Wuthering Heights: Trauma and abuse – a novel for the 21st century
Yes, I know it is almost 180 years since this book was published, and I also know it is a work of fiction rather than a textbook. However, with the release, this year, of another film adaptation of the book, it is perhaps time to look at what this book is really about and one thing that it, quite assuredly, is not. It is also time to examine its relevance to child-protection social work. It is not, as film-makers would have us believe, a love story. It is a story about abuse. It looks at domestic abuse, coercive control, childhood trauma, alienating behaviours and the intergenerational aspects of abuse, whereby the abused goes on to become an abuser in a self-perpetuating cycle. It also looks at the impact of racism. As I write, Cardiff University’s English literature faculty has put a trigger warning on it, advising that it includes themes of misogyny, racism and homophobia, as well as ‘graphic representations of physical and sexual violence’. Not a love story then, but it certainly should be a set text for student social workers.
Let us look at the book through a trauma-informed lens. We learn that Heathcliff was brought to Wuthering Heights as a small child by old Mr Earnshaw, who found him ‘starving and houseless’ on the streets of Liverpool. The child was ‘as dark almost as if it came from the devil’ and speaking ‘some gibberish that nobody could understand’. So, this is a child who has, whether through separation or death, lost his parents and is living on the streets of late Georgian Liverpool. That certainly amounts to some very adverse childhood experiences. He is then abducted and taken 60 miles away to a new home. In the early pages of the book, we also have a marker put down about his race. He is referred to as ‘gypsy’ and a ‘lascar’ (referring to sailors from South-east Asia).
Unlike any other child, he never receives a surname, only a hand-me-down first name from a child who died earlier. We know how important surnames are to children as a way of understanding their origin or belonging to a new adoptive family. Heathcliff does not get that admission into the ‘Earnshaw tribe’. Because of his race or history, he is always marked as an outsider. However, Emily Brontë has hidden a rabbit hole here if we choose to follow it. In the late eighteenth century, in which the beginning of the story is set, what group of people only had first names? Slaves. Liverpool was at the heart of the slave ‘triangle trade’. Was old Mr Earnshaw telling the truth about how he found Heathcliffe, or did he buy him? We never do find out what old Mr Earnshaw’s real business was in Liverpool. In Chapter Six, Heathcliffe is described as ‘that strange acquisition my late neighbour made in his journey to Liverpool – a little lascar, or an American or Spanish castaway’ (emphasis added). We are left to make of these clues what we will, but we do know that Emily and all of her family were committed abolitionists.
Going back to the arrival of Heathcliffe to Wuthering Heights, we know that Mr Earnshaw’s son, Hindley, is, from the outset, jealous of the new member of the family and violent towards him. Knowing this, would you recommend such a foster placement today? Then, with the death of old Mr Earnshaw, Hindley, now the master of Wuthering Heights, has full rein to abuse and degrade Heathcliff.
So that is the abused and traumatised background to the book’s anti-hero. Film adaptations tend to concentrate on the first part of the novel and the relationship between Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff, but largely ignore the second part of the book, where Heathcliff returns to Wuthering Heights with his unexplained wealth and pursues his revenge against everyone he believes to have wronged him. He is violent, coercive and manipulative to get what he wants. If you wanted a handbook for coercive control, read Wuthering Heights.
In revenge for Edgar Linton’s marriage to Catherine, Heathcliff pursues Linton’s sister, Isabella, and persuades her to elope with him. When they elope, Isabella’s dog is found hanged and half-dead. We would now recognise animal abuse as a very big red flag for a capacity for violent abuse, and Heathcliff does not disappoint. The marriage between Heathcliff and Isabella Linton is a catalogue of (just about) every possible form of domestic abuse. She is isolated from her family, demeaned and denigrated and living in squalid conditions. He describes her to servants as ‘an abject thing’, ‘shamefully cringing’, and ‘pitiful, slavish and mean-minded’. The abuse, however, is not mindless. It is cold and calculated. He tells the family servant, Nelly Dean, that he takes care to keep strictly within the law to avoid giving her any right to claim a separation.
Although she later flees with her child, she does not survive for long, and so, after her death, the boy, Linton, is returned to his father. He shows what an upbringing by a violent abuser produces, a character described as ‘perhaps the most unappealing character in Victorian fiction, lacking altogether the strength and charisma of his father. But his puny physicality casts the coercive nature of his abuse into relief.’ He is later married to the late Catherine’s daughter in what we would now describe as a forced marriage.
Of course, you may say that we cannot read modern themes and issues into a nineteenth-century novel. I would disagree. Trauma, racism and abuse are as old as time. We have only invented names and descriptions for things which were there for all to see from time immemorial. The other point to remember is that, although Emily only wrote one novel, she had been writing poetry for many years before that. That is a clue to understanding her writing.
Apart from having spent my ‘free-range’ childhood wandering across the same moors as Emily, I also learned my craft writing poetry. In my case, for small-press magazines, poetry slams and local arts festivals, but I think that I can recognise some of the techniques she may have used in her novel. In poetry, there is no space or time to expand on every issue. A single word must be used as a ‘zip file’, leaving the reader to unpack the file for themselves. Poetry is much more of a partnership between the writer and the reader, and different readers will find different things in the same poem. Emily Brontë, I think, used the same skills in her novel that she learned writing poetry. That is why there is so much in the novel for us to work through for ourselves and in our own time and place.
What is the book really about? In common with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Emily Brontë does not simply give us a portrait of a monster; she shows us how monsters are made. She shows quite clearly how trauma and abuse produce an adaptive response of manipulation and the abuse of others. To make it even more up-to-date, the book even contains examples of alienating behaviours. The wonder is that, long before Freud, long before theories of attachment, and nearly a century and a half before the reports of any child abuse inquiries, a parson’s daughter in a remote village in the West Riding had pretty much got all of this figured out.
Photograph © Rodney Noon