SOURCE: “The Incest Taboo in Wuthering Heights: A Modern Appraisal,” in American IMAGO, Vol. 45, No. 2, Summer, 1988, pp. 217-24.

[In the following essay, McGuire explores the incest theme in Wuthering Heights in the context of modern psychological breakthroughs in the study of incest; the critic draws on Ernest Jones' thesis of the relationship between incest, Satanism, vampirism, lycanthropy, and necrophilia, stating that Heathcliff demonstrates all these traits.]

Wuthering Heights has long been admired as a unique and powerful novel. The brooding atmosphere of Wuthering Heights, the intense characters, and the disturbing theme lure the reader into a world at once repelling and seductive. Who or what is the mysterious Heathcliff? Why does the mutual passion between Cathy Earnshaw and him remain unrequited when there is no apparent obstacle to their union? Why is their consuming physical attachment superseded by a morbid fascination with union after death? I propose that an unconscious incest taboo impeded the two lovers' expectations of normal sexual union and led them to spiritualize their attachment, eventually leading them to believe that they could find union only after death.

Criticism of Wuthering Heights has characteristically taken one of two approaches when the question of incest has been raised. Some critics have suggested that Heathcliff was the illegitimate son of Mr. Earnshaw, but no textual evidence exists to support the hypothesis that Heathcliff and Cathy were blood brother and sister.¹ In any case, for an incest taboo to exist, it is irrelevant whether Cathy and Heathcliff are blood relatives. What is essential is that they were raised as brother and sister. Heathcliff entered the family when he was seven and Cathy was six. They shared all living arrangements as brother and sister, including sleeping together.

Other critics have viewed Heathcliff and Cathy's relationship as a search for the lost paradise of sibling unity, citing the nineteenth-century nostalgic regard for the family as a refuge from public life;² but this perspective fails to account for the sexual tension in the novel, as well as the return of the ghosts of Heathcliff and Cathy as adults rather than children.

Central to a discussion of incest is an understanding of advancements in the study of the Oedipal complex. Modern psychologists, sociologists, and anthropologists maintain that incest can be viewed as an attempt by fragmented man to achieve wholeness and immortality. In a sense, incest offers the most nearly perfect way of attaining oneness, providing the metaphor of like with like merging into complete possession; by suppressing the sexual instincts, this possession can be based on the eternal union of the spirit. Yet incest, arising out of a need for integration, paradoxically results most often in the severest disintegration.

In cases of brother/sister incest, the siblings are likely to be products of an isolated, introverted upbringing. The environment in which Heathcliff and Cathy were raised was extraordinarily conducive to the development of an incestuous situation. Inhabitants of the lonely moors, “completely removed from the stir of society” (WH 45),³ the family circle was closed to all except the servants and a handful of neighbors who lived at some distance.

The role of isolation is significant in incest, as both a motive for the relationship and as an effect of its practice (Justice 135). Although incest arises from a yearning for completeness and belonging, it most often results in further alienation. The incestuous lover, rather than turning outward instead turns inward, a situation which can only end disastrously; in a sense he is attempting a kind of union with himself: Cathy came to believe “I am Heathcliff” (122); Heathcliff said, “I cannot live without my soul!” (204).

The aberrant behavior of the two lovers, especially Heathcliff's vampiristic and necrophilic tendencies and Cathy's physical disorders, is recognized as characteristic of incest. Of course, any discussion of behavioral patterns which suggests an incestuous fixation must begin with Heathcliff, for it is he who best exemplifies the consequences of violating the incest taboo.

In modern times it has become a psychological commonplace that the instinctual self, when consistently rejected, eventually surfaces elsewhere, often in a tragic form. The combination of Heathcliff's deprived early environment and his equally deprived adolescence indicates that he never received the kind of nurturing necessary to mature out of a symbiotic relationship. As a result, he spent much of his energy keeping unmet dependency needs out of awareness. He did this through sadistic behavior, at times bordering on depravity and self-destruction.

Along with sadism, Heathcliff exhibited other bizarre traits which we, as modern readers, can understand in light of psychological breakthroughs in the study of incest. Psychoanalyst Ernest Jones, in his book On the Nightmare, demonstrated empirically the relationship between incest, Satanism, vampirism, lycanthropy (or werewolfism), and necrophilia—all of which were manifested by Heathcliff. In folklore and myth, all of these disorders are considered demonic, a predominant characteristic of Heathcliff. Critics have pointed out the dozens of passages in which he is referred to as “fiend,” “ghoul,” “devil,” etc., but there are also many allusions to vampirism in general and two of its specific forms, lycanthropy and necrophilia.

Strictly speaking, Heathcliff was not a vampire, for the term designates a reanimated body or soul of a dead person who sucks the blood from the living in order to draw him into death, the vampire himself being reanimated in the process (Jones 99). But the predominant imagery of vampirism throughout the novel is so pervasive that it seems fair to say that Brontë created at least a metaphorical vampire. Jones demonstrated that the incest complex underlies the vampire one (127); he makes a parallel between the vampire who sucks blood to sustain himself and the infant who receives life-sustaining nourishment from the mother's breast. The whole superstition of vampirism, according to Jones, is “shot through with the theme of guilt” which is generated in the incest conflicts in infancy (127).

Jones pointed out that the relationship between the werewolf (lycanthrope) and the vampire superstitions are closely connected. In many parts of the world the idea is prevalent that “werewolves become vampires after their death” (139). From the blood-sucking of one to the ravenous lust of the other is but a small step (148).

Images of both vampirism and lycanthropy abound in the novel in regard to Heathcliff's appearance, as well as his behavior. According to folklore, “Werewolves could be recognized when in human form by having heavy eyebrows that met together …” (Jones 137). Nelly described Heathcliff as having “thick brows, that instead of rising arched, sink in the middle” (97). When he arrived at Wuthering Heights, Nelly tells how he spoke some “gibberish that nobody could understand” (77), even though he must have been seven years old. By sixteen he had “acquired a slouching gait, and ignoble look” (108), and he had “sharp cannibal teeth” (212). Cathy told Isabella that he was a “fierce, pitiless, wolfish man” (141), who would “seize and devour her up” (145).

The manifestations of vampirism in general and lycanthropy in particular heightened as Cathy neared death. Heathcliff, in his own words, “haunted” the Grange garden every night for six hours (189). Nelly reveals his behavior during Cathy's final hours: he “gnashed” and “foamed like a mad dog” (197) until Nelly felt as if she were not “in the company of [her] own species; it appeared that he would not understand, though [she] spoke to him” (197). After Cathy's death, he “howled, not like a man, but like a savage beast getting goaded to death with knives and spears” (204), and Nelly “observed several splashes of blood about the bark of the tree, and his hands and forehead were both stained” (204).

Heathcliff manifested the symptoms of necrophilia immediately after Cathy's death. Necrophilia is another sexual aberration which, like vampirism, arises from incestuous desires and guilt. Jones explains that the necrophiliac believes that “a dead person who loves will love forever and will never be weary of giving and receiving caresses” (110). This fantasy particularly appealed to Heathcliff, for “the relationship has none of the inconvenient consequences that sexuality may bring in its train in life” (Jones 111). In other words, Heathcliff would violate no incest taboo by dreaming of “sleeping the last sleep by that sleeper,” with his “cheek frozen against hers” (320).

Nelly discloses Heathcliff's necrophilic tendencies; she reveals that he visited Cathy's funeral chamber at night, a fact that she realized because of the “disarrangement of the drapery about the corpse's face” (205). We learn from Isabella that he slept on Cathy's grave during the summer months (213). We later discover from Heathcliff himself that the night of Cathy's burial he had attempted to remove the dirt from her coffin, but as he bent over the grave he seemed to sense her presence “not under [him], but on the earth” (321). The sense of relief caused him to re-cover the grave and return home. All the way back, he “could almost see her, and yet [he] could not” (320). After that he continued to be tortured by the feeling of her presence, yet the inability to see her.

Jones explained this insatiable desire to be revisited by the dead as mostly a “mechanism of identification.” He maintained that “the deepest source of this projection is doubtless to be found in the wish that ultimately springs from childhood memories of being left alone by the loved parent” (100-01).

Likewise, the insistence on complete possession is, according to Jones, “particularly urgent with those who have not succeeded in emancipating themselves from the infantile desire to make a test case of their first love problem, that of incest with the mother and rivalry with the father” (110).

Of course, rivalry with the father is a primary manifestation of the incest fixation. Nowhere is this rivalry more apparent than in the relationship between Heathcliff and Hindley, a relationship which illustrates Freud's explanation of the incest taboo, the Myth of the Primal Horde. According to Freud, patricide and incest were the only two crimes which troubled primitive society (Totem and Taboo 246). In the myth, the brothers killed the father because he “stood so powerfully in the way of their sexual demands and their desire for power” (248). The incest taboo originated as a result of the guilt which then overwhelmed them (250).

Freud's myth of the father slain by the sons because they lusted for his power and his mate provides a basis for the consequences of revenge and death which follow in the wake of incest. As Ernest Jones realized, “There is a close relation between adult jealousy and the desire for the removal of the rival by the most effective means, that of death …” (Hamlet and Oedipus 72-3). The details of Hindley's death approximately one year after Heathcliff returned from his three-year sojourn are recounted by Nelly in such a way as to imply that Heathcliff could have murdered him.

Suspicion surrounding Hindley's death is planted in the reader's mind by Nelly, whose first thought upon hearing of the death was “Had he fair play?” (221). She hastened to Wuthering Heights to learn from Heathcliff that Hindley had deliberately drunk himself to death. Nelly seemed unconvinced of Heathcliff's innocence, however, saying that his deportment “expressed a flinty gratification at a piece of difficult work, successfully executed” and that there was “something like exultation in his aspect” (222) when the body was being removed.

Although Heathcliff best exemplifies the classical Oedipal characteristics, certainly Cathy's are drawn as accurately, if more subtly. At the inception of Cathy's attachment to Heathcliff, she acted as a kind of surrogate mother to him and is portrayed in terms which suggest a maternal superiority. When she was separated from him, however, she easily lost that superiority and reacted in childlike fashion, throwing tantrums (127), obstinately refusing to take shelter from the elements (125, 103-4), refusing to eat (99, 158), having appalling nightmares (162), and threatening self-destruction (128, 155, 159, 165).

Just as Heathcliff consistently rejected his instinctual self, so did Cathy. Whereas Heathcliff's repressed sexuality surfaced in a number of bizarre behavioral traits, Cathy's emerged as a variety of physical and mental disorders. She suffered a succession of illnesses, variously referred to as “delirium” (127), “a fever” (127), a “kind of fit” (167), “brain fever” (171), and severe headaches (64, 155). In fact, every time that Cathy was physically separated from Heathcliff, she became physically ill, most seriously on the occasions which threatened total separation.

For example, we learn through Lockwood's reading of Cathy's diary (64) and through Nelly's account of Cathy's delirium just prior to her death (162-63) that Cathy's headaches and “temporary derangement” occur when Hindley banished Heathcliff from Cathy's bedroom at ages thirteen and twelve respectively. The text is unclear whether they actually shared the same bed, although Cathy's statement. “I was laid alone for the first time” (163), certainly leaves room for that conjecture. Nevertheless, they at least shared the same room, apparently just the two of them for the three years that Hindley was away at college.

Of course, the most sensational example of this repression is Cathy's second hysterical attack, which eventually led to her death. Once again, the attack occurred because she was separated from Heathcliff, for Edgar had just barred Heathcliff from Thrushcross Grange. The doctor, Kenneth, commented that he could not “help fancying there's an extra cause for this [her hysteria]” (167).

In addition to sharing Heathcliff's repressive tendencies, Cathy was indirectly given a share of his vampiristic tendencies. She asked Nelly, “Who is to separate us [Heathcliff and her], pray? They'll meet the fate of Milo!” (121). Milo, according to a textual note, was a “Greek athlete who, when trying to rend a tree asunder, was trapped in the cliff and eaten by wolves” (WH 370). When Edgar tried to force her to choose between Heathcliff and him, she is described in vampiristic terms as “dashing her head against the arm of the sofa, and grinding her teeth, so that you might fancy she would crash them to splinters!” (156). Nelly further described her reaction to separation from Heathcliff: “She stretched herself out still and turned up her eyes, while her cheeks, at once blanched and livid assumed the aspect of death. … ‘She has blood on her lips!’ [Edgar] said, shuddering” (157). This description is suggestive of Heathcliff when he learned of Cathy's death. The vampiristic image is evident as Nelly continues: “She started up—her hair flying over her shoulders, her eyes flashing, the muscles of her neck and arms standing out preternaturally” (157). Her appearance as she neared death furthered the image: “Her present countenance had a wild vindictiveness in its white cheek, and a bloodless lip, and scintillating eye …” (195). When she thought Nelly had betrayed her, “a maniac's fury kindled under her brows” (166), and she associated Nelly with witchcraft, saying, “I'll make her howl a recantation!” (166).

After Cathy's death, a period of eighteen years elapsed during which Heathcliff continued to seek the wholeness which had eluded him in incest, yet he did not forsake his incestuous longing. His obsession with the dead Cathy and his desire to have her possess him did not abate, but grew stronger. Heathcliff returned to the bed that he and Cathy had shared until separated by Hindley at age twelve and surrendered to his “soul's bliss” (363). When Nelly found him dead, she tried to close his eyelids to shut out the “life-like gaze of exultation,” but “they would not shut” (365), typical of the corpse of a vampire (Jones 103). Hareton and Nelly honored Heathcliff's wish to be buried with his coffin opening into Cathy's, free now that he had shed his mortal being to “dissolve with her” (320). If we are to take seriously the rumors that Heathcliff and Cathy roamed the countryside after his death as adults not children, we must conclude that the union which had been forbidden to them in life found fulfillment in death.

Notes

1. For example, see Herbert Dingle's article, “The Origin of Heathcliff,” Brontë Society Transactions, 16 (1972): 131-38. Also see Eric Solomon's article, “The Incest Theme in Wuthering Heights,” Nineteenth Century Fiction, 14 (1959): 80-83.

2. See Judith May Schelly's dissertation, “A Like Unlike: Brother and Sister in the Works of Wordsworth, Byron, George Eliot, Emily Brontë, and Dickens,” Berkeley: U of Cal P, 1980.

3. All quotations from the text of Wuthering Heights [WH] are based on the 1965 Penguin Classic, introduced and edited by David Daiches.

Works Cited

Brontë, Emily. Wuthering Heights. 1847. Intro. David Daiches. New York: Penguin Classics, 1965.

Freud, Sigmund. Totem and Taboo: Resemblances between the Psychic Lives of Savages and Neurotics. Tr. with intro. by A. A. Brill. New York: Avon Books, 1965.

Jones, Ernest. Hamlet and Oedipus. New York: Norton, 1976.

———. On the Nightmare. New York: Liveright Publishing Corp., 1951.

Justice, Blair, and Rita Justice. The Broken Taboo: Sex in the Family. New York: Human Sciences Press, 1979.