Acts of Custody and Incarceration in "Wuthering Heights" and "The Tenant of Wildfell Hall"

Abstract

If perversity were not so often the defining mode in Bronte criticism, it might seem perverse to assert that Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall are family plots, in fact, stories about custody. Literary criticism-not to mention, in the case of Wuthering Heights, Hollywood and a fiercely held popular opinionhas insisted on these novels as romantic fictions about the couple. And there is ample reason for critics to repeat an attention that the novels themselves would seem not only to invite but to demand. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall offers not just one couple in its effort to demonstrate the lurid brutalities of marriage, but pair after pair of ill-suited (we might as well say violently opposed) mates. In fact, the overdetermined quality of nuptial impossibility among these couples, and the determination with which the novel nevertheless reproduces them, is suspicious. As for Wuthering Heights, the endurance of a single unkillable couple becomes a novelistic obsession similar to the endlessly repeated duos in Wildfell Hall. Not only are Cathy and Heathcliff unable to exit the narrative decently even in death, they are forced to endure the unimaginable horror of an interminable courtship carried on (and on) over supernatural terrain, and apparently reproduced with modifications in the various unions that the novel offers as distorted reflections