Body, Blood, and Spirit: Blurring Class and the Corporeal in Brontë’s Wuthering Heights

At its core, Wuthering Heights is a novel of polarities. From the sprawling grounds of the twin Gothic manors to the night-and-day disparities between Catherine’s warring lovers, the very structure of Brontë’s haunting prose rests on a firm foundation of antithesis and alterity, carefully juxtaposing light against dark, vulgarity against refinement, and love against violence. Though these apparently opposing forces provide the essential backdrop to the tumultuous events of the novel, such symbolic differences are not always clear-cut, as light and darkness melt together in a curious shade of twilight. Throughout the course of the novel, Brontë best illustrates this sense of duality through the false dichotomy of physical and metaphysical, smudging the lines between the real and the preternatural particularly through the characters of Catherine and Heathcliff. While Catherine herself spends much of the novel as a ghost, the corporeality of her undead body is evident and striking, more authentically material and present in her own narrative than she was during her repressive life. While Heathcliff, conversely, lives until his own bitter end, his earthly character is presented almost metaphysically, a monstrous myth of a man whose apparent exoticism renders him nearly superhuman amongst his genteel counterparts. In this sense, Brontë effectively blurs the boundaries between physical and metaphysical to create a subtle commentary on the repressive and limiting nature of the English gentry, an iron chain that can only be broken – or broken out of – through a divergence from reality. While Heathcliff breaks this societal mold in life, with his non-European background and unconventional actions lending him a sense of mysticism that transcends reality, Catherine is able to break from it in death, shedding the weight of a repressive past to become a more solid ghost of herself. 

Perhaps the most conspicuous representation of the complex relationship between physical and metaphysical in Wuthering Heights is illustrated in the life and death of Catherine Earnshaw, whose body haunts both character and reader from her very introduction to the story. In life, Cathy seems to be the very picture of grounded reality; worldly, frivolous, and increasingly concerned with her own sense of propriety, Catherine consistently turns away from her true desires in order to uphold a degree of respectability within polite society, betraying her beloved – and ultimately, herself – in the process. A key illustration of this can be identified in her reluctant rejection of Heathcliff, despite her ever-enduring love for him; in a particularly climactic conversation, Catherine tells Nelly that Heathcliff is indeed “more [herself]” than she is, but insists that their marriage would only “degrade” her due to his denigrated status and lack of “proper” English breeding (Brontë 80). Despite all the wildness and liberation she experienced with Heathcliff as a young girl, an older Catherine rejects a life of untethered freedom as a testament to her own upper-class pride, marrying Edgar Linton and taking up the life of a proper lady. Despite this decision, Catherine still yearns for the carelessness of her childhood, longing to be as “savage and hardy, and free” as she was among the moors (Brontë 125). Though Catherine is indeed alive during her separation from Heathcliff and subsequent marriage to Edgar, she does not truly seem to be living; by repressing the strength of her true desires and forcing herself into a life within such limiting margins, Catherine sacrifices her own wellbeing and livelihood, digging herself into a grave that can only be risen from in death.

It is only after Catherine dies that her life truly seems to begin – or, at the very least, seems to achieve a real sense of authenticity. In life, Catherine is shrunken and repressed, made small enough to fit within the borders of a future she does not want and unable to reach anything beyond that. Forced into a life of propriety and subdued into submission, Catherine loses not only Heathcliff but her very sense of livelihood, leaving behind her wild girlhood in favor of untouchable civility. After death, however, Catherine reclaims her sense of freedom through her ghostly form, returning as a child again to haunt Heathcliff and her moors. Despite her literal demise, Catherine seems arguably more alive than ever; for the first time since girlhood, she is an authentic, tangible being, capable of bleeding and loving and expressing her truest self. The first example of this can be found in Catherine’s jarring encounter with Lockwood, who attacks her terrifying form in fear until her “blood [...] [soaks] the bedclothes” beneath them (Brontë 26). The physicality of Catherine’s ghostly body is perhaps the most striking aspect of this scene; despite the metaphysical existence that should accompany a life after death, Cathy instead seems more tangible than ever, a material participant in her own story instead of the wilting husk of a life before. In death, Catherine is also able to break the mold of the repressive society that once ensnared her, finally reuniting with Heathcliff in a way that feels tangible; when Heathcliff digs up Catherine’s grave towards the end of the novel, he can hear her sighs and feel her “warm breath” on his skin, a “substantial body [...] on the earth” despite her undead state (Brontë 278-79). Scenes like these serve to emphasize the apparent corporeality that Catherine achieves in death, made more herself than ever in her freedom from high society. In this sense, Brontë effectively breaks the boundaries between the physical and the mystical through the character of Catherine, commenting on the repressive and lifeless nature of the social conventions under which the characters reside. 

While Catherine essentially shreds the metaphysical veil in death, Heathcliff complicates the concept of reality through his very existence, blurring the lines between physical and metaphysical through his deviation from the societal standards of his time. From the very beginning of Brontë’s narrative, Heathcliff is repeatedly presented as a sort of philosophical other, a character chiefly at odds with the reputable European society into which he finds himself thrust. When Lockwood first arrives at Wuthering Heights, he immediately thinks to juxtapose Heathcliff’s bodily appearance as a “dark-skinned g*psy” with the “gentleman[ly]” demeanor he outwardly adopts, suggesting that Heathcliff does not truly belong in the realm of high society he has grown to inhabit (Brontë 5). In a world ruled by the strict traditions and conventions of an ancestral English gentry, Heathcliff finds himself necessarily positioned as an outsider, recognizable in matters of manner and dress but ostracized for his darker complexion and foreign features. Rather than attempting to resist such a designation, however, Heathcliff instead resolves to lean into it, removing himself from the ideals of a dominating society and existing somewhere beyond the margins. Heathcliff’s ability to transcend the boundaries of traditional humanity spans throughout the course of the entire novel, most notably through his consistent depiction as an inhuman figure who exists beyond the ordinary constraints and expectations of physical reality. Even Cathy, Heathcliff’s eternal apologist, describes him as an “unreclaimed creature,” a “fierce, pitiless, wolfish man” whose ruthlessness renders him almost larger-than-life in its unrelenting persistence (Brontë 135). In this sense, Heathcliff’s actions and demeanor provide a stark contrast against the lofty propriety of England’s upper classes, depicting him as cruel, animalistic, and subhuman in both breeding and behavior. 

Despite the physical truths of his mortality, humanity, and existence as a corporeal body, Heathcliff is consistently depicted as a monstrous being throughout Brontë’s work, presented as a mysterious and nearly superhuman force capable of wickedness unimaginable within the bounds of proper, well-mannered society. While Heathcliff is indeed a physical human figure, unlike the chilling appearances of Cathy’s ghost that materializes throughout the novel, he is treated and perceived as a similarly ghoulish entity, compared to all manner of myth and monster by both his fearers and his followers. In a particularly notable passage towards the end of the novel, Nelly begins to question whether Heathcliff is truly a “ghoul or a vampire”, likening her former charge to an “incarnate demon” whose peculiar darkness permeates his very being (Brontë 318).  Instances like these epitomize the textual perception of Heathcliff’s character as a hellish and subhuman creature, a monster in the body of a man whose very existence seems to transcend the boundaries of the civilized human realm. Upon a cursory reading of Wuthering Heights as a gothic novel, the supernatural nature of the undead would appear to be the most substantive example of metaphysicality within the story, as Cathy’s ghost haunts the pages of Brontë’s cobwebbed world. However, Heathcliff’s peculiar depiction as a superhuman character instead turns the concept of the supernatural on its head, blurring the lines between physical and metaphysical to emphasize the stifling nature of a society that seeks to ostracize all who refuse to conform. In this sense, Heathcliff becomes the metaphysical not in death, but in life – or rather, in living wrong. By existing outside the margins of English society as a non-white, non-Eurocentric, non-conforming character, Heathcliff seems to warp the very fabric of the physical realm as the characters know it, transcending the boundaries of expectation and reality to reach beyond the veil. 

Though the actual legitimacy of the spiritual and metaphysical within Wuthering Heights has ultimately been left to interpretation, the preternatural nature of both Cathy and Heathcliff within Brontë’s work is of undeniable importance to the essence of the novel as a whole, generating an unexpected commentary on the limits and detriments of an ostentatious European society. While Heathcliff’s societal position as a non-European and non-conforming character forces him to toe the line between physical and fantastical, Catherine is able to escape from her restrictive world only in death, attaining a sense of actualization only through her demise. By blurring the boundaries between the corporeal and the metaphysical throughout the course of Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë comments on the limiting nature of reality in an appropriately haunting fashion, nestling philosophical criticisms within the corridors of an eerie English estate. 

Citations

Brontë, Emily. Wuthering Heights. Barnes & Noble Classics, 2004.