Reconstruction Vol. 15, No. 3
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Becoming Moral: Natural Destruction and Ethical Violence In Wuthering Heights / John Mazzoni
<##> "Nature," to Emily Brontë, was "an inexplicable problem, it exists on a principle of destruction" (qtd. in Torgerson 191). Taken from her private writings, this quote serves as a critical signpost for approaching Wuthering Heights, the "savage" and "gnarled" novel that the Victorian reading public rejected on the basis of a moral duty to outcast modes of human behavior outside the precincts of their ethical systems (Surrage 171). Brontë's oppositional treatment of the two binaric terms, nature and destruction, supports a bifurcated reading of the novel that positions acts of violence committed at the title abode against those at Thrushcross Grange. The two great estates are marked as models of two distinctive systems of human-animal violence, one predicated and justified by an interspecies drive to assert and maintain self, the other, on the enforcement of an exploitative and unequal 'domestic contract.' Further, that Brontë's own "problem" lies in the uncomfortable appropriation of value to violent action (destruction) preformed in service of the continuation of conditions necessary for all life (nature), is valuable to a reading that orients Wuthering Height's many violent human-animal encounters as communicative and identitive positives for both parties. Though Brontë's own words may, in some ways, grant credence to such a reading, critical animal theories concerning systems of legitimized violence against nonhuman subjects at once work to challenge the impermeability of interspecies selfhood at the two houses, and to substantiate acts of violence within them as communicative. I aim to contribute to this discourse by advocating that the novel's formulation works to undermine platitudinous and essentialist Victorian visions of moral relations with animals through the shared ethical values between humans and nonhumans at Wuthering Heights, and the arbitrary interspecies violence by which those values are generated.
<##> Hosts of theorist have commented on the difficulty of fitting an anthropomorphized moral code to a dualistic existence with other, nonhuman, animals. Long time contributors to the field Donna Haraway and Kari Weil, have expressed their skepticism toward such an endeavor, in large part due to the speciest privilege internalized in the conceptual qualifiers used to juristic envisioned ethical relations. In her paper, "A Report on the Animal Turn" Weil regards the work of foundational thinkers like Peter Singer as valuable to dismantling the logic that has "locked [animals] in representations authored by humans, representations that have, moreover, justified their use and abused by humans" (Weil 2). However, she asserts the success of their efforts have been tempered by a missed opportunity to apprehend that, unlike other, human, denizens victimized by this oppressive episteme (women, ethnic minorities, etc.), "those who constitute the objects of animal studies cannot speak for themselves, or at least they cannot speak the languages that the academy recognizes as necessary for such self-representation" (Weil 2). Therefore, human surrogate speakers' denial of the uniquely anthropologic referential properties of language reduces their efforts to extend 'rights' toward animals to conceptual and linguistic projections of human values on nonhumans. Indeed, this encroachment does little to develop the nonhuman self as deserving of an ethical status; to build a sense of a moral responsibility to animal selves. Weil cautions that animal liberators, like Paola Cavalie, founder of the Great Ape Project, must be careful not to ground the emancipating significance that "animal species possess the basic capabilities deemed necessary for subjectivity" ought to carry, in unilateral designations of self that enforce the hierarchy of human over nonhuman (Weil 2).
<##> Donna Haraway's insights work in tandem with Weil's 'Turn.' In chorus, her writings have contended that self-satisfying scaffolds for animals' ethical status can only operate through the animal's "honorary membership in the expanded abstraction of the Human" (Haraway 73). She offers an avenue to a more ethical structure in her work, When Species Meet, where she claims that "taking animals seriously… without the comforts of humanist frameworks," means rejecting moral systems based in "relationships of self-similarity" (71). Her research reconstructs what she terms the "calculating… risk-benefit" (71) scheme that functions to justify what Weil would call the undue "emphasis… on our own [human] impoverished capacities" (Weil 7) when assessing how far to push the limits of ethical action when sacrificing nonhuman values to human ones. "Within the logic of sacrifice," Haraway writes, "only human beings can be murdered" (Haraway 78). Richard Haynes, who also centers his work on the ethical implications of experimental animal subjects, corroborates Haraway's reading of fringe "animal welfare scientists," and tributes the sacrificial excuse to that part of the scientific community's willingness, perhaps eagerness, to make "prudential value added assumptions (the assumptions that life itself has no value for an animal)" (Haynes x). Moreover, and especially relevant to this paper, Haraway's study on the moral relationships between human subjects and nonhuman objects in experimental labs shares many similarities to human-animal relations at play at Thrushcross Grange. Most notably among them is the Lintons' disavowal of their self-appropriated power over the animals, especially dogs, who labor so their exploitation can continue, which mimics normative scientific trends that neglect the "practical and moral obligation [of science] to mitigate suffering among mortals-and not just human mortals" (70).
<##> In her chapter "Shared Suffering: Instrumental Relations between Laboratory Animals and Their People," Haraway contends that "the necessity and the justifications [of humans' use of animals], no matter how strong, do not obviate the obligations of care and sharing pain" (70). Her concept of a moral system with animals that demands mutual pain as a mandate is inexplicably absent from life at Thrushcross Grange. Lisa Surrage's article "Animals and Violence in Wuthering Heights" substantiates both my reading of the Lintons' moral dearth, and Haraway and Weil's work's relevance to it. She contends that with the Lintons', Brontë establishes a "rigorous distance… between their manor and the laboring people and animals which sustain its domestic comforts" (Surrage 166). This distance is first apparent when Lockwood mistakes a pile of dead rabbits for Catherine Heathcliff's favorite pet in an early visit to Wuthering Heights (Brontë 11). His misidentification of the animals there is reflective of an inculcated rationale that assumes the presence of indoor animals must be a sign of domestication. For Surrage, the Lintons' are the defenders and propagators of Lockwood's rationale. More than any one individual who lives there, it is "the Grange [that] exemplifies a system of protective gestures of class separation: guardianship of women; and the ownership of pets, the hallmark of the growing leisured and moneyed middle classes" (Surrage 167). She even appeals to a Foucaultian sense of watched docileness to describe the effected "subjected and practiced bodies-" animal bodies - that have been shaped by these gestures (167).
<##> Pet-keeping, and the domesticating of animals at the Grange underscores its invisible, yet observant, system of oppression, which functions to trap and hold nonhuman animals into a domestic contract based on use-value to their human 'owners.' That the often zoomorphized Heathcliff (particularly in dog like metaphors like "wolfish" (Brontë 102)) manages to disrupt the familial ownership of the Grange by manipulating the legal codes of primogeniture and patriarchy that support it, is not without a purpose. Rather, it reads as a triumph of animality's revenge on the Lintons' and their distorted Lockeian contract, founded on "unidirectional relations of use, [and] ruled by practices of calculation and self-sure of hierarchy" (Haraway 71).
<##> Surrage points to two other examples of this veiled power schematic, both occurring in quick succession of each other, as the young Catherine and Heathcliff get their first look at the domestic "heaven" of Thrushcross Grange (Brontë 48). Peering through an open window, the pair behold the Linton siblings surrounded by "carpeted crimson, and crimson covered chairs and tables, and a pure white ceiling bordered by gold" (48). Enveloped in this artificial enclosure, the Linton children cry, and bookend a yelping little dog that they have "nearly pulled in two between them" (48). This scene undermines the Grange's claim to a moral and contractual (meaning mutually beneficial or agreed upon) relationship with nonhumans because Edgar and Isabella's possessive cruelty reveals that, "underling… the 'civilized' act of pet-keeping" is the Lintons' "claim [to] the body as property" (Surrage 168). The cruel action of this scene undoes its domestic setting, exposing "the violence inherent in social (species) discipline" (168, parenthetical mine). Like Surrage, to posses -women, laborers, or animals - is, for Haraway, to reject "staying inside shared semiotic materiality, including the suffering inherent in unequal and ontologically multiple instrumental relationships" (Haraway 72). The human-animal instrumental relationship at the Grange that requires extracted labor from animals "can be necessary, indeed good, but it can never 'legitimate' a relation to the suffering in purely regulatory or disengaged and unaffected ways" (Haraway 72). The extent of Edgar and Isabella's suffering with their animal subjects is that they only have one dog to mutilate.
<##> The Lintons' home is quickly shown to be a guarded panopticon when Edgar and Isabella call for their parental guardians. On the Derridian significance of their word, militarized animals (bulldogs) pour out from their hidden kennels as if from a great fortress, on command to "hold" and "seize" the notably barefoot Catherine, as Brontë emphasizes her Rousseauian wildness (Brontë 49). She remains pinned down and in "pain" from the animal's "pendent lips streaming with bloody slaver" (49). Though this scene is crucial for more reasons than this paper will hold, to touch on two will suffice in illustrating its significance. Many critics have noted the collision of cultures that is symbolized here, as well as the scene's importance to Catherine's removal from the 'wild' of Wuthering Heights to her captivity in the zoo/prison at Thrushcross Grange (there is little difference beyond the species of the inmates). But Surrage's reading stands out among her peers' because she identifies that "Cathy's entry into this world is figured in terms of animals" (Surrage 168). She writes: "The Lintons' pet dog embodies possession; their guard dog protects the right of possession. Both briefly reveal the inherent violence which the Grange habitually conceals" (Surrage 168). Though here Brontë may not have been endorsing the overt violence that will be shown to be rife at the Heights, like hanging puppies from the backs of chairs, Surrage's reading uncovers that Catherine's downfall begins " when overt violence ceases" (Surrage 168, italics hers).
<##> One other reason this scene is central to deconstructing human justifications of animal abuse as it relates to a denying a shared moral standing with nonhumans is how it relates patriarchical fixation with ownership and possession of women in terms of nonhuman animals. Feminist critics have long shown how Wuthering Heights is presented as a "text in which the fates of subordinate female characters seem entirely dependent upon the actions of ostensibly male heroes or anit-heroes (Gilbert and Gubar 249). It seems unfair to subordinate Catherine Earnshaw to a secondary status in the novel, and such interpretations initially seem to hold more weight for characters like Nelly and Isabella. For Catherine's character is best understood as one where "the most unlikely opposites coexist" (259). One such place of unexpected cohabitation within Catherine's character is her emergent sexual identity as she gets her first glimpse of the house she will eventually die giving birth in. In their seminal work The Madwoman in the Attic, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar read the male bulldog as not just seizing the twelve year old's ankle, but her sprouting sexuality as well. As the Grange mimics, but fundamentally rejects, the order of violence at the Heights, the bulldog is positioned against the feminine and promiscuous dog at Wuthering Heights, Juno, who is described as being "surrounded by a swarm of squealing puppies" (Brontë 6). The difference is that the bulldog's purple tongue and pendant lips has "sexual and phallic connotations, especially to a pubescent girl" (272), while the sexualized dog at the Heights does not pose a threat to Catherine's animalized being that her "allegiance" with the "demon" Heathcliff has engendered (Deleuze and Guattari 45). From this variance, it can be inferred that Catherine does not reach sexual maturity until this very point in the novel, validating why Gilbert and Gubar contend that the scene's importance amounts to "a metaphoric action which emphasizes the turbulent and inexorable nature of the psychosexual rites de passage Wuthering Heights describes, just as the ferociously masculine bull/dog - as a symbolic representative of Thrushcross Grange - contrasts strikingly with the ascendency at the Heights of the hellish female bitch goddess alternately referred to as 'Madam' and 'Juno'" (271).
<##> Their reading expounds on the systematically violent human-animal ideology that Surrage has uncovered, and reorients it as a reciprocal one. This is not to imply that the nonhuman animals there suffer or inflict equal quantities of pain to their owners. Rather, it is intent to highlight the significance that the object of nonhuman violence, Catherine, is not just a sexualized girl, but one that has been raised at the "hellish" Heights, making her a regressive, feral, and Miltonically Satanic one, also (Brontë 172). For Gilbert and Gubar, this means that during her five-week stay at Thrushcross Grange, Catherine "must learn to repress her own impulses, must girdle her own energies with the iron stays of 'reason' (Gilbert and Gubar 274), a forced lesson that has been physically initiated by the nonhuman. Moreover, Catherine's reductive transformation at the Grange is comparable to how nonhuman animals are denied subjective autonomy in their domestic service arrangement there, as both are displaced and mentally distanced from their natural environments and beings. Indeed, both Catherine and the bulldog that bites her end up bloodied as a result of her capture, and both receive an anthropomorphized and masculine culturing. In Weil's terms, this procedure is at the heart of the Grange's moral system because it amounts to an "aestheticization of trauma or, at the least, a denial of its effects on the flesh" (Weil 12).
<##> Haraway's insights faintly allude to this process, but her words echo Derrida more than Weil when she writes, "the Animal is forever positioned on the other side of an unbridgeable gap, a gap that reassures the Human of his excellence by the very ontological impoverishment of a lifeworld that cannot be its own end or know its own condition" (Haraway 77). Brontë's novel is supported by this kind of structure in two important ways. First, as has been shown through an analysis of the moral code at the Grange, the novel is configured with the intent to position the two great houses of the Earnshaws' and the Lintons' as borders on either side of the Animal and Human gap, if not in name, then in character, since Brontë's terms them "nature" and "destruction." It is also clear that that nature/destruction gap is concealed at the Grange, but is made visible by the torturous effects it wreaks on the animals and women (themselves degenerative males as animals are devolutionary Men) who are held captive within it. Secondly, this divide can also be glimpsed through Brontë's, at times, subversive language. Brontë often laces Wuthering Height's storyteller, Nelly Dean's, narrative portraits of the "beautiful fertile valley" of domesticity embodied in and at the Lintons' with such duplicity, as her language is often harshly juxtaposed with the nature of exploitation and conscription the family has enforced on the "wild" things there, both human (Catherine) and animal (Brontë 69, 52).
<##> An example of Brontë's subversive language, which exposes the disguised ethics at the Grange that align it with both the "Human" and "destructive" edges of this multiplicious binary, can be found in the beginning of Wuthering Height's pivotal chapter X. Having been urged to continue her tale by John Lockwood, the dallying urbanite who is perhaps the most 'othered' character in the provincially laden context of the novel, Nelly commences:
"I got Miss Catherine and myself to Thrushcross Grange and, to my agreeable disappointment, she behaved infinitely better than I dared to expect. She seemed almost over-fond of Mr. Linton; and even to his sister she showed plenty of affection. They were both very attentive to her comfort certainly. It was not the thorn bending to the honeysuckles but the honeysuckles embracing the thorn. There were no mutual concessions: one stood erect, and the others yielded, and who can be ill-natured and bad tempered when they encounter neither opposition nor indifference?" (Brontë 91).
<##> Through Nelly, Brontë combines binaric opposites, thus blending the semantic cues of her words to undermine the optimism Nelly has intended to convey about the civilizing transformation Catherine has undergone since her move and marriage to the Lintons'. (It is worth noting that this account foreshadows Brontë's re-introduction of Heathcliff to the plot, as he has also been transformed after an extended stay in parts unknown that he refers to as "Hell."(Brontë 92) Later, Catherine uses the same word to describe her material reality at the Grange (Brontë 157)). Nelly's pairing of the oppositional signs, "agreeable disappointment," functions to disfigure the hierarchy that the two words are meant to express in context: Nelly's satisfaction having been proven wrong about Catherine's behavior. What is more significant about Brontë destabilizing Nelly's language is that its subjects, Catherine and Thrushcross Grange, must also have their definitive semantic characterizations complicated by it. Through allowing the adverse connotations that "disappointment" carries to penetrate the congenial subtext that "agreeable" has initially set forth, Nelly's indiscriminant endorsement of the "kind," "sympathizing," and "wondrously peaceful" atmosphere of the Grange is subtly, almost unconsciously, undermined also (Brontë 91-93).
<##> Furthermore, Nelly attributes this affable change in Catherine to her removal from the "opposition [and] indifference" of Wuthering Heights, as if the 'nature' of her new context has grafted itself onto Catherine's being, and has produced "an alteration in her (destructive) constitution" (Brontë 92, parenthetical mine, though Nelly has used similar language to describe her sensibilities elsewhere). This metaphysical grafting is reinforced by the semiotic grafting expressed in Brontë's flower and thorn metaphor: "It was not the thorn bending to the honeysuckles but the honeysuckles embracing the thorn." Here, Brontë's has synthesized her nature/destruction binary into what Deleuze and Guattari would term two "bands [that] transform themselves into one another" (Deleuze and Guattari 41).
<##> In a straightforward reading, Catherine would be likened to a pain-inducing thorn, while the Lintons' and their estate would be aligned with an apparent semantic-unitasker: an aesthetically pleasing flower. It follows that in connotation, the non-violent honeysuckle is lauded for its self-effacement in "embracing" the undomesticated, unpredictable, and dangerous thorn. However, if Derrida's caution that "there is nothing outside the text" is worthy of remembrance, then within this interpretation lies its undoing (Derrida 158). Victorian cultural reference books, like The Language of Flowers, listed the honeysuckle as representational of the bonds of love and devotion, due to the plants clinging botanic nature. Outside the metaphysical realm of human-added importance, or in material nature, the flower suffocates flora around it, smothering unfortunate plants, and shielding unsightly ones from view in its imposition and engulfment. Almost certainly not unknown to the Yorkshire-born and foreign-educated Emily Brontë, this information radically augments the substance of traditional readings. The Lintons' can still be read as the honeysuckle and Catherine the thorn, but it is the former that is threatening to destroy the latter by "embracing" it. Recalling Weil's work on nonhuman animal subjects in posthuman ethics, the Lintons' and their household are compared with destructive and imperializing anthropomorphic qualities, while Catherine and her upbringing are aligned with a unpredictably thorny nature by the same process that Humans have used to "speak for" Animals: Nelly's language complicates the very beliefs it is used to convey, and prompts readers to question if the Lintons' have allowed Catherine "to express [her] thoughts or whether [they] replaced those thoughts with available and communicable signs" (Weil 6).
<##> If Thrushcross Grange embodies institutionalized violence and moral negligence, then Wuthering Heights is defined by arbitrary violence and suffering. Paradoxically, Brontë presents unpredictable violence as a more genuine ethical model than the Grange's meticulous, logical, and calculating oppression. It is analogous to Weil's description of desirable, but risky, ethical modes that "attempt to recognize and extend care to others while acknowledging that we may not know what the best form of care is for an other we cannot presume to know" (Weil 13). The nonhuman animals at the Heights coexist and communicate with their human companions because each is allowed to test and manifest their desires through violent confrontation with each other. In fact, Brontë begins the novel with an example of shared violence, or, as Haraway terms it, shared suffering.
<##> The first animal to be described in Wuthering Heights, Juno, confronts John Lockwood in their newly shared living environment when he first arrives at the Heights. Denied the sensibilities of animalized characters like Heathcliff and Catherine, Lockwood cannot respond to the "under-bred" (Brontë 5) mother dog's warning that his modern inclination to presume the dog is "kept as a pet" (Brontë 6) is as incorrect as it is threatening, and as such, she responds with an equal show of aggression. Because the moral code at the Heights is comparable to self-preservation by continuous 'becomings' with other interspecies selves, Juno can "understand [Lockwood's] tacit insults" directed toward her (Brontë 6). As an outsider, though, he cannot understand the meaning of her "sneaking wolfishly to the back of [his] legs, her lip curled up, and her white teeth watering for a snatch" (Brontë 5-6), like a Derridian animal, "hunting" and "chasing [him] out of the room" (Derrida 379) because he refuses to grant her a shared moral status. He cannot preserve his self by becoming with the animal because "becoming produces nothing other than itself" (Deleuze and Guattari 37), and Lockwood's denial of her ethical status means he cannot see his self reflected in the animal. Heathcliff, the anomalous "pack animal" (Deleuze and Guattari 40), is able to "re-establish peace" (Brontë 7) simply by entering the room because, unlike Edgar and Lockwood, he is not an "entit[y] with fully secured boundaries, called possessive individuals" (Haraway 70). Contrasting with the dogs at the Grange, Juno is free to communicate and respond to other agentive denizens without need of a language that has long been used to deny that capability to and in the animal. Lockwood's unwillingness to see her warnings as anything but precursors to assault, though inevitably correct, could have been avoidable if he were able to understand them in the context of shared, not unilateral communication.
<##> Ultimately, Brontë is able to provide Derrida one solution to his problem of what response with animals looks like because violence functions as response at Wuthering Heights. The (non)human animals there understand that "justice (justification) can be evaluated" no other way "in a mortal world in which acquiring knowledge is never innocent" (Haraway 70). At almost any point in the novel, there seems to be a chance that the house will be either be torn in two, or will implode and "involve" (Deleuze and Guattari 39) into a self-destructive frenzy. Nevertheless, the metaphoric fist that hangs in the air predicates that a system of "corresponding [and] establishing corresponding relations" (39) necessarily exists there, if only to defer the event of its own destruction. This means there is a constant "concern with and for alterity, especially insofar as alterity brings us to the limits of our own self-certainty and certainty about the world" (Weil 6). It is that mutual threat of destruction, then, like a Hobbesian blessing, that informs the moral code at the Heights, and affords its interspecies inhabitants anarchic equity and respons-ibility (Haraway 71). If, like at the Grange, "this structure of material-semiotic relating breaks down or is not permitted to be born, then nothing but objectification and oppression remains" (71). Therefore, unlike the predacious all-seeing eyes of providence that stalk Thrushcross Grange, Wuthering Height's blind destruction, like natural selection, uses threat of death to generate ethical, if violent, species coexistence.
Works Cited
<##> Brontë, Emily. Wuthering Heights. New York: Barns & Noble Books, 2004. Print
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. "Becoming-Animal." 171-181.The Animals Reader: The Essential Classic and Contemporary Writings. Eds. Linda Kaloff and Amy Fitzgerald. Oxford: Berg, 2007. 37-50. Print.
Derrida, Jacques, and David Wills. "The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)." Critical Inquiry 28.2 (2002): 369-418. Print.
Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology, Part II "Introduction to the "Age of Rousseau," Section 2 "...That Dangerous Supplement...", Title: "The Exorbitant Question of Method . 2nd ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1998. Print
Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979. Print.
Haraway, Donna Jeanne. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota, 2008. Print.
Haynes, Richard P. Animal Welfare: Competeing Conceptions and Their Ethical Implications. Gainesville: Springer Science + Business Media B.V., 2008. Print.
Surridge, Lisa. "Animals and Violence in Wuthering Heights." Bronte Society Transactions: The Journal of Bronte Studies 24.2 (1999): 161-73. Print.
Torgerson, Beth E. Reading the Brontë Body: Disease, Desire, and the Constraints of Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Print.
Weil, K. "A Report on the Animal Turn." Differences 21.2 (2010): 1-23. Print.
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