What's More Romantic Than Death?

Romanticism is, according to William Harmon and Hugh Holman in A Handbook to Literature (2003), "the predominance of imagination over reason and formal rules...and over the sense of fact or the actual" (445). When reason dictates that death is the end to the story and to life itself, the romantic paradox emphasizes the world beyond the physical and proposes that true love can overcome the power of death and can be perfected beyond the grave. The portrayal of death in Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (1847) illustrates the romantic notion that death serves as a positive force that unites and perfects rather than a negative force that separates and destroys.
In his book Laughter & Despair: Readings in Ten Novels of the Victorian Era (1971), U. C. Knoepflmacher describes Wuthering Heights as a "tragic myth enacted by Cathy and Heathcliff" (89). Catherine Earnshaw and the gypsy boy Heathcliff fall in love at an early age and have a spiritual connection that the rest of the world fails to understand; Catherine and Heathcliff's inability to act upon their profound attachment because of social restraint and mutual selfishness leads to their tragic end. Brontë's skillful grasp on the drama of romantic tragedy is sometimes attributed to her childhood fantasy-making experiences with her siblings, who, according to J. F. Goodridge in his chapter entitled "A New Heaven and a New Earth," which appears in The Art of Emily Brontë (1976) "lived within the romantic tradition with extraordinary intensity" (169). Knoepflmacher believes that Brontë's "dramatic powers allowed her to control the fantasy world she had once shared with her brother and sisters" (87). Not only is her talent in creating a wrenching plot ascribed to her life outside of her writing, but some critics also claim that her characters, which are frighteningly human, are inspired by Brontë's own life experiences. Heathcliff, for example, a character "who questions [the] meaning of existence in this world and in the next..., remains a self-projection who acts out some of her own anguish and doubt" (Knoepflmacher 105). The overwhelming passion and darkness of her writings seems to reflect her own personality and influences; Goodridge states that "Emily Brontë's passionate independence, which has even given rise to the legend of her as a superwoman, possessed from childhood by a dark, demoniac spirit that she later embodied in Heathcliff, was no doubt nourished by her reading in the field of romantic literature" (166). In his book The Romantic Novel in England (1972), Robert Kiely claims that "Wuthering Heights is the masterpiece of English romantic fiction" that surpasses in romantic intensity even the greatest influences that contemporary romantic authors had on Brontë's ideas (233).
Brontë's portrayal of romantic ideals is most intense in her characters Catherine and Heathcliff. In their tragic tale, Brontë proves what David Holbrook calls in English for Maturity (1961), "the profound point that such a love, expressive of a supreme vitality, may be more important than life itself" (qtd. in Goodridge 160). Both, at one time or another, consider death to be a more desirable existence than life without one another. For these romantic characters, life is embodied by the one they love; separation would be more unbearable than hell. Catherine, when trying to explain her feelings for Heathcliff, says, "I love him...because he's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same...I am Heathcliff! He's always, always in my mind-not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being" (Brontë 87-9). Heathcliff mirrors her statement about their souls being one when he exclaims upon learning of Catherine's death, "I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!" (184).
Not only do they consider life without each other to be unbearable, but they also consider heaven to be empty without each other. When given the option of going to heaven or being with Heathcliff, Catherine chooses Heathcliff, claiming that she will not be at peace in heaven without him (175). According to Kiely, "In rejecting heaven, Catherine is not...revealing her sinful nature; she is not rejecting good in favor of evil, but rather making a characteristically romantic gesture toward a liberation of the self" (242). Cathy wishes herself to remain on earth as a wandering spirit until Heathcliff can join her in death, and Heathcliff joins in her wish by uttering this curse: "Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest as long as I am living!" (183). Catherine and Heathcliff can only find heaven in each other, and when Catherine dies, " he [Heathcliff] lashes out against a universe that has become meaningless" (Knoepflmacher 100). Because Catherine marries the rich Edgar Linton to avoid being degraded by marrying Heathcliff, she dooms both herself and Heathcliff to unhappiness on earth; the social restraint of marriage can be broken only by death. In the introduction to The Art of Emily Brontë, Anne Smith claims that "the power of Wuthering Heights springs from Emily Brontë's ability to contain and dramatize this most basic of human dilemmas, between the yearning for a love that will fulfill and transcend our mere humanity, and the instinct to merge into the simple, thoughtless rhythm of existence, to be a part of a greater whole" (Smith 17). Catherine chooses the latter option when she marries Edgar, forsaking her passionate love for Heathcliff and destroying both their lives in the process. Both Catherine and Heathcliff must resort to death to end their separation.
Throughout the novel, Catherine and Heathcliff support the romantic idea that death brings about unity rather than separation. T. E. Apter, author of the chapter "Romanticism and Romantic Love in Wuthering Heights," which appears in The Art of Emily Brontë, makes the following statement:
the elements in the Catherine/Heathcliff theme which place it clearly within a Romantic tradition include an involvement with nature so intense, so mystical that it contains a death wish, or, more specifically, a desire to return to the mindless unity of nature, to mend the separation from nature effected by society and sophistication; also included are a love which longs for a soul unity with the beloved (Apter 206).
Upon dreaming that she had died and gone to heaven, Catherine complains, "...heaven did not seem to be my home, and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; and the angels were so angry that they flung me out into the middle of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights, where I woke sobbing for joy" (Brontë 87). Interestingly, Catherine was not crying because she had died but because she was not on earth, or more specifically, not with Heathcliff. As Marielle Seichepine claims in the article "Childhood and Innocence in Wuthering Heights," which appeared in Brontë Studies (2004), "she [Catherine] yearned to transcend death and to recover the freedom she used to share with Heathcliff when she was a child" (210). She desires for her life to end because, as Apter claims, "Her death is the means by which she can satisfy her love for Heathcliff" (217). When Heathcliff learns of Catherine's declining state, he complains to her, "While you are at peace I shall writhe in the torments of hell," but Catherine claims that even when she is lying in the earth, she will never rest until Heathcliff joins her and makes their love complete once again (Brontë 175, 138). Although death is perhaps the most daunting of all obstacles to love, Heathcliff holds that "misery, and degradation, and death, and nothing that God or Satan could inflict would have parted us" and "denies the physical barrier of the grave as well as the spiritual barrier in 'another world'" (Brontë 177, Knoepflmacher 101). When Catherine dies, Heathcliff is left behind to face an empty world on his own, and "until his own demise, Heathcliff will love in that estranged universe. Only in that realm [of death]..., can the two lovers eventually be reunited and attain the oneness..., freed from time and change... [T]hey cannot find fulfillment in a temporal world of change and disruption" (Knoepflmacher 98). The oneness of Catherine and Heathcliff's souls was an unchangeable enigma in a world that was always changing, and by moving into the afterlife where time stands still, their souls can commune in perfect harmony untouched by the outside world. While the idea of victory in death is somewhat hard to stomach, "He and Cathy may well have fused in a world of myth that defies ordinary understanding" (101). This idea of life after death is further explained in the article in Social History (2002) titled "The scales of suffering: love, death and Victorian masculinity" by Stephen Garton who states that "the emergence in the nineteenth century of a sense of continuity between the 'real' world and the afterlife has been the focus of considerable historical investigation. Diverse cultural currents...contributed to the belief that with death the spirit continued, in corporeal form, for eternity" (50). The belief that the spirit of a departed loved one continues after death gives some consolation to the grieving by allowing for the hope they will be reunited with their loved ones beyond the grave. By exceeding the natural law of death and the societal law of marriage, Heathcliff and Catherine can finally love each other without restraint in the world beyond the physical. The desire to become completely united and fused in spirit had filled their earthly lives with longing and unhappiness; in death, their desires met fulfillment.
Just as death is usually thought to separate humans from one another by creating a barrier that cannot be spanned, death is also pictured as an overwhelmingly destructive force that not only ravages the physical body but also tears the love of souls asunder. Because of "the perfect similarity of their souls...she [Catherine] claims that she is Heathcliff, that she and Heathcliff are but one person, and that Heathcliff's soul and her own soul are but one soul" (Sechepine 211). With this perspective of death, the shared soul lives on, spanning the chasm between life and death and allowing for love to continue to be passionately expressed across the barrier. As children, Catherine and Heathcliff lose the death of a beloved father, and their nurse watches as "the little souls were comforting each other with better thoughts than I could have hit on; no parson in the world ever pictured heaven so beautifully as they did, in their innocent talk" (Brontë 46). Even at such a young age, the two considered the life after death to be beautiful and desirable, even more so than the present world. Catherine expresses her impatience to enter the realm of death by saying, "I'm tired, tired of being enclosed here. I'm wearying to escape into that glorious world, and to be always there: not seeing it dimly through tears, and yearning for it through the walls of an aching heart, but really with it, and in it...I shall be incomparably beyond and above you all" (Brontë 176). For one who considers living to be eternal imprisonment, death is a comforting haven from suffering and the ultimate realization of unfulfilled desires. The romantic notion that "the soul is angelic, imprisoned in the body. It longs, like Catherine, to escape from this 'shattered prison' which is its earthly Hell" is internalized completely in the characters of Brontë's novel and places more emphasis on the spiritual than on the physical (Goodridge 176). Because Catherine suffers from conflicting loyalties to her husband and to her soul mate and because she can never love Heathcliff in the way that their immense passion dictates, she seeks death as a resolution to her problems. She desires for freedom from "a finite world of irreconcilables", and "this freedom is, for her [Cathy], now only possible through the release of death" (Knoepflmacher 100, 108).
Rather than being sickened at the sight of a dead body, the nurse describes the Catherine's corpse in beautiful detail: "Her brow smooth, her lids closed, her lips wearing the expression of a smile-no angel in heaven could be more beautiful than she appeared...whether still on earth or...in heaven, her spirit [was] with God" (Brontë 181). The nurse's leaving the option of Catherine's spirit remaining on earth should not be overlooked because Catherine's earthly presence after death is a fulfillment of Heathcliff's curse. At this point in the story, the definite line between the physical and spiritual worlds seems to fade and waver because Catherine's departed spirit is still present, not only to Heathcliff, but also to several other characters such as Nellie, the nurse, a neighborhood boy, and the visitor, Lockwood. When specters visit the living, "life in the form of a question intrudes upon the static picture of death and, simultaneously, the substance of the question raises the opposite possibility of death or the dead encroaching upon life" (Kiely 242). Continuing through life in a semi-conscious state, Heathcliff's only driving motive is the desire to once again be joined with Catherine. Because the love between Catherine and Heathcliff is so strong, not even the bonds of death can keep them apart.
When he finally gives up his life through self-starvation, "Heathcliff's devotion to a Cathy who has been liberated from the confinement of time and space is finally rewarded" (Knoepflmacher 101). Continuing the romantic idea of perfecting love through death, "only at the end... is he [Heathcliff] driven to take the path of all the great lovers, and seek his happiness through the consummation of death" (Goodridge 179). Rather than destroying the love that he and Catherine shared, death only allows their souls to commune in the perfection of that love, unrestrained by the world and unchangeable by time and space.
Taking on a romantic ideology, Catherine and Heathcliff place little value in earthly existence because it is changeable and temporary. They value love above life and feeling above reason. Because of this value system, neither fears the world beyond death; instead, they look forward to it with expectancy. At the end of the novel, the outsider Lockwood wonders "how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth," explaining that although the ghosts of Heathcliff and Catherine are sometimes seen wandering over the moors, their spirits are at peace because they are with one another (Brontë 370). Romantic idealism deprives death of its terrible power; therefore, death could neither separate Heathcliff and Catherine's spirits nor destroy their love.

Works Cited
Apter, T. E. "Romanticism and Romantic Love in Wuthering Heights." The Art of Emily Brontë 205-22.
Brontë, Emily. Wuthering Heights. New York: Tor, 1998.
Garton, Stephen. "The scales of suffering: love, death and Victorian masculinity." Social History 27.1 (Jan. 2002): 40+.
Goodridge, J. F. "A New Heaven and a New Earth." The Art of Emily Brontë 160-81.
Harmon, William and Hugh Holman. A Handbook to Literature. 9th ed. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice, 2003.
Kiely, Robert. The Romantic Novel in England. Cambridge, Massachusettes: Harvard UP, 1972.
Knoepflmacher, U. C. Laughter & Despair: Readings in Ten Novels of the Victorian Era. Los Angeles: U California P, 1971.
Seichepine, Marielle. "Childhood and Innocence in Wuthering Heights." Brontë Studies 29 (Nov. 2004): 209-15
Smith, Anne. "Introduction: Towards a New Assessment." The Art of Emily Brontë. Introduction. New York: Harper, 1976.