Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is a novel rife with intensely lunatic characters, driven mad perhaps by their cloistered existences on the moors or their degrading need for vengeance–the latter pertaining mainly to Heathcliff. While many of Heathcliff’s actions and reactions can be perceived as depicting his manic personality, Alexandra Lewis’ text “Memory Possessed: Trauma and Pathologies of Remembrance in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights” offers a different perspective. Catherine’s death brings about a particularly manic episode from Heathcliff, which could be perceived as demonstrating his sheer madness and abnormal attachment to Cathy, but when informed by Lewis’ text actually depicts an understanding of traumatic processing.
Heathcliff is barred from being present during Catherine’s death yet can predict it when Nelly comes to inform him (Brontë 168). He acts insensibly towards Nelly, chastising her for grief, “’Put your handkerchief away–don’t snivel before me. Damn you all! She wants none of your tears!’” (Brontë 168), suggesting a possible reserve of emotion for his loss. However, this is immediately and violently contradicted, “He dashed his head against the knotted trunk; and, lifting up his eyes, howled not like a man, but like a savage beast…several splashes of blood about the bark of the tree, and his hand and forehead were both stained…” (Brontë 169). In this scene, a typical reading would perceive Brontë’s invocation of the Gothic (describing Heathcliff as bloody and “savage”) as demonstrating Heathcliff’s otherworldly madness and desperation when his “soul” (Brontë 169) dies.
However, Lewis’ text complicates this more straightforward reading. Lewis argues that Heathcliff’s inability to witness Catherine’s death affects him as would a direct trauma, contributing to the way he processes his loss. She asserts, citing work from Geoffrey Hartman, “…while the traumatic event is not directly experienced…there is nevertheless ‘a kind of memory of the event, in the form of a perpetual troping of it by the bypassed or severely split (dissociated) psyche’” (Lewis 413-414). Heathcliff does not see Catherine die, and his reaction to her peaceful death is anything but. Rather than comprehending his reaction as a representation of his crazed, savage nature, Lewis allows insight into how this trauma in particular would affect Heathcliff’s mind. For example, rather than grouping it in with the Gothic trope of Heathcliff’s “otherness”, she asserts that Heathcliff’s repetitive head bashing is indicative of his dissociation with the episode (Lewis 414). Through Lewis’ lens, in contrast with a Gothic reading and understanding of the scene, Heathcliff is processing a trauma in this specific way because he didn’t experience it firsthand.
I really like your use of Lewis’s analysis to look at Heathcliff and his reaction to Catherine’s death. When I first read the passage, I saw it as another way that Bronte was showing Heathcliff’s “otherness” and animalistic nature. However, reframing it as a logical trauma response definitely changes my perspective on how Heathcliff was portrayed. While I didn’t think of him as actually savage, I thought that Bronte’s portrayal of him was meant to be interpreted that way. Now I wonder if Bronte is writing from first-hand knowledge or experience with her and her sisters’ own trauma, and if she was actually trying to show in this scene that Heathcliff was misunderstood by those around him.
I was thinking whether Brontë actually had the intention of portraying the consequences of traumatic experiences in Wuthering Heights, due to her own life events. She was probably feeling suffocated, as Cathy and Heathcliff did, and writing about it was a way to process her own trauma. We don’t know for sure whether this would be the case, but what we know is that she foresaw the upcoming discussions that would take place in the psychological field about trauma. As Lewis said in her essay, “Literature, rather than reflecting … scientific discourse, often anticipates future developments” (p. 408, Lewis).