Wuthering Heights is a rich and complex novel. Amongst other things it is a novel about trauma and the inability to grow emotionally. Heathcliff and Cathy in many ways remain frozen in time as children on the cusp of adulthood. This trauma is most dramatically seen in Cathy’s ghost at the window of Wuthering Heights and in Heathcliff’s reaction to it. For those of us affected by trauma the past is, as William Faulkner wrote, not dead. It’s not even past.
Wuthering Heights
‘Begone!’ I shouted. ‘I’ll never let you in,
not if you beg for twenty years.’
‘It is twenty years,’ mourned the voice: ‘twenty years. I’ve been
a waif for twenty years!’
Wuthering Heights Emily Bronte
Look, don’t be too quick to blame,
who’d let in a ghostly child
with a married woman’s name?
Let in one small wailing wraith
and where will it end? You can’t
play house with a moorlost waif.
Solder up that window fast,
quickly block this broken pane,
and the wildly whirling past
that’s just a hand’s grasp away,
mumbling, raw and icy cold
with everything it can’t say.
Faces at each window piled:
children in adults’ bodies,
and the adult in the child’s.
Could you wrench open your heart’s
casement to these icy fiends?
Dare you hold their frozen parts,
neglected loves, mistook ways,
feel what they feel, set them free?
I say ‘you’, but I mean ‘me’.