See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/335977934

Class conflicts in Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights

Article · March 2011

CITATIONS READS
3 16,957

3 authors, including:

Md. Mohib Ullah

International Islamic University Chittagong
23 PUBLICATIONS 40 CITATIONS

SEE PROFILE

All content following this page was uploaded by Md. Mohib Ullah on 23 September 2019.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

 HORIZON
ISSN 2223-0556
Number- 4, March 2011 (p 79-94)

Class conflicts in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights

Muhammed Rukan Uddin*

Md. Mohib Ullah**

Abstract: This paper proposes to study Wuthering Heights (1847)

by Emily Brontë (1814-1848) as a class-conscious novel that
highlights signs of class conflicts current in nineteenth-century
England. To start with, the paper concentrates on the views
concerning the structure of history and the superstructure of
culture and society to manifest how these ideas are instrumental
to the making of Wuthering Heights. In this regard, our study
intends to look into the socio-cultural scenario of the Victorian
England that had had a great sway on the insightful faculty of
Emily Brontë. Simultaneously, it underscores the cross-cultural
crises bolstered by financial disparity that manipulate different
relationships, and contribute to the towering tensions between the
two houses of the novel—Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross
Grange. The two houses represent two diametrically opposed
classes of the Victorian society, and have an influence on almost
all of the characters in the novel. This paper, thus, examines the
issues of class conflicts mirrored in the novel’s social milieu and
specific forms dramatized in different layers of relationships in
Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights.

Emily Brontë had published Wuthering Heights (1847) one year before
Karl Marx (1818-1883) and Friederich Engels (1820-1895) declared the
historical ‘Manifesto of the Communist Party’ (1848). Our study of the
early Victorian period reveals that the proximity of time between the

*
Lecturer, Department of English, University of Chittagong
**
Lecturer, Dept. of English Language and Literature, International Islamic University Chittagong
HORIZON

Brontë sisters and Karl Marx might lead to a similarity in thought born out
of the identical socio-political issues of the Victorian England. Class-
bound social stratum, thus, has its trace in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering
Heights giving us enough space and scope to evaluate the novel from the
class-conflict perspective. Our understanding of the novel relates to class-
conscious praxis to see through the age-old binary oppositions that exist in
the society between the rich and the poor, the master and the slave etc.
More importantly, the updated form of this opposition which hit the
Victorian society was between the ‘bourgeois’ and the ‘proletariat’ that
made the society fall asunder. Very relevantly, Brontë’s novel deals with
this social paradigm clothed in fictional realism.

Class division in society can be traced to the genesis of civilization, and it

has been updating its course to cope with the passage of time. In all phases
of history there has been a conflict between these two classes of the
society. In ancient times, the conflict was between free citizens and slaves.
In the feudal society of the middle ages, it was between feudal lord and the
serf; later on, between the aristocrats and the commoners. But in the
Victorian age when Emily Brontë wrote Wuthering Heights, there grew
another society which was termed as the bourgeois who possessed the
mode of production. In this period the conflict was, first and foremost,
between the capitalists and the workers, or the proletariat. The oppressors
who direct the mode of production, and thus own wealth and property
often brandish their swords over the oppressed; on the other hand, the poor
carry the yoke of production, and are in a world of economic alienation
heading to eventual deprivation. Marx significantly emphasizes that all
cultures serve the interest of the ruling or capitalist class that sets the
norms which are the superstructure of the society for what is right and
wrong. We get Marx’s stinging words from The German Ideology:

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas:
i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of the society is at
the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the
means of intellectual production at its disposal has control over
the means of mental production. (qtd. in Lavine 1984: 294)

80
 Class conflicts in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights

This is Marx’s wake up call to all the working people to be united to

tumble down the bourgeois from the ruling seats that control the means of
production. It is to create an equal share of the wealth for the people with
an ultimate view to building a classless society, which would make it
possible to contribute according to their abilities and take according to
their needs. In the concluding section of the Manifesto-‘Position of the
Communists in Relation to the Various Existing Opposition Parties’-Marx
declares that the working people’s ‘end can be attained only by forcible
overthrow of all existing social conditions’ , whereas in Wuthering
Heights Brontë makes her hero speak to Hindley, a petty bourgeois: ‘I
only wish I knew the best way! Let me alone, and I will plan it out: while
I’m thinking of that, I don’t feel pain’. (Brontë: Ch.VII) i

Emily Brontë was highly swayed by her time. During her life Emily
traveled many places, and witnessed socio-political upheavals from a very
close distance which stamped a great effect on her mind. Living in a
patriarchal society, she didn’t have an avenue for the unaffected expression
of her rebellious thoughts, which were the direct outcome of her
observation of a society infested with many ills and diseases. It is also a
fallacy to assume that the Brontë sisters lived in a secluded cocoon on the
edge of wild moors. Rather, the truth is, their natal place Haworth was not
in fact a remote locality but a small industrial town near Keighley, in the
industrial West Riding of Yorkshire. The Brontë family saw strikes and
lock-outs in Haworth too, in which the Reverend Patrick Brontë, Emily’s
father and the local clergyman, was inevitably involved. It is said that the
Reverend Patrick, at one time, incurred the anger of the local employees by
assisting the lock-out workers in his parish (Stoneman: 1998). It is also
not completely true that Emily was confined within the boundary walls of
her parsonage, rather she visited Leeds, Bradford, Keighley and Halifax
and even spent a short time in Brussels, Belgium. Thus, the turbulent
world of the 19th century was candidly exposed to her eyes.

In early Victorian England, Emily saw a society split between the rich and
the poor, the workers and industrialists. She saw the worker could have a
12-hour working day in a freezing cold production hall. The pay was often
81
HORIZON

so poor that children and expectant mothers also had to work which led to
unspeakable social conditions. In many places women were obliged to
supplement their earnings by prostitution. Their customers were the
respected citizenry of the town. It infuriated Karl Marx and Emily – the
outcomes were the ‘Manifesto’ of the former and Wuthering Heights of the
latter. What was possible for Marx was not possible for Emily due to the
patriarchal setting of the society that never allowed any woman to write
about even fairy tales, let alone any revolutionary pamphlets for social
change. The situation was such that when Charlotte Brontë, Emily’s elder
sister, wrote to Robert Southey, the Poet Laureate, sending him some of
her poems and asking his advice, she was replied thus:

Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life, and it ought

not to be. The more she is engaged in her proper duties, the less
leisure she will have for it, even as an accomplishment and a
reaction. To those duties you have not yet been called, and when
you are you will less eager for celebrity. You will not seek in
imagination for excitement, of which the vicissitudes of this
life…will bring with them but too much. (qtd. in Gaskell, 1855:
Ch 8)

Elizabeth Gaskell, the biographer of Charlotte Brontë, shows us a brief

picture of the Brontës that gives us an insight into the life of Emily, who
chose to become a writer defying the injunctions of the male-run society.
A man could do whatever he liked; it was a matter of preference for him.
But a woman could not exercise her wishes; she just carried out the
dictation of the society. Gaskell writes:

When a man becomes an author, it is probably merely a change

of employment to him… but no other can take up the quiet
regular duties of the daughter, the wife, or the mother, as well as
she whom God has appointed to fill that particular place: a
woman’s principal work in life is hardly left to her own choice;
nor can she drop the domestic charges devolving on her as an
individual. (ibid)

82
 Class conflicts in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights

Wuthering Heights was produced in a period when England and all other
European countries were going through social and economic changes,
industrial unrest and political instability. Emily grew up in the second
phase of the Industrial Revolution when the great inventions of the 18th
century—such as engine-driven power tillers and power driven machinery-
were developed and consolidated into the factory system. The emergence
of trade unions in the 1830s lobbied against the poor law and for improved
factory conditions thus fueling class battles between organized labour and
their employers. On the other hand, the rise of a broad democratic
movement in the 1840s known as Chartism aimed at campaigning for
reform by mass meetings and demonstrations provoked the government to
severe policies of repressions. Emily’s Yorkshire was at the heart of these
political conflicts and confrontations.

The Brontë sisters grew up near one of the sources of the Industrial
Revolution in an English country divided between large landed estates and
intensive manufacturing. And far from being mysteriously sequestered
from all this, living only in their own private imaginative world, their
fiction was profoundly influenced by it. In fact, Charlotte Brontë’s novel
Shirley (1847) is explicitly set in a landscape of Industrial manufacturing,
large-scale capitalist agriculture and working class unrest. Thus, the
Brontës were not, then, three weird sisters deposited upon the Yorkshire
moors from some metaphysical outer space. On the contrary, their lives
were shaped by some of the most typical conflicts of the Victorian
England–conflicts between rural and urban, colony and metropolis,
commercial south and the industrial north, female sensibility and male
power etc.

The years of the Brontë sisters’ childhood were, indeed, a time of

ruination. Thousands of handworkers were scattered in hill-cottages
throughout the region. Karl Marx described one aspect of that destruction
of the handloom weavers as the most terrible tragedy of English history in
The Capital (1867). The Brontë’s era also coincided with strikes,
Chartism, struggle against the Corn Laws and agitation for factory reform.
One contemporary government official wrote that there was a ferocious
83
HORIZON

civil war boiling in the district; and the Brontë’s own village of Haworth
had several worsted mills and a more than century-old industry (Eagleton
2005:126). In his All Alone: The Life and Private History of Emily Jane
Brontë, Romer Wilson relates one of Emily’s poems to the turmoil and
chaos of the Plug Riots (1843) in which desperate workers tried to destroy
the steam boilers which were reducing them to starvation:

Why ask to know what date, what clime?

There dwelt our own humanity,
Power worshippers from earliest time,
Foot-kissers of triumphant crime
Crushers of helpless misery,
Crushing down justice, honouring wrong:
If that be feeble, this be strong. (qtd. in Stoneman 1998:136)

It is possible that, having visited Manchester in August 1846, Emily had

had her eyes opened to the evils of industrialization. It was the decade of
Chartism, Mrs. Gaskell’s novels of working-class life, and Friedrich
Engels had, by the date of Emily Brontë’s brief visit, been working in
Manchester amongst the slum-dwellers, and written his Condition of the
Working Class in England in 1844.

Brontë very skilfully showcases and sensationalizes the social divergences

that are the hallmarks of the nineteenth century England in her novel. For
example, the differences between the two houses of the novel are
differences of both culture and class. But these differences provide a
nucleus to the social distance between Heathcliff and Edgar Linton and
Hindley. Heathcliff is a creature picked up by old Earnshaw from the
Liverpool streets with an unknown origin. As a boy who is uncultured,
uncivilized and black, he is in every way an antithesis to the Thrushcross
Grange. He becomes a pariah both in the Heights and the Grange. The
Earnshaw family can be called yeoman - a farming family as it is closer to
the land and to agricultural labour; on the other hand, the Lintons are a bit
more polished and refined, and have constructed a distance between
themselves and the rural economy. The Grange stands in a park and its
84
 Class conflicts in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights

security is ensured by the boundary wall in a frontier between civilization

and the wild nature. The house keeps security dogs as the bourgeois does
to protect their ill gotten riches from the workers’ attacks. On the contrary,
the Heights is situated on the moor which is frequently trodden by
Heathcliff and Catherine’s random loitering, and is characterized by all the
primitive roughness of a peasant life-style. Apart from this, the Grange has
all the civilized luxuries of an aristocratic and sophisticated society.
Though apparently the two families are socially compatible and at least of
equal status, there are inherent differences which put one house in contrast
with the other at some levels. From within the Heights has a marvelous
solidity and a clear distinction between the ‘house’ (main living room) and
the kitchen, these rooms share at their worst a primitive lack of comfort
and at their best a homely atmosphere centered on a glowing hearth.
Nelly, the narrator and the attendant of the house describes an interior
tableau which captures the last moment of fireside in the years of
unhappiness at the Wuthering Heights:

[…] we are all together- I a little removed from the hearth, busy
at my knitting, and Joseph reading his Bible near the table (for
the servants sat in the house then, after their work was done).
Miss Cathy had been sick, and Heathcliff was lying on the floor
with his head in her lap. (Brontë: Ch.V)

Such physical and social harmony is absent in the Grange, and is

contrasted absolutely with the empty elegance of the drawing room at the
Grange:

[…] a splendid place carpeted in crimson, and crimson-covered

chairs and tables, and a pure white ceiling bordered by gold, a
shower of glass drops hanging in silver chains from the centre,
and shimmering with little soft tapers. (Brontë: Ch.VI)

The interior scene is obviously indicative of the 19th century industrialists’

house decour which the workers thought was painted red by their blood.

85
HORIZON

Brontë very cautiously uses two important class-conscious words:

‘landlord’ and ‘capital’ in the first chapter that foreshadows the
forthcoming class conflicts in the novel. This also signals the class
divergences that will soon take place between Lockwood, the southern
dilettante who enters the bizarre and unfamiliar world of the remote
northern farmhouse, and Heathcliff, the protagonist of the novel. Their
social incongruence is well revealed in their conversation in the first
chapter of the novel. Lockwood uses a conventional upper class language,
‘while enjoying a month of fine weather at the sea-coast’ (Brontë: Ch.I);
this type of refined language is really antithesis to the harsh dialect of the
other characters and the unpolished domestic atmosphere of the
inhospitable Heights where ‘guests are so exceedingly rare’ (ibid).
Lockwood, as a city dweller marks himself out as both stranger and
intruder. Therefore, the first chapter of the novel doesn’t only show the
meeting of two persons but also shows a cross-cultural conflict between an
independent, sociable city-dweller and a strange territory of an
impenetrably mystifying social landscape signified by Heathcliff with his
‘black eyes’ and ‘suspicious brows’.

When Lockwood visits the Heights for second time, he makes some
mistakes which very much indicate that his culture is a different one. He
compliments Cathy on her ‘favourites’, only to discover that they are dead
rabbits. He assumes that Cathy will display the amiable and hospitable
manners to him familiar in the ladies of his own social milieu; but he is
quickly disappointed when the later flings the teaspoon back into the
caddy. He thinks that Hareton, who is in reality the true heir to the estate,
is a servant because of his worn out attire and behaviour. Moreover,
Lockwood entirely gets the wrong idea about the systems and the
relationships that are characteristic of the Wuthering Heights. Any
searching reader would obviously comprehend that these mistakes and
wrong ideas mark out a social distance between him, and the house he is
entering. This distance suggests that the vicious conflicts that take place
within the farmhouse have something to do with class conflicts.

86
 Class conflicts in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights

As mentioned earlier, one of the main differences, obviously of culture, is

seen in the crucial formulation of the two houses. In chapter VI, this
difference takes a very pierce move leaving us to think of the bourgeois-
proletariat relationship that is still topical in our time. When Heathcliff and
Catherine are detected at the Lintons’ threshold they receive an inhospitable
welcome. The Lintons react to a combat from outside with the instinct of the
bourgeois, assuming the strangers to be working class people who are called
‘robbers’, ‘thieves’ and ‘rascals’ (Brontë: Ch.VI). They use guns and dogs
to protect themselves from the imaginary enemies who are created by their
own oppressive hands. The use of ‘dogs’ to thwart the advance of Cathy and
Heathcliff, according to Terry Eagleton, is due to the bourgeois endeavour to
protect ill-gotten wealth and to suppress the proletariat voice by using
weapons (Eagleton 1975:106-7). Catherine is received with utmost care and
cordiality because of her good attire while Heathcliff is driven out from the
house as if a criminal, and ‘the villain scowls so plainly in his face, would it
not be a kindness to the country to hang him at once’ (Brontë:Ch.VI). The
description of the house of the Lintons narrated by Heathcliff gives us an
imaginary picture of Capitalists’ aristocracy. In addition, the richness,
splendor and luxury of the Grange which is ‘carpeted with crimson’, and the
‘ceiling bordered by gold’ are entirely opposed to the simplicity of domestic
affair of the Wuthering Heights.

The ideologyii that the Grange shows is obviously a dominant ideology

which is so much influencing that it has virtually deformed Catherine both
physically and psychologically. She is transformed from ‘a hatless little
savage’ to ‘a very dignified person’ that even her brother Hindley finds it
difficult to recognize. Hindley’s comment to Catharine--‘You look like a
lady now’ (Brontë:Ch.VI ) is important to note as the word lady reminds
us of a superior class. The Grange has changed Catherine not only in dress,
but also in behaviour, attitude and taste. She comes to her farmhouse as a
girl redefined, and is inculcated in a high-class culture, which is very
unlikely to suit the inmates of the Heights. Catherine’s fingers are
‘wonderfully whitened with doing nothing’ at all. Having been civilized by
a superior house she now wants to civilize Heathcliff whose black attire
and ebony complexion were sources of fascination for her. Heathcliff
87
HORIZON

meets Catherine in torn dress and a worn out look which gives birth to a
belief that the latter has been for six days in a superior house and has now
come back to an inferior one. On the other hand, Heathcliff feels very
much disgraced himself and is not ready to yield to Catherine’s dictation.
Class conflicts underlie the verbal conflicts when Heathcliff says: ‘I shall
be as dirty as I please, and I like to be dirty, and I will be dirty’ (Brontë :
Ch.VII). We might also note that Catherine’s civilizing process reminds us
of Miss Watson’siii to Huck in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn . To
put it plainly, Catherine borrows a sort of dominant culture from the
Lintons which ultimately takes her away from a person she was deeply
attached to.

The novel’s central conflict is based, to a large extent, upon social

considerations. This conflict matures in chapter IX where Catherine
measures the love of Heathcliff and Edgar on the scale of social status.
Catherine’s regard for Edgar Linton is tainted with contempt for the paleness
of his character, and yet she chooses him over the man she loves. Catherine
here is a hapless victim of a society that gives value to social security over
human integrity. A person raised in a democracy might consider this a bit
implausible, especially in view of Catherine’s emotional nature, because in
our relatively fluid society there would not necessarily be any permanent
social distinction between Edgar and Heathcliff. That is, Edgar would not
necessarily be considered ‘better’ than Heathcliff, an interesting man who
might rise in the world eventually gaining wealth and position himself. One
thing we should also consider that Heathcliff’s unknown origin cannot
suffice the fact that his origin is much inferior to that of Hindley or Edgar. It
is the mystery surrounding Heathcliff that his lack of personal history, his
sullen uncommunicativeness, his almost magical capacity to reconstruct
himself during his absence from Wuthering Heights makes him such a
suitable focus for other’s projections. Heathcliff is the ‘cuckoo’ without
history, an enigma so unsettling that Nelly is inclined, as indeed some
criticsivhave been subsequently, to invent a past for him:

Who knows, but your father was Emperor of China, and your
mother an Indian queen, each of them able to buy up, with one

88
 Class conflicts in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights

week’s income, Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange

together? And you were kidnapped by wicked sailors, and brought
to England. Were I in your place, I would frame high notions of my
birth. (Brontë: Ch.VII)

Though we are not sure of his being a pauper or prince before his
reappearing at the Heights, one thing we are well aware of that Hindley’s
incessant oppressions and repeated physical and mental injuries led
Heathcliff to a servile periphery from where Heathcliff forms a granite
determination to come to the centre.

Wuthering Heights reflects English society in the nineteenth century, and

in that society Heathcliff could have scant scopes to become ‘respectable’
as the class structure was far too rigid. One was born into certain social
stratum, and unless something extraordinary happened, one remained in
that level on the social scale throughout life. An essential distinction was
maintained between the servant and the master, the tradesman and the
landowner, the commoner and the aristocrat: movement upward was very
difficult, as it was ‘proper’ to remain in one’s own place. The value of the
individual in that strictly classed society depends, to a large extent, on the
class to which one belongs. Heathcliff with his obscure birth and slum
background is a ‘low’ person as he is emphatically not well-bred. This is
the Achilles’ heel of Heathcliff where both Edgar and Hindley are
hammering. Though Heathcliff can now talk and act like a gentleman, he
can never be on a par with Edgar Linton or Mr. Lockwood as the shadow
of his unknown birth prevents it. When Catherine says it would degrade
her to marry Heathcliff, she is stating a very important impediment, which
might be impossible for Heathcliff to instantly overcome. The wife takes
on the social status of her husband, and if Catherine had married Heathcliff
she would have dropped several rungs on the social ladder, and lost
considerable prestige in the barter. The Earnshaws are an old family; they
own their land and farm it. Thus, though not of the gentry, they are not too
far below that exalted plane, the gap between their level and Heathcliff’s is
immense, especially now that Hindley has degraded him to servant’s
status. Hindley’s brutal behaviour has pushed Heathcliff down the social

89
HORIZON

rung where he was placed by his creator. The Lintons, on the other hand,
are legitimate country gentry, minor aristocrats, who rent their land to
tenants. Catherine, by marrying Edgar, becomes immanently respectable, a
member of the upper classes, and wishes to be ‘the greatest woman of the
neighborhood’ (Brontë: Ch. IX); whereas ‘if Heathcliff and I are married,
we should be beggars’ (ibid). This is obviously a social belief which is
constructed by the structure of the existing society of the nineteenth
century England. For this reason, Heathcliff looks upon Catherine’s
preference for Linton as a form of class discrimination, and Heathcliff’s
verbal rebellion comes out of a sharpest pain: ‘Having leveled my place,
don’t erect a hovel and complacently admire your own charity in giving
me that for a home’ (Brontë: Ch.XI). The class system manipulates the
heart of Catherine, and constitutes the major conflict of the novel by
making Catherine tempted to become a social climber at Heathcliff’s
expense, which the writer presents as very much a social choice, not a
personal one.

Heathcliff remains absent in the novel for three years after he overhears the
conversation of Catherine and Nelly about the former’s cruel decision of
marrying Edgar. Heathcliff makes use of his mysteriously earned money
during his absence to establish power and possession over the Heights and
Grange. He does so because these two houses have thrust him down the
lower step of the ladder from where it is difficult for him to get Catherine
who is in the upper step. It is notable that his desire for Cathy is obviously
not physical, and none of Heathcliff’s actions and utterances proves it; it is
rather an attachment far more deeply interlocked in a purpose sublime and
sanctified. Through his union with Cathy, Heathcliff wants to turn it into a
union between the two opposite rungs of the social ladder; the upper rung
of which will never meet the lower one unless and until the ladder is
broken in the middle. In the same way, Heathcliff thinks he will be able to
reach Catherine only when the enemies who stand between them will be
removed and demolished.

In the modern world, a bitter struggle between two ideologies--capitalist

and communist is going on with an all-encompassing effect in society. In
90
 Class conflicts in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights

every stage, the former has tried to suppress and oppress the latter by
‘owning the economic mode of production and possessing economic,
political, and ideological supremacy’ (Marxist-Leninist Philosophy 1987:
55). The novel also, more or less, shows these characteristics between the
two conflicting classes that ultimately move to class struggles:

F.1. The above diagram shows the differences between Heathcliff and the Lintons that breed cultural
difference as well making the class struggle inevitable in Wuthering Heights.

Heathcliff, by most of the readers, has been often conceived of as a

diabolical character in the novel. What is left is to shower him with
sympathy particularly at the beginning and at the end of the novel. At the
beginning of the novel, he draws on our sympathy because of Hindley’s
diabolical treatment on the former in the absence of Mr. Earnshaw. Early
in the novel we pity him because of Catherine’s pitiless separation from
Heathcliff, and her getting wed with Mr. Edgar Linton. At the end,
Heathcliff keeps our sympathy because his revenge is not merely neurotic;
it has an ethical force. He has been feeling the hoof beats in his heart ever
since he was beaten physically by Hindley and Edgar and also emotionally
by Catherine. Heathcliff uses their own weapons against them with
complete ruthlessness. The weapons he uses against the Earnshaws and
Lintons are their own weapons of money and arranged marriages. He gets
power over them by the classic methods of the ruling class, expropriation
and the property deals. He buys out Hindley after he comes back to the
Wuthering Heights and reduces him to drunken impotency. He marries
Isabella, and then organizes the marriage of his son to Catherine Linton, so
that the entire property of the two families shall be controlled by him. He
systematically degrades Hareton Earnshaw to servility and illiteracy:

I want the triumph of seeing my descendent fairly lords of their

estates! My child hiring their children to till their father’s lands
for wages. (Brontë: Ch. XX)

The end of the novel records the pitiless treatment of Heathcliff towards
the inmates of the two houses by ill-treating Hareton, the rightful inheritor
of the Wuthering Heights, curving the natural liberty of little Cathy, and

91
HORIZON

creating a total ownership of the two houses, precisely the same way that
Hindley and Edgar exploited him. Here too, readers may find it hard to
defend Heathcliff’s actions later in the novel, particularly his cruelty
towards the children and his expropriating their lands and properties and
seizing them himself as the true ideals of the proletariat struggle; they may
find Heathcliff’s systematic revenge remote from the philosophy of the
proletariat revolutionary. In this connection, we should think about the two
phases of communism: Raw communism and Ultimate communism—the
former is obsessed with seizing all material goods from the capitalists, and
it will take place after the ruling class is driven out of the power or when
the situation will be pro-proletariat leading to an abrupt upsurge of pent up
reactions often through bloodshed on the part of the long oppressed. Marx
calls it the Reign of Terror which will be of a short time; after which there
will commence the second phase: the Ultimate Communism ensuring
classlessness, equality, justice, and after which ‘man will repossess,
expropriate, regain, himself from enslavement and will live in unity with
man and nature in the communist world to come’ (Lavine 283). Moreover,
the reason behind Heathcliff’s cruel revenge on the two houses and their
inmates can be found in Nicoly Astrovsky’s novel How the Steel was
Tempered (1936). When Sergei, the protagonist of the novel starts killing
the Polish soldiers, to placate the shocking readers Astrovesky writes—
‘and he, Sergei would kill in order to hasten when men would not kill one
another any longer’. (qtd. in Mukhupaddhay 2006:67)

Though issues of class conflicts mark the novel throughout, and all the
characters are caught up in a whirling vortex of class consciousness,
Brontë makes these conflicts evaporate towards the end of the novel
through her adroit treatment of the characters. The whole thing can be
comparable to the systematic progress of a society from capitalism to
communism. Division into classes disappears under communism–this is
heralded at the end of Wuthering Heights. It is topical to note that once V.
I. Lenin noticed a poster in a hall where he was to make speech; the poster
read: ‘The Reign of the workers and peasants will last forever’ (qtd. in
Buzuev, Gorodnov 1987). V.I. Lenin explained to his audience the
erroneousness of this slogan, and pointed out that the workers’ mission is
92
 Class conflicts in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights

not to immortalize themselves as a class but to liquidate the class

distinctions to build a classless society. In the same way, the concluding
events of the novel show a pattern of resolution and reconciliation through
the tragic destiny acted out by Heathcliff and Catherine. When Mr.
Lockwood returns to the Wuthering Heights after Heathcliff’s death, he
encounters certain changes which were absent during his first visit to the
Heights: ‘I had neither to climb the gate, nor to knock it- it yielded to my
hand. That is an improvement! I thought.’(Brontë: Ch.XXXII)

Early in the novel the gates and doors of the Wuthering Heights were
locked but now they are open. Nature wears new attire. Flowers grow
among the food trees signifying the arrival of a new era. In a sense, the
sophisticated civilization of the Grange has moved closer to the primitive
culture of the Heights. We notice a marked change in the relationship of
Catherine and Hareton. They are passing through tender times reminding
us of Heathcliff and Catherine’s sweet times on the moor. Separation is
replaced by union, hatred by love, and animosity by a sagacity of integrity.
The long sad saga of Heathcliff and Catherine, which is painted by
agonizing events and severance, give way to a narrative between the
Heights and the Grange.

Wuthering Heights was published in a time when England was going

through enormous socio-economic changes due to the rise of the Industrial
Revolution. Division in the society was widening day by day between the
two conflicting classes of the society namely the rising bourgeois and the
proletariat. Emily Brontë’s novel Wuthering Heights (1847) houses these
socio-cultural divergences that are, to a great extent, based on the class
conflicts. Through her masterly delineation of the two contrasting cultures
of the houses and the powerful construct of their inmates’ disposition and
demeanor Emily Brontë not only shows the class conflicts that were
plaguing the Victorian England but also shows, through the amalgamation
of cultures of the two houses later in the novel, how these crises can be
resolved and reconciled.

93
 HORIZON

Notes

i
All textual references are from A Norton Critical Edition: Wuthering Heights,
Emily Brontë. Fourth edition: Edited by Richard J. Dunn: 2005

ii
It is important here to understand the precise meaning of ideology. Ideology is
not in the first place a set of doctrines; it signifies the way men live out their
roles in class-society, the values, ideas and images which tie them to their social
functions and prevent them from a true knowledge of society as a whole.
(Eagleton 2002: 15)

iii
In Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Miss. Watson wants to
civilize Huck, but attempts back fire.

iv
See, for example, James Kavanagh in Emily Brontë (Oxford: Basil Blackwell:
1985) who suggests that Heathcliff has an Irish working class heritage.

Works Cited

Buzuev, V,V Gorodnov. What is Marxism and Leninism? Moscow: Progress

Publishers, 1987.
Eagleton, Terry, Marxism and Literary Criticism. New Work: Routledge, 2002.
---. “Myths of Power in Wuthering Heights”. New Casebooks: Wuthering Heights.
Ed. Patsy Stoneman. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993.
---. The English Novel: An Introduction. UK: Blackwell Publishing, 2005.
Gaskell, Elizabeth. The life of Charlotte Brontë. London: Smith, Elder & Co,
1857.
Lavine T.Z. From Socrates to Sartre: the Philosophic Quest. New York: Bantam
Books, 1984.
Mukhopaddhay, Bimol Kumar. Marxiya Sahityatatwa. Kolkata: Deys Publishing,
2006.
Stoneman, Patsy (Ed.) Wuthering Heights: A Reader’s Guide to Essential
Criticism. Cambridge: Icon Books, 1998.
T. Vlasova, E. Evanob. Marxist-Leninist Philosophy. Moscow: Progress Publisher,
1987.
Wilson, Romer. All alone: The life and Private History of Emily Brontë. London:
Chatto and Windus, 1928.
<http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-
manifesto/index.htm>
94

View publication stats