Timelines in Emily Brontës «Wuthering Heights». Michael Weber

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I. Questions and Contradictions

When reading Wuthering Heights, sooner or later – and always when it is too late to orientate oneself chronologically – the question arises as to the timing of events at Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange. The reason for this is the legendary “confusion of minds” which inevitably sets in during reading.¹ This confusion is due to the year 1801 given at the beginning of the novel, which suggests that events can be dated from this point on, and that Mr. Lockwood arrives at Thrushcross Grange in the winter towards the end of 1801 when Ellen Dean then begins her story. After this, the novel is filled with an abundance of time spans with reference to the second absolute year named in the text, 1778, the year of Hareton Earnshaw’s birth (Chapters 7 and 8). Confusing forward and backward references also appear, along with a plethora of indefinite time expressions. The third and last absolute year named in the text, 1802, appears surprisingly late towards the end of the novel at the beginning of Chapter 32.

      Based on these time references, literary criticism has contended, for example, that the wedding of Catherine Earnshaw and Edgar Linton takes place three years after the death of Edgar’s father when Hareton is nearly five years old, and that Cathy is eighteen and Hareton twenty-three when they become lovers. These claims suggest that the major episode – the short, highly dramatic period with the near-fatal fall of Hareton, the disappearance of Heathcliff and the illness of Catherine Earnshaw – takes place in the year 1780, the wedding in 1783, the death of Catherine Earnshaw in 1784, and that the relationship between Cathy and Hareton begins in 1802, the same year in which Mr. Heathcliff dies. However, there is another indirect time reference to the birth of Hareton Earnshaw, namely that Cathy is thirteen and Hareton eighteen when they meet for the first time. This places their rendezvous in 1796, Cathy’s birth in 1783 and the wedding of Catherine Earnshaw and Edgar Linton in 1782. These dates are corroborated by Ellen Dean’s statement that her story begins almost twenty-three years after the birth of Hareton, that is in 1800, not in 1801.

In light of these contradictions, the general reader resolves to re-read the novel at some point and to pay closer attention to all the time expressions in order not to lose track of time again. This resolution either remains just that, due to insufficient interest in fictional numbers, or it ends unsuccessfully: even re-readers will still not know exactly how long Catherine is engaged, how old she is when she ←13 | 14→dies, how long Mr. Heathcliff lives after her death and how old he is when he dies, or how long after Edgar Linton’s funeral Mr. Lockwood appears at Wuthering Heights, to name just a few examples. The general reader will also not recognise in the Cathy of Ellen Dean’s account the Cathy of Mr. Lockwood’s and will gradually even mix up the two Catherines, losing all feeling for the intervals of time between events, eventually realising that “a powerful and accurate memory” is needed to understand Wuthering Heights.²

If readers turn to academic criticism for help, they will find only divergent and unconvincing opinions on the – for a classic novel like Wuthering Heights – unusually extensive and complicated references to time and their relevance. This will confirm the old observation that literature on Wuthering Heights is “abundant and its incoherence striking”.³ There are in fact only four chronological studies that are sufficiently detailed and that present distinct versions of the novel’s chronology, namely those by Charles Sanger (1926), Charles Clay (1952), S. A. Power (1972) and Stuart Daley (1974). All these authors assume that the year 1801 mentioned at the beginning of the novel is the crucial date for determining the novel’s chronology, taking this date as the basis for their calculations without questioning it. In his analysis of the internal structure of the novel, by which he clearly means the time frame or temporal structure, Sanger establishes a time scheme for the plot which is not always accurate. He also works out the first and only comprehensive chronology and genealogy of the Earnshaw and Linton families, though without going into much detail, arguably due to lack of space. He recommends further study on the question of whether Emily Brontë worked with a calendar, something that he himself does not believe (Sanger, pp. 11, 19). Clay, in his commentary on the chronology of Wuthering Heights, also constructs a genealogy, which he explains in more detail than Sanger, though without referencing Sanger’s research. He believes, like Sanger, that he is able to detect errors in the time structure of the novel, tangling himself up in contradictions in the process (Clay, p. 100). Power points out individual discrepancies in Clay’s research and finds contradictions in the work of Sanger as well. Nevertheless, like Sanger, he assumes that Wuthering Heights is not based on a real calendar. Lastly, Daley (1974, p. 337), adopting and modifying Sanger’s chronology, assumes there to be a “precise […] timing of events”, a time scheme based on historical almanacs, though it is not entirely decipherable and contains errors.⁴

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Besides these four authors, a few other critics have looked at the chronology of Wuthering Heights: Inga-Stina Ewbank (1976) recaps Daley’s dates, making only one change. Her research cannot therefore be counted as an independent chronology. The same applies to Masao Miyoshi’s “internal chronology”, first published in 1989 without commentary and then re-published unchanged in 1994. Miyoshi splits Sanger’s chronology in two, shortens it, reformulates it in places and makes only one change – that of the date of Mr. Heathcliff’s death. Moreover, he adds inaccurate information regarding the dates on which, in his opinion, Ellen Dean tells Mr. Lockwood about the Earnshaw and Linton families. In his monograph A Chronology of the Process of Writing Wuthering Heights, Edward Chitham (1998) uses data from the works of Sanger, Clay, Power, Daley and Ewbank.⁵ He does not undertake any of his own research into the internal chronology of Wuthering Heights, and his remarks concerning the chronology of the novel are ambivalent. On the one hand, he speaks of an “intellectual control of the material”, a “careful chronological framework” and a “tight chronological control”, undertaken only secondarily by Emily Brontë after 1845 for various reasons. On the other hand, he alleges that the “arithmetic [of the chronology] simply does not add up”, that there are “inconsistencies”, that the novel is a “chronological muddle” (an expression that Sanger uses before him) and that Emily Brontë made errors of calculation in her chronology. Chitham asserts that, because of this, the chronology is not perfect and sometimes appears “intractable”. He puts this down to the fact that Emily Brontë failed to correct some of these errors, possibly because it was more important to her to keep the temporal references to her own life than to have a consistent chronology.⁶ Moreover, Chitham (1998, p. 5) believes that Wuthering Heights “only gave up its chronological framework in the 1920s”, clearly thinking of Sanger’s publication of 1926, though Sanger himself never made such a claim. Like Chitham, Christopher Heywood (2004, pp. 433f.) tries to get to grips with the arithmetic of the chronology by using real data, albeit with data from local events from the history of Yorkshire rather than with data from Emily Brontë’s biography. To do so, he makes use of some of Sanger’s data, without adopting Sanger’s formulation of the text passages and “actions” that he uses – although he doubts that Sanger’s chronology is correct. He therefore does not create a distinct, consistent chronological study, either.

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