ABSTRACT
Emily Brontë could not have read Mary Shelley’s Mathilda, which remained unpublished until 1959. Yet Brontë deploys a posthumous voice, I suggest, as her interpretation of that Romantic aesthetic in which Shelley worked, echoing Mathilda’s rhetoric of the daughter’s auto-elegiac speech. Notably, Brontë positions herself as a reader of Byron, not only incorporating Byron in the Byronic character of Heathcliff but also positing a complex authority for feminine voice by an implicit allusion to the frontispiece of Morre’s Life of Byron, which Brontë copied out in an image known as “The North Wind.” In her novel’s recurrent reference to the wind off the moor, Brontë translates the pictorial into the linguistic and appropriates this emblem of the north wind, which appears on the front of the famous poet’s biography, for the implicit source of her heroine’s suppressed voice. Cathy’s voice is linked to the wind off the moor, insofar as the heroine claims to need to breathe that wind to survive, a claim that evokes Byron as a source for the suppressed authority of Cathy’s voice. Wuthering Heights dramatizes the problem of the interdiction of feminine authority in contrast to Byron’s male privilege, his direct access to the authority of canonicity, for Brontë’s novel stages the crossing out of the undomestic, or not quotidian, feminine voice-Cathy’s voice. As masculine name, Byron’s canonical status secretly feeds feminine speech, but the figure of the north wind, as Cathy’s voice, is an emblem obviously vulnerable to figural dissolution. In much the same way that Shelley pushes the mark of the voice of the feminine narrator into a theater of near nonexistence in Mathilda, Cathy is placed as the almost voiceless “other” of whose story the text is revelatory. In sounding out the problematic of femininity, voice, and authority in this chapter, I will apply a Bakhtinian model to argue that Brontë’s character Cathy is the authority for the story that is explicitly told by Lockwood and Ellen Dean, I suggest that the connection between Byron and Cathy’s “voice” signifies Cathy, the waif, persisting as voice in text in Wuthering Heights, her presence disrupting narrative even as it suggests narrative. The waif’s voice is the suppressed voice of the other that organizes the novel. Wuthering Heights itself is often interpreted as being directed by a force outside its author’s control. Variously, the novel has been interpreted as a mystical,
Miltonic, or primitive text. Charlotte Brontë inaugurated this tradition of reading Emily when she framed her sister’s posthumous position by contending that Emily was possessed by a “gift” of which she was not “always master.”1 Along similar lines, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar read Wuthering Heights as a rewriting of Paradise Lost, while J. Hillis Miller claims for the novel an “over-rich” status and Q.D. Leavis interprets it as a work of untutored genius, full of “false” starts.2 David Cecil, who seminally praises the work as unique among Victorian novels, interprets it as a kind of stage for mysticism, again locating its agency in an alterior force, that of mysticism.3 Recent feminist criticism has tended to focus on Cathy’s oppressed position in the novel, reading her as marginalized. Such readings of Cathy as displaced within the novel that she focuses, as not being a “master” of the novel that tells her story, however, perform the compulsion to site the power of Brontë’s novel as inevitably alterior, absurdly beyond its own author.4 I want to suggest that such readings reflect the structure of the novel, which implicitly marks Cathy as the posthumous narrator whose authority drives the explicit narrative of Lockwood. Embedded in the feminist critical argument that notes Cathy’s displacement and marginalization is the gesture of locating the novel in a patriarchal structure that marginalizes women’s writing. This old habit of locating the force of Brontë’s novel outside of Brontë’s control reciprocally turns on readings of Cathy as a character whose voice is marginal. But just as Brontë works through allusion not to dislocate authority from herself but continually to stage the problem of authority, so also is Cathy’s authority posited in terms of allusion, Lockwood’s narrative alluding to Cathy’s suppressed but finally masterful voice. Through the character of Cathy, the novel queries what is at stake in the loss of feminine authority, or voice as mastery. Brontë’s richly allusive novel and its heroine’s character incorporate a complex array of sources as an overarching formal mark, a rhetoric that both formally indicates the problem of woman’s interdicted authority and also mourns that interdiction. Precisely because none of its allusions tie up the novel, Wuthering Heights tropes a formal textualization of mourning’s mode as that which cannot be traced back to one source, one solution. Brontë’s novel formalizes a decentering, centerless feeling, to which critics respond with a variety of interpretations. Wuthering Heights expresses thematically and formally the absence of a safe site of origin to which the heroine, Cathy, may return. I interpret this absence of origin as reflected both in the character’s suppressed voice and in the novel’s insolvably rich allusive code. The novel’s multiple allusions put into text that experience of being unable to reach an originary source, an impasse before origin. Brontë’s array of allusions, a signification of intertextual conversation, prevents return to any one source of origin, a technique I link to the feminine self-elegy, a way of rejecting patriarchy’s claim on the control of origins, dislocating precisely what is perceived as the center and the margin of discourse. Not only is Wuthering Heights haunted by literary fathers, as Gilbert and Gubar suggest, it is also haunted structurally: it structurally reproduces haunting. It
pushes allusiveness until that becomes a form of haunting and of mourning.5 The allusive habit of the novel tropes an overextension and collapse of the symbolic order, or of the paternal metaphor, effecting its control of the way that literary fathers enter Brontë’s text. But the “over-rich” allusive turns also indicate the interdicted feminine narrator’s exclusion from the inheritance of male canonical texts, her exclusion from speaking in that lineage Lockwood easily assumes. A collapse of paternity is focused through Cathy, whose death stands before the text, her inaugurative appearance and disappearance motivating the text. If its allusive tour de force paradoxically creates the illusion that the responsibility for Wuthering Heights lies somehow outside Emily Brontë, the question of who narrates the novel is no less critically fraught. The novel’s quality of being dictated by someone other than its surface narrator derives from a multidirectional allusiveness and also from the implicit role of Cathy as the authority for this tale of her death and posthumous persistence. Posing the problem of posthumous narration, Brontë’s novel puts the explicit narratorsLockwood and Ellen Dean-in the position of readers interpreting the posthumous Cathy. Lockwood reads Cathy’s posthumous voice by interpreting her cryptic inscriptions in her childhood bedroom at the Heights, signifying Cathy as the ghost narrator of the novel.6 Wuthering Heights’s pervasive sense of being controlled by an outside source, then, turns on its staging of inconclusive living narrators, Lockwood and Nelly Dean, who, like the novel’s tricksy allusive gestures, cannot lead us all the way through the labyrinth. Brontë’s deployment of the disembodied posthumous voice presents its narration as something always already interpreted, in effect previously read. Cathy’s childhood inscriptions, introduced into text by Lockwood, also are the text into which they are read, marking a mise en abyme of interpretation in which the narrator inscribes the position of the reader. In reading Cathy’s inscriptions, Lockwood presents the voice of the waif, interpreting her story and signing it under the code of the masculine narrator, his name covering for the ghostly feminine voice behind the text. Wuthering Heights, then, at once comments on and deploys the narrative technique of a posthumous voice through Cathy’s expiatory death and the recuperation of her voice as the authority of the novel’s text. Just as Brontë’s Miltonic and Biblical allusions lead everywhere and nowhere, in effect subverting the patriarchal texts to which she alludes, so also the authority of Lockwood alludes to Cathy, the waif who appears before him at the novel’s outset and haunts him with her story. There is always a voice behind a voice in Wuthering Heights: it is a novel in which narrative is haunted by narration, haunted by the voice of the other. This very self-interpretive positing of narration is also the crucial gesture of a disembodied posthumous voice. I will argue that Lockwood and Ellen Dean stand in for the reader, interpreting Cathy’s troped posthumous voice. We read Lockwood reading Cathy, “hearing” her posthumous voice.
