Creavity: Transcending Genre II

Novelist Evelyn Waugh is once said the only good 

thing about the Twentieth Century was the invention

of the electric light—because by it we are able to stay up all night and read Victorian novels. The Victorian novel I read and re-read is one that creatively bent the rules and taboos of Victorian literature and introduced startling characters and concepts. Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë, excels all other novels of its time in creative reach.

The Victorian era was an era of propriety. Sex was not mentioned, nor was the body. Furthermore, people were expected to restrain themselves. One of Dickens’ characters is falling in love and tells herself, Now, Esther:  duty, duty, duty. You lived to be a useful person and set aside your passion for respectability. Emily Brontë broke with this—at least in the one novel she published.

The teacup world of Jane Austen and the propriety of Dickens are blown out of the water in Wuthering Heights. It amazes the reader by the torrents of passion from her main character Heathcliff and his love, Katherine.

She shatters Victorian convention by making Heathcliff a passionate, emotional character, almost demonic in his drive to marry Katherine, whom he does not wed, and whom he spends the rest of his life trying to win her over from her husband. He rages, swears, swells with anger and violence. He is driven by primal love, which, when denied him, turns to primal rage and thirst for revenge. Katherine loves him the same way but bows to convention and chooses not to marry him. She is destroyed by this.

Rebuffed, Heathcliff goes on a lifelong mission to exact revenge on the people who kept him and Katherine apart. He gets control of Katherine’s and Edgar, her husband’s, son and make him an illiterate farmhand so he can scoff at him. He gains control of all the farms around him and oppresses his neighbor. His own wife, who bears him a son, deserts him, and then dies, writes in a letter, “Is Heathcliff a devil, or a man?”

 This sort of intensity is not seen in other Victorian novels. Brontë creatively pushes her characters to new heights of passion and intensity. She was also highly creative in structuring the novel.

It begins with three of the craziest chapters in literature. A man seeks refuge at Heathcliff’s home and enters a bewildering scene of violence and conflict. He stays at the house and has a bizarre dream related to a text he has just read; and then another dream based on a puzzling entry written in the margin of the pamphlet. He tells Heathcliff about the dream and his reaction is violent and then pathetic as he stands at an open window and weeps, ““Come in! Come in! Kathy, do come. Oh, do—once more! Oh! My heart's darling! Hear me this time, Katherine, at last!”

 The man returns home, is ill, and is told the story of what happens by the housekeeper who nurses him back to health. By the end of her long narrative, we finally understand what happens in the first three chapters. It is a marvel of framing and structuring a work of literature. The imagery of the dreams and the unfolding narrative of Heathcliff are nothing short of amazing.

Emily Brontë seemed quite conventional from her time. But underneath the propriety she displayed was a creative genius whose vast capacity for creating wonder would not fit into Victorian strictures. Wuthering Heights still ranks as one of the most amazing novels I’ve read even thought it was written 167 years ago. Creativity triumphs over time—as we will see in the next blog about a text that succeeds through skillful use of it. 

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