SOURCE: “Incest, Demonism, and Death in Wuthering Heights,” in Literature and Psychology, Vol. 23, No. 1, 1973, pp. 27-36.

[In the following essay, Mitchell theorizes that there is no compelling moral or social reason for Heathcliff and Cathy not to marry each other, but they abstain from a sexual or marital relationship because they are already tightly bound by other ties, including a brother-sister relationship.]

It is clear to most readers of Wuthering Heights, and it is equally clear to Catherine Earnshaw, that she is betraying herself when she decides to marry Edgar Linton.¹ She says that she loves Edgar “entirely and altogether” (p. 71) and a few lines later that she loves Heathcliff far more (p. 72). She knows that she is being inconsistent because she says that she has “no business to marry Edgar Linton” (p. 71). Cathy justifies the marriage by saying that as Edgar's wife she can raise Heathcliff out of his degradation. This, she says, is her best motive for marrying Edgar, a somewhat strange statement in light of her protestations of love for him. Cathy insists that her marriage will not separate her from Heathcliff. Rather facile critical opinion on this point would have it that because Cathy and Heathcliff have the psychic union of which she speaks (p. 74), they indeed cannot be separated. But Cathy seems to doubt the consolations of such a union, for while talking of the subject, to Nelly Dean, she suddenly starts crying and forbids that it be mentioned again, saying that if necessary she would give Edgar up for Heathcliff's sake (p. 74).

The test of Cathy's plans comes immediately when she discovers that the efficacy of her soul union with Heathcliff depends upon his physical presence. When she discovers that he has run away, she becomes hysterical and falls into a protracted delirium. The episode in which Cathy discusses her marriage problem shows some evidence of suppressed, and—what is more significant—repressed desire. A few critics seem to have noticed this, but none to my knowledge have dealt with its nature or its dynamics. At first we have only hints of repression. For example, if Cathy is so confident about the rightness of her plans, plans which very much involve Heathcliff, we may ask why she does not wish to discuss them with him; but they are to be kept strictly secret, as she tells Nelly Dean. Further, Cathy gives one reason in one line for not marrying Heathcliff—that he has been “brought too low” by Hindley, but because she spends dozens of lines describing her love for Heathcliff, this reason for not marrying him is not quite convincing. Up to this time Cathy has shown no signs of snobbery in her relations with Heathcliff, nor does she show any afterwards. Unquestionably, Cathy's passion for Heathcliff is deep and intense: her suffering over his departure very nearly causes her death; and her grief for a while is controllable only by the mechanism of delirium.

Three years later, much stronger suggestions of unconscious desire for Heathcliff occur in the episode in which Cathy becomes, in a sense, permanently deranged. Edgar has ordered Cathy never to see Heathcliff again. Cathy then decides, she says, to become ill in order to punish Edgar—and also Heathcliff, although why she wishes to punish Heathcliff is perhaps obscure. She becomes ill, and then decides that she has a choice in the matter: “I'll choose between these two: either to starve at once or to recover and leave the country” (p. 104). Assuming that she can choose to recover and leave, one may wonder why she does not do so. Heathcliff would take her away, and she no longer considers him “too low” but rather as, in a sense, Edgar's social equal. By now Cathy cares nothing for Edgar and tells him so (p. 109). It is true that her pregnancy might be an impediment to leaving, but she does not say so; in fact, she never again mentions leaving, as attractive as this possibility must have been to her. There is no indication that either Cathy or Heathcliff has any consciously moral ideas about either marriage or sex. Why, then, does Cathy not go to the man she loves? It is tempting to feel at this point a certain sympathy, albeit misinformed, for what may have been the bewilderment of the producers of the recent movie, in which, after Heathcliff's return, Heathcliff and Cathy are shown having an affair.

Before yielding completely to illness following Edgar's order, Cathy has a few moments of lucidity in which she gives an account of the first night of her illness. She tells Nelly that throughout the night she was unconscious—in order, as we shall see, to block out painful thoughts. Near dawn she awoke with the feeling that she was back in her bedroom at Wuthering Heights, in bed and overwhelmed with some great grief, the cause of which she could not remember. Suddenly she found, she says, that she could not remember the last seven years of her life, and just as suddenly she finds that she is a child of twelve, at the time when Hindley has forced a separation between her and Heathcliff. This separation, she says she realized, was the cause of her misery. Then Cathy tells Nelly that, suddenly, memory of the last seven years (and Edgar's order) returned, and her “last anguish was swallowed up in a paroxysm of despair” (p. 107). The immediate, or surface, causes of this despair would seem to be clear enough: her “enforced” separation from Heathcliff. Why then, does Cathy say “I cannot say why I felt so wildly wretched—it must have been temporary derangement, for there is scarcely cause” [italics added] (p. 107)? To say that there is “scarcely cause” is so shockingly illogical as to suggest the presence of a powerful and painful resistance at work. Cathy reinforces the resistance with the answer she provides for her question about why she felt so wretched. Her answer is obvious and predictable: the similarity of the two episodes in which Hindley and later Edgar order a separation between her and Heathcliff. It is this situation, Cathy says, that is “scarcely the cause.” At this point, Cathy is attempting to minimize the importance of a situation which has, only a few hours before, caused grief so great as to precipitate unconsciousness and delusion. If she can thus minimize the meaning of separation from Heathcliff, she can keep further thoughts of recovering and leaving the country out of her consciousness. In any case, a short time later she has forgotten Heathcliff himself, not to remember him until the day of her death. The entire delusional episode in which the memories of the two enforced separations come together begins in an act of forgetting. That is, Cathy forgets the last seven years of her life, and comes to consciousness, as it were, aware of some terrible grief, the cause of which she gradually, with difficulty, remembers. Forgetting the seven years, forgetting the cause of her grief and forgetting Heathcliff can, I believe, be explained only by the theory of repression of material which consciousness cannot tolerate. Cathy's forgetting cannot be accomplished without the aid of derangement, such is the force of the repressed material.

Before forgetting him altogether, Cathy addresses the absent Heathcliff and begs him to come to her; in fact, she dares him to come to her. On the day of her death she talks to him face to face about it. However, what she wants, as she makes quite clear, is for Heathcliff to join her in the grave. If, as I have suggested, Cathy has no compelling moral or social reason for not marrying or otherwise having a sexual union with Heathcliff, there must be some other reason. This reason may be that she loves him only spiritually. That is the standard critical explanation, but it does not take into account Cathy's agony over being physically separated from him, nor does it take into account what seems to be the strategy of repression. In short, Cathy disguises her deepest wishes with derangement; she expresses these wishes in a seemingly desexualized form by daring Heathcliff to die with her.

An argument against my interpretation of these matters is that after Heathcliff's return Cathy seems contented with a life of being married to Edgar and visiting with Heathcliff. This is a strong argument, and I do not know altogether how to answer it. My objection to it is that this period of Cathy's life is brief, a few months, and that during this time Cathy feels an unnatural degree of highly nervous excitement perhaps impossible to sustain. Cathy may sense this. At any rate, she causes, casually or accidentally as it were, Heathcliff to become interested in marrying Isabella, therefore again forcing him to leave her, as if she has pathetically ambivalent hope of removing an obscurely threatening force. This strategy, if that is the right word, does not work, for by the time Heathcliff gets around to running off with Isabella, Cathy is hopelessly ill.

Cathy wants Heathcliff to come to her immediately in the grave, even to die with her. She realizes, however, that he will not join her in death any time soon, and she wonders why not. The reader also wonders why not. This is an important question about Heathcliff which we cannot answer fully at this point. Clearly Heathcliff would like very much to die when Cathy does; he has no scruples against or fears of suicide, yet he continues for eighteen years wishing to die. He arranges with Nelly Dean and the sexton to be buried beside Cathy if his death, when it comes, be regarded as suicide. He has only one conscious reason for remaining alive—revenge, but if that is his only motive for remaining alive, then one must say that his desire for revenge is greater than his desire to be with Cathy. This is obviously not the case. Actually, Heathcliff finally loses all interest in vengeance, but when he does so, he does not immediately kill himself, although by this time his desire to die and be with Cathy is more intense than at any other period of his life. Why, then, does Heathcliff delay his death? One reason may be that Cathy's dead body seems to be a highly cathected object for him, as is shown in his opening her coffin once and his plans for the removal of the coffin panels separating her body from his. If Cathy's dead body is indeed a sexualized object for him, his desire to unite his own body with it might be checked by guilt feelings. The whole matter of Heathcliff's prolonging his life for eighteen years after Cathy's death is an obscure and complicated question. Heathcliff himself does not seem to know why he remains alive. He seems unable to take direct action to bring about his death, because such action would probably arouse his guilt feelings. Instead, he prays almost unceasingly for Cathy to come to him, and she does so, or rather he believes that she does so, on the night of his death.

There are many other questions regarding Heathcliff's behavior and feelings which suggest unconscious motives involving sexual repression. We can deal with only one more of these questions here, and that is this: why Heathcliff accuses Cathy of having betrayed herself, and him, by marrying Edgar? The obvious answer is that Heathcliff believed that Cathy should have married him. If so, why does he wait until he knows that she is dying to tell her so? He has known since his return that she no longer has her former objection to an alliance with him, but he waits not only until Cathy is near death, but until he is married to Isabella.

If Catherine and Heathcliff are indeed kept from a sexual relationship by unconscious wishes and fears, the primary reason may be that they regard themselves as already bound to each other by almost every imaginable tie, including the brother-sister relationship. Upon becoming a member of the Earnshaw family, Heathcliff receives the first name of the dead Earnshaw son and becomes more of a son to Mr. Earnshaw than Hindley himself. At the father's dictatorial insistence, Heathcliff is treated by all as the family favorite. Cathy and Heathcliff are inseparable until Mr. Earnshaw dies, at which time Hindley, by taking Mr. Earnshaw's place as father, becomes even less a brother and Heathcliff becomes even more of one. Nelly Dean regards Heathcliff and Cathy as “counterparts.” The force of this is felt when we realize that Nelly regarded herself as Hindley's foster sister, even though their relationship was not close as compared to that of Cathy and Heathcliff.

We can assume, if only tentatively, that Heathcliff's and Cathy's unconscious feelings for each other are ruled by incestuous desire and guilt. This assumption provides us with an explanation for a great deal; it explains Heathcliff's demonism in particular. Everyone who has read this novel has noticed the many dozens of passages in which Heathcliff is compared to Satan, devils, demons, fiends, spectres, ghouls, goblins, ghosts, and vampires, as well as to demonically related animals such as wolves. Critics have dealt with the relationship between these comparisons and the general failure of creativity in Heathcliff, but there is to my knowledge no published commentary dealing with the relationship of the demonism and incest motifs. These motifs seem to be manifested in the hints of vampirism in general and in some of its specific forms such as lycanthropy and necrophilia.

A secondary basis of these disorders is sadism, a fundamental form of sexual arrestment, and in folklore and myth such disorders are regarded as demonic. With the exception of Hareton, all the major characters, even Cathy, describe Heathcliff in ways which suggest that they sense the demonic in him. Nelly Dean, who of all the characters is the least given to the use of hyperbole, wonders whether Heathcliff is not at times a “ghoul or vampire” (p. 260) or “goblin” (p. 259); she makes reference also to his “sharp cannibal teeth,” (e.g. p. 146) and notices particularly that the wounds on his wrist have no blood on them—a typical sign of demon possession. Charlotte Brontë regarded Heathcliff not as a man at all, but as a “demon,” “ghoul,” or “afreet which has taken on a man's shape” (p. 12, Introduction). Strictly speaking, Heathcliff is not vampirish, for a vampire is a revenant; but in some forms of vampirism, such as lycanthropy can be, the demon is usually a live person. Isabella, more than any other character in Wuthering Heights, suffers from the lycanthropic symptoms in Heathcliff. She seriously questions whether Heathcliff is human at all. She several times refers to his desire to rend and tear people, especially her, with his teeth. Nelly mentions that when Heathcliff is holding the dying Cathy in his arms, he gnashes his teeth “greedily,” and “foamed like a mad dog” (p. 134). When Cathy dies, he howls like a “savage beast” (p. 139). Nelly, that paragon of moderation, calls Heathcliff an “evil beast” (p. 94) who tells her that if Cathy had permitted, he would have “torn the heart out of Edgar and drunk his blood” (p. 125). Cathy suggests that Heathcliff might “seize and devour” Isabella; he replies “in a ghoulish fashion” that if he married Isabella one would “hear of odd things” (p. 93); we do hear of them, and they are obviously sexual in nature. Although we do not know what they are, Heathcliff says that he “experiments on what she would endure” (p. 127). His chief feeling toward Catherine and Linton Heathcliff is the wish to “vivisect them slowly” (p. 215). He is, in short, as Cathy herself says, a “fierce, pitiless, wolfish man” (p. 90), that is, lycanthropic, although without lycanthropic delusions. He is indiscriminately and actively cruel toward all people, except possibly Cathy, toward whom he tends to be passive, even masochistic, as he is toward his own death, which he yearns to have “swallow” him. If he has hostile feelings toward Cathy, they are in the main displaced upon Isabella so that he is lycanthropic toward Isabella but necrophilic toward Cathy. This disease is in Heathcliff expressed in a relatively mild way. If it were not, Heathcliff would disgust rather than appall and amaze the reader.

In incestuous feelings there is always a mixture of love and hate causally related to desire and guilt. The guilt and hatred produce fear, always unconsciously, of course. Heathcliff's fear of taking the initiative in uniting his body with Cathy's in death is balanced by his love, but because these feelings are radically ambivalent, even arrested, they are unresolved. Because they are unresolved, Heathcliff's desire for Cathy is utterly insatiable. Instead of making love to the corpse or tearing it apart and eating it, as might be the case in severe forms of necrophilia, Heathcliff partially spiritualizes it. He does so in an attempt to enhance, or perhaps insure, the permanency of the consolations of love. According to the psychoanalyst Ernst Jones, the necrophilic lover believes that the dead beloved will give and receive love endlessly and completely.² It is to be noted that the first time Heathcliff opens Cathy's grave, he feels “consoled at once, unspeakable consoled,” (p. 230), and the second time—when he opens her coffin—he “gave ease” to himself and for a short time felt “comfortable” and “pacified” (p. 229). Heathcliff's desire to have the dead Cathy possess him is gradually rendered less guilty by his insistent and prolonged spiritualization of Cathy's body to the extent that he seems able at times to see her even in the daylight.

As Jones shows, lycanthropy is related not only to vampirism and necrophilia, but also to Satanism;³ and in Wuthering Heights there are many passages relating Heathcliff to devils, the Devil, the diabolical and Satan. There are so many passages that even the most indifferent reader might wonder at them. Isabella says that after Cathy's death, Heathcliff prays to Cathy and to God, “whom he confounded with his own black father” (p. 144). Nelly Dean also refers to Heathcliff as a “devil” (p. 225). Catherine tells Heathcliff that he is, like the devil, “lonely,” and “envious” (p. 228). Even Cathy specifically compares him to Satan. “Your bliss lies,” she says, “like his, in inflicting misery” (p. 97). Some of the characters seriously believe Heathcliff's gypsy origin to be ultimately hell itself. The most obvious connection between lycanthropy and Satanism is that Satan in folklore is often a wolf. In the Middle Ages the devil became known as the “Arch-Wolf,” the “soul-robbing wolf,” and the “wolf of hell.”⁴ Heathcliff is like Satan not only in point of his lycanthropy, but also in other important ways, for example in having no father. The Devil is traditionally thought to be sterile because he has no semen,⁵ and Heathcliff seems hardly to have really fathered the almost lifeless Linton, who resembles him in nothing save a chronic sadism. One of the prime motives of the Devil is his defiance of the Father,⁶ as in incest situations. One reason, then, that Heathcliff hates Hindley so much is that Hindley stands in the relation of a father to him. Heathcliff, unable to steal Hindley's semen, as the traditional Devil would have done, steals Hindley's son, Hareton. As we know from many sources, including Milton,⁷ the Devil's insubordination is accompanied by his desire to imitate the Father; thus we see Heathcliff taking Hindley's place as master of Wuthering Heights. He also takes Edgar's place as master of Thrushcross Grange, appropriately so, because if the incest complex goes as deep in Heathcliff as it seems to do, then Edgar as Cathy's husband would also be a kind of father figure to Heathcliff.

My point regarding Heathcliff's Satanism is to show its relationship, working through lycanthropic and necrophilic symptoms, to the incest problem. It will be recalled that necrophilia is one of the forms which vampirism and lycanthropy may take. Both the latter may be incestuous; necrophilia always is. My ultimate point in this regard has to do with what many critics have written about: the loss of Heathcliff's potentially enormous creative power. The cultural background of this loss is the original identity of God and Satan, as A. B. Watts shows in The Two Hands of God. The wolf as a symbol was originally associated with light and reproductivity on the one hand, and with darkness and death on the other. In the latter association he had a position of great dignity as psychopomp.⁸ When the wolf's symbolic status degenerated, especially in the Middle Ages, he came to symbolize night, winter, and death and became associated with corpses and with the “dangerous and immoral side of nature in general and of human nature in particular.”⁹ Heathcliff's private totem is probably the wolf. His family (or clan) totem is probably winter, or rather the winter storm wind. Such a totem would be exogamous, for he shares it with Cathy.

Many readers have been impressed by the unrelenting durability and intensity of Heathcliff's love for Cathy. Heathcliff willingly (perhaps eagerly) endures the suffering inevitable in such a love experience. That he can keep his love for Cathy so alive for so long induces many readers to accept him to a remarkable degree. One of the psychological explanations for Heathcliff's love involves the very qualities of intensity and durability which we admire in him; the explanation obtains in what Freud called the repetition compulsion. I wish to show two things about this compulsion in Heathcliff: that it exists, and that he turns it to account in such a way as to achieve a unique state of transcendence. Remarks of a clinical nature often offend literary critics; therefore, I wish to stress that like many other admirers of Wuthering Heights I agree with critics who see Heathcliff as a kind of earth force, perhaps cultural force, trying to renew itself. To put it another way, Heathcliff is probably on one level a symbol of nature struggling to settle back to a state of homeostatic peace out of which new energy, Eros in the form of Hareton and Catherine, will come. To view Heathcliff in clinical terms is not necessarily in any way reductive and belittling; on the contrary, it is illuminating.

Freud discovered that the repetition compulsion is an attempt to find a state of total and unchanging peace. It is in this way, Freud said,¹⁰ based on though not caused by the death instinct, itself a desire for a timeless, conflictless condition. The repetition compulsion is caused by some early, unresolved, trauma—in Heathcliff's case the trauma of being abandoned—first in infancy in some mysterious and possibly prototypical way, second in adolescence by Cathy when she decides to marry Edgar and third by Cathy when she decides to die. The repetition compulsion is an acting out of the trauma in two ways: it refers to the cause of the original trauma and to the desire to resolve it. After Cathy's death, Heathcliff repeatedly and obsessively tries to see, and to be with Cathy. Here is Heathcliff's own account of the matter:

“When I sat in the house with Hareton, it seemed that on going out, I should meet her; when I walked on the moors I should meet her coming in. When I went from home, I hastened to return; she must be somewhere at the Heights, I was certain! (italics added).

(p. 230)

The repeated actions of leaving, are an enactment of being abandoned; the repeated actions of returning, are an enactment of being reunited. There are dozens of such passages in the novel.

It is necessary now to look briefly at another matter, the relation of sadomasochism in Heathcliff to his death wish and to his repetition compulsion. By the time he wrote Beyond the Pleasure Principle Freud had decided that masochism is anterior to sadism, that sadism is an extroversion of a primary masochism, and that masochism at its most fundamental level is identified with the death instinct. Whether one accepts Freud on this point or not, it is to be noted that Heathcliff is overtly sadistic most of his life up to the last few days of it, when vengeful activity no longer gives him any pleasure. He then seems to turn his aggressions inward in so radical a way that he need not, in the usual sense, kill himself. He simply ceases to remind himself to breathe. According to Norman O. Brown, the relation of masochism and death in Freud's work is an expression of the Nirvana principle¹¹ because it is the principle of an ideal equilibrium between tension and release. Such a principle, says Brown, reunifies life and death.¹² Cathy and Heathcliff do not, as critics have observed, see life and death as opposites.

Because the repetition compulsion causes a fixation on the past and a desire to find the past in the present, Heathcliff's instinctual life develops little after Cathy abandons him by marrying, and not at all after she abandons him by dying. The Cathy with whom Heathcliff identifies is the Cathy of his childhood and early adolescence, the one who has not abandoned him. This is the Cathy of his unconscious—the area of his instinctual life. This Cathy has not changed, because the unconscious is timeless, a fact of crucial importance, as Freud has shown. That Heathcliff is in some ways a symbol of the unconscious life has been noticed by critics. The significance of this fact for my purpose is that Heathcliff wants to break through to his instinctual life, to his unconscious life containing the unchanged Cathy, for he seems to regard this area of his life as a kind of timeless paradise. It may seem inconsistent to say that Heathcliff's unconscious represents the past when I have also said that throughout the book Heathcliff struggles to overcome the past. There is no inconsistency here, however, if we see that Heathcliff conquers the past when he overcomes the abandonment trauma by dying.

It would be well to pause for a moment here to look at the question of why Heathcliff dies at this time of his life. He could, of course, die of old age or by accident, but that would make of Wuthering Heights another kind of book. His unconscious prohibitions against suicide have been noted above, and it is to be further observed that at the time of his death Heathcliff has no plans, as such, to die and tries in no way to bring about his death. Although he goes without food for four days, he intends occasionally to eat, but forgets to do so because of his obsessive thoughts of Cathy and his ceaseless coming and going in quest of her. His search for reunion with Cathy is a curious combination of passivity and aggressiveness. Heathcliff searches for Cathy with all the unremitting passion of his being, and in this he is aggressive. But in that he must wait for death and Cathy to come to him, he is passive. Heathcliff's death, then, is a natural consequence of, or rather an extreme expression of, a passive quality in the repetition compulsion ritual. Some critics have said that Heathcliff dies at this time simply because his powers have burned themselves out, but this explanation does not take into account his passionate excitement on the day of his death. Heathcliff's abandonment trauma has remained unresolved in the first place because of the repression of sexual elements in his love; and, as I have suggested, Heathcliff's repetition compulsion is most intense in the moment of death—of reunion. It is this compulsion therefore which opens a way from the violent, nightmare world of the present to the timeless world of the past. The past then can no longer be thought of as the past, for that is to make it a temporal unit; rather it is to be thought of as eternity. A truly remarkable thing about Heathcliff is his power to create eternity—the thing great lovers often have wanted to do.

Incest repression is only a part of the total design of symbolism in Wuthering Heights, for in Heathcliff's demonism the Devil-Wolf qualities may symbolize winter and death, in short, the past and nature in general demonized, though potentially creative. Although Heathcliff and Cathy belong together according to one law, they must, according to another one, remain apart. This is to describe nature, or the universe, as being in collision with itself, to use A. C. Bradley's term in describing the world of Hamlet. Heathcliff and Cathy are in a sense one mind, the unconscious mind which in myth and in Jungian psychology may be microcosmic, universal. This is probably what Cathy means, without knowing it, when she says that she is Heathcliff.

The incest problem in the works of writers such as Sophocles, Webster, Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, and Lawrence is on one level a symbol of culture's struggle to renew itself. A culture must assimilate its infantile images (to borrow Joseph C. Campbell's phrase) to avoid arrestment by them. Brontë is not so much describing a culture as a universe, but Wuthering Heights does present a definite time and place, and an idea of love which is, at its worst, medieval, gothic, and puritan in background. There is no schematic conflict of past and present in Wuthering Heights. The conflict is rather between, as David Cecil says, the destructiveness of storm and the weakness of calm.¹³ But storm in Heathcliff is associated with winter and darkness, mythopoeically the past. Heathcliff transforms the past into eternity and in so doing breaks down the death-life antithesis by making death once more, as it was with pre-Christian Greeks, a part of life, a part of the process of palingenesis, which produces Hareton and Catherine as lovers.

James Joyce has described history as a nightmare. Ernst Jones in the earliest work on the subject and John E. Mack in the latest¹⁴ have shown that beyond doubt nightmare content consists basically of deeply repressed sexual material. Wuthering Heights opens, one might say, with one of the most detailed descriptions of a nightmare in literature. Oddly enough, it is experienced not by Heathcliff, as we would logically expect it to be, but by Lockwood. The reason for this displacement shows, in a peculiarly subtle way, that Heathcliff in his death transcends the historical, demonized world of time. To see that this happens, it is necessary first to review some points in the Heathcliff-Lockwood relationship. Lockwood stresses his belief that he has found in Heathcliff a kindred misanthropic spirit. Lockwood particularly likes being withdrawn following his sadistic treatment of the young lady at Bath; he is puzzled by his behavior, though not disturbed by it, being, unlike Heathcliff, incapable of deep feeling. His treatment of the threatening agent in his nightmare is even more sadistic, although the agent is the child Cathy. An important point about Lockwood's dream, which immediately precedes his nightmare, is that it concerns some secret sin, the nature of which remains hidden in the dream, although he is punished for it by the Reverend Jabez Branderham, Joseph, and other members of the congregation, who crowd around him and beat him. In Freudian psychology such a dream crowd represents a secret, in this case, obviously, a secret sin. During his beating, Lockwood is awakened by the banging of the branches of the fir tree outside the window—Cathy's window rather, for Lockwood is sleeping in Cathy's room. Lockwood falls back into sleep as the fir boughs continue to knock against the window, and his nightmare begins. Appropriately enough, the secondary cause of the nightmare is the winter storm wind, the exogamous totem of Cathy and Heathcliff, the power which creates the “atmospheric tumult” of Wuthering Heights, twisting its trees and its people.

What all this suggests is that Cathy comes as a threatening agent to Lockwood because he is Heathcliff's civilized double; Lockwood's secret sin is, as it always is according to Freud's Totem and Taboo, an incest fixation. The effete Lockwood fears love too much to develop emotionally beyond the childhood stage. Therefore Cathy comes as a child to him, a symbol of a dead past which threatens to overwhelm him. He pretends to be attracted to the passionate Catherine Heathcliff, but his fears of her are greater than his attraction to her. In his dream terror Lockwood defends himself by grinding Cathy's outstretched arm into the broken glass on the window sill. On the night of Heathcliff's death when Heathcliff takes Lockwood's place in Cathy's bed, he reaches out to open the window to allow Cathy to enter. It is his arm that gets wounded, and on his face is a “life-like gaze of exultation” (p. 264), for he has overcome history as nightmare.

Notes

1. Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, Norton Critical Editions, edited by William M. Sale (New York: W. W. Norton, 1963), p. 71. Subsequent quotations from Wuthering Heights will be followed by page numbers in parentheses.

2. Ernst Jones, On The Nightmare (New York: Liverwright Paperbound Editions, 1951), p. 110.

3. Jones, pp. 89-98.

4. Jones, p. 186.

5. Jones, p. 179.

6. Jones, p. 180.

7. Jones, p. 181.

8. Jones, p. 132.

9. Ibid.

10. Sigmund Freud, Vol. XVIII, The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1920-1922), pp. 14-17, 35-36.

11. Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death, The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (New York: Vintage Books, 1959), pp. 90-91.

12. Brown, p. 91.

13. Lord David Cecil, Early Victorian Novelists (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1935), p. 150.

14. See Jones, On The Nightmare; most of On The Nightmare was written in 1910-11; it was first published in its entirety in 1931; and John E. Mack's Nightmare and Human Conflict (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970).