Wuthering Heights 1.4

"They both promised fair to grow up as rude as savages."
~     Oxford World's Classics, pg 40

Wuthering Heights is not didactic or sentimental. It isn't educational, or a realm of the fantastic to be a child again. It is not autobiographical, from memory, and although Nelly Dean diagnoses poor Catherine every which direction, the story itself frustrates and even disapproves of such judgment. No, I believe that the children in this novel, though they grow up soon enough, can only be agents with authorial power. They frustrate beloved plot patterns, and behave badly.

Mr. Lockwood, the tenant in the narrative frame, learns most of Catherine's story from Nelly, who unabashedly dislikes her charge, so far as to say "I own I did not like her, after her infancy was past" (58). And yet she's the romantic heroine of at least the first part of the book. Well. . .

I'll say this: Nelly's theories on how to raise a proper child (education and discipline) contradict Catherine's wild, romantic childhood. She plays on the moors with a foundling named Heathcliff, and her "natural" development leads her to love him, and vice versa. Things begin to go wrong when that wild childhood meets the demands of civilized society, and I do not believe that a conclusive answer for the tragic conflict is offered by the text. As any great work of literature, it merely presents the questions. Is the Romantic child missing necessary skills for a successful adulthood? Is the "civilized" child missing characteristics necessary for happiness?

A criticism of the Romantic child is the condemnation of ignorance. I will need to come back to this text. It fascinates me more, the more I think about it.

I mean, does the Romantic childhood, does wildness produce the agent? Maisie was certainly a little ignorant, her book education being neglected for seeking her approval. Education must in these times have been thought of as producing civilization, control, and passivity, where now the rhetoric seems to imply, at least, that education offers power and independence. I think the Victorians were possibly more right. Anyone who has survived the liberal conditioning that is an undergraduate degree knows that education intentionally reproduces similar or nearly unvarying modes of thought.