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ОглавлениеII. The Temporal Structure of the Novel
If narratological and chronological errors are to be avoided, a distinction must be systematically made between Ellen Dean’s story and Mr. Lockwood’s report.1 In the novel, Ellen Dean’s “story” is also referred to as a “narrative” and a “tale”, though significantly Mr. Lockwood does not use such terms to describe what he imparts. To a degree, Knoepflmacher (1994, p. 48) already makes this differentiation in his distinction between “Lockwood time” and “Earnshaw time”, by which he means Ellen Dean’s “chronicle”. Yet, he has no specific chronological objective in making this distinction, evidenced by the fact that the numerous, seemingly contradictory time references do not concern him as such. Miyoshi (1969, pp. 217f.) rightly points out that this “narrative duplication” allows “a subtle manipulation of time”. Solomon (1959, p. 81) recognises this potential ten years before Miyoshi when he speaks of the carefully handled “manipulation of time sequence and angle of vision”.
The Report and the Story – Formal and Functional Narrative Aspects
The report and the story are easily distinguished from one another thanks to the stylistic idiosyncrasies of the reporter and the storyteller. What is more, the story is composed exclusively in the past simple, and sections are indicated by breaks in the text. The present tense is only used when Ellen Dean speaks as if to herself at the end of a section, and therefore serves to distinguish between the narrated events of the past and the personal reflections of the narrator in the present, in other words between the narrated story and the “discourse story” (“Erzählgeschichte”, Schmid 2008, p. 280). The present tense signals “now-time” with regard to the telling of the story; it is the narrative present. In relation to the report, on the other hand, Ellen Dean’s narrative present is the past, as shown by Mr. Lockwood’s use of the past simple following every such passage in his report.
A typical passage is found at the end of the first part of the story:
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At first, on hearing this account from Zillah, I determined to leave my situation, take a cottage, and get Catherine to come and live with me: but Mr. Heathcliff would as soon permit that, as he would set up Hareton in an independent house; and I can see no remedy, at present, unless she could marry again: and that scheme it does not come within my province to arrange. (WH, 367)
This is followed by Mr. Lockwood’s remark in the past simple tense, “Thus ended Mrs. Dean’s story”. The distinct differences in style and grammar between the two characters make it unlikely from the start that the narrator of the events has been invented by the reporter.
Speech marks are not used to mark Ellen Dean’s story, even though the indicative is used throughout. Furthermore, speech marks are not used when Ellen Dean addresses Mr. Lockwood in the course of her monologue – which is repeatedly the case – nor are they used for Mr. Lockwood’s insertions, such as “she said”. However, they are used in dialogue between Mr. Lockwood and Ellen Dean to mark direct speech, and for the conversations between Ellen Dean and other characters in her story. Only occasionally are speech marks used for the soliloquised reflections of Mr. Lockwood in his report or for those of Ellen Dean in her story.
Ellen Dean’s story is accordingly embedded in Mr. Lockwood’s report and presents the events preceding those which Mr. Lockwood witnesses during his stays and which he then records in his report.
On three occasions either a dotted, starred or continuous crossline occurs in the novel, both to separate the notes written by Catherine in 1775 from Mr. Lockwood’s report (WH, 24f.) and to distinguish between the report and Ellen Dean’s story (WH, 41). Only the first starred line appears in the Norton Critical Edition (2003, p. 18), while the Clarendon Edition has only the first two starred lines (p. 27). These typographical differences have no chronological meaning, however.
In contrast to Ellen Dean’s story, Mr. Lockwood’s report is composed using the present, past and perfect tenses, with the occasional inclusion of the future. Consequently, the construction of the report is much more complicated than that of the story in terms of the tenses used. Like Ellen Dean when she comes to the end of a section of her story, Mr. Lockwood lapses into the present tense when speaking to Ellen Dean, as if to himself, or to readers at the end of a passage of his report. In addition, he uses the present tense five times when commenting or describing: at the beginning of Chapters 1, 10 and 15, at the end of the first section of Chapter 4 before the crossline and at the end of Chapter 30. This is of great importance for the dating of events. The Lockwood-present of his reported experiences must not under any circumstances be equated with the real present, ←22 | 23→that is the reporting-present, unless correlated with other dates, and nor therefore may it be used for the reconstruction of the chronology.
It is not easy to determine when Mr. Lockwood visits Wuthering Heights and chronicles those visits or when Ellen Dean tells him her story. Mr. Lockwood visits Wuthering Heights four times in total, twice in quick succession in the winter of one year and twice six months apart the following year, in January and in summer. What is certain is that, according to Mr. Lockwood’s account, Ellen Dean begins her story on the day that he returns from his second visit to Wuthering Heights (WH, 38). This is evident from the context, but it is only revealed to the reader after the first four chapters.
Even though it initially seems as if the year 1801 at the beginning of the novel can be used to date events unambiguously, it is nevertheless difficult to establish in which years the events at Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange take place. This is because the year 1801 is seemingly inconsistently connected with the year of Hareton Earnshaw’s birth, 1778, by numerous relative time expressions relating to the events depicted in the report and the story, and above all with the year of Catherine Earnshaw’s wedding, her death and the so-called major episode.2 This means that the years do not cohere when counting from 1801 on the one hand or from 1778 on the other. With two exceptions, there is a discrepancy of one year between 1778 and 1801, as shown in the introductory example (see Chap. I above). This one-year discrepancy does not affect the dating as far as the months are concerned. Apart from the two exceptions, the months given in the report and the story are always consistent and can, indeed must, be used for chronological calculations as year-independent quantities.
Accordingly, there are two different years possible for the events mentioned above. The major episode takes place in either 1779 or 1780, Catherine Earnshaw marries in either 1782 or 1783, and the death of Catherine Earnshaw and the birth of Cathy Linton are in either 1783 or 1784. Mathematically speaking, four chronological hypotheses must therefore be tested. These are:
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– Both 1778 (as the year of Hareton’s birth) and 1801 (as the year of Mr. Lockwood’s first visit) are correct.
– Both 1778 and 1801 are incorrect.
– 1778 is incorrect and 1801 correct.
– 1778 is correct and 1801 incorrect.
The discrepancies mentioned above show that it is not possible for 1778 to be the year of Hareton’s birth and 1801 to be the year of Mr. Lockwood’s first visit. If 1778 is not the year of Hareton’s birth and 1801 is not the year of both Mr. Lockwood’s first visit and the beginning of Ellen Dean’s story, the whole timeline of the novel is wrong. There would be no rigorous, consistent time scheme for the report or the story, and no further discussion would be necessary. For this reason, the validity of the years 1778 and 1801 need to be verified only in connection with the respective events that take place. It will be demonstrated that the last option is evidence-based and therefore correct: placing Mr. Lockwood’s first visit to Wuthering Heights in the year 1801 cannot be correct. Only in the last option is there a coherence between all the usable time data (there are also unusable data) – in the sense of external evidence – and a congruence between these data and the continuity of events, i.e. all the plot details (internal evidence), in the sense of combined evidence.3 The differentiation between the report and the story is the first of four crucial steps on the way to solving the chronological confusion. The second step is the realisation that Mr. Lockwood is a diarist, the third is that Ellen Dean does not know the dates that Mr. Lockwood uses, and the fourth is that Mr. Lockwood and Ellen Dean pursue the same narrative intentions. An analysis of Mr. Lockwood’s report is focused on first because Wuthering Heights begins and ends with it and – as will become apparent – it is from the report that the timelines of the novel can most easily be followed.
The Time Scheme of Mr. Lockwood’s Report
In his ground-breaking and much-cited essay of 1926, Sanger explains what originally induced him to study the chronology of Wuthering Heights. “What first brought me to study the book more closely was when I noticed that the first word in the book was a date – 1801. I thought this must have some significance” (Sanger, p. 11). However, like every general reader, Sanger recognises that the ←24 | 25→year must have some relevance, without recognising its real significance. This is shown by his omission of the em-dash following “1801” and his use of that year as the starting point for all his calculations, that is as the year of Mr. Lockwood’s first two visits to Mr. Heathcliff at Wuthering Heights and as the year in which Mr. Lockwood begins his report.
However, this assumption must be an error for the reasons that follow below.
Although Mr. Lockwood himself never explicitly states that he is reporting events retrospectively like a diary writer, this is a reasonable assumption to make. Even without algebraic arithmetic, the assumption that Mr. Lockwood’s first two visits to Wuthering Heights do not take place until November 1801 can be ruled out from the start by a fact that is just as plausible as it is banal, though it has never been recognised as such. If the visits had taken place at that time, Mr. Lockwood’s report of his third visit to Wuthering Heights in January would have come under the year 1802. However, this is not the case. Under the year 1802, he only chronicles his fourth visit to Wuthering Heights in the summer, a short visit six months after his premature departure in January of the same year. The report of his third visit, in January, comes under the year 1801, together with the descriptions of his first two visits. Events from two different years cannot logically be reported under one and the same year when that year is used to date those events. The two years brought into play by Mr. Lockwood cannot therefore be used to date his visits to Wuthering Heights. This realisation (after the differentiation between the ‘report’ and the ‘story’ described above) is the second crucial step on the way to solving the chronological paradoxes of the novel.
The only rational explanation for the use of both dates is that they indicate the years in which Mr. Lockwood composes his report, that is they do not refer to the reported events but rather to when Mr. Lockwood reports the events. The years “1801 —” and “1802. –” only create the impression that they date the plot. In fact, “1801 —” dates the year Mr. Lockwood sets down on paper his first two visits in 1800, as well as his third visit in 1801 and his report of the visit. On the other hand, “1802. –” dates the recording of his fourth visit, which also takes place in 1801.
The recording of his first two visits and that of his fourth (and last) visit thus occur in the year following the events reported. Only the third visit takes place in the same year in which it is reported. Mr. Lockwood begins his diary at the beginning of January 1801, continuing it until the “second week in January” 1801 when, by his own account, he is “so many days nearer health” (WH, 191). He ←25 | 26→concludes the first part of his report between his third visit to Wuthering Heights and his departure later that same month (WH, 367).
The two dates 1801 and 1802 can therefore only come from some sort of diary kept by Mr. Lockwood, written retrospectively from the perspective of the beginning of 1801 and later of 1802, rather than being composed concurrently with Ellen Dean’s account of events. This explains the use of the em-dash after the date 1801, followed by Mr. Lockwood’s initially reflective then more discursive report of the year 1800. The em-dash is in fact used only once in the critical edition of the novel. A full stop and an en-dash appear after the date 1802, followed by the report of Mr. Lockwood’s journey to the north of England in the July of 1801 and his fourth visit to Wuthering Heights. Similarly, the dash in the first line of Chapter 15 – as will be elucidated – signifies Mr. Lockwood’s mental leap out of the reporting present into the reported past. In January 1801, he initially jumps back in time to his first visit to Wuthering Heights, then to the end of the fifth week of his illness, and sometime in the year 1802 he jumps back to July 1801. All three dashes have a specific chronological meaning.
The idea that the dates “1801 —” and “1802. –” refer to the recording of Mr. Lockwood’s report rather than to the chronology of the storyline has, astoundingly, never occurred to anyone until now. It is evidently so counterintuitive, at least to the authors who cling to the traditional chronologies and to those who are perhaps otherwise biased, that it may provoke violent emotions for some time to come. Heywood (2004, p. 434) prefers to question the reliability of the year 1778 as the unambiguous year of Hareton’s birth rather than consider the chronological relevance of the date “1801 —”, despite the fact that Goodridge (1964, p. 16) has already recognised, and Tytler (1994, p. 138) already mentioned (albeit in passing), that Mr. Lockwood is keeping a diary. Ort (1982, pp. 88f.) also rightly points out that Mr. Lockwood is writing a “summary diary with sporadic annual reviews”, and even Heywood himself (2004, p. 436) speaks at one point of “Lockwood’s diary”. But none of the authors has profited chronologically from their findings and realised that all calculations concerning the chronology of the novel have to start with 1800 as the year in which Mr. Lockwood twice visits Wuthering Heights and in which Ellen Dean begins her story. West (1981, p. 52) argues that it is not possible for the date 1801 at the beginning of the novel to be the date of the diary’s composition since a diarist normally notes the day and the month unless it is the beginning of a new year. However, this argument does not hold water because this is indeed the case: Mr. Lockwood begins his report at the beginning of 1801, acting exactly in accordance with West’s view.
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The fact that in some places Mr. Lockwood uses the historic present in keeping with oral storytelling is further evidence of the diary-like character of his report. In diaries, letters and “fictional oral discourses”, oral patterns of narration have survived: “In the process of narrative development from the written codification of oral storytelling via the written composition of texts on an oral model towards a purely writerly conception of narrative structure, the shape and function of the historic present tense necessarily undergo equivalent changes with the result that the oral pattern […] disappears in the realist novel and facilitates the proliferation of other uses of the present tense” (Fludernik 1992, p. 1). Fludernik points out the typical characteristics of the historic present tense pattern: “[…] the oral pattern is based on ‘tense switching’ […], that is to say on the sudden shift into the present tense and the equally sudden shift back into the past tense sometimes even within the same sentence. Whereas the ‘classic’ historic present tense of nineteenth-century fiction […] extends for passages of several consecutive sentences, frequently ranging from between a whole paragraph to a series of paragraphs and entire chapters” (Fludernik 1992, pp. 77–107). There are no such oral patterns in Wuthering Heights, however. The character of the passages that are untypical for the nineteenth century, and the unique narrative function of these passages, will be discussed in more detail in the section ‘Mr. Lockwood the contemporary witness’ in this chapter.
The unconventional chapter division of Wuthering Heights also indicates that Mr. Lockwood keeps a diary. The structure of the chapters only sometimes appertains to the plot or narrative situation; otherwise, it follows Mr. Lockwood’s arbitrary apportioning of the narrative material (cf. ‘The Report and the Story – Temporal and Chronological Aspects’ in this chapter).
The monomaniacal-seeming, one-sided interpretation of the years 1801 and 1802 as the years of the plot is astonishing, not only because of the references in Wuthering Heights-literature to the diary-like character of Mr. Lockwood’s report, but also because in principle and especially in novels of the nineteenth century any dating at the beginning or end of a text must be examined in order to see whether the years date the writing or date the plot action. Stendhal’s famous, intentionally misleading dates at the beginning of Le Rouge et Le Noir and Rome, Naples et Florence en 1817 are two examples of such potential difficulties.
The chronological meaning of the grammatical and stylistic signals in the two chapter openings has, incidentally, been misunderstood not only by Sanger and all his successors but also by those who, since the first publication of the novel in 1847, have published or translated Wuthering Heights arbitrarily omitting the dashes, changing their length or adding dots, or even putting the years in italics or placing them differently. As early as 1848 in the first North American Edition, ←27 | 28→there is an “1801. – ” instead of “1801 —”. The same applies to the English Second Edition of 1850 and the Haworth Edition of 1903. It is worth noting that in the first three North American Critical Editions published by William M. Sale jr. (Norton Edition) the years are reproduced correctly, but then in the Fourth Edition of 2003 published by Richard M. Dunn, the years are printed in the same style as they were in 1848 and 1850. Furthermore, in the 2009 Edition of Wuthering Heights published by Oxford University Press, the length of the dash has been changed compared with the previous editions, and for this reason it is not used here for text citations. The English First Edition must be considered the benchmark because there are no other editorially relevant materials (cf. Dunn, p. xii and Small, p. XXIV). Also, in the First and Second Canadian Editions of Wuthering Heights, the typographical style of the opening of the novel does not correspond with the English First Edition.
At first glance it may seem unnecessary or even absurd to assume that the date of Mr. Lockwood’s first visit to Wuthering Heights is not also the date on which he begins to write his report. But, theoretically, Mr. Lockwood could have started his report after the first, second or even third visit. What is crucial in this regard is how Mr. Lockwood begins the first part of his report. The opening sentence is extremely important for the dating of the event and, in its style, it is unique:
1801 — I have just returned from a visit to my landlord – the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with. This is certainly a beautiful country! In all England, I do not believe that I could have fixed on a situation so completely removed from the stir of society. A perfect misanthropist’s Heaven: and Mr. Heathcliff and I are such a suitable pair to divide the desolation between us. A capital fellow! He little imagined how my heart warmed towards him when I beheld his black eyes withdraw so suspiciously under their brows, as I rode up, and when his fingers sheltered themselves, with a jealous resolution, still further in his waistcoat, as I announced my name. (WH, 1)
Right from the very start, it is possible to rule out the suggestion that Mr. Lockwood begins his diary immediately after his first visit because of the future form used in the first sentence. The “shall” of the second half of the sentence proves that the “trouble” is still to come but that it is already known at the beginning of the report. Since Mr. Lockwood can hardly have the gift of foresight, he cannot have started the report on the same day as his first visit – it must have been after his second visit at the earliest. After his first visit, there are no disappointments and there is no cause for concern. After the second visit, ←28 | 29→however, the situation is quite different – Mr. Lockwood is disappointed and depressed.
In her “critical comparison of two German translations of Wuthering Heights”, Elsbeth Ort actually considers Mr. Lockwood to be a clairvoyant. To explain the second half of the opening sentence and the “shall”, she writes:
Lockwood versucht darin, die unbekannte Zukunft, die vor ihm liegt, zusammenzufassen. Er tut dies aufgrund eines ersten Besuchs auf Wuthering Heights, von welchem er in der Folge berichten wird. So viel ist ihm klar: Heathcliff wird ihn beschäftigen. Lockwood ist in diesem Augenblick so ausschließlich auf die Zukunft ausgerichtet, dass die Gegenwart davor gänzlich in den Hintergrund rückt. Die einzige dieser Zukunftsbezogenheit gemäße Zeitform ist das Futurum. Es ist allerdings zu sagen, dass mit dem Zeitformwechsel die Wahl eines anderen Verbs einhergehen müsste. (Ort 1982, p. 89)4
This means she accuses the author of making a mistake with the change of tense. Whether the “I shall be troubled with” is to be translated as “mit dem ich beschäftigt sein werde” or rather “mit dem ich Ärger (oder Schwierigkeiten) haben werde” may be a matter of opinion, but anyway the connotation of trouble is always negative and it is clear that after the first visit the trouble is yet to happen. Ellen Dean will also use the word “troubles” in the same vein before she begins her story. Until his second visit, Mr. Lockwood is bowled over by Mr. Heathcliff: “A capital fellow! […] how my heart warmed towards him” (WH, 1). After his second visit, “capital fellow” has become “rough fellow”, a “churl” (WH, 40), which indicates that Mr. Lockwood cannot have recorded his experiences until after his second visit to Wuthering Heights at the earliest. Even Ort (1982, pp. 88f.) mentions this as a plausible way of explaining the change in tense but rejects it because she sees it as a threat to the “unity of the plot”. She does not realise the chronological relevance of the tense change nor the circumstances surrounding the writing of the report.
Just like Ort, Knoepflmacher (1994, p. 12) – who quite rightly considers the beginning of the novel to be a “brilliant opening” – simply deems Mr. Lockwood’s remarks “confused and ambivalent flounderings”, attaching no ←29 | 30→deeper, chronological importance to them. He writes (ibid., p. 13) in conspicuous agreement with Ort: “Does Lockwood anticipate, on the basis of this first visit, trouble from the ‘solitary neighbour’ […]?” However, this cannot be true: the first visit does not go smoothly, but there is no reason to believe that trouble is imminent. Had this been the case, Mr. Lockwood would hardly have been so quick to repeat his visit to Wuthering Heights of his own accord.
There is a second passage in Mr. Lockwood’s report which proves that he is reporting retrospectively and where he even admits to it, though with misleading information about the circumstances. The passage is also an opening sentence, this time to the original second volume of the novel, Chapter 15:
Another week over – and I am so many days nearer health, and spring! I have now heard all my neighbour’s history […] I’ll continue it in her own words […]. (WH, 191)
Ellen Dean has arrived at the point in her story where she is describing Cathy’s wretchedness at Wuthering Heights and her own helplessness. Just like in the opening sentence of the novel, Mr. Lockwood’s formulation makes it appear as if he is reporting from the perspective of December when he hears the end of the story; he seems here to be communicating from the perspective of the experiencing or reporting I: “I have now heard […]”. Only comparing this with the final sentence of Chapter 30 when Mr. Lockwood returns to the end of Ellen Dean’s story does it become apparent that the previous sentence (“Another week over – and I am so many days nearer health, and spring!”) means that he is reporting from the perspective of the second week of January, which he actually names. This indicates the change from the reported to the reporting I and thus shows the retrospective character of the diary in rare clarity: “[…] and, though it be only the second week in January […]” (WH, 367). This will be discussed in more detail at the end of the next section in connection with Mr. Lockwood’s illness.
Mr. Lockwood gives the impression in a few other places that he is reporting in hindsight. This is down to the particular numbers he uses (such as the number twenty) and the seemingly unnecessary facts (such as the properties of peat), which readers can recognise as allusions to corresponding passages in Ellen Dean’s story long after they have been mentioned. Since their detection assumes that the content of Ellen Dean’s story is known and that her narrative strategy is clear, the allusions will be discussed later in Chapter VII, The Chronology as Practical Narratology, where it will also be explained why Emily Brontë needed to create Mr. Lockwood and have him report retrospectively.
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Regarding Mr. Lockwood’s illness after his second visit to Wuthering Heights, it can be deduced from the text that he could not have started his diary while he was ill. His remarks make it clear that he did not put anything down on paper the night immediately after he returned to Wuthering Heights after his second visit:
At this point of the housekeeper’s story, she chanced to glance towards the time-piece over the chimney; and was in amazement on seeing the minute-hand measure half-past one. She would not hear of staying a second longer: in truth, I felt rather disposed to defer the sequel of her narrative myself. And now that she is vanished to her rest, and I have meditated for another hour or two, I shall summon courage to go, also, in spite of aching laziness of head and limbs. (WH, 109)
The question arises as to what causes Mr. Lockwood to brood for almost two hours. It cannot be anything other than Ellen Dean’s strange behaviour at the beginning of her story and the causes of this behaviour, i.e. the events preceding Catherine Earnshaw’s wedding. There is reason to believe that Mr. Lockwood already sees through Ellen Dean and her secretiveness and is thinking about how he will handle her.
In his own words, after this night Mr. Lockwood is too ill to undertake anything or to get anything done for four weeks (WH, 109). After these four weeks, he is still “too weak to read” (WH, 110) – and therefore to write. For him, it is “quite an easy interval” when Mr. Heathcliff pays him a visit and sits “at [his] bedside a good hour” at the end of his fourth week of illness. When this takes place can be calculated, as shown below, though finding a method of calculation for this chronologically extremely important date is difficult and is a prime example of Emily Brontë’s camouflage.
About seven days before the end of Mr. Lockwood’s fourth week of illness, Mr. Heathcliff sends him “a brace of grouse – the last of the season” (WH, 110). Sanger (1926, p. 13) states that, according to the Game Act of 1831, grouse could not be shot after 10 December. This law did not yet exist in the fictional year of 1800. From this, and from the fact that Ellen Dean sings a Danish song to Hareton in 1779 even though the song was first made known in England in a narrative poem by Sir Walter Scott not published until 1810, it has been concluded that historical events cannot be used for the dating of the novel, and that therefore it is not possible to get to grips with the time scheme by using historical critical methods (cf. Ewbank 1976, p. 487). This is certainly correct as far as the year is concerned but not when it comes to the day and the month. Wuthering Heights has its own inner historicity, as will be shown by the use of Byron’s biographical dates for those of Mr. Heathcliff (cf. Chap. IV, Mr. Heathcliff’s biography). In this respect, it would not be correct to speak of external errors made ←31 | 32→by Emily Brontë, that is to say, discrepancies between what is written in the novel and actual real-life circumstances.5 Anyway, according to Sanger, Mr. Lockwood receives the famous Scottish game bird shortly before, on or shortly after 10 December. This temporal vagueness comes as a surprise. How is it that Mr. Lockwood can remember precisely when Mr. Heathcliff visits him but only imprecisely when Mr. Heathcliff sends him some of the coveted grouse, which was just a few days before the visit he mentions in the same breath? Why does he not simply write “a few days ago”, if he believes that he received the present fewer than seven days before the visit, or “more than a week ago” in the opposite case? Emily Brontë will once more use the chronologically risky, exegetically somewhat unfair “about” at another chronologically very important place, at the birth of Cathy, when she has Ellen Dean say that she was born at “about twelve o’ clock” (WH, 202). Much later, she has Ellen Dean specify the date of birth (as will be shown in Catherine Linton’s biography in Chapter IV) – in the case of the grouse, this clarification fails to materialise. One must accept the obviously intentional, narratively tactical, temporal vagueness. Chronologically, it is irrelevant anyway – it makes no difference whether Mr. Lockwood feels a little better a day earlier or later.
The necessity for scientific accuracy makes it important to factor in the temporally indefinite preposition “about” in all chronological deliberations that follow. Since that would be stylistically unsatisfactory and laborious, and since it also involves the danger that it could be mistakenly assumed that the “about” means that the date varies considerably or that even the month and year of the date in question are uncertain, the “about” will be tacitly omitted from the dates that can be deduced from 10 December. From the date 10 December and the “seven days”, it follows mathematically that on 17 December the fourth week of Mr. Lockwood’s illness comes to an end and that on this day he asks Ellen Dean “to finish her tale” (WH, 110). Even the time of day when Ellen Dean continues with her story can be determined: namely, in the morning, after Mr. Heathcliff’s visit. This is evident from her question as to whether Mr. Lockwood is “feeling better this morning” (WH, 111). Moreover, the date of 10 December proves, if one counts back on the timeline, that Ellen Dean begins the first part of her story on 18 November (that is three weeks and one day before 10 December)6 and that Mr. Lockwood visits Wuthering Heights for the first time on 16 November.
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On the morning of 17 December 1800, Ellen Dean talks for several hours about the events between March 1782 and March 1783 until she is interrupted by the visit of the doctor. She informs Mr. Lockwood that the rest of her story “will serve to wile away another morning” (WH, 191). The fact that Ellen Dean as housekeeper (as she calls herself, though more in the spirit of lady of the house) wants to have her story finished by Christmas by the very latest and the fact that she expects Mr. Lockwood to want the same (WH, 109) is as understandable as Mr. Lockwood’s silence, as a professed unsociable “misanthropist”, with regard to Christmas: he makes no mention of Christmas at all in his report. It is not clear from the text when and how long Ellen Dean continues her story after that and at what intervals. The rest of the story comprises about 176 pages (from the beginning of Chapter 15 until the end of Chapter 30). Assuming Ellen Dean talks for about two hours a day, it can be deduced from the amount of text that she manages the content over a period of one week. This fits with Mr. Lockwood’s remark at the beginning of Chapter 15 that Ellen Dean has told him “all [his] neighbour’s history, at different sittings” and that “[a];nother week [is] over”, which means that she in fact comes to the end of her story on 24 December 1800 (seventeen plus seven):
Another week over – and I am so many days nearer health, and spring! I have now heard all my neighbour’s history, at different sittings […]. I’ll continue it in her own words, only a little condensed. She is, on the whole, a very fair narrator, and I don’t think I could improve her style. (WH, 191)
The meaning of these sentences with three different time expressions in the first sentence alone, and with their multiple tenses and various time references, is as difficult to understand as that of the opening sentence of the novel, bringing with it considerable interpretational risks. This is not surprising since Chapter 15 is the original start to the second volume of the novel. Just as he does at the very start of Chapter 1, Mr. Lockwood gives the impression that he is reporting almost contemporaneously with the events (that therefore his time expressions relate to the time of the action rather than to the time of his writing the report), in this case just after 17 December. In the end, he continues his report exactly where he left off on 17 December, that is in March 1783 of the story. However, investigative readers are puzzled that one week after 17 December he is talking about being so many days nearer to spring. Who talks about spring at Christmas? Even more striking is the fact that at the end of Chapter 30 when he explicitly returns to the narrative again, Mr. Lockwood writes:
Thus ended Mrs. Dean’s story. Notwithstanding the doctor’s prophecy, I am rapidly recovering strength; and, though it be only the second week in January, I propose getting ←33 | 34→out on horseback in a day or two, and riding over to Wuthering Heights […]. I would not pass another winter here for much. (WH, 367)
The “second week in January” does not fit at all with a “week after 17 December”, that is with 24 December 1800. Reading both quotes (176 pages apart) carefully and comparing them chronologically with each other, the cause of the confusion becomes clear: the phrase “[a];nother week over” in the first quote, without any verb to indicate the tense, does not have to be a reference to the duration of Ellen Dean’s story, but is in fact much more likely to be referring to the second week of January and Mr. Lockwood’s morale at that time. Mr. Lockwood (to stay within fictional reality) has learned something about narrative technique from Ellen Dean – as already suggested by his use of “about”, and as a few other instances will confirm – and also how to induce the drawing of wrong conclusions by transference (or association), as in this case. The period of one week is not in itself wrong. It is correct for both December and the following January. Regarding the end of Ellen Dean’s story, it is fair to say that it probably falls at Christmas. Ellen Dean cannot possibly continue telling her story until the second week of January, as the last quote may suggest. The link between the narrative and Mr. Lockwood’s health in January 1801 has no chronological significance. The time expression “the second week in January” in connection with the present continuous (“I am rapidly recovering”) proves only that Mr. Lockwood cannot have started his report until January at the earliest for health reasons, probably starting it after his third visit to Mr. Heathcliff.
Furthermore, it is also mnestically plausible that, from the beginning of January 1801, Mr. Lockwood notes what Ellen Dean had told him earlier in November and December 1800. He could hardly have kept the vast and temporally complicated material in his head for longer than seven weeks. The fact that he is able to do this at all is remarkable, if not inconceivable.7
This aspect, along with other psychological considerations, has played an important role in the assumption that Mr. Lockwood is an unreliable narrator. This alleged characteristic of Mr. Lockwood will be discussed in more detail ←34 | 35→in the section ‘The Time Scheme of Ellen Dean’s Story’ in this chapter and in Chapter VII, The Chronology as Practical Narratology.
Mr. Lockwood the contemporary witness
It can be proved grammatically that, contrary to first appearances, Mr. Lockwood’s first two visits to Wuthering Heights are in 1800 rather than 1801, and that 1801 is the year in which he begins his report. This can be done by differentiating between the real and the historic present through the analysis of the frequent tense changes in the text. Or, conversely argued, the tense changes, especially the use of the present and the present perfect, cannot be used to prove that Mr. Lockwood makes his first two visits to Wuthering Heights in 1801, as has been claimed. Again, the unusual and elaborately constructed opening sentence of the novel and the tense switching play a special role here. This striking opening inevitably attracts the attention of the reader since particular relevance is usually assigned to the beginning of a novel. The paragraph boasts tense changes between the present, the future, the simple past, and includes a preposed present perfect.8
The present tense with Mr. Lockwood’s enthusiasm for Mr. Heathcliff and the country, and the “just” with the present perfect tense, only suggest that the report is contemporaneous with the time of his visit. The present is the historic present, it cannot be the real present, which means it refers to the time of the reported I, not to the present of the reporting I. With the help of the tense change, Mr. Lockwood gives the impression that he is reporting close to the events, i.e. at one day’s remove each time or by an even shorter interval, like any regular diarist. For this reason, in addition to tense changes, he repeatedly uses time adverbs like “yesterday” and “tomorrow”, or synonymous terms, in his later records. For example, at the beginning of Chapter 2, he begins the description of his second visit to Wuthering Heights with the following words: “Yesterday afternoon set in misty and cold” (WH, 8). If this time reference were in fact real and not historical (i.e. if it referred to the present of the reporting I and not to the past experiences of the reported I), he would have had to write at least “the day before yesterday” instead of “yesterday” since he himself says that he was able to write his diary on the day after his second visit but not the night following it. At the earliest, he could have started his records two days after the visit. With the report being so precise, such a subtle discrepancy would be an alarm signal that something is not right ←35 | 36→with the figures of the hypothetical time scheme. At the beginning of Chapter 32, there is a further tense change that is dangerous for chronologists: the past simple with the time expression “[t];his September”. The introductions to Chapters 1 and 32 are particularly confusing, not only because of the preceding dates 1801 and 1802, but also because of the contradictory combination of the past simple with the temporal adverbials “just” and “[t]his September”. Since the past rather than the present is spoken of after the dates, the adverbials and the two named years lead to misconceptions when temporally determining the narrative perspective, owing to the deictic nature of the two time expressions.
In four other passages in Mr. Lockwood’s report, the present tense is used in several tense changes, which can lead to chronological errors, as with the opening sentence. To avoid this, a distinction must again be made between the real and the historic present by taking the reporting situation into account. Shortly before Ellen Dean begins her story, Mr. Lockwood reports:
The worthy woman bustled off, and I crouched nearer the fire; my head felt hot, and the rest of me chill: moreover I was excited, almost to a pitch of foolishness, through my nerves and brain. This caused me to feel, not uncomfortable, but rather fearful (as I am still) of serious effects from the incidents of to-day and yesterday. She returned presently, bringing a smoking basin and a basket of work […]. (WH, 41)
The “to-day and yesterday” can unequivocally only be referring to the day of Mr. Lockwood’s return from Wuthering Heights and the day before that, in November 1800, whereas the “as I am still” makes no sense for the day of the return. On the day of his return, he would have simply said that he was “already rather fearful of serious effects”. The not unintentionally parenthesised “as I still am” dates from January 1801, rules out “to-day” as the real present and consigns “yesterday” to November 1800. By contrast, the “as I still am” is the real present.
What is important in this regard is that Mr. Lockwood states that on that November night after his second visit, when Ellen Dean concludes the first half of her story, he says that he “meditated for another hour or two” (WH, 109). There is no evidence to suggest that he then begins recording events. The change of tense, the parentheses and the adverb “still” prove that this is a reference to January 1801 – when Mr. Lockwood reports all this – and date the first two visits to Wuthering Heights to November 1800.
The same applies to the repeated use of the present tense after Mr. Heathcliff’s visit to the sick Mr. Lockwood:
This is quite an easy interval. I am too weak to read; yet I feel as if I could enjoy something interesting. Why not have up Mrs. Dean to finish her tale? […] Yes: I remember […]. I’ll ring: she’ll be delighted to find me capable of talking cheerfully. (WH, 110)
←36 | 37→
This is followed by “Mrs. Dean came” in the past simple tense. The above is not real now-time, it is not the reporting present of the diary-writing I, but rather, once again, it is the historic present, the reported past of the experiencing I. Here, the report refers back to the time expression used at the beginning of the same chapter, where it says that all this happened four weeks after the visit to Wuthering Heights, meaning after Mr. Lockwood has been ill for four weeks and during which time Ellen Dean has not been able to continue with her story.
At the beginning of Chapter 15, the next passage in the present tense occurs. Regarding Ellen Dean’s qualities as narrator, Mr. Lockwood says:
Another week over – and I am so many days nearer health, and spring! I have now heard all my neighbour’s history, […] I’ll continue it […]. (WH, 191)
The tense of “[a];nother week over” cannot be clarified without a verb. He is probably referring to his state of health in January because Mr. Lockwood mentions spring and his recovery immediately afterwards. The “now” in the next sentence, on the other hand, most likely refers to 24 December 1800, when Ellen Dean concludes her story, and is therefore historical. Mr. Lockwood then announces the continuation of the report in January 1801, shortly before his third visit to Mr. Heathcliff – in the real present.
The fifth and last passage in the present tense appears at the end of Chapter 30 when Mr. Lockwood returns to the end of Ellen Dean’s story:
Thus ended Mrs. Dean’s story. Notwithstanding the doctor’s prophecy, I am rapidly recovering strength; and, though it be only the second week in January, I propose getting out on horseback in a day or two, and riding over to Wuthering Heights, to inform my landlord that I shall spend the next six months in London; and, if he likes, he may look out for another tenant to take the place, after October – I would not pass another winter here for much. (WH, 367)
From here on, it continues in the past tense: “Yesterday was bright, calm, and frosty. I went to the Heights as I proposed […]” (ibid.). Since it is not “I have already recovered” but “I am rapidly recovering strength”, the only conclusion possible is that Mr. Lockwood makes a quick recovery after the end of the story. This not only suggests that Ellen Dean has concluded her story by the end of December but that as far as the report is concerned “now-time” has been reached. The present tense used is the real not the historic. All this happens in the second week of January 1801. The triple change of tense (past – present – future – past) is unique in the text and is the basis for this line of argument. The change in tense can only mean that Mr. Lockwood chronicles his first two visits of November 1800 in the second week of January 1801 before his third visit to Wuthering Heights, and that he chronicles his third visit on the following day ←37 | 38→(“yesterday”). This “yesterday” has a completely different chronological meaning to the “to-day and yesterday” mentioned almost 400 pages earlier or the “yesterday afternoon” at the beginning of Chapter 2. Both are simply expressions of a historic present (WH, 8, 41).
Contrary to Miller’s opinion (1982, p. 72), the “present moment” does exist in Wuthering Heights: it is the reporting present condensed into the reporting moment and it lies in the second week of January 1801. Knoepflmacher (1994, p. 50) suspects that the second week in January could be particularly significant, without recognising the chronological facts. He correctly states that the “calendars” – by which he means Mr. Lockwood’s chronology (“Lockwood time”) and Ellen Dean’s “Earnshaw Chronicle” – converge in mid-January (“the calendars can be synchronized”).
For the grammatical reasons mentioned above, the present perfect tense used at the beginning of the first sentence of the novel could even arouse the suspicion that the visit to Wuthering Heights that is being referred to is the third one, the visit in January, rather than the first or second. From a linguistic point of view, however, this seems implausible because of the future used in the same sentence (“I shall be troubled”) and the temporal circumstances described in January 1801.
Comparing the two parts of the report, the beginning of the second part, preceded by the year 1802, is also composed in the past tense, though it is the past simple not the present perfect (WH, 375). In both parts, Mr. Lockwood reports retrospectively, but at a different distance from the past. In contrast to the invitation, the visit is not long ago. The tenses allow the conclusion to be drawn that the events (the visit and the invitation) lie in the past, before 1801 and 1802 respectively. The fact that the invitation is already one year old at the start of the journey and that the month “September” refers to when the invitation is made and not to the date of the journey is demonstrated below.
Mr. Lockwood states that he has rented Thrushcross Grange for twelve months in total and that he will inform Mr. Heathcliff that he intends to spend the next six months in London (WH, 367). Since Mr. Heathcliff does not release him from his tenancy agreement, Mr. Lockwood decides while on his new trip to the north six months later, in July 1801, that he “might as well pass the night under [his] own roof [Thrushcross Grange] as in an inn” (WH, 376). It is only in this light that the opening sentence of Chapter 32 makes sense:
1802.– This September, I was invited to devastate the moors of a friend, in the North […]. (WH, 375)
←38 | 39→
This wording may give the impression that he arrives in September,9 but in fact he arrives in July. This sentence is just as ambiguous as the opening sentence of the novel and the opening sentence of Chapter 15. Since Chapter 32 was probably originally planned as the beginning of the third volume, it can be surmised that Emily Brontë systematically used the beginning of all three volumes to have Mr. Lockwood create chronological confusion. There is a certain narrative intent behind the use of the historic present at the beginning of these chapters and at the beginning of a narrative episode, which is thus relevant both narratologically and chronologically. Until the nineteenth century, the historic present usually functioned as an incipit of a plotline, marked the climax of an episode or the special involvement of the narrator in the events. After this time, it was just the typical stylistic phenomenon of a ‘written prose narrative’ (Fludernik 1991). Neither is in fact the case in Wuthering Heights. Formally and functionally, the historic present in Emily Brontë obviously plays a completely different role and, with it, a unique role in literary history.
The special character and significance of the opening of Wuthering Heights, with its alleged stylistic ineptitude, confirms that the key to the proper understanding of a novel is sometimes found on the first pages, if not in the first lines. Comparable to Wuthering Heights in German literature is not, as is often said, E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Das Majorat, but Theodor Fontane’s crime story Unterm Birnbaum with its cryptic beginning. This parallel may seem strange and far-fetched, and it certainly only relates to certain aspects of the novel, but it makes sense because Wuthering Heights, as far as the time frame is concerned, must be read like a crime novel with the keen nose of a detective.
If one continues to treat the fictional facts as if they were real facts, it must of course be considered that Mr. Lockwood resumes his diary in the summer of 1801 after his last visit to Wuthering Heights. However, his time plans indicate that he does not do so until 1802: in the year of his first two visits, he had already precisely planned the following year. He arranges to stay at Thrushcross Grange from October until Michaelmas (29 September, the beginning of autumn) of the following year, with the option of an extension. Otherwise, he would not have tried to cancel the lease with Mr. Heathcliff in the January of the following year after his difficult experiences. Clearly, the contract contains an extension option ←39 | 40→which is why Mr. Lockwood – after Mr. Heathcliff does not release him from the contract – at least gives notice for the coming winter. For September and the time after, he plans visits to a friend with hunting trips in the north of England. Michaelmas is one of the days that divides the English financial year into four quarters; at that time, rental contracts were usually concluded up to one of these days (Small, p. 335). This ties in with the fact that Mr. Heathcliff informs Ellen Dean during his first confession at the beginning of September 1800 that he will rent out Thrushcross Grange (WH, 353) and also with the fact that Mr. Lockwood on his first visit to Wuthering Heights apologises to Mr. Heathcliff for pushing so hard to rent the Grange (WH, 1). Mr. Lockwood obviously then takes his time travelling to Yorkshire despite his insistence on renting the Grange, though he is not slow to make his courtesy call. It is therefore unlikely that Clay (1952, p. 100) is right when he states that Mr. Lockwood rents Thrushcross Grange from 1 November 1801 until 31 October 1802. Heywood (2004, p. 391) accepts this assumption without citing Clay. The conversion of the Julian calendar to the Gregorian highlighted by Sanger (1926, p. 13) and Daley (1995, p. 173) in this connection, with its loss of eleven days between 28 September and 10 October, is irrelevant for dating purposes but it does explain Mr. Lockwood’s scheduling. Theoretically, the time change may have had some significance because it made those affected aware of how easily time can be changed. Clay (1952, p. 100) explicitly mentions the duration of the tenancy and even the six months that pass between Mr. Lockwood’s third and fourth visits to Wuthering Heights, without drawing the inevitable conclusions concerning the months of Mr. Lockwood’s visits to Wuthering Heights.
After his premature departure at the end of January, Mr. Lockwood adheres to his original schedule with his second trip to the north, even though his attitude to the north of England is by now as ambivalent as Dr. Johnson’s was to Scotland. It is rather unlikely that he has forgotten Wuthering Heights and Cathy Linton in the intervening six months, as he claims to have done (WH, 375), and that he purely by chance and quite spontaneously decides to visit Wuthering Heights. He speaks a lot about the weather, even for an Englishman.
The month of July is confirmed by meteorological and botanical data. It is hot, “too warm for travelling”, the harebells are in bloom in the cemetery, at Wuthering Heights wallflowers and stocks are blooming, the “very green oats, newly reaped” are brought in by the farmers. The unequivocal piece of information that the harvest in Gimmerton is three weeks later than elsewhere dates the visit to between the middle and end of July (WH, 375, 376, 378, 417).
On his arrival in the north of England, Mr. Lockwood is so enthused by the “delightful scenery” that he writes:
←40 | 41→
[…] had I seen it nearer August, I’m sure it would have tempted me to waste a month among its solitudes. (WH, 376)
This sentence is difficult to pin down chronologically. July is certainly nearly August. His wording seems to indicate that he arrives in June, but this can be ruled out by the six-month interval and the meteorological details. On the other hand, the wording could be taken as evidence that Mr. Lockwood does not arrive until September, as September is also near August. If this were the case, however, the wording would probably be something like “if it had still been August”. Perhaps the solution to the mystery lies in the fact that Mr. Lockwood always has something to find fault with: in summer it is too hot for him, and in winter it is too cold.
When Mr. Lockwood approaches Wuthering Heights, the moon rises at dusk. It shines so brightly that he can “see every pebble […] and every blade of grass” (WH, 378). From this it has been concluded that there is a full moon, leading to attempts to determine the date of the visit. According to the lunar calendar, there was a full moon on 25 and 26 July 1801. This is incompatible with Mr. Lockwood’s statement that his visit was not near August. Unless it was not a full moon. Halfmoon was on 18 July 1801, so theoretically a day between 18 and 26 July would also be possible (see Fig. 3). If this were the case, it would be an indication that the fictional calendar of 1801 corresponds with the real calendar, as in fact will be demonstrated in connection with Easter in the year 1801 (cf. Chap. III, ‘Daley’s almanacs’ and Chap. IV, Mr. Heathcliff’s biography). It should be mentioned that in 1802 the full moon was ten days earlier than in 1801 – on 15 July. This date fits much better with the words “had I seen it nearer August” and could be taken as evidence that 1802 is the correct year, not 1801, and that in 1802, not 1801, the fictional calendar and the real calendar correspond. Emily Brontë must have known all this and used it for her own purposes.
Regarding the lack of time and opportunity to write his report about his last visit to Wuthering Heights, it should be noted that Mr. Lockwood is only at the Grange for one day before going hunting with a friend on the moors (WH, 375). Neither during the visit, nor while on his hunting trip, can he spare the time needed to write his report. He therefore does not continue the diary until the following year, which explains why the second part of his report is under the year 1802, not under 1801.
These conclusions drawn from Mr. Lockwood’s behaviour in his five different roles in the novel prove that the last of the chronological hypotheses mentioned applies (namely, that 1778 is the year of Hareton Earnshaw’s birth and that 1801 ←41 | 42→is not the year of Mr. Lockwood’s visit). The following analysis of Ellen Dean’s dates will further prove this.
The Time Scheme of Ellen Dean’s Story
Before she begins her story, Ellen Dean answers Mr. Lockwood’s question
You have lived here a considerable time, […] did you not say sixteen years?
with
Eighteen, sir: I came, when the mistress was married, to wait on her; after she died, the master retained me for his housekeeper. (WH, 38)
At the time it is cold and misty; later, it even snows (WH, 8, 36). Readers inevitably associate this wintry weather with November or December 1801 because the novel, and therefore the beginning of Mr. Lockwood’s report, opens with the date 1801, and it is clear from the context that Mr. Lockwood arrives in late autumn. This naturally leads to the conclusion that the wedding and the move to Thrushcross Grange take place eighteen years earlier, in November or December 1783.
When a second retrospective time reference appears towards the end of the first part of the narrative, one again counts back from 1801 – in the assumption that Ellen Dean does exactly the same. Regarding the discovery of Cathy’s secret visits to Wuthering Heights, which take place one November, Ellen Dean states that:
These things happened last winter, sir, […] hardly more than a year ago. Last winter, I did not think, at another twelve months’ end, I should be amusing a stranger to the family with relating them! (WH, 315)
This dates Cathy’s visits to the year 1800 and the wedding and the move to 1783 because, according to the text, Cathy is sixteen years old at the time of the visits and she is born one year after the wedding (1801 - 1 = 1800, 1800 - 16 = 1784, 1784 - 1 = 1783). The year of the wedding and the move thus appears to be doubly confirmed from a chronological point of view and to be categorically incontrovertible. This is deceptive.
Just as the time scheme of Mr. Lockwood’s report contains an easily identifiable, extremely important and logical argument, hitherto unmentioned in Wuthering Heights-literature, that events from two different years cannot be dated with one and the same year, namely 1801, there is also an extremely important logical argument for the time scheme of Ellen Dean’s story. It argues against the assumption that 1801 can be used as the starting year for chronological calculations and that the year of the wedding and the move has been clearly established. ←42 | 43→Ellen Dean’s “eighteen” years and “hardly more than a year ago” cannot pertain to the year 1801, because the year comes from Mr. Lockwood’s report, not from her. How should Ellen Dean know in November what year Mr. Lockwood would write down the following January? There is no indication whatsoever that Mr. Lockwood lets Ellen Dean know of his intention to write a diary. Without explicitly mentioning the year, because of course for her it goes without saying, Ellen Dean’s comments pertain to the year in which Mr. Lockwood appears at Thrushcross Grange when she is required to take care of him. At the time of the narration, the two periods she mentions have no year of reference at all and therefore cannot be used to determine the year of the wedding and the move. The time spans on the timeline can be arbitrarily moved forwards or backwards; they have no value for the reader as far as the chronology of Ellen Dean’s story is concerned. This realisation is the third crucial step on the way to achieving the aim of this analysis – that of resolving the chronological muddle.
When it comes to chronologically analysing Ellen Dean’s references to time, Mr. Lockwood has an advantage over readers: he knows, of course, in which year Ellen Dean is telling him her story. Because it is year-independent, the only chronologically relevant information for readers is the time of year “winter”, which indicates that Ellen Dean begins her story in November or December.
Clay interprets Ellen Dean’s time span as “for eighteen years” when he writes: “[Ellen Dean] states that she had come to Thrushcross Grange eighteen years earlier” (1952, p. 101) – as do many other authors before and after him. In the text, however, there is neither an “earlier” nor a “for”. Neither does Mr. Lockwood ask whether Ellen Dean has lived at Thrushcross Grange “for 16 years”, as Chitham (1998, p. 164) assumes, quoting Mr. Lockwood inaccurately. In fact, Mr. Lockwood only says, “did you not say sixteen years?” Mr. Lockwood and readers are not yet able to recognise that Ellen Dean’s laconic “eighteen” (without the assumed “earlier”) does not specify a time span exact to the month, but only refers to the year of the move.
In this light, the time scheme of Ellen Dean’s story must be examined to see how consistent it is as a self-contained system, that is, it must be checked to see whether its year dates are coherent and in particular whether the year 1778 holds true both as Hareton Earnshaw’s birth year and as the reference year for the two time periods mentioned by Ellen Dean before she begins her story. Without using data from outside the self-contained system, which is a methodological must, it can be proved from the following difficult to detect time references that the dates are coherent and that, contrary to first appearances, Ellen Dean has lived at Thrushcross Grange since 1782, not since 1783.
←43 | 44→
Time references based on textual content (internal evidence)
Starting from the premise that 1778 is the year of Hareton Earnshaw’s birth, the major episode described above must have taken place in either 1779 or 1780. The course of events, that is the internal evidence, rules out a time before 1779 and after 1780. The three-year absence of Heathcliff specified by Ellen Dean establishes that three years elapse between the major episode and Catherine Earnshaw’s wedding and her move with Ellen Dean to Thrushcross Grange. Four years pass until Catherine’s death because the time between her wedding and her death amounts to one year (from one March to the next), as shown by the following details: Catherine is described as having “seasons of gloom and silence, now and then” after her marriage. Edgar Linton attributes the moods to her “perilous illness” (WH, 112) (after the major episode) and has a “deep-rooted fear of ruffling her humour” (WH, 111). He ensures that consideration is given to Catherine, and “for the space of half a year, the gunpowder lay as harmless as sand, because no fire came near to explode it” (WH, 112). This comes to an end on a “mellow evening in September”. Things are therefore relatively calm in the first six months of the marriage between March and September. If Sanger thinks he can conclude from this that Catherine is “happily married”, he is mistaken and reveals some rather peculiar ideas about marriage. There follow another six months until Catherine’s death, from September until the following March, as will be calculated in the biographies of Catherine Earnshaw and Mr. Heathcliff (Chap. IV). The twelve months between Catherine’s wedding and death make up the one-year time span that is so important for the chronology.
In order to calculate the year of the wedding, the year of the major episode must be determined. The fact that the major episode takes place in 1779, not in 1780, is shown as follows: if the major episode had taken place in the summer of 1780, there would be two years between Hareton Earnshaw’s birth in 1778 and the major episode, but this is too long. The text makes it clear that the time span could only have been one year, the period in which the young Edgar Linton undertakes his rare visits to the Heights before his engagement to Catherine during the major episode (WH, 80). There is no evidence in the text for an additional year. The chronological sequence is rigorous: the birth of Hareton in 1778, the major episode in 1779, the absence of Heathcliff and the engagement of Catherine for the period up until 1782, the death of Catherine and the birth of Cathy in 1783. A further year would be superfluous. These fictional facts thus make it clear that the major episode takes place a little more than a year after Hareton Earnshaw’s birth in June 1778, namely in the summer of 1779. ←44 | 45→Sanger and Daley, who argue that the wedding takes place in 1783, overlook this crucial point.
The fact that the major episode takes place in 1779 is also reinforced by two aspects of Hareton Earnshaw’s developmental physiology.
At the time of the episode, Hareton is an infant sitting on the ground at Ellen Dean’s feet during the dramatic events. He can follow her around, which means that he can crawl and walk, and he can say the words “wicked aunt Cathy” (WH, 85f.).10 Ellen Dean calls him “[l];ittle Hareton” and tries to hide him from his drunken father in the kitchen cupboard. He is a “little wretch” and her “little lamb” (WH, 88, 90, 92). When his father carries him upstairs and holds him over the banister, he screams and tries to squirm away. This all fits with the theory that he is only about fifteen months old at the time. If the major episode had taken place in the summer of 1780, Hareton – as a child over the age of two – would have behaved differently. He would have been psycho-motorically more advanced and it would not have been possible to hide him from his father in a kitchen cupboard, even if he had already learned to fear his father’s emotional outbursts and to behave quietly (cf. Baumann 2007, p. 366).
Time references based on numerical data (external evidence)
Two unambiguous time references in the story confirm the fact that 1779 is indeed the year of the major episode and thus 1782 the year of the move.
First time reference:
Regarding Hareton Earnshaw’s date of birth, June 1778, Ellen Dean says in the first section of the first part of her story:
[…] and instead of leaping three years, I will be content to pass to the next summer – the summer of 1778, that is nearly twenty-three years ago. (WH, 75)
This date proves that she tells her story in the year 1800, because “nearly twenty-three” stands for twenty-two plus X, which means June 1778 plus twenty-two is June 1800 plus X. X then corresponds to five months, less than half a year (from June to November). “Nearly” accordingly means seven months less. If 1801 were the correct year of reference, it would read “more than twenty-three years ago” or “nearly twenty-four”. Thus, 1782 is the year of the wedding and the move, not 1783.
Clay (1952, p. 101) blames the discrepancy between the “nearly twenty-three years ago” and his hypothesis that 1801 is the year of the writing of the report on ←45 | 46→an inaccuracy by Ellen Dean, which he calls “a slight slip”. He turns the “nearly” into “rather more than”, leaving aside the fact that he should have continued the sentence with “twenty-three years”, or that he should have written “nearly twenty-four years ago” in the manner of Ellen Dean.11
Before Clay, Sanger (1926, p. 11) discusses this important time reference. In contrast to Clay, he does not reinterpret it, but he does make a miscalculation in its interpretation: he adds the twenty-three to the 1778 according to the arithmetic of the decimal system and thus lands in the year 1801 – without taking into consideration that months must be included in calendrical calculations and that the “nearly” must not be ignored. To be arithmetically and calendrically correct, the equation must read:
June 1778 + 22 years + X months = November 1800 =
6 months + 1778 years + 22 years + X months = 11 months + 1800 years =
21342 months + 264 months + X = 21611 months
X = 21611 - (21342 + 264) = 21611 - 21606 = 5 months
With any other number greater than five, one arrives in December, the following January, or an even later month. The text rules out these months as the possible beginning of the report and the story.
Heywood (2004, pp. 433, 437) also focuses on this reference to “nearly twenty-three years ago” and its discrepancy with the year 1801 as the year of Mr. Lockwood’s first two visits to the Heights and the beginning of Ellen Dean’s story. He believes that the discrepancy was probably intended by Emily Brontë, and he even goes so far as to consider 1778 a misstatement. He entertains the idea that Hareton is not born until 1779, making this year the starting point of a hypothetical second timeline, which he calls the “1779 series” (ibid., p. 433). Instead of moving the year of the visits one year to the left on the timeline as he should, he moves Hareton’s year of birth one year to the right. He does not think of questioning 1801 as the year of Mr. Lockwood’s first two visits, changing instead one of the three absolute years on which the chronology of Wuthering Heights is irrefutably based.
Second time reference:
According to Ellen Dean in the second section of her story, Cathy is thirteen years old when she first meets Hareton Earnshaw one July. This age is extremely important for the chronology and is clearly evidenced three times in the text, ←46 | 47→once indirectly and twice directly (WH, 233, 234, 239). Hareton is eighteen years old at the time, which is categorically stated in the text (WH, 239). Since he is born in 1778 (as one of the three absolute years proves), their meeting must take place in 1796, which means that Cathy is born (and her mother Catherine dies) on 20 March 1783.12 Accordingly, the wedding of Catherine Earnshaw and Edgar Linton must take place in March 1782, the conception of Cathy in September 1782 and the dramatic events of the major episode in 1779 because Mr. Heathcliff disappears for three years after these events, only reappearing in September 1782, Cathy is “a seven months’ child” and the period between Catherine Earnshaw’s wedding and death is the already specified one year. The reference to Hareton Earnshaw’s year of birth indicates the correct path through the time labyrinth. It is out of the question that Catherine marries in 1783 and dies in 1784.
Clay (1952, p. 101) does not address these important chronological realities. He holds the view that the wedding takes place in 1783, justifying this with the “for eighteen years”, which has already been refuted. He feels corroborated by Edgar Linton’s remark to Catherine Earnshaw shortly before her death in March that at the same time one year earlier he had wanted her under his roof (ibid., p. 101). However, for methodological reasons, it is not possible to prove a particular year with this time span. The stated interval of one year is always correct because it is year-independent. The only thing that the time span proves is that – as stated – Catherine dies one year after her wedding. In his other calculations, Clay does not take into account this important one-year span, leading him to miss the fact that there are actually six months between the wedding and Mr. Heathcliff’s return. He does not specify the length of this time span, only describing it as “not long” (ibid., p. 101). Clay also sees 1783 corroborated as the alleged year of Catherine Earnshaw’s wedding when Mr. Heathcliff comes to take Cathy to Wuthering Heights on the evening of Edgar Linton’s funeral. Ellen Dean indicates at that time that eighteen years have passed since his return (WH, 352). Again, this is only correct in terms of the time span. The dating, however, must be based on 1782, not 1783. Later, Clay unacceptably uses another time span for dating: concerning the dream that she has during the hallucinations in the year of her death, Catherine Earnshaw declares that “the whole last seven years of my life grew a blank!” (WH, 154) – the seven years since her father’s death. Clay (ibid., p. 103) draws on these seven years to help date Mr. Earnshaw’s ←47 | 48→death to 1776, because he places Catherine’s illness at the end of 1783 instead of at the end of 1782.
Because of the one-year span (the period between Catherine Earnshaw’s wedding and her death, and Cathy’s birth), Clay, proceeding from 1783, dates the year of Cathy’s birth to 1784 instead of 1783. This mistake inevitably brings with it a whole string of further misdating, because, although Clay quite correctly identifies the time spans, his year of reference is wrong. There is, therefore, a systemic error. To be correct, all his year dates need to be pre-dated by one year, i.e. they must be shifted to the left on the timeline. It is true that Cathy is seventeen years old in the year of Edgar Linton’s death (WH, 299), which is why he must have died in 1800 and not in 1801, as Clay (ibid., p. 102) thinks. It is also true that, in the November of the year before his death, Edgar Linton forbids Cathy from continuing her secret visits to Wuthering Heights. However, this is in 1799, not 1800. It is true that, in the second section of the first part of her story, Ellen Dean points out that she is describing the prohibition of the visits and its attendant circumstances exactly one year after the events. This necessarily dates the narration of the story to November 1800 and does not – as Clay (ibid., p. 102) thinks, in an unacceptable reverse conclusion – date the prohibition to 1800. Despite Ellen Dean’s indisputable time reference, Clay (ibid., p. 101) surprisingly dates this passage of the story to 1802 rather than one year after the prohibition, that is – to follow his incorrect approach, which is out by one year – to 1801. This is explained by the fact that, right at the beginning of his treatise, he decides that Ellen Dean relates this passage of her story in 1802 (ibid., p. 100), which is incorrect. This mistake in the dating of the narrative should have occurred to Clay when determining the time of the prohibition – either 1801 is correct or 1802. Both cannot be true. The systemic post-dating error by one year is of course also observable in the biographical data of the main characters, deduced from Catherine Earnshaw’s year of birth (cf. Chap. VI, ‘The Genealogies of the Earnshaw and Linton Families’). Thus, Clay (ibid., pp. 102f.) gives the year of Isabella Linton’s death as 1797 instead of 1796, the year of Hindley Earnshaw’s death as 1784 instead of 1783, etc.
The fact that Cathy is thirteen years old when she first meets Hareton is also noted by Heywood (2004, p. 439). However, he is wrong to state that their meeting takes place on Cathy’s thirteenth birthday, i.e. in March. Cathy in fact meets Hareton for the first time in summer. Heywood is probably confusing this meeting with that of Cathy and Linton Heathcliff, which does actually take place on her birthday – but on her sixteenth. In neither the first nor second of Heywood’s editions of Wuthering Heights does he make any mention of Ellen ←48 | 49→Dean’s crucial statement that Hareton is eighteen years old at their first meeting, proven by the fact that their first meeting takes place in 1796.13
Time references based on misleading ages
There are two places in Ellen Dean’s narrative that could indicate that 1801 is the first year of the narration – if they stand up to critical scrutiny. These two places suggest that Cathy is born in 1784, not in 1783, and contradict Ellen Dean’s two unambiguous statements mentioned above, that she narrates the first half of her story nearly twenty-three years after Hareton’s birth in June 1778 and that Cathy is thirteen and Hareton eighteen years old when they meet for the first time. The two discrepant statements concern Hareton’s age at the time of Catherine’s marriage to Edgar Linton (he is allegedly “nearly five years old” at the time) and Hareton’s age at a much later point when he is reconciled with Cathy on an Easter Monday in April (he is allegedly “twenty-three years old” at the time). Both ages are dubious from the very start because of their incompatibility with the unambiguous and proven ages already stated and they must therefore be examined particularly critically. In fact, both ages could simply be incorrect since Cathy cannot have been born in 1784 according to the textual information regarding the year of the major episode mentioned above, in other words according to the internal evidence: if 1784 were the year of her birth, Catherine’s wedding would have taken place one year earlier, in March 1783. But then, because of Heathcliff’s three-year absence, the major episode would have occurred in the summer of 1780, which has already been ruled out in view of the internal evidence.
It is therefore more plausible to assume that the ages are incorrect rather than to assume that 1801, not 1800, is the first year of the narration. In fact, the two ages can be discredited, and a plausible explanation can be found for the deception, based on Ellen Dean’s intention to use chronological ambiguity to conceal certain correlations in the story. Nevertheless, or precisely because of this, Ellen Dean herself provides the opportunity for her misleading statements regarding these ages to be recognised as such. She does this by referring to discrepancies regarding the wedding month of Catherine and Edgar Linton and the birth months of Cathy and Hareton.
The first refutable assertion:
Ellen Dean states at the end of the first section of her story that Hareton Earnshaw is “nearly five years old” when she leaves him to move to Thrushcross Grange with the newly married Catherine (WH, 108). Since Hareton is born in June ←49 | 50→1778, according to the hypothesis to be tested, the move would have taken place before June, sometime in the spring of 1783. Immediately before this relativised age, Ellen Dean also states that the wedding of Catherine Earnshaw and Edgar Linton takes place three years after the death of Edgar Linton’s father:
Edgar Linton […] believed himself the happiest man alive on the day he led her to Gimmerton chapel, three years subsequent to his father’s death. (WH, 108)
The usability of Hareton’s age is thus compromised by two interlinked additional details: what does “nearly” mean and when exactly did Edgar Linton’s father die? Why does Ellen Dean not simply say that three years after the death of Edgar Linton’s father in the November after Heathcliff’s disappearance, Hareton was such and such an age? This lack of clarity must give pause for thought in view of the unambiguousness of the other two temporal references already discussed.
Mr. Lockwood and readers have to assume up to this point in the story that Ellen Dean’s move to Thrushcross Grange takes place one November or December because before she begins her story, one November or December, Ellen Dean tells Mr. Lockwood that she has lived at Thrushcross Grange “eighteen years”.14 It will be concluded from this that Edgar Linton’s father also dies in November or December. The fact that Ellen Dean then also temporally links Hareton’s birthday with the wedding of Catherine and Edgar Linton one spring raises questions. This new temporal association of the month of death in winter with the month of birth inevitably plunges the reader into chronological confusion.15 So, when in fact do the move and the wedding take place? As will shortly ←50 | 51→be made clear, the wedding takes place in spring, and from this it can only be concluded that something is incorrect regarding Hareton’s age.
In the attempt to resolve the chronological confusion, it becomes apparent that the date of the wedding and the move up until the account of the move itself is based on only two imprecise (because they are approximate or are to be understood as approximate) time references by Ellen Dean. Ellen Dean states only a very long time after the move and only in a veiled way that the wedding took place in March. In Chapter 21, when Ellen Dean describes how Mr. Heathcliff catches Cathy plundering “moor-game” nests on the anniversary of her mother’s death in 1799, she states that it was the “twentieth of March” (WH, 262). This date matches Ellen Dean’s statements in Chapters 15, 16 and 17 regarding the weather in the days before Catherine’s death. She mentions that at that time the branches on the trees already had buds, the blackbirds were beginning to build their nests and the primroses and crocuses were in bloom (WH, 193, 205, 209). Since Catherine, in view of the one-year span, dies exactly one year after her wedding, March is clearly the wedding month. Only with this knowledge can the relevance and validity of the two imprecise time references be analysed.
The first imprecise time reference is the “eighteen years” which Ellen Dean specifies rather generally as the duration of her time at Thrushcross Grange, without providing further details regarding the month. She makes this statement in November just before beginning her story, which could suggest to readers that the wedding takes place in November. Since the wedding actually takes place in spring, Ellen Dean should have said “eighteen years and seven months” or at least “for eighteen years”. From the beginning of the story until the time of the move, readers have absolutely no reason to think about or even question the implications of Ellen Dean’s time reference. It is only with the mention of the date 20 March that readers are reliably informed that the “eighteen years” reflects the number of years that Ellen Dean spends with Catherine and Cathy at Thrushcross Grange and that it does not mark the exact month of the wedding and the move, and thus not the month of Mr. Linton Snr’s death. For the following line of argument, it is important to keep in mind that November has ←51 | 52→not been proved to be the month of his death and that, due to the course of the disease, October is the most likely month in which he dies.
The second imprecise time reference is the “subsequent” used by Ellen Dean to date the death of Mr. Linton Snr, which readers understand as “after” and thereby conclude that Catherine marries in November 1783. However, the question is whether this interpretation is correct or whether the “three years subsequent to his father’s death” could be read in the sense of “in the course of the third year after…”. With regard to November and the March following the November, the “subsequent” would then mean two years and four months: November 1779 plus four months = March 1780, March 1780 plus two years = March 1782. There would then be coherence as to month and year, the contradiction with the theory that the wedding takes place in 1782 would be resolved and the hypothesis that 1783 is the wedding year would be refuted. Of course, these calculations apply not only to November, but also to October. Taking October as the month of Mr. Linton Snr’s death, “subsequent” means five months. In Chapter 17, much later, Ellen Dean uses the word “subsequent” again, this time in connection with the birth of Linton Heathcliff, which is “a few months subsequent to [Isabella’s] escape” (WH, 226). At this point, Mr. Lockwood and readers cannot yet know that Isabella flees Wuthering Heights on 25 April 1783 and that Linton Heathcliff is born in September 1783. In this case, “subsequent” stands for “five months after”. If this is applied to the “subsequent” regarding Catherine’s wedding, it follows – provided that Ellen Dean uses “subsequent” both times instead of the number five – that Edgar Linton’s father dies in October.
The time references “eighteen years” and “three years subsequent” are not in themselves incorrect, but they are misleading in their vagueness. The “temporal vagueness” of the two time spans is seven months each: the “eighteen years” are seven months too few, the “three years” seven months too many. The month “November” is undeniably correct, as month specifications in the text always are – but only as the month in which Ellen Dean begins her story, not as the month of Mr. Linton Snr’s death and not as the month of Catherine Earnshaw’s wedding.
The statement under discussion is itself imprecise, too. What does the “nearly” in “Hareton was nearly five years old” mean? According to standard language usage and sense of time, “nearly five years old” means less than five years and significantly more than just four years. Mathematically, “nearly” means less than half of the year in between, i.e. less than six months before the fifth year. Looking in the text of Wuthering Heights for other time references which are preceded by the word “nearly”, the phrase that stands out is “nearly twenty-three years ago”, which is mentioned in relation to the time span between the birth of Hareton ←52 | 53→Earnshaw and the beginning of Ellen Dean’s narration (WH, 75). In the phrase “nearly twenty-three years ago”, “nearly” means seven months less than twenty-three years. The chronological equation is: June 1778 to June 1800 = 22 years, June 1800 to November 1800 = 5 months. “[N];early” = 23 years less 22 years + 5 months = 7 months. Ellen Dean therefore uses “subsequent” synonymously for five months and “nearly” synonymously for seven months. Thus, she divides the span of a year into two sections of different lengths. She calls the first section of five months calculated additively from the beginning of the year “subsequent” and the second section of seven months subtracted from the end of the year “nearly”. She therefore contravenes common language usage and the readers’ sense of time with disastrous consequences for their understanding of the chronology. Assuming that the “nearly” in the phrase “nearly five years old” means seven months less than five years (instead of the usual “fewer than six months less than five years”), then Hareton’s age is four years and five months, and one arrives arithmetically at November 1782: June 1778 plus four years is June 1782, plus five months is November 1782. Therefore, with the calculation based on “ ‘nearly’ means ‘seven months less’ ”, one lands exactly in the November from the statement “three years subsequent to his father’s death” – however, this is the November of 1782, not that of 1783. This is no coincidence because the calculations from the two combined statements must end in the same month in order to be plausible. Assuming that “nearly” means the usual “fewer than six months less”, for example three months, one arrives in March 1783 – this would be correct as far as the month of the wedding is concerned, but wrong for the month of death, October. Since November is ruled out as the month of the wedding, the statement “nearly five years old” must also be wrong. When the move takes place in March 1782, Hareton is in fact, and in the generally accepted sense, nearly four years old: three years and nine months to be exact (there are three months until his fourth birthday). It is also no coincidence that the age “nearly five years old” is made in direct connection with the period “three years subsequent”. Their combination is to be understood as a warning sign that the dates need to be clarified before their chronological use and that Hareton’s age cannot be used to determine the year of the wedding and the move but is only correct for the alleged wedding month of November. This warning has not been recognised before, probably because the correct wedding month is mentioned long after the wedding (in Chapter 21) and in a completely different context, and the alleged wedding month very early, before the beginning of the story (in Chapter 4).
As with the determining of the year of the major episode, there are two aspects concerning Hareton’s physiological development that also suggest that the “nearly five years old” cannot be correct.
Ellen Dean supplies additional ←53 | 54→information regarding Hareton’s approximate age, which actually reveals his true age at the time of the move. Concerning that period, she says: “[…] and I had just begun to teach him his letters” (WH, 109). Children usually start to write letters at about the age of four, starting with their own name, with their “own letters”, as Ellen Dean puts it (Baumann, p. 394). At the time of Catherine’s wedding and the move, Hareton cannot have been nearly five years old, but only about four. The second aspect is that Hareton can no longer remember his foster mother Ellen Dean “ten months” after the wedding and the move (cf. Chap. IV, Hareton Earnshaw’s biography). If he had been over five years old at the time, he would have remembered her, but not as a younger child.
In view of all these facts, it cannot be mere coincidence that the age “nearly five years old” is in direct correlation with the period “three years subsequent”. The combination of the two time references is to be understood as a warning against using the dates uncritically. In Ellen Dean’s story, it is the narratological equivalent to the opening sentences of Chapter 1 and Chapter 32 in Mr. Lockwood’s report. They lead to false conclusions because they are ambiguous and contradictory in themselves. They are unsuitable for refuting the postulate that 1778 is correct as the year of Hareton’s birth and 1801 incorrect as the year of the first visit.
The second refutable assertion:
