In Myths of Power

In Myths of Power:
A Marxist Study of the Brontës
Terry Eagelton


Walaa Khorshed


1. Contradictions in Wuthering Heights:

Wuthering Heights deals with the terms “Romance and Reality” with an “astonishing unity”. A single incident can reflect a dramatic or farcical tone exactly like Catherine’s mixture between “Passionate and Pettish”. The kind of realism presented in Wuthering Heights is tragic in the sense that passion and society have no reconciliation, and the contradiction between them is “ineradicable”. However, this tragic opposition produces this superior work and presents the “shattering passions” along with the “realist control” more obviously.

2. Culture and Nature:
Heathcliff himself is aware of the Cultural-Natural conflict that takes place in the Heights. This conflict is presented in Catherine’s character which “is at once wild and pettish, savage and spoilt”.
Heathcliff’s love story with Catherine is described as “ontological” or “metaphysical”, because it refers not only to a love story between two individuals but reflects the social thinking as well. This social thinking “measures oneself by the criteria of class structure only, that is why love in Wuthering Heights drives you out of the society”. Heathcliff’s love is rejected just for being natural not social. Finally, their love becomes just a dream only in their minds. It remains “metaphysical” and never becomes true except in death only.

3. Oppression and Violence in the Heights itself:
“The underlying truth of violence is continuously visible at the Heights”; their culture enforces their brutality in the sense that one must defend ruthlessly his properties. Unwittingly, Heathcliff raises violence in the Heights with the Earnshaw family by two means. First, the family struggles for the land. Second, it wants to keep its respectful name. This violence turns against Heathcliff and affects his attitude. His violence is due to his being treated like an outcast and exploited as a servant and labourer by Hindley. Heathcliff is robbed even of his own freedom as an outsider. His situations within or outside the society are “inverted mirror images of one another”, which reflects a crucial truth about the bourgeois society that there is neither liberty inside it, nor even outside. That is why freedom for them is another face of oppression which “always exits in its shadow”. Then Heathcliff’s violent character is a logical consequence of freedom exploiters. He turns to be savage and brutal and moves from being Hindley’s victim to becoming, like Catherine, his own executioner.

4. Heathcliff and Catherine:
Catherine is affected greatly by the appearance of Heathcliff especially after the death of Earnshaw. She suffered a “spiritual” orphan hood, similar to Heathcliff’s “literal” one. Both of them become “outside” the domestic structure. Due to his unknown origins as well as his internal emigration to the Heights, Heathcliff is free of any social ties. He finds no suitable one except Catherine to be in relation with. He offers her a kind of friendship that opens an internal social freedom for her. In spite of being brought up in the Heights, Heathcliff is still “a down outsider”, because barbarous are lower classes. Heathcliff is both “lowly and natural”, but he , as well as Catherine, enjoyed partial freedom, in addition to a love relationship that can be described as “natural”. Despite their failure, Heathcliff and Catherine proved that “human possibilities can reach beyond any tight, strict system”.

5. Heathcliff and the Earnshaw family:
Heathcliff is an orphan whose darkness is both “fearful” and “fertilizing”. That is why he is a “gift” and a “threat” for the Earnshaw family. The appearance of Heathcliff changes some contradictions of the closed world of the Earnshaw themselves. Being of obscure origins, Heathcliff is free of any exact social role. He is brought to the Heights only for being loved. He may be a prince as Nelly Dean says. “He is ushered into the Heights for no good reason other than to be arbitrarily loved; and in this sense he is a touchstone of others’ responses, a liberating force for Cathy and a stumbling-block for others”.

6. Contradiction in Heathcliff’s character:
Heathcliff represents both a “metaphysical hero” in his story with Catherine and a “skillful exploiter” who is able to collect the properties of the others. In that sense, the novel presents its “outside” as its “inside”. This conflict takes place actually, but the society “isolated this challenge in a realm eternally divorced from the actual one”.