That is women plural. Beat them as in grabbed them and held them against their will, hit them violently and locked them indoors. And he did so repeatedly. And he threatened them regularly when he wasn't actually beating them. And then there were the other abusive acts such as hanging Isabella's dog from a tree, locking women in rooms and forcing them to marry and robbing them of their property.
And then there is this:
Heathcliff doesn't just have bad habits, he isn't just moody and difficult to get along with, he isn't just faithless and uncaring, he isn't just oblivious to anyone else's feelings or needs including being oblivious to the feelings and needs of the woman he loves, although he is all of those things. No he is a systematic abuser of other people especially women and children. Heathcliff belongs in jail.
And yet he remains a hero to many.
Wuthering Heights is full of brilliant writing but all that brilliance adds up to nothing. I just finished reading it again for the first time in about thirty years and was surprised to find the writing was not just better but much better than I remembered it. But there is a huge problem with the morality of this book. It is driven by the moral outlook of the raging child. It is driven by I'm-going-to-hold-my-breath-until-I-die-and-then-you'll-be-sorry-Mummy-but-I'll-be-dead-so-ha-ha-on-you morality.
You can see this in the three sleights of hand it pulls. The first is that Heathcliff simply disappears for a long stretch after Cathy rejects him and then comes back, strong and financially independent. What happens while he is gone? How does he manage this trick against fearsome odds? We never learn. This huge hole in his development makes something that ought to be ludicrous appear reasonable to us. That is that years later he is still consumed by the rejection.
Women are allowed to reject men (and vice versa). Responding to rejection by thinking that she can only be with me rather than sucking it up and moving on lesson learned is classic behaviour in abusive men. This is the way guys who shoot their ex-girlfriends or ex-wives before sticking the barrel in their own mouth think. If Bronte had actually given us some notion of what it would have taken Heathcliff to maintain and nurse that rage all those years he was away the sheer moral insanity of it would have been to give the game away.
(By the way: Is there anything that looks even remotely like plausible evidence that Heathcliff would not have also beaten Cathy had he been able to marry her as he wished? Look at the man and ask yourself,would a married Cathy have been able refuse this man anything he wanted without getting the same treatment Isabella did? And a real answer to this question would include actual evidence rather than saying. "But he really, really, really luuuuves Cathy!")
The second trick is Catherine's death. It's not just the silly superstitious thinking that someone could die of an emotion (again the morality of a raging child); it's the way she dodges the fact that it is Catherine's fault and nobody but Catherine's fault that she dies. If we compare Catherine to Marianne in Sense and Sensibility we can see the problem clearly. Marianne's sickness is not instantaneous. She neglects herself for weeks on end so there is is some credibility to her sickness. And, as with Heathcliff's nursed grudge, the more realistic account makes it clear where the responsibility lies.
The final trick is Heathcliff's own death. And they were dead happily ever after. It imposes a formal end on a novel that has no moral trajectory. Heatcliff just goes on being this vile bastard for hundreds of pages and then he stops. And he has to die because having him walk around and try to explain the supposed change in himself would be to reveal the hollow empty space at the core of the novel.
And then there is this:
When our teacher asked us, a class of adolescent girls, how many of us would like to marry Heathcliff, all the hands in the class shot up.Now you may think I'm being unfair to Sheila Kohler in that she does recognize there is a problem and goes on to say so.
I imagine if she'd asked us about Mr Rochester we would have done the same thing. This, I imagine, did not augur well for our futures, our lives as women and wives or our careers.And she goes on to talk about her own marriage to an unfaithful man and then she moves to Vampire fiction and finally to the brooding Mr. Rochester. All very interesting I'm sure but it misses something very important: Heathcliff is in a category by himself.
Heathcliff doesn't just have bad habits, he isn't just moody and difficult to get along with, he isn't just faithless and uncaring, he isn't just oblivious to anyone else's feelings or needs including being oblivious to the feelings and needs of the woman he loves, although he is all of those things. No he is a systematic abuser of other people especially women and children. Heathcliff belongs in jail.
And yet he remains a hero to many.
Wuthering Heights is full of brilliant writing but all that brilliance adds up to nothing. I just finished reading it again for the first time in about thirty years and was surprised to find the writing was not just better but much better than I remembered it. But there is a huge problem with the morality of this book. It is driven by the moral outlook of the raging child. It is driven by I'm-going-to-hold-my-breath-until-I-die-and-then-you'll-be-sorry-Mummy-but-I'll-be-dead-so-ha-ha-on-you morality.
You can see this in the three sleights of hand it pulls. The first is that Heathcliff simply disappears for a long stretch after Cathy rejects him and then comes back, strong and financially independent. What happens while he is gone? How does he manage this trick against fearsome odds? We never learn. This huge hole in his development makes something that ought to be ludicrous appear reasonable to us. That is that years later he is still consumed by the rejection.
Women are allowed to reject men (and vice versa). Responding to rejection by thinking that she can only be with me rather than sucking it up and moving on lesson learned is classic behaviour in abusive men. This is the way guys who shoot their ex-girlfriends or ex-wives before sticking the barrel in their own mouth think. If Bronte had actually given us some notion of what it would have taken Heathcliff to maintain and nurse that rage all those years he was away the sheer moral insanity of it would have been to give the game away.
(By the way: Is there anything that looks even remotely like plausible evidence that Heathcliff would not have also beaten Cathy had he been able to marry her as he wished? Look at the man and ask yourself,would a married Cathy have been able refuse this man anything he wanted without getting the same treatment Isabella did? And a real answer to this question would include actual evidence rather than saying. "But he really, really, really luuuuves Cathy!")
The second trick is Catherine's death. It's not just the silly superstitious thinking that someone could die of an emotion (again the morality of a raging child); it's the way she dodges the fact that it is Catherine's fault and nobody but Catherine's fault that she dies. If we compare Catherine to Marianne in Sense and Sensibility we can see the problem clearly. Marianne's sickness is not instantaneous. She neglects herself for weeks on end so there is is some credibility to her sickness. And, as with Heathcliff's nursed grudge, the more realistic account makes it clear where the responsibility lies.
The final trick is Heathcliff's own death. And they were dead happily ever after. It imposes a formal end on a novel that has no moral trajectory. Heatcliff just goes on being this vile bastard for hundreds of pages and then he stops. And he has to die because having him walk around and try to explain the supposed change in himself would be to reveal the hollow empty space at the core of the novel.
When I first read the novel I was confused. Where was the "romantic" Heathcliff of every girl's dreams I'd heard about all my life? All I saw were a couple of crazy people (Heathcliff and Cathy -- both of them were psychotic) making everyone around them crazy and miserable. My hand would have remained firmly on the desk.
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