontës subscribed to a number of newspapers

and journals and also had access to the library at the Keighley
Mechanics’ Institute, an establishment that promoted education
for the working classes. Emily Brontë may have been more inter-
ested than many of the English in the Irish Repeal Movement
since her father Patrick was born and grew up in what is now the
southeastern corner of Northern Ireland.7
Brontë’s anti-hierarchical novel Wuthering Heights—written
during the 1840s8—takes up the same kinds of concerns as those of

the radical social movements. While I am not arguing that Brontë’s
conscious intent was to produce a text that advanced concepts like
those of the Chartists and Young Ireland, the novel nevertheless
reproduces and disseminates the momentary resistances to class-
and gender-based systems of power that were part of the social
milieu of the era. It reflects contemporary ideas about undermin-
ing the institutions of the state and about subverting class- and gen-
der-based hierarchies. More importantly, Wuthering Heights
participates in the socio-political upheavals of the era. It depicts a
community—the locality of Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross
Grange and many of its people—that is a microcosm of rebellion, a
realm in which uprisings against figures in positions of power regu-
larly occur, where the subordinate do not remain in their places,
and where dominant modes of power are disparaged. This commu-
nity thus represents many of the attitudes and actions of the 1840s
radical movements on a smaller, more personal scale. The novel,
therefore, is revolutionary not just in its presentation of Heathcliff,
as Eagleton argues, but through the characters of Lockwood and
the two Cathys. Wuthering Heights first presents Lockwood as the
common reader (he is the first “reader” of Nelly’s tale) and repre-
sentative of prevailing middle-class values. The novel then sets out
to disrupt those values by disparaging Lockwood. In addition,
Wuthering Heights portrays Catherine Linton and Catherine
Heathcliff as insurgents against hegemonic views of gender roles and
bourgeois marriage. The text thereby undermines the intertwined
7
Several scholars have discussed the Brontë sisters’ access to reading material; see,
for example, Peterson (5). Interestingly, the Brontës had a political dissident in the
family. Patrick’s brother William was a participant in the Battle of Ballynahinch during the
1798 United Irish rebellion against British rule (Chitham 25, 103).
8
See Edward Chitham and Mary Visick.
class and gender systems that support the state. Further, though
several critics read the ending of the novel (with Catherine Linton
and Hareton Earnshaw “domesticated” and on the verge of
marriage) as a reassertion of middle-class propriety, I argue that
the text refuses such a neat resolution and instead hints that the
rebellions enacted have only been temporarily halted.
The text first complicates the ideals of the dominant classes
through the representation of the original narrator of the text.
Lockwood is represented as a solid member of the middle class.

Although no source of his income is given, it is apparent that he
does not work for a living and thus might be taken as a member of
the aristocracy. He does not, however, own land nor is he in line for
an inheritance. He rents Thrushcross Grange and spends time at
the seaside and traveling in the north, but he has no title. As
Raymond Williams reminds us, the term “middle classes” was com-
monly used in the 1840s to distinguish the socio-economic group
that existed between the aristocracy or the “privileged” and the
laboring classes. And while the term often refers to those “whose
livelihood depended on fees [or] profits,” it could also include
those who were “independent” (64–5). Lockwood thus occupies a
position in the upper reaches of the middle classes, what we might
now refer to as “upper middle class.” Moreover, Lockwood adheres
to hegemonic ideas about class, gender, labor, familial relations,
courtship and marriage, and rebellion. He thus functions as a repre-
sentative of many of the dominant power structures of the period.
As the first auditor of Nelly’s story, Lockwood offers the reader
a guide for his or her own reactions. For example, upon first visiting
Wuthering Heights, Lockwood is immediately confused as to the
socio-economic status of the house and especially of its inhabitants.
He tells us that
The apartment and furniture would have been nothing extraordinary as

belonging to a homely, northern farmer […] But Mr. Heathcliff forms a sin-
gular contrast to his abode and style of living. He is a dark-skinned gypsy in
aspect, in dress and manners a gentleman—that is, as much a gentleman as
many a country squire: rather slovenly, perhaps, yet not looking amiss with his
negligence, because he has an erect and handsome figure. (3–4)
Lockwood is somewhat disconcerted, as any middle-class reader

might have been, by the appearance in what seems the abode of a
8 Abbie L. Cory
“homely, northern farmer” of a “dark-skinned” man with the dress

and bearing of a gentleman. Here interior decoration, dark skin
color, and “slovenl[iness]” operate as markers of a lower-class
atmosphere, markers confusingly at odds with Heathcliff’s dress,
manners, and figure.
Lockwood sustains his role of reader’s guide via his responses
to the insurgencies that take place at Wuthering Heights. Those
inhabitants of the Heights who are assigned a subordinate place in
the relations of power regularly rebel against that position. Wuther-

ing Heights is the space from which the “insurrectionary” Heathc-
liff begins his “revolution from below” 20 years before the opening
of the novel; Eagleton observes that this insurgency is “rather like
[the revolt of] Ireland against Britain” (18, 20). Of course, it could
be argued that by the time of Lockwood’s visit in 1801, the revolu-
tionary atmosphere of the Heights has been contained. The once-
rebellious Heathcliff has obtained ownership of both Wuthering
Heights and Thrushcross Grange, and he behaves tyrannously to
those who are now beneath him on the class and gender ladder.
But resistances to authority persist. The Heights is still a place
where servants disregard orders from their master, as when Joseph,
sent to “bring up some wine” at the first visit of Lockwood, “mum-
bled indistinctly in the depths of the cellar, but gave no intimation
of ascending” (5). And it is a place where women, particularly, defy
conventional expectations about their behavior which function to
keep them in positions of relative powerlessness. Like the Chartist
and Young Ireland women discussed above, the two Cathys of
Wuthering Heights challenge their assigned roles in the hierarchy of
gender. Yet while the Bethnal Green women simultaneously uti-
lized their domesticity to justify their involvement in political resis-
tance, the two Cathys repudiate more fully the tenets of female
domesticity, particularly in the early sections of the novel. Cathe-
rine Earnshaw grows up here “mischievous and wayward” (36) and
even after her apparent transmutation into a young lady during
her stay at Thrushcross Grange, Nelly refers to her as “haughty,”
“headstrong,” and “proud” (65, 67). Catherine Linton, upon Lock-
wood’s second visit to the Heights, refuses to play hostess to him.9
9
For the sake of convenience and clarity, I will from this point forward refer to Cathe-
rine Earnshaw Linton, the first-generation Catherine, as “Cathy” and to Catherine Linton
Heathcliff, the second-generation Catherine, as “Catherine.”
She inhospitably neither asks him to sit down nor pours him a cup of
tea. Moreover, Catherine refuses to keep her eyes modestly downcast
as a young lady should; she “kept her eyes on [Lockwood] in a cool,
regardless manner,” an action which Lockwood interprets as
“exceedingly embarrassing and disagreeable”(8).
The revolutionary environment of the Heights is brought
home to Lockwood even more explicitly when he is forced to spend
the night there and reads Cathy’s “diary,” scribbled in the margins
of her books: “‘An awful Sunday!’ commenced the paragraph

beneath. ‘I wish my father were back again. Hindley is a detestable
substitute—his conduct to Heathcliff is atrocious—Heathcliff and
I are going to rebel—we took our initiatory step this evening’”
(18). Heathcliff and Cathy first “rebel” against the “tyrant” Hindley
by destroying the religious texts they have been given to read (19).
They then appropriate the dairy woman’s cloak and go out for an
illicit Sunday “scamper on the moors” (20). Upon being punished
by Hindley for these transgressions, Cathy angrily observes that
Hindley “‘has been blaming our father (how dare he?) for treating
Heathcliff too liberally; and swears he will reduce him to his right
place’” (20). Rather than forcing Cathy to conform to expected
standards of behavior, Hindley’s punishment confirms her role of
rebel. She verbally challenges Hindley’s authority here (“how dared
he?”), and the implication is that she will side with Heathcliff to
prevent Hindley’s “reduc[ing] him to his right place.”
The staunchly middle-class Lockwood initially has great diffi-
culty deciphering signs in this realm of rebellion. An attempt to
befriend one of the dogs in the house ends when the dog “sud-
denly [breaks] into a fury” and “half-a-dozen four-footed fiends”
assault him. Heathcliff has to inform Lockwood that at Wuthering
Heights dogs are not kept for pets (5). At his second visit, Lockwood
mistakes Catherine for “Mrs. Heathcliff,” causing her to respond
with the malevolent stare noted above. Finally, Lockwood cannot
discern whether Hareton is a servant or a member of the family: “his
dress and speech were both rude [. . .] his thick, brown curls were
rough and uncivilized, his whiskers encroached bearishly over his
cheeks, and his hands were embrowned like those of a common
laborer; still his bearing was free, almost haughty, and he showed
none of a domestic’s assiduity in attending on the lady of the
house” (10). This “absence of clear proofs of [Hareton’s] condi-
tion” puts Lockwood into an “uncomfortable state.” Thus neither
10 Abbie L. Cory
the labor arrangements,10 nor the familial relationships, nor class

status, nor gender behavior at Wuthering Heights are explicable
to Lockwood. As a result, he must undergo a rite of passage into
this sphere of insurgence.
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar have argued that Cathy’s
intrusion into Thrushcross Grange as a young girl functions as a
sort of initiation into adult womanhood. They note the bleeding
caused by the bite of Skulker the bulldog and his “extraordinarily
phallic” “equipment for aggression” and observe that “the entire

Linton household cossets the wounded (but still healthy) girl as if
she were truly an invalid (272). Indeed, feeding her their alien
rich food—negus and cakes from their own table—washing her
feet, combing her hair, dressing her in ‘enormous slippers,’ and
wheeling her about like a doll, they seem to be enacting some
sinister ritual of initiation” (273). I would argue that Lockwood,
in his first visits to the Heights, undergoes a similar initiation, an
initiation not into the world of proper femininity but into the
realm of revolution, particularly the realm of female rebellion. Like
Cathy, Lockwood undergoes this violent rite in the form of an
attack by a dog.
During his initial visit to Wuthering Heights, Lockwood makes
the mistake of making faces at the housedog, as observed above.
Thus provoked, the dog
suddenly broke into a fury, and leapt on my knees. I flung her back, and
hastened to interpose the table between us. This proceeding roused the
whole hive. Half-a-dozen four-footed fiends, of various sizes and ages,
issued from hidden dens to the common centre. I felt my heels and coat-
laps peculiar subjects of assault; and, parrying off the larger combatants as
effectually as I could, with the poker, I was constrained to demand, aloud,
assistance from some of the household in re-establishing peace. (5)
Note that the dog that first attacks Lockwood is female; Lockwood
tells us that “I flung her back,” and she is later referred to by the
name of Juno (in classical mythology, Juno is the recalcitrant wife
10
Indeed, visible labor of any sort seems to unsettle Lockwood, as when, at the begin-
ning of Chapter Two, he is literally repelled from his room by the sight of “a servant-girl
on her knees, surrounded by brushes and coal scuttles, and raising an infernal dust as she
extinguished the flames with heaps of cinders. This spectacle drove [him] back immedi-
ately” (7). From Lockwood’s position as middle-class male, labor is a “spectacle” that is as
abhorrent as it is rarely seen.
of the philandering Jupiter) (26). Violence in the sphere of rebel-

lion is thereby explicitly associated here with the female. At this
point one of the servants comes to Lockwood’s rescue before blood
has been shed, and thus the initiation is seemingly incomplete.
Upon his second visit to the Heights, however, Lockwood attempts
to steal a lantern to light his way home through the snowstorm. At
this, Joseph sics the dogs on him:
Two hairy monsters flew at my throat, bearing me down and extinguishing

the light, while a mingled guffaw from Heathcliff and Hareton, put the
copestone on my rage and humiliation.
Fortunately, the beasts seemed more bent on stretching their paws,
and yawning, and flourishing their tails, than devouring me alive; but they
would suffer no resurrection, and I was forced to lie till their malignant
masters pleased to deliver me [. . .]
The vehemence of my agitation brought on a copious bleeding at the
nose [. . .] [Zillah] thought that some of them had been laying violent hands
on me.
(15–16)
This time the dogs indirectly draw blood, as Skulker later does
directly to Cathy, and Lockwood’s “initiation ceremony” is complete.
Lockwood, as stand-in for the middle-class reader, must undergo
initiation into the sphere of rebellion in order to properly read
the continuing narrative of revolution.
In the passage above, the response of the hegemonic classes to
revolutionary violence is clearly registered; the attackers are figured
as “hairy monsters” and “beasts” which lead to the “humiliation”
and “agitation” of Lockwood. This language is remarkably similar
to that in which the politicized working class is represented in
another novel published less than a year after Wuthering Heights,
Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton. Gaskell’s novel is a conservative
text sympathetic only to the nonpoliticized working class; Gaskell
describes striking workers as “cruel brutes; they’re more like wild
beasts than human beings” (182). She refers specifically to Chartists
as “monsters” who “rise up [. . .] they irritate us, they terrify us,
and we become their enemies. Then, in the sorrowful moment of
our triumphant power, their eyes gaze on us with mute reproach”
(170). Gaskell’s text utilizes the figure of the gaze as one means of
registering resistance; I demonstrate below that Brontë also
employs this device. Both texts, then, display apprehension on
12 Abbie L. Cory
the part of the dominant classes regarding those who resist their
prescribed roles in society.
These novels thus employ similar language for different ends.
As I will continue to argue, Lockwood is ridiculed and shown to be
an entirely unsympathetic character.11 The text thereby undermines
Lockwood’s critical assumptions and the middle-class values he
ostensibly upholds, while it simultaneously buttresses the revolu-
tionary characteristics of the actions of Heathcliff and the two
Catherines. The dominant power structures of which Lockwood is a

representative are therefore metaphorically disrupted, as the radical
social movements of the era threatened those structures in actuality.
Mary Barton, on the other hand, while sharing particular kinds of
language with Wuthering Heights, functions to discourage resistance
and to uphold institutionalized power through the demonization of
the politicized working class. Note that Gaskell uses the inclusive
“us,” thereby assuming a shared attitude between herself and her
readers. Both Lockwood, despite the initiation, and the “us” of
Gaskell’s novel refuse for the most part to sympathize with those
who inhabit the realm of resistance, and both remain staunchly
committed to the conventional ideologies of the middle classes. In
this sense, Lockwood’s induction ceremony is unsuccessful.
Yet Lockwood is not unchanged by the initiation; he is over-
whelmed and unmanned by the rite. As in Cathy’s intrusion into
Thrushcross Grange, the language in the passage quoted above is
distinctly sexual. The dogs “bear [Lockwood] down” and he is
“forced to lie” until Heathcliff “pleased to deliver [him]”. These
are images of sexual assault. In addition, Lockwood is rendered
“sick exceedingly, and dizzy and faint” by the experience (16).
In terms of conventional gender expectations for the period,
this reaction is more appropriate for a woman than for a man.
Thus Lockwood is unmanned by his first exposures to the
sphere of rebellion. In this way, his authority as narrator and
his middle-class beliefs in social order and stability are further
undermined.
11
Other scholars with this view of Lockwood include Gilbert and Gubar, Peter J.
Donnelly, J. Hillis Miller, Nancy Armstrong, and Patricia Yaeger. In a nice turn of phrase
for purposes of my argument, Yaeger writes that through his bumbling and his unsympa-
thetic character, Lockwood is “deauthorized” as a narrator (196).
Lockwood’s position of authority in the novel is also subverted

through his attitude toward and treatment of women. Very early
in Lockwood’s narration, he relates the story of his attempt at
establishing a relationship with a young woman of his class:
While enjoying a month of fine weather at the seacoast, I was thrown into
the company of a most fascinating creature, a real goddess in my eyes, as
long as she took no notice of me. I “never told my love” vocally; still, if
looks have language, the merest idiot might have guessed I was head over
ears: she understood me, at last, and looked a return—the sweetest of all
imaginative looks—and what did I do? I confess it with shame—shrunk
icily into myself like a snail, at every glance retired colder and farther; till
finally, the poor innocent was led to doubt her own senses, and, over-
whelmed with confusion at her supposed mistake, persuaded her mamma
to decamp. (4)
This is the only bit of background information we are given regard-

ing Lockwood, and it is thus extremely important. The brief para-
graph accomplishes several objectives. First, it suggests Lockwood’s
objectification of women (“goddess,” “fascinating creature”) and
their dehumanization through the absence of naming and
description. The woman is a “creature,” a “goddess,” a “poor inno-
cent,” but she is never referred to as a girl or a woman, nor is she
named or physically described. To Lockwood, women seem at
times little more than ciphers.
Secondly, this short narrative establishes a pattern in Lock-
wood’s behavior as it simultaneously sets up an important trope
in the novel, that of the disruptive power of the female gaze. Beth
Newman writes of this scene that
Lockwood’s account of his abortive flirtation intimates a psychic structure

whereby a woman who “looks a return” at a man threatens to immobilize
him, to deprive him of his self-command, to render him stock-still—practi-
cally to paralyze him. We have not far to travel from Lockwood’s “fascinat-
ing creature” to Freud’s “Medusa’s Head,” the direct sight of which evokes
the terror of castration in the male spectator. (451)
It is immediately after the young woman “looked a return” that

Lockwood “shrunk icily” into himself. The woman’s look disrupts
his ability to continue courting her, and eventually she leaves the
seaside, “overwhelmed with confusion.” As Nancy Armstrong
14 Abbie L. Cory
observes, Lockwood “is about to repeat the same scene several

times over”, repeatedly enacting a scenario in which he first
desires a woman and then rejects her (436). And in almost every
instance, it is the disruptive gaze of the woman that interrupts
Lockwood’s desire. In his visit to Wuthering Heights on the day of
the snowstorm, Lockwood observes the beauty of young Catherine,12
yet her stare repels him:
She kept her eyes on me, in a cool, regardless manner, exceedingly embar-
rassing and disagreeable. [. . .] had [her eyes] been agreeable in expression,
they would have been irresistible—fortunately for my susceptible heart, the
only sentiment they evinced hovered between scorn and a kind of desper-
ation, singularly unnatural to be detected there. (8–9)
Catherine’s look registers both rebellion against prevalent concepts

of female behavior and rejection of Lockwood as a potential suitor.
But the threat in the female gaze additionally lies in
the knowledge that the other sees and therefore resists being reduced to
an appropriable object. That is, Medusa defies the male gaze as Western
culture has constructed it: as the privilege of a male subject, a means of
relegating women (or “Woman”) to the status of object (of representation,
discourse, desire, etc.). Such defiance is surely unsettling, disturbing the
pleasure the male subject takes in gazing and the hierarchical relations by
which he asserts his dominance.
(Newman 451)
If the male as spectator and the female as spectacle are emblematic

of the power relations of patriarchy, then a reversal of that dynamic
can potentially disrupt those relations. What seems to be merely
personal and intimate thereby becomes political. By directly return-
ing Lockwood’s look, then, both Catherine and the woman at the
seaside challenge the patriarchal system of power relations, refusing
the position of object and temporarily reversing the gendered
order of dominance.
The motif of the defiant female gaze was also deployed by
the women writers of Young Ireland. For example, “Fionnuala”
describes a meeting between sixteenth-century Irish resistance
12
In contrast to the young woman at the seaside, Catherine is described here in some
detail.
leader Grainne Maol (or Granuwaile, often anglicized as Grace

O’Malley) and Queen Elizabeth I in a poem published in The Nation
on May 2, 1846. While historians are uncertain as to whether such
an occasion actually occurred, in Irish Republican discourse the
meeting functions as a symbol of the Irish confrontation of their
British oppressors. In the nineteenth-century poem, Grainne
Maol successfully convinces Elizabeth to become the “ally” rather
than the persecutor of Ireland, in part through Grainne Maol’s
powerful gaze. “Fionnuala” tells us that “Dark flashes [Grainne

Maol’s] eye with the fire of her race” as she confronts Elizabeth;
Grainne Maol’s look reveals the “might of the rock and the wild”
which “has passed like fire” into this female symbol of revolutionary
Ireland (11.9, 11–12). The images in these lines—”flashes,” “fire,”
“the rock,” “the wild”—connote determined resistance to British
dominance, all conveyed through Grainne Maol’s gaze and appro-
priated by the poet for use in the 1840s insurgency against the
union of Ireland with Great Britain. Both poem and novel, then,
use the device of the resistant female gaze to convey rebellion
against hegemonic socio-political structures.
The pattern of the rebellious female gaze quenching Lock-
wood’s heightened desire recurs in Lockwood’s dream during his
overnight stay at the Heights. While drowsily perusing Cathy’s
books, “an immediate interest kindled within me for the unknown
Catherine” (18), yet of the dream itself Lockwood states that “I
discerned, obscurely, a child’s face looking through the window—
Terror made me cruel; and, finding it useless to attempt shaking
the creature off, I pulled its wrist on to the broken pane, and
rubbed it to and fro til the blood ran down and soaked the bed-
clothes” (23). Dorothy Van Ghent refers to this passage as “proba-
bly the most cruel one in the book” and also as “gratuitous [. . .]
violence” (160). On the contrary, when one recalls the context of
the dream,13 it becomes apparent that Lockwood’s response is
not “gratuitous” at all. Rather, it exposes the response of the domi-
nant classes to gender- and class-based rebellion. And although
Cathy is portrayed in this same scene as shivering, sobbing, and
wailing and thus seemingly not in an emotional state conducive
to rebellion, the fact remains that it is Cathy’s face “looking through
13
Lockwood has just been perusing Cathy’s diary, discussed above, which clearly
reveals her as an insurgent against “tyranny” and authority.
16 Abbie L. Cory
the window” and severely disturbing Lockwood. The scene thus

stands as another instance in the pattern of the disruptive nature
of the female gaze, potentially reversing power relations between
the genders. As Newman writes, “to be the object of the gaze—to
be spectacle instead of spectator—is to lose one’s position of
mastery and control” (452). As do the “initiation” scene and the
passage from Mary Barton discussed above, Lockwood’s dream
exposes anxiety about losing that position, and from his point-of-
view such a challenge must be contained. Just as a newly estab-

lished police force increasingly used violence in order to put
down Chartist demonstrations, industrial militance, and other
risings, so Lockwood violently attempts to halt Cathy’s threat to
his position of power by drawing her wrist repeatedly across the
broken glass.
The motif of the female gaze disrupting male dominance occurs
again after Lockwood has heard from Nelly a significant portion of
the tale of Heathcliff and Cathy. Lockwood states that he must
“beware of the fascination that lurks in Catherine Heathcliff’s
brilliant eyes. I should be in a curious taking if I surrendered my
heart to that young person, and the daughter turned out a second
edition of the mother!” (154). The gaze in this passage is “fasci-
nat[ing],” as in the case of the woman at the seaside, and poten-
tially dangerous—it is something to be wary of, something he must
avoid “surrender[ing]” to. Yet here it is not necessarily the look of
young Catherine herself that presents the danger, but its associa-
tion with her mother. Several characters in the novel observe that
young Catherine has inherited her mother’s eyes (Nelly remarks,
for example, that she has “the Earnshaw’s handsome dark eyes”
[188]); the two women are linked through this common trait as
well as through their shared rebelliousness. Yet for Lockwood, the
older Cathy presents the greater danger, possibly because her sub-
versiveness is more clearly presented in the early section of Nelly’s
tale; it is, after all, of Cathy that Lockwood dreams. Even the poten-
tial, however, for Catherine to turn out “a second edition of the
mother” is enough to threaten Lockwood.
The story of Lockwood’s encounter with the young woman at
the seaside serves yet another function: it allows Brontë to confront
the mid-nineteenth century middle-class courtship system,
wherein women were chosen for marriage partners primarily
according to their financial prospects and their appearance.
Although companionate marriage was becoming more and more

widespread, financial status continued to be of much importance
as middle-class families strived to maintain or elevate their posi-
tion in the social hierarchy. Moreover, while many women were
allowed by their parents to reject a potential suitor, rarely did
women actively pursue a possible partner. This behavior would
have been chastised as overly forward and unladylike. Thus, in
many ways young women were at the mercy of men, much as is
the woman at the seaside—unable to do much more than “look a

return” and subject to the vanities and hypocrisies of men whose
gaze and consequent actions are at odds with each other.
The novel advances its criticism of the middle-class courtship
and marriage system, and thus women’s roles in that system, in its
depiction of Cathy’s love for Heathcliff. Cathy is quite aware of what
it might mean to her position in the neighborhood to marry Edgar
Linton. When Nelly questions her as to her motives for doing so,
Cathy replies, “he will be rich, and I shall like to be the greatest
woman in the neighborhood” (78). Yet when Nelly objects to this,
Cathy replies, “Nelly, I see now, you think me a selfish wretch, but
did it never strike you that if Heathcliff and I married, we should
become beggars? Whereas, if I marry Linton, I can aid Heathcliff to
rise, and place him out of my brother’s power” (81). Not only is
Cathy aware, then, of the financial politics of middle-class marriage;
she plans to use her elevated socio-economic status to help Heathc-
liff in his plans to rebel against his class position.14 In this way, Cathy
plays the role of “assistant rebel,” doing what she can to assist
Heathcliff in his goal of overturning the socio-economic hierarchy
of Thrushcross Grange/Wuthering Heights. This role corresponds
with the part many women played in sociopolitical movements of
the period. Frequently discouraged by the dominant gender para-
digm from freely voicing or acting upon radical opinions, women
often performed and justified their actions via an appeal to their
roles as partners, sisters, and daughters of men. This manipulation
of the rhetoric of separate spheres resembles that which I docu-
mented by the Chartist women at the beginning of this article. Well
aware of the ways in which the interrelated gender and economic
14
Remember that this scene in the novel occurs before Heathcliff’s 3-year absence.
At this point Heathcliff is being forced by Hindley into the role of servant; he has yet to
earn his wealth.
18 Abbie L. Cory
systems functioned to keep them in their prescribed places, the

Keighley women appropriated the feminine language of duty to
enable them to stand beside their “brethren in toil” in their strug-
gle. Similarly, Cathy plans to use the gender and class structures to
her advantage in assisting Heathcliff with his insurgency.
Importantly, however, Cathy can also be seen as subversive in
her own right as she struggles against the strictures of the middle-
class marriage system. During Nelly’s confrontation of Cathy over
her decision to marry Edgar, Cathy makes it clear that her

marriage will in no way separate her from Heathcliff:
“He quite deserted! We separated!” she exclaimed, with an accent of indig-

nation. “Who is to separate us, pray? […] Every Linton on the face of the
earth might melt into nothing, before I could consent to forsake Heathcliff.
Oh, that’s not what I intend—that’s not what I mean! I shouldn’t be
Mrs. Linton were such a price demanded! He’ll be as much to me as he
has been all his lifetime.”
(81)
Patsy Stoneman points out that, while Cathy’s statement seems

naïve or even absurd in light of the dominant ideology regarding
women’s roles, there is a literary model for such a love triangle—
Percy Shelley’s “Epipsychidion” (xxxi). Shelley writes:
I never was attached to that great sect,

Whose doctrine is, that each one should select
Out of the crowd a mistress or a friend,
And all the rest, though fair and wise, commend
To cold oblivion[. . .]
[. . .]Narrow
The heart that loves, the brain that contemplates,
The life that wears, the spirit that creates
One object, and one form, and builds thereby
A sepulchre for its eternity.15 (11. 149–173)
As Stoneman observes, it is not clear in the novel whether

Cathy’s relationship with Heathcliff is a sexual one. Yet Cathy’s
15
Both Edward Chitham and Winifred Gerin believe it likely that Brontë read Percy
Shelley. Both biographers note remarkable similarities in the poetry of Brontë and Shelley,
and Gerin notes that Charlotte Brontë quotes Shelley in an unpublished novelette. See
Chitham, pages 72–73, and Gerin, pages 153–154.
desire to remain close to Heathcliff while married to Edgar defies

mainstream ideas of women’s roles in courtship and marriage
(xxx). This resistance to established gender roles is also a revolt
against the economic system with which such roles are entwined.
Within the nineteenth century capitalist patriarchy, one of the
primary roles of middle- and upper-class women was to produce
heirs in order to facilitate the perpetuation of a man’s wealth.
Virginity at marriage and monogamy after marriage were there-
fore extremely important. Cathy, with her desire for continued

intimacy with Heathcliff after her marriage to Linton, disrupts
this crucial control on women’s sexuality; for, once intimate with a
man other than her husband, a woman makes impossible the fact
of securing without a doubt a man’s wealth upon his child. Thus,
one of the crucial foundations of the capitalist-patriarchal state is
weakened in the novel.
Shelley and Brontë were not the only ones, moreover, who
were experimenting with ideas about open marriage in the nine-
teenth century, and in fact debates about marriage reform raged in
the radical press and alternative communities of the time. Robert
Owen, an early proponent of socialism, was perhaps the best known
of the British promoters of new concepts of marriage. Owen linked
marriage to the ills of private property; by eliminating “single-family
arrangements” and establishing instead modes of living commu-
nally, the underpinnings of capitalism would be eradicated. Like
Shelley (to whom his ideas were often linked), Owen felt that
marriage as then constructed, confined humans within artificial
structures that denied the spontaneous expression of sexual love.
Owen wrote that
the law of God is, that humanity is compelled to like or love that which is
agreeable or lovely to the peculiar combination of qualities given by
God to each individual at birth, and as cultivated by society, and to
dislike or loathe those qualities which are made to be disagreeable or
hateful to the instincts or natural feelings of the individual. Any arrange-
ments of ignorant men which contravene this universal and unchanging
law of God, are sure to produce physical and mental disease, crime,
and misery, to a fearful extent [. . .] The remedy for these diseases of
body and mind, is to abandon the laws of men on this subject, to stay
their endless practical evils; evils often producing, to the female sex
especially, more agonizing mental suffering than their nature can
endure. (85)
20 Abbie L. Cory
Therefore, Owen proposed that in the new socialist communities,

a man and woman wanting to marry need simply make their
intention known 3 months before the “ceremony,” at which time
the couple declared their union before an assembly of the com-
munity. The couple could divorce after 12 months of “marriage”
by publicly stating their desire to do so and were free to remarry
after 6 months. Moreover, in the communities each young person
over a particular age was given a bedroom of his or her own; this
bedroom would be retained through the person’s adulthood

regardless of any marriage or sexual relationships into which the
person might enter. Owen acknowledged that various sexual
liaisons might develop, and as Barbara Taylor observes, noted
that “to satisfy ‘those who have been accustomed to associate morals
with the letters forming certain words or certain arbitrary [. . .] cere-
monies’ the word ‘marriage’ would, if couples chose, be applied ‘to
all intercourse tending to happiness’” (qtd. in Taylor 53).
In the majority of Owenite communities, the more standard
monogamous unions seem to have dominated. Yet sexual unions
other than legal, conventional marriage were often accepted in
these and other radical circles.16 These ideas, as well as relatively
more conservative concepts of marriage and divorce reform, were
widely discussed in the radical press of the day, not only in the pri-
mary Owenite journal New Moral World, but in the largest Chartist
newspaper, The Northern Star, as well as in many other working-
class and radical publications. Like ideas about working-class suf-
frage and the repeal of the Union between Ireland and Britain,
conversations about alternative forms of marriage were part of the
social milieu of the 1830s and 1840s, and in Cathy’s attempt to
resist conventional concepts of marriage we can see once again the
microcosm of the Wuthering Heights community mirroring the
macrocosm of mid-century British radicalism.
Furthermore, Cathy’s statement that she will not be separated
from Heath cliff even though married to Edgar offers an alter-
native to the courtship model portrayed in Lockwood’s narrative
of the woman at the seaside. Within that model, as noted above,
women were not allowed to actively pursue a potential partner
and were subject to the caprices of men. Cathy’s courtship system,
however, defies such oppression of women and further radicalizes
16. See Taylor—for example, 196–199.

even Shelley’s notions of love as expressed in “Epipsychidion,” for

here it is the woman choosing her partner(s), here Cathy says what
she wants and at least tries to carry out those actions.17
Yet unsurprisingly, given the dominance of the particular
class and gender relations of the time, and the isolated quality of
Cathy’s resistance, her rebellion is unsuccessful. As Foucault points
out, power relationships depend upon resistance to “play the role
of adversary, target, support, or handle” (95). But force relations
are subject to shifts, regroupings, and realignments, and the novel

continues in its critique of the dominant sociopolitical power
arrangements. Upon Heathcliff’s return from 3 years’ absence,
Cathy voices to Edgar her desire to remain “friends” with Heathcliff.
When Edgar objects, Cathy attempts violence: “she started up—her
hair flying over her shoulders, her eyes flashing, the muscles of her
neck and arms standing out preternaturally. I [Nelly] made up my
mind for broken bones, at least” (118). Unlike the Irishwomen
whom “Eva” of The Nation calls to arms, Cathy has no weapons
other than her own body, but she continues to strive for her ver-
sion of freedom. It is perhaps this image of female revolutionary
rage that most provokes both Lockwood and nineteenth-century
critics to strongly disapprove of Cathy. And even though the rage
does not prevail, the criticism of the entwined gender/class struc-
tures continues. For Cathy dies, not as punishment for her insur-
gency,18 but because she is unable to exist in a world which will not
allow her to live according to her rebellious impulses.
By the conclusion of the novel, the revolutionary atmosphere
appears at first glance to be contained. Several scholars of Wuthering
17
As expressed in stanza 7 of the Dedication to The Revolt of Islam, Mary Shelley also
defied convention when she actively chose to elope with the already married Percy, and
Percy praises her for this:
How beautiful and calm and free thou wert
In thy young wisdom, when the mortal chain
Of custom thou didst burst and rend in twain,
And walked as free as light the clouds among,
[…]and my spirit sprung
To meet the from the woes which had begirt it long. (11. 57–63)
Brontë and Shelley, then, are expressing similar alternatives to the conventional
model of courtship and marriage.
18
As the critic of the Spectator observed, the novel’s “villainy [does not lead] to results
sufficient to justify the elaborate pains taken in depicting it” (cited in Allott 217).
22 Abbie L. Cory
Heights read the ending, with Hareton and Catherine on the verge
of marriage, as a restoration of conservative values: Heathcliff and
Cathy are dead, the younger couple are the inheritors of the prop-
erties usurped by Heathcliff, and Catherine contentedly “civilizes”
Hareton by helping him learn to read. Dorothy Van Ghent writes
that “[w]ith Cathy and Hareton Earnshaw, [. . .] Victorian ‘amelior-
ism’ finds a way to sanction the relationship by symbolic emascula-
tion; Cathy literally teaches the devil out of Hareton [. . .] the
daemonic quality has been completely suppressed” (169–70).

Margaret Homans observes that “the second Cathy moves more or
less successfully if sadly from the maternal and nature to the world
of adulthood governed by paternal authority” (75). Terry Eagle-
ton, while reading the novel’s ending more ambiguously than
either Van Ghent or Homans, states that the ending represents “a
victory for the progressive forces of agrarian capitalism” (409).
Instead of viewing the ending as some type of return to or entry
into social order, however, I argue that the novel refuses to privilege
a peaceful assertion of the tenets of patriarchal capitalism.19 While
Hareton is indeed being socialized into the middle-class value sys-
tem and Catherine appears content with her domestic role, the fact
remains that Hareton—until now a member of the working
class—and Catherine—a woman—have obtained property to
which they would otherwise have had little access. Furthermore,
19
Other commentators have also interpreted the novel’s conclusion less conserva-
tively. Kate Flint is somewhat equivocal in her reading: the ending
quietly challenges conventional power relations. It is Cathy who teaches Hareton to
read, thus giving him the key to unlock literature, the very thing which, the novel
demonstrates by its own existence, has the potential to unsettle, to pose questions
rather than provide answers. Nonetheless, after the passion of Heathcliff and
Catherine, this is but a whimsical romance. Its lasting image is that of Cathy sidling
over to Hareton and putting a primrose, with calculated uselessness, into his bowl
of porridge. (177)
Newman “agree[s] with the general tendency of [the more conservative] readings[…]
Nevertheless, [Brontë’s] critique of specular relations keeps the novel from simply capitu-
lating to the ideology of the patriarchal family and sacrificing the subversive energies and
critical edge of Volume I to the demands of closure” (458). Susan Meyer’s interpretation
is more in line with my own: “Wuthering Heights makes no comparable [comparable, that is,
to Jane Eyre] attempt to represent a reformed social order: this novel instead persists
through its ending in affirming transgression against British social structures[…] Wuther-
ing Heights relentlessly pursues its exploration of the ‘fearful’ and ‘disturbing’ energies of
social transgression” (103).
the final chapters of the book, when Lockwood returns to

Wuthering Heights and visits the apparently content inhabitants,
are set in the fall of 1802—just after the onset of the short-lived
Treaty of Amiens, by which peace was temporarily restored
between England and revolutionary France.20 The novel suggests
this context when Nelly, upon viewing Catherine and Hareton
together, observes that “I did not doubt the treaty had been rati-
fied on both sides, and the enemies were, thenceforth, sworn allies”
(315). Yet many readers in Brontë’s time would remember that,

in the autumn of 1802, the French were not to remain allies of
the British for long. The peace was shattered in May of 1803, and
England was unable to decisively defeat the French state until
1815. The “sworn allies” were shortly to become “enemies” again
in the war of revolutionary versus conservative state. Similarly, the
post-1798 rebellion “treaty” that was the 1800 Union between
England and Ireland (by most accounts, established through
patronage and bribery) did not ensure lasting peace. The Union
was to be repeatedly challenged throughout the nineteenth and
into the twentieth centuries as Ireland fought to free itself from
the rule of that same British state. Through the use of this rhetoric
of treaties, allies, and enemies, the novel implies that the goodwill
between Catherine and Hareton will not last.
Moreover, the motif of the disruptive female gaze is not put to
rest in the final chapters, as one might expect in a novel that ends
with the re-establishment of social order. In the final section of
Nelly’s narrative, while Heathcliff is still alive but Catherine and
Hareton have become friends, Joseph describes Catherine as “‘yon
flaysome graceless quean, ut’s witched our lad, wi’ her bold een, un’
her forrard ways’” (319). In addition to labeling her as graceless,
forward, a witch, and a whore (epithets which obviously place her
outside the norm of mid-nineteenth century femininity), Catherine
has also retained the “bold een” or eyes of her mother. Even
worse, perhaps, is Nelly’s observation a few pages later of Catherine
and Hareton: “They lifted their eyes together, to encounter
Mr. Heathcliff—perhaps you have never remarked that their eyes
20
Chapter 18 of the novel begins, “1802.—This September, I was invited to devastate
the moors of a friend, in the North; and, on my journey to his abode, I unexpectedly came
within fifteen miles of Gimmerton[…]A sudden impulse seized me to visit Thrushcross
Grange” (305).
24 Abbie L. Cory
are precisely similar, and they are those of Catherine Earnshaw”

(322). Here, both members of the younger generation have inher-
ited the eyes of the revolutionary Cathy, and the implication is that
Cathy’s disruptive qualities have not been put to rest. The resistance
to the intertwined systems of class and gender will continue.
Brontë’s novel, then, functions as a literary microcosm of the
radical social movements of 1840s England and Ireland. Her text
contains challenges to and criticisms of the hegemonic structures
of power, whether they be metaphorical, as represented by the

denigration of Lockwood and the ideals for which he stands, or
more concrete, as in Cathy’s apparent defiance of monogamous
marriage and the ensuring implications of that defiance for the
capitalist patriarchy. Both the novel and the social movements
suggest the need for a realignment of power relations in British
society. And while radicalism failed to achieve its goals and died
out at the end of the 1840s, that expiration was only temporary as
new working-class and anticolonial movements arose again later
in the century. In the same way, the radical challenges to author-
ity in Wuthering Heights appear to be only momentarily halted.
A difference, however, between the novel and the social move-
ments exists in the actions of the female characters and the Chartist
and Young Ireland women. The latter took their challenges into
the “public” sphere, either via their published writing or by actual
participation in demonstrations and other activities. The two
Catherines, on the other hand, carry out their rebellions while
remaining in the “private” sphere. Neither of them publishes insur-
rectionary writing or goes to meetings or demonstrations. They
rebel against oppressive class and gender structures while remain-
ing within the arena of the domestic. Yet the ostensible boundaries
between public and private cannot stand when the apparently
“public” act of revolution takes place within the “private.” The
dissolution of these boundaries is perhaps what makes Wuthering
Heights such a revolutionary novel.
WORKS CITED
Allott, Miriam, Ed. The Brontës: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge, 1974.
Armstrong, Nancy. “Imperialist Nostalgia and Wuthering Heights.”Wuthering
Heights. By Emily Brontë. Ed. Linda H. Peterson. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s,
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——Desire and Domestic Fiction. New York: Oxford UP, 1987.

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Women's Studies: An inter-

“Out of My Brother’s Power”:

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“OUT OF MY BROTHER’S POWER”: GENDER, CLASS,

AND REBELLION IN WUTHERING HEIGHTS

As part of the move toward New Historicist scholarship in recent

Address correspondence to Dr. Abbie L. Cory, University of California, San Diego,

change in the relations of force in the community, neither are

that constitute the capitalist, patriarchal state were threatened by

summer of 1848 and the movement never fully recovered; the

presented in Parliament; they held tea parties at which attendees

This type of discourse, as Jutta Schwarzkopf observes, blurs the

women to the private was a device employed by “the government

The Keighley women call upon Chartists to defy the entwined

from O’Connell’s group, largely over O’Connell’s adherence to

of mouth. The Brontës subscribed to a number of newspapers

during the 1840s8—takes up the same kinds of concerns as those of

Lockwood is represented as a solid member of the middle class.

The apartment and furniture would have been nothing extraordinary as

Lockwood is somewhat disconcerted, as any middle-class reader

“homely, northern farmer” of a “dark-skinned” man with the dress

the relations of power regularly rebel against that position. Wuther-

of her books: “‘An awful Sunday!’ commenced the paragraph

the labor arrangements,10 nor the familial relationships, nor class

phallic” “equipment for aggression” and observe that “the entire

of the philandering Jupiter) (26). Violence in the sphere of rebel-

Two hairy monsters flew at my throat, bearing me down and extinguishing

Catherines. The dominant power structures of which Lockwood is a

Lockwood’s position of authority in the novel is also subverted

This is the only bit of background information we are given regard-

Lockwood’s account of his abortive flirtation intimates a psychic structure

It is immediately after the young woman “looked a return” that

observes, Lockwood “is about to repeat the same scene several

Catherine’s look registers both rebellion against prevalent concepts

If the male as spectator and the female as spectacle are emblematic

leader Grainne Maol (or Granuwaile, often anglicized as Grace

powerful gaze. “Fionnuala” tells us that “Dark flashes [Grainne

the window” and severely disturbing Lockwood. The scene thus

view such a challenge must be contained. Just as a newly estab-

Although companionate marriage was becoming more and more

the woman at the seaside—unable to do much more than “look a

systems functioned to keep them in their prescribed places, the

her decision to marry Edgar, Cathy makes it clear that her

“He quite deserted! We separated!” she exclaimed, with an accent of indig-

Patsy Stoneman points out that, while Cathy’s statement seems

I never was attached to that great sect,

As Stoneman observes, it is not clear in the novel whether

desire to remain close to Heathcliff while married to Edgar defies

fore extremely important. Cathy, with her desire for continued

Therefore, Owen proposed that in the new socialist communities,

bedroom would be retained through the person’s adulthood

16. See Taylor—for example, 196–199.

even Shelley’s notions of love as expressed in “Epipsychidion,” for

are subject to shifts, regroupings, and realignments, and the novel

daemonic quality has been completely suppressed” (169–70).

the final chapters of the book, when Lockwood returns to

(315). Yet many readers in Brontë’s time would remember that,

are precisely similar, and they are those of Catherine Earnshaw”

of power, whether they be metaphorical, as represented by the

——Desire and Domestic Fiction. New York: Oxford UP, 1987.