“This Thing of Darkness I / Acknowledge Mine”: Heathcliff as Fetish in Wuthering Heights

Abstract

THIS THING OF DARKNESS I / ACKNOWLEDGE MINE” : HEATHCLIFF AS FETISH IN WUTHERING HEIGHTS DANA MEDORO Queen’s University IN a brief article that links the heroine of her own novels to Jean Rhys’s Antoinette Cosway/Bertha Rochester, Jamaican writer Michelle Cliff states, “It makes one (at least, this one) wish another Caribbean writer would take on the character of Heathcliff and write him a life” (264). Although Heathcliff ’s (denied) life is one of the central preoccupations of Wuthering Heights, it is buried under the last century and a half of criticism on the text, which accepts, or barely deviates from, Charlotte Bronte’s prefatory interpretation of Heathcliff as “a man’s shape animated by demon life” (23). Cliff’s sympa­ thy for the dark-skinned Heathcliff strikes through the repeated failures on the part of critics to examine the stereotypical language in which Heathcliff is constructed by the notoriously misleading narrators, Lockwood and Nelly Dean. The critical collusions with the narrators’ shocked and fascinated re­ actions to Heathcliff unconsciously invoke and reproduce the colonialist or racist discourse that Cliff recognizes in Wuthering Heights: Heathcliff is a “wicked, diabolical male character” (Peterson, “History” 293), the personi­ fication of “human and animal traits” (Gilbert and Gubar 293), and “both lowly and natural” (Eagleton 403). Such descriptions of Heathcliff, the only non-white or “gypsy” figure in Wuthering Heights, as animal, natural, or diabolical sustains the nineteenth-century mentality about the monstrous, primitive “other”-the native African, Indian, or American in Britain’s impe­ rialist imagination. For instance, when Thomas Moser positions his reading of Wuthering Heights in a tradition that describes Heathcliff as “essentially anthropomorphized primitive energy” and the “embodiment of sexual en­ ergy” (4, 9), he perpetuates the association between dark skin and lascivious sexuality. According to Patrick Brantlinger, the British justified their col­ onizing and missionary invasions of new territories through reports “about cannibalism, witchcraft, and apparently shameless sexual customs” (198). It is this imperialist discourse that subtly enters into both Lockwood’s and Nelly Dean’s representations of Heathcliff and into the tradition of criticism on Wuthering Heights, a tradition that divorces the text from its position within and against a larger ideological framework. The aim of this paper is not to argue that Heathcliff is a colonial subject from a specific place, but to English Stu d ies in Ca n a d a , 22, 3, September 1996 investigate his racial alterity in relation to the other characters of Wuthering Heights. I will argue that Heathcliif is repetitively debased in the layers of narration as a stereotype — as the “stereotype-as-fetish,” a term articu­ lated by Homi K. Bhabha and derived from Frantz Fanon. Heathcliff is, to borrow a phrase from Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, “sealed into crush­ ing objecthood” (Fanon 109) while the story of his “life” is suppressed and (mis)represented under the colonizing gaze of the two narrators. In his essay, “The Other Question: Difference, Discrimination and the Discourse of Colonialism,” Bhabha explains that colonialist discourse is predicated upon an ambivalent construction of racial and cultural differ­ ence; according to colonialist ideology, the conquered native is both natu­ rally subservient and undeniably menacing. This ambivalence underlies the creation of the stereotype, which is meant to fix and contain threatening contradictions. Like the fetish object, the image of the stereotype accords power/pleasure to the aggressor and simultaneously resists this power. Both fetish and stereotype function as appropriated objects in aggressive schemes of self-sufficiency or fulfilment. Admittedly indebted to Lacanian psycho­ analysis, Bhabha argues that the stereotype should be read in terms of fetishism because the stereotype’s skin colour or physical appearance is the site upon which the colonizer projects the desire for this elusive selfsufficiency . Racial difference, in colonialist discourse, simultaneously invokes and disrupts the colonizer’s desire for sameness, for an “unbroken and un­ differentiated line of vision and origin” (85). As the fetish object of the colonizer, the stereotype is discursively seized to mask the separation be­ tween cultures and to signify the colonizer’s mastery of the external world. Throughout his essay, Bhabha compares racial difference with the differ­ ence between the sexes. In psychoanalytic...