{"id":892,"date":"2022-10-07T22:01:58","date_gmt":"2022-10-07T22:01:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/19thcennovel\/?p=892"},"modified":"2022-12-01T20:40:18","modified_gmt":"2022-12-01T20:40:18","slug":"tyrant-or-traumatized","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/19thcennovel\/2022\/10\/07\/tyrant-or-traumatized\/","title":{"rendered":"Tyrant or Traumatized?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Emily Bront\u00eb\u2019s Wuthering Heights<\/em> is a novel rife with intensely lunatic characters, driven mad perhaps by their cloistered existences on the moors or their degrading need for vengeance\u2013the latter pertaining mainly to Heathcliff. While many of Heathcliff\u2019s actions and reactions can be perceived as depicting his manic personality, Alexandra Lewis\u2019 text \u201cMemory Possessed: Trauma and Pathologies of Remembrance in Emily Bront\u00eb\u2019s Wuthering Heights<\/em>\u201d offers a different perspective. Catherine\u2019s 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\u2019 text actually depicts an understanding of traumatic processing.<\/p>\n

Heathcliff is barred from being present during Catherine\u2019s death yet can predict it when Nelly comes to inform him (Bront\u00eb 168). He acts insensibly towards Nelly, chastising her for grief, \u201c\u2019Put your handkerchief away\u2013don\u2019t snivel before me. Damn you all! She wants none of your<\/em> tears!\u2019\u201d (Bront\u00eb 168), suggesting a possible reserve of emotion for his loss. However, this is immediately and violently contradicted, \u201cHe dashed his head against the knotted trunk; and, lifting up his eyes, howled not like a man, but like a savage beast\u2026several splashes of blood about the bark of the tree, and his hand and forehead were both stained\u2026\u201d (Bront\u00eb 169). In this scene, a typical reading would perceive Bront\u00eb\u2019s invocation of the Gothic (describing Heathcliff as bloody and \u201csavage\u201d) as demonstrating Heathcliff\u2019s otherworldly madness and desperation when his \u201csoul\u201d (Bront\u00eb 169) dies.<\/p>\n

However, Lewis\u2019 text complicates this more straightforward reading. Lewis argues that Heathcliff\u2019s inability to witness Catherine\u2019s death affects him as would a direct trauma, contributing to the way he processes his loss. She asserts, citing work from Geoffrey Hartman, \u201c\u2026while the traumatic event is not directly experienced\u2026there is nevertheless \u2018a kind of memory of the event, in the form of a perpetual troping of it by the bypassed or severely split (dissociated) psyche\u2019\u201d (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\u2019s mind. For example, rather than grouping it in with the Gothic trope of Heathcliff\u2019s \u201cotherness\u201d, she asserts that Heathcliff\u2019s repetitive head bashing is indicative of his dissociation with the episode (Lewis 414). Through Lewis\u2019 lens, in contrast with a Gothic reading and understanding of the scene, Heathcliff is processing a trauma in this specific way because he didn\u2019t experience it firsthand.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Emily Bront\u00eb\u2019s 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\u2013the latter pertaining mainly to Heathcliff. While many of Heathcliff\u2019s actions and reactions can be perceived as depicting his manic personality, Alexandra Lewis\u2019 text \u201cMemory Possessed: Trauma and … Continue reading Tyrant or Traumatized?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4979,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[344620],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-892","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fall-2022"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/19thcennovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/892","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/19thcennovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/19thcennovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/19thcennovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4979"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/19thcennovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=892"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/19thcennovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/892\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/19thcennovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=892"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/19thcennovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=892"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/19thcennovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=892"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}