Childhood, maturity and elusive autonomy in Wuthering Heights

“We saw its nest in the winter, full of little skeletons,” Catherine Earnshaw recounts during her pregnancy-induced bout of psychosis (72). She rips a pillow open with her teeth, exploding feathers into her bedroom. This manic episode has the effect of unspooling a tightly wound thread of repressed emotion and memory, and like many of Emily Bronte’s plot devices, it has a macabre, funereal tinge. In Wuthering Heights, Bronte repeatedly links childhood to death through muddled temporal landscapes and imbricated narratives, a fixation with infanticide, and an extension of immaturity beyond childhood. This connection between immaturity and death grapples with oppositional views of maturity and its longevity.
For Cathy, feathers trigger a repressed memory of encountering an abandoned nest on the moors with Heathcliff when they were children. Yet Bronte indicates the memory has become void of its initial positive connotations, instead taking shape as Cathy’s morbid fascination with the dead lapwings of her childhood, and a nest strewn with caracasses. The nest filled with tiny baby bird skeletons is a specific (and thus more forceful) visual that Bronte deploys both as a criterion for Cathy’s descent into mania and a component of Bronte’s fascination with the ways childhood and death intertwine.
Childhood, adulthood, and death are inextricable from one another in Wuthering Heights, often simply by virtue of the novel’s convoluted narrative structure, which presents a shifting, kaleidoscopic view of Wuthering Heights, Thrushcross Grange, and their three generations of inhabitants. One of the novel’s more memorable attributes is its replicate names, which, when coupled with a slurry of perspectives and timelines, generate a cross-generational homogenization of experience. Her mimetic naming system makes transparent Bronte’s intent to present characters that are duplicates or prototypes for their children/parents. What Bronte lacks in thematic subtlety, she makes up for in philosophical salience, as her presentation in this way of trauma as something progenital and learned aligns with contemporaneous enlightenment thinking in the mold of thinkers like Goethe, whose conceptualizing of “perennial adolescence” undeniably reverberates through Cathy and Heathcliff and the havoc they wreak on themselves and their children.
Heathcliff, for one, makes little effort to even conceal this penchant for choreographing the traumas of his children and children-adjacent. “We’ll see if one tree won’t grow as crooked as another, with the same wind to twist it!” he says, laying bare his desire to render Hareton subservient as retribution for Hindley’s abuse (107). The line comes as one of the many instances of where Heathcliff’s unfettered cruelty percolates without self-censorship — this too is inherited; in Wuthering Heights’ world, characters make no effort to impose restraint. In Kant’s view, restraint is an indicator of maturity. Thus, failure to sublimate inner turmoil — as demonstrated repeatedly by virtually every character — is immature both in content, and in the fact of its existence and frequency.
Though writing characters uniquely possessed with an inability to curb their emotional outbursts may seem like a convenient or rudimentary plot device, it is dialectically intricate. In keeping with the novel’s dreamlike atmosphere, where everything seems to exist in a fugue or heavily obfuscated state, characters behave in ways that seem incongruous with reality. Behaving outside the realm of reality is more forgivable from children, but this tendency afflicts even Bronte’s adult characters. Beyond simply acting in a manner out of accordance with normalcy, the residents of Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange lack an ability to parse the real from the metaphysical — or in some instances, comprehend anything encumbered by facade:
“Mr. Earnshaw did not understand jokes from his children: he had always been strict and grave with them…His peevish reproofs wakened in her (Catherine) a naughty delight to provoke him: she was never so happy as when we were all scolding her at once, and she defying us with her bold, saucy look, and her ready words; turning Joseph’s religious curses into ridicule, baiting me, and doing just what her father hated most — showing how her pretended insolence, which he thought real, had more power over Heathcliff than his kindness: how the boy would do HER bidding in anything, and HIS only when it suited his own inclination.” (26)
The social ineptitude displayed later on by the likes of Cathy and Heathcliff has its origins in Mr. Earnshaw, whose rigidity of thinking begets a fundamental inability to read people, even children. Cathy’s childhood trickery is not anomalous, nor is its impetus cloaked in mystery. From here, without her father understanding of her childish machinations and limiting them, it becomes easy to trace Cathy’s childhood immaturity into adulthood.
The hostility of Wuthering Heights also engenders a volatile disposition in Heathcliff, who, from the moment he sets foot at Wuthering Heights is dehumanized and met with a hatred that careens into the unprecedented and dark locale of infanticide. Early in the novel, when Mr. Linton finds the young Heathcliff with Catherine he proclaims: “…the villain scowls so plainly in his face; would it not be a kindness to the country to hang him at once, before he shows his nature in acts as well as features?” (30) Rather than constructing idyllic origins for her lovers, Bronte sets them on a trajectory of violence that recoils far beyond the confines of their relationship, or even their lifetimes.
It bears acknowledging that much of the action and histrionics that unfold in the novel occur when Heathcliff and Cathy are still very young and — by contemporary metrics of maturity — children. Though the lines delineating childhood and adulthood in the popular imagination have long been blurred or tampered with, readers of Wuthering Heights would have likely understood Catherine and Heathcliff to be young adults at the time of Catherine’s marriage and pregnancy, which is the catalyst for her psychotic break and later, death. Catherine’s pregnancy coincides with her most tenuous stage of life: young adulthood. At the moment that it becomes her reality she is unable to reconcile her selfhood with her fast approaching motherhood and adulthood, initiating a descent into insanity. Interestingly, she is cognizant of and able to articulate these anxieties:
“I thought . . . that I was enclosed in the oak-panelled bed at home; and my heart ached with some great grief which, just waking, I could not recollect. I pondered, and worried myself to discover what it could be, and, most strangely, the wholepast seven years of my life grew a blank! I did not recall that they had been at all. I was a child; my father was just buried, and my misery arose from the separation that Hindley had ordered between me and Heathcliff. I was laid alone, for the first time, and, rousing from a dismal doze after a night of weeping, I lifted my hand to push the panels aside…. I cannot say why I felt so wildly wretched … I wish I were a girl again, half savage, and hardy, and free; and laughing at injuries, not maddening under them! Why am I so changed? Why does my blood rush into a hell of tumult at a few words? I’m sure I should be myself were I once among the heather on those hills.” (74)
The root cause of her anxieties is less her newfound obligations or role, but more a sharp and incisive realization of her loss of stasis and helplessness to bend time to her will. Ironically, Catherine approaches at least a silhouette of maturity — an acknowledgement of the ways she is “changed” — but she doubles back on her intellectual progress by her declaration that she wishes she could recapture and prolong her girlhood. This desire to rekindle childhood is innocuous when confined to rhetoric, but Catherine materializes it in her actions. Underscoring all of Cathy and Heathcliff’s antics and their downward spirals towards death and sadism, respectively, is the notion that individuals retain a certain degree of autonomy and freedom to relinquish the threads that bind their childhood traumas to their present choices. Adopting a cynical view, her demise is in some ways self-inflicted, borne of a desire to convalesce under the weight of reality. It is far easier to infantilize oneself when there is an external impetus, it takes some degree of maturity to circumvent it.
Catherine and Heathcliff’s mutual fixation on childhood even as adults (Heathcliff’s is even more pronounced and all-encompassing) results from interfacing with shifting notions of maturity and its timelines. Bronte’s portrayal of maturity, or lack thereof, pulls from both a worldview where maturity is tantamount to emotional and physical survival, and also one where immaturity is the norm. It is learned and absorbed before being subsequently taught. Bronte eschews a rigid identification with the idea that immaturity within this context is surmountable, yet she seems wary of acquiescing to it, though her two central characters do. Rather, the question of how personal responsibility can interact with childhood and maturity is left deliberately unanswered in the form of a new beginning: Catherine Linton and Hareton’s union at the end of the novel.