Читать книгу Timelines in Emily Brontës «Wuthering Heights» - Michael Weber - Страница 11

I. Questions and Contradictions

When reading Wuthering Heights, sooner or later – and always when it is too late to orientate oneself chronologically – the question arises as to the timing of events at Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange. The reason for this is the legendary “confusion of minds” which inevitably sets in during reading.¹ This confusion is due to the year 1801 given at the beginning of the novel, which suggests that events can be dated from this point on, and that Mr. Lockwood arrives at Thrushcross Grange in the winter towards the end of 1801 when Ellen Dean then begins her story. After this, the novel is filled with an abundance of time spans with reference to the second absolute year named in the text, 1778, the year of Hareton Earnshaw’s birth (Chapters 7 and 8). Confusing forward and backward references also appear, along with a plethora of indefinite time expressions. The third and last absolute year named in the text, 1802, appears surprisingly late towards the end of the novel at the beginning of Chapter 32.

Based on these time references, literary criticism has contended, for example, that the wedding of Catherine Earnshaw and Edgar Linton takes place three years after the death of Edgar’s father when Hareton is nearly five years old, and that Cathy is eighteen and Hareton twenty-three when they become lovers. These claims suggest that the major episode – the short, highly dramatic period with the near-fatal fall of Hareton, the disappearance of Heathcliff and the illness of Catherine Earnshaw – takes place in the year 1780, the wedding in 1783, the death of Catherine Earnshaw in 1784, and that the relationship between Cathy and Hareton begins in 1802, the same year in which Mr. Heathcliff dies. However, there is another indirect time reference to the birth of Hareton Earnshaw, namely that Cathy is thirteen and Hareton eighteen when they meet for the first time. This places their rendezvous in 1796, Cathy’s birth in 1783 and the wedding of Catherine Earnshaw and Edgar Linton in 1782. These dates are corroborated by Ellen Dean’s statement that her story begins almost twenty-three years after the birth of Hareton, that is in 1800, not in 1801.

In light of these contradictions, the general reader resolves to re-read the novel at some point and to pay closer attention to all the time expressions in order not to lose track of time again. This resolution either remains just that, due to insufficient interest in fictional numbers, or it ends unsuccessfully: even re-readers will still not know exactly how long Catherine is engaged, how old she is when she ←13 | 14→dies, how long Mr. Heathcliff lives after her death and how old he is when he dies, or how long after Edgar Linton’s funeral Mr. Lockwood appears at Wuthering Heights, to name just a few examples. The general reader will also not recognise in the Cathy of Ellen Dean’s account the Cathy of Mr. Lockwood’s and will gradually even mix up the two Catherines, losing all feeling for the intervals of time between events, eventually realising that “a powerful and accurate memory” is needed to understand Wuthering Heights.²

If readers turn to academic criticism for help, they will find only divergent and unconvincing opinions on the – for a classic novel like Wuthering Heights – unusually extensive and complicated references to time and their relevance. This will confirm the old observation that literature on Wuthering Heights is “abundant and its incoherence striking”.³ There are in fact only four chronological studies that are sufficiently detailed and that present distinct versions of the novel’s chronology, namely those by Charles Sanger (1926), Charles Clay (1952), S. A. Power (1972) and Stuart Daley (1974). All these authors assume that the year 1801 mentioned at the beginning of the novel is the crucial date for determining the novel’s chronology, taking this date as the basis for their calculations without questioning it. In his analysis of the internal structure of the novel, by which he clearly means the time frame or temporal structure, Sanger establishes a time scheme for the plot which is not always accurate. He also works out the first and only comprehensive chronology and genealogy of the Earnshaw and Linton families, though without going into much detail, arguably due to lack of space. He recommends further study on the question of whether Emily Brontë worked with a calendar, something that he himself does not believe (Sanger, pp. 11, 19). Clay, in his commentary on the chronology of Wuthering Heights, also constructs a genealogy, which he explains in more detail than Sanger, though without referencing Sanger’s research. He believes, like Sanger, that he is able to detect errors in the time structure of the novel, tangling himself up in contradictions in the process (Clay, p. 100). Power points out individual discrepancies in Clay’s research and finds contradictions in the work of Sanger as well. Nevertheless, like Sanger, he assumes that Wuthering Heights is not based on a real calendar. Lastly, Daley (1974, p. 337), adopting and modifying Sanger’s chronology, assumes there to be a “precise […] timing of events”, a time scheme based on historical almanacs, though it is not entirely decipherable and contains errors.⁴

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Besides these four authors, a few other critics have looked at the chronology of Wuthering Heights: Inga-Stina Ewbank (1976) recaps Daley’s dates, making only one change. Her research cannot therefore be counted as an independent chronology. The same applies to Masao Miyoshi’s “internal chronology”, first published in 1989 without commentary and then re-published unchanged in 1994. Miyoshi splits Sanger’s chronology in two, shortens it, reformulates it in places and makes only one change – that of the date of Mr. Heathcliff’s death. Moreover, he adds inaccurate information regarding the dates on which, in his opinion, Ellen Dean tells Mr. Lockwood about the Earnshaw and Linton families. In his monograph A Chronology of the Process of Writing Wuthering Heights, Edward Chitham (1998) uses data from the works of Sanger, Clay, Power, Daley and Ewbank.⁵ He does not undertake any of his own research into the internal chronology of Wuthering Heights, and his remarks concerning the chronology of the novel are ambivalent. On the one hand, he speaks of an “intellectual control of the material”, a “careful chronological framework” and a “tight chronological control”, undertaken only secondarily by Emily Brontë after 1845 for various reasons. On the other hand, he alleges that the “arithmetic [of the chronology] simply does not add up”, that there are “inconsistencies”, that the novel is a “chronological muddle” (an expression that Sanger uses before him) and that Emily Brontë made errors of calculation in her chronology. Chitham asserts that, because of this, the chronology is not perfect and sometimes appears “intractable”. He puts this down to the fact that Emily Brontë failed to correct some of these errors, possibly because it was more important to her to keep the temporal references to her own life than to have a consistent chronology.⁶ Moreover, Chitham (1998, p. 5) believes that Wuthering Heights “only gave up its chronological framework in the 1920s”, clearly thinking of Sanger’s publication of 1926, though Sanger himself never made such a claim. Like Chitham, Christopher Heywood (2004, pp. 433f.) tries to get to grips with the arithmetic of the chronology by using real data, albeit with data from local events from the history of Yorkshire rather than with data from Emily Brontë’s biography. To do so, he makes use of some of Sanger’s data, without adopting Sanger’s formulation of the text passages and “actions” that he uses – although he doubts that Sanger’s chronology is correct. He therefore does not create a distinct, consistent chronological study, either.

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Some years before Heywood, Ulrich C. Knoepflmacher (1994, p. 50) writes of several “competing chronologies” in Wuthering Heights, which Emily Brontë “mixes” in order to depict the conflict between the novel’s “temporal progressions” and its “timelessness”, probably alluding to Miyoshi’s above-mentioned chronology, which Knoepflmacher published. In his own publication, Miyoshi detects two “time-schemes” in Wuthering Heights, the “straight chronological” and “ordinary time” of Mr. Lockwood and the “mythical time” of the “Heathcliff-Cathy generation”, coming to the conclusion that “[a];t the end of the story myth is swallowed up in time” (1969, p. 217). Alison Booth is clearly referring to this when she deems the chronology to be “[a]t once mythic and calendrically precise” (2009, p. xxx). Heywood (2004, p. 433) also mentions two such timelines, which he calls the “1778 and 1779 series (numerical series)”, without citing the studies by Knoepflmacher or Miyoshi. Heywood is not able to resolve the discrepancy of the timelines. He is so convinced that 1801, the starting point of his “1779 series”, dates the year of Mr. Lockwood’s first visit to Wuthering Heights that he even considers that Hareton Earnshaw could in fact have been born in 1779, rather than in 1778, even though 1778 is the only absolute year named by Ellen Dean and refers unambiguously to Hareton’s birth. Conal Boyce (2013) reflects on Catherine Earnshaw’s date of birth and draws six chronological conclusions. Otherwise he adopts, but only in part, Sanger’s chronology and the “traditional dates” derived from it, considering the dates to be “generally accepted nowadays uncritically” (2013, pp. 100, 101). What is more, he admits that his revision could be “myopic” and “simply erroneous”.

Hardly a treatise exists on Wuthering Heights that does not assert that the plot of the novel is told in an unchronological fashion by Ellen Dean and Mr. Lockwood. Gerda Stedman (2015, pp. 80–83) even employs the semantically rather unclear term “achronological”, though it is debatable whether this means here that the chronological order of events is not adhered to or that the novel does not have a (rigorous) chronology. H. W. Garrod (1930, p. xii) remarks that Wuthering Heights, according to some, is “careless in its indications of date”. Again and again, Ellen Dean is accused of not always being accurate in her chronology; of being an unreliable, untrustworthy narrator just like Mr. Lockwood.⁷ W. Somerset Maugham counts Wuthering Heights amongst the ten greatest ←16 | 17→novels in world literature and pays Emily Brontë unparalleled compliments, but at the same time he considers the novel “very clumsily constructed […] very imperfect” (1948, pp. 130, 132, 133). Unsurprisingly, he was severely rebuked (cf. Weir, p. 414). Robert Gleckner (1959, p. 330) is of the opinion that the novel does not report so much “an orderly progression in chronological time of separated, discontinuous events” but that the narrative structure conveys “a kind of all-pervading present, of which the past and the future are integral parts”, with past episodes appearing like flashbacks. Walter Kluge (1972, p. 1238) claims that the novel is not chronological, not “linear”. Carol Louise West (1981, pp. i–ii) also believes there to be “nonlinear representations of time” in Wuthering Heights, and that monthly “cyclical recurrences” represent the “ordering principle” of the novel, by which she probably means the plot. She considers the studies by Sanger and his successors to be “very technical” (which Sanger presciently feared, and which could explain their wide acceptance, though seemingly paradoxically at first), and the philosophically-oriented studies on temporality to be “very general”.⁸ West supposes that Emily Brontë is concerned with more than just “conventional distinctions between past, present, and future” (ibid., p. iv).

Despite this unsatisfactory state of affairs, this “chronological muddle”, the old chronologies with their “traditional dates” (Boyce, p. 100) have been, and continue to be, cited in literature on Wuthering Heights and used as a basis for textual interpretation. The dating is clearly regarded as accepted or tolerated, be it out of ignorance or because there is nothing better. In this respect, one can speak of a general consensus on the internal chronology of Wuthering Heights. The years 1801 and 1802 at the beginning of Chapters 1 and 32 respectively have never been scrutinised as to whether they are in fact chronologically relevant for the dating of the events in the novel, that is whether there is another explanation for the dates. Whether Wuthering Heights has a consistent and transparent chronological order and why Emily Brontë made a great mystery out of her time scheme – if there is one – continue to puzzle. Is Wuthering Heights a cryptic representation of reality in the spirit of E. Auerbach? Why did Emily Brontë hide her watch, as E. M. Forster (1927, p. 31) puts it in a witty but not entirely apposite metaphor (for what is really missing is a calendar, a rigorous timetable)? Why did Emily Brontë behave like a “Sibylline”, as Chitham phrases it? Why is “the whole texture [of Wuthering Heights] dense, posing questions and ←17 | 18→giving half-answers” (Chitham, pp. 5, 6)? Chitham (1998, p. 88) assumes that as a “nervous and retiring perfectionist, she would have been delighted to hear that thousands of readers 150 years after her death would still be enjoying her novel, but would have been reluctant to clarify what they found puzzling”. That may be so, but she would certainly not have been delighted by the accusation of defects in her craft. This study aims to solve this dilemma and put an end to dismissive criticism in Wuthering Heights-literature. It will be shown that the chronologically relevant fictional facts can be treated like real facts, i.e. the facts can be objectively quantified and determined as they are in the natural sciences.⁹ In such a way, mathematical rigor can be used to counteract the inherent stubbornness of scholarship with its need for harmony in the formation of facts, even if they are delusions (to draw upon the words of L. Fleck from his sociological and scientific theoretical study on the genesis and development of a scientific fact first published in 1935 (Fleck 1979)).

To this end, the next chapter will start by establishing the time structures of the novel. The three named absolute years already mentioned – the year 1778 (the year of Hareton Earnshaw’s birth, in Chapters 7 and 8), the year 1801 (at the beginning of Chapter 1) and the year 1802 (at the beginning of Chapter 32) – are taken as the basis. The assumption is that these named years are correct unless they are refuted by other data. As will be seen, all other relative time references can be mapped to these three named absolute years.¹⁰ It is crucial for the coherence of the time references and for the reconstruction of the chronology to determine what happened in a particular year. The result will depend ←18 | 19→on whether 1801 is considered to be the year of Mr. Lockwood’s first visit (which has always been assumed and which the text seems to suggest) or whether 1801 is seen as referring to something else, namely the beginning of Mr. Lockwood’s diary-like records.

The past events of Mr. Lockwood’s diary, therefore, must not only be brought into a coherent chronological order, they must also correlate with his reporting present, which he here and there weaves into his discourse. In other words, it must be kept in mind that some of Mr. Lockwood’s remarks may relate to the reporting present rather than to the reported past. This applies a fortiori to what Ellen Dean tells him in several sittings and what he notes down in portions some time later.

Chapter II goes on to discuss the various ways and means of deducing a chronology of the events from the data provided. After a brief overview of the novel’s narrative structure and narrators, as well as the dating methodology used, time schemes are determined from the data provided by Mr. Lockwood and Ellen Dean, and an analysis of the proposals found in Wuthering Heights-literature is provided. Starting with the premise that 1801 refers to the year that Mr. Lockwood writes his diary, rather than to the year of his first visit to Wuthering Heights, it becomes apparent that many time references can be squared with one another, above all the references which concern the central events of the novel. However, there are a few references that do not appear to fit. These are discussed in detail to demonstrate that they cannot be attributed to errors made by the author and to show that they make sense within the novel. These data, which at first glance seem incorrect, can be explained intra-fictionally, fitting into the framework of an overarching interpretation, which will be discussed in more detail in Chapter VII. Before this, Chapter III presents a tabular summary of the plot, depicting the entirely consistent chronology of the novel as it emerges from its time references, and is a result of the deliberations in Chapter II. Following this, the previous chronological theories are documented, and their shortcomings delineated. These can be resolved by the new proposal.

Chapter IV presents character-based chronologies. In the form of biographies of the individual characters, chronological details are reconstructed, which are linked to further observations, such as the fact that Mr. Heathcliff’s biographical dates show parallels with those of Lord Byron, which in turn provides insight into his character profile. Chapter V is devoted to the “ghost”, offering an interpretation of this phenomenon which eschews supernatural explanations. Chapter VI offers an overview of the family trees that have been developed so far. As will be shown, unresolved questions in this regard are directly connected with Ellen ←19 | 20→Dean’s narrative intentions. The critical genealogy proposed here takes these into account.

In Chapter VII, the findings from the previous chapters are brought together and consolidated into an interpretation which offers a succinct explanation for the remaining contradictions in the time schemes. This is largely based on an elucidation of Ellen Dean’s hidden intentions, which in turn Mr. Lockwood sees through in the course of his stay and which he goes along with in his writings. It becomes clear that it is possible to connect conclusively more time references than ever before and that an explanation can be found for the few remaining questionable time references, showing them to have been intentionally laid down as red herrings by Ellen Dean and Mr. Lockwood. Chapter VIII summarises the most important questions and answers once more, bringing them together at the end in a series of interpretational hypotheses on the text and answers to the practical questions which have long preoccupied the minds of readers of Wuthering Heights:

– who were Mr. Heathcliff’s parents?

– what does Mr. Heathcliff die of and when?

– what lies behind the ghost at the window of Catherine’s room at Wuthering Heights?

– was Mr. Heathcliff really the father of Linton Heathcliff, and Edgar Linton the father of Cathy?

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1 Cecil (1958, p. 164).

2 Chitham (1998, p. 6).

3 Miller (1982, p. 50).

4 Cf. Daley (1990), (1995) and (2003).

5 Cf. Chitham (1998, pp. 5, 133, 204, 209).

6 Chitham (1998, pp. 6, 98, 135, 161, 162, 164, 186, 188, 189, 200).

7 Cf. Boyce (2013, p. 100), Clay (1952, pp. 100, 104), Frangipane (2016, p. 29), Power (1972, p. 142), Shunami (1973, p. 464). These two narratologically contentious adjectives are also used hereinafter, although – as M. Jahn (1998, p. 82) has established – their scientific relevance appears to be in inverse proportion to their prevalence.

8 The former is only tenable if by “very technical” one means “too detailed” as measured by the lack of a convincing result; the latter if one starts from the hypothesis that time plays a crucial but unclear role in Wuthering Heights (ibid., p. iii).

9 On 23/12/1903, Henry James (1984, p. 302) wrote to Lady Millicent Fanny St. Clair Erskine, Duchess of Sutherland, about his novel The Ambassadors: “[…] don’t break the thread. The thread is really stretched quite scientifically tight. Keep along with it step by step – and then the full charm will come out. […] I find that the very most difficult thing in the art of the novelist is to give the impression and illusion of the real lapse of time, the quantity of time represented by our poor few phrases and pages […].” Sanger felt this lapse of time when reading Wuthering Heights and used the wording verbatim. It is hardly likely that Sanger would have known James’s letter. Neither will Henry James have concerned himself with the chronology of Wuthering Heights. Indeed, he never mentions the novel or Emily Brontë in his published letters.

10 Relative time references are those which place two (or more) events in a temporal relationship with each other and indicate time spans through expressions like “tomorrow” or “three days later” and through indications of age like “x was 18 years old when…”. Sometimes two past events of the narrated story correlate with one other, but sometimes a reference point is the present time of the story or the narrator, which refers back to an earlier time with the help of a temporal modifier.