By Dr Eyhab Abdulrazak Bader Eddin

The first time I picked up Wuthering Heights, I was in my third year studying English Language and Literature in Damascus University. The daylight fell warmly on the campus in soft gold and jasmine drifted over the old courtyard, but as I plunged into the pages, I was swept away on the tempestuous Yorkshire Moors. I had a weird identity with the wild winds and the ghostly echoes of the world of Brontё in the very heart of Damascus, the city of ancient tales. Even the afternoon call to prayer from a nearby minaret lost its significance in the backdrop; I heard but the supposed cry of the wind in the moorland. The rhythm of those nineteenth century voices, so alien to my daily life in Arabic and in the classroom English was more of a haunting tune, new and bewitching. The silent hum of a Damascus afternoon was replaced by the spooky silence and wrath of the moorland, so that at that instant I was a student in a sunlit Damascus courtyard and a traveller on a wet heath, and my heart clashed with the stormy and wild music of Wuthering Heights.

I cannot forget my initial experience in hearing the voices of Wuthering Heights: it was like listening to apparitions. The language of the novel moves the reader back to the Yorkshire Moors of the late 18th century, where the characters talk in a very distinctly different manner. The novel of Emily Brontё is known to be passionate and violent, but what is also very remarkable is the peculiar way the dialogue and narration might sound to contemporary ears. Brontё invents a sort of language weather system: syntax, address, emotion, politeness vortex, etc, and the reader must learn to inhale it.

The fact that the distance that exists between them is not only historical but also psychological surprises me. The book is not merely old-fashioned – it is coarse, it seems to be uncivilised, even to the point of the present-day English having not yet learnt how to put a pleasant bandage over its heart. Brontё did not make all her characters speak in the same manner; the main characters possess a unique voice determined by their class and character. It is a collision of the polished language of Lockwood against the thick Yorkshire dialect of Joseph which many English readers find hard to follow. Such a challenge is important: it makes us aware that English was never a smooth surface at all – it is a topography with gullies, hills and unexpected cliffs.

And I also find it amazing how fast we tend to fault ourselves when we are not able to comprehend a Joseph-like misunderstanding as we perceive it to be a personal shortcoming and not a stylistic choice that was made in the novel. The language barrier that Brontё has created is not a barrier but a strength of the book. Brontё is, in a sense, instructing us in humility: we must strive to gain admittance to this world, a sentence, a peculiar pronoun, an ugly word of exchange, at a time. This aspect examines four facets of the language in the novel: syntax, forms of address, affective intensity and politeness to highlight that the English language can be altered to give a new meaning to what contemporary readers believe they are reading.

Syntax: Winding sentences and old-fashioned structures

The syntax is one of the first things that a contemporary reader will notice. The sentences in the novel are usually written in lengthy, curvy run-ons interrupted by semicolons and dashes. Lockwood is an educated and wordy narrator, and the narration of Nelly Dean, though of a more practical nature, nonetheless bears complicated scaffolding which is sometimes dismayingly dense in comparison with the prose of nowadays.

 I do not believe that these lengthy sentences reflect the Victorian style. They serve as fog: they darken and at the same time they provide air. The syntax used by Brontё makes us move at a slower pace and makes us pay attention in a certain way that we are not used to doing in modern times. While modern prose is sometimes constructed to move swiftly, the prose in Brontё seems to be constructed to act as force – as though we were to be pressed into the mood till we cease moving swiftly on the surface and begin to live.

Sometimes reading Brontё’s work is much like the walking up a hill in a long skirt – long and clumsy, but with a tremendous view at the top. I was also compelled to re-read some of the sentences due to the lack of clarity as well as cadence. It has a moral implication as well, as long sentences may seem to feel indulgent to contemporary readers since we have been conditioned to think that shortness is the same as being honest. Brontё spurns that proposition silently – she even alludes to the idea that complexity is sometimes frankest when the mind is intricate.

The syntax is also played with by Brontё when she portrays the dialect. The word arrangement and omission in the lines by Joseph mix up the words and letters – ‘Aw wll hae noa hend wi it!’ It is purposely tortured, and not simple to comprehend. In my mind I continued to think that the dialect of Joseph is the built-in bouncer of the novel. To enter you must slow down, sound it out, make the understanding of it work.

And here is the awkward intuition: we are playing Joseph out when we are impatient with him, we are recreating the school instincts the very book itself shows – that good conversation was normal and all the rest was whistle. The noise that Joseph makes is in fact data on culture: it indicates age, religion, a sense of the place that he lives in, and a blind unwillingness to adapt himself to strangers. I started to appreciate Brontё in not making him smoothed out for our comfort – she doesn’t make the poor readable by speaking like us.

Addressing: Names, titles, and endearments (or abuse)

Addressing in Wuthering Heights – names, titles, pronouns – encode hierarchy and intimacy that is frequently lost in modern English. Miss Catherine, Master Hareton, Mr Heathcliff: they are not adverse; they are social tools. The fact that Heathcliff has no surname identifies him as an outsider early into the story; this is followed by the title of Mr Heathcliff which gives him a certain appearance of respectability that society cannot ignore.

 I find this interesting as it shows how identity may be grammatical. We discuss identity today in the sense of writing about yourself, whereas Brontё demonstrates identity as something that others draw on your back as they live. The formality of Lockwood (who uses ‘Mr Heathcliff’) does not fit the custom of the house and that opposition is the character development.

The most telling scene is the use of the tense of pronouns ‘thou’ and ‘you’. Mr Earnshaw raves at Catherine with ‘thou’; Catherine responds with ‘you’. I almost shouted with approval at her answer – it was like a Victorian mic-drop, audacious and yet rebellious again.

However, I also read it as a language caution sign: there are never neutral pronouns. Even today, when English is trying to make everyone equal by calling them just ‘you’, we still form new politics of pronouns, by title, honorific, by ma’am/sir, first-name culture, and even the politics of the strategic use of the word ‘buddy’. We haven’t lost hierarchy, we have simply made it less noticeable.

Nelly notes that Catherine who has lived with the Lintons is acting better and ashamed of being rude in the face of constant courtesy. At home, however, she possesses little inclination to practise politeness. This is where the language turns some sort of costume drama that has real effects: Catherine gets to know what it is like to talk like a respectable person – but she does not cease to be herself.

And I cannot but wonder: we tend to idealise Catherine as being wild, but part of that wildness is a denial of her being tamed by words. Her insurrection is, partially, syntactic: she will not necessarily talk as a lady is supposed to talk.

Affective intensity: The passion and the pain

Brontё’s characters do not express themselves, rather they proclaim their emotions in a dramatic manner. Heathcliff screams, “I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!". The love speech between Catherine and the other blurs the separation between the self and other. The emotional range of the novel can be too much nowadays – but it is the superfluity which makes the book memorable.

I once thought that melodrama was something insulting. Brontё changed my mind. Stunningly, in Wuthering Heights, melodrama occurs when the hunger of the extraordinary is impossible to sustain with the ordinary language.

As I read the wail of Heathcliff – “I CANNOT live without my life! I CANNOT live without my soul!” – I shuddered. The paper screamed as if I could hear him! In spite of the archaic wording, the emotional reality hits like a brick.

My critical reservations are these: occasionally the reader interprets the emotional extremity of Brontё as the universal standard of love. I don’t know whether it’s intended to be ideal or not. We can also read it as a case study in obsession – how love, when made with possession, results in a form of spiritual violence. When love turns into possession, it erases the boundary between self and other, as if the beloved is no longer a person but a “life” or “soul” you must own to survive. That intensity becomes spiritual violence because it demands total fusion – using cosmic, absolute language (“cannot live,” “soul,” “hell”) to justify obsession, leaving the other no space to exist freely.

Brontё’s language raises the emotional appeal with metaphors and cosmic words: souls, devils, heaven and hell. The characters are unable to stay within the human size and must enlist the universe to support them. Catherine thinks of her love for Edgar as something that changes seasonally and then her love for Heathcliff is like the everlasting rocks of the earth – needful and not pleasurable.

I am uncomfortable with that metaphor in a productive manner. Necessary love may sound romantic before it dawns on you that necessity may be a cage. With the help of Brontё, we must ask ourselves at what point does devotion become fate, at what point does fate become a pretext?

In my case, the most disturbing point is that the extreme emotion makes linguistic sense in the novel. When you take in the register, the declarations no longer sound excessive, but like another technology of emotions, the older language whereby no one had to shrink from their feelings into an acceptable discourse.
 

Civility and incivility: Pushing the traditional pattern

Wuthering Heights may be a surprise to anyone who is expecting the restraint of Jane Austen, a surprise because it swaps polite restraint for harsh, confrontational candour, especially at Wuthering Heights. Brontë also shows manners can be a weapon – sometimes kindness, sometimes control – so the moral compass stays unsettled. In Thrushcross Grange, we have grace and etiquette, whilst at Wuthering Heights, niceties, like leaves, scatter in the wind. For example, Heathcliff does not see the necessity to be polite to Lockwood, being his tenant. The exchanges are usually confrontational, crude – inhuman even.

I liked this candour – it felt refreshing, as though I had come out into the cold moor wind after lingering in a stuffy parlour. The characters express themselves without mincing words. However, politeness is also revealed by Brontë as a weapon of social life: civility can turn outcasts, humiliating and taming them.

This is the twist that I cannot help thinking about. However, sometimes politeness is kindness and sometimes it is control. It is one thing to be polite at the Grange, and another to be rude and appear honest at the Heights. Brontë does not allow settling on a plain moral compass.

The fact that Catherine switches her language when she spends time with the Lintons points out the strain between social graciousness and crudeness. I read her better manners not as learning to be moral but as learning to be acceptable. And that poses a painfully contemporary question: how far our good behaviour is really ethical, and how far it is an exercise in survival.  And, in case we are too quick to judge the characters as uncivilised, we may miss how the novel challenges the very concept of civilised speech. It appears that Brontë is posing the question: how helpful can politeness be when accompanied by exploitation, cruelty of classes, and lack of emotions?