The Effective Protagonist in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel: Scott, Bronte, Eliot, Wilde (Nineteenth Century)

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The Effective Protagonist in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel

For Ynaieˆ and Beatrice

The Effective Protagonist in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel Scott, Bronte¨, Eliot, Wilde

TERENCE DAWSON

# Terence Dawson 2004 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. The author has asserted his moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Gower House Croft Road Aldershot Hampshire GU11 3HR England

Ashgate Publishing Company Suite 420 101 Cherry Street Burlington, VT 05401-4405 USA

Ashgate website: http://www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Dawson, Terence The effective protagonist in the nineteenth-century British novel: Scott, Bronte¨, Eliot, Wilde. – (The nineteenth century series) 1. Scott, Walter, Sir, 1771–1832. Ivanhoe 2. Wilde, Oscar, 1854–1900. Picture of Dorian Gray 3. Bronte¨, Emily, 1818–1848. Wuthering Heights 4. Eliot, George, 1819–1880. Silas Marner 5. English fiction – 19th century – History and criticism 6. English fiction – 19th century – Themes, motives 7. Jungian psychology I. Title 823.8 009352 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Dawson, Terence. The effective protagonist in the nineteenth-century British novel: Scott, Bronte¨, Eliot, Wilde/ Terence Dawson. p. cm.--(The nineteenth century series) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-7546-4135-X (alk. paper) 1. English fiction--19th century--History and criticism. 2. Characters and characteristics in literature. 3. Wilde, Oscar, 1854–1900. Picture of Dorian Gray. 4. Bronte¨, Emily, 1818–1848. Wuthering Heights. 5. Scott, Walter, Sir, 1771–1832. Ivanhoe. 6. Eliot, George, 1819–1880. Silas Marner. I. Title. II. Nineteenth century (Aldershot, England) PR868.C47D39 2003 823 0.80927--dc22 2003063729 ISBN 0 7546 4135 X Printed on acid-free paper Typeset by Tradespools, Frome, Somerset Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wilts

Contents List of Figures Acknowledgements The Nineteenth Century General Editors’ Preface

vii ix xi

Introduction On Critical Assumptions On the Adjective ‘Jungian’ A Post-Jungian Methodology Anima/Animus Possession The Effective Protagonist in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel Objectives

1 2 3 6 16

PART ONE: ANIMA POSSESSION 1. ‘A Victim of his Own Contending Passions’: Ivanhoe, Cedric of Rotherwood and the Logic of Romance The Argument England and the Temple Cedric as Effective Protagonist Cedric as Thrall to his own Dream Rotherwood: Cedric and Bois-Guilbert Ashby-de-la-Zouche: The Nature and Function of Coincidence The Siege of Torquilstone: Aspects of the Shadow Aftermath in the Forest: Reluctance to Learn The Trial at Templestowe: The Glory and Limitations of Chivalry The Epilogue: Rowena and Rebecca Conclusions 2.

‘Man’s Deeper Nature is Soon Found Out’: Psychological Typology, the Puer Aeternus, and Fear of the Feminine in The Picture of Dorian Gray The Argument (1) A Portrait of Basil Hallward

19 23

29 31 33 35 37 39 43 46 57 60 63 65

67 67 69

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(2) (3)

The Psychology of the Puer Aeternus The Fear of the Feminine

PART TWO: ANIMUS POSSESSION 3. ‘An Oppression Past Explaining’: Wuthering Heights and the Struggle for Deliverance from the Father The Present and the Past The Argument (1) An Oppression Past Explaining (2) The Myth (I): Escape from Wuthering Heights (3) The Myth (II): Inability to Settle at Thrushcross Grange (4) Catherine’s History (I): The Evolution of a FatherComplex (5) Catherine’s History (II): A Tentative Deliverance (6) Conclusion 4.

‘Light Enough To Trusten By’: Structure and Experience in Silas Marner The Argument The Parallels Between the Two Plots Nancy, the Animus, and the Shadow Nancy and Animus Possession ‘Light Enough to Trusten By’ Conclusions

Bibliography Index

92 110

131 133 136 139 156 171 199 235 248

253 255 258 262 268 271 276 281 295

List of Figures 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6

The Narrative Structure of Wuthering Heights The Marriage Quaternio A Flawed Engagement Parallel Histories The Quaternio at the heart of Wuthering Heights The Ambivalence of the Central Events

137 170 170 206 246 247

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Acknowledgements My warmest thanks to all those colleagues who have taken time to read and comment on various parts of the argument outlined in this study, especially to Clive Scott and Vic Sage (East Anglia), Richard Sheppard (Christ Church, Oxford), Elinor Shaffer (London), Gerald Gillespie (Stanford), Robert Scott Dupree (Dallas), George Landow (Brown), Jan Kemp (Auckland), Susan Ang, Arthur Lindley and John Richardson (Singapore), Joe Henderson (San Francisco) and the late Marie-Louise von Franz (Zurich). I am also very grateful to the Modern Humanities Research Association and the editors of the Modern Language Review, and to the editors of The Psychoanalytic Review, Orbis Litterarum and New Comparison for allowing me to reuse and rework material from articles originally published in these journals; and to Princeton University Press and Routledge for permission to quote from The Collected Works of C.G. Jung (Princeton and London, 1953–76) and Visions: Notes of the Seminar Given by C.G. Jung in 1930–34, ed. Claire Douglas (Princeton and London, 1997). A Note on Textual Practice All in-text references to The Collected Works of C.G. Jung are to volume and paragraph number.

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The Nineteenth Century General Editors’ Preface The aim of the series is to reflect, develop and extend the great burgeoning of interest in the nineteenth century that has been an inevitable feature of recent years, as that former epoch has come more sharply into focus as a locus for our understanding not only of the past but of the contours of our modernity. It centres primarily upon major authors and subjects within Romantic and Victorian literature. It also includes studies of other British writers and issues, where these are matters of current debate: for example, biography and autobiography, journalism, periodical literature, travel writing, book production, gender, non-canonical writing. We are dedicated principally to publishing original monographs and symposia; our policy is to embrace a broad scope in chronology, approach and range of concern, and both to recognize and cut innovatively across such parameters as those suggested by the designations ‘Romantic’ and ‘Victorian’. We welcome new ideas and theories, while valuing traditional scholarship. It is hoped that the world which predates yet so forcibly predicts and engages our own will emerge in parts, in the wider sweep, and in the lively streams of disputation and change that are so manifest an aspect of its intellectual, artistic and social landscape. Vincent Newey Joanne Shattock University of Leicester

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Introduction One should never forget that one dreams in the first place, and almost to the exclusion of all else, of oneself. (C.G. Jung, ‘The Meaning of Psychology for Modern Man’, 1933) It would be hard to count the novelists who imagined – in the epoch of Realism – that they were ‘objective’ because they suppressed the signs of the ‘I’ in their discourse! (Roland Barthes, ‘The Discourse of History’, 1967)

The Effective Protagonist in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel explores the correlation between narrative structure, gender, and the governing psychological concern at the heart of four well-known nineteenth-century British novels. It is an exercise in post-Jungian methodology and literary criticism, whose overarching claim is that the opening situation in a novel represents an implicit challenge facing not the obvious hero or heroine, but a character that I describe as the ‘effective protagonist’. To illustrate this claim, two sets of novels with unexpectedly comparable dilemmas have been paired: Ivanhoe with The Picture of Dorian Gray and Wuthering Heights with Silas Marner. Three of these works bear titles indicative of their hero or heroine, and few would dispute the claim that the central figures of Wuthering Heights are Cathy Earnshaw and her friend Heathcliff. But as we shall see, in all four novels the effective protagonist is not the obvious hero or heroine, but an apparently minor figure whose crucial function in the ordering of the events has been overlooked. Re-reading these very different texts in relation to the effective protagonist provides a new way of exploring their psychological implications, uncovers startling new issues at the heart of each of them, redefines the nature of the dominant concerns of fictions devised by male and female writers, and suggests that the engagement with the psychological concerns it identifies represents an important aspect of literary tradition.

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The Effective Protagonist in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel is also a study of the nature and implications of misplaced attachment. In each of the texts examined, a male character behaves unconscionably toward a female character and the latter suffers. And in each text, the cruelty takes a different form: from more or less unconscious psychological pressurizing to more or less deliberate physical abuse. In Ivanhoe, Cedric bullies his ward Rowena into an engagement to a man whom she has no wish to marry and Bois-Guilbert, in a highly charged and unforgettable scene, tries to compel a magnificently defiant Rebecca to give herself to him. In Wilde’s only novel, Dorian Gray falls in love with a young actress to whom he quickly becomes engaged. One evening, she acts badly and he brutally rejects her. In Wuthering Heights, violence is not exceptional; it is the norm. Mr Heathcliff’s merciless goading of Isabella and his brutality toward the second-generation Catherine, as when he throws her across his knee and gives her a ‘shower of terrific slaps’ on her head, are only the most obvious examples. In comparison, Godfrey’s cruelty toward his fiance´e Nancy Lammeter, in Silas Marner, might appear slight – until one remembers that a man cannot inflict a greater hurt on a woman who trusts him than to deceive her. How and why do male characters behave so cruelly toward female characters they pretend they love? And are there any significant differences between the depictions of cruelty in texts written by men and by women? This study not only uncovers surprising and intriguing explanations for such unkind behaviour, but also provides a sustained defence of a specific post-Jungian methodology.

On Critical Assumptions In the 1930s, Picasso produced a number of works that feature a minotaur. Amongst them is Minotaur and Dead Mare before a Grotto, a striking ink-and-watercolour painting dated 6 May 1936. To the left is a cliff with the dark mouth of a grotto facing onto a bay. From the cave, two hands extend tentatively towards the central figure of a standing minotaur that appears to have just emerged from the darkness of the grotto. In its right arm, the minotaur is carrying a dead mare. Its left arm is raised as if to ward off the figure, on the right of the picture, of a young woman whose torso rises from behind a broken wall that might also be a giant fist in which she is held. She is lifting a veil from her face as she stares intently at the minotaur. The focal point of the painting is in the upper centre: gazing over the dead mare in its arm and yet not quite at the viewer, is the enormous head of the minotaur – beautifully, painstakingly, lovingly drawn in Indian ink.

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Looking at this work from a distance of about twelve or fifteen feet, one is struck by the minotaur’s expression. The crooked smile and a disturbing gleam in its eyes suggest triumphant, lecherous, even sadistic intentions. As one steps forward, these are gradually transformed into an expression of unbearable and tragic sadness. The impression of gloating cruelty is utterly dispelled and one notices, instead, the tear-filled eyes and an expression of truly harrowing sorrow. The contrast between the two expressions is bewildering, even disturbing. Only a few steps are enough to cause one to read the painting very differently. Fascinated disgust is replaced by a searing empathy. It takes only two or three steps to read this painting in a dramatically different way. When standing at a distance, one cannot see the evidently genuine grief. When standing close, one is utterly unaware of the sadism. Whichever one notices first, the other comes as a shocking surprise. Each reading is self-sufficient. Each reading is exclusive. And yet each reading is incomplete without an awareness of the other. The same applies to readings of narrative fictions. We tend to see in a text only what our own critical assumptions enable us to. And because we assume that what we see is an objective fact about the text, we are suspicious of any claims based on other critical assumptions. We prefer to dismiss them as ‘subjective’ rather than make the effort to understand what happens when a text is explored from a different point of view. The value of a reading should not rest on whether its findings corroborate our own assumptions, but on whether it can enhance overall understanding of the text in question. The only requirements are that each reading be coherent and self-sufficient. For this reason, each reading will inevitably seem exclusive. And yet each reading will be incomplete without an awareness of the fullest possible range of other coherent critical possibilities.

On the Adjective ‘Jungian’ The name of Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961) elicits unusually diverse reactions. Some dismiss him as an opportunist and a charlatan, as a man who left much to be desired in both his professional and his private life (Stern, 1976; Noll, 1994 and 1997). A characteristic of this group is a tendency to gleefully berate his ideas, very often without producing any evidence of having understood them (McGowan, 1994). And others, perhaps wilfully, continue to regard him as a pioneer psychologist, the man whose ideas offer the most persuasive methodology yet devised for understanding the workings of the unconscious mind (von Franz, 1975 and 1993; van der Post, 1975; Stevens, 1990).

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Albeit sometimes grudgingly, it has long been acknowledged that many of Jung’s ideas have the potential to make a major contribution to literary criticism. They never have. Ever since the 1930s a steady stream of so-called ‘Jungian criticism’ has appeared, of very uneven quality. Some of it is tediously predictable; some of it, especially recent studies in post-Jungian theory, is excellent (for example, Rowland, 1999; Hauke, 2000). In many ways, Jungian approaches to both literature and culture generally are in better health than they have been for many years. But they have yet to make any major impact, let alone a sustained impact on mainstream debate. Although Jung anticipated a great many of the directions that contemporary ideas have taken (see Samuels, 1997, esp. pp. 4–7), his work barely features on most academic courses in psychology. It has been argued that this is largely because some of Freud’s advocates were determined to marginalize his ideas and there may be some substance in this claim (Gallant, 1996). But at the end of the day, primary responsibility for any marginalization that Jung’s ideas have suffered must rest firmly with the Jungian community. The inevitable consequence of the failure of his followers to make a persuasive claim for the lasting relevance of Jung’s legacy is that, outside Jungian circles, his ideas are not only poorly understood, but also significantly misrepresented. One widespread and yet mistaken assumption held by a great many psychologists of other persuasions – as well as almost all academics teaching literature at tertiary level – is that Jungians are a more or less homogenous group with more or less identical concerns. This simply is not so. In the last half-century, those who acknowledge a debt to Jung’s ideas have developed along very different paths. Although very few of them like to be identified with any group, it was inevitable that they should be classified together according to the main tendencies of their ideas. In the 1950s and 1960s, there were two major camps, often referred to as the Zu¨rich and London schools. It was not long before the rapid growth of interest in Jung in the United States made this division untenable. In 1985 Andrew Samuels distinguished three different orientations, which he called the ‘classical’, ‘developmental’ and ‘archetypal’ schools. The ‘classical school’ describes those who continue to develop more or less within the tradition established by Jung. The ‘developmental school’ originated in London but now has adherents across the world. It differs from the ‘classical school’ both in its insistence on the early development of the ego and in a greater willingness to cross-fertilize with other schools of psychoanalysis (for example, Kleinian). The ‘archetypal school’, whose best-known

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representative is James Hillman, is characterized by a concern with the archetypal dimension of all experience, sometimes to the point of excluding any interest in the ego. By 1998, however, Samuels found it necessary to reclassify the schools of post-Jungian analytical psychology. He considered the archetypal school to have been ‘either integrated or eliminated as a clinical entity’ (Samuels, 1998, p. 21). And he now saw four distinct groupings: a fundamentalist school, the classical school, the developmental school and a Jungian merger with psychoanalysis. The differences between these schools are striking. Jungians working within the classical school (as well as the archetypal school, which continues to influence literary criticism) place considerable emphasis on the nature and implications of archetypal imagery. And indeed, an interest in archetypal images and their possible implications is likely to play a part in almost all readings indebted to Jung. Even so, and this is the important point, it should not be assumed that every ‘Jungian’ reading of a text is interested only (or even primarily) in the mythical or archetypal dimension of its dominant images. For Jungians working within the developmental school give far greater attention in their analysis to the ‘ego’, that is, to the client. They are less interested in exploring the mythical dimension of the client’s dreams than they are in establishing their possible significance for the specific individual who dreamt them. In other words, the amplification of archetypal material is not the defining aspect – indeed, it is not even a necessary aspect – of a Jungian methodology. Almost the only thing that the representatives of the various schools have in common is an acknowledgement of Jung’s influence on a major aspect of their own thinking. In all other respects, they could hardly be more different. Jungians today are not a monolithic group who continue to parrot the ideas advanced by Jung. At least three of the four schools identified by Samuels represent a significant departure from Jung. And even within each of these, such considerable variances exist that it may not be long before it becomes necessary to identify further basic differences of emphasis. Post-Jungian psychology is in a continuous process of renewal. In short, the adjective ‘Jungian’ does not indicate an ‘adherence’ to a given body of ideas, or to a single methodology, or even to a set of concerns. It indicates a range of distinct methodologies, each of which explores a very different aspect of Jung’s legacy. Hence the need for the term ‘post-Jungian’, which I use here in the same sense as Samuels in a recent explanation of what he intended to denote when he coined it: ‘I meant a connection to and at the same time a critical distance from Jung’ (Samuels, 1998, p. 19; italics in original).

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A Post-Jungian Methodology The Effective Protagonist in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel is an apologia for only one possible post-Jungian methodology. It borrows from all of the three schools initially identified by Samuels, albeit not equally. But within the spectrum, for the most part it places itself somewhere between the classical and the developmental schools. From the classical school, it borrows Jung’s own emphatic interest in the possible psychological significance of the product in question. In other words, in each of the four chapters that make up this study the focus will be on the possible psychological significance of the text. The following readings owe little or nothing to biography. They are emphatically grounded in an analysis of their various textual interactions. But they acknowledge a weakness in Jung’s own emphasis. The greatest single weakness running through Jung’s various works is not, as is often claimed, his methodology. This may lack discipline (indeed, it does), but there is nothing intrinsically problematic about his methodology. The greatest single weakness of his various theories is his apparent lack of concern with the subject of the experiences that he analyses. For Jung is always so preoccupied with the amplification of dream material (that is, with the broader, more ‘collective’, more universal implications of the dreams and texts he examines) that he pays very little attention to the specific individuals and conditions that produced them (for example, see Henry Murray’s ‘Postscript’ to the 1976 edition of Jung’s Visions Seminars, p. 517). And not surprisingly, this has contributed to the view that his ideas are poorly rooted in any social or even individual reality. Of the various post-Jungian schools, the developmental places most emphasis on the subject. And this may account for it being far and away the most popular approach today among Jungian psychotherapists. The strength of the developmental school is its interest in the specific individual that is the client. Its weakness is that its adherents tend to focus their attention on a relatively limited range of issues, notably early childhood experiences and the transference and counter-transference process (see Kirsch, 2000, pp. 246 and 254). Not surprisingly, it has had little impact on literary criticism. The Effective Protagonist in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel represents an endeavour to fuse the strengths of the classical and developmental schools. From the classical school, it borrows an emphasis on uncovering the psychological implications of a text. And from the developmental school, it borrows a concern with the value that the interactions within this text might have for a specific individual (cf. Jung, CW 7: 130). Its methodology has six characteristics, discussed below.

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A Necessary Premise

It is often held that the weakness of psychological analyses of literary works is that they require the reader to accept their premises. This both is, and is not so. Post-Jungian literary criticism rests on very much the same procedures as any other methodology. Its aims are to explore texts, to uncover patterns at work in these texts, to explicate these patterns, and to contribute to our understanding of both the personal and the cultural significance of the patterns it reveals. The aim of this study is no different from that of an essay written from any other critical perspective: to persuade the reader of the coherence and implications of its argument. And its argument, like all others, rests on its premises. A Jungian reading is built on the premise that everything in a text reflects an essentially imaginal reality pertinent to an aspect of the writer’s inner world and, by extension, also to his or her personality. In other words, both the setting and all the interactions described in a text are viewed as the expression of an identifiable psychological process. In other words, whatever care a writer might have taken to make his or her characters credible social types, the Jungian critic assumes that they can also be viewed as personifications of different aspects of the writer’s personality, and that the course of their interactions gives expression to a significant psychological dilemma facing the author at the time of writing. (2)

The Importance of Narrative Structure

One of the more disturbing characteristics of recent literary criticism is the increasing tendency to build an argument on only a handful of isolated textual moments. No matter how intriguing the findings of such criticism might be – and they often are – one is not always convinced that the selected incidents are sufficiently representative to serve as the foundation for a reading of the text as a whole. A psychological analysis requires coherence, and if it is intended as a reading of a text, it must self-evidently shed light on the whole text. Just as every school of psychoanalysis rests its claims on extensive ‘case studies’, so an essay whose purpose is to illustrate a specific psychoanalytic methodology must rest its claims on extended close readings. One of the main contentions in the following pages is that a reading of a nineteenth-century novel must begin with a consideration of its specific narrative structure. For whatever it might have in common with other works, every text is a unique narrative structure. ‘Narrative structure’ is not the same as ‘plot’. The plot describes the ordering of the events of a story when considered in literal terms. For example, in Wuthering Heights, the first three chapters are set in the

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present. The next fourteen are set in the distant past. Most critics, imprisoned by literalism, assume that the earliest events described must be the origin of all the others. Freudian psychoanalysis follows this assumption. But it is by no means certain that all narrative fictions obey the same laws. For a Jungian, the remembered past is always governed by its relation to the present. And this is why, in this study, the phrase ‘narrative structure’ refers to the textual events as given us by the author, without any presupposition as to their possible chronological order. (3)

The Effective Protagonist

There is good reason to insist that the relation between a dream and the dreamer is comparable to that between a text and its author. Nevertheless, if literary criticism wants to apply a methodology evolved within the discipline of psychology, it must also remember that its subject is not a person, but a text. To what extent, then, can we identify the main protagonist of a novel with the author? Analysts are expected to know certain facts about their clients and they might very well interpret a dream in the light of such material. But they would never confuse their analysand’s representation of himself or herself (¼ the dream-ego) with their client (the ego). Any representation of the dreamer in a dream is only a representation. It might indicate something about an aspect of the dreamer’s personality; it is never considered a reflection of the whole person. In similar fashion, the literary critic should be wary of any equation between the hero or heroine of a novel and the author. It might be that a figure can be shown to represent an important aspect of a presumed author, but this aspect should not be confused with the entirety of the personality of the biographical author. Psychological approaches to literature are not necessarily a form of biographical criticism. In the following pages I shall stop short of exploring all but the most necessary biographical implications of my findings. My aim is to uncover and explore the psychological implications of four familiar texts. According to Jung, we feature in most – perhaps all – of our dreams: ‘one dreams in the first place, and almost to the exclusion of all else, of oneself’ (CW 10: 321). In some dreams, we appear more or less as we think we are in reality. In others, we appear in strangely distorted forms (for example, shorter or more aggressive or with curiously different attitudes). And in yet others, it is not clear whether we are part of the action or not: we are simply an observing consciousness. Thus, when interpreting a dream, the first task is to establish which figure can best be

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described as the primary carrier of the dreamer’s personality. Jung described this figure as the ‘dream-ego’. If we wish to apply Jung’s ideas to a literary text, the first task must be to identify the character that can best be defined as the primary carrier of the author’s unconscious personality. In other words, our overriding question should be: Whose story is given expression in the text? To discover this, one needs to do two things (cf. von Franz, 1982, pp. 27–8). Compare the situation at the outset of the work with the situation at its conclusion. And establish which of the characters is most radically changed by the events recounted. Novels invariably trace a major change affecting the central protagonist. In some cases, the character most changed by the events is the obvious hero/heroine and, in such cases, this character may very well be the primary carrier of the author’s personality. But just as there are dreams in which the dreamer features only as a very minor protagonist or just an observing consciousness, so there are novels in which an apparently minor character has an axial importance that is not immediately evident. The most significant change does not always affect the apparent hero/heroine, and the apparent hero/heroine is not always the primary carrier of the author’s personality. In a great many novels one quickly finds that another character – and this might be an apparently minor character – undergoes an even more significant change than the apparent hero/heroine. And if all the events of a novel can be convincingly related to a single character, even an apparently minor character, then no matter how unexpected the identification, there is good reason to describe this figure as the primary carrier of the author’s unconscious personality – but with a major proviso. Because of the selfevident differences that exist between dreams and novels, it may not be either appropriate or useful to describe this figure as the ‘dream-ego’. I have coined the term effective protagonist to describe the equivalent character in a literary fiction (Dawson, 1997). By this term, I mean to describe an axial character to which all the events of the novel can be related, without exception: even those events in which the effective protagonist takes no part reflect an aspect of a process affecting him or her. In other words, the effective protagonist is the character that determines both the structural and psychological coherence of the entirety of the narrative in question. (4)

Archetypal Images

A Jungian approach to narrative fictions will inevitably reflect the way in which a Jungian analyst interprets the figures encountered in dreams. Possibly the most common type of dream shows the dream-ego

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interacting with other dream-figures. By implication, the dream-ego belongs to one level of reality (let us call it imaginal) and all the other characters must belong to a significantly different level of reality (let us call it archetypal). And according to Jung, the most frequently encountered archetypal figures are the shadow and the anima/animus. (a)

The Shadow

Jung used the term ‘shadow’ to describe two very different entities. In the first place, he used it to describe the entirety of the unconscious. In this sense, the shadow refers to everything that the effective protagonist does not have under conscious control. Jung also used the term ‘shadow’ to describe a specific aspect of an individual’s unconscious personality; that is, a personification of ‘the ‘‘negative’’ side of the personality, the sum of all those unpleasant qualities [that he/she likes] to hide’ (CW 7: 103n.5). The shadow embodies everything that an individual ‘has no wish to be’ (CW 16: 470). It personifies all those attitudes and character traits of which the conscious ego is either unconscious, or not fully conscious, and with which he/she does not wish to deal. In other words, all those aspects of which he/she is not in complete control (for example, unrealistic ambition, small-mindedness, anger, etc.). James Hall defines both the ego and the shadow as ‘identity structures’ (Hall, 1983, pp. 14–16; 1986, p. 36). The shadow is always of the same sex as the effective protagonist. According to Jung, every dream refers to the situation in which the dreamer finds himself or herself in the present. It ‘shows the inner truth and reality of the patient as it really is: not as I conjecture it to be, and not as he would like it to be, but as it is’ (CW 16: 304). And this is especially true of the shadow. Edward Whitmont provides a useful example of what is meant by the shadow. He describes the case of a male client who considered himself liberal, tolerant and broad-minded. One night he had a dream: Coming home, I find that my apartment is occupied by a fascist who, with his militia, has turned everything upside down. He has arrested everybody in the house and put them in chains. The place is a shambles. (Whitmont, 1978, p. 161)

Reading the dream in the light of Jung’s hypothesis, its significance is clear: the apartment represents the dreamer. The fascist represents his shadow; that is, an aspect of his personality of which he is utterly unconscious. The man liked to think of himself as having liberal views; he was the kind of man who would say he abominated fascism. But,

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although he is utterly unaware that this might be so, his dream implies that he has a tendency to being a domestic bully. It provides a vivid representation not only of how – albeit unconsciously – he is behaving, but also of the consequences of his behaviour both for his family and for himself. They are in chains and his home (¼ his ego-structure) is a shambles. In other words, his unconscious suggests that he is not nearly as ‘liberal’ as he thinks he is. His shadow thus represents an unacknowledged – and therefore unexamined – tendency in his own personality. A dream only represents tendencies of our personality. The question is: how does one respond to such an unexpected view of oneself? Does one shrug it off? ‘Thank goodness it was only a dream!’ Or does one reflect on its implications and, if necessary, adjust one’s attitudes and behaviour accordingly? According to Jung, every dream implies a double challenge: first, to recognize what tendency is at issue and, secondly, to modify the attitude responsible for it. The dream will never tell us this. A dream is not an agony aunt; it has no moral message to advocate. But if it does indeed comment on various aspects of our personality that might need adjustment, then it can be described as having not perhaps a purpose (as it cannot be ascribed with volition), but a function: to urge the dreamer into taking another, closer look at him- or herself. (b)

The Anima/Animus

It is often thought that only larger-than-life contrasexual figures ‘qualify’ to be designated as anima or animus figures: this simply isn’t so. We all dream of contrasexual others: from the moment that we reflect on their possible significance for us, we are, in effect, regarding them as anima/ animus figures. Jungian psychology is always concerned with gender and, as a result, so too is Jungian literary criticism. Jung used the term anima (Latin ¼ ‘soul’) to describe the image of a woman or a feminine figure in a man’s dreams or fantasies, and animus (Latin ¼ ‘spirit’) to describe the image of a man or masculine figure in a woman’s dreams or fantasies. In contrast with the shadow, which Hall defines as an identity structure, the anima and animus are ‘relational structures’ (Hall, 1983, pp. 16–19). They imply a relationship either to persons of the opposite sex, or to the social world more generally, or even – indeed, perhaps most importantly – to the dreamer’s own imaginal world. The anima refers to a man’s innermost image of a woman, which is why it so often manifests itself as a ‘type’ rather than an individual. Jung identified four basic types (Eve, Helen of Troy, Mary, Sophia), and his

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followers have identified others. While it is, of course, theoretically interesting to note such different categories, the individual experience of the anima should never be squeezed into any classification. Female figures in a man’s dream should always be taken for what they are. A useful (because curious) example of what Jung meant by the anima is provided by a series of dreams taken from his writings. The dreams belonged to a young man who appears to have been utterly unaware of any need to ‘connect’ with his inner image of the feminine. In one of the dreams from the series, the young man dreamed of a white bird flying through the window of his room: ‘[The bird] perches on a table. Suddenly it changes into a fair-haired seven-year-old girl and just as suddenly back into a bird, which now speaks with a human voice’ (CW 9i: 359). We know little about this young man, but it would seem obvious that if he could dream of a bird changing into a young girl, whether the image in question was of someone he knew or not would make little difference: the fact that the bird and the girl are one suggests that ‘it/she’ pertains to an essentially imaginal reality. Emma Jung (Jung’s wife) also refers to this series in her own study of the anima. She comments: This shows that a feminine creature wants admission to the dreamer’s house; but it is still a child, that is, undeveloped; this is also expressed by the fact that it becomes a bird again. (Emma Jung, 1957, p. 79)

This interpretation – which the subsequent dreams recorded by Jung would seem to corroborate – suggests that the young man needed to develop a more appropriate relationship with his inner image of the feminine. Note that the emphasis in this hypothesis is not on the ‘nature’ of the anima, but on the man’s relation with his anima. A useful example of the animus is provided by Jung at the outset of an extended seminar, in which he analyses the dreams and waking fantasies of an intelligent thirty-year-old woman, a natural scientist by education. She dreamed: ‘I was going to see a doctor who lived in a house by the sea. I lost my way and desperately asked people to put me on the right path so that I could get to him.’ With puckish humour, and speaking in his somewhat stilted English, Jung commented: Freud would say wish-fulfilment – a resistance; she wishes not to find her way to you because things are getting disagreeable. And that is the truth too, there are doubts in her . . . Naturally, her first leap was at me. But I said no, thank you . . . If a dream should say that someone was going to see Dr C.G. Jung living on Seestrasse, Ku¨snacht, then I would admit it referred to myself. But [here the] problem is much greater than I, and it is wise to hold

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fast to the words the dream gives, because one cannot expect to be wiser than nature. (Jung, 1997/1998, pp. 13–16)

In Jung’s view, what was at stake was not a desire to meet a specific ‘doctor’ (the woman was in good physical health), but an unconscious desire to connect with an aspect of her personality to which she had paid too little attention – her inner image of the masculine. The doctor is an image of the animus; in other words, an imaginal figure pertaining to an essentially imaginal reality. And once again, we note that the emphasis in this interpretation is not on the ‘nature’ of the animus, but on the woman’s basic attitude towards her animus. The urgency of her need to meet her animus suggests that she was not paying sufficient attention to her inner world. This brings us to the defining characteristic of Jungian psychology. (5)

Compensation

Surprising as this might seem, half a century after the publication of his last great work, Jung’s single most important contribution to the domain of depth psychology is still not widely recognized. The defining characteristic of Jungian interpretation is not an interest in archetypal images, but the concept of compensation. In practice, Jung never altogether abandoned many aspects of Freudian theory. He continued to maintain that some dreams and other unconscious products (for example, waking fantasies) are indeed suggestive of conflicts that have been repressed according to the principles of psychoanalysis. But in the years following his break with Freud, he gradually came to the view that more often than not the contents of the unconscious ‘compensate’ an aspect of the subject’s conscious attitudes. Dreams, he writes, are ‘compensatory to the conscious situation of the moment’ (CW 8: 487; cf. CW 7: 92; CW 8: 545; CW 18: 507). And he described the psyche – by which he meant the totality of both the conscious and the unconscious mind – as ‘a selfregulating system’ (CW 7: 275; CW 8: 159). In the same way as every organism is constantly adjusting itself in order to grow to its maturity (a branch will grow toward the brightest clearing of light, a wound will create the conditions for its own healing), so the psyche is engaged in a continual process of self-regulation. Jung ascribed the need for such regulation to the imbalance, one-sidedness and excess that can arise from overdetermined conscious attitudes. In other words, dreams are concerned not with issues that the dreamer has ‘repressed’, but with issues with which the dreamer has yet to grapple. This implies that the unconscious is composed of material that

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INTRODUCTION

stands on the threshold of consciousness; it has not yet become conscious. And the crucial point to note is that whether it does so or not depends entirely on the subject’s attitude towards it. In order to illustrate this, let us refer once again to the dreams we have cited. In each of them, the dream-figure (shadow; anima/animus) can be said to compensate an aspect of the dreamer’s personality. The man who could not conceive that he might be a domestic bully dreams of a fascist invading his house: the image compensates his somewhat self-satisfied image of himself. The young man who is unconscious of any need to ‘connect’ with his inner image of the feminine has a naı¨ve and insubstantial relationship with women. His dream of his anima trying to take form in his life – the image of the bird/girl – thus compensates his hitherto undeveloped relation to the realm of the feminine. The young woman who dreams of going to find a doctor was rightly proud of an intelligence that allowed her to think that she was in complete control of her life (see Douglas, 1993). The image of her seeking a doctor when she was in the best of health compensates her confidence in her own self-sufficiency. In each case, the dream faces the dreamer with a challenge to come to terms with the implications of their dream. Each of the interpretations given suggests that a dream not only indicates the nature of a dilemma confronting the dreamer, but also, for the dreamer, represents an implicit challenge – a challenge that has two distinct aspects: 1.

2.

A challenge to acknowledge the relevance and implications of the dream to the situation in which the dreamer finds him-/herself at the time of the dream, and A challenge, facing the dreamer, to modify his or her assumptions and attitudes in the light of the dream.

Even the first step is not easy. We are often reluctant to acknowledge that we are not quite what we like to think we are. We are equally reluctant to imagine that we have any shortcomings in our relations either with the opposite sex or with our own inner world. But if the first step is a major hurdle, the second is an almost insurmountable obstacle. Goethe expressed this very succinctly in his extraordinary novella, Elective Affinities: We are willing to acknowledge our shortcomings, we are willing to be punished for them, we will patiently suffer much on their account, but we become impatient if we are required to overcome them. (1971, p. 181)

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The second part of the implicit challenge requires one to wrestle with and ‘overcome’ what are often very deeply engrained tendencies. Jung would sometimes refer to this process as an Auseinandersetzung, an untranslatable German word that suggests an active engagement with, or confrontation: ‘having it out with, discussing, [and] analyzing’, all with a view to ‘an eventual coming to terms’ with the issues at stake (see Hannah, 1981, p. 22). Dreams do not advance any specific view. Jung never ascribed the unconscious with intention: he simply affirmed that the contents of the unconscious stand in compensatory relation to a conscious attitude. If the subject (either consciously or unconsciously) recognizes this relation, his or her dreams can provide a useful means by which to identify and so correct inappropriate attitudes (cf. CW 10: 732). If for any reason the subject fails to heed its suggestions, his or her dreams very often become increasingly threatening or destructive. And yet, the same mechanism continues to apply; indeed, the more urgent the material of the dream, the more obvious is its compensatory function: ‘A compensatory content is especially intense when it has a vital significance for conscious orientation’ (CW 8: 487). Jung’s single most important contribution to psychoanalysis is neither his theory of a collective unconscious, nor even his identification of a number of archetypal images. It is his view that unconscious products have a potentially corrective function, that unconscious products compensate the one-sidedness of a society’s or a person’s conscious attitude. In other words, a dream represents a ‘challenge’ not necessarily to do anything, so much as to modify the attitude that is responsible for the impasse in which the individual implicitly finds himself or herself. (6)

The Personal Unconscious

Because most of Jung’s writings are predominantly about the collective unconscious, he is usually thought to have ‘discovered’ this level of unconscious experience. This assumption, however, is neither accurate nor helpful. All literature prior to the Romantic period – from Homer through to the middle of the eighteenth century – is predominantly about the collective imagination. Jung did little except to give it a name and identify some of its tendencies. And he needed to give it a name in order to distinguish it from the personal unconscious. Somewhat ironically, very little of his work is centrally concerned with the personal unconscious. And yet, if indeed he can be attributed with the discovery of any level of unconscious representation, it is of the personal unconscious.

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INTRODUCTION

Jung described the personal unconscious as composed of images familiar to the dreamer: that is, of material ‘comprising all the acquisitions of personal life, everything forgotten, repressed, subliminally perceived, thought, felt’ (CW 6: 842). And he described the collective unconscious as a composed of all other material, especially vivid, unexpected images for which the individual has no immediate associations, but which none the less can be likened to the interactions and images encountered in collective traditions such as myths. Because he had far more interest in such material, he never developed his definition of the personal unconscious. His works, however, require us to do so. This study is not built on biographical material and, consequently, it has no occasion to refer to the personal unconscious in the sense that Jung defined it. But there is good reason to extend his definition. In this study, I shall be using the term ‘personal unconscious’ to indicate a writer’s unique and very individual relation to his or her narrative; in other words, to indicate that the archetypal material encountered in the text has a specific and thus ‘personal’ significance for the author. This was not always so. It is only from about the middle of the eighteenth century that literary products begin to express genuinely personal concerns; in other words, to reveal not just the writer’s relation to collective issues and/or debates (this had always been the case and continues to be so), but also the ‘personal’ concerns and thus the personal (that is, the unique and individual) psychology of their author. As we shall see, all four of the novels explored in this study engage with material that might be attributed to the collective unconscious. But all of them also give expression to dilemmas of an emphatically personal significance to their author.

Anima/Animus Possession Archetypal images can exercise an extraordinary fascination upon any individual who experiences them – whether consciously or unconsciously – either in their dreams or waking fantasies. As a result, it often happens that individuals fall under their spell. Very often without realizing it, their thoughts keep returning to the archetypal image that fascinates them. As a result they unconsciously seek the experience of this image and find it where they can by projecting it onto an ‘other’ whom they invest either with larger-than-life qualities or attributes suggestive of characters from the world of mythology. As long as individuals show willing to adjust their attitudes towards figures such as the anima or the animus, these images generally manifest

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themselves in a more or less positive guise. But if for any reason an individual fails to heed the compensatory promptings of the archetypal image in question and thus perseveres in a misguided and ‘one-sided’ attitude, the unconscious has only one way in which to respond: by becoming more insistent. Under such circumstances, typically, it becomes either increasingly beguiling, or it begins to assume less and less attractive forms. Jung noted that when the latter occurs, the anima and the animus will assume somewhat negative characteristics: The anima is fickle, capricious, moody, uncontrolled and emotional, sometimes gifted with daemonic intuitions, ruthless, malicious, untruthful, bitchy, double-faced, and mystical. The animus is obstinate, harping on principles, laying down the law, dogmatic, world-reforming, theoretic, word-mongering, argumentative, and domineering. Both alike have bad taste: the anima surrounds herself with inferior people, and the animus lets himself be taken in by second-rate thinking. (CW 9i: 222ff.)

Jung claimed that an individual whose anima or animus has assumed such characteristics very often behaves as if ‘possessed’ by the same negative qualities as his anima/animus. A man with a moody anima might very well be moody; a woman with an argumentative animus may well be argumentative. Almost all behaviour connected with the contrasexual other that might be described either as negative or excessive stems from such anima- or animus possession. As long as a person’s ability to interact with others (especially of the opposite sex) is not adversely affected by such tendencies, there is no pressing need to overcome them. But if for any reason this ability is threatened and the individual loses the capacity to interact with others, then a serious problem arises. Anima and animus possession have not formed a major part of recent Jungian criticism – et pour cause: they come perilously close to unacceptable labels. They appear both reductive and essentialist. We should be wary, however, of sweeping them under the carpet merely because they embarrass. The questions that need to be addressed here are whether they have any validity at all and, if so, how they might be useful for the purposes of literary criticism. The first point to note is that Jung’s definitions are often formulated with infuriating smugness. He tended to write about archetypal images as if they were people and as if he alone knew how such images ‘behave’: ‘The anima is fickle’, etc. Such glib assertions grate. Clearly, however autonomous archetypal images might appear to be, they are not people. And ironically, if indeed there is any substance in Jung’s various theories, whatever characteristics are encountered in an archetypal image, their

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INTRODUCTION

autonomy is only apparent. They always reflect an aspect of the subject’s characteristic tendencies. This is why we need to take account of the subject whenever one considers archetypal material. And also why, in this study, I emphasize both the dilemma facing the effective protagonist and the specific process to which it gives rise. And secondly, one can never argue backwards, as both Jung and his early followers often did, and assert, for example, that because a man is moody, he must be suffering from anima possession, or because a woman offers forceful opinions, she must be suffering from animus possession. Such armchair psychology makes one squirm. And yet it does not represent the origin of Jung’s ideas. Almost all his theories were based on his understanding of the images encountered in dreams; that is, of various experiences of the unconscious. If his concepts of anima and animus possession are of any value, it must be as a way of understanding the nature of the unconscious dilemma confronting the subject. And this is why, in this study, we shall not argue from biographical material, but from the patterns of interaction found in each specific text. In spite of these two reservations, as we shall see in the course of this study, there is sufficient evidence to corroborate Jung’s basic position. My contention, however, is that if his terms are to enter the domain of literary criticism they need to be made both broader and more specific. Anima and animus possession are symptoms of misapprehension: the challenge is to discover the complexity of their cause and the significance of the different forms they take. In Part One of this study, we shall examine two very different novels, Ivanhoe and The Picture of Dorian Gray. At the heart of both works we discover a condition that might very well be described as anima possession. But in each novel, the condition takes a very different form, and as we shall see, in each case this is because of the enormous differences that exist between the attitudes expressed in the text. In Part Two of this study, we shall look at two equally different novels by women writers (Wuthering Heights, Silas Marner). My contention here is that both these works are centrally concerned with the condition that Jung defined as animus possession. But once again, the differences that give each text its specific characteristics come from the equally great differences between the attitudes, both conscious and unconscious, given expression in these texts. In other words, the terms anima and animus possession should not be seen as an attempt to fully explain any of the four works; in each case, one needs to establish the specific kind of possession at issue and exactly what it signifies. Men do not usually write well about women, and vice versa. And we note that a great many nineteenth-century novels are about not only misplaced attachment, but also its corollary: a misapprehension of the

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significance of the contrasexual other. And this very often results in a form of psychological possession. Realism should never be mistaken for reality: the contrasexual other is almost always determined by psychological factors pertinent to the effective protagonist (and by extension, also to the writer). This study seeks to explore the psychological implications of the different concerns found at the heart of novels written by men and by women. And, as we shall see, these often force us to (re)consider the two conditions that Jung identified as anima and animus possession.

The Effective Protagonist in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel In the following pages, we shall explore the possible psychological implications of four well-known nineteenth-century British novels in relation to the character that I define as the effective protagonist, that is, the character to whom all its events, without exception, are related. In none of the four novels examined is the effective protagonist the obvious hero or heroine; indeed, in most, the identity of the effective protagonist will come as something of a surprise. Every chapter offers a dramatically new reading of the text in question, resolves at least some of the problems that beset existent critical readings of these texts, and raises a number of hitherto unexamined issues for discussion. The first part of the study looks at two very different novels in which literary representations of men are either unwittingly or gratuitously cruel to a female figure that they idealize. The aim is to demonstrate that, in each text, the effective protagonist is faced by an implicit challenge to modify a misplaced attachment to his ‘anima’, that is, the personification of his instinctive attitude towards the feminine. Chapter 1 takes a close look at the best-known – and possibly leastunderstood – of the Waverley Novels. Ivanhoe is often derided for its pseudo-medieval trappings. There are many who wonder whether its facile oppositions merit serious critical attention. The problem, however, may stem from traditional assumptions. Reading the novel not ‘literally’, but as a reflection of a dilemma confronting its effective protagonist produces an unexpectedly coherent reading, and one that might still have some relevance: the problem of a man who is so absorbed in his romantic fantasies that he has lost touch with the reality in which he lives. The chapter begins with a sustained justification for regarding Cedric of Rotherwood, the father of the eponymous hero, as the ‘effective protagonist’ of the action. Although his importance has been noted by earlier critics (for example, McMaster, 1981, p. 64), this essay is the first to place him at the very centre of the novel. My contention is that

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INTRODUCTION

everything that happens in the text can be read as the expression of a conflict between two aspects of Cedric’s personality. While one part of him dreams about how he can bring about the restoration of a Saxon monarchy, another – and even more deeply unconscious – part of him reflects on the psychological implications of what it is that he seeks to achieve. The chapter examines the relation between the events and the dilemma facing the effective protagonist, the connection between the political and the personal, and the cruel effect of patriarchal obsession on a woman. Its aim is to demonstrate that this all-too-easily disparaged historical romance is a far more coherent, more intriguing, and more significant work than is usually realized. Chapter 2 explores the various kinds of misplaced attachments that lie at the centre of The Picture of Dorian Gray. The argument is in three sections. The first section demonstrates how Jung’s theory of psychological types can help to further specify the nature and implications of the interactional dynamics between the effective protagonist and his shadow. I begin by exploring the question why a character such as Basil should be so fascinated by Dorian. I provide a rationale for suggesting that Basil is the effective protagonist, and I then explore the relation between the dilemma facing him and the course of Dorian’s odyssey of experience. The aim is to show how the novel’s interactions are entirely determined by the nature of Basil’s psychological type, and the psychological type of his shadow, Lord Henry. The second section asks what it is about Dorian Gray that causes him to exercise such a fascination not only on Basil, but also on all who meet him. It calls upon Jung’s theory of archetypal images to demonstrate that Dorian Gray is invested with attributes disturbingly similar to those ascribed by Ovid not only to the young Dionysos, but also to Apollo. It then reflects on the significance and implications of these parallels, and suggests that the novel provides a case study of the fascination that an archetypal image of ‘eternal youth’ can exercise upon a particular kind of middle-aged man. It then relates this to the novel’s somewhat unusual pronouncements on aesthetics. The third section takes a close look at Dorian’s relationship with Sibyl Vane. It illustrates how Jung’s theory of archetypal images can also help to identify the various interrelated factors responsible for Dorian’s initial fascination with her, and why this is so rapidly replaced by ice-cold rejection. It argues that this pattern of behaviour is conditioned by an unconscious fear of the feminine. It then connects these findings to the challenge implicitly facing Basil Hallward. In the final section, the conclusions are briefly related to the author.

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The emphasis in the first part of the study is on consistency and coherence. Several critics have acknowledged the importance of Cedric in Ivanhoe; others, the importance of Basil in The Picture of Dorian Gray. But they have not fully explored the implications of such claims. Part One seeks to demonstrate how important it is to follow the logic of these claims to their conclusion; in other words, to produce a coherent reading of the whole text. Part Two of the study is altogether more startling and more challenging. It approaches its two component texts from a point of view that is utterly unexpected and will require considerable mental agility of the reader. The two novels have been chosen because they both feature a central female character that suffers from a devastating lack of confidence in her own worth as a result of a tendency to idealize the figure of the first man in her life: her father. The aim is to demonstrate that both Wuthering Heights and Silas Marner explore the incapacitating difficulties that a woman with an over-strong attachment to her father must face when it is time for her to ‘connect’ with her animus. Chapter 3, the pivotal chapter in this study, consists of an extended analysis of Wuthering Heights. It has been said that Emily Bronte¨’s only novel defies a coherent reading. This chapter demonstrates that when read in relation to the effective protagonist, it is both unusually and disturbingly coherent. Unexpected as this might seem, my contention is that the key to the novel’s structural and thematic coherence lies in the story that unfolds in the all-too-often neglected second generation. I define the second-generation Catherine as the effective protagonist and describe the story of her relationships with Hareton as the main plot. I argue that Thrushcross Grange represents her ego-structure and that Wuthering Heights represents a compound and ambivalent animusstructure. My purpose is to demonstrate the unexpected but extraordinary structural unity of the novel and to identify the harrowing process with which it is concerned. The argument is in five sections. The first, explores the situation depicted in the first three chapters: they are set in 1801, which can be regarded as ‘the present’. It provides reasons for regarding Catherine as the effective protagonist and defines the nature of the dilemma facing her. It notes that she is a virtual prisoner at Wuthering Heights, and explains the nature of the challenge facing her: she needs to escape back to her own home. The second section argues that the events set in the distant past (that is, the history of Cathy Earnshaw’s childhood) provide a mythic or archetypal representation of the challenge facing Catherine. Just as Catherine must find her way back to Thrushcross Grange, so Cathy ‘escapes’ from Wuthering Heights and finds her way to Thrushcross

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INTRODUCTION

Grange. It is shown how the story of Cathy’s childhood is entirely dictated by the dilemma facing her daughter in the first three chapters. The next section looks at the interactions that follow upon Mr Heathcliff’s unexpected return to Wuthering Heights. They are usually seen as the climax of the novel. The contention is that the series of unforgettable scenes that lead up to Catherine’s birth gives expression to a chillingly self-destructive dialectic between two aspects of a woman’s unconscious personality (Cathy and Isabella) and an intruder into her animus-structure, Wuthering Heights. The fourth section examines the harrowing origin of the dilemma facing the effective protagonist. It takes a close look at the story of Catherine’s childhood and of her over-dependence on her father Edgar Linton. The intention here is to demonstrate the relation between this and the hold that Mr Heathcliff, his dark counterpart, obtains on her; in other words, to explore the psychological implications of her overattachment to her father, to illustrate its inevitable consequences, and also, more surprisingly, to show how her attitudes as an adolescent determine all the corresponding events in the ‘first’ generation. The final section brings the argument to its ambivalent conclusion and discusses the tentative nature of what has been achieved. My purpose is to demonstrate that the novel gives expression to a devastating ‘odyssey of experience’ (Hillman, 1979, p. 24). Wuthering Heights is one of the most extraordinary, heterogeneous, polyvalent and disturbing narratives ever written. It describes not only the harrowing process that led Catherine into the fateful situation in which we discover her at the outset, but also the various attempts of the unconscious to goad her into freeing herself of her misplaced attachment to her father. After an account of such powerful emotions, it is only appropriate to close with an apparently very different kind of text: George Eliot’s Silas Marner. And yet, surprising as this might seem, Silas Marner has a great deal more in common with Wuthering Heights than might be thought. Both novels hinge upon a daughter’s fixation with a father-figure. For a close analysis of the two plots that make up George Eliot’s ‘charming minor masterpiece’ suggests that all its major events are directly related to Nancy Lammeter, an apparently minor figure hitherto almost completely ignored by critics. The novel tells how a woman whose love had frozen into fear unconsciously discovers a ‘light enough to trusten by’ that allows her to achieve at least a partial escape from her own self-doubts and a partial fulfilment of her desires. Critics have never found it easy to explain how Silas Marner might be related either to its author or her other works. But if read in relation to its effective protagonist, its theme is surprisingly pertinent to the impasse in which

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George Eliot found herself in 1860, and concerned with many of the same themes that are found in her other novels.

Objectives The Effective Protagonist in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel invites the reader to consider the dynamics of fictional relationships from a fresh point of view. Instead of viewing them as an expression of social (and thus also realist, literal) interactions, it sees them as the expression of a dynamic process involving different aspects of the personality of the effective protagonist. It differs from more familiar psychoanalytic approaches in three fundamental ways. First, traditional psychoanalytic approaches tend to see literary texts as the expression of a single, regressive neurotic tendency that is categorically theory-driven and thus known to both the critic and the reader from the outset: the only issue is how to demonstrate it. In contrast, this post-Jungian study views a novel as the unique expression of a complex unconscious process that can never be known beforehand either by the critic or by the reader. Its possible psychological implications have to be uncovered by a close analysis of textual interactions. In other words, the argument is driven not by theoretical assumptions, but by textual patterns. Secondly, whereas many psychoanalytic approaches base their arguments on the analysis of only a few carefully selected – and not necessarily representative – textual moments, this post-Jungian approach takes account of the entirety of each narrative structure. In this, it is as deeply indebted to some of the premises of structuralism as it is to Jungian psychology: its arguments are always built on the implications of patterns of interaction. But with a major difference: it is interested in the possible psychological significance of the patterns that it identifies for a specific individual. And thirdly, whereas most Jungian literary criticism is more interested in the collective than the personal, this study is more interested in the personal than in the collective. Albeit not always justly, Jungian criticism is widely perceived as falling into two categories: either it makes woolly claims about some unquestionable process of individuations, or it insists on the significance of abstruse archetypal imagery. And understandably, other approaches very often find it difficult to relate to such concerns. In contrast, the methodology adopted in this study brings together the strengths of the classical school (a concern with the implications of a text) and the developmental school (a post-Jungian emphasis on the primary carrier of the author’s unconscious personality) that allows it to

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INTRODUCTION

uncover unexpected and provocative new readings of the texts it examines. The Effective Protagonist in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel takes another look at four well-known texts in which the axial importance of the effective protagonist has never been noticed. My contention is that the narrative structure of each of these novels reflects both the nature of the dilemma implicitly facing the effective protagonist at the outset of the events and the nature of his or her response to this dilemma. In each of the novels examined, it sees the opening pages as a representation of an implicit psychological challenge facing the effective protagonist. In each case, the narrative then proceeds by way of an imaginal descensus that illustrates how the effective protagonist responds to this challenge. And in every instance, the ending is ambivalent: something has been achieved, but it is only tentative. The objective is to uncover the psychological implications of each novel’s interactions when considered in relation to the effective protagonist; that is, in relation to the fictional character who is the primary carrier of the author’s unconscious personality. The focus, throughout, is on the psychological implications underlying the dynamics of various kinds of relationships: father and son (Ivanhoe); a man, his ‘shadow’, and the implications of the archetypal figures that fascinate him (The Picture of Dorian Gray); a daughter torn between a benign and a tyrannical father figure (Wuthering Heights), and a daughter torn between allegiance to a father and commitment to her partner (Silas Marner). And, as we shall see, there is good reason for thinking that these relationships represent a major, perhaps even a determining aspect of each fiction in question. The study is divided in two parts in order to illustrate the claim that a Jungian methodology provides an invaluable tool for identifying typical tendencies and concerns of the male and the female imagination. It explores not only some of the significant differences that exist between the ways in which each sex imagines the other, but also the essentially different concerns expressed in novels written by men and novels written by women. The Effective Protagonist in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel seeks to revive debate about two of Jung’s more problematic terms. As we shall see, anima and animus possession very pertinently describe major tendencies in the nineteenth-century British novel. In the two novels by male writers, the effective protagonist both idealizes and causes unintentional hurt to a central female character. In both the novels by women writers, the effective protagonist has an over-strong attachment to her father that causes her problems with relating to another man. This study sheds fresh light on one of the most consistent

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and disturbing motifs found in nineteenth-century fiction: the hurt that characters bring upon themselves, no less than the hurt they inflict on others can often be ascribed to misplaced attachment. It is both a literary and a psychological theme that cries out for further exploration and that demands to be better understood. The Effective Protagonist in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel also seeks to illustrate the contention that literary tradition is not only about the development of a genre or a surface theme, but also about the different ways in which writers have wrestled with typical, and yet also specific psychological dilemmas. The dilemmas encountered in fictions written by men and women are fundamentally different, they express fundamentally different concerns, and they represent, in effect, significantly different literary traditions. The study introduces two new terms to the vocabulary of post-Jungian debate. The first and most important of these is the effective protagonist: the character to which all the events of a novel are related in much the same way as all the events of a dream are related to its (implicit) dreamego. The analysis of Wuthering Heights introduces a further term: the animus-structure, that is, a structure with which a number of different animus-figures are related. The study also sheds fresh light on old distinctions. Jungian psychology has long been familiar with the distinction between two levels of the unconscious (the personal and the collective). This study argues that many nineteenth-century novels unfold on at least three distinct levels of imaginal representation: a ‘personal’ level, and at least two distinct, and very different archetypal levels. As we shall see, this distinction helps to explain patterns essential to an understanding not only of Ivanhoe, but also, and far more significantly, of Wuthering Heights. In other words, one sometimes needs to distinguish between separate levels of the archetypal imagination. It also sees a need to extend Jung’s definition of the personal unconscious. Western literature written from about the middle of the eighteenth century would appear to give far greater expression to the author’s personal psychology than earlier literature. We need a term to indicate this, and there is no need to devise a new one. In this study, the term ‘personal unconscious’ is used to signify that the material in question has a specific ‘personal’ value for the writer. But it must be emphasized: our purpose in insisting on this distinction is not to bring the argument back to the writer (biography), but to explicate the specific value of a text (literary criticism). In short, The Effective Protagonist in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel argues that narrative fictions are inseparable from their psychological implications; in other words, that narrative structures

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INTRODUCTION

are psychological structures. Whatever we want to say about the textual, social, political, or other ideological implications of a novel, we must also be aware of what it signifies when considered as an expression of psychological concerns confronting the author at the time of writing.

PART ONE ANIMA POSSESSION Cruelty has a Human Heart. (William Blake)

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CHAPTER ONE

‘A Victim of His Own Contending Passions’: Ivanhoe, Cedric of Rotherwood and the Logic of Romance That grand struggle in my inner house. (Saint Augustine, Confessions, c. 397) Take the life-lie away from the average man and straight away you take away his happiness. (Henrik Ibsen, The Wild Duck, 1884)

Critical views on the works of Walter Scott span an unusually broad spectrum. From those that deride the author’s ‘jejune romanticism’ (Mark Twain, 1883, p. 500), through those that assert he had ‘no message whatever to deliver to the world’ (Thomas Carlyle, 1838, p. 82) and those that none the less concede he was ‘a born story-teller’ (Henry James, 1864, p. 431), to those that, with apparent wilfulness, insist he was an important writer: ‘No novelist in his century saw life more sanely and portrayed it more lucidly’ (Edgar Johnson, 1973, p. 62). It is not easy to reconcile such differences of opinion. What is certain is that the ‘Waverley Novels’ both captured and helped to form the imagination of the nineteenth century. They were devoured by successive generations of readers not only in Britain, but also throughout Europe and North America. They provided the subject of the excitable debate that bestsellers always inspire. They were adapted into plays, operas and burlesques: over 4,500 different dramatic productions of Scott’s works were mounted between 1810 and 1900. Their author was, and by a wide margin, the most popular – and possibly also the single most influential – British writer of the nineteenth century. Ivanhoe represents the peak of his success. Very few novels have been so immediately successful. The first, expensive edition sold out within a fortnight of its appearance in December 1819. Even before it had done so, indeed within a few days of its publication, two dramatizations had appeared in London. One was at the fashionable Surrey Theatre (Thomas Dibdin’s Ivanhoe; or, The Jew’s Daughter, with music by Sanderson); the other was an anonymous production in an East London

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theatre (Ivanhoe; or, The Jew and the Black Knight). These were very quickly followed by productions at the Coburg (W.T. Moncrieff’s Ivanhoe; or, The Jew of York, with music by Hughes), at the Adelphi (Ivanhoe; or, The Saxon Chief, with music by Lawrence), at Drury Lane (George Soane’s The Hebrew, with music by Busby), and finally at Covent Garden (Samuel Beazley Jr’s Ivanhoe; or, The Knight Templar, with music by Storace; see Bolton, 1992). 1820 was the year of Ivanhoe. It was as omnipresent as the most successful Hollywood blockbuster today – but with this difference: the rage was extraordinarily tenacious. In the course of the nineteenth century, some 290 dramatizations of Ivanhoe appeared, about a quarter of them various kinds of operas. At least two of them are still granted the occasional revival: Marschner’s Der Templer und die Ju¨din (The Templar and the Jewess, 1829), and Arthur Sullivan’s only ‘grand opera’, Ivanhoe, first mounted in 1891, when it ran for an astonishing 150 performances. Taste has changed. Ivanhoe is much less widely read, and reasons for this are not hard to fathom. Coleridge once admitted to having read and re-read some of its chapters ‘with an untired interest’, but added that he had never been able to read it all the way through (1970, p. 182). Presumably because, although it is composed of a succession of vivid but inconsequential scenes, the sum of its sometimes memorable parts do not appear to add up to a convincing whole. Its weaknesses are not only evident, but intrusive: its confusion of incongruous genres, its naive simplification of history, cameos of types that have little or no depth, the implausibility of the action, the sudden descents into pantomime, and the hurry and carelessness of the writing. Many regard it as marking that moment in his career when Scott turned his back on the historical realism of his novels about the making of modern Scotland and surrendered himself to the representation of ‘a tinsel-and-tushery medievalism’ (Duncan, 1996, p. ix). Even those who champion Scott very often avoid discussing Ivanhoe at any length (for example, Welsh, 1963; Cockshut, 1969; Shaw, 1983; Millgate, 1984; Kerr, 1989). And if asked why, they would very probably reiterate a variant of Walter Bagehot’s damning opinion that the appeal of Ivanhoe is ‘to that kind of boyish fancy which idolizes mediæval society as the ‘‘fighting time’’ ’ (1858, p. 36). Why then should we choose to begin a discussion of the nineteenth-century novel with a study of Ivanhoe? Most recent essays on Ivanhoe – from Luka´cs (1950), through Wilt (1985), to Chandler (1998) and Morillo and Newhouse (2000) – have sought to explore various facets of the tension between history and representation (see Rubenstein, 1993; cf. Duncan, 1996, p. xiv). The insights of these and many other critics have radically changed our views about the ideological implications of the text. The problem with their

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findings, however, is not that they ask us to read the novel more seriously than it deserves, but that they find the seriousness in the wrong places. My primary contention in these pages is that neither the action nor the characters of Ivanhoe stand up well to any reading based on realist assumptions. Read literally, at best it is an entertaining but inconsequential yarn; at worst, preposterous nonsense. At the outset of a new millennium, we expect a plot to have more coherence. We expect characters to be both more substantial and more credible. We expect to be given an indication of their inner conflicts. We expect the language to be better crafted. And without such features, we cannot even enjoy it as a good story, let alone as a text of lasting significance. These difficulties, however, do not stem from the text, but from the literal assumptions that readers continue to take to it. Ivanhoe harbours all those qualities that it seems to lack. If it is approached not literally, but as a projection of concerns related to its effective protagonist, it will be seen that its plot is coherent. Its main characters are quite sufficiently substantial for their purposes. And we are given more than enough information to understand the inner conflict of its central character. This chapter illustrates how the structural and thematic coherence of Ivanhoe stems from the relation of the events to the effective protagonist.

The Argument Ivanhoe is probably better known for its two heroines than for its hero. Critics have always assumed that the two heroines must be seen in relation to the title hero. This is not necessarily so. In the following pages, I shall re-examine the nature and implications of the text as a whole in order to better understand its stereotypic treatment of the two heroines. All readers recognize that Rebecca is the more interesting of the two, and many feel that Scott made a mistake to end the novel with the engagement of Ivanhoe to Rowena (cf. Thackeray, Rebecca and Rowena, 1850). Indeed, even the most level-headed critics tacitly imply that ‘more’ would have been achieved if Ivanhoe had chosen Rebecca (Duncan, 1996, pp. xxv–xxvi). The author’s explanation for not bringing them closer is that Rebecca is a Jewess. Whilst several critics have elaborated this explanation, one continues to doubt that the opposition of Christians and Jews is a key to the text. The important questions are: why should the author have made his dark heroine more interesting than the fair? Why should he have imagined her as a Jewess? And how does the Jewish theme relate to the other major concerns of the text?

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Although it has often been remarked that Scott’s heroes are somewhat passive and colourless (for example, Welsh, 1963), critics have never provided a convincing explanation for this defining characteristic. It is, I believe, the single most important key to the nature of the action not only of the Waverley Novels, but also of a fair number of other nineteenth-century fictions. There is a very simple reason why Ivanhoe is a one-dimensional figure. Although he is the apparent hero of the novel, he is not its ‘effective protagonist’, that is, the axial character in the text to whom all its events – without exception – can be related. The effective protagonist of the novel is not Ivanhoe, but his father, Cedric of Rotherwood. Many have noted Cedric’s importance in Ivanhoe: for example McMaster, who has argued that Scott’s purpose in Ivanhoe was ‘to show how an allodial proprietor (Cedric) finally enters the feudal system because it is his only protection against lawlessness’ (1981, p. 64). My contention is somewhat different: it is that everything that happens in the text can be read as an expression of a conflict between two aspects of his personality. While Cedric dreams of the restoration of a Saxon monarchy, the text gives expression to his unconscious fears. It shows the implications of what he desires – the implications not only for himself, but also for others. The colourful trappings (the medieval setting, dependence on coincidence and larger-than-life characters) ought not to obscure the fact that the subject of Ivanhoe is the defiance of unacceptable subjection in order to recover both personal and ‘national’ identity. It is of course an age-old subject. The purpose of the early chapters is to describe the political oppression endured by the Saxons under Prince John. The situation described echoes the opening of the only trilogy to survive from classical antiquity. The Oresteia begins with a tired Watchman lamenting the state of oppression that exists in Argos as a result of the king’s extended absence. While Agamemnon has been away in Troy, Klytaimnestra has seized the reins of power. Ivanhoe begins with two serfs lamenting the condition in which the Saxons find themselves as a result of Richard’s extended absence, first in Palestine and then as a prisoner of the French. Prince John has seized this opportunity to assume power for himself and, in order to win followers to his cause, he has allowed them to harass and oppress their Saxon neighbours. The Saxons bitterly resent this encroachment on their freedom. As Gurth expresses it to his companion Wamba: ‘ ‘‘ . . . little is left to us but the air we breathe, and that appears to have been reserved with much hesitation, solely for the purpose of enabling us to endure the tasks [the Normans] lay upon our shoulders’’ ’ (p. 21). Ivanhoe is about the courage with which a handful of individuals, all of whom either are or become associated with Cedric, defy the arbitrary

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and oppressive power exercised by a small group of Norman nobles who have allied themselves with Prince John. It opens on the road to Rotherwood with Wamba and Gurth defying Brian de Bois-Guilbert; at Ashby-de-la-Zouche, Locksley defies Prince John and Ivanhoe defies the Knight Templar; at Torquilstone, Isaac defies Front-de-Bœuf, Rowena defies De Bracy, and Rebecca defies Bois-Guilbert. And throughout, Cedric defies all Normans, including his king. Cedric is a man without any obsessive desire for personal power. He is a kingmaker: he dreams of power for others. And although he desires this power for a man, his dream is centred on a woman. He wants his ward Rowena to marry Athelstane and so to become queen of England. Never mind that his ambition is unrealistic. The point is that she has no desire for such power. She only wants to marry Ivanhoe. Cedric’s dream does violence to Rowena. In this chapter I offer a radically new reading of Ivanhoe – a reading not of its surface structures, but of its deeper psychological implications. My contention is that Scott’s most widely read but often disparaged historical romance owes only its obvious subject-matter to history and other literary sources. Its dominant theme is determined entirely by the author’s unconscious imagination. And when read as an expression of unconscious tendencies, it becomes a much more coherent, more unusual, and perhaps more significant work than is usually realized. I have two objectives. In the first place, to show how the identification of Cedric as effective protagonist radically changes one’s reading of the novel, to produce the range of evidence that supports this claim and to show how the text explores the implications of a patriarchal fantasy that has a very detrimental effect on a woman’s autonomy. And secondly, to illustrate a methodology: to outline a fresh way of envisaging the relationship between narrative and psychological theme.

England and the Temple The first point to establish is that the basic opposition in Ivanhoe is not between Saxons and Normans (for example, Vanden Bossche, 1987). Both races can – and must – be divided into two distinct categories. Not until the death of Athelstane are we introduced to any Saxons who do not form part of Cedric’s immediate entourage. Only then do we realize that the Saxons are divided by age. The younger Saxons have already adopted a great many Norman customs. And Wilfred of Ivanhoe is representative of this younger generation. He respects both his father and his Saxon heritage, but considers at least two aspects of Norman culture to be superior to Saxon practice. He has adopted Norman dress

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and the Norman code of chivalry. He embodies the fusion of the best of each nation: the straightforward loyalty of the Saxon and the sophisticated manners of the Norman knight. As do all the younger Saxons, he thinks of himself as English. At the funeral festivities for Athelstane, it becomes clear that it is only the older Saxons who cannot bring themselves to accept even the best of Norman customs. And within the context of the novel, the major representative of this group is Cedric. The Normans are divided by character. The typical Norman is defined by refinement, moderation, and subscription to the code of chivalry. According to Ivanhoe, chivalry is ‘the nurse of pure and high affection – the stay of the oppressed, the redresser of grievances, the curb of the power of the tyrant’ (p. 249). Never mind, for the moment, that Rebecca pours scorn on his assertion (we shall return to this issue): we note the gist of the claim and the use of the word ‘tyrant’. Chivalry is designed to check excessive or illegitimate use of power and most of the Normans practice chivalry. They take pride in their ‘honour’ and they acknowledge Richard as their legitimate king. In other words, most Normans share the qualities that are ascribed to Ivanhoe. The majority of Saxons have no quarrel with the majority of Normans. The Normans whom both Ivanhoe and his father Cedric resent are not typical of their race. They consist of a relatively small group of opportunists who surround Prince John and whose behaviour is governed either by excess or vice. Prince John is characterized by his hasty and intemperate behaviour (pp. 126–7), Front-de-Bœuf by lechery, avarice and ambition, De Bracy by an irresponsible love of ‘adventure’, and Bois-Guilbert by his excessive desire for Rebecca and his obsession with temporal power. They side with Prince John for the sole purpose of self-advancement. They use their power to extend their land at the expense of their Saxon neighbours and they turn a deaf ear to Saxon grievances. In other words, they violate the fundamental principles of chivalry. They are ‘foreign’ by birth and ‘tyrants’ by nature. And their immediate leader is of course Bois-Guilbert, a Knight Templar. In all three of the main scenes (Ashby-de-la-Zouche, Torquilstone and Templestowe), the quarrel is between ‘England’ and the ‘Temple’. At Rotherwood, Cedric asks the ‘pilgrim’ to name the knights who upheld ‘the renown of merry England’ against the Knights of the Temple. At Ashby, following his victory over Bois-Guilbert, Ivanhoe raises a bowl of wine ‘To all true English hearts, and to the confusion of foreign tyrants’ (p. 84). The battle cries on the second day of the tournament are ‘Desdichado’ (who represents ‘England’) and ‘For the Temple’ (p. 112). At the siege of Torquilstone, the battle cries on the outside are ‘St George for merry England’ and, on the inside, for the three leaders, amongst

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whom is the Templar, Sir Brian de Bois-Guilbert (p. 245). The final major scene of the novel opposes ‘the royal standard of England’ and ‘the Temple banner’ (p. 393). And, significantly, at the end, the ‘foreign tyrants’ are not defeated either by Saxons or Saxon qualities. This is brought about by Norman chivalry as practiced by two knights who call themselves ‘English’, Ivanhoe and Richard. As the Templars retreat, the shout is raised: ‘Long Life to Richard with the Lion’s Heart, and down with the usurping Templars!’ (p. 395). Whereupon the way is paved for ‘the hostile distinction of Norman and Saxon’ to disappear entirely and be replaced, in time, by a common notion of Englishness. The fundamental opposition in the novel is not between Saxons and Normans, but between those who accept the existent socio-political reality (an England composed of both Saxons and Normans) and those who do not. Both the major protagonists belong to the latter group. Cedric wants to see a restored Saxon monarchy; Bois-Guilbert, equally unrealistically, wants to carve himself a place in history.

Cedric as Effective Protagonist At the outset of the events, Ivanhoe has been disinherited by his father Cedric in order to keep him away from Rowena (p. 157). At the end, he regains his father’s favour and secures his permission to marry Rowena. The text clearly spans a major change in his circumstances. And that Scott chose to give his name to the title of his work invites us to see Ivanhoe as the main protagonist. But is he? One of the more striking aspects of the novel is that Ivanhoe undergoes no significant development in his character. None of the three great scenes brings about any decisive change in his circumstances. He is already an accomplished knight when the novel begins. At the Ashby-de-la-Zouche tournament, he merely confirms his prowess when, favoured by chance, he is once again able to defeat the Templar, Brian de Bois-Guilbert. He neither instigates, nor is he an actor in the various events of the siege of Torquilstone. And beyond Chapter 12, he cannot be credited with anything more remarkable than being able to stay on his horse: first between the priory of St Botolph and that part of the forest where he arrives too late to be able to help King Richard against the attempted regicide by Waldemar Fitzurse; then between Coningsburg Castle and York, and finally for the duration of the first charge in the tiltyard at Templestowe. He acts more like an automaton than an individual character. Albeit a major element of the plot, his deep dislike of Bois-Guilbert is never examined, let alone explored, and nor is there any indication of what he achieves by the latter’s death. Indeed, he cannot even claim

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credit for it: the Templar dies unscathed by his lance (p. 391). In similar fashion, his disinheritance is another major issue in the novel, and yet it too goes unexplored. The reader is never taken inside the manor that Richard allots to Wilfred – the manor whose name (Ivanhoe) Wilfred adopts as his own. One might imagine that Front-de-Bœuf’s seizure of this manor would set up a bitter rivalry. And yet it is not the death of the Norman giant so much as Richard’s subsequent defeat of John’s rebellion that secures Ivanhoe’s repossession of his property. Even his reconciliation with his father is brought about by Richard’s intervention. All that the reader learns about Ivanhoe is that he is loyal to his king, believes fervently in the code of chivalry (pp. 50–51 and 248–9), and that he is deeply attached to Rowena. And yet, of his inner feelings for Rowena, the reader learns nothing. None of his defining characteristics undergoes any change or even minimal development. They are merely a ‘given’. The novel cannot be said to be about – or even to hinge on – any of them. At no stage could it be said to record Ivanhoe’s experiences. If one asks what is achieved in the closing pages, the answer is not that Ivanhoe wins the bride for whom he has struggled, nor even that he has finally defeated the Templar. It is that the most offensive representatives of Norman rule have been defeated. And this has a significant effect on the small group of Saxons at the centre of the novel. Those Saxons who resented the Norman yoke finally abandon their passive resistance and accept the existent order of reality. The marriage of Ivanhoe and Rowena serves to symbolize the final establishment of a deeper union between the two races of Saxons and Normans, which now merge forever as the ‘English’ (p. 398). But there is no indication that this change affects Ivanhoe in any way whatsoever. Long before the opening scenes of the novel, Ivanhoe has already accepted the need for Saxons and Normans to live in peace and harmony. Although he helps to secure this outcome, he cannot be credited with bringing it about. On the second day of the tournament at Ashby, he would have been overpowered by the odds against him had it not been for the timely assistance of the Black Knight, that is, King Richard (p. 114). The credit for securing Cedric’s escape from Torquilstone belongs not to Ivanhoe, but to Locksley, Wamba and the Black Knight. And at Templestowe, Bois-Guilbert dies not from any blow of Ivanhoe, but ‘a victim to the violence of his own contending passions’. Ivanhoe does little to bring an end to Saxon opposition to Norman rule. Owing to the popular success of Freud’s theory of the Oedipus complex, it is often assumed that any conflict between a father and son must reflect the son’s point of view. If the title of a novel invites us to see the action from the son’s point of view, the temptation to do so will be

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particularly strong. But at no stage in the novel does Ivanhoe manifest any problem with his father. At no stage do we feel that the action reflects either his point of view or any challenge facing him. We watch Ivanhoe; we never enter his mind. What mind? He is an automaton; he acts mechanically, unable to do otherwise. He fulfils the role assigned to him. That is all. In the course of the novel, it is not Ivanhoe but his father Cedric who most obviously undergoes a significant change. His violent opposition to the Normans has earned him the epithet of ‘the Saxon’. It is with this epithet that he is introduced (p. 28) and Scott reminds us of it again and again in the opening chapters. For Cedric personifies Saxon resentment of – and resistance to – the Norman yoke. His one governing thought is to help secure the restoration of a Saxon dynasty. He is much more vividly imagined and drawn than his son. We are given a colourful account of his character. We learn about his innermost hopes and feelings. We know why he has banished Ivanhoe: to prevent him becoming an obstacle to his dream of bringing about the restoration of a Saxon monarchy. We follow him through the increasing hopelessness of his ambition. The novel ends when he is finally compelled to admit that his dream is unrealistic. Cedric, and not Ivanhoe, is its effective protagonist. If this is so, then everything in the novel will relate to a process affecting him.

Cedric as Thrall to his own Dream At the outset, Cedric is marginalized. Although he thinks of himself as a key figure in Saxon England, his ways and views are outdated. He suffers from a kind of psychological inflation: he thinks himself more important than he is. A new order has emerged. The challenge facing him is to adapt to it: to learn that his fantasy of being a kingmaker is the stuff of boyhood dreams. By the end, he has undergone a change. He has renounced his impractical dream. He has a more realistic assessment of his own part in society. He is integrated into the new order. If Cedric is the effective protagonist, then everything in the novel – including the other main characters – will correspond either to an aspect of his personality or to a dilemma facing him. Ivanhoe is Cedric’s son. As such, he personifies an aspect of his father’s personality. That he accepts the existent political reality against which Cedric has set himself suggests that he personifies his father’s more reasonable nature – an aspect of his nature that Cedric has ‘disinherited’, that is, suppressed. But he also personifies the best of Norman practices,

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including a commitment to the ideal of chivalry, which he defines as ‘the stay of the oppressed, the redresser of grievances, the curb of the power of the tyrant’ (p. 249). It is important to note the irony. The aims of chivalry correspond exactly to what Cedric most desires to see: an end to oppression, to all grievances, and to the power that has allowed foreign tyrants to marginalize him in his own country. When Cedric finally learns to accept his son, his own marginalization is brought to an end. The entirety of Scott’s historical romance comes back to the dilemma facing Cedric. The Saxon leader is consumed by his dream to secure the marriage of his ward Rowena to Athelstane and thus bring about the union of the two strongest claimants to the Saxon throne. But Rowena is in love with Ivanhoe. Because he is afraid that the growing bond between them will imperil his project, Cedric disinherits his son. We learn nothing about how Ivanhoe felt on being disinherited; all we are told is that he accompanied King Richard to Palestine. The coincidence of his disinheritance and his immediate journey to Palestine is doubly ironic. In the first place, Cedric suppresses that aspect of his own personality that would prevent him from pursuing his idle dream of trying to restore a Saxon nation. Secondly, in the context of the novel, it suggests that the Third Crusade functions as a symbolic representation of Cedric’s romantic dreams. Just as Cedric dreams of restoring a Saxon monarchy, so Richard and the crusaders are engaged in a romantic adventure whose purpose is to establish a new kingdom based in Jerusalem. Ivanhoe thus corresponds to an ambivalent unconscious tendency in his father’s character. On the one hand, he personifies his father’s more realistic nature (which, ironically, corresponds to what Cedric most desires to bring about); on the other, as a result of having been disinherited, he has come to represent the very romanticism that is leading Cedric astray (which reflects the means by which Cedric hopes to achieve his end, that is, his quixotic determination to single-handedly challenge ‘all comers’). The opening scenes offer a vivid portrayal of Cedric’s personality. The first two characters to whom we are introduced are his servants. His swineherd, Gurth, has features that are ‘sad and sullen’ and his ‘deep dejection’ is enlivened only by a consciousness of his ‘oppression and a disposition of resistance’ (pp. 19–20). Cedric’s fool, Wamba, has looks that indicate ‘ . . . a sort of vacant curiosity, and fidgety impatience of any posture of repose, together with the utmost self-satisfaction respecting his own situation and the appearance which he made’ (p. 20). Both men wear a thick metal ring around their neck: it is an eloquent testimony to their condition. They are ‘thralls’ of Cedric of Rotherwood – and it is evident from the joy that Gurth expresses on

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being given his freedom that he, at least, finds his condition oppressive (p. 273). Cedric is given the very same attributes as his two thralls. When we first encounter him in his own home, he is sitting on one of the two raised chairs in his hall. His features betray ‘that sort of good humour which often lodges with a sudden and a hasty temper’ (p. 34) and he is fretting about a possible affront to his authority. He is so anxious about his herd of swine that he starts from his chair ‘in impatience at the supposed injury’ (p. 37). That is, he is invested with exactly the same characteristics as have been ascribed to his swineherd: dejection enlivened only by the smart he feels at the condition of his people and his own subjection to Norman oppression. And his evident sense of selfimportance is undermined by an ‘irritable impatience’ which is curiously similar to that of his fool (p. 34, cf. p. 352). The parallels strongly suggest that his two thralls personify different aspects of Cedric’s personality: the one, bitterness arising from his awareness of oppression; the other, frustration at his own powerlessness to bring about a change in his situation. Although nothing is inscribed on the broad gold collar that Cedric wears around his neck, he too lives in a state of unacceptable ‘thralldom’ to his Norman neighbours. He is obsessed by a desire to see a return of Saxon rule and this obsession conditions all other thoughts and every other feeling. He is living in unacceptable subjugation and dreaming of a day when he might recover his freedom.

Rotherwood: Cedric and Bois-Guilbert The first major scene of the novel takes place at Rotherwood. And what is most striking about this opening scene is that it constitutes a symbolic representation of the situation facing Cedric. Cedric lives as simply and intensely as a monk with unusually marked missionary zeal. In this, he resembles a churchman. He also enjoys a well-laden table and is irascible if anyone crosses him. In this, he resembles the stock image of a soldier. The first scene in which he is introduced hinges on the tension between these two aspects of his personality. He has already barricaded his home when he learns that a party of Normans has ‘requested hospitality and lodging for the night’ (pp. 37–8). The party consists of Prior Aymer, Bois-Guilbert and – disguised as a palmer – the son whom he has disinherited. All three appear to be churchmen. But as in Chaucer, none of them could be considered a good churchman. Prior Aymer wears the persona of a devout churchman, but would be better described as a bon vivant. He enjoys the pleasures associated with

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a well-laden table and the conversation that goes with it. So too does Cedric, even if his taste and conversation might be of a less sophisticated kind. Bois-Guilbert is described as ‘half a monk, half a soldier’ (p. 28). Although he pretends to be concerned with the advancement of Christianity, he is much more interested in his own ambition. This is equally true of Cedric. Although he imagines that he is only interested in the restoration of a Saxon monarchy, he is consumed by his own self-importance. Nothing angers him so much as a slight of his own person. The third is Ivanhoe, who is disguised as a palmer. A palmer was a pilgrim who returned from the Holy Land with a palm frond that he would place on the altar of his parish church. Although intended to indicate a pilgrim’s selflessness of purpose, a palm frond was also associated with military glory (cf. p. 49). In Roman times a victorious gladiator was awarded a palm frond. Cedric believes he is a selfless agent in a ‘holy’ cause; in reality, he is governed by the desire to bring about the downfall of his antagonists. In each case, the tension between a spiritual ideal and a material objective reflects a tension in Cedric’s personality: a conflict between a selfless crusade for the restoration of a Saxon monarchy and the concerns of a man who likes to indulge himself and is forever suspecting others of slighting his patriarchal authority. The last person to seek shelter at Rotherwood that night is Isaac the Jew. Much has been written about the Jewish theme in the novel (for example, Rosenberg, 1961; Cagidemetrio, 1989; Mergenthal, 1993; Ragussis, 1993; Sutherland, 1995). Scott was evidently aware of the nastiness of social prejudice against the Jews in the Middle Ages, but his novel is not centrally concerned with this issue. Some have been tempted to see a parallel between Isaac and Ivanhoe: both are outcasts, both are wanderers. But unless contextualized, this parallel is misleading. Isaac is hated by all because of his religion. Ivanhoe is not hated by anyone except Bois-Guilbert, whose dislike stems not from any religious or other ideological principle, but from wounded pride. Whatever parallels there might be, there are more differences. The parallel is not with the son, but with the father. Isaac is another part of the pattern of relationships that find their centre in Cedric. Isaac is the representative of a disinherited race; so too is Cedric (p. 16). Jews were hated by Christians because they would not accept the Messiah, and tradition had it that their wandering would cease only when they acknowledged Christ. Cedric is the representative of a small number of older Saxons who are hated by John and his followers because they stubbornly refuse to accept Norman customs. And their oppression and marginalization will cease only when they acknowledge the present reality. In other words, Isaac personifies an aspect of Cedric’s

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personality. He personifies the way in which Cedric has made himself an outcast by his adherence to an outdated order. Cedric is so obsessed by his desire to see the restoration of a Saxon dynasty that he disinherits his son, who represents his better nature. Only when Cedric learns to accept the reality of the existent order will the ‘wanderings’ of his son come to an end. The treatment of Isaac thus symbolizes a conflict within Cedric’s personality. His better nature wishes Isaac to be treated with the respect due to a guest, but by failing to ensure the latter’s comfort, he effectively negates his own intention. Bois-Guilbert’s plan to rob the Jew as soon as he leaves the following day corresponds to Cedric’s unwillingness to defend his guest. When Ivanhoe warns Isaac of the Templar’s plan, the Jew falls at his feet . . . not in the fashion of one who intentionally stoops, kneels, or prostrates himself to excite compassion, but like a man borne down on all sides by the pressure of some invisible force, which crushes him to the earth without the power of resistance. (p. 58)

The ‘invisible force’ weighing on Isaac is equivalent to the ‘force’ that is working toward the annihilation of Cedric’s better nature and transforming a good man into a petty despot. Hence the extraordinary parallels that exist between him and the Templar. The first thing we learn about Cedric is that he is ‘proud, fierce, jealous, and irritable’ (p. 30). Interestingly, on being informed that two Normans are requesting hospitality at his gate, he ascribes almost identical qualities to Bois-Guilbert: ‘Bois-Guilbert? that name has been spread wide for both good and evil. They say he is valiant as the bravest of his order; but stained with their usual vices, pride, arrogance, cruelty, and voluptuousness; a hard-hearted man, who knows neither fear of earth nor awe of heaven.’ (p. 38)

In each case, pride is followed by three further adjectives: the Saxon’s anger, jealousy and irritability are set against the Norman’s arrogance, cruelty and voluptuousness. In other words, the Templar’s characteristics are an exaggerated or extreme form of those ascribed to the Saxon leader. Both men have been hardened by action. Cedric is ‘powerfully made, like one accustomed to endure the fatigue of war or of the chase’ (p. 34). Bois-Guilbert is a tall, . . . athletic figure, which long fatigue and constant exercise seemed to have left none of the softer part of the human form, having

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reduced the whole to brawn, bones, and sinews, which had sustained a thousand toils, and were ready to dare a thousand more. (p. 24)

Both men are brave and both have an overbearing confidence in their own military prowess that verges on recklessness. During the siege of Torquilstone, Cedric insists on fighting without the protection of armour (p. 261), while Bois-Guilbert neglects his own ‘defence’ in order to secure the safety of Rebecca (p. 267; see also pp. 205–206, 263). Both men are hard-hearted: Cedric, toward his son and household; Bois-Guilbert, in his entire vision of life. Whenever their own authority is questioned, both men are quickly roused to vindictive anger. Cedric is described as of a ‘frank, but hasty and choleric temper’ (p. 34). The various members of his household are familiar with it. When Gurth and Wamba fail to return by the expected time, he immediately suspects a Norman of having violated his property: ‘ ‘‘But I will be avenged’’, he added, starting from his chair at the supposed injury, and catching hold of his boar-spear’ (p. 37). In similar fashion, Bois-Guilbert’s first action in the novel is to raise his riding rod in order to chastise Gurth for ‘what he considered as the insolence of the peasant’ (p. 28). Both men are also voluptuaries, but with a difference. Cedric’s voluptuousness extends only to a well-laden table; in contrast – and in defiance of the rules of his order – BoisGuilbert is unable to master his desire for Rebecca. Which brings us to the most telling parallel: both men dream of unreal future states and, in both cases, the dream is centred on a woman. Cedric believes in the possibility of a restored Saxon dynasty. Bois-Guilbert dreams of establishing an order of Templars with ‘wider views’ than those of its founders (p. 202). The ambitions of the former are idle fantasy; those of the latter are manic. Cedric’s dominating ambition is to join the two strongest claimants to a Saxon monarchy. It is for this reason that he impugns Norman rule: ‘The restoration of the independence of his race was the idol of his heart, to which he had willingly sacrificed domestic happiness and the interests of his own son’ (p. 156). And he is heedless of Rowena’s feelings: It was in vain that he attempted to dazzle her with the prospect of a visionary throne. Rowena, who possessed strong sense, neither considered his plan as possible, nor as desirable, so far as she was concerned, could it have been achieved. (p. 157)

Bois-Guilbert is even more careless of Rebecca’s feelings. One of the most memorable scenes in the novel is his attempt, during the siege of Torquilstone, to dazzle Rebecca with a similar prospect, which she derides:

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‘Thou shalt be a queen, Rebecca – on Mount Carmel will we pitch the throne which my valour will gain for you, and I will exchange my long desired batton for a sceptre.’ ‘A dream’, said Rebecca; ‘an empty vision of the night, which, were it a waking reality, affects me not.’ (p. 343)

The parallels are too close to be fortuitous. The daemonic love of BoisGuilbert for Rebecca ‘mirrors’ the manic intensity of Cedric’s plans for Rowena. All of these parallels suggest that the principal thematic opposition in the novel is between Cedric and Bois-Guilbert. Their opposition has two characteristics. In the first place, Bois-Guilbert personifies everything to which Cedric is most strongly opposed. And secondly, his character is a more intense and violent form of the Saxon leader’s personality. BoisGuilbert thus corresponds to the dream-figure that Jung referred to as the specific ‘shadow’, that is, a personification of ‘the ‘‘negative’’ side of the personality, the sum of all those unpleasant qualities we like to hide’ (CW 7: 103 n. 5). The shadow embodies everything that an individual ‘has no wish to be’ (CW 16: 470). Bois-Guilbert personifies tendencies in Cedric’s character of which the latter is utterly unconscious. The process described in the novel is set in motion when Cedric comes face to face with a figure that personifies the darker, more manic tendencies in his own personality: in other words, when he meets his ‘shadow’ for the first time. The scene at Rotherwood (¼ the exposition) is a representation of a dilemma implicitly facing the Saxon chief. He is faced by an implicit challenge to recognize, confront and integrate those unacknowledged shadow qualities that are threatening to take possession of him and turn him into a petty tyrant. We have looked at one kind of parallel: the parallels that exist between the characteristics of the main protagonists. But there is another that is equally important to the coherence of a narrative structure: the parallels that arise when two apparently unrelated events happen to occur either at the same time, or one very soon after the other.

Ashby-de-la-Zouche: The Nature and Function of Coincidence From Hellenistic to modern times, one of the primary, possibly even defining characteristics of western romance is the use of coincidence. We cannot therefore appreciate romance unless we understand not only the function, but also the implications of coincidence. Reading any of Scott’s novels literally, even the Scottish novels, one is quickly irritated by their over-dependence on coincidence. In contrast, reading them in relation to

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their effective protagonist invariably reveals very good reasons for the major coincidences. The first of the three great scenes of Ivanhoe provides a clear illustration of this. The tournament at Ashby-de-laZouche unfolds over two days. Its spectacular action need not detain us: let us focus only on its relation to Cedric. A tournament represents a conflict of opposites. A literary representation of a tournament is a self-conscious enactment of such a conflict. And in Ivanhoe, the opposites in question refer to conflicting aspects of Cedric’s personality. The five ‘knights challengers’ who line up on the first day of the tournament at Ashby-de-la-Zouche do not represent a cross-section of the Norman nobility; they represent only the kind of Norman with whom Cedric is in conflict. Two are neighbours of Cedric, who are further disliked by the crowd because of ‘their characters’ (p. 80); and two are ‘strangers and foreigners’ (p. 80). The first is Ralph de Vipont, who is a knight of St John of Jerusalem. The other is BoisGuilbert, whose arrogance, cruelty and manic ambition vividly portray the kind of man that, without realizing it, Cedric has almost become. In the pursuit of his goal, Cedric is on the point of becoming as unnaturally ruthless as the Templar and his cronies are in the pursuit of theirs. The tournament provides Bois-Guilbert and his friends the opportunity to challenge and also – as they expect – to defeat all comers. In relation to the effective protagonist, this suggests that the arrogance and violence that they personify are on the point of becoming the dominant tendencies in Cedric’s personality. But he is not naturally a bully. His tendency to such behaviour stems from his shadow, that is, a tendency of his unconscious personality. There is another, more reasonable aspect to his personality, one that he has repressed, but which now manifests itself. Ivanhoe, calling himself ‘Desdichado’ (¼ disinherited), is the only serious champion. That Cedric does not realize who Desdichado is suggests that he is still not ready to allow his own more reasonable nature to overcome his shadow qualities. He has only two thoughts: to see the defeat of the Templar and his friends (men whom he abominates, but who strangely mirror his own faults) and to see the restoration of a Saxon monarchy. Hence he is bitterly disappointed by the advantage that the Templar’s friends gain in the four opening encounters. As soon as a fresh champion enters the list and challenges BoisGuilbert to mortal combat his interest revives. He follows the new arrival’s fortunes in each course ‘with half his body stretched over the balcony . . . not with his eyes only, but with his whole heart and soul’ (p. 89). The phrase not only indicates the degree of his animosity toward the Templar and his followers, but also suggests an intuition about the deeper significance of the outcome of the first day of the tournament: one that implicates both his ‘heart and soul’. He is overjoyed when the

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nameless knight humiliates his adversaries. He does not realize that he is admiring his son, whom he has cruelly disinherited in the name of his dominating ambition. Jung thought that the contents of the unconscious provide the ‘best possible’ representation not of a past, but of a present attitude or dilemma. He also held that unconscious material ‘compensates’ an aspect of the conscious attitude. Cedric’s worst tendencies are on the verge of triumphing over his better. The unexpected return of Ivanhoe serves to ‘compensate’ ( ¼ to challenge or counterbalance) this development. But Cedric is nothing if not obstinate. He continues to see himself as the heroic defender of a just cause; he is utterly unconscious that he is behaving despotically toward the two people to whom he is most closely tied: his son and his ward. On the first day of the tournament, Ivanhoe wins only a narrow victory over Bois-Guilbert. Had the Templar won, it would have signalled that Cedric had become as hard-hearted as his shadow. That Bois-Guilbert is only very narrowly defeated signals that the outcome is only tentative. Everything now depends on how Cedric reacts to this new situation. On the second day, when Cedric finally discovers Ivanhoe’s identity, paternal affection almost gains ‘the victory over pride and patriotism’ – but is instantly replaced by a renewed determination to ensure ‘the union of Athelstane and Rowena’ (p. 158). And this introduces the first of the major coincidences. The discovery that the wounded knight is Ivanhoe coincides with Cedric’s decision to rush forward ‘as if to separate him from Rowena’ (p. 117). The coincidence of these two otherwise unrelated events suggests that, in metaphorical terms, Ivanhoe has been wounded not so much by the lance of his antagonist, as by his father’s unaltered determination to pursue ‘the restoration of Saxon independence’ (p. 158). The text provides almost immediate corroboration of this interpretation. The same evening, at Ashby Castle, in the presence of Prince John, Cedric once again disowns his son and even sanctions the claim of Frontde-Bœuf to the manor of Ivanhoe (pp. 128–9). And the events affecting him take an immediate turn for the worse. For, while Cedric is confirming that he gives greater value to his obsessive dream than he does to his own son, Bois-Guilbert is setting a new chain of events in motion. The coincidence is significant. The renewal of Cedric’s determination to pursue the cause in which he so fervently believes – even at the expense of his son – coincides with Bois-Guilbert persuading De Bracy of the best way to get a wife (pp. 135–6). The consequences of this new development are inevitable, disastrous and almost immediate. Cedric and both of those in whom he places all his hopes (Athelstane and

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Rowena) are ambushed and taken prisoner. And so too, of course, is Ivanhoe. For by reiterating his decision to disinherit a character that personifies his own better nature, Cedric falls into the hands of those Normans who personify the least admirable aspects of his own personality. He and his party are taken to Front-de-Bœuf’s castle at Torquilstone where they are imprisoned.

The Siege of Torquilstone: Aspects of the Shadow The ensuing events are of course the climax of the novel. Everything prior to their ambush has moved relentlessly toward this event; everything following the fall of the castle will move equally relentlessly toward the narrowly averted catastrophe and the ensuing de´nouement. The entire novel rests on Cedric’s desire to see Rowena become queen of a restored Saxon monarchy. This ambition is unusual in two ways. In the first place, Cedric has no affective interest in Rowena; secondly, he has no desire to see her marry his son. In realist terms, we might have expected one or other of these. But Cedric is not an opportunist. He is defined by his utter lack of selfishness. He spoils Rowena because she is ‘the sole remaining scion’ of Alfred. He brings her up as if she was a ‘princess’ (p. 157), but he is not in love with her. He is not interested in promoting either his own claim to the throne or that of his son. All his energy is directed toward securing the restoration of a Saxon monarchy by bringing together those with the best claim to the title. When St Augustine describes himself as held ‘captive’ by ‘habit’ (Confessions, 6.12.22), the metaphor has obviously psychological connotations. If the inability to control one’s habitual tendencies can be experienced as a form of imprisonment, how much more an obsessive ambition? Cedric is ‘imprisoned’ by his obsession. Following the ambush in the forest, the metaphorical imprisonment becomes literal. And it is only appropriate that Cedric should find himself imprisoned by Front-deBœuf. His obsession with ‘his favourite plan’ is selfless, but it has also caused him to disinherit Ivanhoe, to repudiate him even when he is severely wounded, to sanction Front-de-Bœuf’s appropriation of the latter’s manor, to reconfirm his determination to see Rowena married to a man in whom she is not interested, and to brutally punish Gurth. In other words, his obsession has brought out the very worst in his character. Front-de-Bœuf exhibits ‘the fiercer and more malignant passions of the mind’ (p. 180). He personifies one of Cedric’s nastiest characteristics: his tendency to bully. Just as Cedric bullies those around him (Chapters 3, 18, etc.), so Front-de-Bœuf, who despises anything weaker than himself,

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is ‘accustomed to see men of all ranks tremble in his presence’ (p. 210). It is entirely appropriate that it is he who seizes the manor that Richard gave to Ivanhoe while they are abroad. The brutality with which Frontde-Bœuf pursues his own interests is a representation of the brutality with which Cedric repudiates and disinherits his son. The motif of imprisonment represents the process of introversion necessary if Cedric is to confront and come to terms with the consequences of his ambitions (cf. von Franz 1993, p. 127). It thus signals a metaphorical descensus to a stratum of unconscious experience at which he comes face to face with the consequences of his misguided ambitions. This implies that all the elements that make up this central siege belong to a deeply archetypal level of experience. The Templar, Front-de-Bœuf and De Bracy personify different unconscious tendencies of Cedric’s character. The Saxon leader thinks he is a good man; the truth is that he has become as nasty and tyrannical as the Normans he abhors. In other words, the Norman adventurers serve to illustrate the reality of his attitudes and behaviour. (a)

Aspects of the Archetypal Shadow

The siege of Torquilstone has a curious symmetry: it is composed of four concentric circles. On the outside, although not in the immediate vicinity, are Prince John and his followers. Closer to the castle walls are the outlaws. In possession of the castle are three of John’s followers: Front-de-Bœuf, De Bracy and Bois-Guilbert. And in their hands are Cedric and his party, including Athelstane, Rowena, Isaac, Rebecca and, although he does not know it, his own son. And as we shall see, all of these circles relate to Cedric. The circles can be paired. Just as Prince John and his followers are determined to suppress Locksley and his outlaws, so his henchmen (BoisGuilbert, Front-de-Bœuf and De Bracy) seek to suppress Cedric and blackmail the two Jews, Isaac and Rebecca. As we shall see, this reveals a curious parallel between the English outlaws and the Jews. The Normans to whom Cedric stands opposed consist of a relatively small group of opportunists who surround Prince John. Although the character ascribed to Prince John is ‘thoroughly in line with the view of him taken by Scott’s contemporaries’ (p. 497), one cannot help but notice that all the attributes given him represent an aspect of Cedric’s shadow. He is handsome, dresses ostentatiously, and can manage his horse well, qualities which win him the ‘clamorous applause’ of the crowd at Ashby (p. 71). He is also ‘licentious and tyrannical’ (p. 71), as well as ‘fickle’ (p. 126). He will never forget a grudge, nor will he ever miss an opportunity either for pleasure (p. 120) or to mortify and humiliate any Saxon of

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consequence (p. 71). He would seem to be the antithesis of Cedric – until we remember that the Saxon leader is no less proud of the appearance he makes, and he too is fickle and cruel (e.g. his treatment of Gurth and Fangs). Whenever Cedric feels that his authority has been questioned, he becomes petty, tyrannical and vindictive. John is licentious; Cedric is a widower. But there is a parallel even here: licentiousness results from a man’s assumption that he can do as he likes with a woman. These parallels suggest that Prince John and his followers are an archetypal representation of just the kind of despotic behaviour that Cedric exhibits in his own home. The entire novel hinges on Cedric’s determination to coerce Rowena into a marriage against her wishes. Locksley and his merry men also personify significant tendencies in Cedric’s personality. Just as Cedric has done all he can to annihilate his son’s identity for no greater crime than defining himself as English, so Prince John and his immediate followers have done all they can to destroy Locksley and his merry men – for the same offence. Just as Cedric resents the ‘foreign tyrants’, so too do the outlaws. Cedric’s defining characteristics are his insistent demand for justice and the courage with which he resists an oppressive regime. Locksley and his men personify the same courage and expectation of justice that characterize the better side of Cedric’s personality. Their coincidental appearance at various moments in the story signals a compensatory manifestation of these better qualities whenever either Cedric or an aspect of his more generous personality (for example, Richard: see below) comes under threat. The outlaws never initiate any events. They cannot ‘act’; they can only ‘react’. In this sense, they do not belong to the same ‘level’ of the imagination as Cedric. Their form of Englishness represents the best of the qualities that Cedric has renounced as a result of his obsession. In this sense, they reflect a tendency that pertains to a deeply archetypal level of the imagination. They personify the better aspect of Cedric’s political dream, that aspect which will not let him – or any representative of his better side – fall victim to the tyrannical Normans (that is, the darker side of his shadow-personality). This is evident from the way in which their ‘good will’ is earned. At Ashby, it is the unswerving loyalty of Gurth to Ivanhoe (that is, Cedric’s better nature) that earns Cedric the help of the outlaws at Torquilstone. The third group is composed of the Jews, Isaac and Rebecca. And what is at issue here is neither race nor religion. Ivanhoe is not dictated by a concern for either social or religious tolerance, but by the logic of the unconscious imagination. It is a romance and in the world of romance, a Jew is simply an available image and thus necessarily stereotypical.

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Stereotypic images are invariably based on psychological projections and, in a novel, the projection will always relate to the effective protagonist. Isaac is a stereotype of someone who clings tenaciously to what he invests with ‘value’. And each of the values to which he clings (his religion, his money and his daughter) reflects a different aspect of Cedric’s dream. Isaac’s unshakeable belief in his religion is a representation of Cedric’s equally unshakeable belief in his own views. Isaac’s obsession with money is a representation of the ‘value’ with which Cedric invests his dream. And, most obviously, Isaac’s bond with Rebecca is a representation of Cedric’s attachment to Rowena. In similar fashion, just as Prince John and his followers do everything they can to humiliate Cedric, so they also do everything they can to squeeze his last shekel out of the Jew. Isaac personifies the way in which Cedric has made himself an outcast as a result of his ambitions for Rowena. Rowena is perhaps the most unjustly belittled character in all of literature. Although brought up as if she were a princess, she is sufficiently level-headed not to have been swayed by her guardian’s ambitions. She is always ready to speak her mind: ‘The opinions which she felt strongly she avowed boldly’ (p. 157). She has constantly defied her guardian’s wishes; she has even threatened to ‘take refuge in a convent [rather] than share a throne with Athelstane’ (pp. 157–8). She refuses to accompany Cedric to Ashby Castle, where he disgraces himself by sanctioning Front-de-Bœuf’s claim to the manor of Ivanhoe. She has a great deal more personality than is usually thought. If she appears bland beside Rebecca, this is only because of their relation one to another. Rebecca is an idealized image of the way in which Cedric imagines Rowena. The Saxon leader’s temper and opinions might vacillate, but Rowena never does. She is as determined as anyone, man or woman could be expected to be. Rebecca personifies not only the strength of character but also the qualities with which Cedric invests Rowena. She is devout because Cedric has a romantically idealized image of woman. She is a healer, because this represents how he expects his ideal vision of womanhood to behave toward her people when she becomes queen. And she is also a nurse, because his ideal image of womanhood is of a woman who nurtures/nurses (both words stem from the same root: nutrire ¼ to nourish) the best in a man. In other words, she is an archetypal representation of the qualities with which Cedric invests Rowena. If Rebecca is more vivid a character than Rowena, it is only because she belongs to a more deeply archetypal level of imaginal reality. In short, both Jews, father and daughter, stand in ambivalent relation to Cedric. On the one hand, they represent a more refined version of the

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better side of his personality, which is that of a franklin with a penchant for a well-laden table. The desire that Rebecca expresses at the end of the novel, to live in a less militant and belligerent society, corresponds to Cedric’s own dream. On the other hand, they represent what Cedric has made of himself by his refusal to acknowledge the existent order of reality. In this, they have much in common with Ivanhoe. As such, their function is to compensate any threat to the better side of Cedric’s personality. It is to ensure the survival of this that Isaac and Rebecca provide Ivanhoe with the unexpected help that he needs on various occasions. Isaac lends Ivanhoe a horse not just because he would dearly like to see the supporters of Prince John defeated at Ashby, nor because he is suddenly overcome by generosity, but because of his archetypal function within the text. Both the outlaws and the Jews compensate the tyranny exercised by the Normans. The outlaws create their own independent society and so too do the Jews. Just as Locksley establishes a just society, so the Jews give priority to domestic pleasures. Both groups thus illustrate Jung’s insistence that the shadow is neither necessarily, nor inherently negative. The shadow is composed of ‘compensatory’ tendencies pertinent to the conscious ego; or, in terms of a literary fiction, pertinent to the effective protagonist. Just as the Normans reveal the worst of Cedric’s tendencies, so the outlaws and the Jews reveal different aspects of the better side of his nature. The outlaws represent his tenacious commitment to justice; the Jews, his deep, but unconscious belief in the importance of family bonds. Both groups recall Northrop Frye’s assertion that romance is ‘directly descended from folktale’ (p. 15). Just as the outlaws belong to a mythic or archetypal domain from which help mysteriously appears when it is most needed, so Isaac functions like a ‘helpful animal’ in a folk tale. In return for a small favour, he and his daughter appear at key moments and provide exactly the assistance that Cedric requires if he is to regain possession of his better nature. At a literal level, the reason that Ivanhoe takes no useful part in the siege of Torquilstone is because he is wounded. But at a psychological level, it is because Cedric has confirmed in public his decision to disinherit him. Hence the need of other helpers: the outlaws. The conflict at Torquilstone is between the various friends of the man who has misappropriated the manor of Ivanhoe and the followers of Locksley. Front-de-Bœuf represents Cedric’s brutality; Locksley, his courage and determination to see the power of the tyrant curbed and the grievances of the oppressed redressed (cf. p. 249). And these, we note, coincide exactly with the aims of chivalry, as advocated by the son that Cedric has so brutally disinherited.

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(b)

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Aspects of the Specific Shadow

The four simultaneous scenes that make up Chapters 21 to 24 are an extraordinary tour de force. Everything that happens both during them and in the course of the ensuing siege of Torquilstone constitutes a symbolic representation of the challenge facing Cedric. Cedric’s dominating ambition is to see Athelstane become king. One could hardly miss the humour implicit in Athelstane’s unsuitability for the position. Less obvious – but far more germane – is the fact that Athelstane personifies the fatuity of Cedric’s objectives. Appropriately, the two men find themselves imprisoned in a room that was once the great hall of the castle, but has since been turned into ‘a sort of guardroom’, that is, a place where servant-soldiers boast of their day’s achievements and eat and drink more than they should. It is an ironically appropriate setting for contrasting the different reactions of the two Saxons: Cedric can think only of past heroism; Athelstane, only of present deprivation. ‘Alas!’ reflects Cedric, ‘that such an enterprize as the regeneration of England should turn on a hinge so imperfect!’ (p. 177). This realization represents the first necessary step toward freeing Cedric of his unrealistic aspirations. The following three scenes – all of which take place simultaneously – form the climax of the novel. And the logic of both their individual encounters and their succession cannot be appreciated unless they are related to the situation into which, as a result of his dream, Cedric has unwittingly cast Rowena. Front-de-Bœuf has placed Isaac in the deepest recess of his castle – his ‘treasure chamber’ – in order to extort a thousand silver pounds as ransom for his release. The Jew can scarcely believe his ears. As soon as he understands the baron’s purpose, he exclaims: ‘It is impossible that your purpose can be real! The good God of nature never made a heart capable of exercising such cruelty!’ (p. 182). But Front-de-Bœuf is relentless. As so often in British literature that features stereotypic Jews, Isaac’s religion is a metaphor for an aspect of the dilemma facing the effective protagonist. It signals the inability of one character to understand another character whose values are utterly different from their own. Front-de-Bœuf cannot comprehend how anyone would risk life and limb for money. His highest value is his own life. He would happily renounce anything to secure his safety. Isaac cannot comprehend how anyone would renounce what belongs to him. The money is not the point: it provides a little, and somewhat tasteless comedy; that is all. What is at issue, however, is a sense of ‘value’. Isaac will not renounce any part of what he knows to be his, for whatever is his represents an aspect of his identity, his deepest conviction, his most cherished value. And this value

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is variously represented by his religion, his tenacious attachment to money and his love of his daughter. The parallel with Cedric is clear: Isaac clings fiercely to what is his – in exactly the same way as Cedric clings to his dream. Front-de-Bœuf and Isaac represent opposite tendencies of Cedric’s personality: the Norman represents his tendency to bully others who are weaker than he is; the Jew, his refusal to be bullied by those who are stronger than he is. In his Confessions, St Augustine refers to the ‘grand struggle in [his] inner house’ (Confessions, 8.8.19). This scene represents just such a struggle. The image of Front-de-Bœuf torturing Isaac is a vivid representation of what is happening within Cedric’s unconscious, that is, in the deepest recess of his identity. Hence the irony: for however violent and disturbing the scene might be, there is a sense in which Frontde-Bœuf’s objective can be described as ‘purposive’. He is trying to get Isaac to renounce what he holds most dear. Cedric must renounce the dream to which he clings as tenaciously as Isaac clings to his money, and which has made him as brutal and ruthless as Front-de-Bœuf. The Norman giant is about to secure what he wants when the Jew surprises him by demanding a guarantee of his daughter’s honour. That is: Cedric just might be persuaded to renounce his dream, but only if his change of mind were to leave Rowena untainted. Front-de-Bœuf explains that he has given Rebecca as ‘a handmaiden’ to Bois-Guilbert, whereupon Isaac lets out a yell that terrifies even his captors. He refuses to pay a ‘silver penny’ unless his daughter is delivered to him ‘in safety and honour’ (pp. 186, 185). Front-de-Bœuf is once again at a loss: he cannot comprehend that a Jew would feel so deeply for his daughter. But dearer to Isaac than either his money or his life is his daughter’s honour. In metaphorical terms, his cry of defiance comes from deep within the recesses of Cedric’s unconscious. The Saxon leader may be in a different part of the castle, but the cry none the less represents an intuition of the way in which his own high-handedness has placed Rowena in the hands of an adventurer. This is the first step in the process. Maurice De Bracy might appear to be the most vapid and the least offensive of the small group of Normans with which the action is concerned. He is an adventurer, but (he would have us believe) not without honour. A closer reading suggests that he is an altogether more disturbing figure. For De Bracy is a personification of that kind of man who can assess correctly the dubious actions of his peers, and yet will pursue a course of action as ignoble as those whom he so acutely criticises. He candidly admits to Waldemar Fitzurse that his behaviour is dictated not by principle but ‘pleasure’ and adds, both ominously and perhaps unexpectedly: ‘the work of the Conquest should be completed’

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(p. 136). In his own way he is every bit as ruthless as the more insistent partners of his adventure. He has set his mind on getting himself a wife, and his eye has fallen on Rowena. In short, he personifies another aspect of Cedric’s shadow. Both men are quick to note the splinter in the eyes of others rather than the beam in their own. Just as Cedric thinks contemptuously of Norman excess and yet is blind to his own, so De Bracy pours scorn on others without realizing how contemptible his own behaviour is. They are both ruled by fashion. Just as Cedric makes a point of dressing in traditional Saxon clothes, so De Bracy adopts the Norman fashion of the moment. They both see themselves as leaders of derring-do adventures. Just as Cedric is the leader of a small group of Saxons who follow him less from ideological conviction than because of his position in Saxon society, so De Bracy is the leader of a group of Free Companions who follow him only for money and adventure. They are both utterly single-minded in the pursuit of their separate goals. And in each case the victim of their ambitions is Rowena. In the second scene at Torquilstone, De Bracy’s offensive gallantry toward Rowena is a parody of Cedric’s vapid ambitions for her. She proudly defies him until, like Isaac at almost exactly the same time, she is touched where she is most vulnerable: she learns that Ivanhoe lies wounded in the castle and De Bracy will betray him to Front-de-Bœuf if she does not comply with his wishes. She cannot believe a human being capable of such dishonourable behaviour and breaks into tears. Ever since seeing Ivanhoe at Ashby, Rowena has become more determined than ever not to marry Athelstane and her renewed strength of purpose is reflected in her defiance of De Bracy. If she breaks into tears, it is not because she lacks character; it is because she is confronted with the cruellest of choices: to submit to a man whom she abhors, or to have her helpless lover betrayed into the power of a man who would show him no mercy. To criticize her for her tears at this juncture is not to understand either her predicament or her function in the process in which she is a central player. The scene between De Bracy and Rowena vividly illustrates the tension between the romantic levity of Cedric’s plans and the cruelty of its effect on Rowena. Her tears none the less constitute the second turning-point of the climax. They cause De Bracy to pause, which corresponds to the fact that Cedric has no intention of hurting his ward. Indeed, he is so obsessed with his project that he is unconscious of doing her any hurt. Thus a third scene is needed to clarify the reality of this threat. The third scene is possibly the single most memorable encounter in the novel. Bois-Guilbert attempts to seduce Rebecca to his purpose. He arrogantly admits that he has no thought of marriage; he wants her par

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amours and assumes he only has to ask for her to surrender to him. He has not taken account of her strength of mind. She refuses to submit, opens a lattice, and while she stands at the gaping window he tells her the story of how he loved Adelaide de Montemare. One day, returning from his travels, he finds his fiance´e ‘wedded to a Gascon squire’. He continues: ‘Since that day I have separated myself from life and its ties – My manhood must know no domestic home – must be soothed by no affectionate wife – My age must know no kindly hearth – My grave must be solitary, and no offspring must outlive me, to bear the ancient name of Bois-Guilbert. At the feet of my Superior I have laid down the right of self-action – the privilege of independence. The Templar, a serf in all but name, can possess neither lands nor goods, and lives, moves, and breathes, but at the will and pleasure of another.’ ‘Alas!’ said Rebecca, ‘what advantages could compensate for such an absolute sacrifice?’ ‘The power of vengeance, Rebecca’, replied the Templar, ‘and the prospects of ambition.’ ‘An evil recompense’, said Rebecca, ‘for the surrender of the rights which are dearest to humanity.’ (pp. 200–201)

The codes contrasted here form the core of the novel. As a Templar, Bois-Guilbert has surrendered everything to the will of his superior. He has forsworn a relationship with a woman and renounced even his freedom of movement. This time it is the Jew who cannot comprehend the Christian’s values. Rebecca cannot understand such a complete surrender, either to another human being or to a cause, of what she sees as the ‘rights which are dearest to humanity’. She puts her trust in God, and shares her life between family duties and helping to alleviate the suffering of other human beings. Her response is an archetypal elaboration of Rowena’s similar inability to believe that her guardian will force her to something so abhorrent to her. The dreams of Cedric and Bois-Guilbert are alike not only in their absurdity, but also in the cruelty of their effect on a woman. Rebecca’s comment on the Templar’s argument might just as well have been levelled at Cedric. Both men devote everything they have to the cause in which they believe. That Bois-Guilbert can describe himself as a ‘serf’ reflects what we have already defined as Cedric’s thraldom to his obsession. They have allowed their equally manic ambitions to alienate them from any kind of social reality. Just as Bois-Guilbert is contemptuous of the very superiors to whom he has surrendered his liberty (p. 340), so Cedric grudgingly recognizes that Athelstane is an imperfect ‘hinge’ on which to turn ‘such an enterprize as the regeneration

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of England’. And they are equally blind to the cruel presumption of their dream: in both cases, it does violence to a woman. Cedric has ‘willingly sacrificed domestic happiness’ in order to promote the restoration of Saxon independence (p. 156). And as the Templar tells Rebecca in her ‘cell’ at Torquilstone, so too has he. By stubbornly refusing to acknowledge Rowena’s preference for Ivanhoe, Cedric not only imprisons himself in a world of make-believe, but also causes his ward cruel distress. Bois-Guilbert’s lust for Rebecca is an archetypal representation of Cedric’s plans for Rowena. The scene between them represents the tension between the manic intensity of Cedric’s ambition and its cruel effect on Rowena. Critics have always admired the characterization of Rebecca and rightly so: Scott has imagined her vividly. But they should be cautious about comparing her with Rowena. For Rowena and Rebecca are not ‘opposites’ in a single social reality; they exist on different levels of an imaginal reality. The point about the two women is not that one is spirited and the other bland. It is that Rebecca’s courage in the face of a much more resolute foe is a symbolic representation of the threat to Rowena. Bois-Guilbert’s attempt to seduce Rebecca is an imaginal amplification of Cedric’s attempt to coerce Rowena to his ends. It might be insisted that Rebecca is much more politically conscious than Rowena, but this is beside the point. Her bitter reflection that ‘The sound of the trumpet wakes Judah no longer, and her dispersed children are now but the unresisting victims of hostile and military oppression’ (p. 250) is an amplification of how Cedric sees the Saxon nation. Her bold defiance of Bois-Guilbert and her composure in the face of adversity are an archetypal representation of Rowena’s defiance not only of De Bracy, but also of her continuing intention to defy Cedric. The irony is of course that Cedric means Rowena no harm. It is his restlessness and idle folly that have led both him and his ward into the situation in which they find themselves. And it is a personification of his restlessness and folly that contrives his escape. The following scenes are interwoven with those involving another figure. Clearly designed to have the intensity of a classical kommos, the story of Ulrica does not appear to be well integrated into the events. In fact, albeit somewhat clumsily, it takes us to the heart of the problem. (c) Ulrica and Anima Possession On being brought to Torquilstone, Rebecca is shown into the same cell as an old woman who feels that her end is approaching. Ulrica wants to confess. She learns there is a priest in the castle and, mistaking Cedric for a priest, she confronts him, and begs him to hear her confession. He is

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horrified by her tale. For Ulrica is the daughter of Torquil Wolfganger, a widely admired Saxon chief who was the previous owner of the castle in which she lives: he was also a close friend of Cedric’s father. As a young woman, she was present when the father of Front-de-Bœuf attacked Torquilstone, and she had to watch as Front-de-Bœuf senior killed her father and her brothers. Even so, she became his willing mistress. Some time later, she seduced his son, Front-de-Bœuf, and then tried to persuade him to murder his father. No wonder that Cedric (who is steeped in patriarchal values) accuses her of suffering from leprosy of the soul. He tells her that even Front-de-Bœuf is less odious to him than her. They would appear to be opposites, but – as with everything else in this novel – her story and situation are related to him. Ulrica is consumed by remorse and a searing conviction that she has violated both her social and her innermost identity. She offers a striking image of what would become of Rebecca if she were to surrender to Bois-Guilbert. She embodies the humiliation of a woman who has become the object of a man’s fantasy. For if Rebecca were to submit to Bois-Guilbert, she too would become a Norman’s whore and we have already learned that this would effectively kill her father Isaac. The important point to note, however, is that this dilemma applies not only to Rebecca, but also to Rowena. For although Rowena has no desire to marry Athelstane, she is so deeply loyal to her guardian – and so constrained by the patriarchal code in which she has been brought up – that she finds herself in a cruel dilemma. She has no wish to offend her guardian; she has even less intention of betraying herself. Ulrica’s predicament is a vivid representation not only of the ‘fate’ awaiting Rebecca if she surrenders to Bois-Guilbert, but also of the psychological consequences of what Cedric is unwittingly – but insistently – doing to Rowena. At the heart of this text is a portrait – hyperbolic certainly, but no less significant for that – of the suffering inflicted on a woman as a result of a man’s anima possession. The anima is the name Jung gave to a particular kind of female figure encountered in a man’s dreams and wakingfantasies. The anima is never an image of a known person (for example, mother, sister, partner, wife); it is always remote and usually idealized. It belongs not to the personal, but to the collective unconscious. And the specific form it assumes for each individual is indicative of both his unconscious attitudes towards women in general, and the nature of his relationship with a specific woman. All men experience dreams in which anima figures appear, but not all men are fixated by their anima. Those that are can be so completely governed by dreams and waking fantasies of their anima that they often allow their real relationships to

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deteriorate; in extreme cases, such men lose all contact with reality. Jung referred to such a condition as ‘anima possession’. Cedric’s ambitions for Rowena provide an example of one kind of anima possession. Note that it is not a sexual fixation. He has no interest in her for himself, but he is so consumed by thoughts associated with her becoming queen that he has no thought of finding himself another partner. And he becomes increasingly unable to negotiate with the social reality in which he finds himself. A man suffering from anima possession tends to be ‘fickle, capricious, moody, uncontrolled and emotional’ (Jung, CW 9i. 223). All of these adjectives apply to Cedric. BoisGuilbert’s obsessive desire for Rebecca represents another form of anima possession. On the surface, it might appear to be sexual: it is not. The interview between Bois-Guilbert and Rebecca is magnificent precisely because it is essentially archetypal. It is an interview between a man’s shadow and an archetypal embodiment of his anima. It is entirely shaped by the nature of Cedric’s equally obsessive ambitions for Rowena. Just as Cedric unintentionally devalues the woman whom he wishes to see crowned, so Bois-Guilbert devalues the woman by whom he claims to be captivated. Just as Cedric denies Rowena the right to choose her own partner, so the Templar can only relate to Rebecca as sexual object. And Ulrica vividly personifies the consequences of such anima possession for a woman. Helpless to determine her own future, she is both devalued and – paradoxically, but understandably – also de-sexed. For a man who seeks only the fulfilment of his sexual pleasure effectively robs a woman of her sexual identity. The image of Ulrica goading Front-de-Bœuf to kill his father is a symbolic representation of how Rowena would feel about the man who thrust her into a loveless marriage; in other words, about her guardian Cedric.

Aftermath in the Forest: Reluctance to Learn The ensuing ‘bridge passage’ – the scenes that explain how one big set piece moves toward the next – is characterized by coincidence. As soon as Cedric joins the outlaws, he takes his place at their head, gallant but ineffective. Not long after, smoke is seen rising from the castle. Ulrica has kept her word and set fire to the castle. Taking advantage of the confusion, the Black Knight and Locksley press upon the defenders and it is not long before the castle falls. The death of Front-de-Bœuf symbolizes the end of the ruthlessness with which Cedric had formerly pursued his goal. But the process is by no means complete, for the very excitement of the action gives new life to the Saxon’s dream. Hence, as the castle falls,

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Bois-Guilbert grabs hold of Rebecca. Mistaking her for Rowena, Athelstane immediately challenges the Templar. In the original text, Bois-Guilbert thereupon kills Athelstane, which would have signalled the end of Cedric’s dream. One must regret the insistence of Scott’s friend and editor. John Ballantyne persuaded the author that it was a shame for Athelstane to die. Scott obliged him by having Athelstane levelled only with ‘the flat’ of the Templar’s sword and later ‘resuscitating’ the Saxon leader. But this misjudgement changes nothing. Thinking that Athelstane is dead, Cedric has no choice but – albeit reluctantly – to renounce his project. The two curious scenes that follow provide a commentary on Cedric’s reluctance. Chapters 32 and 33 reflect the tension between his awareness that his ambitions are both vain and ludicrous and his reluctance to give up the motivating factor in his life. The outlaws gather around the ‘trysting-tree’ to distribute the spoils. Upon noticing that his ‘curtal friar’ is missing, Locksley sends the Miller to see what has become of him. A few moments later, the ‘clerk of Copmanhurst’ appears, dragging Isaac by a rope. Whereupon the Miller suggests that Prior Aymer ‘should name the Jew’s ransom, and the Jew name the Prior’s’ (p. 284). The two churchmen are mirror images of one another. The Prior is a friend of Bois-Guilbert; the clerk of Copmanhurst, a friend of Locksley. Neither is very concerned with the world of the spirit. Prior Aymer enjoys company and culinary dainties; the clerk of Copmanhurst is a hermit and a glutton. The former corresponds to the way in which Cedric imagines he behaves: as a privileged member of an elite and the counsellor of Athelstane. The latter corresponds to the way in which Cedric really does behave: living a life of social seclusion in which – apart from his dream – his major concern is to eat plentifully. The ransom of Aymer suggests that Cedric has not yet been able to renounce his desire to wine and dine with the political elite. The ransom of Isaac is more disturbing. The comedy of the scene does not disguise the fact that the sum of money required from Isaac is the same as that demanded on the previous day by Front-de-Bœuf. On learning of the abduction of Rebecca, Locksley reduces the sum. But no one thinks of doing anything to help Rebecca. In realist terms, it is a chilling moment. But this is a romance, and its thematic coherence lies in the underlying patterns of interaction. Here as elsewhere in the novel, Isaac’s love of money symbolize’s Cedric’s reluctance to part with what he values most. Isaac’s ransom suggests that Cedric must part with his hope of seeing a restored Saxon monarchy. There is, however, an important difference between this and the earlier scenes at Torquilstone. This time Isaac is being coerced not by a personification of Cedric’s more brutal nature (Front de Bœuf), but by a personification of his better nature (Locksley).

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This reluctant acknowledgement of the existent reality is represented in the following scene. We remember how Gurth personifies a major aspect of Cedric’s personality. He has ‘an appearance of deep dejection’ which might have been construed as apathy, were it not for a ‘fire’ in his eyes that suggested ‘a sense of oppression, and a disposition of resistance’ (pp. 19–20). The same could be said of Cedric. As soon as Wamba asks Cedric to forgive Gurth, the Saxon leader not only does so, but also grants him his freedom. Whereupon Gurth leaps to his feet and asks for a file to rid himself of his serf’s collar. He feels the difference: ‘I am a man changed to myself and all around’ (p. 273). And his new state of independence is a symbolic representation of a further stage in Cedric’s own freedom from his obsession. Wamba is not given his freedom, not because he is a fool, but because he personifies Cedric’s restlessness, his ‘fidgetty impatience’ and ‘utmost self-satisfaction respecting his own situation and the appearance which he made’ (p. 20). Cedric is not the man to be able to govern either of these. Although Rowena is now conscious that she has been ‘freed from further persecution on the only subject in which she had ever been contradicted by her guardian Cedric’ (p. 274), it remains for Cedric to still those tendencies that stem from his impatient selfsatisfaction. Cedric, however, remains unconscious of the change through which he has gone. As he prepares to leave, he earnestly entreats the Black Knight to return with him to Rotherwood and make his home there (p. 275). The irony is that he still does not realize that he has invited ‘Richard of England’ to share his home. Had he known it, he would not have proffered the invitation, for he is still very reluctant to renounce his life-long ambition. This is the sense of the intended regicide. Prince John prompts Waldemar Fitzurse to attack Richard in the woods. In both political and in psychological terms, this is the most dangerous moment in the novel. And one notes that Cedric’s ‘representative’ in this encounter is Wamba, his fool. Had the attempted regicide been successful, it would have signalled the end of the romantic nature of Cedric’s dreams, and their replacement by dreams of personal scheming and subterfuge. The treason is defeated, however, not so much by Richard’s knightly prowess, as (once again) by Locksley’s timely intervention. And this suggests that Cedric is finally allowing his loyalty to England to outweigh his desire to turn the clock back. But he has not yet come to terms with his shadow. The transformation process must be brought to a more substantial conclusion. Hence the last great scene of the novel.

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The Trial at Templestowe: The Glory and Limitations of Chivalry As Torquilstone falls, the Templar abducts Rebecca and flees to the preceptory at Templestowe. Had he known that Lucas de Beaumanoir was visiting, he might have gone elsewhere. For the Grand Master of the Order of Knights Templar is determined to root out the corruption into which the order has fallen. On learning of Rebecca’s presence there, he immediately assumes that she is guilty of having incited Bois-Guilbert’s obsession with her. He decides to try Rebecca as a sorceress. This time it is Bois-Guilbert’s turn not to believe his ears: ‘Will future ages believe that such stupid bigotry ever existed?’ (p. 315). But he thinks he can cheat his Grand Master. He decides to defend Rebecca. He is convinced that he can overcome any opponent, that he will be able to secure Rebecca’s pardon and so win her over to his ambition. But his intention is frustrated: he is made to represent the Temple in the trial by combat that he instigated. The scene at Templestowe is a symbolic representation of the process in which Cedric is still involved. He thinks he is championing Rowena’s interests; in fact, he is still intent on forcing her to conform to his will. The parallel between the layout of Rotherwood and the grand hall of the preceptory is not coincidental. Just as Cedric, together with his immediate family and friends, occupies a raised dais at one end of his main hall (pp. 33–4), so the Grand Master and the senior Templars occupy an almost identical ‘dais’ at Templestowe (p. 319). Just as Cedric suspects everyone of slighting his authority, so the Grand Master suspects Rebecca of witchcraft. One also notes the unexpected parallels between him and the Grand Master. Lucas de Beaumanoir is: A formidable warrior, his thin and severe features retained the soldier’s fierceness of expression; an ascetic bigot, they were no less marked by the emaciation of abstinence, and the spiritual pride of the self-satisfied devotee. (p. 304) He was not originally a cruel or even a severe man; but with passions by nature cold, and with a high, though mistaken, sense of duty, his heart had been gradually hardened by the ascetic life which he pursued, the supreme power which he enjoyed, and the supposed necessity of subduing infidelity and eradicating heresy, which he conceived peculiarly incumbent on him. (p. 330)

He wants to bring about the return of his order to its original highminded purpose. Although we are reminded also of Bois-Guilbert’s confession to Rebecca at Torquilstone (‘I am not naturally that which

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you have seen me’; p. 200), the more significant parallel is with Cedric. He too leads an almost ‘ascetic’ life. He too is consumed by the ‘spiritual pride’ that comes from manic belief in his own purpose. He too has hardened his heart in the pursuit of an ambition to which he has devoted himself. He too believes in the possibility of bringing about a restoration of an old order. And just as Lucas Beaumanoir, in order to achieve this, turns justice on its head without any concern for the innocence of Rebecca, so Cedric, in the pursuit of his own form of bigoted intolerance, repudiates his own son without any concern for the happiness of Rowena. In spite of thinking Athelstane dead, he has still not yet fully accepted the need to abandon all his ‘hopes’ (cf. p. 272). In the forest, following the rescue of Richard by Locksley and his men, the King decides to visit Coningsburgh Castle, where Athelstane’s funeral is in progress. He reveals himself to Cedric, who refuses to kneel before him. Cedric tells him: ‘ ‘‘King I own thou art, and wilt be, despite of my feeble opposition.–I dare not take the only mode to prevent it, though thou hast placed the strong temptation within my reach!’’ ’ (p. 375). Just as Richard forgives Fitzurse (p. 359), so he forgives Cedric. Instead, he demands the boon that Cedric promised him at Torquilstone, that Ivanhoe be forgiven: ‘ ‘‘In this reconciliation thou wilt own I have an interest–the happiness of my friend, and the quelling of dissension among my faithful people’’ ’ (p. 375). Cedric insists that Ivanhoe first ‘shew himself of English ancestry’ (p. 376): he means ‘Saxon’. And he continues: before Ivanhoe can marry Rowena, she must complete two years’ mourning. The parallel with what is happening at Templestowe at the same time is evident. In both cases, a woman is required to pay for a man’s manic obsession. Never mind the sequel, which is clumsy farce. Athelstane reappears, tenders Richard his allegiance, and is about to give Rowena’s hand to Ivanhoe when the latter’s absence is noticed. He has been called to Templestowe. Athelstane may have been chastened by his experience, but Cedric still has not. Consequently, the process working towards his change of heart and mind continues. The conclusion, however, is in sight. Indeed, the ending of the novel scarcely requires any comment. Ivanhoe arrives just in time to defend Rebecca from being burned as a witch. After a hard ride, and still suffering from his wound, he is in no fit state to joust. He is neither responsible for the death of Bois-Guilbert, nor does he achieve anything by it. The Templar dies ‘a victim to the violence of his own contending passions’ (p. 392) and his death anticipates the final, albeit grudging, renunciation of Cedric’s ambitions.

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Scott was clearly fascinated by chivalric practice. The most famous lines about the subject belong, of course, to the conversation between Ivanhoe and Rebecca during the siege of Torquilstone. Ivanhoe, still suffering from a wound received during the ‘games’ at Ashby, tells her that the end of chivalry is glory. The Jewess is unimpressed: ‘Glory?’ continued Rebecca; ‘alas, is the rusted mail which hangs as a hatchment over the champion’s dim and mouldering tomb – is the defaced sculpture of the inscription which the ignorant monk can hardly read to the inquiring pilgrim – are these sufficient rewards for the sacrifice of every kindly affection, for a life spent miserably that ye may make others miserable?’ (p. 249)

Ivanhoe chides her for deploring a code of values whose purpose is to redress wrong, whatever form it takes: ‘Chivalry! – why, maiden, it is the nurse of pure and high affection – the stay of the oppressed, the redresser of grievances, the curb of the power of the tyrant–nobility were but an empty name without her, and liberty finds the best protector in her lance and her sword.’ (p. 249)

Most readers feel that Rebecca gets the better of the argument. But the justice of Ivanhoe’s position is borne out by the ending. For it is ‘chivalry’ that secures not only her rescue at Templestowe, but also the recovery of liberty with which the novel is so centrally concerned. The defeat of Bois-Guilbert is not brought about by any specifically Saxon qualities, but by two individuals – one of French origin, the other of Saxon origin – who embody the defining principles of Norman chivalry. Just as Prince John personifies some of Cedric’s least likeable tendencies, King Richard personifies many of his finest and defining traits. Richard is called ‘of the Lion Heart’; the same might be said of Cedric. Richard is ‘generous, but rash and romantic’ (p. 401); the same could be held of Cedric. In Richard . . . the brilliant, but useless character, of a knight of romance, was in a great measure realized; and the personal glory which he acquired by his own deeds of arms, was far more dear to his excited imagination than that which a course of policy and wisdom would have spread around his government. (p. 365)

He is reckless of both his private and public person (cf. p. 363). So too is Cedric: at Torquilstone, he insists on fighting in the van without the protection of any kind of armour (p. 261). As is clear from the interest he takes in the accomplishments of the Disinherited Knight at Ashby (p. 89), he reveres the combination of martial skill and generosity embodied

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in a knight. Cedric might pretend to scorn both ‘the games of chivalry’ and the chivalric code of a Norman knight, but Richard none the less personifies the very qualities he most admires. As king, however, Richard achieves nothing: . . . his reign was like the course of a brilliant and rapid meteor . . . his feats of chivalry furnishing themes for bards and minstrels, but affording none of those solid benefits to his country on which history loves to pause. (p. 365)

In short, Richard also personifies Cedric’s limitation. According to Cirlot, knighthood is ‘a superior kind of pedagogy helping to bring about the transformation of natural man (steedless) into spiritual man’ (p. 171). Although there is little or nothing in Ivanhoe that could usefully be described as ‘spiritual’, the quotation is still relevant. The novel traces a process affecting Cedric – not, perhaps, his transformation into ‘spiritual man’, but into someone who has become a little better adjusted to the reality of his time. Even so, the tentative nature of the change is suggested by the poverty of Richard’s lasting contribution to his country. It is also suggested by the many unresolved elements. Prince John has not been punished; De Bracy and Waldemar Fitzurse both flee abroad. Even Isaac and Rebecca, who have little to fear, prefer to emigrate. And the fact that they do so is suggestive that very little has been learned. Only Front-de-Bœuf and Bois-Guilbert die and only the two Malvoisin brothers are executed. But their deaths are significant. Albert Malvoisin plays a relatively minor part in the events and it comes as something of a surprise that he should be singled out at the end for punishment. But he was Preceptor at Templestowe and this is significant. His crime is implicit: he allows Rebecca to be held against her wishes. In this sense, he personifies that aspect of Cedric’s personality responsible for the way in which his dream constrains Rowena, against her wishes. Cedric’s two most immediate ‘shadow-figures’ have been slain, but others remain. He may have had to acknowledge the existent political reality, but he never really renounces what Ibsen might have called his ‘life-lie’ (cf. The Wild Duck, Act V).

The Epilogue: Rowena and Rebecca At the end of the novel, when Rebecca gives Rowena a casket filled with priceless jewels, she tells her that ‘the people of England are a fierce race, quarreling ever with their neighbours or among themselves’ (p. 399). This is why she and her father have chosen to leave the country. Rowena

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tries to explain that, as friends to Ivanhoe, Rebecca and Isaac would be well protected in England. She even advises Rebecca to seek ‘the counsel of holy men’ to wean her from her ‘unhappy law’ (p. 400). It is perhaps the most tactless and bigoted comment in the entire novel. It harbours a fierce conviction that a Jew must convert to Christianity before he or she can be considered as a person. It perfectly illustrates why Rebecca feels she has no place among the English. She will not change the faith of her people ‘like a garment unsuited to the climate’ in which she lives (p. 400). Even so, her decision should not be read literally. Rebecca and her father are not victims of a Christian narrowmindedness peculiar either to the late twelfth or to the early nineteenth century. They are archetypal images that serve to comment on the main concern of a romance written in the early nineteenth century. They have no individuality. They are types. Their function is to amplify the nature of Cedric’s ambitions regarding Rowena. The highest values attributed to the Jews (family, compassion and God) are those that Cedric has either renounced or to which he has never given any thought. Rebecca expresses it best: chivalry is no substitute for ‘domestic love, kindly affection, peace and happiness’ (p. 249) – qualities that Cedric so obviously lacks. Neither Cedric nor Bois-Guilbert enjoys the domestic happiness so highly prized by Rebecca. Her function in the novel is to ‘compensate’ Cedric’s single-minded obsession; to waken him to the importance of allowing Rowena her own life. Readers and scholars alike have long quarrelled about the unsatisfactory nature of the ending. At a literal level, it may be true that Rebecca has asked her father to take her away from a country that reminds her of Ivanhoe. But this is a fiction. At no stage in the text does Ivanhoe demonstrate any affective interest in Rebecca. His entire character – if such it can be called – depends on his unswerving devotion to Rowena. If the image of Rebecca recurs ‘to his mind more frequently than the fair descendant of Alfred might altogether have approved’, there is no reason to suspect that he ever wishes he had thought of her more ardently than he does. The previous sentence makes this clear: Ivanhoe . . . lived long and happily with Rowena, for they were attached to each other by the bonds of early affection, and they loved each other the more, from the recollection of the obstacles which had impeded their union. (p. 401)

Their union is a symbolic representation of two things: Cedric’s tentative acceptance of the existent reality, and the ending of hostility between Saxons and Normans. Rebecca’s decision to leave England is ambivalent. On the one hand, it symbolizes the complete abandonment of Cedric’s

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ambitions vis-a`-vis Rowena. But on the other, it suggests a weakness in Scott’s fictional imagination: even at the end of Ivanhoe, he cannot find a way to emphasize the importance of family, compassion and good works that Rebecca so evidently represents.

Conclusions This post-Jungian reading addresses only one set of questions. But it resolves at least some of the issues that other approaches have failed to explain. In the first place, it offers an explanation why Scott’s heroes tend to be one-dimensional. It also demonstrates that the plot is a good deal more coherent than has been recognized and that the main characters are much better imagined than might be thought. It is time to learn afresh how to read this historical romance – but not for what it might tell us about history, so much as for the unusually vivid way in which it describes a typical unconscious process that might still be relevant today. My main purposes have been to demonstrate (a) that a narrative fiction describes a process affecting not the obvious hero, but the effective protagonist; and (b) that Jung’s theories about the shadow and the anima, together with his theory of compensation, provide a more useful tool for defining this process than is usually recognized. The argument outlines a fresh way of examining the relation between narrative and psychological theme. It suggests that narrative is governed (a) by the nature of the implicit challenge facing the effective protagonist at the outset, and (b) by the specific way in which this character either confronts or evades this challenge, and why. Cedric represents the type of man who cannot accept the conditions of the age in which he lives. He is in thrall to a ‘life-lie’. He yearns for the return of an imaginary past. He is so completely absorbed by ‘his favourite plan’ that he is utterly unconscious of the extent to which he has become as irascible and tyrannical as the men whose power he resents. He has adopted the worst tendencies of his shadow. Every major scene in Ivanhoe reflects the challenge implicitly facing him from the outset: to renounce his vapid dream, adapt to the existent socio-political reality and allow his ward to marry the man of her choice. The action is set in motion when he comes face to face with a character that personifies his own unconscious character and ambitions (Bois-Guilbert). But he never gets to confront and thus thrash things out with either Bois-Guilbert or any of the other aspects of his shadow. He plays no part in the deaths of Front-de-Bœuf or Bois-Guilbert, and De Bracy escapes abroad. This suggests that the process with which this novel is concerned

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unfolds almost entirely below the threshold of his (and by extension also of the author’s) consciousness. This is why the ending is only tentative. De Bracy, who personifies the vapid romanticism of his dream, survives. Ivanhoe provides what amounts to a case study both of the shadow and the anima. Each of the Normans who has a reason to fear the return of Richard represents a distinct aspect of Cedric’s shadow personality. And Rowena and Rebecca both represent different aspects of his anima. Rowena is his ideal image of womanhood; Rebecca, an archetypal representation of Rowena’s qualities. Ivanhoe is entirely shaped by Cedric’s manic ambitions for his ward. The events explore the consequences of anima possession both for the man (Cedric) and for the woman who – however unwittingly – gives rise to his fantasy (Rowena). The stories of Rebecca and Ulrica serve to amplify these consequences. Ivanhoe offers an unusually well-controlled exploration of the origins, nature and consequences of anima possession.

CHAPTER TWO

‘Man’s Deeper Nature is Soon Found Out’: Psychological Typology, the Puer Aeternus, and Fear of the Feminine in The Picture of Dorian Gray Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. (Basil to Lord Henry, p. 5)

The opening scene of Oscar Wilde’s only novel appears straightforward: three charming young men chatter about life and art. Any commentary would seem superfluous. And yet a moment’s reflection introduces a surprising number of critical problems. Basil Hallward, an up-andcoming society painter, is shy, dull and conservative. Lord Henry Wotton, an idle aristocrat, is characterized by his flamboyant personality and outrageous wit. It is impossible to believe that he would ever have thought of calling on his ostensible ‘friend’: the two men have nothing in common. If Wilde has brought them together, it is very obviously not only to enable two diametrically opposite ‘types’ to comment on Basil’s masterpiece, but also to set the scene for the ‘influence’ that Lord Henry quickly begins to exercise on the young man who sat for it. But what kind of ‘types’ do they represent? And what kind of ‘influence’ is at stake? In short, what are we to make of the relationships between the three young men at the centre of the novel? What value is one to accord the various ideas they each espouse, especially on aesthetics? And how does one connect the issues raised in the opening scene with Dorian Gray’s ensuing ‘odyssey of experience’ (Hillman, 1979, p. 24), which both begins with and grows out of his brief relationship with a young actress, Sibyl Vane?

The Argument This chapter consists of a post-Jungian analysis of the interactions between the four main characters in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890/

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1891). Its main contention is that the painter Basil Hallward determines both the structural and psychological coherence of the novel; in other words, that he is its effective protagonist. As we shall see, all the events of the novel – including those that feature the eponymous hero – reflect a challenge implicitly confronting him in the opening pages. At the outset of the novel, Basil is a successful painter so wrapped up in his work that he cares for nothing else (p. 9). He has little imagination and ‘no curiosity’ (p. 213): he is ‘dull’ (p. 212). But because he is considered a good painter, he is lionized by society hostesses. Two months prior to the opening scene, he goes to a crush where he meets a young man who fills him with a ‘curious sensation of terror’ (p. 6). He turns to flee, but is prevented by Lady Brandon, who is determined to introduce him to her other guests. Finally, happening to find himself next to the young man, he asks her to introduce him. The two men quickly become inseparable. But Basil is the kind of man who so identifies with his ‘persona’ (his role as painter) that he gives no thought at all to his ‘ego’ (the centre of his own private, conscious personality). He paints his new young friend in every conceivable role, but he never even thinks of trying to understand Dorian as an individual, even less of trying to understand why Dorian should have had such an unusual impact on him. He tells Lord Henry, ‘Dorian Gray is to me simply a motive in art’ (p. 11). This chapter argues that the painter’s sudden fascination with his new young friend presents him with an implicit, albeit ambivalent challenge. But Basil is so deeply unconscious of his need to reflect on the possible significance that Dorian holds for him that he misinterprets the nature of this challenge. And before he knows it, his young model has fallen under the spell of Lord Henry. It is not long before Dorian begins to behave very differently from the young man that captivated Basil. Reading the text in relation to Basil Hallward opens up surprising parallels between the impasse in which he finds himself and the concerns of the central narrative. The aim is to demonstrate that reading the novel in relation to Basil resolves a great many of the difficulties experienced by critics. The argument is in three parts. The first section offers an unexpected explanation of the dynamics that govern the relationships between the three young men at its centre. It begins with the question: is there anything about Basil that might help to explain why he is so fascinated by the young man he meets? It demonstrates how Jung’s theory of psychological types can be used to address this question. It identifies the nature and implications of Basil’s fascination and provides a rationale for suggesting that Basil is the effective protagonist. And this leads to a consideration of the relation between the dilemma facing him and the course of Dorian’s odyssey of

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experience. The aim of the first part is to show how the novel’s interactions are entirely determined by Basil’s psychological type, or, rather, how they describe what happens to a particular kind of introverted intuition type when he fails to address the problem posed by his shadow. The second section provides an unanticipated explanation of Basil’s fascination with Dorian Gray. In other words, it seeks to resolve one of the major difficulties that critics have had with this text: that of deciding what literary significance to accord the young man at its centre. It reverses the question posed in the first section, and asks whether there is anything about Dorian that might help to explain why he makes such a powerful impression on Basil. It uses Jung’s theory of archetypal images to demonstrate that Dorian Gray is invested with attributes uncannily similar to those ascribed by Ovid not only to the young Dionysos, but also to Apollo. It then reflects on the significance and implications of these parallels. Its aims are not only to suggest that the novel provides a case study of the fascination that an archetypal image of ‘eternal youth’ can exercise upon a particular kind of middleaged man, but also to relate this claim to the aesthetics espoused in the text. The third section demonstrates the connection between Basil’s interest in his young friend and Dorian’s own fascination with Sibyl Vane. It illustrates how Jung’s theory of archetypal images can also help to identify the various interrelated factors responsible for Dorian’s initial fascination with her. It explains why this is replaced by ice-cold rejection and argues that this pattern of behaviour is conditioned by an unconscious fear of the feminine. It then connects these findings to the challenge implicitly facing Basil Hallward. In the final section, the findings are briefly related to the author. The aim is to demonstrate not only that Dorian’s encounter with Sibyl Vane provides a determining theme of the novel, but also to reflect on the implications of this assertion. Oscar Wilde is possibly the most celebrated homosexual in British literature. And yet, somewhat curiously, the interactions depicted in his only novel suggest that his homosexuality may have been determined by an unconscious but none the less overpowering fear of the feminine.

1. A Portrait of Basil Hallward Actual life was chaos, but there was something terribly logical in the imagination. (The narrator, with reference to Dorian Gray; p. 200)

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The main plot of The Picture of Dorian Gray would appear to be about Dorian’s curious history. Dominick Rossi, with good reason, compares it with the first part of Goethe’s Faust (Rossi, 1969; cf. Nethercot, 1944). It begins when Dorian meets Lord Henry (cf. Mephistopheles); soon after, he becomes infatuated with the very ordinary Sibyl Vane (cf. Gretchen); when he repulses her, she commits suicide; some time later he is threatened by James Vane (cf. Valentine); and the novel ends with the protagonist being overcome by his conscience. The parallel with Goethe’s narrative structure raises an important question about the nature and purpose of Lord Henry’s influence. In the following pages, I explore the psychological implications of the influence that Lord Henry exercises on Dorian Gray. Because Dorian Gray only takes on a life of his own after meeting Lord Henry, one is tempted to think of his personality principally in relation to his acknowledged mentor. But in psychological terms, he may owe more to Basil. Admittedly, in Chapter 9 Dorian tells the painter: ‘I owe a great deal to Harry . . . more than I owe to you. You only taught me to be vain’ (p. 108). But this view is significantly modified in Chapter 13 when, only a moment before showing Basil the portrait that he has kept in the old schoolroom, Dorian confesses to him: ‘ ‘‘You are the one man in the world who is entitled to know everything about me. You have had more to do with my life than you think.’’ ’ (p. 155). My contention is that this confidence provides a necessary key to the novel’s psychological implications. Basil has far more to do with Dorian Gray than is usually recognized. My aim in the following pages is to demonstrate that Dorian’s every experience is determined by the nature of the dilemma facing Basil. In this first section of my argument, I call on Jung’s theory of psychological typology to demonstrate that the characters of both Dorian and Lord Henry are determined by Basil’s psychological type. That is, Lord Henry provokes Dorian into assuming typological characteristics that elaborate on the implications of Basil’s fascination with him. My aim is to demonstrate that Wilde’s only novel comprises what amounts to a case study of the interactions between three identifiable psychological types. It has often been said that Dorian misinterprets Lord Henry’s advice. My interest is in trying to specify how and why he does so. And surprising as this might seem, the reason has far more to do with Basil than is usually recognized.

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Jung’s Theory of Psychological Types Jung developed his theory of psychological types in order to explain both the similarities and the differences in the ways in which individuals instinctively perceive and relate to external stimuli. His purpose was not to ‘classify human beings into categories’ but, rather, to provide a ‘critical tool’ that could account for the wide variations that occur in the habitual emphases of different people (CW 6: 986). And implicit in this aim is the conviction that individuals should be more aware not only of what interests them, but also why it interests them in the way it does; in other words, why they react to a given stimulus in the specific way they do. And it need scarcely be added: these are also concerns pertinent to literary criticism. The use of psychological typology for vocational guidance has long been recognized (for example, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator test, which is of course modelled on Jung’s distinctions); its use in education is also being increasingly recognized. But somewhat curiously, it is not often referred to in contemporary literary criticism, and one wonders why. For the better one understands a character’s ‘type’, the better one is able to understand the implications of the interactions with which he or she is involved. Let us test this contention in relation to Basil. Jung distinguished between two basic ‘attitudes’ (extraversion and introversion) and four habitual ‘functions’ (thinking, feeling, sensation and intuition). Thinking and feeling he described as ‘rational’ functions, because they involve reflection (CW 6: 787). Sensation and intuition he described as ‘irrational’ because they describe reactions to every occurrence and thus ‘lack all rational direction’ (CW 6: 776). There are therefore eight basic types (extraverted thinking type, introverted thinking type, etc.). Each of these basic types describes a typical emphasis in conscious orientation: that is, not only the nature of our interests, but also the way in which we relate to these interests is determined by our psychological ‘type’. In his posthumously published Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung asserted that Psychological Types (1921) constitutes a ‘psychology of consciousness’ (p. 207). But this is only half true and, like all half-truths, is very misleading. For the single most important aspect of all his various theories is his view that unconscious products such as dreams and waking fantasies compensate the one-sidedness of conscious orientation. And this also applies to his theory of psychological typology. According to Jung, the figures encountered in dreams very often manifest the qualities of a type that is the ‘opposite’ of the conscious type. For example, the dream-figures in the unconscious fantasies of an ‘extraverted thinking type’ very often manifest characteristics typical of

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‘introverted feeling’; the dreams of an ‘introverted sensation type’ are very often characterized by ‘extraverted intuition’. If this is so, then the main use of Jung’s theory of psychological typology is not as a system by which one can classify a person’s conscious type (which is of course the most usual, and somewhat superficial purpose of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator test), but as a means of exploring the dynamics between the conscious ego and unconscious products. By extension, the value of his theory for literary criticism is not that it allows one to define a character according to his type, but that it helps to explore the dynamics of the interactions between the main protagonists. But before one can do this, one must of course establish the conscious type. Thus, in the following pages, our first task must be to identify the psychological types of the two most important characters (Basil and Lord Henry). But our purpose is to demonstrate that the novel gives expression to a very tightly-knit dialectic between their typological tendencies. Basil: An Introverted Intuition Type Basil’s response to Dorian has two characteristics. The first is a tendency to ‘translate’ his experience into an abstract equivalent. For example, he tells Lord Henry that Dorian is ‘never more present in my work than when no image of him is there’ (p. 11). And he describes his enthusiasm for a landscape that he painted while Dorian sat beside him: ‘Some subtle influence passed from him to me, and for the first time in my life I saw in the plain woodland the wonder I had always looked for, and always missed’ (p. 10). According to Jung, a tendency to register not the immediate stimulus, but a powerful abstract emotion that the stimulus suggests is characteristic of introversion: ‘the introvert’s attitude is an abstracting one’ (CW 6: 557). Basil is an introvert. The second defining feature of Basil’s response to Dorian is its irrational intensity. As he later admits to him: ‘ . . . from the moment I met you, . . . I was dominated, soul, brain, and power by you. You became to me the visible incarnation of that unseen ideal whose memory haunts us artists like an exquisite dream. I worshipped you.’ (p. 114)

In other words, when looking at Dorian, Basil does not see just an unusually handsome young man. He ‘sees’ something beyond the mere sensation that Dorian produces in him – something that impresses itself so forcefully on him as to change his ideas. He sees ‘an entirely new manner in art, an entirely new mode of style’. As he tells Lord Henry:

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‘The merely visible presence of this lad . . . defines for me the lines of a fresh school, a school that is to have in it all the passion of the romantic spirit, all the perfection of the spirit that is Greek. The harmony of soul and body.’ (p. 10)

The irrational intensity of Basil’s reaction to Dorian suggests that his primary function is intuition, which, according to Jung, sees behind the surface of things and is ‘represented in consciousness by an attitude of expectancy, by vision and penetration’ (CW 6: 610). Basil is an introverted intuitive type. The introverted intuitive is able to see behind or beneath the superficial appearance of things (CW 6: 656). As a psychological function, however, intuition does not imply a preternatural ability to ‘fix’ the most appropriate image. It functions on a trial-and-error basis: it ‘tries to apprehend the widest range of possibilities, since only through envisioning possibilities is intuition fully satisfied’ (CW 6: 612). Hence the succession of different portraits that Basil paints of Dorian: as Paris, Adonis, Antinous and Narcissus. Basil’s art consists in reproducing Dorian’s image in a series of possibilities, the most perfect of which is a painting of him in late nineteenth-century dress. According to Jung, ‘The artist might be regarded as the normal representative’ of the introverted intuition type (CW 6: 661). Significantly, he adds: ‘only a slight differentiation of judgment is sufficient to shift intuitive perception from the purely aesthetic into the moral sphere’ (CW 6: 662). These two aspects of introverted intuition match Basil perfectly. At the outset of the novel, he regards Dorian as the ‘dominant motive’ of his art (p. 212, cf. p. 11). He is convinced that his vision of Dorian Gray will open a new era in world history (pp. 9–10). When Dorian ceases to pose for him, his art is destroyed (pp. 116, 213), and he becomes ‘an amateur curate’ (pp. 152, 55). A further characteristic of the introverted intuition type is that he is often reluctant to reflect on the significance of what he experiences. He ‘moves from image to image . . . without establishing any connection between them and himself’ (CW 6: 658). He never pauses to reflect on the personal significance of his vision. Basil thinks of himself as a great and highly principled artist with an enormously important contribution to make to world art. In reality, he is a second-rate painter who has no life apart from his art. He never seeks to understand the possible significance of his own intuitions. His only interesting characteristic is the intensity of his fascination with his young friend. But he has no sense of Dorian as a specific human being. He is much too wrapped up in how he feels about his own ‘intuitions’ to have any genuine interest in others. Lord Henry draws attention to this characteristic toward the

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end of the novel: ‘Basil was really rather dull. He only interested me once, and that was when he told me, years ago, that he had a wild adoration for you, and that you were the dominant motive of his art’ (p. 212). To which he adds, somewhat surprisingly, but also revealingly: ‘He had no curiosity. It was his chief defect’ (p. 213). Basil can only see Dorian as a ‘motive in art’ (p. 11). He is so absorbed by his own intuitions that he lacks any interest in others – either in Dorian as an individual or in the possible significance of his own fascination with his young friend. It is sometimes assumed that the introvert understands his inner world better than the extravert: this is not necessarily so. The introvert is more aware of his subjective interests, but does not always seek to understand their significance. Basil finds his intuitions embodied in Dorian; in other words, he projects his intuitions into Dorian. He never even considers that they might reveal something about his own personality. His only interest is in re-experiencing the thrill that Dorian gives him. As a result, his sensation function is unable to function. And because sensation anchors an individual in the real world, Jung would often refer to it as the fonction du re´el. Basil lives in a world of his own. He has lost any footing in reality. Both his emotional and his psychological development are – to borrow a word from Wuthering Heights – ‘stalled’. Lord Henry: An Introverted Sensation Type The novel opens with Lord Henry watching as Basil puts the finishing touches to a portrait of a young man in modern dress (p. 114). And yet, like the painter, Lord Henry does not see a young contemporary: he refers to Basil’s model as a young Adonis, a Narcissus (p. 3). The parallel with the painter is obvious; the differences are even more telling. Lord Henry’s attitude is suggested by his advocacy of Individualism: ‘One’s own life – that is the important thing. As for the lives of one’s neighbours, . . . they are not one’s concern. Besides, Individualism has really the higher aim’ (p. 78). He sees other people only through the lens of his own theory. He thus conforms to Jung’s definition of the introvert, who ‘interposes a subjective view between the perception of the object and his own action’ (CW 6: 620). In similar fashion, the nature of his new Hedonism suggests his psychological function. As he tells Dorian: ‘Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing . . . A new Hedonism – that is what our century wants’ (p. 22). His primary function is sensation. Lord Henry has the dominant characteristics of an introverted sensation type.

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Jung also noted that the introverted sensation type is often ‘conspicuous for his calmness and passivity, or for his rational selfcontrol. This peculiarity . . . is really due to his unrelatedness to objects’ (CW 6: 650). This corresponds exactly with Lord Henry, who is defined by his calm, his passivity, his rational self-control and, perhaps most tellingly, by his unrelatedness to people (for example, his wife and sister: pp. 4, 46, 212, 152). Basil encapsulates him in one of his few aphorisms: ‘You like every one; that is to say, you are indifferent to every one’ (p. 8). Lord Henry is aware that he does not like to get too close either to people or to life. As he admits to Sir Thomas: he is ‘content with philosophic contemplation’ (p. 40). He explains himself to Basil: ‘I never interfere with what charming people do. If a personality fascinates me, whatever mode of expression that personality selects is absolutely delightful to me’ (p. 73). In other words, he is not necessarily fascinated by the most interesting personalities; what matters is whether a personality fascinates him. He notices only what his own predispositions cause him to attribute to Dorian and he wants to enjoy his awakened fascination to the full. All of these tendencies accord with Jung’s description of introverted sensation, of whom he writes: What is perceived is either not found at all in the object, or is, at most, merely suggested by it . . . It has to do with presuppositions or dispositions of the collective unconscious, with mythological images, with primordial possibilities of ideas. (CW 6: 648)

Like Basil, Lord Henry is an introvert, and the introvert does not respond to the object per se. Instead of losing himself in visions of a new age in art, however, the sensation type is gripped by the subjective sensation that an object arouses in him (CW 6: 647). Indeed, like Basil – albeit for very different reasons – he is so engrossed with his own subjective sensations that he has little interest in the objective reality of others. He prefers to live ‘in a mythological world’ of his own (CW 6: 653), that is, in a world of ‘philosophic contemplation’ in which he sets himself apart from, or above the common lot: ‘Besides, Individualism has really the higher aim’ (p. 78). Lord Henry regards his own views as the expression of a higher truth than those advanced by anyone else. The parallel with Basil is obvious: he too thinks that he has access to a higher truth than any other artist or thinker. But the difference is more significant. Although Basil is in thrall to a single type, he is unable to fix its significance. He envisages it in a succession of possible roles. In contrast, Lord Henry is fascinated by the implications harboured in a great many different types. Whereas Basil intuits different facets of the significance of Dorian’s character, Lord Henry notices about Dorian

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only what his own predispositions cause him to attribute to him. Whereas Basil expresses no curiosity about the personal implications of his intuitions, Lord Henry is genuinely curious about the motivating factors of whatever happens to capture his imagination. He likes to observe and analyse others, and he derives considerable pleasure from reflecting on the implications of what he observes: To note the curious hard logic of passion, and the emotional coloured life of the intellect . . . there was a delight in that! What matter what the cost was? One could never pay too high a price for any sensation. (p. 57)

Although he is no more interested in Dorian-as-an-individual than Basil, he is fascinated by Basil’s confession about Dorian’s effect on him. He insists on meeting Dorian so as to experience the sensation that Dorian will arouse in him. He is genuinely curious about the nature and the implications of what catches his imagination (cf. p. 57). In short, he is interested in exactly those aspects of experience in which Basil is not interested. Lord Henry thus personifies a psychological type that is diametrically opposite to Basil’s. Basil has an excessive intuition function; Lord Henry’s equally excessive sensation function stands in compensatory relation to it. In other words, he corresponds to the figure that Jung defined as the shadow, that is, a figure that embodies everything that the subject (here Basil) ‘has no wish to be’ (CW 16: 470). Lord Henry therefore has an ambivalent significance. On the one hand, the influence that he exercises over Dorian represents the way in which, albeit unwittingly, Basil is influencing Dorian by teaching him not only to be vain of his good looks (p. 156, 108), but also to see life ‘from a proper artistic point of view’ (p. 110). On the other, by urging Dorian to explore all those psychological tendencies of which Basil dreams, but whose implications the painter is not interested in examining, Lord Henry’s ‘theories’ indicate the implications of Basil’s excessive intuitive function. The shadow personifies those aspects of the unconscious personality that the ego (strictly speaking, Wilde) does not like to acknowledge. It therefore always represents an implicit challenge: to stir the ego into recognizing that he (or she) does indeed harbour such character traits, so as to either overcome them or else better integrate them into his (or her) conscious personality. And if Lord Henry can be defined as Basil’s shadow, this suggests that the primary opposition in the novel might not be between Dorian and Lord Henry, but between Basil and Lord Henry.

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Basil as Effective Protagonist Basil is the novel’s effective protagonist. The opening scenes represent the dilemma facing him. He is caught in a psychological impasse. He wants Dorian to be always available to him. He is fascinated by what Dorian means to him. But whatever he might say about friendship (p. 113), he is not even remotely interested in his young model. And he is even less interested in trying to understand the nature of his own obsession. His only concern is to reproduce the image(s) that Dorian arouses in him and to express these as best he can in art. He is entirely absorbed in his artistic vision of Dorian; he is utterly indifferent to everything else. Basil does not involve himself with others. A confirmed bachelor, he has an emphatically one-dimensional personality. And according to Jung, the shadow compensates the one-sidedness of the ego’s – for our purposes, the effective protagonist’s – conscious attitudes. It is, therefore, no coincidence that Lord Henry’s defining characteristic is his interest in the life of others. Lord Henry compensates Basil’s apparent indifference. Thus the challenge implicitly facing Basil is to recognize the implications of Lord Henry’s attitudes as an aspect of his personality with which he must come to terms. In psychological terms, Lord Henry presents Basil with an implicit challenge: to adjust his governing attitude towards life. As in Ivanhoe (see Chapter 1), the novel begins with a scene between the effective protagonist (Basil) and his specific shadow (Lord Henry). But also as in Ivanhoe, at no stage in the novel does Basil stand up to Lord Henry and ‘confront’ the implications of his friend’s various theories for himself. He is too sure of his own point of view. As a result, the only way in which he might be shaken out of his psychological impasse is for his shadow to promote a situation that he is obliged to confront. In other words, to stir Dorian into illustrating the implications of Basil’s obsessive interest in him. Basil endeavours to reproduce on canvas what Dorian Gray means to him in one tentative image after another – without ever reflecting on why he should be interested in a young man whom he asks to pose as Paris, Adonis, Antinous, or Narcissus. He invests all his psychic energy in Dorian. What he fears most is to lose Dorian, not as a friend, but as a model. And inevitably, this is exactly what Lord Henry brings about. He awakens Dorian to a realization that there is more to life than posing for Basil. More to the point, he sees to it that the curious dream that Basil has sought to ‘imprison’ on canvas is ‘dreamed onwards’ (p. 2; cf. CW 9i: 271). Lord Henry stirs the ‘image’ that enthrals Basil into

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consciousness of the very attributes with which Basil invests his young friend – and the novel portrays the consequences. The Challenge Facing Basil If Basil is the effective protagonist, then Lord Henry and Dorian represent different aspects of his unconscious personality. They personify everything that he does not recognize about his own attitudes, and give expression to those tendencies with which he must come to terms. Basil is socially awkward, is dominated by one all-consuming experience, and uses his ‘principles’ and ‘prejudices’ as a ready-made excuse for not engaging with life (p. 56). In contrast, Lord Henry and Dorian are always the centre of attention at social gatherings, are curious about all modes of expression, and do not air their ‘moral prejudices’ (p. 73). In other words, they represent different aspects of Basil’s shadow. Lord Henry is a ‘dandy’, content with philosophic contemplation (pp. 31, 40): he personifies the passivity of Basil’s introverted attitude toward life. While Dorian lives the life that Basil represses: his ‘infinite curiosity’ compensates Basil’s complete absence of curiosity. Basil is defined by his complete lack of curiosity about the real concerns of others. He is an introvert; Dorian, in contrast, is an extravert. In other words, Dorian serves to compensate Basil’s indifference: his ‘purpose’ is to stir Basil into becoming more curious not only about other people, but also about the implications of his own unconscious tendencies. Lord Henry’s first extended conversation with Dorian is thus directly related to the challenge facing Basil. It implies that Basil must find a way to channel his introverted intuition outwards so as to become more involved in ‘life’. But Basil has no interest in life. He exemplifies that type of man who lives entirely within his persona; in his case, that of an artist. He moves from one intuition of Dorian’s personality to another (from Paris, to Adonis, to Antinous, to Narcissus) without ever asking himself what these images might tell him about himself. Meeting Dorian has given Basil an ungovernable desire to re-experience the frisson that he feels whenever he is with his younger friend. And the way in which both Dorian and Lord Henry move from one delightful frisson to another vividly represents the implications of the way in which Basil responds to Dorian. Basil’s artistic obsession with Dorian is mirrored in Dorian’s obsessive life. Just as Basil is afraid of losing Dorian, so Dorian is afraid of having to assume the ‘burden’ that his portrait bears as a result of his mad prayer. Just as Basil endeavours to repeat the thrill that Dorian gave him at their first meeting, so Dorian amasses a collection of tangible

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‘treasures’ that ‘were to be to him means of forgetfulness, modes by which he could escape, for a season, from the fear that seemed to him at times to be almost too great to be borne’ (p. 140). Just as Basil, in his desire to realize his messianic dream, has ‘repressed’ all other aspects of his life, so Dorian acts with ruthless unconcern for anything other than his own sensations. Just as Basil casts Dorian in a succession of roles, so Dorian is content to watch Sibyl Vane play a succession of parts. The pointlessness and obsessive nature of Dorian’s little frissons are a representation of the real nature of Basil’s driving passion. In short, Dorian’s ‘odyssey’ represents the implications of Basil’s fascination with him. This brings us to the all-important question of why Basil should be interested in a young man of extraordinary personal beauty. Although Basil speaks and acts as if he were both mature and balanced, one notes that he is neither. He has never allowed his emotional life any expression. This aspect of his life is still in an adolescent stage. And thus the challenge implicitly facing him at the outset is to awaken to his own emotional life. It is, therefore, no coincidence that he becomes fascinated by a youth who stands at the threshold of adulthood, that is, by a young man who is about to go through exactly the same rite de passage as he metaphorically also needs to undergo. Basil’s fascination with Dorian stems from the fact that his young model embodies the very challenge implicitly facing him. After falling under Lord Henry’s spell, the first thing that happens to Dorian is that he goes to the theatre and falls in love with the young leading actress. And this too should be read in relation to Basil, for Dorian’s mad infatuation with Sibyl mirrors Basil’s equally intense infatuation with him. Just as Dorian’s youth corresponds to the stage in emotional development at which Basil is stuck, so Sibyl’s youth and innocence correspond to Dorian’s youth and innocence. But we must also be consistent: in a novel everything relates to the effective protagonist. Sibyl also reflects Basil’s ignorance of the world of the feminine. That she is an actress reflects his passion for art. And, perhaps crucially, that she is a ‘sleeping beauty’ waiting to be awoken to love suggests that he needs to wake to an experience of the feminine. But Basil is not ready to do this. He is afraid of life. If he didn’t need to show his face in society once in a while, he would shun everyone. He befriends Dorian, because Dorian is willing to pose for him. At no stage does Dorian make any personal demands of Basil. There is a significant parallel with the relation between Dorian and Sibyl. His disinterest in learning anything about her that might clash with his own image of her mirrors Basil’s equivalent indifference to learning anything about Dorian that clashes with his image of him. And just as Dorian repulses Sibyl as

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soon as he sees her as she is, so Basil is shocked to the core on seeing Dorian as he really is. Not a Faustian Tragedy Any interpretation of The Picture of Dorian Gray must rest on the way in which the relationship between the eponymous hero and Lord Henry Wotton is read. It has long been recognized that it has the same basic structure as the ‘typical’ story in which the main protagonist barters or sells his soul in order to enjoy a supra-human quality. In other words, the novel offers a variant of the situation depicted in Goethe’s classic reformulation of the Faust legend (Rossi, 1969; cf. Nethercot, 1944). Lord Henry’s ‘pointed brown beard’ (p. 9), ‘olive-coloured face and worn expression’ (p. 20–21) characterize him as a Mephistopheles who represents ‘all the sins’ that Dorian has never had ‘the courage to commit’ (p. 79). Just as Faust is rejuvenated, so Dorian is granted eternal youth. Just as Faust becomes infatuated with Gretchen, so Dorian becomes infatuated with Sibyl. And, as with Faust, the psychological implications of an influence that appears to come from ‘outside’ coincides with a tendency that comes from ‘inside’. In Chapter 3, while on his way to lunch with his Aunt Agatha, Lord Henry reflects on the influence he has had on Dorian: There was something terribly enthralling in the exercise of influence. No other activity was like it. To project one’s soul into some gracious form, and let it tarry there for a moment; to hear one’s own intellectual views echoed back to one with all the added music of passion and youth; to convey one’s temperament into another as though it were a subtle fluid or a strange perfume; there was a real joy in that . . . (p. 35)

But Lord Henry’s suggestions always coincide with tendencies that already exist within his young friend’s burgeoning personality. On listening to him for the first time, Dorian becomes ‘dimly conscious that entirely fresh influences were at work within him. Yet they seemed to have come really from himself’ (p. 18). In this too, then, there is evident parallel with Goethe’s tragedy. But one should not be misled by these parallels. The differences are even more significant. In the first place, Faust is the effective protagonist of Goethe’s philosophical poem. Dorian is not the effective protagonist of Wilde’s novel: everything that happens to Dorian is an extension of Basil’s fascination with him. And secondly, whereas Faust yearns for knowledge, Dorian yearns for sensations. Borrowing from Jung’s theory of psychological types, it is the significance of this second difference that we shall now explore.

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Dorian: An Extraverted Intuition Type Dorian is characterized by his ‘mad curiosity’ (p. 48): ‘curiosity had much to do with [his love for Sibyl], curiosity and the desire for new experiences’ (pp. 58–9). When he repudiates Sibyl, he tells her that she no longer stirs his curiosity (p. 86). On first realizing that his portrait has changed, he throws himself down on ‘a luxuriously-cushioned couch’ facing the screen that he has placed in front of his portrait: ‘He scanned [the screen] curiously, wondering if ever before it had concealed the secret of a man’s life’ (p. 94). On learning of her suicide, he rushes to have another look at Basil’s masterpiece and wonders: ‘had his choice already been made? Yes, life had decided that for him – life, and his own infinite curiosity about life’ (p. 105). Dorian is defined by his curiosity. As he admits to Basil, ‘I love beautiful things that one can touch and handle’ (p. 110). ‘Like Gautier, he was one for whom ‘‘the visible world existed’’ ’ (p. 129). Chapter 11 is given to a lengthy description of his engrossment with ‘things’: musical instruments, jewels, embroideries and ecclesiastical vestments. And the same is true of his interactions with individuals. On seeing Sibyl, he is overcome by a sudden ‘mad adoration’ of her (pp. 56, 54). He responds to her as if she were an aesthetic artefact. His behaviour is conditioned by the impression made on him by external things. As such, he corresponds to Jung’s definition of an extravert whose ‘decisions and actions are determined not by subjective views but by objective conditions’ (CW 6: 563). Because Dorian confides to Lord Henry that he has ‘a passion for sensations’ (p. 48), one is tempted to see him as a sensation type. But sensation may not be his primary function. Jung defines sensation as the fonction du re´el (CW 18: 21): ‘No other human type can equal the extraverted sensation type in realism’ (CW 6: 606). And Dorian is not a realist: he lives entirely in a world of his own make-believe. He shows no respect for the objective ‘reality’ of others. He is excited not so much by the physical sensation that a person or an external object arouses in him, as by the intuition of a quality inhabiting it (cf. CW 6: 774). Like Basil, he ‘sees’ in others not their real properties, but something beyond their objective reality. He describes Sibyl Vane as ‘sacred’ (p. 51): ‘She is all the great heroines of the world in one. She is more than an individual’ (p. 54). His whole life becomes a ‘wild longing’ for ‘a world in which things would have fresh shapes and colours, and be changed, or have other secrets’ (pp. 131–2). ‘He knew that the senses, no less than the soul, have their spiritual mysteries to reveal’ (p. 133). And this tendency to envisage something that is, at best, only suggested by the object in question is a defining characteristic of an intuitive type.

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Jung explained the distinction that lies behind his definition of extraverted intuition in this way: . . . if I ask an intuitive how he orients himself, he will speak of things that are almost indistinguishable from sense-impressions. Very often he will even use the word ‘sensation’. He does have sensations, of course, but he is not guided by them as such; he uses them merely as starting-points for his perceptions. (CW 6: 611)

Dorian is described in almost identical terms: . . . in his search for sensations that would be at once new and delightful, and possess that element of strangeness that is so essential to romance, he would often adopt certain modes of thought that he knew to be really alien to his nature, abandon himself to their subtle influence, and then, having, as it were, caught their colour and satisfied his intellectual curiosity, leave them with that curious indifference that is not incompatible with a real ardour of temperament, and that indeed, according to certain psychologists, is often a condition of it. (p. 132)

This passage mirrors Jung’s definition so closely that it might have been its model. According to Jung, the extraverted intuition type . . . is constantly seeking fresh outlets and new possibilities in external life. In a very short time every existing situation becomes a prison for the intuitive, a chain that has to be broken . . . He seizes on new objects or situations with great intensity, sometimes with extraordinary enthusiasm, only to abandon them cold-bloodedly, without any compunction and apparently without remembering them, as soon as their range is known and no further developments can be divined. So long as a new possibility is in the offing, the intuitive is bound to it with the shackles of fate. It is as though his whole life vanished in the new situation. (CW 6: 612 and 613)

This perfectly describes Dorian. Following his first meeting with Lord Henry, he goes for a walk, in the course of which he drops in on an ‘absurd little theatre’ where Sibyl Vane is playing Juliet (p. 48). Significantly, he attributes this encounter to Lord Henry: ‘It never would have happened if I had not met you’ (p. 57). Over the next few weeks, he sees Sibyl in a succession of dramatic roles: ‘I have seen her in every age and in every costume’ (p. 51). He falls in love with her and describes his engagement to his two friends: ‘Of course it is sudden: all really delightful things are. And yet it seems to me to be the one thing I have been looking for all my life’ (pp. 74–5); ‘She is everything to me in life’ (p. 50). He sees Sibyl as ‘absolutely and entirely divine’ (p. 54), and

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what excites him about her is ‘the wonderful soul that is hidden away in that little ivory body’ (p. 54). In all of these reactions, he echoes Jung’s description of the extraverted intuition type, for whom . . . objects appear to have an exaggerated value . . . One gets the impression, which he himself shares, that he has always just reached a final turning-point, and that from now on he can think and feel nothing else. (CW 6: 612–13)

Dorian is so intent on his own subjective intuition that he has no sense of Sibyl’s reality. He barely knows her. He has never seen her as ‘Sibyl Vane’, that is, as she ‘is’ (p. 54). Indeed, he does not even want to meet her (p. 53). Even so, he tells his two friends that she is ‘the girl to whom I am going to give all my life’ (p. 81). In psychological terms, Sibyl has an ambivalent function. On the one hand, she corresponds to an aspect of Dorian’s personality. As an adolescent, he has little experience of women: his child-like innocence is mirrored by hers. As an intuitive, he has a very poorly developed sense of reality. And Sibyl, one notes, describes her world as hollow, sham and empty pageant (cf. p. 86). Her make-believe world reflects his poorly developed sense of reality. This suggests that she can be defined as an anima-figure that personifies the state of his relation with women. But on the other hand, Sibyl also compensates Dorian’s ignorance of both women and the feminine. She tells him, ‘I knew nothing but shadows, and I thought them real. You came – oh, my beautiful love! – and you freed my soul from prison. You taught me what reality really is’ (pp. 85– 6). Her desire to become real corresponds to his unconscious desire to do the same. To become ‘real’ herself, she needs to make him respond to her as she really is. She seeks to draw him into relationship. Her function is to awaken Dorian to an awareness of his emotional life. But Dorian is not ready for this. He has no concept of Sibyl as a human being and even less interest in relating to her as a woman. He only wants to idolize here, to ‘appropriate’ her as something to put on a pedestal of gold (cf. p. 77). In other words, he invests so much energy in his introverted intuitions that he is alarmed when he finally has to see Sibyl as she is. He is utterly uninterested in learning anything about Sibyl that clashes with his own notions about her. He cannot face the fact that Sibyl is merely an ordinary mortal (see Fernandez, 1971, p. 135). As soon as he sees her as she really is, he rejects her: ‘You used to stir my imagination. Now you don’t even stir my curiosity. You simply produce no effect. I loved you because you were marvellous, because you had genius and intellect, because you

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realized dreams of great poets and gave shape and substance to the shadows of art. You have thrown it all away . . . What are you now? A third-rate actress with a pretty face.’ (pp. 86–7)

Without her art, he is unable to see the ‘wonderful soul’ that excited him, and he feels that he has to move on. In psychological terms, what is ‘killed’ (p. 86) for him is his ‘intuition’ of her divinity (p. 51, 54). And such a pattern of enthusiasm followed by sudden and motiveless rejection – a pattern that is repeated again and again not only in Dorian’s relations with other women, but also in his friendships with men (see pp. 150–52) – is typical of the extraverted intuition type. As soon as Dorian sees Sibyl as she ‘is’, he is appalled. And the cruelty with which he rejects her is the ‘climax’ of the novel, for it signals the rejection of the potentially compensatory nature of Lord Henry’s advice. From this moment, we notice that there is a slight but all-important shift in Dorian’s psychological type. His attitude (extraversion) becomes more and more pronounced, but he increasingly identifies with Lord Henry’s function (sensation), which corresponds to his own ‘inferior function’. As Camille Paglia writes: ‘Dorian becomes Lord Henry’ (1990, p. 518), but she does not fully explore the psychological implications of her assertion. Identification with the Inferior Function The ‘inferior function’ is the term Jung coined to designate the unconscious function that stands in compensatory relation to the conscious function. Being unconscious, it describes an aspect of the personality over which consciousness has little or no control. It must be emphasized that the adjective ‘inferior’ is not intended to suggest ‘weak in intensity’. Indeed, as Jung once said, the inferior function is ‘something terribly strong but primitive, . . . and almost impossible to control. It controls you’ (1997/1998, vol. I, pp. 31–2; see also von Franz, 1971). It erupts into consciousness as a fait accompli (CW 14: 272), and manifests itself differently in different individuals. For example, when crossed, a thinking type very often exhibits unexpectedly petty and illconsidered feelings. If nervous, a sensation type might suddenly begin to talk nonsense about an impending political event. Such compulsive and ill-considered opinions, or outbursts either of temper or pretentiousness very often stem from the inferior function. Individuals very often pronounce such expressions of the ‘inferior function’ with incontrovertible assurance; but to others, their irritating dogmatism will always raise an eyebrow and often appear disturbingly unbalanced. Many of those

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characteristic tendencies that reveal a person in their least attractive light come from the inferior function. In short, compulsive and obsessive behaviour very often stems not from the conscious type, but from the inferior function. The central scenes of the novel illustrate this. Lord Henry’s inability to sympathize with suffering (p. 39) clearly anticipates Dorian’s indifference to Sibyl’s pain. Basil is appalled at how lightly Dorian treats the question of her suicide. He tells him: ‘You were the most unspoiled creature in the whole world. Now I don’t know what has come over you. You talk as if you had no heart, no pity in you. It is all Harry’s influence’ (p. 108). To which Dorian replies: ‘ ‘‘A man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure. I don’t want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them’’ ’ (p. 108). To forget Sibyl, Dorian goes for a walk and then to the opera – voila` tout. The link between Sibyl and opera is music, suggestive of his nascent ‘feelings’. In other words, to escape from one kind of feeling-based experience, he simply shifts his attention to another. And from the moment he rejects Sibyl, Dorian begins to behave like a sensation type. For in order to forget one sensation, all the sensation type has to do is fasten his attention on another object and respond to its different stimulus. Sensation types, however, are usually more or less in control of their sensations. The problem arises when ‘sensation’ is the inferior function. And when it is, the tendency to avoid the experiences associated with ‘sensations’ represents a compulsive and yet unconscious force acting on the conscious personality. The harder that Dorian tries not to be ‘wounded’ by coming into contact with ‘reality’ (cf. p. 100), the more he is dominated by his inferior sensation function. This is very well illustrated by what happens on the afternoon that he first discovers ‘a visible symbol of the degradation of sin’ in his portrait. Not knowing ‘what to do, or what to think’, he writes Sibyl a passionate letter in which he expresses his remorse at what he has done (p. 95). No sooner has he finished it than Lord Henry appears at the door with news of her suicide. This is more than just dramatic irony; it reflects the fact that his resolve has no ethical merit. It is mere self-indulgence. His decision to write her a passionate letter – like his later decision to abandon Hetty Merton as ‘flowerlike’ as he finds her (p. 210) – is simply an attempt to explore his own subjective response to the situation, that is, his own ‘sensation’. And as Jung notes: The more complete the conscious attitude of extraversion is, the more infantile and archaic the unconscious attitude will be. The

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egoism which characterizes the extravert’s unconscious attitude goes far beyond mere childish selfishness; it verges on the ruthless and the brutal. (CW 6: 572)

The parallel with Dorian is self-evident; the consequences, no less so. Dorian, the very picture of innocence, has become ‘ruthless’ and ‘brutal’. Dorian’s and Lord Henry’s psychological types appear to be the diametrical opposite of one another (extraverted intuition; introverted sensation). But somewhat curiously, they offer an example of the maxim les extreˆmes se touchent. Both men, albeit differently, tend to override the objective ‘reality’ of others. They see others as ‘objects’ whose only purpose is to fascinate them for a moment. The common denominator of extreme forms of extraverted intuition and introverted sensation is a tendency to live at one remove from reality. In this way, both external objects and other people are unintentionally devalued, thus condemning the subject to a hermetic world of pseudo-philosophic or aesthetic pleasures which eventually produce ‘that ennui, that terrible taedium vitae, that comes on those to whom life denies nothing’ (p. 145). The ‘outside world’ is experienced only as a stimulus for either a ‘perception’ of something else, or a private frisson. Dorian pursues one frisson after another, like an opium addict. Both he and Lord Henry are dependent on procuring as many ‘delightful’ frissons as they can – and at whatever cost to themselves. In other words, Dorian has completely identified with this aspect of his inferior function. Escape into Aesthetics Basil’s passion is to observe – and Dorian’s behaviour illustrates its psychological implications. Dorian develops an insatiable hunger for passing experiences that will help him escape from having to admit responsibility for his own behaviour. The mechanism is apparent at all the novel’s various crises. When he first meets Lord Henry, to distract him from the latter’s ‘words,’ he turns to observe a bee: He watched it with that strange interest in trivial things that we try to develop when things of high import make us afraid, or when we are stirred by some new emotion for which we cannot find expression, or when some thought that terrifies us lays sudden siege to the brain and calls on us to yield. (p. 23)

When Basil comes to console Dorian for Sibyl’s death, Dorian tells him: ‘If one doesn’t talk about a thing, it has never happened’ (p. 107) – and thereupon goes to the opera. After having murdered Basil, he walks

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over to the balcony, looks at what is happening in the street below, and reflects: ‘the secret of the whole thing was not to realize the situation’ (p. 159). When he shows Alan Campbell into the room where Basil’s murdered body lies, he refuses to allow the real sensation of the moment to impress itself on him: ‘There he stopped, feeling afraid to turn round, and his eyes fixed themselves on the intricacies of the pattern before him’ (p. 174). In all of these cases, Dorian ‘escapes’ from his experience by turning his attention to other things. This mechanism runs through the entire novel. To escape from the ‘reality’ of an inner sensation, Dorian focuses his attention on an external design. He avoids becoming conscious of his psychological experience by aestheticizing a perception of something else – exactly as Basil does at Lady Brandon’s crush, where he almost flees in panic after meeting Dorian for the first time. One of the most disconcerting aspects of this novel is that all three of its main protagonists watch life as if they were at a play. Basil justifies the distance he maintains between himself and life by insistence on an aesthetic perspective. And both Lord Henry and Dorian create a distance between themselves and the objects of their ‘philosophic contemplation’. The former compares the ‘real’ tragedies of life, which only impress by their sheer brute force, with another kind: Sometimes, however, a tragedy that possesses artistic elements of beauty crosses our lives. If these elements of beauty are real, the whole thing simply appeals to our sense of dramatic effect. Suddenly we find that we are no longer the actors, but the spectators of the play. Or rather we are both. We watch ourselves, and the mere wonder of the spectacle enthrals us. (p. 101)

Reality is experienced as if it were dramatic art. Basil’s love of ‘form’ and Lord Henry’s love of ‘sensation’ combine in Dorian’s quest for form in life: Form is absolutely essential to it. It should have the dignity of a ceremony, as well as its unreality, and should combine the insincere character of a romantic play with the wit and beauty that makes such plays delightful to us. (p. 142)

On realizing that his portrait changed in relation to the events of his life ‘as they occurred’ (p. 104), Dorian ‘wondered, and hoped that some day he would see the change taking place before his very eyes’ (p. 105). In other words, he increasingly steps outside his experience in order to observe it from a distance: ‘To become the spectator of one’s own life, as Harry says, is to escape the suffering of life’ (p. 110).

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Fear of the Inferior Function Dorian steps back from the events in which he is involved in order to appreciate them from an aesthetic point of view. But, crucially, he never asks himself how the drama relates to him. He is incapable of selfreflection. And so too is Basil. Some eighteen years after telling Lord Henry that Dorian is ‘absolutely necessary’ to him (p. 9), Basil is made to face the fact that Dorian is no longer the adolescent who once held him in his sway. And the day that Dorian takes the painter up to his old schoolroom to show him the secret of his ‘soul’, Basil is shaken to the core: ‘He turned and looked at Dorian Gray with the eyes of a sick man. His mouth twitched, and his parched tongue seemed unable to articulate’ (p. 156). He tries to avert having to recognize it as his own work: It was some foul parody, some infamous, ignoble satire. He had never done that. Still, it was his own picture. He knew it, and he felt as if his blood had changed in a moment from fire to sluggish ice. His own picture! What did it mean? Why had it altered? (p. 156)

In metaphorical terms, it is his own picture. It is a portrait of Basil’s inner life, of what he has done to himself as result of having repressed everything except his over-developed intuition function. But he is still not ready to admit it. He insists that it must reflect a development in his young model’s inner life: ‘It was from within, apparently, that the foulness and horror had come. Through some strange quickening of inner life the leprosies of sin were slowly eating the thing away’ (p. 157). The portrait does not of course record ‘the hideous corruption of [Dorian’s] soul’ (p. 122). The corruption of the painting is a literary device that reflects a psychological change pertinent to the effective protagonist. The reference to soul is misleading. Readers should be wary of Wilde’s silly chatter about ‘sin’ and ‘evil’ and the ‘soul’: the novel doesn’t even touch upon any significant theological debate. The changing image of the portrait represents the gradual development not only of Dorian’s psychological alienation, but also, by extension, of Basil’s. Dorian, meanwhile, has been enjoying the spectacle: The young man was leaning against the mantelshelf, watching him with that strange expression that one sees on the faces of those who are absorbed in a play when some great artist is acting. There was neither real sorrow in it nor real joy. There was simply the passion of the spectator, with perhaps a flicker of triumph in his eyes. (p. 156)

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The reaction reminds one of the fear that Basil experiences the day he first meets Dorian, and how he quickly translates his initial terror into a similar artistic obsession. Dorian’s attitude at this moment illustrates the degree to which Basil refuses to acknowledge that there is any connection between the hideous image of the ‘satyr’ and himself. Whenever Basil comes too close to any disturbing thought, he blocks off its psychological realization by shifting his attention to something else, with inevitable consequences. We remember his earlier pronouncement: ‘Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not the sitter’ (p. 5). But now that his masterpiece is ugly, he cannot even conceive that it might represent what he has become. He assumes that Dorian must ‘be worse’ even than the nastiest rumours about him suggest (p. 157). He cannot grasp that his picture represents the implications of his own tendencies. All he can do in this direction is to assume that he is ‘punished’ for having worshipped Dorian too much (p. 158). But he misses the main point. Basil is ‘punished’ not for worshipping Dorian (whatever this might mean), but for trying to live only for art and, as a result, repressing his emotional life. His only interest is in reexperiencing the frisson that Dorian once gave him – as art. The more that Dorian adopts Lord Henry’s maxims, the less he is able to ‘control’ his nature (cf. p. 127). He is dominated by a compulsion to experience new ‘sensations’ – new ‘pleasures’ – until he becomes an unscrupulous hedonist and, more pertinently, also, like Basil, an aesthete. For the ‘mad’ sensual hungers that become more ravenous the more he feeds them (p. 128) are inextricably linked with an aesthetic pleasure. And as the long descriptions of Chapter 11 make plain, his quest for ‘infinite passion, pleasures subtle and secret, wild joys and wilder sins’ (p. 105) is an aesthetic quest. He even asks Basil to teach him to see Sibyl’s suicide ‘from a proper artistic point of view’ (p. 110). At the end of the novel, Lord Henry’s comment that art is ‘simply a method of procuring extraordinary sensations’ (p. 213) reflects Dorian’s inability to distinguish between sensual and aesthetic pleasure. And as Jung notes: The more sensation predominates, however, so that the object disappears behind the sensation, the less agreeable this type becomes. He develops into a crude pleasure-seeker, or else degenerates into an unscrupulous, effete aesthete. Although the object has become quite indispensable to him, yet, as something existing in its own right, it is none the less devalued. It is ruthlessly exploited and squeezed dry, since now its sole use is to stimulate sensation. (CW 6: 608)

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In other words, Dorian has become an extreme extraverted sensation type, of which Jung writes: This type – the majority appear to be men – naturally does not think he is at the ‘mercy’ of sensation. He would ridicule this view as quite beside the point, because sensation for him is a concrete expression of life – it is simply real life lived to the full. (CW 6: 606)

This is exactly how Dorian regards his own sensations. In other words, he has taken on the characteristics of Basil’s inferior function. And, inevitably, the change in his character reflects Basil’s similarly obsessive desire to re-experience the ‘sensation’ that Dorian inspires in him. According to Jung, a ruthless extraverted egocentrism eventually produces such a split in the personality that ‘the subject no longer really knows what he really wants and nothing interests him’ (CW 6: 573). In Chapter 18, on learning of the death of a ‘beater’ (who turns out, of course, to be James Vane), Lord Henry reassures Dorian, ‘It is nothing to us’ (p. 203). When Dorian admits to feeling that it is a terrible omen, Lord Henry replies, ‘The only horrible thing in the world is ennui, Dorian. That is the one sin for which there is no forgiveness’ (p. 203). The phrase is telling, for ennui is the physiological expression of a psychological impasse. Ennui is felt when the compensatory (and thus also corrective) nature of the unconscious is misunderstood and the subject’s psychic life comes to a standstill. ‘Life is a great disappointment,’ Dorian tells Lord Henry and the Duchess, to which she replies, ‘When a man says that one knows that Life has exhausted him’ (p. 179). Dorian picks up a knife and murders Basil. In other words, the effective protagonist is killed by the young man who personifies the implications of his own inferior function. A fiction is only a fiction: its effective protagonist may die. This does not affect its purpose, which is to illustrate the implications and consequences of the process that it records for the ego. The Picture of Dorian Gray provides a chilling illustration of what happens to an intuitive type who cannot govern his inferior function. It traces the consequences of Basil’s inability to recognize any relation between the advice that Lord Henry gives his young model and himself. Conclusions The Picture of Dorian Gray is a tragedy of misapprehended influence. Dorian’s tendency to escape from every unpleasant realization by turning his attention to other things is a representation of Basil’s reluctance to reflect on the significance of his experiences. Clinging to his ‘principles’

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and ‘prejudices’, Basil is unwilling to admit that his interest in Dorian represents an implicit challenge to pay more attention to his emotional life. He is afraid of intimacy; he seeks refuge in art. And it is left to his shadow to underline the consequences. After Dorian tells him of his infatuation with Sibyl Vane, Lord Henry comes to the conclusion that his young friend’s ‘sudden mad love’ is ‘not a simple but rather a very complex passion’ (pp. 58, 59): It was the passions about whose origin we deceived ourselves that tyrannized most strongly over us. Our weakest motives were those of whose nature we were conscious. It often happened that when we thought we were experimenting on others we were really experimenting on ourselves. (p. 59)

It is not clear whether, at this moment, Lord Henry is thinking of Dorian, or whether he is referring to himself. What is certain is that this insight – or should we describe it as an intuition? – refers to the way in which Basil misleads himself about his relation with his young model. The parallels with Goethe’s tragedy are therefore more superficial than substantive. On the surface, Dorian plays Faust to Lord Henry’s Mephistopheles. A closer analysis reveals three all-important differences. First, Dorian is no Faust. His decisions do not determine the course of events; experiences simply happen to him. This is because, secondly, the relation between Dorian and Lord Henry is entirely determined by the nature of the dilemma confronting Basil, who is the effective protagonist of the novel. And thirdly, Dorian’s struggle is not – as it is in Goethe’s drama (see CW 11: 244; CW 12: 204; CW 6: 148 n.) – between ‘feeling’ and ‘thinking’. It is between ‘intuition’ and ‘sensation’. Some have argued that Lord Henry represents Wilde’s view (for example, Roditi, 1947, p. 124; Lester, 1968, p. 146; Ericksen, 1977, pp. 100, 116). But in psychological terms, the identification of Wilde with Mephistopheles (who is self-evidently a shadow-figure) is obviously problematical. If one were interested in extending the analysis of the novel’s interactions to its author, one would have to describe Lord Henry as the carrier not of the author’s ‘ego’, but of compulsive tendencies that belong to his ‘inferior function’ (that is, an aspect of his shadow). Such views as Lord Henry advances represent an aspect not only of Basil’s, but also of Wilde’s personality over which neither was able to exercise any control. The Picture of Dorian Gray offers a case study of the implications of ungovernable introverted intuition. Basil lives for his art – and Lord Henry and Dorian both personify what it means to live only for art. They become increasingly hedonistic and increasingly divorced from reality,

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spectators of a play in which they take no part. Most critics have seen their various assertions in relation either to an aesthetic or a philosophical theory. In psychological terms, their refusal to get involved, as well as the aesthetic theories with which they both justify their attitudes toward life, are entirely determined by Basil’s psychological type. They represent the consequences of Basil’s driving ‘passion’ – his all-consuming artistic idolatry of Dorian. And it is to this we must now turn. The second and third parts of this essay explore the two figures that hold others in their spell: Dorian and Sibyl – both of whom are ascribed with ‘personality’. It is one of Wilde’s favourite words, and yet it is not at all obvious what he means by it.

2.

The Psychology of the Puer Aeternus Surely this is either Zeus or Apollo who has the silver-bow, or Poseidon, for he looks not like mortal men but like the gods who dwell on Olympus. (Homeric Hymn ‘To Dionysus’, c. 600 BC) Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life, and . . . either reproduces some strange type imagined by painter or sculptor, or realizes in fact what has been dreamed in fiction. (Wilde, ‘The Decay of Lying’, 1889)

The title of The Picture of Dorian Gray is, of course, ambivalent. On the one hand, it suggests that the novel offers a portrait in narrative of Dorian Gray; in other words, that the novel records the behaviour of the eponymous hero from the moment that he utters his ‘mad prayer’ to retain the unsullied splendour of his youth that is depicted in his portrait until his equally calamitous decision to destroy the painting to which he attributes the ‘failure’ of his life (pp. 220, 223). And, as we have seen in the first section of this essay, this narrative is entirely determined by the nature of the dilemma confronting Basil Hallward; and this, in turn, is dictated by the excesses of his psychological type. On the other hand, the title clearly refers to Basil Hallward’s portrait of ‘a young man of extraordinary personal beauty’. The novel begins with the young artist putting the finishing touches to his masterpiece; it ends with the painting reverting to its original splendour. This painting raises a number of questions. At one level, its function is to record ‘the hideous corruption of [Dorian’s] soul’ (p. 122). At another, it also clearly encapsulates something of the novel’s concern

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with aesthetics. In other words, the picture harbours a major aspect not only of the novel’s subject, but also, and perhaps more importantly, of its various themes. The aesthetics expounded in The Picture of Dorian Gray have been much discussed (for example, Baker, 1969; Nassaar, 1974; Showalter, 1991; Sinfield, 1994). In this chapter, I shall look at only one small but crucial facet of this debate: the significance of the portrait that stands at its centre. My contention is that the place this painting occupies in the novel has less to do with its aesthetic properties than with its psychological implications. Basil’s painting is a portrait of a specific young man at a specific moment of his development. And each of the three main protagonists reacts differently to the way he looks at this moment. In his painting, Basil records the ‘curious artistic idolatry’ that Dorian inspires in him. Dorian is so overcome by the ‘revelation’ of his own beauty that he utters a ‘mad prayer’ that he retain his unspotted youth, while the painting carry the scars not only of his actions and his years, but also of his ‘soul’. And Lord Henry becomes ‘intensely interested’ by Dorian’s immediate response to his panegyric on life – which is, of course, triggered by watching Dorian’s reaction to Basil’s canvas. The Cult of Personality One of the most striking features of Wilde’s novel is that Basil, an otherwise unassuming introvert, has a messianic conviction that he has discovered something of far-reaching consequence. Until he meets Dorian, he is a very ordinary gentleman-painter, entirely absorbed in his second-rate art. Lord Henry is astonished by the effect that the young man has had on him: ‘How extraordinary! I thought you would never care for anything but your art.’ ‘He is all my art to me now,’ said the painter, gravely. ‘I sometimes think, Harry, that there are only two eras of any importance in the world’s history. The first is the appearance of a new medium for art, and the second is the appearance of a new personality for art also. What the invention of oil-painting was to the Venetians, the face of Antinous was to late Greek sculpture, and the face of Dorian Gray will some day be to me.’ (pp. 9–10)

There is nothing very outrageous about the claim regarding the appearance of a new ‘medium’ (oil-painting): one thinks of marble or print or photography or, more recently, the revolutionary impact of digital text and images. But to suggest that the advent of a new

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‘personality’ marks an equally crucial turning-point in history is more troubling. Is Basil suggesting that the importance of personalities (Christ? Napoleon?) stems only from the moment that they make their first appearance in art? Is he really maintaining that the first representation of Antinous, the beautiful young man with whom the emperor Hadrian was infatuated, opened a new historical era? And if so, is it relevant that both of Basil’s examples belong to the decline of the civilizations in question (Hellenistic, Venetian)? What is implied by the preference for an art in which sensuality is such a dominant characteristic? In short, what is suggested by Lord Henry’s emphasis on the appearance of a new ‘personality’? In Chapter 6, Lord Henry tells his friend Basil Hallward: ‘If a personality fascinates me, whatever mode of expression that personality selects is absolutely delightful to me’ (p. 73). The sentence appears straightforward – but is it? In ordinary speech, the word ‘personality’ would seem to imply a prior ‘mode of expression’. But for Lord Henry, ‘personality’ appears to refer to something that is anterior to any ‘mode of expression’. This begs the questions: what does the word ‘personality’ imply if individuals can select any ‘mode of expression’ they choose? And also, how is the word ‘delightful’ to be understood? In the usual sense of the word, Dorian Gray is not attributed with any obvious ‘personality’. Indeed, he is a very ordinary young man. This invites the reader to assume that Lord Henry is fascinated only by surface appearances, for example, the combination of Dorian’s youth and beauty. If this were so, however, Lord Henry would be equally ‘fascinated’ by any good-looking young man, and this does not appear to be the case. He must be fascinated, therefore, by something that lies behind Dorian’s evident youth and beauty, by something that is anterior to these qualities, and thus by something that can be said to determine his interest in Dorian. In other words, by something without which neither youth nor beauty nor even innocent charm would harbour any special attraction for him. The obvious inference, of course, is that Wilde used the word ‘personality’ as a euphemism for the effect produced by a particular kind of young man in whom he was sexually interested. And, somewhat unwisely, the author contributed to this assumption by his often flippant answers at the Marquess of Queensberry’s trial in April 1895. It will be remembered that the latter’s counsel, Edward Henry Carson, laid considerable weight on some of the more suggestive passages in The Picture of Dorian Gray. After reading before the court Basil’s account of his first meeting with Dorian Gray, he asked Wilde if he considered the feeling described ‘a proper or an improper feeling’. To which the writer replied: ‘I think it is the most perfect description of what an artist would

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feel on meeting a beautiful personality that was in some way necessary to his art and life’ (Hyde, 1948, p. 127). Only a few minutes later, Carter insisted on the word again – and again. Carson: Wilde: Carson: Wilde:

‘Do you mean to say that that passage describes the natural feeling of one man towards another?’ ‘It would be the influence produced by a beautiful personality.’ ‘A beautiful person?’ ‘I said ‘‘a beautiful personality’’. You can describe it as you like. Dorian Gray’s was a most remarkable personality.’ (Hyde, 1948, p. 129; cf. Foldy, 1997, p. 11)

Wilde lost the case and paid a heavy price for his imprudence in charging the Marquess with libel for accusing him of posing as a ‘somdomite’. And yet, somewhat oddly, the real issue at stake in both the novel and, later, in this crucial exchange from the cross-examination, has never been resolved. Carson evidently thought the descriptions of Basil’s feelings for Dorian Gray must imply homosexual desire. Perhaps they do: my aim is not to suggest otherwise. But the very emphasis given to the word ‘personality’ invites us to explore further. It invites us to look behind (or beneath) the surface of the textual interactions to see if we can uncover any factors that might be described as being anterior to – and which would thus determine – this desire. In other words, it requires us to identify those factors that are implicit in Wilde’s use of the word ‘personality’. Jung’s theory of archetypal images is well-suited to identify these factors. A Curious Confession The Picture of Dorian Gray opens with Basil Hallward putting the final touches to his portrait of ‘a young man of extraordinary personal beauty’. As he does so, he closes his eyes ‘as though he sought to imprison within his brain some curious dream from which he feared he might awake’ (p. 2). Lord Henry immediately announces: ‘It is your best work, Basil, the best thing you have ever done . . . You must certainly send it next year to the Grosvenor.’ He is amazed when Basil tells him that he is not going to exhibit it anywhere. His curiosity is further aroused by the artist’s confession about the ‘curious artistic idolatry’ that he feels for his young friend. And, an hour or two later, he is once again taken aback to see ‘the sudden impression that his words had produced’ on Dorian Gray. In other words, the look that Basil fixes on his canvas combines not only the image of the young man who impressed him so

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powerfully, but also the effect of Lord Henry’s desire to waken Dorian to a realization of his potential. The novel is set in motion from the moment that Basil captures in his portrait of Dorian Gray – the moment when his young model trembles into a new consciousness and awakens to a desire to enjoy his own youth and beauty. This raises some questions. Is Basil’s initial fascination occasioned only by his young model’s ‘extraordinary personal beauty’? And is Lord Henry’s sudden interest in the boy occasioned only by the excitement he derives from ‘the exercise of influence’ (p. 35)? Or are there other perhaps unexpected factors at work? We have already commented on Basil’s initial reaction to Dorian, which he recounts to Lord Henry: ‘A curious sensation of terror came over me. I knew that I had come face to face with some one whose mere personality was so fascinating that, if I allowed it to do so, it would absorb my whole nature, my whole soul, my very art itself.’ (p. 6)

It is indeed a ‘curious’ confession – one that deserves much closer analysis than it has received. On first seeing Dorian, Basil is overcome by ‘terror’. He turns to flee. Only accident, in the form of a very determined Lady Brandon, prevents him. It scarcely needs to be insisted that ‘terror’ is not the usual reaction of an older man to the sight of a handsome and elegant younger man. We remember Jung’s view that the introverted intuitive ‘is always intent on withdrawing libido from the object, as though he had to prevent the object from gaining power over him’ (CW 6: 557). But this does not explain why Dorian should impress Basil with such ‘terror’. In spite of his initial fear, Basil quickly makes friends with Dorian and begins a series of portraits of him as Paris, Adonis, Antinous and Narcissus. Two things are striking about the series. In the first place, all the paintings cast Dorian in a mythological role. In other words, Basil does not ‘see’ his young model as an unusually handsome young man; he sees him as a variant of a number of mythological figures, all of which are associated with youth and beauty. We can assume that each of the roles in which he casts Dorian captures something of the quality that he sees in Dorian and that so forcefully impresses itself on him. But it is equally clear that it is the portrait on which he is working at the outset of the novel that best captures what it is that struck him when they first met. And this is a portrait of a specific young man at a specific moment of his development. Secondly, none of the paintings suggests any reason for Basil’s initial terror. Why would a young man be terrified by an even younger man

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who looks like Paris, or Adonis, or Antinous, or Narcissus? And this begs some questions. Does Basil ask Dorian to pose as Paris, Adonis, Antinous and Narcissus simply because these are the most immediate associations for an unusually good-looking young man? Or does he suggest these roles in order to evade having to come to terms with the terror that his first sight of Dorian inspired? And, perhaps crucially, is the portrait of Dorian in modern dress ‘better’ because it comes closer to conveying his original reaction to his young model (p. 114)? Basil responds to Dorian in very much the same way as the helmsman to the stranger in the so-called Homeric Hymn ‘To Dionysus’: ‘Madmen!’ cries the alarmed helmsman to his crew. ‘Surely this is either Zeus or Apollo who has the silver-bow, or Poseidon, for he looks not like mortal men but like the gods who dwell on Olympus’ (Homeric Hymn ‘To Dionysus’, Hesiod etc., 1936, pp. 429–30). His suppositions, of course, are wrong: the stranger is Dionysos. But the helmsman is the only member of his crew to be able to ‘see’ behind the superficial appearance of the stranger and to respond appropriately to the young god. And as he should be, he is both terrified and fascinated. In other words, he experiences the stranger as both a tremendum and fascinosum, in the sense defined by Rudolf Otto (1917; cf. Jung CW 10: 864, 874). This is exactly how Basil reacts on first seeing Dorian. He too is both terrified and fascinated. A few moments later, he finds himself ‘face to face with the young man whose personality had so strangely stirred me’ (p. 7). The use of the phrase ‘face to face’ reminds one of Jacob’s experience at Peniel (Gen. 32: 30) or of Moses in the Tabernacle (Ex. 33: 11). It suggests that Basil invests Dorian with the attributes of a numinous and terrifying deity (cf. p. 114). It need scarcely be added that such a reaction to another human being is ‘excessive’: it thus invites analysis of its psychological implications. We have seen how one part of Basil’s obsession with Dorian stems from his own psychological tendencies. It is time to explore what he sees in Dorian Gray. In the following pages, I want to suggest that Basil’s fascination stems from the resonance that inhabits the attributes with which he unconsciously invests Dorian. And these attributes are those of the two most powerful young gods of ancient Greece: Dionysus and Apollo. The Puer Aeternus (1): The Young Dionysus There is an interesting difference between what Dorian prays for and what he considers implicit in his prayer. In Chapter 2, on first looking at Basil’s finished portrait, ‘the sense of his own beauty came on him like a revelation’ (pp. 24–5). And then his intuition runs ahead of him: he

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foresees a time when ‘his face would be wrinkled and wizen, his eyes dim and colourless’ (p. 25). Whereupon he utters a ‘mad wish’ (p. 90): If it were only the other way! If it were I who was to be always young, and the picture that was to grow old! For that – for that – I would give everything! Yes, there is nothing in the whole world I would not give! I would give my soul for that! (pp. 25–6)

It appears to be a straightforward exchange, but is it? The evening that he repudiates Sibyl Vane, he returns home and is startled to see ‘a touch of cruelty’ in the mouth of Basil’s portrait. He checks the line of his lips in a mirror: they have not changed. He cannot believe his eyes: ‘Such things were impossible’ (p. 90). And he intuitively grasps: ‘For every sin that he committed, a stain would fleck and wreck [his portrait’s] fairness’ (p. 91). The following day, after learning of Sibyl’s suicide, he looks again at his portrait and realizes: ‘Eternal youth, infinite passion, pleasures subtle and secret, wild joys and wilder sins – he was to have all these things. The portrait was to bear the burden of his shame: that was all, (p. 105). It is unlikely that Dorian had any of these thoughts clearly in his mind at the moment of his ‘mad wish’. But very quickly he comes to see them as implicit in his ability to retain his unusual personal beauty. And if this is so, then we can also regard them as implicit in his appearance on the fateful day when he poses for Basil: For nearly ten minutes he stood there motionless, with parted lips, and eyes strangely bright. He was dimly conscious that entirely fresh influences were at work within him. Yet they seemed to him to have really come from himself. The few words that Basil’s friend had said to him – words spoken by chance, no doubt, and with wilful paradox in them – had touched some secret chord that had never been touched before, but that he felt was now vibrating and throbbing to curious pulses. (p. 18)

This is, very clearly, a moment of initiation. And the ‘curious pulses’ that he feels for the first time are an anticipation of the ‘wild joys and wilder sins’ that he is going to be able to enjoy. And they invite a parallel with a figure from Greek mythology. Iakchos (Iacchus) is one of the more enigmatic figures of Greek religion. We know very little of his significance, but what we do know suggests that he played a central part in the most important process of initiation in the classical world. A ritual incantation of his name formed part of the Eleusinian Mystery cult. According to Kere´nyi, ‘his name was called loudly in endless repetition, and he was a torchbearer’ (1976, p. 78). Mylonas is more specific: ‘He was the personification of the

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procession of initiates from Athens to Eleusis’ (1961, p. 238). In the course of time, Iakchos became increasingly identified with Dionysus. By the time of Ovid (43 BC–AD 17), the process was complete: he was widely regarded as a manifestation of Bacchus. Ovid begins the fourth book of his Metamorphoses with an invocation of Iacchus, that is, of the young Dionysus: For thine is unending youth, eternal boyhood (puer aeternus), Thou art the most lovely in the lofty sky; Thy face is virgin-seeming . . . The Orient owns thy sway; Where’er thou goest, glad shouts of youths and women echo round ... Pentheus thou didst destroy, thou awful god. (Metamorphoses IV, 17–23)

Ovid’s figure of the puer aeternus (‘eternal boy’) continues to resonate with the qualities ascribed to him earlier in the Eleusinian Mysteries, but he is further invested with attributes indicative of Dionysian ‘Life’. The parallel with the image that fascinates Basil is evident. Dorian is invested with all the essential attributes of Ovid’s puer aeternus: Ovid’s puer aeternus

Dorian Gray

thou art the most lovely in the lofty sky;

. . . a young man of extraordinary personal beauty. (p. 1) Basil: ‘You became to me the visible incarnation of that unseen ideal whose memory haunts us artists like an exquisite dream.’ (p. 114)

thy face is virgin-seeming . . .

He had always the look of one who had kept himself unspotted from the world. . . . His mere presence seemed to recall to them the memory of the innocence that they had tarnished. (p. 127)

The Orient owns thy sway (the Orient is a metaphor for the ‘rising generation’ or a ‘fresh insight’)

. . . there were many, especially among the very young men, who saw, or fancied that they saw, in Dorian Gray the true realization of a type of which they had often dreamed. (p. 124)

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Where’er thou goest, glad shouts of youths and women echo round, with drums of tambourine, and cymbals’ clash, and the shrill piping of the flute.

. . . on each Wednesday evening while the season lasted, he would throw open to the world his beautiful house and have the most celebrated musicians of the day to charm his guests with the wonders of their art. (pp. 128–9)

Pentheus thou didst destroy, thou awful god.

Compare Dorian’s murder of Basil. (p. 158)

Indeed, Dorian’s association with Dionysus is made explicit toward the end of the novel. Following a discussion of Basil’s murder, Lord Henry comments on his friend’s ‘exquisite life’: ‘You have drunk deeply of everything. You have crushed the grapes against your palate. Nothing has been hidden from you. And it has all been to you no more than the sound of music. It has not marred you. You are still the same . . . At present you are a perfect type.’ (p. 216)

Dorian thus personifies far more than just ‘extraordinary’ beauty and ‘eternal youth’. The above parallels strongly suggest that he also incarnates Dionysian life: he loves parties, music, wine and women. Sibyl’s description of him is apt: she calls him ‘Prince of life!’ (p. 86). And yet, in spite of the insistence of these associations, the quality that impresses Basil most strongly about Dorian has ‘nothing to do with Dionysus’. It is his young friend’s perfection. As the artist admits: ‘I only knew that I had seen perfection face to face, and that the world had become wonderful to my eyes’ (p. 114). And perfection is suggestive not so much of Dionysus, but of a deity often envisaged as his diametrical opposite: Apollo. If Dionysus embodies ‘intoxication, and hence proximity’, Apollo signifies ‘clarity and form, and hence distance’ (Walter Otto, 1955, p. 78). Marsyas and Apollo Toward the end of the novel, Dorian is playing the piano when Lord Henry remarks: ‘What a blessing it is that there is one art left to us that is not imitative. Don’t stop. I want music tonight. It seems to me that you are the young Apollo, and that I am Marsyas listening to you.’ (p. 216)

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The myth of Marsyas and Apollo must have held considerable significance for Wilde, for he makes several references to it in his works (for example, Wilde, 1966, p. 987; also Letters, 2000, pp. 755–6 [’De Profundis’] and 1035). And it provides a clue to a major theme in The Picture of Dorian Gray. At the heart of the myth is a contrast between the different musical abilities of Marsyas and Apollo. One intriguing and fruitful – although perhaps unexpected – way of understanding the difference between their skills is provided by the distinction Jung made between ‘feeling’ and ‘emotion’ (or ‘affect’). Jung uses the word feeling to describe the function of consciousness that tells us ‘how and to what extent a thing is important or unimportant for us’ (CW 6: 900). It is the psychological function that establishes a ‘criterion of acceptance or rejection’ (CW 6: 725). As such, because an experience can only become real or meaningful when an individual has established the specific ‘value’ it holds for him or her, it is a necessary aspect of every process in which the ego is involved. In contrast, Jung uses the words emotion and affect to describe any kind of excessive reaction. Emotion and affect are ‘characterized by marked physical [enervation] on the one hand and a peculiar disturbance of the ideational process on the other’ (CW 6: 681, paraphrasing Wilhelm Wundt). They refer to any reaction that an individual cannot control: excessive pleasure, pain, guilt, anger, or even feeling. The different ways in which Apollo and Marsyas relate to their respective musical abilities would seem to illustrate this distinction. Apollo is a god of distance. He is of such ‘brightness’ (phœbus) that only his parents, Zeus and Leto, can withstand his presence. His attributes are the bow and the lyre. And somewhat surprisingly, Jung’s definition of ‘feeling’ provides an interesting way of seeing the relation between these two apparently opposite properties. Jung uses the word ‘feeling’ to denote the psychological function that decides both whether an individual will invest an experience with significance or not and, if so, how and to what extent. ‘Feeling’ involves judgement and thus can be described as a ‘rational’ function (CW 6: 601). In Jung’s view, the experience of music very often has a similar significance: ‘Music expresses, in some way, the movement of the feelings (or emotional values) that cling to the unconscious processes’ (1973, vol. I, p. 542). Apollo is a personification of a particular kind of ‘otherness’ that has to do not only with rational judgement, but also with feelings. His bow and his lyre are different reflections of an essentially discriminating – and thus judging – nature. With his bow, Apollo punishes, mostly for misguided attitudes and feelings. With his lyre, he

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bestows approval, mostly for proper attitudes and feelings. His lyre thus symbolizes ‘feeling’ as a function of evaluation. In contrast, the flute in which Marsyas takes such delight has a very different significance. His flute is not one of his attributes; it does not belong to him. Before he found it, it belonged to Athene (see Ovid, Fasti VI, 693ff; Apollodorus, The Library I, iv, 2 and n.). Upon playing on it, Marsyas is increasingly carried away by his new-found ability. Encouraged by his fellow satyrs – who personify his inferior (uncontrollable) impulses – Marsyas challenges Apollo and becomes embroiled in a competition over which he has no control. His musical talent is not an attribute of his character. It symbolizes an excessive identification with his own ‘feeling function’. In other words, it represents what Jung would have called ‘emotion’, that is, an excessive emotional reaction causing such a disturbance in the individual’s ideational process that he thinks himself the equal of a god. Viewed in this light, the myth of Marsyas and Apollo tells of the consequences for a human (Marsyas) of trying to appropriate a transpersonal or ‘divine’ attribute. The flaying of Marsyas is a terrible punishment and one must therefore assume that he committed a correspondingly terrible crime. Urged on by his mischievous companions, Marsyas thinks himself the equal of Apollo. His crime is ‘identification’ with the attributes of a god. And the extremity of the punishment suggests that the Greeks considered such ‘psychological inflation’ a heinous offence. The problem of inflation is that of the razor’s edge between affirming one’s ego to the limit, whilst never identifying with the transpersonal ‘self’. To borrow Buber’s terminology, the ‘I’ and the ‘Thou’ must never be confused. Not only Marsyas, but the fates of Icarus, Phae¨ton and Bellerophon all attest to the dangers of such confusion. Psychological inflation is not necessarily constituted by any feeling of power or grandeur; it is constituted by identification with a transpersonal entity, whether person, property, or ability. Basil, Dorian and Lord Henry all make sweeping ‘value-judgements’ – Basil vis-a`-vis art, Lord Henry, visa`-vis life, and Dorian vis-a`-vis the objects of his ever-changing interests. And they are each, albeit differently, punished for their tendency. All three main protagonists relate to Dorian’s ‘wonderful youth and beauty’ in a manner suggestive of the myth of Marsyas and Apollo. Lord Henry likens himself to Marsyas, and Dorian to Apollo. Basil is related to Marsyas by virtue of his comparable punishment at the hands of Dorian (as ‘Apollo’). And Dorian as protagonist is related to Marsyas, both because he is the novel’s main protagonist, and by virtue of the punishment he suffers as a result of his identification with his own perfect Apollonian beauty.

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Thus, at the heart of the novel is a crucial paradox: Dorian prays to appropriate both ‘infinite passion’ and ‘unsullied splendour’ (p. 105), qualities that are associated with Dionysus and Apollo respectively. He discovers that his ‘unsullied splendour’ allows him to enjoy his ‘infinite passion’. Somewhat paradoxically, however, at the end of the novel he is not punished – as one might have expected – by his Dionysian ‘passions,’ but by the Apollonian image of ‘unsullied splendour’. The Portrait as the Self By 1890, the days when a sailor might mistake a stranger for a god were long gone. And yet, when Basil first comes ‘face to face’ with Dorian, he experiences him as both a tremendum and a fascinosum; in other words, as if he were a god. Such a reaction begs a psychological explanation. Basil invests an unexceptional young man with the attributes of both the young Dionysus and Apollo. In other words, he projects these attributes onto Dorian. The latter’s youth and beauty provide the necessary ‘hook’, but it is because Basil is reluctant to confront the implications of the dilemma implicitly facing him that he projects the factors responsible for his impasse onto others. Basil is the effective protagonist. The image that he paints of Dorian is an image of ‘otherness’ par excellence. As a god-image, he corresponds with Jung’s definition of the ‘self’. According to Jung, an experience of ‘the self acts upon the ego like an objective occurrence’ (CW 9ii: 9). To Basil, the properties that he sees in Dorian appear to pertain to Dorian. But it would be more realistic to assert that he (or, strictly speaking, the author) projects attributes associated with the self onto the younger man. In other words, the ‘self’ is an essentially imaginal experience. The collective self can be defined as an embodiment of a culture’s highest values. In this sense, it is a personification of ‘the total personality which, though present, cannot be fully known’ (CW 9ii: 9), and is therefore very often associated with a religious figure (for example, Christ or the Buddha). But when an otherwise ordinary individual (Basil) invests an otherwise unexceptional individual (Dorian) with the properties of the self, the image is far more ambivalent. On the one hand, it represents an ideal toward which the individual is powerfully drawn (Basil’s love for Dorian). On the other, it harbours a tension of opposites that the individual needs to decode, and from whose power he needs to free himself. According to Jung, the self often manifests itself as a complexio oppositorum (‘mixture of opposites’: see CW 11: 283). Basil’s ‘picture of Dorian Gray’ is an archetypal image that embodies a complexio of Dionysian Life and Apollonian Form. And as such, it constitutes an implicit challenge. Only if the individual (that is,

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Basil) can decipher the specific significance that it holds for him will he be able to avoid being overwhelmed by it. Basil’s first portraits of Dorian are of him as Paris, Adonis, Antinous and Narcissus. They are based on the immediate association he makes with youth and beauty. They do not indicate the ‘self’ in Jung’s sense of this word. They represent various facets of Dorian’s character in a relatively tame form. Which, in turn, suggests that he paints Dorian in these roles in order to evade having to come to terms with the implications of the more terrifying image of the self that he projects onto Dorian when they first meet – an image that, because of Lord Henry’s timely intervention, manifests itself again in his masterpiece. The centrality of the portrait has always been recognized: for example, by San Juan, who writes that ‘Dorian Gray’s picture . . . propels the whole train of events leading to the disclosure of his true self’ (1967, pp. 9–10). San Juan, of course, is not using the word ‘self’ in the same way as Jung: he is referring to the authentic centre of the personality that Jung would have defined as the ‘ego’. But the image that survives the tragedy of Dorian’s unwitting suicide is not his ‘true self’ in the sense in which San Juan means it. The image of Dorian that so fascinates Basil and Lord Henry has nothing to do with either Dorian’s, or Basil’s or even Wilde’s ‘ego’. It is an image – Jung would have called it an archetypal image of the self – suggestive of both Dionysus and Apollo. Basil is overcome by ‘a curious sensation of terror’ when he first sees Dorian because he unwittingly projects a powerful and ambivalent image of the self onto him. The moment that he captures in his portrait carries the same resonance. And at the end, the painting survives Dorian’s attempt to destroy it because, like the gods, archetypal images are eternal. The Puer Aeternus (2): The Psychology of a Middle-Aged Man In Symbols of Transformation, Jung observes that a figure similar to the puer aeternus will often appear in the dreams and fantasies of a certain kind of middle-aged man. And he goes on to say that a man who becomes fascinated by this archetypal image is very often ‘granted only a fleeting existence, because he is never anything but an anticipation of something desired and hoped for’ (CW 5: 392). It remained for his collaborator, Marie-Louise von Franz, to provide a full account of the psychology of such a man in a series of lectures given in 1959–60 and subsequently published as Puer Aeternus (1970/1981). She defines such a man as a ‘puer’. And the puer, she explains, tends ‘to avoid the immediate friction of realization. . . . [he] lives a certain

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amount of instinctual life, but he blocks off its psychological realization’ (p. 149): The one situation dreaded throughout by such a type of man is to be bound to anything whatsoever. There is a terrific fear of being pinned down, of entering space and time completely, and of being the specific human being that one is. (p. 2)

As a result, he very often shows no transition stage in his feelings, but moves quickly from infatuation to ice-cold brutality (pp. 8, 47). Very often he justifies his behaviour with ‘a clever tour de passe-passe with a spiritual or intellectual explanation – and escapes again’ (p. 244). The parallels with Dorian are self-evident – but Dorian is not a puer. He is a figure that holds a special fascination for a middle-aged man (Basil) and, by extension, also his author (Wilde). According to von Franz, a further feature of the puer is that he is convinced that childhood is ‘the only true life’ (p. 12), for ‘the child is fully alive; does not suffer from remoteness from life’ (p. 98). One recalls the definition of Utopia in ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’ (1891), which was written immediately after his novel and in which Wilde writes: ‘the personality of man will be very wonderful. It will be as wonderful as the personality of the child’ (Wilde, 1966, p. 1084). It is not only The Picture of Dorian Gray, but also his other works that suggest that Wilde manifests many of the characteristics associated with the psychology of the puer. This has long been recognized, but usually just from an overview of his behavioural tendencies (for example, Casement, 1998, p. 11). Our concern in these pages has been to illustrate the extent to which the novel gives vivid expression to such psychological tendencies. We remember The Picture of Dorian Gray has a great many references to ‘psychology’ (pp. 19, 36, 58, 125, 132, 133, 143, 169, 190, 205). And yet for all the babble about psychology, there is a chilling blindness to the psychological implications of the action itself. And significantly, this is a characteristic of the puer. James Hillman, the founder of archetypal psychology, expresses this most clearly. He describes the ‘puer spirit’ as ‘pseudo-psychological’: It can search and risk; it has insight, aesthetic intuition, spiritual ambition – all, but not psychology, for psychology requires time, femininity of soul, and the entanglement of relationships. Instead of psychology, the puer attitude displays an aesthetic point of view: the world as beautiful images or vast scenario. Life becomes literature, an adventure of intellect or science, or of religion or action, but always unreflected and unrelated and therefore unpsychological. (Hillman, 1967, pp. 25–6)

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The parallels with Dorian are evident. So too are the parallels with Wilde. His blather about psychology conceals an essentially ‘unpsychological’, because un-enquiring nature. We remember Lord Henry’s comment about Basil: ‘He had no curiosity.’ Wilde too readily stops at pronouncement. He never thinks about the subjective implications of what he writes. He had no real curiosity and without curiosity there can be no psychology. He has an instinctive fear of what he might learn about himself. He prefers to evade not only the frictions of life but also of learning any home truth. As a man, Wilde was too impatient, too sure of himself, too glib to be genuinely concerned with the other. He always liked to escape into a pseudo-aesthetic with what von Franz calls ‘a clever tour de passe-passe’. And this, of course, is characteristic of puer psychology. It also brings us to Wilde’s most celebrated quality: his wit. The Dandy and the Wit As we have seen, Lord Henry and Dorian are not individuals, so much as ‘types’. And their type is that of the dandy. At the heart of Wilde’s novel – as of all his critical essays – is the view that he advanced most clearly, vis-a`-vis T.G. Wainewright, in ‘Pen, Pencil, and Poison’ (1889): ‘This young dandy sought to be somebody, rather than to do something. He recognized that Life itself is an art, and has its modes of style no less than the arts that seek to express it’ (1966, p. 995). As we have seen, Basil sees nothing in Dorian beyond ‘a young man of extraordinary personal beauty’. When Dorian realizes this, he challenges Basil: ‘I am less to you than your ivory Hermes or your silver Faun. You will like them always. How long will you like me? Till I have my first wrinkle, I suppose’ (p. 26). His indignation is well-founded. But what Dorian does not realize at this moment is that the type he will become as a result of the combination of this realization and the influence of Lord Henry is an embodiment of the very aestheticism that he finds so repugnant in Basil. Towards the end of the novel, Lord Henry tells Dorian: You are the type of what the age is searching for, and what it is afraid it has found. I am so glad that you have never done anything, never carved a statue, or painted a picture, or produced anything outside of yourself. Life has been your art. (p. 217)

Dorian is the Wildean dandy par excellence. He is what both Basil and Lord Henry would like to be: invulnerable from the possible wounds that life can afflict and immersed in a world of his own ‘philosophic

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contemplation’. He is afraid of the power that an individual – any individual – is potentially capable of exercising over him. He does not involve himself in the worries of his friends, for worry signals suffering, and the Wildean dandy will do everything possible to avoid suffering. He blocks off any realization that might pain him. He is afraid of his own unacknowledged desires. He is afraid to live the kind of life that so fascinates him. And his wit is his most powerful means of defence. It is a way of evading the obligation to respond to the demands and individuality of another person. Many of Oscar Wilde’s characters reveal the same tendencies. This can be easily illustrated by taking three more or less random examples of his wit, one from the novel, and two from the plays. First, when Sir Thomas says to Lord Henry ‘I assure you there is no nonsense about the Americans’, the latter answers: ‘How dreadful! I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable. There is something unfair about its use. It is hitting below the intellect’ (p. 40). Second, in Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892), Lord Darlington is eulogizing the woman he loves: Lord Darlington: Cecil Graham:

Dumby: Lord Darlington: Dumby:

This woman has purity and innocence. She has everything we men have lost. My dear fellow, what on earth should we men do going about with purity and innocence? A carefully thought-out buttonhole is much more effective. She doesn’t really love you then? No, she does not! I congratulate you, my dear fellow. In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it. The last is much the worse; the last is a real tragedy! (1966, p. 417)

Finally, in The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), Miss Prism is cautioning Cecily: Miss Prism: Cecily: Miss Prism: Cecily:

I highly disapprove of Mr. Ernest Worthing. He is a thoroughly bad young man. I fear he must be. It is the only explanation I can find of his strange attractiveness. (Rising) Cecily, let me entreat of you not to be led away by whatever superficial qualities this unfortunate young man may possess. Ah! Believe me, dear Miss Prism, it is only the superficial qualities that last. Man’s deeper nature is soon found out. (p. 356)

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Not only do all the speakers have the same kind of humour, but each of these exchanges has a similar mechanism. In the first example, Lord Henry simply overrides Lord Thomas’s opinion. In the second, neither of Lord Darlington’s friends shows any interest in the point he is trying to make. In the third, Cecily does not acknowledge Miss Prism’s genuine concern. The characters are not even trying to understand one another. The second speaker is picking up a word or phrase employed by the first, and is capping it with an exhibition of his or her cleverness. In each case, the wit overrides the first speaker’s intention and meaning. And by ignoring it, the second speaker not only prevents the possibility of an exchange of views, but in effect also denies the identity of the other. Wilde’s humour is extravagant and paradoxical. It rests on the second speaker’s presuming that he or she has access to a higher truth than the original speaker. His characters escape the obligations of relationship by pronouncing witticisms from imaginary Olympian heights. Dorian Gray prays not to have to suffer the ordinary hurts of life. The essence of Bunburyism is that it allows Jack to escape from reality and indulge in a fantasy life as Ernest. Wilde’s wits all exhibit the same basic attitude as Dorian Gray: they have a compulsive need to stall the other, to refuse the demands of relationship, and to use the other only as a vehicle for their own wit. The Wildean dandy pursues a particular kind of repartee. But in spite of its possible brilliance in terms of word play, there is nothing funny about either the mechanism underlying it, or its psychological implications. It signals a more or less callous indifference to the demands of others together with a nagging fear of being pinned down and made to assume responsibility for one’s all-too-ordinary human nature. It is the wit characteristic of a puer. Conclusions It is time to return to those questions we left hanging at the outset. Basil is not fascinated by every handsome young man that he meets. He is enthralled only by one. Both he and Lord Henry are captivated by far more than just Dorian’s youth and beauty. They see behind his superficial appearance, and what they see is a complex and ambivalent archetypal image composed both of the young Dionysus and Apollo. Somewhat paradoxically, the faults of this novel (its clumsy melodrama, its reiteration of a pseudo-Weltanschauung, the irritating dependence on adjectival intensifiers and the laziness of much of the writing) are inseparable from its strengths. For The Picture of Dorian Gray provides a case study not only of the implications of ungovernable introverted intuition, but also of the wayward, childishly provocative

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and essentially un-psychological psychology of the middle-aged puer, whose vanity is but a mask for a deep-rooted inability to reflect on the psychological implications implicit in his own intuitions. Like it or not, The Picture of Dorian Gray has made an impact far deeper than many much better texts. For it is a precursor of a minor but none the less enormously significant tradition. The puer aeternus has exercised his considerable fascination on a great many writers and readers since the time of Oscar Wilde. The most celebrated of these include: J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan (1904 and 1911; cf. Yeoman, 1998); Thomas Mann, Death in Venice (1912) and The Confessions of Felix Krull (1954); Andre´ Gide, Les Caves du Vatican (1914), and, perhaps most famously, Saint Exupe´ry, Le petit Prince (1943; cf. von Franz, 1981). Every one of these works has been a ‘cult’ bestseller at one time or another during the last century, and had a marked influence on otherwise very different kinds of readers. As Lord Henry tells Dorian: ‘You are the type of what the age is searching for, and what it is afraid it has found’ (p. 217). In this respect, at least, Wilde was prophetic. The twentieth century was obsessed with adolescence; that is, it was fascinated by ‘eternal youth, infinite passion, pleasures subtle and secret, wild joys and wilder sins’ – with inevitable consequences. Today the puer is a type that will be recognized by every practicing psychologist. For better or worse, Oscar Wilde must be credited with introducing a new ‘type’ into literature: ‘the young man of extraordinary personal beauty’ who shares one or more of the attributes of the puer aeternus. Carson, then, was wrong to suggest that Wilde’s emphasis on the word ‘personality’ could only harbour homosexual overtones. As used in his novel, the word reveals an altogether deeper fascination with an unusually complex archetypal image. In all likelihood, there is a connection between his fascination and his homosexual tendencies, but these need not concern us. The point here has been to find a possible reason why, in his novel, Wilde laid such emphasis on the word. This explanation of the significance that the word ‘personality’ held for Wilde also helps us to understand what the author might have meant by the assertion that the importance of a personality stems only from the moment that it makes its first appearance in art. As aesthetic theory, it might quickly be demonstrated that the view that Basil expounds has little or no substance. But its very glibness and provocative assurance intrigues. And this is because, in psychological terms, it makes perfect sense. For it is of course the logical extension of his psychological type. He is in thrall to an archetypal image of the puer aeternus. Consequently, he believes not in a ‘great men’ theory of history, so much as in a ‘great image’ theory of art.

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And this, of course, as has been suggested in the first section of this essay, is the kind of aesthetic theory that only an introverted intuitive type could advance. Indeed, it could only be made by an introverted type whose ‘intuition’ was prey to an equally compulsive ‘sensation’ function. This is why Basil, an otherwise unassuming conservative, should be so fascinated by an art that combines sensuality and decadence: because these reflect a dilemma pertinent to his psychological type. His intuitions of an ideal are blurred by an uncontrollable obsession with the frisson aroused by its physical equivalent. Wilde was a puer, and the puer is always the plaything of his type; or, rather, as we saw in the first section of this study, of the inferior function of his type (pp. 84–86). Aesthetics is usually viewed as a branch of philosophy, and philosophers are wary of any attempt to ‘psychologize’ ideas. But if, as my argument suggests, aesthetic claims do not always stem from the ‘thinking function’, then one of the merits of Jungian psychology is that it provides a method by which to identify which other function or functions might be involved, and why. For my conclusion would seem to suggest that all philosophical statements reflect a specific psychological typology, perhaps even a typological dialectic, and that each psychological type is likely to hold a different attitude towards the archetypal images – or ideas – that hold it in its sway. We have seen, then, how the nature of the influence that Lord Henry exercises on Dorian can be explained as a representation of the uncontrollable inferior function of an introverted intuition type (Basil). And we have seen how Basil’s fascination by Dorian corresponds to the dilemma confronting a middle-aged man who finds himself obsessed by an image of a puer aeternus. In the final part of our argument, we shall demonstrate how this fascination is inseparable from, and perhaps even determined by a deeply unconscious fear of the feminine.

3.

Fear of the Feminine The justification of a character in a novel is not that other persons are what they are, but that the author is what he is. (Wilde, ‘The Decay of Lying’, 1889)

At the centre of The Picture of Dorian Gray is Dorian’s brief relationship with a young actress. Sibyl Vane is introduced in Chapter 4 and is the main focus of the events in the next six chapters. Her brother reappears in Chapter 16, still determined to find the ‘Prince Charming’ responsible for his sister’s suicide some eighteen years before, and he pursues Dorian through the next two chapters. Thus almost exactly half the novel is

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directly concerned with Sibyl. Furthermore, in so far as Dorian’s treatment of her is the first manifestation of the character that Basil finds so shocking, she also indirectly conditions the events leading to the latter’s murder. And yet in spite of this centrality, she has attracted relatively little interest from criticism. Even when her importance is acknowledged, as it is by some critics (for example, Shewan, 1977), there is a strange reluctance to explore the theme of Dorian’s relation with her as a determining aspect of the novel. Basil, we remember, has painted Dorian as Actaeon, Narcissus and Adonis. Picking up on the distinction that Jung made between emotion and feeling, this final section analyses Dorian’s relationship with Sibyl in the light of the three best-known myths associated with these figures: the stories of Actaeon and Artemis, Narcissus and Echo, and Adonis and Venus. The aim is to demonstrate that the Dorian–Sibyl relationship is an unexpected key to the novel. More specifically, it is to argue that Dorian’s fascination with Sibyl can be defined as a reflection of an important aspect of Wilde’s authentic unconscious, and that Basil’s fascination with Dorian is a substitute experience resulting from an unconscious fear of the feminine. Music: Emotion and Feeling The way in which the hero of a novel is introduced is often a key to its subsequent events. Dorian is introduced at the beginning of Chapter 2 ‘seated at the piano . . . turning over the pages of a volume of Schumann’s Forest Scenes: ‘You must lend me these, Basil,’ he cried. ‘I want to learn them’ (p. 14). As we have seen, Jung made a significant distinction between emotion and feeling. On first hearing Lord Henry expound his philosophy of Individualism, Dorian reflects: Music had stirred him like that. Music had troubled him many times. But music was not articulate. It was not a new world, but rather another chaos, that it created in us. (p. 19)

Lord Henry’s wife makes much the same point when she tells Dorian: ‘I adore [good music], but I am afraid of it. It makes me too romantic’ (p. 45). In Jung’s terms, ‘chaos’ and ‘excess’ signal emotion; that is, an excessive reaction ‘characterized by marked physical enervation on the one hand and a peculiar disturbance of the ideational process on the other’ (CW 6: 681). In other words, prior to the events described in the novel, Dorian associates music with emotion. His determination to

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‘learn’ Schumann’s Forest Scenes thus represents a desire to give form to chaos, to translate emotion into feeling. Curiously, very much the same challenge is implicit in his initial reaction to Sibyl Vane, the first girl with whom he falls in love. He reacts to her as if she were ‘music’. He describes her to Lord Henry: ‘And her voice – I never heard such a voice. It was very low at first, with deep mellow notes, that seemed to fall singly upon one’s ear. Then it became a little louder, and sounded like a flute or a distant hautbois. In the garden-scene it had all the tremulous ecstasy that one hears just before dawn when nightingales are singing. There were moments, later on, when it had the wild passion of violins. You know how a voice can stir one.’ (p. 50)

Later, he reflects about Hetty Merton, the last girl with whom he falls in love: ‘What a laugh she had! – just like a thrush singing’ (p. 219). That he should associate them both with music suggests that he invests them with a considerable degree of feeling or ‘emotional value’. And this implies that Sibyl faces Dorian with a comparable challenge: to translate his immediate infatuation with her (that is, an excessive reaction, and thus emotion) into an attachment (that is, a bond in which he is capable of balanced feeling). But this of course does not happen. As soon as Sibyl shows herself to him ‘as she is’, he cruelly repudiates her. When Basil comes to bring Dorian the news of her death, the latter (who has already heard the news from Lord Henry) cuts him short: ‘I don’t want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, to dominate them’ (p. 108). This represents a parody of his earlier intention. He wants to master his emotions. But the way in which he does so is an expression not of rational feeling so much as compulsion. He does not want to be reminded of an emotion that he felt the previous evening. In the space of a few hours, he moves from infatuation to ice-cold indifference, which is an equally excessive emotional reaction and thus corresponds to Jung’s definition of emotion. In the following pages, I shall illustrate how we can further explore this mechanism by way of an analysis of three mythic patterns to which Dorian’s relationship with Sibyl can be compared. The aim is to ascertain whether there is a common denominator that might be said to condition it. Actaeon and Artemis Dorian is attracted by a particular kind of female beauty. In Chapter 18, he compares Gladys to Artemis, the goddess of the forest (p. 205). This links her with the music that he wants to learn at the outset of the novel:

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Schumann’s Forest Scenes. He also associates Sibyl with the forest: ‘I was away with my love in a forest that no man had ever seen’ (p. 75). And, tellingly, she too has a beauty suggestive of the virgin goddess of ancient Greece: ‘Harry, imagine a girl, hardly seventeen years of age, with a little flower-like face, a small Greek head with plaited coils of dark-brown hair, eyes that were violet wells of passion, lips that were like the petals of a rose. She was the loveliest thing I had ever seen in my life.’ (p. 50)

Artemis was the sister of Apollo, and her primary attributes were a bow and arrows. When she was three years old, she begged her father Zeus that she be always attended by nine-year-old nymphs. In Brauron, a town near Athens, girls were dedicated to Artemis when they were nine years old and they remained in her service until they were nubile. Artemis was a virgin huntress. By virgin was meant ‘unattached’ (¼ unmarried), and hunting, in psychological terms, suggests searching for (that is, trying to identify) one’s instinctual nature. Artemis thus represents a period between childhood and womanhood. Her love of hunting symbolizes the independence of girlhood while it slowly discovers its own adult feminine nature. From a woman’s point of view, Artemis embodies a phase in the development of her own female nature. But from a man’s point of view, an image of a young girl who is suggestive of Artemis represents the anima. The ‘anima’ is the name Jung used to describe the image of a female figure that appears in a man’s dream or fantasy, and with which he has no immediate ‘personal’ associations. The nature of a man’s anima is invariably indicative of his attitudes towards women, both conscious and unconscious. An anima-figure suggestive of Artemis thus reflects a particular stage in a man’s relation with his unconscious image of the feminine. For this reason, Artemis-figures are often encountered in the dreams of young men. And Basil is a young, or youngish, man at the outset of the novel, when he first meets Dorian. But he is almost thirtyeight on the fateful evening that he visits Dorian in order to thrash things out with him. And it is worth pointing out that Wilde was about this age at the time of writing The Picture of Dorian Gray. In other words, the novel describes a middle-aged man’s fixation with an image of girlhood independence suggestive of a particular phase in female development. In the Metamorphoses, Ovid gives the classic version of the most famous story about Artemis. Actaeon is a young man who enjoys hunting. One day, while resting during a hunt, he happens to see Diana (¼ Artemis) bathing in a nearby pool. To prevent him boasting that he

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has seen her naked, she changes him into a stag, whereupon his own pack of hounds tears him to pieces (Ovid, vol. 1, 1977, pp. 134–43). The myth almost explains itself. That a mortal comes upon a goddess (an archetypal image) suggests that the myth is primarily a male projection. Ovid emphasizes the chance: ‘Actaeon comes wandering through the unfamiliar woods with unsure footsteps and enters Diana’s grove; for so fate would have it’ (I, p. 137). Dorian’s meeting with Sibyl, as he admits to Lord Henry, is also a chance encounter: ‘After all, it never would have happened if I had not met you . . . Well, one evening about seven o’clock, I determined to go out in search of some adventure . . . I don’t know what I expected, but I went out and wandered eastward, soon losing my way in a labyrinth of grimy streets and black, grassless squares. About half-past eight I passed by an absurd little theatre . . . You will laugh at me, I know, but I really went in and . . . To the present day I can’t make out why I did so: and yet if I hadn’t . . . I should have missed the greatest romance of my life.’ (pp. 47–8)

Artemis (Diana) is a virgin huntress: she always appears clothed. To see her naked – that is, in the role of Aphrodite (Venus) – was not permitted. The sight of Artemis bathing offers an intimation of sexuality, but not – for Artemis is a pre-sexual goddess – its manifestation. In other words, the figure of Artemis that features in this myth is an ambivalent archetypal image of the feminine that is at once virginal and sexual. The former aspect corresponds to Actaeon’s lack of interest in the feminine: he still prefers hunting. The latter aspect corresponds to his need to awaken to his own sexuality. Thus the image of Actaeon unexpectedly coming on Artemis bathing both illustrates his present state (disinterest in the feminine) and the nature of the challenge facing him: to acknowledge the sexuality latent in the feminine. We note that the roles in which Dorian sees Sibyl act (Rosalind, Juliet, Ophelia and Desdemona) are all built on a tension between purity and sexuality. Dorian is struck by the sudden appearance of a new look in Sibyl’s eyes. He notices it while he is talking to her after a performance of As You Like It, a play, incidentally, which largely takes place in a forest. He is ‘flushed with excitement’ as he tells his two friends: ‘suddenly there came into her eyes a look that I had never seen there before’ (p. 75). The look in question does not belong to Artemis. It is an intuition of Sibyl’s adult sexuality. We note it again the evening that Dorian takes his friends to the theatre. On first seeing Sibyl step onto the stage, Lord Henry has to admit that she is ‘one of the loveliest creatures . . . he had ever seen’: ‘There was something of the fawn in her shy grace and startled eyes. A faint blush, like the shadow of a rose in a mirror of silver,

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came to her cheeks’ (pp. 81–2). Artemis does not usually blush. But Sibyl is burning within. As she later tells Dorian: ‘I might mimic a passion that I do not feel, but I cannot mimic one that burns me like fire’ (p. 86). She is blushing at the intimation of her own sexuality. This moment in Sibyl’s development corresponds to the tension that lies at the heart of the myth of Actaeon and Artemis. Artemis is outraged to have been discovered naked. She transforms Actaeon into a stag, that is, an animal that she usually protects for its spiritual qualities. Hence the irony: Artemis changes Actaeon into the noblest of forest animals in order that his hounds will attack him. The hounds represent his unconscious desire. We note the parallel: just as Actaeon briefly becomes a stag, so Dorian briefly enjoys a kind of nobility in his infatuation: ‘She is everything to me in life’ (p. 50). But his unconscious desire is equally apparent: He was walking up and down the room as he spoke. Hectic spots of red burned on his cheeks. He was terribly excited . . . His nature had developed like a flower, had borne blossoms of scarlet flame. Out of its secret hiding-place had crept his Soul, and Desire had come to meet it on the way. (pp. 54–5)

The word ‘Soul’ in this context clearly refers to Sibyl (anima ¼ soul), and Desire, to Dorian’s unacknowledged lust. In other words, Dorian’s unconscious ‘Desire’ has run ahead of the development of his inner image of the feminine, and this corresponds exactly to the crime for which Actaeon is punished. The implicit parallel with the myth amplifies the dilemma facing not only Dorian, but also, by extension, Basil. The myth of Actaeon, however, is only one of the myths on which Dorian’s relationship with Sibyl is based. To further explore his ‘very complex passion’ we have to turn to another (p. 59). Narcissus and Echo In The Picture of Dorian Gray, there are at least four specific references to Narcissus (pp. 3, 105, 114, 128). The earliest surviving extended account of the story most frequently associated with him appears in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and it too reveals a further facet of Dorian’s encounter with Sibyl Vane. Possibly the most arresting feature of Ovid’s account of the story is his portrait of Echo: she represents one of the earliest and most powerfully conveyed examples of unrestrained female sexuality in literature: Now when she saw Narcissus wandering through the fields, she was inflamed with love and followed him by stealth; the more she

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followed, the more she burned by a nearer flame; as when quickburning sulphur, smeared round the tops of torches, catches fire from another fire brought near. Oh, how often does she long to approach him with alluring words and make soft prayers to him. (1977, I, p. 151)

Sibyl also experiences love as an inner fire. She greets Dorian after her ‘ridiculous’ performance: ‘Her eyes were lit with an exquisite fire. There was a radiance about her’ (p. 85). She begs him to take her away with him to where they can be alone, away from the world of the theatre: ‘I might mimic a passion that I do not feel, but I cannot mimic one that burns me like fire’ (p. 86). As Narcissus is to Echo, so Dorian is ‘pale, proud, and indifferent’ to Sibyl’s love (p. 84). He treats her equally cruelly: ‘You simply produce no effect’, he tells her. Echo pines away for love of Narcissus. Sibyl commits suicide for love of Dorian. Just as Nemesis, the goddess of righteous retribution, punishes Narcissus by making him pine for someone he loves and who will never love him in return (his own reflection), so Dorian is punished with ‘mad hungers’ that grow more ravenous the more he feeds them (p. 128). Narcissus becomes infatuated by his own reflection, just as Dorian grows ‘more and more enamoured of his own beauty’ (p. 128). Narcissus eventually seeks release from his body, and wishes his reflection longer life: Oh, that I might be parted from my own body! And, strange prayer for a lover, I would that what I love were absent from me! . . . Death is nothing to me, for in death I shall leave my troubles; and I would he that is loved might live longer; but as it is, we two shall die together in one breath. (I, p. 157)

Dorian half-realizes this prayer: for he confines an aspect of himself to his old school-room. And he too eventually seeks release from the condition that he had once prayed to be allowed to enjoy. He too feels a strange pity for his other self: ‘A sense of infinite pity, not for himself, but for the painted image of himself, came over him’ (p. 91). The parallel is corroborated by something Dorian says towards the end of the novel: ‘I wish I could love, . . . But I seem to have lost the passion, and forgotten the desire. I am too much concentrated on myself’ (p. 205). The parallel with the myth of Narcissus was noted by Albeaux-Fernet (1972; cf. Gonza´lez, 1994), but he makes no reference to Echo, who is central to the myth. The characteristic with which Narcissus is most often associated is not an attribute of his inherent personality. Narcissus is a hunter, more interested in his own pursuits than in relating with a female figure (cf. Adonis, below). And it is for this that he is punished. His falling in love

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with his own reflection is a punishment inflicted on him by the goddess of righteous retribution for rejecting Echo, who embodies female sexuality. Both Echo and Sibyl represent images of the feminine endeavouring to awaken their respective male protagonists to eros. By this term, Jung meant a principle of psychic relatedness whether to another human being or indeed anything ‘other’; a principle that very often carries with it implications of sexual relationship (CW 9ii: 29, 33). Both Narcissus and Dorian represent male protagonists who draw back not only from sexual relationship, but even psychic relatedness. They are over-interested in their own ‘adolescent’ pursuits, symbolized in the myth by hunting. Adonis and Venus The very different figures of Artemis and Echo are brought together in the last of the three myths relevant to Dorian’s encounter with Sibyl. On first seeing Basil’s portrait of him, Lord Henry likens Dorian to Adonis (p. 3, cf. p. 114). Ovid’s version of the best-known myth about him tells how, while kissing his mother, Venus (¼ Aphrodite), Cupid happens to scratch her breast with an arrow protruding from his quiver. The next person whom Venus sees is Adonis. She immediately falls in love with him, and leaves Mount Olympus to follow him in his pursuits: . . . though her wont has always been to take her ease in the shade, and to enhance her beauty by fostering it, now, over mountain ridges, through the woods, over rocky places set with thorns, she ranges with her garments girt up to her knees after the manner of Diana [¼ Artemis]. She also cheers on the hounds and pursues those creatures that are safe to hunt, such as the headlong hares, or the stag with high-branching horns, or the timid doe; but from wild boars she keeps away. (Ovid, Vol. II, 1984, p. 103)

One day, Venus warns Adonis to beware of wild beasts, for ‘Neither youth nor beauty, nor the things which have moved Venus, move lions and bristling boars and the eyes and minds of wild beasts’ (p. 103). But the boy’s ‘manly courage would not brook advice’ (p. 115). He goes hunting, is gored by a wild boar, and killed. Once again, the myth reveals a male perspective. Adonis may have been a god in the religion of the Phoenicians, but by the time of Ovid, he had become simply an available figure for a story. In his telling of the story, Adonis is a mortal; Venus, a goddess. Her infatuation with him thus represents a man’s experience of the feminine. The personification of sexual love is so enamoured with Adonis that she has come down from Heaven to be with him. She is even prepared to dress herself as

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Artemis so as to be able to join him in his pursuits. This is a curious reverse from the situation depicted in the myth of Actaeon. In the myth of Actaeon, Artemis is seen in the role of Aphrodite; in the myth of Adonis, Aphrodite is willing to impersonate Artemis. That in this myth the goddess is Venus (Aphrodite) suggests that the anima as sexual passion has emerged from unconsciousness, but Adonis is not yet ready to incorporate adult sexuality into his life. Because he is not ready to relate to this new element ‘as she is’, he retains her in an Artemis-stage of development. The parallel with the story of Narcissus and Echo is obvious. Both Narcissus and Adonis avoid sexuality. Adonis refuses to commit himself to Venus, and the myth suggests that the price for evading such a relationship is death: cf. Lord Henry’s reflection ‘There was something fascinating in this son of Love and Death’ (p. 36). Sibyl tells Dorian of her love for him; he responds by leaving her, Adonis-like, to search for other ‘sensations that would be at once new and delightful, and possess that element of strangeness that is so essential to romance’ (p. 132). He abandons Sibyl because she no longer represents ‘romance’ for him: ‘You have spoiled the romance of my life,’ he tells her (p. 87). Just as Venus warns Adonis against hunting lions and boars, so Sibyl warns Dorian against her brother: ‘ ‘‘Don’t go away from me. I couldn’t bear it. Oh! don’t go away from me. My brother . . . No; never mind. He didn’t mean it. He was in jest . . . ’’ ’ (p. 87). But James Vane does mean it, and it is only as a result of his quick wits that Dorian is able to escape the brother’s revenge. In Ovid, the boar suggests nothing more than Adonis’s unconscious lust. But in the version of the story recorded in The Library, traditionally (but probably erroneously) attributed to Apollodorus, Adonis is ‘wounded and killed in hunting by a boar through the anger of Artemis’ (1970, p. 85). James Vane is prompted to revenge by Sibyl as ‘Artemis’. The most intriguing aspect of Ovid’s version of the story of Adonis is that Venus behaves as if she were Diana (Artemis). Given that the myth is told from a male perspective, this suggests that Adonis prefers hunting to the company of Venus. The irony is that hunting symbolizes a quest to understand one’s own instinctual nature. Adonis is punished because his Desire is not sufficiently developed for it to be able to respond to an image of Aphrodite. Hence the somewhat paradoxical formula: because he is not ready to ‘value’ relationship as sexual union, he condemns himself to an eternal quest, whose objective is the discovery of the ‘value’ of sexuality. It is worth pausing to note that the evolution of the figure of Adonis illustrates how human consciousness gradually absorbs unconscious material. In the first stage, Adonis is a god: Frazer, in The Golden Bough

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(1922), describes him as a ‘dying-god’ who ‘represented the yearly decay and revival of life, especially of vegetable life’ (p. 6). In the next stage, represented by Ovid’s version of the story, Adonis becomes a mortal with whom a goddess falls in love. In other words, human consciousness can now identify with a young man with the attributes of Adonis, even if his story is determined by ostensibly divine factors. In the third stage, represented by Dorian and Sibyl, both protagonists are mortal, and the entire encounter occurs in realistic terms. Dorian’s experiences still retain the basic pattern of the myth, but he is potentially able to make decisions in a way that neither the original dying-god nor Ovid’s protagonist can. In this way, numinous experiences are slowly assimilated or integrated by consciousness, allowing the ego to assume greater responsibility for his actions. Fear of the Feminine Because Dorian is likened to Actaeon, Narcissus and Adonis, one can infer that each of them reveals an aspect of his nature, although none of them describe him fully. The myths are of course all concerned with the feminine. Actaeon stumbles on an image suggestive of sexuality before his own image of the feminine is ready to integrate this. The myth of Narcissus suggests that he cannot relate to an image of female sexuality. The myth of Adonis shows that his desire is not sufficiently developed for his image of the feminine to reveal her sexuality. The common issue in all three myths is that the male protagonist is not ready to acknowledge sexuality in his image of the feminine (that is, his anima). Two of these myths – those of Actaeon and Adonis – are specifically concerned with a confusion between Artemis and Aphrodite. In terms of Dorian’s experience, the apparent endeavour of his anima as ‘Artemis’ to become ‘Aphrodite’ reflects his own difficulty in responding to female sexuality. He is not ready to integrate adult sexuality into his life. The three myths represent different aspects of the dilemma in which he finds himself. Like Actaeon, he has had an intuition of sexuality, but in an image in which it does not belong. His unconscious desire (adolescent lust) has moved ahead of his ability to relate to women. He thus ‘sees’ sexuality where it is not appropriate. For his anima, which reflects the true state of his ability to relate to the feminine, is still that of a pre-sexual goddess. Sibyl’s burning love reflects the force of Dorian’s unacknowledged desire: it represents an element of his own personality demanding it be recognized and integrated into his life. But, like Narcissus, he turns his back on Sibyl as soon as she reveals her sexuality to him. And the myth of Adonis explains why he does so. It represents how a man who is more engrossed in his own pursuits

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requires Aphrodite to behave ‘as if’ she were Artemis. This represents how Dorian is only able to relate to an image of the feminine corresponding to pre-sexual girlhood. He ‘sees’ every woman as an Artemis: Sibyl, Gladys and Hetty all have the same Artemis-attributes. Albeit unconsciously, he is afraid of Aphrodite. The relation between his unconscious fear of feminine sexuality and his fear of his own maturation is evident. The day after cruelly rejecting Sibyl, Dorian awakens, afraid to look at Basil’s altered canvas: ‘He shuddered, and felt afraid, and going back to the couch, lay there, gazing at the picture in sickened horror’ (p. 95). He is afraid of learning that he has been cruel, and his cruelty is the result of his evasion of female sexuality. He can worship Sibyl as a creature from Shakespeare’s plays (p. 75), but he cannot respond to her as a woman with her own demands. A few moments later, he admits to Lord Henry: ‘Then came that dreadful night – was it really only last night? – when she played so badly, and my heart almost broke. She explained it all to me. It was terribly pathetic. But I was not moved a bit. I thought her shallow. Suddenly something happened that made me afraid. I can’t tell you what it was, but it was terrible.’ (p. 99)

Without her ‘art’, he is no longer able to see her as Artemis. And from the moment he becomes aware of her as a young woman with her own demands, he becomes afraid of her. In other words, he is afraid of the challenge with which she faces him. Just as Actaeon is afraid of Artemis, Narcissus of Echo, and Adonis of Venus, so Dorian Gray is afraid of Sibyl Vane as a young woman burning with love for him. And his fear is very similar to that which Diana plants in Actaeon after transforming him into a stag: ‘And last of all she planted fear within his heart’ (Ovid, Vol. I, 1977, p. 139). Such fear reflects a fear not only of female sexuality, but also of his own unconscious desires. The heart of Lord Henry’s new Hedonism is the credo that ‘Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul’ (p. 20). If either of these requires curing, this can only be because Dorian has paid them insufficient attention; in other words, that he has not invested either his anima (soul) or the first woman he meets with sufficient value (¼ ‘feeling’). Lord Henry’s assertion could be translated thus: ‘Just as the anima is necessary in order to develop sexual commitment to a woman, so sexual commitment to a woman is necessary in order to develop the anima.’ This implies that not only must Dorian commit himself to Sibyl in order for her to develop from an image of virginal purity into an image of womanhood, he must also

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relate to her as a projection of his anima if he is to develop a mature relationship with her as a woman. Neither his infatuation with Sibyl Vane nor his cruel rejection of her signals ‘feeling’, in Jung’s sense of this word. His infatuation is excessive; his cold indifference to her declaration equally excessive. They both refer to ‘emotion’. Dorian’s tragedy is that he cannot invest his anima with sufficient value for it, and by extension also him, to develop. If his first words – his desire to learn to play a piece of music – suggest that the challenge facing him is to discover how to relate to his feelings, then the novel records a ‘failed initiation’. His relation with Sibyl symbolizes a failure to translate adolescent emotion into adult feeling.

Confusion of the Anima and the Self A reader cannot help but be struck by the parallels between Dorian’s experience of Sibyl, and Basil’s experience of Dorian. Just as Dorian discovers Sibyl as a result of a chance whim, so Basil comes across Dorian unexpectedly (p. 6). Dorian explains his infatuation to Lord Henry: ‘She has not merely art, consummate art-instinct, in her, but she has personality also; and you have often told me that it is personalities, not principles, that move the age’ (p. 55). Similarly, Basil is fascinated by Dorian because he represents ‘a new personality for art’ (p. 10). In the same way as Dorian manifests a fear of Sibyl when she reveals her Echolike sexuality, Basil confesses that his first reaction on meeting Dorian at Lady Brandon’s crush is fear: ‘A curious sensation of terror came over me’ (p. 6). Dorian’s desire to set Sibyl on a pedestal of gold and see the world worship her (p. 77) is clearly related to Basil’s ‘curious artistic idolatry’ of Dorian (p. 11). The Picture of Dorian Gray proceeds from the studio of an artist who ‘worships’ a young man of extraordinary personal beauty who, in turn, ‘worships’ a young actress of extraordinary loveliness (pp. 114, 51, 77). Dorian is fascinated by Sibyl’s Artemis-qualities, and Basil is fascinated by Dorian as an image of ‘eternal youth’, which is an attribute of the young Dionysos. Dorian is fascinated by an image of eternal girlhood, Basil by an image of eternal boyhood. Dorian is fascinated by Sibyl because she represents a girl awakening to womanhood. Similarly, Basil’s portrait of Dorian captures the young man’s first apprehension of his adult individuality: . . . a look had come into the lad’s face that he had never seen before. . . . For nearly ten minutes he stood there, motionless, with parted lips, and eyes strangely bright . . . The few words that Basil’s friend had said to him . . . had touched some secret chord that had never

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been touched before, but that he felt was now vibrating and throbbing to curious pulses. (pp. 17–18)

The metaphor of music suggests that this moment refers to Dorian’s initiation into feeling; to his recognition of a new dimension to life that suddenly holds a ‘value’ for him. In other words, Basil is fascinated by an image of a young man of unstained purity in the process of becoming aware of his infinite passions. Both Sibyl and Dorian represent a moment between the unconscious innocence of childhood and the different horizons and values of adulthood: the moment of ‘becoming selfconscious’ (p. 57). The fact that so many parallels exist between their respective experiences suggests a confusion between an experience of the anima and an experience of the Jungian self. Which raises the question: why? What might this signal? An obvious example of the translation of the feminine into an experience of masculinity is provided by Dorian’s fascination with Sibyl in the role of Rosalind – that is, of a young woman who disguises herself in ‘man’s apparel’ (As You Like It II, iv). This, however, can scarcely constitute an unconscious confusion. But there is a passage in which just such a translation would appear to be unintentional. Lord Henry is reflecting on what his uncle has just told him of Dorian’s background: From a psychological point of view, how interesting he was! The new manner in art, the fresh mode of looking at life, suggested so strangely by the merely visible presence of one who was unconscious of it all; the silent spirit that dwelt in dim woodland, and walked unseen in open field, suddenly showing herself, Dryad-like and not afraid, because in his soul who sought for her there had been wakened that wonderful vision to which alone are wonderful things revealed. (p. 36)

These are amongst the very few lines in the novel in which the sense is not immediately clear. The reader fastens onto the subsequent reference to Plato, without noticing the discrepancy between the platonic idea and Wilde’s very different ‘silent spirit’. Plato’s ideas are not Dryad-like, nor do they dwell in dim woodland. Lord Henry is describing a ‘silent spirit’ whose sex is evidently feminine, and whose relation to Artemis is suggested by virtue of her belonging to the forest, and by her showing herself to a male viewer when, although looking for her, he least expects her to appear. The passage thus represents a variant of the Actaeon and Artemis myth, but with an all-important difference: Lord Henry is not referring – as the passage would seem to imply – to a young woman. He is describing his reaction to Dorian, a young man. How can we explain such sexual confusion?

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The Puella Aeterna We have defined Basil as the effective protagonist. He is an artist without any life beyond his art; indeed, without any interest in life. More to the point, he is so stuck in his ways (a situation which is very often indicative of a psychological impasse) that there is never any question of Lord Henry trying to change him. As in Ivanhoe, the effective protagonist never even thinks of confronting his shadow. And so the unconscious has to slip to another ‘deeper’ level of representation. If the challenge facing Basil can be defined as the primary narrative, the challenge facing Dorian can be defined as an ambivalent archetypal amplification of his dilemma. In other words, we are dealing with narratives that reflect different kinds of authenticity. The primary narrative represents a dilemma pertinent to the subject at the time of its composition. In this sense, it is authentic. But it is also prone to the prevarications and distortions that stem from the subject’s mistaken attitudes. The effective protagonist is not necessarily a carrier of the subject’s ego. Some three years after the publication of his novel in book form, Wilde wrote to an admirer called Ralph Payne: I am so glad you like that strange coloured book of mine: it contains much of me in it. Basil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry what the world thinks me: Dorian what I would like to be – in other ages, perhaps. (2000, p. 585)

Although Wilde admits to identifying closely with Basil Hallward, one should not assume that Basil represents Wilde’s ego. What Wilde acknowledges is that Basil represents ‘what I think I am’. And what one thinks one is very rarely coincides with the ego. By definition, it corresponds to his persona, that is, a representation of the way in which a person sees or imagines himself, and this is never ‘authentic’. It is determined by the conscious attitude. Even so, the persona is also an archetypal image (as Oscar Wilde said, ‘Give a man a mask and he will tell you the truth’): it reflects what Wilde really had made of himself. Wilde liked to present himself as a man committed only to his art. The novel’s secondary narrative is an archetypal amplification of the dilemma facing the effective protagonist. It reflects an authentic level of experience, and if (as is often the case) the ego fails to recognize its connection to himself/herself, he or she will have no cause to distort it. In this sense, the secondary narrative can often be described as more authentic than the primary narrative. The secondary narrative traces Dorian’s transformation from an extraverted intuition type into an introverted sensation type, whose common denominator is a tendency to

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live at one remove from reality. The change affecting Dorian represents the change that has affected Basil. The secondary narrative not only indicates what Basil must do if he is to snap out of his impasse (he must overcome his unconscious fear that his anima, an Artemis-cumAphrodite type, instils in him and commit himself to relationship), but also what will happen if he does not (he will be killed, metaphorically, by his wrong-headed fascination with Dorian). The key word here is ‘metaphorically’. An archetypal narrative cannot prophesy or announce. It can only indicate the psychological implications of a tendency. Dorian’s story represents how Basil has allowed his authentic emotional life to dry up, partly as a result of his fear of the feminine, and partly as a result of his tendency to escape the obligations of life by insisting on a pseudo-aesthetic view: by pretending to be an artist he is not. Thus underlying Basil’s fascination with the puer aeternus is Dorian’s equal fascination with its closest equivalent: the archetypal image of the puella aeterna, the ‘eternal girl’. And like its counterpart, the puella aeterna is an image that harbours both adolescent innocence and adult sexuality: its childhood innocence is suggestive of Artemis, while its intimations of sexuality are suggestive of Echo or Aphrodite. The figure of a teenage puella aeterna – of Artemis-cum-Aphrodite – plays a determining part in Wilde’s only novel. Conclusions Jung writes: ‘As against Freud’s view that the dream is essentially a wishfulfilment, I hold . . . that the dream is a spontaneous self-portrayal, in symbolic form, of the actual situation in the unconscious (CW 8: 505; italics in original). If this is so, then a dream provides a ‘snapshot’ of a tendency pertinent to the subject at the time of the dream. At the time of writing the first version of his novel (published in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine in July 1890), Wilde was already on friendly terms with Robert Ross. A few months later, he met the young Lord Alfred Douglas, by whom he very soon became captivated. It would be easy to assume, like Carson, that there is no need to look further than homosexual inclination to explain his fascination. But as we have seen, there is. Wilde’s fascination with the archetypal image of the puer aeternus anticipates, and therefore may very well have helped to shape his later interest in ‘Bosie’. But his fascination with the puella aeterna was already evident. Wilde was in his early thirties when, in late November 1883, he wrote to Lily Langtry:

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I am going to be married to a beautiful girl called Constance Lloyd, a grave, slight, violet-eyed little Artemis, with great coils of heavy brown hair which make her flower-like head droop like a flower, and wonderful ivory hands which draw music from the piano so sweet that the birds stop singing to listen to her. (Letters, 2000, p. 224)

Six years later, he invested Sibyl with exactly the same attributes as he saw in his wife when he was in love with her: ‘a girl, hardly seventeen years of age, with a little flower-like face, a small Greek head with plaited coils of dark-brown hair, eyes that were violet wells of passion, lips that were like the petals of a rose’ (p. 50). He was clearly attracted by a ‘type’ of young woman who embodies, on the one hand, the prepubescent innocence of Artemis and, on the other, the intimation of sexual desire implicit in the best-known myth about her. In other words, he was attracted by the image of a young woman who is in the process of discovering – and always and only just on the verge of, but never quite discovering – her own adult sexuality. Because he was neither ready nor willing to meet its implicit demands, he held it (if the analogy may be excused) at arm’s length, at one remove from actuality. For some years, Wilde’s marriage appears to have been more or less happy. But by the time he came to write The Picture of Dorian Gray, it was already beginning to show acute signs of strain (see Bentley, 1983; Amor, 1983; Schmidgall, 1994, pp. 97–126). Frictions had arisen. At some stage in Wilde’s life between 1883 and 1890, his fascination with an Artemis-cum-Aphrodite type was gradually replaced by an increasing and self-destructive fascination with a puer aeternus type. In his novel, it is Dorian who is playing the piano when we first meet him. Wilde appears to have had a homosexual tendency from quite young. That his only novel appears to anticipate the course of his subsequent life has long been recognized: indeed, it is such a commonplace that it irritates because it has not been further elaborated or justified. This essay suggests a great many reasons for this view. But this final section of my argument, however, is concerned with something that has not been sufficiently appreciated: the determining role that the puella aeterna plays in his tragedy. The patterns of interaction that lie at the heart of The Picture of Dorian Gray strongly suggest that the reason that Wilde finally gave way to his homosexual inclination was because he unconsciously sought to escape from having to respond to the very sexuality that he projected into the Artemis-cum-Aphrodite figure that fascinated him. In other words, he projected onto Alfred Douglas a fascination with Apollonian form in order to avoid having to come to terms with the intimations of sexuality that he experienced at the heart of the Artemis-type to which he

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was instinctively drawn. The love he developed for the young Alfred Douglas was at least partly occasioned by an unconscious fear of the feminine. Jungian analyst Katherine Bradway asserts that it is not unusual for the contrasexual ‘other’ to appear in the dreams of homosexual men and women. For example, she records the case of one man who often dreamed about his mother. One day, however, he dreamed of a girl standing in the rain playing music. Not long after, he had another dream: ‘I find a woman who is ill. We climb some perilous stairs and she loses her footing. I save her at the risk of my own life.’ Bradway comments: The first dream presents the image of the anima with no interaction with her. The second portrays the urgency of saving the feminine part of himself. This sequence is similar to those I find in dreams of heterosexual men: the activation of the anima, followed by the rescuing of the anima. And with this comes the possibility of relating to women, to the world, and to their own unconscious in a new way. (Bradway, 1982, pp. 283–4)

The parallel with the situation in The Picture of Dorian Gray is evident. Sibyl’s declaration of love for Dorian can be compared with the first of these dreams about the girl standing in the rain playing music. We remember that Sibyl’s voice is also related to music: ‘it had the wild passion of violins’ (p. 50). If music signals ‘feeling’, in both cases a young girl is inviting a male figure to ‘relate’ to her. And if one adopts Jung’s view that the dream represents the ‘actual’ situation in the dreamer’s unconscious, Sibyl’s desire to be loved must be regarded as a crucial aspect of the pressing dilemma confronting the author in 1890. In other words, just as Basil and Dorian escape from the demands of eros (psychic relatedness, or commitment to another) and take shelter in aesthetics, so Wilde – in his only novel – is endeavouring to escape from the demands implicit in his fascination with a puella aeterna by seeking refuge in an ‘idolatry’ of a puer aeternus. To escape from the fear that feminine sexuality arouses in him, Basil hides behind his persona: that of an artist. And in order to escape from the demands of relationship with his wife (eros), Wilde the puer begins to avoid her and to hide behind his persona: that of an aesthete – and a homosexual. Because of his trial, the name of Oscar Wilde has become inseparable from his homosexuality. But this reading of his only novel suggests that his homosexuality may not constitute an expression of his authentic personality. With tragic irony, he may indeed, as the insufferable Marquis of Queensberry suggested, only have been ‘posing’ as a ‘somdomite’ [sic]. For if Dorian’s infatuation not only with Sibyl, but also with all the other Artemis-types (including Hetty Merton, who is ‘quite beautiful, and wonderfully like Sibyl Vane’, p. 210), can be said to

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belong to an archetypal, and thus authentic level of Wilde’s imagination, then the unconscious of this most celebrated of homosexuals would appear to have been urging him to relate to the feminine.

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PART TWO ANIMUS POSSESSION ‘A woman’s love is always freezing into fear. She wants everything, she is secure in nothing . . . God was cruel when he made women.’ (George Eliot)

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CHAPTER THREE

‘An Oppression Past Explaining’: Wuthering Heights and the Struggle for Deliverance from the Father So hopeless is the world without The world within I doubly prize . . . (Emily Bronte¨, ‘To Imagination’, 3 September 1844) A novel will be the higher and nobler the more inner and less outer life it depicts. (Arthur Schopenhauer, from Parerga and Paralipomena, 1851)

Although Emily Bronte¨’s only novel has inspired a great many provocative readings of its most arresting parts, it continues to defy a persuasive and coherent reading of the whole. On this point, critics as otherwise different as Q.D. Leavis and J. Hillis Miller agree and, somewhat curiously, they both ascribe the difficulty to the novel. In general, writes the former, ‘one attempts to achieve a reading of a text which includes all its elements, but here I believe we must be satisfied with being able to account for some of them’ (Leavis, 1969, p. 229). The latter is more categorical: No hidden identifiable ordering principle which will account for everything stands at the head of the chain [of its events] . . . What is lost in the case of Wuthering Heights is the ‘origin’ which would explain everything. (Miller, 1982, pp. 51, 61)

Confronted by this novel, he concludes, ‘the logical mind . . . conspicuously fails’ (p. 63). But why should Wuthering Heights – alone of all novels – be allowed to defy a coherent reading? On the surface, it would appear to invite a coherent reading of ‘all its elements’: the relationships that lie at its heart are unusually symmetrical and it has an unusually consistent chronology. If ‘the logical mind’ is unable to explain this text, this may well be because it is resting its arguments on inappropriate assumptions.

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Before we proceed, however, we must pause to distinguish between the two heroines. For reasons that should quickly become clear, this study reverses usual critical practice. The full name (Catherine) will always refer to the daughter: that is, to the second-generation Catherine (ne´e Linton) who, in the opening chapters of the novel, is Mrs Catherine Heathcliff. In contrast, the abbreviated form (Cathy) will always refer to her mother (ne´e Earnshaw) who, after her marriage, becomes Mrs Cathy Linton. Wuthering Heights appears to be composed of two stories told one after the other. The first is about how Cathy (ne´e Earnshaw) is torn between Heathcliff and Edgar Linton. The second traces the course of Catherine Linton’s relationships with her two cousins, Linton Heathcliff and Hareton Earnshaw. Criticism tacitly assumes that the earliest events described serve to explain the later events; in other words, that Wuthering Heights is a dynastic novel. Critical attention has always privileged the first-generation events. Partly because they are more vivid: no reader ever forgets the immediacy of the bond that exists between Cathy and Heathcliff. And partly because, being anterior, it is assumed that they must determine the later events. And in literal terms, there can be no question that this assumption produces a more or less credible, but not entirely coherent ‘story’. If we are to arrive anywhere close to the heart of this extraordinary novel, we must not commit the first sin of criticism: that is, confuse the story (that is, the chronological sequence of events as reconstructed in 1926 by C.P. Sanger) with the plot (that is, the narrative structure given us by Emily Bronte¨). Let us suspend all our unexamined assumptions about the text and explore it as a unique sequence of events considered in the order that the author has given them to us. Emily Bronte¨ does not begin her tale in 1771, the year in which the young Heathcliff is introduced into the Earnshaw household. She begins it in 1801, not long after ‘Mr Heathcliff’ has finally secured ownership of Thrushcross Grange. And she brings it to a close soon after his death, when Hareton inherits Thrushcross, and he and the second-generation Catherine plan to live there. The narrative structure of Wuthering Heights is firmly anchored in the time period 1801–02. As we shall see, this framing device is fundamental to a grasp of the relation between the two generations. A further characteristic of criticism of this novel is that it tends always to begin with a consideration of a specific (and thus isolated) textual moment: Hillis Miller (1982) even insists that this is the only possible way in which to approach it. In this chapter, it will be shown how a very different kind of reading is generated when one begins with a consideration of the novel’s over-arching narrative structure.

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The Present and the Past Wuthering Heights begins in November 1801. The first three chapters introduce Mr Heathcliff, whose character is revealed by two apparently contrary tendencies: his brutal aversion for his young daughter-in-law Catherine in the present, and his equally grotesque yearning to be reunited with her mother Cathy, who died in 1784, that is, seventeen years previously. The tense domestic situation observed by Lockwood in the opening chapters takes place in the present: it is, so to speak, ‘objective’. In contrast, what happened in the past (that is, between 1771 and 1801) is ‘a bedside story’ told by Nelly (¼ Mrs Nelly Dean) to Lockwood, ostensibly to while away the time while he recovers from the chill that he caught from having to struggle through the snow following his second visit to the Heights. It is Nelly’s ‘recollection’ of those moments from the past that continue to impact on Catherine’s situation in the winter of 1801–02. The purpose of her story, therefore, is to explain three issues: (1) how Catherine came to find herself in the situation in which Lockwood first meets her, (2) why her father-in-law, who cannot bear her presence, none the less insists that she stay at Wuthering Heights, and (3) why, on learning of Lockwood’s dream, Mr Heathcliff manifests such an anguished yearning for Cathy, who is Catherine’s mother. The events of Nelly’s story provide an explanation for the situation observed by Lockwood. And yet we note a curious discrepancy. When Nelly begins her tale about the residents of Wuthering Heights, she does not, as one might have expected, speak of recent events. Had she, she would have been spoiled for choice: for recent events of a traumatic nature include the brutal kidnapping of Catherine, the latter’s forced marriage with Linton, the death of her father (Edgar Linton), Mr Heathcliff’s insistence that Catherine return with him to Wuthering Heights, and the death of Linton. All of these occur within three months of the opening scene. Any one of them might have given Nelly a sufficient excuse to expand on her wish that one day Catherine will be allowed to join her at Thrushcross Grange. Instead, she begins her tale thirty years earlier. As Lockwood invites Nelly to begin her tale, there can be no question about what has caught his interest. He is interested in learning more about Catherine: ‘that pretty girl-widow, I should like to know her history; whether she be a native of the country, or, as is more probable, an exotic that the surly indigenae will not recognise for kin’ (p. 31). In other words, if Nelly chooses to begin her story with an account of the arrival of Heathcliff at Wuthering Heights, it is because this event is part of a full explanation for the events that lead to Catherine’s imprisonment there in the present.

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In literal terms, the past comes before the present. But this is not necessarily the case in either metaphorical or psychological terms – in both of which, the past may be represented in terms of ‘depth’. The following pages explore the possibility that the past in Wuthering Heights is far more ambivalent than is usually realized. On the one hand, it obviously refers to chronological time and, in this sense, the earliest events clearly determine later events. On the other hand, in psychological terms, the past may also be a metaphor for a ‘deeper’ level of imaginal experience. Nelly’s story divides naturally into two major time periods: the distant past and the recent past, each of which can be further divided into two parts. She begins with the events of the distant past, which concern Cathy. She then jumps over Catherine’s early childhood. The last two parts of her story belong to a more recent past, and they give an account of how Catherine came to be in the situation in which Lockwood discovers her. The four parts can be described thus: 1.

2.

3.

4.

Cathy’s history: part one (1771–80). This traces a handful of crucial events in Cathy’s childhood from the time that her father returns from Liverpool with young Heathcliff to the events surrounding the latter’s unexpected disappearance on the day that Cathy becomes engaged to Edgar. Cathy’s history: part two (1783–84). This begins in September 1783, with the return to Wuthering Heights of a ‘transformed’ Mr Heathcliff, and reaches its climax on the night of 19–20 March the following year, when Cathy gives birth to Catherine and dies soon after. Catherine’s history: part one (1797–1801). This covers the key events in Catherine’s adolescence from shortly before her thirteenth birthday until the time of Lockwood’s third visit to Wuthering Heights, when he announces his intention to return to the south. Catherine’s history: part two (1801–02). Lockwood unexpectedly returns to Wuthering Heights to learn how the situation in which he first met Catherine has changed as a result of Mr Heathcliff’s death.

It should be noted that the first part of Cathy’s history must end with Cathy settling in Thrushcross Grange, for the very simple reason that Catherine must be born there. In other words, there is a sense in which Catherine is a significant aspect of the first part of Cathy’s history. And she is, of course, central to the entire second half of the novel. The over-arching narrative structure of Wuthering Heights thus invites the reader to pay particular attention to the second-generation Catherine, or Mrs Catherine Heathcliff as she is in the opening scenes.

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We note that the novel spans a dramatic change in her circumstances. The opening three chapters describe the appalling situation in which she finds herself in the present: she is forcibly constrained in a home that she hates. Lockwood meets her at the lowest point of her fortunes: she has lost her father, she has lost her husband, and she has lost her home. And the novel ends when the unexpected death of Mr Heathcliff frees Catherine to become engaged to Hareton, and to return to her own home, a home that she loves. Time, in this novel, is far more ambivalent, or (as we shall see) polyvalent than is usually assumed. Instead of regarding ‘time’ only in chronological terms, I propose to explore it as an expression of psychological concerns. My contention is that the three major time periods of the novel represent different ‘levels’ of imaginal experience. The present describes an ‘actual’ situation. The recent past provides an explanation of how this situation came about: I shall refer to it as an anamnesis. And the distant past might be defined as an archetypal myth that elaborates on this. I refer to it as a myth for three reasons. In the first place, as already noted, because it is predetermined and predetermined closure is one of the defining properties of a myth. Secondly, because it functions as an aition: it explains the deep-rooted ‘origin’ of the situation observed by Lockwood in the opening chapters. And thirdly, of course, because it has the archetypal power of mythic structures. In other words, each of the three main narrative sections in this novel belongs to a fundamentally distinct kind of narrative: The present 1801–02 Catherine’s imprisonment The frame The recent past 1797–1801 Catherine’s history The anamnesis The distant past 1771–84 Cathy’s history The myth The first three chapters offer a vivid description of the plight in which Catherine finds herself in the ‘present’, at the time of Lockwood’s first visit to his landlord: to all intents and purposes, she is a ‘prisoner’ of her father-in-law. No great change occurs in her situation in the course of his brief stay at Thrushcross Grange. And although at least two significant events occur during the eight months in which he returns to ‘the busy world’ (Mr Heathcliff dies and Catherine makes her peace with Hareton), upon his last visit to the North, Lockwood finds Catherine still living at Wuthering Heights. Catherine is living at Wuthering Heights from the beginning to the end of the novel; that is, from November 1801 to September 1802. In the following pages, I argue that a reading of Wuthering Heights that is based on an assumption of its ‘linear’ repetition needs to be

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complemented by another more complex, more challenging, but also more satisfying reading that explicates its ‘vertical’ amplification.

The Argument The following reading is indebted to theories advanced by Jung. And not surprisingly, Wuthering Heights has attracted a great many previous readings indebted to Jung. The following are only the more important. Peter D. Lucas (1943) argues that all the characters are aspects of Cathy’s personality, which inevitably leads to a scanty treatment of the novel’s second half. Elliott B. Gose (1966) maintains that the fairy tale pattern symbolizes a process of initiation. Barbara Hannah (1971), more interestingly, examines the ways in which characters and other elements seek to arrange themselves in groups of four, a symbol of wholeness. Joan Carson (1975) holds that its deepest level of experience is a ‘night-sea journey’ analogous to the myth of Osiris. Curiously, more recent forays are disappointingly predictable. Bettina L. Knapp argues that ‘The central theme of Wuthering Heights is the birth, burgeoning, and death of love on a worldly plane, and the rebirth of this passion in atemporal spheres’ (1991, p. 108). And David Holbrook (1997) contends that the novel is about a process of individuation: a grand but somewhat nebulous claim of the kind that characterized Jungian analyses of the 1960s. None of these – or indeed any analysis of any other persuasion – privileges the events in the second generation; in other words, gives any central importance to the role of the secondgeneration Catherine. In this chapter I offer a post-Jungian reading of Wuthering Heights that is as surprising as it is unexpected. My contention is that, in psychological terms, the experience that lies at the heart of this novel concerns the second-generation Catherine. The present describes her predicament. The recent past provides an anamnesis of her predicament. And the distant past is intrinsically ambivalent: on the one hand, as a myth, it explains both what Catherine must do if she is to ‘escape’ from Wuthering Heights and why she is unable to; on the other, its events also constitute an archetypal amplification of her anamnesis. Figure 3.1 suggests that the narrative structure of Wuthering Heights is curiously similar to that of the Odyssey. Homer’s epic begins with four books set in the present (the so-called ‘Telemakheia’), the narrative then plunges into the distant past (the ‘Odysseia’), in which the events belong to an ‘older’ or ‘deeper’ level of imaginal experience, and the narrative is gradually brought back to the present in order to describe the change

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Figure 3.1

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The Narrative Structure of Wuthering Heights

effected. The Odyssey is not only about a ‘homecoming’, it is also (and perhaps even primarily) the story of a ‘coming of age’: Telemachus recovers possession of his father’s home. In similar fashion, Wuthering Heights begins with three chapters set in the present (Catherine’s plight), the narrative then plunges to a distant past in which the events have an archetypal immediacy (Cathy’s history), the narrative is gradually brought back to the present (Catherine’s history), and just when things appear to be hopeless, a change is brought about. Wuthering Heights not only tells us how Catherine recovers her own home, but – as we shall see – also tells us how she takes the first tentative steps in separating herself from her father’s unwittingly detrimental influence (a ‘coming of age’). There are of course equally important differences: but let us not pursue the parallel further than it needs be here. The point is that Wuthering Heights has a narrative structure surprisingly similar to that of the oldest homecoming in the western literary tradition. My contention is that Wuthering Heights tells the story of how Catherine finds a tentative but unsatisfactory solution to the challenge implicitly facing her in the opening chapters: to find her way back to her own home. The argument is in five parts (see Fig. 1). In the first section, I define Catherine as the ‘effective protagonist’ and explore the implications of the scenes witnessed by Lockwood at Wuthering Heights. Catherine is, in effect, ‘imprisoned’ at the Heights by Mr Heathcliff: the challenge facing her is to find a way to escape and return to her own home, Thrushcross Grange. In the second section, I demonstrate that Cathy’s history has the same basic structure as a well-known two-part myth. My intention is to demonstrate that the first part of Nelly’s story provides a mythic, that is, a deeply archetypal representation of the challenge facing Catherine. In the present, Catherine finds herself imprisoned by Mr Heathcliff; the challenge facing her is to escape to Thrushcross Grange. It is no

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coincidence that this is exactly what Cathy does in the first part of Nelly’s story: she too escapes to Thrushcross Grange. The third section looks at the celebrated interactions that follow upon Mr Heathcliff’s unexpected return to Wuthering Heights. These are, as every reader knows, the climax of the novel. My aim is to demonstrate that they are very much more ambivalent than it usually recognized: on the one hand, Cathy’s renewed friendship with Mr Heathcliff explains why Catherine is unable to escape from Mr Heathcliff in the present; on the other, Isabella’s behaviour depicts the horrendous consequences of her inability to do so. As will be shown, everything in this novel hinges on the history of the second-generation Catherine. The novel’s tight symmetries pertain to her. She grows up in total isolation, attached only to her father. As she tells Nelly: ‘I love him better than myself’ (p. 231). On kidnapping her, Mr Heathcliff tells her: ‘I shall be your father to-morrow – all the father you’ll have in a few days’ (p. 271). At puberty, she finds herself faced by a choice between two cousins: Linton, who is Mr Heathcliff’s son, is a sickly version of how her father looked as a young man, and Hareton, whom Mr Heathcliff – who keeps him in deplorable ignorance – none the less describes as ‘gold put to the use of paving stones’ (p. 219). She is torn between two fathers and two cousins. It defies belief that critics have never seen the dilemma that this represents as more central to the novel. In the fourth section of the argument, I take a close look at the logic underlying the story of her childhood and the reason for the terrible choices she makes in the course of her adolescence. The more she clings to her biological father, the more strongly she is drawn towards Mr Heathcliff – until she finds herself imprisoned at Wuthering Heights. In November 1801, both Catherine and the rightful owner of Wuthering Heights are dominated by a tyrannical father-figure. The opening of the novel provides a vivid fictional representation of a woman imprisoned by an unusually powerful father-complex. Nelly says of Mr Heathcliff that his mere proximity is ‘an oppression past explaining’ (p. 107). He represents not only something alien, but also something powerful enough to have ousted the two rightful owners from their homes. The challenge facing Catherine is to escape from his clutches and find her way back to her own home. Readers and critics alike usually think of the second half of the novel as something of an anti-climax. This, categorically, it is not. The dilemma facing Catherine is the cornerstone of the novel. She is a father’s daughter. The second half of the novel traces the horrendous process by which she comes into Mr Heathcliff’s clutches. The psychological implications of the interactions between Catherine, her two fathers, and

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her two cousins, have an appalling immediacy. They command much greater interest than is usually assumed. My intention is not only to explore these implications for their own interest, but also – paradoxical as this might seem – to demonstrate how Catherine’s attitudes at each moment determine the corresponding events in the ‘first’ generation. The penultimate section brings the argument to its ambivalent conclusion and discusses the tentative nature of what has been achieved. This experiment in post-Jungian criticism offers a radically new reading of the interactions of Emily Bronte¨’s only novel. My purpose is not to gain ‘rational mastery’ over this extraordinary text (Miller, 1982, p. 63), nor to intrude upon its mystery, but simply to try to better understand precisely what is unique about Wuthering Heights both as a narrative fiction and as an expression of a specific experience. My contention is that Wuthering Heights gives expression to a devastating ‘odyssey of experience’ (Hillman, 1967, p. 24). It offers a harrowing account of how a woman might at least tentatively resolve the dilemma posed by an over-attachment to her father – and, surprising as this might seem, this story runs through the entire text. For Emily Bronte¨’s only novel is as inexorably ‘logical’ as the most relentless Greek tragedy; indeed, it is perhaps the most tightly structured and ‘logical’ text in all of English literature. But its logic is the logic of the unconscious. No other novel offers such a powerful account of the consequences of misreading the promptings of the unconscious. In the following pages, I explore the nature of the events that unfold over the two generations, illustrate the unexpected way in which they relate to one another, provide a fresh definition of the psychological dilemma that lies at the heart of this extraordinary novel, and demonstrate that Wuthering Heights is far more heterogeneous, polyvalent, and – perhaps most importantly – more disturbing than is generally recognized.

1. An Oppression Past Explaining What my soul bore, my soul alone Within its self may tell. (Emily Bronte¨, ‘My Comforter’, 10 February 1844)

When considering the psychological implications of a novel, the first task is to establish the identity of its ‘effective protagonist’; the second is to specify the nature of the ‘challenge’ implicitly facing this character. And as we have seen in previous chapters of this study, comparing the situations with which a novel opens and closes very often reveals a key to

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both of these: that is, not only the identity of the effective protagonist, but also its dominant psychological theme. The Effective Protagonist Wuthering Heights opens with a date: 1801. In the course of his second visit, Lockwood discovers that Mr Heathcliff has ‘a genuine bad nature’ (p. 10), and notes that Catherine and Hareton are at each other’s throats. The antepenultimate chapter also begins with a date: 1802. Lockwood returns to the Heights to learn that, only a few months after his last visit, Mr Heathcliff unexpectedly died – and that the onset of his final sickness coincided with Catherine finally making her peace with Hareton and acknowledging him as her ‘cousin’ (p. 313). At the end, Hareton achieves what he desires but will not admit to in the opening chapters – Catherine’s attention – and she is free to return to the house where she was born. The novel spans – and, in some important way, is therefore ‘about’ – a change in their attitudes toward one another. But Hareton has admired Catherine covertly ever since he first met her. It is Catherine’s attitude towards him that has changed dramatically. At the outset, she is fiercely independent of all those amongst whom she lives. By the end of the novel, she is transformed: she dotes on Hareton and is looking forward to marrying him. Given this transformation, it is worth looking closely at the way in which she is introduced. In November 1801, Catherine is living amongst three hostile men in a house that is hateful to her. It is not, however, until Lockwood’s second visit that he even learns of her existence. On both occasions that he comes in contact with her, she is by the fire of the ‘house’ (¼ the main room). Thus, although degraded and dominated in this predominantly masculine household, she none the less holds a central position. When he first notices her, he bows and waits for her to invite him to take a seat. Critics have frequently commented on his ineptitude; they all too rarely consider the cause for this. Catherine refuses to enter into any social interaction. She rejects any connection with her surrounds. She snaps at anyone near her. And she is gratuitously indifferent and contemptuously aloof toward Lockwood’s effort at social discourse. Although described as the ‘missis’, she simply stares at him ‘in a cool, regardless manner, exceedingly embarrassing and disagreeable’ (p. 8). He comments on a litter of puppies; she immediately disowns them. He comments on the wildness of the evening, and she retorts: ‘You should not have come out’ (p. 9). When he offers to help reach the two canisters of tea, she snaps back at him: ‘I don’t want your help . . . I can get them for myself’ (p. 9). She twice demands to know whether he has been asked to tea: the implication being that she

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will not give him tea unless he has been asked. This is curious: she will not even greet an unexpected visitor, but does acknowledge an obligation to one who has been invited. The distinction implies that she has no interest whatsoever in any other person unless it is demanded by a custom she does not think of challenging. She has none of the qualities traditionally associated with a ‘missus’: she does not welcome Lockwood, nor does she do anything to ensure he feels comfortable. She is characterized by an aggressive, leave-me-alone-I-know-what-I’mdoing, independence. And yet, when he reminds her that she is the proper person to invite him to tea, she feels the slight. The ‘persona’ that she chooses to adopt dissolves and reveals not a young woman of seventeen, but a child: ‘her forehead corrugated, and her red under-lip pushed out, like a child’s, ready to cry’ (p. 9). Behind the mask of this fiercely independent wouldbe adult is a child that knows not how to behave. The most striking feature of the early chapters is that the attributes of each of the three male residents of Wuthering Heights correspond to an aspect of Catherine’s personality. The house itself is defined as a ‘perfect misanthropist’s Heaven’ (p. 1); Catherine has become a perfect misanthropist. Its three male residents are grim and taciturn; so is she. Joseph, aptly described as ‘vinegar faced’ (p. 7), is a model of ‘peevish displeasure’ (p. 2); so too is Catherine. Hareton is characterized by his ‘free, almost haughty’ bearing; Catherine is ‘as chill as an icicle, and as high as a princess’ (p. 296). Although a gentleman, Mr Heathcliff is a savage bully who will snap at Catherine and even strike her; Zillah says of Catherine, just before the events with which the novel begins: ‘She has no lover or liker among us – and she does not deserve one – for, let them say the least word to her, and she’ll curl back without respect of any one! She’ll snap at the master himself, and as good as dares him to thrash her; and the more hurt she gets, the more venomous she grows.’ (pp. 297–8)

In Chapter 3, when Mr Heathcliff chides her for being idle, she boldly stands up to him: ‘I’ll not do anything, though you should swear your tongue out, except what I please!’ (p. 29). He is about to slap her, when Lockwood makes his presence known. Whereupon Mr Heathcliff drops the hand he had lifted to strike her and she curls up her lip in scorn at his cowardice. This not only suggests that part of her seeks the punishment that she feels she has earned, but also that she is scornful of anything weaker than herself – just as Mr Heathcliff is. In other words, the personalities of all three male residents of the Heights ‘mirror’ different aspects of Catherine’s character. Mr Heath-

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cliff’s and Hareton’s misanthropy (pp. 1, 6, 9) reflect her lack of interest in Lockwood (p. 8). Hareton’s absence of any refinement reflects her scorn of social conventions such as hospitality and domesticity (pp. 9, 28–9). And Joseph’s pharisaism reflects her self-righteous contempt for all around her (see p. 297). Such parallels cannot be coincidental: they strongly suggest that the relation between her and the ‘surly indigenae’ of Wuthering Heights is essentially psychological. Wuthering Heights might appear to belong to a social reality. We are told, for example, that ‘The apartment and furniture would have been nothing extraordinary as belonging to a homely, northern farmer’ (p. 3). But Mr Heathcliff is not a homely farmer. He has no dealings with his neighbours. He and all the other residents of Wuthering Heights are asocial. This is evident from their antipathy toward Lockwood. Their lack of interest in him is not a reaction to a specific individual. It reflects their complete indifference to the outer world. They have and desire no connection with anyone from ‘the busy world’ (cf. p. 256). Wuthering Heights is a hermetic world, with its own laws and customs. And the parallels between Catherine and its three male residents in November 1801 suggest that the house and its inhabitants represent a powerful compound image of masculinity. Just as every man has an inherent image of the feminine that reflects his relationship with women, so every woman has an inherent image of the masculine that mirrors her relationship with men. Jung referred to this figure as the animus: an image of a man, in a woman’s dreams and waking fantasies, that personifies her ‘inner’ (¼ unconscious) attitudes towards men and the world of ideas that were associated, by tradition, with the masculine. Because these attitudes are very often diverse, the animus is not always an image of only one man; it is often made up of several figures, each of which has an apparently autonomous ‘personality’ until the woman recognizes that it represents an aspect of her own personality. Once acknowledged as such, it becomes a mediator between her and her unconscious; that is, it serves to reveal facets of her own personality which she had not previously considered (CW 7: 332–9). The parallels between Catherine and the three male residents of Wuthering Heights require an explanation, and perhaps the most obvious is that the three men personify different aspects of her personality. In other words, the various inhabitants of the house in which she finds herself represent different manifestations of her compound image of masculinity, that is, her animus. And this, in turn, suggests that Wuthering Heights represents a ‘container’ for her various images of the masculine. Even this brief consideration of the relation between Catherine and her surly house-mates suggests that she is a far more significant figure in the

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novel than has been realized. That the novel spans a startling change in her circumstances; that she should own Thrushcross Grange and Hareton, Wuthering Heights; that the novel is brought to a close when she makes her peace with him and they each recover their respective properties, all suggest that Catherine is the novel’s effective protagonist, and that the key to the novel’s structural and thematic coherence is the story of her relationship with Hareton. The Two Houses It has long been recognized that the two houses represent the fundamental polarities in the novel. Critics have tended to see them as symbolizing two contrasting abstract principles ‘out there’, equally necessary in the order of things and thus requiring some kind of balance between them. The houses have been interpreted in a great many different ways and, somewhat disconcertingly, there is no consensus as to which of the pairings proposed is the most appropriate. Even more disconcertingly, there is no evidence of any development in critical specificity: Date

Critic

1912 Sinclair 1934 Cecil 1943 Lucas

1949 Traversi 1953 Van Ghent 1958 1970 1975 1979

Allott Donoghue Eagleton Gilbert/Gubar

1982 1988 1989 1991

Benvenuto Prentis Reed Lavabre

Wuthering Heights

Thrushcross Grange

soul body storm calm the unconscious (spirit) consciousness that disregards the soul’s life personal social (realms) anonymous natural civilized manners and energies codes heart head Soul body nature culture Hell, anti-hierarchical, Heaven, hierarchical, raw cooked yang yin sexual spiritual savagery civilization patriarchal society negated feminine authority

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It is somewhat disconcerting to note that the polarities proposed, for example, by Richard Benvenuto in 1982 (yang and yin) and Donna Reed in 1989 (savagery and civilization) are even more abstract and remote than those proposed by May Sinclair seventy years earlier (soul and body). The crucial point, however, is that the polarities conceived by the imagination are not necessarily abstract terms with a more or less ‘equal’ value. In a woman’s dream, a male figure – by virtue of being a contrasexual other – will inevitably have a value quite different from that of any female figure. One always interprets a dream-figure in relation to the dreamer. Which raises a question: can one do the same for a literary text? Instead of viewing the two houses in Wuthering Heights as signalling abstract terms of equal status, could it be that one represents a woman’s ‘ego-structure’ and that the other is a ‘carrier’ for her compound image of masculinity? A house is a motif frequently encountered in dreams. In the introduction to this study, I referred to the case of a man who dreamed of his apartment being taken over by a fascist. Because the man identified the apartment as his own, his analyst interpreted it as representing his ego (see pp. 10–11 above; also Jung, 1965, pp. 160–62; Harding, 1965, pp. 171ff.; and Hall, 1983, pp. 82–3). When two houses appear in a dream, interpretation is of course more problematic. But there is a strong possibility that the dreamer would identify with one more strongly than the other. In other words, in a dream, two buildings do not necessarily signal a conflict between abstract properties of an ‘equal’ value. One building might well represent the ‘I’; the second house, an ‘other’. In The Living Symbol, Gerhard Adler discusses a recurrent dream; that is, a dream that had appeared on frequent occasions to a female patient during her life: ‘I had another beautiful house as well as the one in which I normally lived and I wondered whether it was right to have one which I used so little and whether the rent was paid.’ Adler interprets the two houses as ‘an inner experience of the two aspects of the personality, the empirical plane of the ego and the ‘‘hypothetical’’ plane of the self’ (1961, p. 98). In his view, the second house was a representation of an aspect of the dreamer’s personality to which the woman had not given sufficient attention: he identified this aspect as the self (in its Jungian sense: see above, p. 103). But the ‘other’ house does not always represent the self: in other dreams, it might very well represent either the shadow or the anima/animus. In a novel that prominently features two houses, the characteristics ascribed to each will usually indicate (a) which of them can be more

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closely identified with the effective protagonist, and (b) to which aspect of the personality the ‘other’ house can be ascribed. It is not until his second visit to the Heights that Lockwood even notices a female figure ‘whose existence [he] had never previously suspected’ (p. 8). Catherine is described as the ‘missis’ – a title that allows her no other privilege than that of refusing to earn her bread, whether chided for her idleness by Joseph or Heathcliff (pp. 13, 28). And yet, on both occasions that Lockwood comes in contact with her, she is by the fire of the central ‘house’ (¼ room). Thus, although clearly at odds with the male residents of the emphatically masculine household of Wuthering Heights, she none the less holds a central position. And this further suggests that she has an importance in the novel belied by the impression she makes on Lockwood. And yet she very evidently does not ‘belong’ at Wuthering Heights. While recovering from the ordeal of his horrendous struggle through the snow that covers the driveway to Thrushcross Grange, Lockwood learns from Nelly Dean that the home he has rented from Mr Heathcliff – who unnecessarily stresses his ownership on the first page of the novel – is in fact the ancestral home of the ‘pretty girl-widow’ in whom he has taken an interest. As has often been noted, just as the high and windswept station of Wuthering Heights is suggestive of a primitive masculine spirit (cf. Sinai, Olympus), so the rich valley parkland of Thrushcross Grange is suggestive of femininity. Even its male representative and previous owner, Edgar Linton, is described as having ‘a soft-featured face, exceedingly resembling the young lady at the Heights’ (p. 66). And Catherine has been cheated of her rightful home. We later learn that some three months before the events with which the novel begins, Mr Heathcliff kidnapped Catherine and compelled her to marry his son Linton. Very soon afterward, the latter died and his property passed to his nearest male relative, that is, his father, who is Mr Heathcliff. And whatever the legal validity of the latter’s claim, it rests on undoubtedly unscrupulous and probably illegitimate practices. The derided ‘missis’ of Wuthering Heights should own Thrushcross Grange. Wuthering Heights, in contrast, is a predominantly ‘masculine’ household. It has three male residents: Mr Heathcliff, who is its present master, Hareton, who looks like a common labourer, and Joseph, who is (almost) ‘the whole establishment of domestics’. In spite of legally owning the Heights and claiming Thrushcross Grange as his own, Mr Heathcliff does not belong in either house. Nelly describes him, variously, as a ‘cuckoo’, an ‘interloper’ and a ‘usurper’ (pp. 33, 36, 196). And to revenge himself on Hindley, he has ‘cheated’ Hareton of his house (pp. 33, 187).

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There can be no doubt, however, about the true ownership of Wuthering Heights: the house is clearly and categorically defined as belonging to Hareton Earnshaw. His name appears carved above the principal door, as it has done since ‘1500’. The gratuitous historicity of the accompanying date testifies to his inalienable ownership. In 1801, however, the date with which the novel begins, Hareton is not its master: he has been ‘cast out like an unfledged dunnock’. The two houses not only have masculine and feminine associations, but they ‘belong’ to Catherine and Hareton respectively. At the outset of the novel, Catherine and Hareton are at loggerheads. Their engagement brings the events to a close. In other words, the novel ends when they recover possession of their ancestral homes. This strongly suggests that their ancestral homes are an intrinsic part of their respective identity. This reading of Emily Bronte’s only novel reiterates the contention that the two houses represent its fundamental polarities, but it radically reformulates this view. It does not see the houses as representing any abstract qualities (whether storm/calm or savagery/civilization). It views them, consistently, as embodying different aspects of a woman’s personality. Thrushcross Grange represents Catherine’s ego-structure and Wuthering Heights, her animus-structure. And this is the important point to note: the two houses are fixed structures. They have the same value throughout the novel, that is, throughout all the events that occur in the past. Thrushcross Grange is a feminine house even in the first generation. When Heathcliff is brought to Wuthering Heights, it already has ‘Hareton Earnshaw’ carved above its lintel. In other words, everything that occurs at Thrushcross Grange has to do with the nature of Catherine’s ego-structure. And, as we shall see, everything that occurs in and around Wuthering Heights has to do with the formation of her animus. A Definition of Animus Possession If Catherine is the novel’s effective protagonist, then it goes without saying that her situation at the outset is enormously significant. Lockwood is taken aback by the expression in her eyes, which hovers ‘between scorn and a kind of desperation singularly unnatural to be detected there’ (p. 9). When he asks if she could tell him how to find his way back to Thrushcross Grange, she misunderstands him: ‘I cannot escort you. They wouldn’t let me go to the end of the garden-wall’ (p. 14). In other words, she is a virtual prisoner. The first three chapters are a vivid symbolic representation of a woman ‘imprisoned’ in a house whose hostile male residents personify a compound animus-image. Jung

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called such a condition animus possession, and noted: ‘A woman possessed by the animus is always in danger of losing her femininity’ (CW 7: 337; also CW 5: 272; CW 9i: 223). Not surprisingly, such essentialist, sexist language has given Jung a bad name. And it must be conceded, it is a shockingly clumsy phrase. But let us not throw out the baby with the bathwater. The point at issue is not really the definition of ‘femininity’: it is whether a woman who is over-fascinated by one or more animus figures might also be acting out of character. In other words, the real point here is whether one can establish any connection between the inner experience (the animus) and the outward behaviour. Catherine has lost both her youthful high spirits and her freedom, and she finds herself imprisoned by a household of hateful men who personify different aspects of her own personality. If the ‘surly indigenae’ can be described as various aspects of Catherine’s animus, then the literal imprisonment that she suffers at Wuthering Heights is an imaginal representation of her own psychological imprisonment. In other words, in psychological terms, she is responsible for the situation in which Lockwood discovers her. This is very well illustrated by her response when Mr Heathcliff tries to prevent Hareton from accompanying Lockwood back to Thrushcross Park. Catherine interrupts, ostensibly on the latter’s behalf: ‘A man’s life is of more consequence than one evening’s neglect of the horses’ (p. 15). In spite of her previous attitude towards him, she is now trying to help Lockwood obtain the help that he so obviously needs. But the justification unwittingly devalues the gesture. She has already made it clear that she has absolutely no interest in Lockwood. She is not defending him out of any concern for him, personal or merely humanitarian. She is simply voicing a platitude – and no opinion is more ‘imprisoned’ than one that appeals to a self-evident truth. In other words, by refusing to subscribe to conventional expectations (for example, her role as ‘missis’), Catherine finds herself not more individual, but ‘imprisoned’ by an inferior (¼ ungovernable) would-be masculine logic – a tendency that Jung defined as animus possession. Not many contemporary Jungian analysts like to use the term ‘animus possession’ – for obvious reasons. Like the equivalent term for a man (anima possession), it smacks of a reductive sexism. And this impression is sadly confirmed by turning to Jung’s definitions. His claims about the animus often sound somewhat dogmatic: for example, ‘In a woman the animus produces . . . dogmatic opinions and prejudices which are taken over at random from somebody else and are never the product of her own reflection’ (CW 16: 504 n.). Such assertions grate: they beg more qualification than he ever gave them. There is good reason to be wary of them. But we should not hurry to dismiss them without first trying to

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establish whether they have any validity. Even if irritatingly formulated, the term might still provide a useful pointer to the nature of Catherine’s behaviour. For in the opening chapters of Wuthering Heights she is behaving in exactly the way that Jung described. Everything she says appears to stem from collective notions that seem to imprison her. We later learn that her personality has undergone a sea-change: youthful exuberance has been replaced by an unnatural desperation. But she appears to be utterly unaware that she might have any responsibility either for the change or for her current situation. Lockwood’s Two Nightmares It is a quarter of a century since David Musselwhite noted: ‘Lockwood’s night at the Heights must be one of the most densely commented passages in English fiction and no account of it can expect to be other than inadequate’ (1976, p. 156). Since then, a great many others have expounded on its component elements (for example, DeLamotte, 1990). It must seem either foolhardy or otiose, or both, to offer any further readings of Lockwood’s two nightmares. And yet, coherence demands it, for if our claim is that everything in a fiction relates to its effective protagonist, we must establish how these two curious dreams relate to Catherine. Lockwood’s two nightmares must rank among the most interesting and revealing dreams in all of western literature. The function of most literary dreams is transparent: for example, the dream of Clarence in Shakespeare’s Richard III, or Anna Karenina’s recurrent dream, in which she has two husbands, Alexey and Vronsky, who lavish their caresses on her. Such dreams fit so neatly into the respective plots of these two works that it is impossible to regard them as anything other than well-wrought literary devices. Their function is unambiguous. There is little need either to explicate or discuss them. In contrast, Lockwood’s two dreams impress first and foremost because their relation to the plot is not self-evident. They do not strike one as having been contrived to fit the plot. They read as if they were transcripts of authentic dreams. They invite a commentary. And the two most obvious questions they raise are: Why should they be ascribed to Lockwood? And what do they signal? (a)

Jabes Branderham

In the course of his second visit to Wuthering Heights, Lockwood is so infuriated by the ill manners of his hosts that he grabs a lantern and makes as if to find his own way home. This time the dogs do attack him

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and knock him to the ground and frustrate his attempt to leave. He is grudgingly invited to stay the night and Zillah surreptitiously shows him into Cathy’s old room. As he settles down to sleep, he finds some of Cathy’s old books and begins reading her marginalia. He becomes drowsy and his eyes wander to the title of the book of sermons that he is holding. He dozes off and finds himself dreaming. The dream can be divided into five parts: 1. Lockwood thinks it is morning; snow is lying deep on the road. He sets out for ‘home’ (Thrushcross Grange) with Joseph for a guide. The latter wearies him with constant reproaches that he has not brought a pilgrim’s staff, telling him that he could never get into the house without one. Lockwood thinks it absurd that he should need such a weapon to gain admittance to his own residence, but then realizes that they are in fact on their way to hear Jabes Branderham preach from the text ‘Seventy Times Seven’ (see Matthew 18:21–35). 2. They come to Gimmerton chapel, which is unusually crowded. Jabes Branderham is delivering a sermon divided into 490 parts, ‘each fully equal to an ordinary address from the pulpit—and each discussing a separate sin’. They strike Lockwood as odd transgressions that he had never previously imagined. 3. He grows insufferably weary of the sermon, but is ‘condemned to hear all out’. When Branderham reaches the ‘First of the SeventyFirst,’ he is moved by a sudden inspiration to rise and denounce Branderham as the sinner of the sin that no Christian need pardon (cf. Matthew 12:31–2). He explains how he has tolerated 490 sections of the sermon, but that the 491st is ‘too much’. He thereupon urges other members of the congregation to crush the preacher ‘to atoms’. 4. Branderham points at Lockwood, saying ‘Thou art the Man!’ And telling him that he has forgiven Lockwood for the contortions of his visage seventy times seven times. But now the first of the seventy-first is come. And he urges the congregation to ‘execute’ on Lockwood the judgement written. 5. The whole assembly rushes at Lockwood with raised pilgrim’s staves. Lockwood grapples with Joseph, his fiercest assailant, in order to secure a staff to defend himself. In no time at all, blows intended presumably for Lockwood fall on the heads of others and every man’s hand is against his neighbour. Branderham tries to restore calm by tapping loudly on the pulpit. There are few more ambivalent dreams in literature. On the one hand, the pertinence of this dream to Lockwood needs no insistence: it has

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often been noted. The inhabitants of Wuthering Heights wear such a universal scowl that he would like to return to his rented lodging. Instead, he finds himself listening to a long and tedious sermon. This reflects the rebukes given him by the inmates of Wuthering Heights. Lockwood is bored by the sermon: we can well imagine that he might have contorted his visage at the discussion of each of the 490 parts just as he was taken aback by the surly manners of his hosts. And the subsequent reaction of the congregation echoes his two unfortunate experiences with the dogs. Such a reading, however, begs as many questions as it resolves. Why should the dream represent Lockwood as needing a pilgrim’s staff to get into Thrushcross Grange? Why should Thrushcross Grange be transformed into Gimmerton chapel? None of the ‘surly indigenae’ of Wuthering Heights is loquacious: why should he find himself listening to an apparently endless sermon? Why should he think that Jabes Branderham has committed ‘the sin that no Christian need pardon’? And why should Joseph be his fiercest assailant? The answer to these questions is as unexpected as it is crucial to an understanding of the novel. Although dreamed by Lockwood, the dream reflects the situation in which Catherine finds herself. This may be demonstrated section by section: 1.

2.

Although Catherine gives little outward sign of it, a part of her clearly yearns to find her way ‘home’ (that is, back to Thrushcross Grange), and the word ‘home’ has far more pertinence to and resonance for her than it might have for Lockwood, who has only recently moved to his rented accommodation. The insistence on the use of a pilgrim’s staff suggests that she needs to adopt a less selfcentred and more humble attitude if she is to find her way to ‘God’, which is here equivalent to ‘home’. One notes that Catherine is ‘imprisoned’ by her self-righteousness, a characteristic that she shares with Joseph. That her home is represented as a chapel corresponds to Jung’s contention that the animus is sometimes experienced as ‘an assembly of fathers or dignitaries of some kind who lay down incontestable, ‘rational,’ ex cathedra judgments’ (CW 7: 332). Joseph corresponds exactly to this aspect of the animus. And, as we shall see in the last section of this chapter, it is her tendency to pronounce similar judgements (cf. ‘You should not have come out’; p. 9) that she will need to renounce if she is to find her way back to Thrushcross Grange. We have already commented on Catherine’s tendency to hairsplitting logic. The sermon represents that kind of isolating selfrighteousness in which a woman with an animus problem can so

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easily ‘imprison’ herself. For example, when Lockwood asks Catherine to point out some landmarks so that he can find his way back to Thrushcross Grange, she replies: ‘Take the road you came’ (p. 14): the road in question is invisible beneath drifted snow. She knows this, but appeals to a truism that, in her view, allows her to wash her hands of the matter. It is a form of self-righteousness that only hurts herself, for it isolates her from the affairs of others. 3. There is, however, one positive sign in the fact that the dreamer rebels against these tendencies. This suggests that at some deeply unconscious level, Catherine strongly desires to be free of her ‘imprisonment’ by inferior masculine thinking (see Hannah 1971, 218–19). In his dream, Lockwood rises up to denounce Branderham as ‘the sinner of the sin that no Christian need pardon’. The phrase comes from Mark 3:29–30, where it refers to a disbelief in the power of the spirit to heal. Lockwood is thus rising in revolt at the hairsplitting logic of Branderham, another animus figure. The implication is that as long as a woman has a tendency to such hair-splitting logic, she will not be able to find the inner strength/spirit that she needs if she is to heal herself. Lockwood thus personifies an aspect of her animus that wants her to free herself of her tendency to pronounce imprisoning truisms (cf. Jung’s theory of compensation). 4. Branderham rounds on Lockwood: ‘Thou art the man!’ he thunders. Just as Catherine is ‘scornful’ of Lockwood’s various clumsy suggestions, ‘snaps’ at him when he offers his help, and curls up her lip not only at Hareton and Joseph but also at Mr Heathcliff, so Jabes Branderham accuses Lockwood of contorting his ‘visage seventy times seven times’. And as critics have frequently noted, Lockwood has a great deal in common with her. He is equally shy, retiring and – perhaps crucially – unusually awkward with members of the opposite sex, just as Catherine is. 5. Joseph is Lockwood’s fiercest assailant. This is because, in November 1801, Catherine is dominated by a spirit of scornful self-righteousness toward those with whom she lives, an aspect of her animus personified by Joseph. Lockwood’s dream is triggered by reading the ‘Pious Discourse delivered by the Reverend Jabes Branderham’, that is, exactly the kind of ‘lumber’ that Joseph inflicted on Cathy and Heathcliff (p. 19). And one remembers that, on Sundays, when the two children could not get to church, Joseph liked to ‘get up a congregation’ and deliver ‘a short homily’ that ‘lasted precisely three hours’ (p. 18): the parallel with Jabes Branderham is self-evident. The end of the dream, however, anticipates the novel’s resolution. It suggests that the various aspects of the animus must eventually exhaust themselves and, as we shall

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see, in a sense, this is what happens. We recall Catherine’s desire to see one part of her animus rise up against another: she vainly urges Hareton to turn against Heathcliff (p. 320). This astonishing dream, therefore, is far more coherent when considered in relation to Catherine than it is in relation to the apparent dreamer, Lockwood. It provides a graphic illustration of the detrimental consequences of the hair-splitting pedantry that is characteristic of animus possession, the best example of which is Catherine’s repeated reluctance to serve Lockwood tea unless he has been invited. Although its hyperbole sometimes verges on the comic, Lockwood’s first dream is a chilling representation of the hurt that Catherine is unwittingly causing herself. Lockwood seeks a physical explanation for his dream, and he finds it in ‘the branch of a fir-tree that . . . rattled its dry cones against the panes’ (p. 22). His second dream undermines his own interpretation. (b)

Catherine Linton

The second of Lockwood’s dreams is even more memorable, and equally ambivalent. The dream has two parts: 1.

2.

Lockwood hears the rattling of pine-cones and gets up to move the branch away from the window. Instead he finds himself holding the fingers of a little ice-cold hand. A girl begs to be let in. He asks her who she is: ‘Catherine Linton . . . I’m come home, I’d lost my way on the moor!’ (p. 23). Lockwood is so frightened that he rubs her wrist on the broken window-pane, but she won’t let go. Eventually, he has to cheat: ‘Let me go, if you want me to let you in!’ She loosens her grip, whereupon he quickly blocks the window with a pile of books. She groans: ‘I’ve been a waif for twenty years!’ she tells him, and makes a further attempt to get in. Lockwood yells.

Hearing Lockwood’s scream, Mr Heathcliff appears at the door and demands to know the cause of his ‘horrid noise’. When Lockwood tells him of his dream, Heathcliff is overcome by ‘an access of violent emotion’. As soon as he has sent Lockwood away, he throws open the window again and begs Cathy to show herself: ‘ ‘‘Cathy, do come. Oh do – once more! Oh! my heart’s darling, hear me this time – Catherine, at last!’’ ’ (p. 27). Mr Heathcliff assumes that the ‘Catherine Linton’ to whom Lockwood refers is Cathy (ne´e Earnshaw). We subsequently learn that at the time of her death some seventeen years before Lockwood’s visit to

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Wuthering Heights, Cathy (that is, Mrs Catherine Linton) had also begged to be able to return to Wuthering Heights. The reader notes the parallel and is thus tempted to agree with Heathcliff’s interpretation. Once again, the relevance of this dream to Lockwood needs no insistence: many, including feminist critics, have noted it (Nussbaum, 1996; Berg, 1996). But they do not offer a satisfactory explanation why the reader should enter this novel through two dreams ascribed to Lockwood; nor do they deal with the question why a child called ‘Catherine Linton’ should show herself to him. In order to understand why, we must read beyond the literal. In one sense – and one sense only – the figure in Lockwood’s dream might be Cathy. For the dream-figure does not say seventeen or eighteen years. And, as has been repeatedly shown (by Sanger, inter al.), the novel has an unusually precise chronology. We note, however, that it is not Catherine, but Lockwood who introduces the number of years: ‘I’ll never let you in, not if you beg for twenty years.’ The dream-figure only echoes this number. And twenty years earlier corresponds very closely with the date of Cathy’s engagement to Edgar. In other words, an aspect of Cathy’s personality has been ‘homeless’ ever since she made her ‘wrong’ decision to marry Edgar. Cathy, however, was born at Wuthering Heights: she belongs there. As a child, Cathy never needed to beg to be allowed inside her own home: she lived there. The reason that ‘Cathy’ does not show herself to Heathcliff is not because spectres are capricious, but because the waif is not ‘his’ Cathy. Although most critics have concurred with Heathcliff’s assumption that ‘Catherine Linton’ must be Cathy, this is very unlikely. Catherine Linton as a child can only refer to Catherine (ne´e Linton); that is, to Catherine, the effective protagonist of the novel, who has slept through both Lockwood’s nightmare and her father-in-law’s unusual reaction. In the second half of the novel we learn that as a child, Catherine was strangely drawn toward ‘what lies on the other side’ of the hills that she can see from her nursery window (p. 189); that is, toward Wuthering Heights. And we note that it is through the same window that, later in the novel, Catherine climbs in order to escape from Wuthering Heights and be present at her father’s death: ‘she got easily out of its lattice, and onto the ground, by means of the fir tree, close by’ (p. 285). The conclusion is inescapable: Heathcliff misinterprets Lockwood’s second dream, which is as deeply ambivalent as the earlier one and, like it, also refers to the effective protagonist of the novel. Catherine Linton as a child represents an aspect of Catherine’s unconscious personality. That the dream-figure is a child suggests that there is something childish about the present Catherine. And there is: she behaves like a child (pp. 9,

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301–302), exhibiting a perverse will and an ungovernable independence that shocks the middle-class Lockwood. On the one hand, the waif is an archetypal aspect of the effective protagonist’s personality, begging Lockwood to notice her, and not to reject her as he usually rejects the ‘fascinating’ creatures on whom he sets his timorous roving eye (p. 4). On the other, she terrifies him by her wild insistence. The dream therefore offers an anamnesis in miniature of Catherine’s plight. It suggests that her ‘primal error’ dates back to childhood, when she took an unnatural interest in what lay the other side of the hill that separates the Grange from the Heights; when she sought to explore Penistone Craggs. As this essay will demonstrate, in November 1801 Catherine has not freed herself of the tendencies she developed as a child. And, as a result, in the present, she is so numbed by the treatment she has received at Wuthering Heights that she has lost any compelling desire to try to regain control of her own home. Viewed in this light, we come to a curious conclusion. However cruel Lockwood’s reaction might seem (pulling the waif’s wrist across the broken glass until ‘blood ran down and soaked the bed-clothes’, p. 23), there is a sense in which his action might be justified: he effectively prevents the waif from getting into the animus-structure. And in psychological terms, as long as this imaginal representation of Catherine’s childhood error remains a waif, there is a hope that Catherine Heathcliff – that is, the effective protagonist in the present – will find a way to return to Thrushcross Grange, where she belongs. In his second dream (as in his first), Lockwood represents an aspect of Catherine’s personality. His cruelty is a reflection of her need to keep the waif out of Wuthering Heights. His deception (‘Let me go, if you want me to let you in!’) is a representation of the ‘trap’ in which she is caught. She wants to ‘escape’ from Wuthering Heights – but not quite enough to cause her to renounce all those tendencies in her character that continue to ‘imprison’ her. At the level of story, the two dreams provide an effective way of drawing both Lockwood into the events and the reader into the novel. The latter is intrigued by Heathcliff’s reaction and reads on. But at the level of plot, these two extraordinary dreams do far more than this. The first indicates the nature of the dilemma that faces Catherine (animus possession); the second indicates its origin (in her childhood). The Challenge Facing Catherine If Hareton and Mr Heathcliff are both animus figures, it is necessary to distinguish between them. In 1801, Hareton may be hostile to Catherine, but at no stage in the novel does he seek to imprison her. Indeed, she is

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happier with him than she is with any other character (pp. 192, 315, 316). And they have something in common: he too is ‘imprisoned’, for he is reduced to being ‘a common labourer’ (p. 10), forced to menial work by his tyrannical master. Most importantly, that the resolution is brought about when Catherine changes her attitude towards him suggests that he is, in some sense (we shall have occasion to qualify this assertion later), her ‘intended’ partner. In other words, Hareton may be defined as her authentic animus. His uncouth appearance mirrors her complete ignorance of the world of men. His boorish behaviour mirrors her surly manners. The challenge implicitly facing Catherine is to change her attitude toward him. It is not Hareton, but Mr Heathcliff who keeps Catherine a virtual prisoner. And Mr Heathcliff is not a ‘character’ in the usual sense of the word. Mr Earnshaw introduces him as ‘it’ (p. 34); Isabella wonders ‘what’ she has married, refers to him as a devil, and categorically denies that he is a ‘human being’ (pp. 136, 172). Edgar tells him that his ‘presence is a moral poison that would contaminate the most virtuous’ (p. 114); even Cathy describes him as ‘a fierce, pitiless, wolfish man’ (p. 102). He breeds ‘bad feeling’ from the moment he appears (p. 36); Nelly reflects that his mere proximity is ‘an oppression past explaining’ (p. 107). He represents not only something alien, but also something powerful enough to oust the two rightful owners from their homes. Mr Heathcliff kidnapped Catherine in order to force her to marry his son Linton. She is, therefore, his daughter-in-law, a relationship that is underlined at other moments in the novel. As soon as she marries Linton, he releases her so that she can witness her father’s death. But after the funeral, announced by a servant as ‘that devil Heathcliff’ (p. 286), he comes to collect her from Thrushcross Grange: ‘I’m come to fetch you home,’ he tells her, ‘and I hope you’ll be a dutiful daughter’ (p. 287). That is, he impresses on her that ‘Wuthering Heights’ is now her only home and that he – as Nelly Dean phrases it – is ‘her new father’ (p. 291, cf. p. 271). It is no coincidence that Hareton also acknowledges him as his father, his ‘devil daddy’ (p. 109, cf. 321). In November 1801, both Catherine and the rightful owner of Wuthering Heights are dominated by a ‘devilish’ father-figure. The Mr Heathcliff encountered in the first three chapters is an image of a tyrannical father. The opening of the novel provides a vivid fictional representation of a woman ‘imprisoned’ by an unusually powerful father-complex. One may legitimately assume that the task facing a woman who finds herself in such a situation is to free herself from it. The novel opens with a description of a young woman whose youthful high spirits have been brutally crushed by Mr Heathcliff (pp. 271, 294,

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297–8). That Mr Heathcliff does not belong at Wuthering Heights implies that he does not ‘belong’ amongst Catherine’s various images of men. The ‘challenge’ facing Catherine is to modify tendencies in her nature that, in the novel, are described as having originated in childhood. And this, in turn, is a metaphor for tendencies that are very deeply rooted. Lockwood’s dream of Catherine Linton as a ‘waif’ desperately seeking admission to Wuthering Heights represents Catherine’s ‘primal’ fascination with the animus, a tendency which must be corrected if the ‘pretty girl-widow’ is to regain possession of her own ancestral home (¼ her ego-structure). There are therefore two distinct but effectively inseparable aspects to the challenge facing her. On the one hand, she must free herself from a powerful interloping image of a father (Mr Heathcliff) – that is, from her ‘imprisonment’ within her animus-structure – and acknowledge her authentic image of masculinity (Hareton). On the other, she must regain possession of Thrushcross Grange (¼ her own feminine ego-structure). In the following pages, we shall attempt to ally two views: the first, by Denis Donoghue, ‘The entire book may be read as Emily Bronte¨’s progress toward Thrushcross Grange’ (1970, p. 131); the second, by Sandra Gilbert, ‘Emily Bronte¨ was looking for her own female origins’ (1979, p. 256).

2.

The Myth (I): Escape From Wuthering Heights ‘You will escape from a disorderly home into a wealthy respectable one; and you love Edgar and Edgar loves you. All seems smooth and easy – where is the obstacle?’ (Nelly to Cathy, p. 79)

Although several critics have drawn attention to the mythic properties of Cathy’s history (for example, Van Ghent, 1961, pp. 155–6), they have failed to pursue the logic of their observation to its conclusion. If myths are typical narrative structures, this must be because they express typical kinds of experience. And in many cases, the nature of the experience can be inferred from the story told. If Cathy’s history is a myth, then it should be possible to identify the factor responsible both for the course of its events and its outcome. Catherine is the novel’s effective protagonist. She belongs at Thrushcross Grange, which thus represents a woman’s ego-structure. But, at the outset of the events, she is imprisoned at Wuthering Heights, which is an animus-structure. Reading Wuthering Heights, it must never be forgotten that the two houses have the same value throughout both parts of Nelly’s story, and

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that this inevitably impacts on the psychological significance of their residents. This implies that Cathy’s character, as well as the entire course of the events in which she features, are entirely determined by the nature of the situation in which Catherine finds herself and the nature of the challenge implicitly facing her. Cathy is a product of her animus. She is ‘born’ in the animus-structure. She is an archetypal image that personifies an aspect of Catherine’s imprisoned personality. In other words, Cathy is not a carrier of any part of a woman’s ego. She is an archetypal image whose function is to indicate what Catherine has to do if she is to escape back to her home; her fate illustrates the consequences of any failure to settle at Thrushcross Grange. More paradoxically, the value of the two houses implies that Edgar is only a male character in literal terms; in psychological terms, he represents an aspect of a woman’s ego. This is so contradictory to common sense that it takes a moment or two to realize that it is, indeed, exactly what we should expect. In the first place because, as we have seen, Catherine’s dilemma in the opening pages stems from an overattachment to her father Edgar. And secondly, because the challenge implicitly facing Catherine is (a) to return to her own home (Thrushcross Grange) and (b) to connect with someone from the ‘busy world’. Thus the challenge facing Cathy must be (a) to move into Thrushcross Grange and (b) to become engaged to a male character from a more credible social world than her own. Paradoxical as it must seem, these two equally necessary factors meet in Edgar. My objective in this section is to explore the ambivalence of this contention in relation to the events leading up to Cathy’s engagement. We shall begin by further defining the archetypal or ‘mythic’ nature of the events that are set in the distant past. Then we shall examine how and why a conflict should arise between Hindley (the ‘legitimate son’ and natural heir to Wuthering Heights, the animus-structure) and Heathcliff (an ‘adopted son’). The remainder of this section will show how the dilemma facing Cathy is to differentiate between an imaginal representation of a man from a social reality outside her animus-structure and a powerful image inside her mind. The following section will explore the crucial events that follow upon Mr Heathcliff’s return to Wuthering Heights after his three-year absence. The Ambivalence of Myth Jung held that the unconscious compensates one-sided conscious attitudes. In the opening chapters, Catherine’s situation would appear to be hopeless. She seems resigned to remaining where she is; she cannot

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see a way to returning to her own home. She is ‘stalled’ (cf. p. 300), but the narrative is not. It continues with a description of events that took place some thirty years previously, and that are deeply ambivalent. On the one hand, in causal terms, they constitute a ‘remembrance’ (cf. Gezari, 1999), that is, an archetypal anamnesis. On the other, in teleological terms, they constitute an archetypal myth whose function is to stir Catherine into discovering a firmer desire to return to her own home. Nelly’s story is divided in two parts. The first part is about how Cathy, who ‘belongs’ at the Heights, finds her home increasingly constraining and desires to escape to Thrushcross Grange. The parallel between the challenge implicitly facing Catherine (in November 1801) and the direction in which Cathy is drawn cannot be fortuitous. This raises the question: Could it be that the first part of Cathy’s history is a ‘mythic’ (or archetypal) representation of what Catherine must do in order to return to Thrushcross Grange? The events in the earlier generation must end in failure, for the very simple reason that Nelly’s story cannot change the fact that Catherine remains imprisoned at Wuthering Heights throughout its telling. Thus, if Cathy’s history indicates what Catherine must do if she is to recover possession of her own home, it must also indicate why she has been unable to do this. The second part of Nelly’s story traces the events that follow upon the return of Mr Heathcliff to Wuthering Heights. Not long after settling in Thrushcross Grange, Cathy finds herself first renewing her friendship with the transformed Mr Heathcliff and then, in her delirium, being drawn back toward her childhood home. As she dies, Cathy yearns to be back at Wuthering Heights. And this begs a further question: Could it be that the second part of Nelly’s story is a mythic (or archetypal) explanation why Catherine has not been able to return to her own home? An unexpected answer to both these questions is provided by considering this two-part narrative pattern in relation to a typical twopart mythic structure, an example of which is provided by the myth of Narcissus, the classic rendering of which is by Ovid. In the Metamorphoses, Narcissus is an adolescent whose only interest is hunting. As a result, he fails to respond to the advances of Echo, a nymph who is burning with love for him. Echo wastes away. A young man, equally spurned, prays to Nemesis that she punish Narcissus by making him suffer the same fate as Echo. The goddess of righteous retribution causes him to fall in love with his own reflection: he soon begins to waste away with love for his own reflection (that is, someone unattainable). In causal terms, such two-part mythic patterns are very often selfreflexive: each part ‘comments’ on the other. The first part of the myth

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explains why Narcissus is over-engrossed with himself (because he is not ready to meet the demands of female sexuality). The second part of the myth explains why he is not ready to meet the demands of female sexuality (because he is over-engrossed with himself). But such a literal, causal reading needs to be complemented by another that draws out its implicit teleological possibility: in other words, by a reading that sees the myth as an expression of an implicit challenge facing its effective protagonist: . .

The first part of the myth presents Narcissus with a possible course of action: that is, it faces him with an implicit challenge to respond to Echo’s advances and the sexual demands they imply. The second part provides a symbolic representation, deciphered by the reader but not by Narcissus, of the consequences of his failure to meet this challenge.

Read in this way, the myth illustrates both an identifiable attitude and its implications. The first part is implicitly urging Narcissus to meet the demands of female sexuality; the second part, warning him of the consequences that will ensue if he fails to do so. The story of Narcissus thus harbours both a causal explanation (cf. Freud) and a teleological suggestion (cf. Jung) of what the individual must do in order to escape from the circular impasse in which he is caught. Somewhat surprisingly, the first part of Nelly’s story (Cathy’s history) harbours almost exactly the same ambivalence. On the one hand, the events in the first generation provide a causal explanation for the situation in which Catherine finds herself in ‘November 1801’ (cf. Freud). On the other, they also indicate what Catherine must do in order to escape from her debilitating imprisonment at Wuthering Heights. In other words, they provide a symbolic (teleological) representation of both the challenge facing her in November 1801 (she must find a way to form an alliance with someone living at Thrushcross Grange, but who is from the outside world) and of the consequences for her should she fail to do so (cf. Jung). Thus, exactly as in the teleological reading of the myth of Narcissus: . .

The first part of Cathy’s history presents her with an implicit challenge: to escape from Wuthering Heights and to marry Edgar. The second part provides a symbolic representation, deciphered by the reader but not by Cathy (nor by Lockwood), of the implications of her inability to consolidate her relationship with Edgar: she is drawn back to Heathcliff (or Mr Heathcliff as he is in this section of the novel), which ends in her death.

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Thus, in relation to Catherine (the effective protagonist), Cathy’s history can be interpreted as both prompting her to meet the demands of the male ‘other’, as well as warning her of the consequences of not doing so. And in the same way as the terrible punishment suffered by Narcissus suggests that he might have done better to respond to Echo’s advances, so Cathy’s equally terrible death suggests that she might have done better not to turn her back on Edgar. The analogy suggests that there is a sense in which Cathy might have done better to consolidate her marriage to Edgar. In the following pages, we shall elaborate on this possibility. Conflict within the Animus-Structure In literal terms, Nelly’s account of Cathy’s history tells Lockwood how Catherine came to be in the physical predicament in which he finds her. But in psychological terms, everything that happens at Wuthering Heights (her animus-structure) has to do with the nature of her relationship with her animus. The past is a metaphor for depth: the distant past indicates that Catherine’s problem with her animus is very deeply rooted. The problem begins with the arrival of Heathcliff at Wuthering Heights. When old Mr Earnshaw goes on a visit to Liverpool, he asks his son what he would like as a present and Hindley asks for a fiddle. A musical instrument very often symbolizes ‘feeling’, that is, value. Asking for a fiddle suggests that Hindley is seeking to have his value acknowledged. From the ostensibly earliest events in the novel, the legitimate heir to Wuthering Heights is seeking to have its value acknowledged. But on Mr Earnshaw’s return journey, the fiddle is ‘crushed to morsels’ and in its place he produces a ‘gipsy brat’. And Hindley and the young Heathcliff are soon locked in bitter rivalry. There are three distinct stages in their quarrel: (1) the period of boyhood rivalry, (2) the period of Hindley’s tyranny, and (3) the period of Heathcliff’s revenge. The first of these is illustrated by two episodes. Old Mr Earnshaw becomes particularly attached to his young prote´ge´, and Heathcliff takes advantage of this: he ‘had only to speak and all the house would be obliged to bend to his wishes’ (p. 37). In other words, like Catherine as a young child, he exhibits a ‘perverse will that indulged children invariably acquire’ (p. 188). The most obvious example of this tendency is revealed in his quarrel with Hindley over the colts that Mr Earnshaw buys them: Heathcliff took the handsomest, but it soon fell lame, and when he discovered it, he said to Hindley, ‘You must exchange horses with

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me; I don’t like mine, and if you won’t I shall tell your father of the three thrashings you’ve given me this week.’ (p. 37)

Afraid that his father will reprimand him, Hindley (who is seven years older than Heathcliff) gives way. But not before striking the younger boy again. The subject of their quarrel is significant. Traditionally, a horse is a symbol of vitality. The age-old motif of the hostile brothers thus appears in its simplest form: the older boy’s tyranny stems from his fear lest the younger boy expose his absence of vitality and merit (see Jung, CW 5: 422). And given that it is immediately after this episode that Mr Earnshaw describes his son as ‘naught’ (p. 39), in effect the interloper is blackmailing the rightful heir of Wuthering Heights to renounce his primogeniture. Perhaps the most important aspect of these early episodes is to note that Hindley only wants to have his value acknowledged. If anyone is at fault, it is not Hindley so much as old Mr Earnshaw, who is perhaps a little too quick to defend Heathcliff, and not surprisingly this breeds resentment. As we shall see in the fourth section of this essay, Edgar Linton is also perhaps a little too quick to defend Catherine. The second stage begins when old Mr Earnshaw dies and Hindley takes his place. Nelly and Hindley are the same age, and she is clearly attached to him. But following Hindley’s marriage with Frances and his return to Wuthering Heights, Nelly has to concede that he begins to behave tyrannically. Cathy describes him as a ‘detestable substitute’ for her over-indulgent father (p. 18). And yet, somewhat surprisingly, he is very attached to his young wife. In her ‘book’, Cathy records the way that she and Heathcliff once caught the couple unawares: ‘ ‘‘ . . . there they were, like two babies, kissing and talking nonsense by the hour – foolish palaver that we [¼ Cathy and Heathcliff] should be ashamed of’’ ’ (p. 19). Hindley rounds on the two spies. When Cathy tries to explain that they used to be allowed to play quietly on Sunday evenings, he replies: ‘ ‘‘You forget you have a master here,’’ says the tyrant’, whereupon he instructs Frances to pull the plough-boy’s hair. It is on being ‘found out’ that Hindley feels it necessary to remind Cathy of his authority, which he immediately abuses by instructing his wife to behave in a very ‘unfeminine’ manner. His relation with Frances illustrates Jung’s contention that ‘sentimentality is sister to brutality, and the two are never very far apart’ (CW 5: 668). But there is more to it than this. From a woman’s point of view, everything that occurs in an animusstructure reflects an aspect of her personality. A tyrannical animus robs a woman of her authentic mode of behaviour. One notes how quickly Frances becomes unable to sustain even a friendship with Cathy:

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Her affection tired very soon, however, and when she grew peevish, Hindley became tyrannical. A few words from her, evincing a dislike to Heathcliff, were enough to rouse in him all his old hatred of the boy. (p. 44)

The inability of Frances to maintain a friendship with Cathy reflects Cathy’s inability to form any friendship with a woman from the ‘outer’ world. And her fear of dying symbolizes how the feminine cannot survive in such conditions (p. 43). As soon as she has given birth to Hareton, her fears are realized. The reason given is that she is consumptive (p. 63). But in psychological terms, she dies because she has served her only necessary functions: to give birth to Hareton, and to demonstrate that a female character cannot survive long in an animusstructure. As we shall see in the last section of this chapter, her death anticipates Catherine’s deep-rooted inability to successfully accomplish the ritual passage from adolescent independence to the commitment and responsibility of adulthood. In other words, Frances has more significance than one might think: she personifies what happens to a woman who falls under the sway of the animus. A gnawing fear of her own inadequacy causes her to oscillate between mawkish sentimentality and an impulsive brutality. Following her death, Hindley disintegrates completely. Even so, almost everything in the unconscious is ambivalent. His tyranny and the disorderly and comfortless home over which he presides are also responsible for making Wuthering Heights uncongenial to Cathy (p. 79). In this sense, his behaviour provides the goad that she needs if she is to discover Thrushcross Grange, the ego-structure. The earliest events at Wuthering Heights thus offer a symbolic representation of the origins of animus possession. Because of her isolation, Cathy grows up a little over-protected by her father, as a result of which she is unable to develop a relationship with anyone other than her brother and foster-brother. Nelly tells Lockwood: ‘Her spirits were always at high-water mark . . . a wild, wick slip she was – but she had the bonniest eye, and sweetest smile, and lightest foot in the parish’ (p. 40). She embodies the fierce independence of girlhood that, in Greek mythology, is represented by the pre-pubescent figure of Artemis. Although Cathy is too mischievous and wayward for a favourite, her father none the less dotes on her, just as Zeus dotes on Artemis. And on her first expedition to the Grange, although it is late November and night-time, like Artemis she runs barefoot (p. 46). It is probably not the first time.

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During the first six years of their companionship, she and Heathcliff are inseparable. And the common denominator between them is that they both enjoy the power that they exercise as a result of a father’s overfondness for them. The present that Cathy asks her father to bring back from Liverpool is a whip (p. 34). Her idea of play is ‘to act the little mistress; using her hands freely, and commanding her companions’ (p. 40). She boasts to her father how Heathcliff ‘would do her bidding in anything, and his only when it suited his own inclinations’ (p. 41). She is perhaps a little too conscious of the power she wields. And she is fast approaching an age when attitudes appropriate to girlhood must be modified, when independence might be replaced by commitment. Cathy Discovers Thrushcross Grange The central events in the first part of the myth are Cathy’s discovery of Thrushcross Grange (when she is twelve) and her engagement to Edgar (when she is fifteen). It is not long after her twelfth birthday that, in order to get away from Hindley, Heathcliff proposes a scamper on the moors (p. 20). Even if not actually the same, this is certainly equivalent to the expedition in the course of which Cathy and he discover Thrushcross Grange. On the pretext of seeing how the Linton children ‘passed their Sunday evenings’ (p. 45), he leads her out of Wuthering Heights, an ‘animus-structure’, and toward the discovery of Thrushcross Grange, which represents the effective protagonist’s ‘ego-structure’. As Sandra Gilbert very pertinently notes, Cathy does not choose to stay at Thrushcross Grange. She is bitten in the ankle by the Grange bulldog, which prevents her from escaping (1979, p. 271): and slim ankles are a defining attribute of Artemis. In other words, although she does not want to enter the world of the adult female ego-structure – a world that is governed by relationship and commitment – the unconscious spontaneously produces a situation that not only retains her there, but also inflicts a wound to her untamed Artemis-nature. And one notes that her attitude toward the Grange changes noticeably during her five-week convalescence. She quickly learns to appreciate its greater comforts and sophistications, and when she returns to the Heights, the ‘wild, hatless little savage’ has become a ‘lady’ (p. 51). To thank the Lintons for their kindness toward Cathy, Hindley and Frances invite Edgar and Isabella to spend Christmas with them. Heathcliff, who has utterly neglected himself while Cathy was at Thrushcross Grange, determines to reform: ‘Nelly, make me decent, I’m going to be good’ (p. 55). He cleans and tidies himself up for the occasion, but Hindley sees him and sends him into the garret ‘till dinner

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is over’ (p. 57). Peeping round the door, Edgar carelessly remarks on the length of his hair and Heathcliff retaliates by throwing ‘a tureen of hot apple-sauce’ in his face. Whereupon Hindley seizes him and takes him out. Nelly is unsympathetic toward Edgar; Cathy positively chides him: ‘You should not have spoken to him! . . . He was in a bad temper, and now you’ve spoilt your visit, and he’ll be flogged – I hate him to be flogged!’ When Edgar begins to blubber an explanation, Cathy reprimands him contemptuously: ‘Well, don’t cry! . . . don’t make more mischief’ (p. 58). Meanwhile, Hindley thrashes Heathcliff and confines him to the garret throughout the ensuing festivities. This scene is axial. For it is on being released by Cathy that Heathcliff vows vengeance (p. 60). Two things help to explain what is at issue. The first is the coincidence of Cathy chastising Edgar while Hindley chastises Heathcliff. The second is that Cathy defends Heathcliff by telling a lie, which reveals far more about her than it does about Heathcliff at this moment. Heathcliff is not in a ‘bad temper’ on this occasion. Hindley is. And Hindley (owner of the animus-structure) personifies Cathy’s increasingly high-handed way of treating people such as Edgar. The scene illustrates how her natural inclinations – and even good intentions – are all too quickly replaced by her own deep-rooted contempt for anything that she sees as weaker than her own petted will. Edgar suffers from a want of spirit (p. 66). And yet Heathcliff, who will stand up to, and fight with the much older and stronger Hindley, never seeks any kind of confrontation with him. Indeed, the more that Cathy sees of Edgar, the more that Heathcliff allows himself to degenerate. Cathy eventually demands of him: ‘ ‘‘What do you talk about? You might be dumb or a baby for anything you say to amuse me, or for anything you do, either!’’ ’ (p. 69). The implication is clear. His gradual deterioration is brought about not by Hindley’s tyranny, but by Cathy’s changing attitude toward him. Before her visit to the Grange, the two were inseparable, and consequently Heathcliff bore his degradation at Hindley’s hands ‘pretty well at first, because Cathy taught him what she learnt’ (p. 44). But, after being captivated by the Grange, she spent fewer evenings with him (p. 69), and Heathcliff was left to his own devices: ‘He struggled long to keep up an equality with [Cathy] in her studies and yielded with poignant though silent regret; but, he yielded completely’ (p. 67). Heathcliff’s ‘inward and outward repulsiveness’, his ‘slouching gait, and ignoble look’ and his ‘almost idiotic excess of unsociable moroseness’ (pp. 67–8), are a direct consequence of Cathy’s neglect of him. He personifies that aspect of her character that is unruly because her father was at first careless about, and then unable to discipline her. She is now on the threshold of puberty, but cannot bear the thought of

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having to discipline that aspect of her character that still clings to the high-handed freedom that she enjoyed as a child as a result of her father’s indulgence. And this high-handed freedom is now standing in the way of her developing a commitment to Edgar. The conclusion is both inevitable and as surprising as it is unexpected. In relation to the legitimate animus-figure, Heathcliff is an autonomous force that not even Hindley, who is both older and stronger, can subjugate. But in relation to the first man from an ‘outer’ world with whom Cathy has any dealings, Heathcliff is utterly powerless. Although Cathy is a product of the animus, in this section of the novel, she is none the less the primary carrier of the effective protagonist’s personality. Edgar corresponds to a decision that Catherine needs to take, and at this deeply archetypal level of the imagination, this decision is ambivalent. On the one hand, Catherine needs to return to her own home (Thrushcross Grange as ego-structure); on the other, she needs to connect with someone from a credible social world (that is, Lockwood). In short, Edgar embodies both these needs, and Heathcliff personifies Catherine’s unconscious attitudes toward these needs. Even more paradoxically, as we shall see, his changing nature corresponds to the nature and implications of Cathy’s commitment to Edgar. A ‘Wrong’ Engagement Between the ages of six and twelve, Cathy is simply an image of girlhood vitality. But as she enters puberty, she becomes a ‘protagonist’ of the events. The announcement of her engagement to Edgar is the first time that Cathy can be attributed with a decision that is not equally associated with Heathcliff. From this moment, she becomes a little more responsible for her actions. This is very clearly illustrated by the three pivotal scenes that lead to the announcement of her engagement, each of which comments on the curiously insubstantial nature of her commitment to Edgar. One day, knowing that Hindley is away, Edgar calls on Cathy and he finds her upset, largely because Heathcliff has made a fuss about how little time she now spends with him. Cathy expects Nelly to leave her and Edgar alone, but Nelly decides not to move. Thinking that Edgar cannot see her, Cathy thereupon pinches Nelly, lies about having done so, and then slaps Nelly ‘a stinging blow’ on the cheek (p. 70). And before she can check herself, she applies another to Edgar. Shocked by this revelation of her ‘genuine disposition’, he turns to leave. Cathy tells him he is not to go: ‘ ‘‘Edgar Linton – sit down, you shall not leave me in that temper. I should be miserable all night, and I won’t be miserable for you!’’ ’ (p. 71).

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It is a revealing series of imperatives. Edgar is not in a bad temper; she is. Cathy is initially upset because she could not obtain her way with Nelly. And now she is further upset because she is afraid of losing the company of someone whose primary purpose is to ‘amuse’ her. Edgar, however, will not be swayed. ‘You’ve made me afraid, and ashamed of you’, he tells her and makes to leave. Whereupon, seeing she cannot control him, she resorts to a childish threat: ‘Well, go, if you please – get away! And now I’ll cry – I’ll cry myself sick’ (p. 72). This revelation of Cathy’s imperious, headstrong but peevish personality is followed by an even more curious scene. Hindley returns home drunk and forces a knife between Nelly’s teeth. He then shifts his attention to Hareton, whom he carries upstairs, lifts over the banister, and drops. Ironically, disaster is averted by Heathcliff, who happens to be passing below and instinctively puts out his arms to catch the boy. This is another crucial scene (and we shall have occasion to refer to it again in the fourth section below; see pp. 222–3). Here we shall comment only on the way in which this scene constitutes a metaphorical representation of the nature of Cathy’s attitude on the day of her engagement. Hindley’s drunken behaviour offers a vivid metaphor for what is wrong with her attitude in the previous scene. For his careless actions mirror Cathy’s equally careless and high-handed imperiousness towards all those with whom she comes in contact. That is, it indicates the origin of the animus possession that retains Catherine in Wuthering Heights in November 1801. And the paradox should be noted: animus possession threatens the legitimate animus, for animus possession always stems from an ‘interloper’ in the animus, never from the legitimate animus. And note that Heathcliff instinctively catches Hareton: in other words, however hostile the adult Mr Heathcliff might appear to Catherine in the present, his function is to prevent her doing further damage to herself as a result of her inappropriate attitudes. It is later the same day that Cathy announces her engagement to Edgar. The expression on her face is ‘disturbed and anxious’ as she asks Nelly whether she ought to have accepted (p. 76): ‘I accepted him, Nelly; be quick, and say whether I was wrong!’ Critics have invariably assumed that her preference for Edgar is ‘wrong’. Cathy, however, and this must be insisted, is only referring to her decision. The insubstantial nature of her relationship with Edgar is evident: it can be deduced from her replies to the brief catechism that Nelly puts to her. When Nelly presses her further, she can only answer with a platitude:

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‘I love the ground under his feet, and the air over his head, and everything he touches, and every word he says – I love all his books, and all his actions, and him entirely, and altogether. There now!’ (p. 78)

Not one word of this carries the least conviction. The platitudes betray how little she understands her own feelings. She may love Edgar’s books, but her recent behaviour toward him has demonstrated that she does not love him ‘entirely’. Nelly summarizes her attitude: ‘ . . . you love Mr Edgar, because he is handsome, and young, and cheerful, and rich, and loves you. The last, however, goes for nothing – You would love without that, probably, and with it you wouldn’t, unless he possessed the four former attractions.’ ‘No, to be sure not – I should only pity him – hate him, perhaps, if he were ugly, and a clown.’ (p. 78)

In other words, to borrow Nelly’s expression, Cathy has ‘only to do with the present’. She becomes engaged to Edgar without assuming responsibility for what the future might bring. Given her headstrong determination to proceed, Nelly cannot understand why Cathy has consulted her. Nor can she see where the ‘obstacle’ might be: ‘Here! and here!’ replied [Cathy], striking one hand on her forehead, and the other on her breast. ‘In whichever place the soul lives – in my soul, and in my heart, I’m convinced I’m wrong!’ (p. 79)

That is, she is convinced that her decision is wrong; there is nothing in the text to indicate that Edgar is an unsuitable partner for her. It is at this moment, however, that Cathy proceeds, against Nelly’s wishes, to tell her of a dream she once had of being in heaven. Nelly is disturbed by the ‘unusual gloom’ in Cathy’s face; she foresees ‘a fearful catastrophe’ and threatens to leave her. But Cathy merely laughs, and pins her to her seat: ‘I was only going to say that 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 top of Wuthering Heights; where I woke sobbing with joy. . . . I’ve no more business to marry Edgar Linton than I have to be in heaven.’ (p. 80)

Nelly assumes that the dream implies that Cathy is ‘not fit’ to go to heaven; and her interpretation may be closer to the mark than that of many later literary critics. The first of the Beatitudes is: ‘Blest are those who know their need of God; the kingdom of Heaven is theirs’ (Matthew 5:3). Only those who recognize a need for a transpersonal authority will

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have a place in heaven. Those who cannot are, ipso facto, ‘puffed up’ (1 Cor. 4). The context of the dream makes it clear that ‘heaven’ is a metaphor for Thrushcross Grange (cf. p. 46), and the reason that Cathy feels she has no place there is because she feels no urge to submit to its authority. She is so strongly attached to her present inclinations that she feels no need to change them. She is scornful of the all-too-human aspect of a building that represents the effective protagonist’s ego-structure. Cathy’s problem is that she continues to cling to an image of herself that she should have outgrown. She still wants to wield her ‘whip’ and play the little mistress as she did throughout her childhood. Her inability to control her temper when crossed betrays the fierce independence that she enjoyed in girlhood. Like Artemis, she resists attachment. Her ‘dream’ offers a disturbing representation of the hollowness of her commitment to Edgar. This is made clear a moment later. For Cathy admits that if Hindley had not ‘brought Heathcliff so low’, she would not have thought of marrying Edgar: ‘It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff, now; so he shall never know how I love him; and that, not because he’s handsome, Nelly, but because he’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same, and Linton’s is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire.’ (p. 80)

It is on overhearing her say that it would degrade her to marry him that Heathcliff rises from the bench by the wall and steals out, noiselessly. What he doesn’t stay to hear is her confession about how strongly she is attached to him. What this reveals, however, is not only the nature and depth of her bond with Heathcliff, but that her relation with Edgar is hollow. Critics often comment on the moment that Heathcliff leaves, and they always miss the point. Cathy is not faced by a choice between two men, one of whom she loves more deeply, or differently than the other. Her dilemma is an archetypal representation of a part of the dilemma facing Catherine in the present: to choose between a character from the outer world and an animus figure in her own imagination. And just as Catherine is utterly indifferent to anyone from the outer world (Lockwood), so Cathy is equally indifferent to Edgar. The only difference is that she has to marry him: the myth demands it. Unaware of Heathcliff’s departure, as she was of his presence, Cathy proceeds: ‘ ‘‘I want to cheat my uncomfortable conscience, and be convinced that Heathcliff has no notion of these things – he has not, has he? He does not know what being in love is?’’ ’ (p. 81).

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The rhetorical question suggests that she thinks she knows what being in love is; she has just demonstrated that she does not. Her shallow replies to Nelly’s catechism, the fact that she gives no thought to the future, and her inability to feel as if she might belong at Thrushcross Grange all illustrate how little Cathy understands the nature of a relationship such as marriage. Everything in Cathy’s account of her engagement comes back to her inadequate sense of commitment to Edgar. Edgar is not necessarily the wrong partner for her; it is the insubstantial nature of her decision to accept him that is ‘wrong’. Indeed, this is evident from the sense of Cathy’s most famous speech. Intuitively worried about Heathcliff’s withdrawal, Nelly reminds her that marrying Edgar would mean deserting him. Cathy cannot believe her ears: ‘He quite deserted! we separated! . . . Who is to separate us, pray? They’ll meet the fate of Milo! Not as long as I live, Ellen – for no mortal creature. Every Linton on the face of the earth might melt into nothing, before I could consent to forsake Heathcliff. Oh, that’s not what I intend . . . ‘My great miseries in this world have been Heathcliff’s miseries, and I watched and felt each from the beginning: my great thought in living is himself. If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and, if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the Universe would turn to a mighty stranger. I should not seem a part of it. My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods. Time will change it, I’m well aware, as winter changes the trees – my love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath – a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, 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.’ (pp. 81–2)

This declaration is not a young woman’s comparison of her feelings towards two young men. Cathy’s account of her attachment to Heathcliff is not a description of love for another person. It describes an unusually vivid awareness of a male figure that is always present in her mind; in other words, of an animus figure or, to be more specific about her case, the figure of an ‘interloper’ in the animus. But when it comes to a choice, she is not free: the myth dictates that she marries Edgar. An Incomplete ‘Initiation’ According to Jung, any marriage between two individuals must be consolidated by the ‘marriage’ of their respective animus and anima. In a well-balanced relationship, the woman’s animus will correspond with

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Figure 3.2 The Marriage Quaternio

her husband, and the man’s anima will be an image of his wife. He referred to this relationship as the ‘marriage quaternio’ (CW 16: 422, 437) (see Figure 3.2). In a relationship, the close union between two individuals is almost always matched by the compatibility of their psychic images. If the latter cease to be compatible with the respective partner, a distancing, or even conflict will almost certainly arise between the two partners. Cathy’s engagement to Edgar might have been written to illustrate this. As we have seen, there are, in effect, two Cathys, and they must be kept separate. The first Cathy that the reader meets is the embodiment of girlhood vitality, a figure whose fierce independence might be compared to that of Artemis. It is to this Cathy that Heathcliff is attached, just as she is to him. The second Cathy that the reader meets is the fifteen-yearold protagonist. This Cathy belongs to the same level of social reality as Edgar, and it is to this Cathy that Edgar is attached. In other words, Heathcliff’s Cathy and Edgar’s Cathy do not belong to the same ‘level’ of imaginal reality. The relationship between them is illustrated in Figure 3.3. The ‘marriage quaternio’ provides a graphic illustration of the nature of the flaw in Cathy’s attachment to Edgar. Cathy-the-protagonist’s animus is not compatible with Edgar: the figure that she always has in her mind is Heathcliff. The two male figures could not be more different. In relation to Cathy, Edgar belongs to a social reality. Heathcliff, in contrast, corresponds both to her highhanded attitudes towards others and – more surprisingly but, in psychological terms, also inevitably – to her hollow relationship with Edgar. As soon as he hears that Cathy is going to marry Edgar, he

Figure 3.3 A Flawed Engagement

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doesn’t argue with her: he simply disappears (we shall explain why in the fourth section, p. 199 below). In similar fashion, the Cathy that Edgar loves is a somewhat headstrong but none the less respectable young lady. But Cathy the protagonist has nothing in common with her own inner image of herself which is as an embodiment of girlhood freedom and vitality (¼ Heathcliff’s Cathy). Jung’s marriage quaternio highlights the confusions that underlie her engagement with Edgar. Cathy’s engagement to Edgar is ‘wrong’ because her animus does not coincide with the man whom she intends to marry. She values her relationship with an archetypal image far above her commitment to any merely mortal creature (cf. p. 81). It must also be noted that her attachment to Heathcliff is equally, indeed it is even more ‘wrong’, precisely because it prevents her from committing herself more completely to Edgar (we shall elaborate on this point in the following section). In short, the first part of Nelly’s tale is unusually ambivalent. On the one hand, at a more or less literal level, the early years in Cathy’s history provide an explanation of how things began to go wrong. The interactions provide a vivid representation of the ‘cause’ of her problem: her inability to discover any sense of commitment to Edgar stems from her unchecked childhood. On the other hand, the same events can also be read in teleological terms: that is, as an archetypal or ‘mythic’ representation of what she must do. The first part of the mythic pattern presents her with an implicit challenge: to commit herself to Edgar and the obligations of the social world this implies. And the obvious must be reasserted: Cathy must marry Edgar, because Catherine must be born in Thrushcross Grange. And we must never forget that the story of how Cathy is drawn, however incompletely, towards Edgar and Thrushcross Grange is also a representation of the direction in which Catherine must move if she is to discover a way out of her predicament in November 1801. As we shall see in the next section, the second part of the mythic pattern provides a vivid representation of the consequences of her failure to meet this challenge.

3: The Myth (II): Inability to Settle at Thrushcross Grange ‘I was only going to say that 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.’ (Cathy to Nelly, p. 80)

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The second part of Nelly’s story has always been regarded as the most compelling section of Wuthering Heights. It begins one evening in September 1783; that is, some five months after the marriage of Cathy and Edgar, when a ‘transformed’ Mr Heathcliff asks to see Mrs Linton. And it reaches its climax the night of 19–20 March of the following year when, soon after giving birth, Cathy dies. Her daughter Catherine is described as ‘a puny, seven months’ child’ (p. 164). The principal section of the novel thus spans, more or less exactly, the duration of Cathy’s pregnancy. And yet this crucial fact is almost completely silenced. And one would not readily guess it, for the events that follow the unexpected reappearance of Mr Heathcliff include some of the novel’s most violent scenes: the struggle between Edgar and Heathcliff, Cathy’s rage and delirium, Isabella’s brutal reception at her new home, Cathy’s last meeting with her childhood companion, Hindley’s brutal attack on him later the same day, and the latter’s equally brutal retaliation. All of these occur in the course of Cathy’s pregnancy. They are amongst the most powerful and memorable scenes in world literature. Their raw violence is shocking. And yet their full import can only be fully appreciated when they are read in relation to Catherine, the novel’s effective protagonist. Cathy’s pregnancy is also Catherine’s gestation, and this suggests that the events that follow upon Mr Heathcliff’s return to the vicinity of Wuthering Heights give expression to a dilemma very deeply rooted in her character. We must never forget that everything that occurs at Thrushcross has to do with the formation of Catherine’s ego-structure, and everything that occurs in and around Wuthering Heights has to do with the formation of her animus. The climactic events that follow upon Mr Heathcliff’s return must be read not only in relation to their protagonists, but also in relation to Catherine. We have seen how the first part of Nelly’s story, in which Cathy moves from Wuthering Heights to Thrushcross Grange, is a representation of what Catherine must do, in November 1801, if she is to escape from her imprisonment by Mr Heathcliff at Wuthering Heights (¼ the animus-structure). This section argues that the second part of Nelly’s bedside story is even more unusually ambivalent than the first. On the one hand, very obviously, it illustrates Cathy’s inability to settle at Thrushcross Grange. On the other, and equally significantly, it offers an archetypal representation of Catherine’s deeply rooted inability to accept the conditions of a woman’s ego-structure. For Cathy’s history is a kind of myth. It is not modelled on interactions that belong to a credible, social reality. It reflects an imaginal process pertinent to Catherine and is wholly determined by the despair into which the latter is cast as a result of finding herself a virtual prisoner in an animus-structure.

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The Importance of Isabella Wuthering Heights was not only written by a woman, it also tells a woman’s story. We expect a female protagonist and we find one in Cathy. As we have seen, however, until she turns twelve, she is not so much a protagonist as an image of girlhood high spirits. It is only after her marriage (that is, in the crucial central section of the novel) that her attitudes and actions can be said to determine the events. She welcomes Heathcliff into Thrushcross Grange. She tries to forbid Isabella’s subsequent infatuation. She virtually invites Edgar to quarrel with Mr Heathcliff. She is increasingly, irresistibly, and largely unconsciously, drawn back in her thoughts to the world of her childhood at Wuthering Heights. And she provokes her own death, possibly the crucial scene in the novel. It must however be reiterated: Cathy was born at Wuthering Heights. She ‘belongs’ there. She is a product of that aspect of Catherine’s personality that is over-attached to the animus-structure in which Catherine is imprisoned in November 1801. And thus, although there can be no question that Cathy is the principal female protagonist of the central section of the novel, at no stage in its events can she be considered as a representative of a woman’s ‘ego-structure’. She may determine the events, but she is not a ‘carrier’ of a woman’s feminine identity. She is not, however, the only female figure in the novel’s central and climactic section. Critics tend to disparage Isabella, and one can readily understand why. But to do so is to misread her function. She has an equal – and, in a very real sense, perhaps even a greater – claim on our attention. Cathy’s behaviour illustrates tendencies that stem from the animus-structure and are therefore related to the sometimes debilitating condition that Jung described as animus possession. If we are to understand the implications of Cathy’s decisions for a woman’s feminine personality, it must be from the point of view of a representative of Thrushcross Grange, the novel’s ego-structure. Isabella is not a protagonist; she has no will of her own; she only ‘mirrors’ what Cathy does – but she is a representative of the novel’s egostructure. And for this reason, her ‘story’ is of just as great a significance as Cathy’s. The course of Isabella’s mad infatuation and disillusionment represents the horrendous implications of Cathy’s renewed alliance with Heathcliff for a woman. The second part of Nelly’s history illustrates the tragic consequences for a woman of a misguided over-attachment to an ‘interloper’ in the animus, and a corresponding inability to accept any form of constraint

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from her own ego-structure. It is composed of two narratives that tell the same story from two very different, but complementary points of view: .

.

The events in which Cathy features tell the story from the point of view of an archetypal image that belongs in the animus; in other words, they explain why, in the ‘frame story’, Catherine remains unable to escape from the animus-structure. The events featuring Isabella tell the same story, but from the point of view of a representative of a woman’s ego-structure; in other words, they represent the consequences of Catherine’s inability to escape from the animus-structure for her feminine personality.

Every move that Cathy makes is mirrored by Isabella. Cathy’s behaviour signals the archetypal tendency responsible for the impasse in which Catherine finds herself; Isabella’s behaviour illustrates the devastating implications of Cathy’s behaviour for a woman’s ‘ego’. The purpose of this section is, first, to identify and explore the nature of the extraordinary dialectic between Cathy, Edgar, Isabella and Heathcliff that stands at the centre of the novel; that is, to identify the process that ensues when an ‘interloper’ in the animus-structure not only gains possession of the animus-structure, but also – and far more worryingly – gets to marry a representative of the ego-structure whom he abhors; and secondly, to demonstrate that the alternating scenes offer a chillingly logical dialectic between two aspects of an unusually imprisoned woman’s imagination. A Transformed Mr Heathcliff Although readers and critics readily acknowledge that the love between Cathy and Heathcliff is self-destructive, they are often inconsistent: they none the less assume that they are meant for one another. The reasons for this assumption would seem to be unquestionable. But are they? We learn little enough of what they really shared either as children or as teenagers, and the text is obstinately silent about the nature of the pleasure enjoyed by Cathy and the adult Heathcliff. The pleasure may be real, but so too are its consequences: the reappearance of Mr Heathcliff leads inexorably to Cathy’s delirium and death and, it need scarcely be added, her death also leads inexorably to his. No two literary characters more obviously auto-destruct. In other words, in psychological terms, there are a great many reasons for taking another look at the nature of the extraordinarily powerful bond that they so obviously have with one another.

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Readers and critics alike also tend to belittle Edgar. Cathy’s marriage to Edgar may be hollow, but this does not imply that he is the ‘wrong’ partner for her. Indeed, Nelly assures Lockwood that their marriage was happy: ‘they were really in possession of deep and growing happiness’ (p. 92; cf. p. 149). There is no reason to disbelieve her. Indeed, somewhat curiously, the strongest evidence for her claim is provided by Cathy’s instinctive gesture on learning of Heathcliff’s return. Wild with excitement, she flings her arms around Edgar: Catherine flew upstairs, breathless and wild, too excited to show gladness; indeed, by her face, you would rather have surmised an awful calamity. ‘Oh, Edgar, Edgar!’ she panted, flinging her arms round his neck. ‘Oh, Edgar, darling! Heathcliff’s come back – he is!’ And she tightened her embrace to a squeeze. (p. 94)

Everything about this passage suggests that there is a sense in which she is genuinely attached to Edgar. Readers who assume that she made the wrong choice of husband should note the phrase ‘Edgar, darling!’ and the subsequent tightening of her embrace. Even so, it must also be conceded that this brief passage is equally revealing of other, more disturbing tendencies. The expression on her face suggests that she already intuits the subsequent calamity and her behaviour explains why the calamity should be imminent. For the wild and breathless Cathy who flings her arms around her husband’s neck is not his Cathy; she is a throwback to the Cathy whose wild Artemis-like independence he cannot understand and of which he is ashamed. In other words, she is reverting to Heathcliff’s Cathy. Nelly has been aware of this undercurrent in her nature for quite some time. She uses a striking metaphor to describe the nature of the relationship between Cathy and the residents of Thrushcross Grange, one of whom is of course Isabella: ‘It was not the thorn bending to the honeysuckles, but the honeysuckles embracing the thorn. There were no mutual concessions; one stood erect, and the others yielded’ (p. 91). That is, Edgar and Isabella have always been over-tolerant of her highhanded ways. Ever since Heathcliff’s departure, Edgar has evinced ‘a deep-rooted fear of ruffling [Cathy’s] humour’. He has made it his business to see that she is never vexed. If he chances to see a servant ‘grow cloudy at some imperious order of hers’, he lets the servant know his displeasure. As a result, he allows Cathy to become increasingly imperious toward both him and his sister. Five months after her marriage, her old nature is taking possession of her again. And one notes Nelly’s phrase about ‘the honeysuckles embracing the thorn’: the representatives of the ego-structure are in danger of

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destroying themselves by tolerating Cathy’s high-handed ways. Cathy holds herself ‘erect’ and expects all those around her to ‘yield’. As in her childhood, she still instinctively thinks of chastising those who offend her. She confides to Nelly: ‘But [Edgar and Isabella] are very much alike: they are spoiled children, and fancy the world was made for their accommodation; and, though I humour both, I think a smart chastisement might improve them, all the same.’ (pp. 97–8)

Her remark, of course, constitutes an evident projection of her own spoiled nature: indeed, this is immediately confirmed by Nelly’s reply: ‘You’re mistaken, Mrs Linton . . . They humour you – I know what there would be to do if they did not! You can well afford to indulge their passing whims, as long as their business is to anticipate all your desires.’ (p. 98)

Cathy still betrays the same tendencies that she first developed as a result of her father being over-indulgent toward her whims. She still likes to wield her little ‘whip’ and her desire to do so is getting the better of her (p. 34, cf. pp. 40, 191, 252). Nelly’s comment about the ending of Cathy’s happiness with Edgar is apropos: It ended. Well, we must be for ourselves in the long run; . . . and it ended when circumstances caused each to feel that the one’s interest was not the chief consideration in the other’s thoughts. (p. 92)

Whether human nature is always quite as egoistic as this implies need not detain us. What is certain is that, within a few months of her marriage, Cathy is finding it increasingly difficult to keep her high-handed ways under control. On a mellow moonlit evening, as Nelly returns to the house from the garden, she is accosted. It is not until she catches a glimpse of the man’s eyes that she recognizes Heathcliff. Indoors, seen by the fire and candlelight of Thrushcross Grange, she is astounded: I was amazed . . . to behold the transformation of Heathcliff. He had grown a tall, athletic, well-formed man, beside whom my master seemed quite slender and youth-like. His upright carriage suggested the idea of his having been in the army. His countenance was much older in expression and decision of feature than Mr Linton’s; it looked intelligent, and retained no marks of former degradation. A half-civilized ferocity lurked yet in the depressed brows and eyes full of black fire, but it was subdued; and his manner

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was even dignified, quite divested of roughness though too stern for grace. (p. 95)

It is difficult to understand why critics like to elaborate on Nelly’s speculation that Heathcliff might have been in the army. Why seek an explanation outside the text when a much more persuasive explanation presents itself within the text? Heathcliff’s alteration is not to be explained by success either in commerce, or in the army, or in the colonies, or even as a highwayman: for none of these is there sufficient textual evidence. It corresponds to, and reflects an equivalent transformation in the text: the change in Cathy. When he left, Cathy was still an adolescent with a clearly inadequate sense of commitment to her fiance´. When he returns, she is a young woman with considerable – indeed, perhaps a little too much – confidence in her partner. Mr Heathcliff reflects this change. His so-called transformation reflects Cathy’s development between the ages of fifteen and eighteen. Heathcliff’s ‘upright carriage’ reflects her tendency to stand ‘erect’ and compel everyone else to yield to her. His ‘half-civilized ferocity’ mirrors her desire to give Edgar and Isabella a ‘smart chastisement’. Nelly’s supposition that he has been in the army only indicates the kind of selfdiscipline that Cathy’s marriage has required of her (cf. p. 99). Cathy’s difficulty, of course, is related to the animus. During her engagement and the first few months of her marriage, Cathy became prone to periodic ‘seasons of gloom and silence’ (p. 91). Such moodiness is characteristic of animus possession; one notes that in this section of the novel, it is mirrored not by Heathcliff but by Hindley. Following the death of Frances, Hindley slowly gives himself to drink and gambling. His behaviour offers an archetypal representation not only of Cathy’s self-absorbed inwardness, but also her mistaken attitudes. For metaphorically, her high-handed attitude towards her husband represents both a form of drunkenness and a gamble: in other words, it is related to Hindley’s defining characteristics. Cathy can barely disguise her careless indifference to Edgar. She tells Nelly: ‘I have such faith in his love that I believe I might kill him, and he wouldn’t wish to retaliate’ (p. 98). It is no coincidence that the evening Cathy makes this announcement to Nelly, Mr Heathcliff becomes a guest at Wuthering Heights. And it soon becomes clear that his intention is to ‘kill’ Hindley without him being able to retaliate. In other words, if a tendency to moodiness is the ‘origin’ of Cathy’s problem, she exacerbates it by misplaced notions of such violence that it is clear that she has already begun to lose her grip on reality. One notes that Cathy is responsible for admitting Heathcliff into Thrushcross Grange: as in a fairy tale, he has to wait for her to invite him

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in. She does so, and the events proceed to their inevitably tragic conclusion. The subsequent interactions that make up this section of the novel indicate the consequences of Cathy’s inability to keep her domineering tendency under firm control. Isabella’s Mad Infatuation Cathy’s renewed interest in her childhood friend is mirrored by Isabella’s mad infatuation with Mr Heathcliff. And Isabella’s behaviour illustrates the consequences, for a woman, of Cathy’s wrong-headed tendencies. We remember that Isabella is almost exactly the same age as Cathy, perhaps three or four months younger. And there is a considerable difference in Isabella’s character before and after meeting Mr Heathcliff. Before meeting him, her large eyes express a ‘sparkling spirit’ (p. 206). She is ‘a charming young lady of eighteen; infantile in manners, though possessed of keen wit, keen feelings, and a keen temper, too, if irritated’ (p. 100). And we have already seen that Cathy is also characterized by keen feelings and a keen temper. From the moment that Cathy renews her relationship with Mr Heathcliff, Isabella evinces a ‘sudden and irresistible attraction towards the tolerated guest’ (p. 100). And her character undergoes a dramatic change. She begins to behave in an un-characteristic fashion. She loses weight, falls sick, becomes ‘cross and wearisome’, continually snaps at and teases Cathy, complains of the servants not doing her bidding, of her family neglecting her, and of the parlour fire being allowed to go out ‘on purpose to vex her’ (pp. 100–101). It must be emphasized: this is not her usual behaviour. It is the way she behaves as a result of her ‘fantastic preference’ for Mr Heathcliff. Her petty, ceaseless, self-indulgent whining illustrates what happens to a woman’s ego-structure if she is drawn towards an illegitimate interloper in her animus-structure. Cathy, we note, is not only high-handed with Edgar, but equally peremptory with Isabella. When Isabella complains about something, Cathy scolds her, insists that she go to bed and threatens to send for a doctor (p. 101). And what is interesting here is that she is utterly unconscious of how high-handed she is being. She is taken aback when Isabella complains of her harshness: ‘ . . . you told me to ramble where I pleased, while you sauntered on with Mr Heathcliff!’ ‘And that’s your notion of harshness?’ said [Cathy], laughing. ‘It was no hint that your company was superfluous; we didn’t care whether you kept with us or not; I merely thought Heathcliff’s talk would have nothing entertaining for your ears.’ (p. 101)

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She is neither jealous nor possessive of Mr Heathcliff. How could she be? She is an archetypal character in a predetermined myth. As such, she cannot be expected to have any self-consciousness. Her attitudes and behaviour are none the less significant. Her indifference as to whether Isabella keeps pace with her and Heathcliff indicates that she does consider Isabella ‘superfluous’. This implies that, following the renewal of her friendship with Heathcliff, Cathy loses not only all respect for, but also all interest in the female representative of the ‘ego-structure’. She has no other thought than to be with Heathcliff. What is extraordinary about this scene is that she cannot comprehend how someone like Isabella could be attracted to Mr Heathcliff: ‘It is impossible that you can covet the admiration of Heathcliff – that you can consider him an agreeable person!’ (p. 102). It is a curious speech and revealing, for it identifies the root of the problem. A representative of Thrushcross Grange should not be drawn towards an interloper in the animus in the way that Isabella is. Even so, Isabella is not being silly; she really has no choice. Her function is to illustrate the consequences of Cathy’s behaviour for a representative of the feminine ego-structure. Her attraction to Mr Heathcliff underlines the fact that Cathy’s allegiance to Thrushcross Grange is weakening, and that her reawakened interest in Mr Heathcliff is going to force her to confront the implications of her unresolved animus problem. If evidence were needed that Mr Heathcliff belongs to an archetypal level of the imagination, it is provided by Cathy’s description of him to Isabella: ‘Nelly, help me to convince her of her madness. Tell her what Heathcliff is – an unreclaimed creature, without refinement – without cultivation; an arid wilderness of furze and whinstone. I’d as soon put that little canary into the park on a winter’s day as recommend you to bestow your heart on him! It is a deplorable ignorance of his character . . . He’s not a rough diamond – a pearl containing oyster of a rustic; he’s a fierce, pitiless, wolfish man. I never say to him ‘let this or that enemy alone, because it would be ungenerous or cruel to harm them’, I say ‘let them alone, because I should hate them to be wronged.’ (p. 102)

Wuthering Heights is not a realist novel. The point at issue in these lines is not whether this is a description of a man that a woman in her right mind would choose to spend time with, or even whether Cathy is ‘a poisonous friend’. The point is that these lines constitute an evident projection of Cathy’s unconscious attitudes. One notes that the somewhat shocking description is immediately followed by an equally revealing example of how Cathy sees her concern for Isabella. She is not

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the least interested in whether it would be cruel to hurt another (here, Isabella), but only in establishing that she expects to be able to exercise absolute rule over this ‘fierce, pitiless, wolfish man’. Such a game of power strongly suggests that Mr Heathcliff personifies a ‘fierce, pitiless, wolfish’ streak in her character. This has already been demonstrated in relation to her desire to inflict a smart chastisement on her husband and sister-in-law. A further example of this tendency is her readiness to humiliate Isabella in front of Heathcliff by revealing her infatuation with him: ‘ ‘‘Heathcliff, I’m proud to show you, at last, somebody who dotes on you more than myself . . . It is in your power to be Edgar’s brother!’’ ’ (p. 104). Isabella tries to withdraw; Cathy restrains her. When Isabella finally achieves her release, Cathy explains Isabella’s feelings for him. Heathcliff cannot believe his ears. As Isabella flees the room, he looks at her as if she were ‘a strange repulsive animal, a centipede from the Indies, for instance, which curiosity leads one to examine in spite of the aversion it raises’ (p. 105). Cathy notes his interest and with cruel complacency she adds: ‘I like her too well, my dear Heathcliff, to let you absolutely seize and devour her up.’ She is not being hypocritical. She intends no specific harm to Isabella (that is, the ego-structure). But she can no longer control her own ‘fierce, pitiless, wolfish’ tendencies. And her mercilessness toward Isabella is of course immediately echoed by Mr Heathcliff’s unexpected interest in the young woman for whom he feels only repulsion: it awakens his desire to mercilessly crush her ‘like a sparrow’s egg’ (p. 102). But later, we note, Cathy virtually admits her responsibility for the sequel when she likens her suggestion that Heathcliff marry Isabella to ‘offering Satan a lost soul’ (p. 112). By offering Isabella to him as a wife, Cathy not only acknowledges her indifference to the ego-structure, but she also effectively triggers the tragic sequel. Mr Heathcliff’s Desire for Revenge Like all archetypal figures, Cathy cannot comprehend change. She seeks to renew her friendship with the ‘transformed’ Mr Heathcliff as if he were still the young Heathcliff. But by September 1783, not only has she changed, so too has her childhood friend. In her new capacity as protagonist, she is a young married woman and the ‘transformed’ Mr Heathcliff is very much more independent of her than she realizes. Her friendship with the young Heathcliff embodied her girlhood vitality. But her renewed friendship with Mr Heathcliff reflects the substance of her relation with Edgar and his home (the novel’s ‘ego-structure’). His

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function is to hold a mirror up so that she can see herself as she is. She is becoming increasingly peremptory, increasingly high-handed in her attitude towards her husband, and increasingly scornful of the all-toohuman world to which he is attached. Mr Heathcliff simply mirrors her attitudes. Somewhat intriguingly, there is nothing in the novel to suggest that Mr Heathcliff wishes Cathy to turn her back on Edgar. Later, he tells Nelly categorically: ‘I never would have banished him from her society, as long as she desired his’ (p. 148). As long as she desired his: precisely. But the time in which she has an interest in her husband’s company is rapidly drawing to a close. She enters into her renewed friendship with Mr Heathcliff without any thought for Edgar. And this may explain why she is stung so deeply by Isabella’s accusation that she is behaving like ‘a dog in the manger’ (pp. 102, 105), that is, of wanting something for herself for which she has no use. Isabella, of course, is referring to Cathy’s evident desire to monopolize Mr Heathcliff’s company and attention, even though she is already married. But, revealingly, the charge is far more applicable to Cathy’s relation with Edgar. She is happy to be married to Edgar, but will not commit herself to him. Isabella’s axial role in this novel is vividly underlined by the fact that she is the subject of the only major quarrel between Cathy and Heathcliff, as between Edgar and Heathcliff. One day, Nelly happens to see Heathcliff clearly ‘making love’ to Isabella. She immediately denounces him to Cathy, who promptly takes him to task. Cathy asks him why he has ‘disregarded’ her request that he leave Isabella alone. She has forgotten that she proposed the alliance. To which Heathcliff retorts ‘I have a right to kiss her, if she chooses, and you have no right to object – I’m not your husband, you needn’t be jealous of me!’ (p. 112, cf. p. 151). His point is that Isabella is old enough to decide matters for herself and that he owes Cathy no bond of loyalty. Cathy’s reply is thus revealing: ‘I’m not jealous of you; I’m jealous for you.’ She is not sexually jealous of him, which highlights the curiously asexual nature of the bond between them. She is interested only in retaining access to his company: in other words, she does not want him to do anything that might end with Edgar Linton securing his expulsion from the region. She thinks that she can manage Mr Heathcliff as easily as she thinks she can manage Edgar. She is wrong. She cannot grasp that Mr Heathcliff is not the same person as her former playmate. Heathcliff’s indignation and threat are therefore amongst the most revealing and decisive passages in this novel. He rounds on her: ‘I want you to be aware that I know you have treated me infernally – And, if you flatter yourself that I don’t perceive it you are a fool –

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and if you think I can be consoled by sweet words you are an idiot – and if you fancy I’ll suffer unrevenged, I’ll convince you of the contrary, in a very little while! Meantime, thank you for telling me your sister-in-law’s secret – I swear I’ll make the most of it – and stand you aside!’ (p. 112)

Heathcliff’s anger amazes her. Cathy thinks she can divide her attention between Edgar and him. Heathcliff makes it clear that he is no longer content with what she has to offer him: ‘The tyrant grinds down his slaves and they don’t turn against him, they crush those beneath them – You are welcome to torture me to death for your amusement, only, allow me to amuse myself a little in the same style . . . Having levelled my palace, don’t erect a hovel and complacently admire your own charity in giving me that for a home. If I imagined you really wished me to marry Isabella, I’d cut my throat!’ (p. 112)

The meaning is unambiguous. Cathy is the ‘tyrant’. Her hollow relation with Edgar was responsible for having ground Heathcliff down. Even so, he will not turn against her. Instead, he will crush Isabella and Edgar, whom he regards as being ‘beneath’ him (p. 112, cf. pp. 115, 102). In other words, Cathy’s increasing scorn of the all-too-human Edgar and Isabella is mirrored now by Heathcliff’s determination to destroy both representatives of the ‘ego-structure’. His desire for revenge provides a vivid imaginal representation of what, albeit unwittingly, Cathy is doing to her own feminine nature. She has become indifferent to her human needs. Her only interest is in being with Heathcliff, who has no roots in society; he belongs to a world of archetypal images. His intentions are neither good nor bad, since he can only mirror her attitudes. And yet there is a sense in which his function might be described as positive: for it is to shake Cathy into recognizing how self-destructive her attitude is. She is surprisingly quick to spot the implications of what he threatens: ‘quarrel with Edgar if you please, Heathcliff, and deceive his sister; you’ll hit on exactly the most efficient method of revenging yourself on me’ (p. 113). But this does not deter Heathcliff, for the simple reason that she can no longer stop herself. As Nelly comments: ‘The spirit which served her was growing intractable; she could neither lay nor control it’ (p. 113). And Mr Heathcliff personifies the growing intractability of her spirit. Cathy cannot grasp that her attitude might be wrong-headed. Perhaps the key word in Heathcliff’s outburst is ‘complacently’. Cathy never pauses to reflect on the deeper implications of her own attitudes.

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The Quarrel Nelly leaves Cathy and Heathcliff in the kitchen and goes off to find Edgar. He is quick to admit that he cannot ‘clear his wife of blame’. Even so, he realizes that he must act. He calls two servants and asks them to wait in the passage while he speaks with Mr Heathcliff, who is still in the kitchen. It is an appropriate setting for this crucial scene, for the ensuing quarrel may be defined as a process of transformation from ‘raw’ attitudes into ‘cooked’ and thus irreversible decisions. Edgar enters to find Cathy ‘scolding’ Heathcliff, we are not told for what. On becoming aware of Edgar’s presence, Cathy asks him whether he has been listening at the door ‘in a tone particularly calculated to provoke her husband, implying both carelessness and contempt of his irritation’ (p. 114). Her words are mirrored by Heathcliff giving a ‘sneering laugh’. Edgar thereupon addresses Heathcliff, quietly but surprisingly firmly: he does not mince his words. He tells Heathcliff: ‘Your presence is a moral poison . . . – for that cause and to prevent worse consequences, I shall deny you, hereafter, admission into this house.’ Heathcliff looks at him derisively: ‘ ‘‘Cathy, this lamb of yours threatens like a bull! It is in danger of splitting its skull against my knuckles. By God, Mr Linton, I’m mortally sorry that you are not worth knocking down!’’ ’ (p. 114). On noticing Edgar signal Nelly to fetch the men from the passage, Cathy intercedes. She slams and locks the door and tells the startled Edgar: ‘Fair means! If you have not the courage to attack him, make an apology, or allow yourself to be beaten. It will correct you of feigning more valour than you possess . . . I’m delightfully rewarded for my kindness to each! After constant indulgence of one’s weak nature, and the other’s bad one, I earn, for thanks, two samples of blind ingratitude, stupid to absurdity! Edgar, I was defending you, and yours; and I wish Heathcliff may flog you sick, for daring to think an evil thought of me!’ (p. 114–15)

There is nothing unusually weak about Edgar. His weakness is the weakness of the mortal world. And for all his greater height and physical build, there is nothing intrinsically strong about Heathcliff. What strength he has comes from the strength of Cathy’s will. His every thought, word and gesture mirror her attitudes. And these are neither nasty nor even ill-intentioned, so much as mistaken. She is so attached to her world of archetypal notions that she has no interest in any social interactions. Her angry outburst is a vivid representation of the extent to which she has become contemptuous of everything that pertains to

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Thrushcross Grange. And the cruel irony of her outburst stems from her complete unconsciousness of where she is at fault. At a moment when she should have stood by her husband, she wishes Heathcliff to thrash him until he is sick. From this moment, she has sealed her fate. Edgar tries to save the situation, the only way he knows how. It is not admirable, but we must remember that this section of the novel owes nothing to realism. It describes a deeply archetypal process in which the characters enact a predetermined and self-destructive drama. Cathy is quick to realize that Edgar intends to call in his servants, whereupon she throws the key into the fire. Edgar leans against the back of the chair and covers his face and earns Cathy’s chilling sarcasm: ‘Oh! Heavens! In old days this would win you a knighthood! We are vanquished! We are vanquished! Heathcliff would as soon lift a finger at you as the king would march his army against a colony of mice. Cheer up, you sha’n’t be hurt! Your type is not a lamb, it’s a sucking leveret.’ (p. 115)

No speech better indicates the nature and degree of her unconsciousness. On the one hand, her use of ‘we’ indicates that she does identify with Edgar; on the other, she speaks for Heathcliff. Holding such contradictory loyalties, of course she feels misunderstood by both parties; of course she feels that she is being torn apart, not by any external pressure on her, but by her own misplaced allegiances. And the most obvious of these is her contempt for her husband’s all-too-human frailties. The relation between this and her previous humiliation of Isabella is obvious: in both cases, she scorns a representative of Thrushcross Grange, that is, the novel’s ego-structure. In both quarrels, Cathy promotes the events: she suggests that Heathcliff has an opportunity to become Edgar’s ‘brother’ and she suggests that he flog her husband. She realizes that she would be the first casualty – but she can no longer rein herself in. She imagines that she has been defending Edgar’s interests, whereas in effect she has only been defending her intention of keeping him like a faithful lapdog while she spends her time with Heathcliff: that is, of behaving like a dog in the manger. The lapdog is at bay, but it can still snap. Although faced by a much larger and stronger man, he unexpectedly strikes Heathcliff ‘full on the throat a blow that would have leveled a slighter man’ (p. 115). And once again Cathy demonstrates how misplaced are her allegiances. She takes sides, against her own interests. Fearing that Edgar will return with pistols and half-a-dozen assistants, she tells Heathcliff: ‘But go – make haste. I’d rather see Edgar at bay than you’ (p. 116). She ‘sides’ with a personification of her own intractable

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nature against a representative of a woman’s (Catherine’s and, by extension, also Emily Bronte¨’s) ego-structure. Cathy’s Brain Fever Edgar’s announcement that Heathcliff will no longer be admitted into his household almost unhinges Cathy. She cannot bear the thought of once again being separated from the figure that links her with her carefree childhood. She thinks she could have dissuaded Heathcliff from his objective with Isabella, on whom – unjustly but unsurprisingly – she casts responsibility for the ‘uproar’ (p. 116). She cannot see that Isabella’s infatuation only mirrors her own irrational preference for Heathcliff. Cathy is beside herself; as she explains to Nelly: ‘I did not care, hardly, what they did to each other; especially as I felt that, however the scene closed, we should all be driven asunder for nobody knows how long! Well, if I cannot keep Heathcliff for my friend – if Edgar will be mean and jealous – I’ll try to break their hearts by breaking my own.’ (p. 117)

Her fatalism is of course prophetic. For the way in which she responds to the situation in which she now finds herself is revealing. We have no reason to believe that Edgar is either ‘mean’ or even (in the usual sense of this word) ‘jealous’. He has been as understanding as he could be toward Heathcliff. He has not acted on his own behalf. He only stepped in when the situation all too clearly concerned his sister. He fears the consequences for her. In other words, he champions the female representative of his family, Isabella, who represents the ego-structure. Ironic as this might seem, Edgar is thus fighting on behalf of Catherine’s ego-structure. His decision to bar Heathcliff from Thrushcross Grange is an attempt to defend the only female representative of the ego-structure from coming under Heathcliff’s sway – and, as we shall see, this very obviously anticipates the events of the second generation. But Cathy, assuming that her own judgement has been slighted, determines to obtain her revenge on both men in the most self-indulgent fashion possible: by breaking her own heart. Her behaviour reminds one of Hindley. Her raving is a form of drunkenness, and her deliberate attempt to break their hearts by breaking hers is a form of selfdestructive gambling. Her self-induced and self-destructive delirium is denominated a ‘brain fever’ (p. 134), which is a very appropriate description of animus possession. Not unnaturally, Edgar ‘requires’ that she choose between him and Heathcliff, once and for all (p. 118). This she cannot do. She cannot

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choose for the simple reason that she has neither volition nor selfawareness. She is an archetypal character whose function it is to act out the implications of the effective protagonist’s deep-rooted inability to find a way to escape from her imprisonment at Wuthering Heights in the present (November 1801). She demands that she be ‘let alone’ (exactly mirroring Catherine’s insistence in the present) and refuses all food for the next three days. In the course of her fast, she ‘translates’ the choice that lies before her into her own terms. She tells Nelly that she now knows what she must do: ‘ ‘‘I’ll choose between these two – either to starve, at once, that would be no punishment unless he had a heart – or to recover and leave the country’’ ’ (p. 121). By self-imposed starvation she intends to punish Edgar: one notes that her decision also anticipates Heathcliff’s later behaviour. And by recovering, she presumably means to leave the country with Heathcliff which, in psychological terms, would imply regressing further into unconsciousness. Cathy asks Nelly if Edgar really is so ‘utterly indifferent’ about her life. He is not, of course. Indeed, the depth of his feeling for her is borne out by the sequel, in which he never celebrates his own daughter’s birth because it reminds him too painfully of her mother’s death. His ignorance of Cathy’s condition simply mirrors her lack of concern at what she is doing to herself. Her question to Nelly is simply a projection of her indifference toward him. Nelly thereupon tells her that he is in his study amongst his books, the same books for which she used to love him. She interprets this as meaning that he has no heart: ‘what in the name of all that feels, has he to do with books, when I am dying?’ she demands (p. 122). The self-indulgence requires no comment. Much more interesting is the scorn of what Hareton will later describe as ‘booklarning’ (p. 220). Archetypal figures do not construct their identity through reading: they express problems with life. Edgar’s retreat to his library at this critical moment reflects Cathy’s retreat to her room. Just as he is literally surrounded by books that he does not think of trying to read, so she immerses herself in a world of archetypal interactions that she does think of trying to interpret. In her delirium, Cathy stares into a mirror, which she mistakes for the press that stood beside her bed in childhood. In it she sees the reflection of a face that frightens her. Nelly tries to calm her: ‘It was yourself, Mrs Linton; you knew it a while since.’ ‘Myself,’ she gasped, ‘and the clock is striking twelve. It’s true, then; that’s dreadful.’ (p. 124)

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The face that she sees in the mirror is not described, but the implication is clear: she sees an image of herself, and thinks it is an omen. A moment later, she is wishing she were once again a child, back in her own bed ‘in the old house’. In other words, the adult Cathy has not only lost all attachment to Thrushcross Grange (ego-structure), but is wishing herself back in her childhood home (animus-structure). She begins playing as she might have done in her childhood. As Nelly says: ‘she seemed to find childish diversion in pulling the feathers from the rents she had just made [in the pillow], and ranging them on the sheet according to their different species’ (p. 122). Each feather reminds her of the happy days she spent in Heathcliff’s company, when her chief amusement was to run on the moors: ‘I wish I were a girl again, half savage and hardy, and free . . . and laughing at injuries, not maddening under them!’ (p. 126). Her longing has two aspects. In the first place, her yearning to return to a state of untamed independence is suggestive of a deeply rooted identification with Artemis, which implies that she is not yet ready for the commitments of adulthood, whether those of Aphrodite or Hera. And secondly, her self-indulgence is reminiscent of Ophelia’s distraction but, in psychological terms, with an all-important difference. Ophelia is an anima-figure in a play written by a man: in other words, she represents an aspect of a man’s unconscious image of the feminine. Cathy is a protagonist in a novel written by a woman. Her plight has far more immediate bearing on the personality of the writer and thus her delirium is even more poignant. The care that Edgar lavished on Cathy in her sickness stems from much more than the ‘common humanity’ and ‘sense of duty’ that Heathcliff so derides (p. 148). A man cannot demonstrate greater confidence in his partner than an understanding of her need to relate to her archetypal world. Edgar demonstrates this when he allows Heathcliff access to Thrushcross Grange. But the line between confidence in a partner’s relation to her inner world and unwitting promotion of an alltoo-deep immersion in archetypal fantasy is sometimes thin. When Cathy’s ‘brain fever’ is brought under sufficient control for her to communicate again, her thoughts are fixed on Wuthering Heights. Even Edgar, who has tended her indefatigably, brings her ‘a handful of golden crocuses’ which she recognises because they are ‘the earliest flowers at the Heights!’ (p. 134). It must also be conceded, however, that Edgar’s concern represents the ego-structure’s inability to keep Cathy from indulging in archetypal reverie. He tells her: ‘ . . . last spring at this time, I was longing to have you under this roof – now, I wish you were a mile or two up those hills: the air blows so sweetly, I feel that it would cure you’ (p. 134). It is too late. Cathy spurns the incentive to recovery: ‘I shall never be there, but

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once more!’ said the invalid; ‘and then you’ll leave me, and I shall remain for ever’ (p. 135). She repulses Edgar for the last time. She can only relate to the world of the Heights, the world of her childhood, and which in psychological terms is also an animus-structure. The tragedy must ensue, for the very simple reason that there is no help for it. The narrative of which Cathy is a protagonist is an archetypal representation of those mistaken attitudes that are keeping Catherine at Wuthering Heights in the present. It is a myth; its ending is predetermined. Edgar must let go, so that the process can move into a new phase; so that it can move closer to personal consciousness. The story of Catherine’s childhood and how she came to find herself at Wuthering Heights belongs to both the archetypal and the personal unconscious. But before examining it, we must consider the remainder of Cathy’s story, for it is not without interest. The important point to note about the dialogue between Cathy and Edgar is that it more or less exactly coincides with Isabella’s elopement. For the same evening as Cathy admits that she longs to be back at Wuthering Heights, Isabella elopes with Mr Heathcliff. Isabella’s Elopement and Marriage The onset of Cathy’s ‘brain fever’ coincides with Isabella’s elopement with Heathcliff, of which Isabella later confesses: ‘I think the concentrated essence of all the madness in the world took up its abode in my brain the day I linked my fate with [the inmates of Wuthering Heights]!’ (p. 143). Her brief but terrible ordeal there elaborates on the implications of Cathy’s behaviour. The relationship between Isabella and Heathcliff must rank as one of the least credible of all literary relationships. The reader has difficulty believing that either party could have looked at the other with interest, let alone affection. The reader learns virtually nothing about how they each behaved toward one another. And what they might have done and said to each other in the course of their honeymoon challenges the imagination. In realist terms, at the heart of this novel is a condition that defies both credibility and description. And yet, in psychological terms, every step in their relationship follows the inexorable logic of the archetypal imagination. Later, when Nelly reminds Heathcliff of Isabella’s ‘capacity for strong attachments’, he is scornful. As far as he is concerned, Isabella abandoned her home ‘under a delusion’: ‘ . . . picturing in me a hero of romance, and expecting unlimited indulgence from my chivalrous devotion. I can hardly regard her in

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the light of a rational creature, so obstinately has she persisted in forming a fabulous notion of my character, and acting on the false impressions she cherished.’ (p. 150)

The reader should not disparage Isabella for her ridiculous infatuation. She has no choice. She can only mirror Cathy’s behaviour. These lines provide a vivid metaphor for Cathy’s misguided tendency to form a ‘fabulous notion’ of Heathcliff’s character. And his function is to spell out the implications of Cathy’s misplaced allegiance for a representative of a woman’s ego-structure. Indeed, this is made brutally clear in his explanation, to Nelly, of how he showed himself to Isabella in his true colours: ‘The first thing she saw me do, on coming out of the Grange, was to hang up her little dog, and when she pleaded for it the first words I uttered were a wish that I had the hanging of every being belonging to her, except one: possibly she took that exception for herself – But no brutality disgusted her – I suppose she has an innate admiration of it, if only her precious person were secure from injury! Now, was it not the depth of absurdity – of genuine idiocy, for that pitiful, slavish, mean-minded brach to dream that I could love her?’ (p. 151)

A dog is a traditional ‘emblem of faithfulness’ (Cirlot, 1971, p. 84). That is, Heathcliff’s action graphically, brutally illustrates that he wants no such fidelity either from Isabella or, by extension, even from Cathy. He does everything possible to make Isabella abominate him. ‘Isabella, are you sure you hate me?’ he asks her (p. 151). But he cannot give her cause for a separation. For it is not enough for her to recognize the ‘mistake’ of her infatuation. It is Cathy who must face the fact that she has behaved with ‘genuine idiocy’. His brief justification is interesting for another reason. Who is the exception of which Heathcliff speaks? The only possible candidate is Cathy. But Isabella, like any lover, assumes that he is referring to her; in other words, she assumes that her relation with Heathcliff is ‘unique’. And yet the point of all that he says is that it also applies to Cathy. For the curious, but very significant inversion of usual assumptions must be noted. Up to this moment, Isabella’s behaviour has ‘mirrored’ that of Cathy. But here Heathcliff’s phrase suggests that Cathy ‘belongs’ to Isabella. And in one sense she does, for whatever Cathy’s origins, by virtue of her sex she too belongs at Thrushcross Grange, that is, in a female ego-structure. And thus, by extension, she also ‘belongs’ to Isabella.

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It is impossible to imagine the two-month honeymoon of Isabella and Mr Heathcliff. Like Cathy’s delirium, it signifies a complete abdication of both responsibility and consciousness. One of the attributes of Wuthering Heights is that its outer gate is always locked, even on those occasions when the front door is open. When Isabella returns from her honeymoon, it thus appears like an ancient castle. And so it should. A representative of a woman’s egostructure is not meant to be drawn toward, let alone into the animusstructure. It is for this reason that Wuthering Heights appears so indifferent as to be almost hostile to her. Significantly, Heathcliff ‘disappears’ on arrival, leaving her to enter their home alone. Once again, one notes the insistence that, in a woman’s fiction, the female protagonists must always take the initiative. Isabella is met by the young Hareton, who greets her with an oath and a threat to set Throttler on her if she does not ‘frame off:’ ‘ ‘‘Hey, Throttler, lad!’’ ’ whispered the little wretch, rousing a half-bred bulldog from its lair in a corner. ‘‘ ‘Now, wilt tuh be ganging?’’ he asked authoritatively’ (p. 137). This of course recalls Cathy’s first expedition to the Grange, when Skulker prevented her from escaping. Throttler is Skulker’s pup (p. 144), but instead of having to prevent Isabella from running away, his task is to dissuade her from entering his home. The implications are clear: indeed, the whole dialectic of Wuthering Heights is encapsulated in these two episodes. Skulker retains a reluctant Cathy in the house that represents the female ego-structure. Whereas Throttler and Hareton do all they can to dissuade Isabella from entering the animus-structure. And for good reason: a woman has no place in an animus-structure. The legitimate animus at this ‘level’ of the process is of course Hindley and, as we have already seen, his behaviour reveals another aspect of Cathy’s animus possession. He is so lost in ‘deep abstraction’ that Isabella cannot even get him to register her presence (p. 139). She asks him where the maidservant is, but it is not the function of the animus to provide a woman with maidservants. Just as Cathy has locked herself up, so Isabella must wait on herself. She even has difficulty finding a suitable ‘rahm’ (¼ room). In similar fashion, just as Cathy is divided between an allegiance to her archetypal origins and a building that represents a woman’s egostructure, so Isabella is split between two aspects of herself. She writes to Nelly: ‘Inform Edgar that . . . my heart returned to Thrushcross Grange in twenty-four hours after I left it, and is there at this moment, full of warm feelings for him, and [Cathy]! I can’t follow it, though.’ (p. 136)

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Just as Cathy’s marriage is hollow because she is more strongly allied to a figure constantly in her mind, so Isabella’s ‘genuine idiocy’ – this is Heathcliff’s phrase (p. 151), but Cathy uses the same noun to describe Isabella’s infatuation (p. 102) – is the result of an infatuation with a ‘fabulous notion’ in her mind, that is, the animus (p. 150). But although Isabella’s ‘heart’ abominates Heathcliff as soon as she begins to comprehend his true nature, she remains tied to him by a perverse logic. The reason that she gives for not being able to return to Thrushcross Grange is that ‘ . . . whatever [Heathcliff] may pretend, he wishes to provoke Edgar to desperation – and he says he has married me on purpose to obtain power over him; and he shan’t obtain it – I’ll die first!’ (p. 152)

In psychological terms, this is, of course, nonsense: Heathcliff can have no such desire of himself. Archetypal images give expression to individual dilemmas, and they are not often perverse in themselves. They correspond to the attitude an individual has towards them (cf. Jung CW 12: 29). As we have seen, Heathcliff, Hindley and Hareton do everything possible to dissuade Isabella from entering into the ‘unreal’ world of Wuthering Heights. For this reason, their extreme antipathy towards her cannot properly be described as either cruel or malevolent. And they have no interest in anyone from the ‘outer’ world. The person who wishes to provoke Edgar to ‘desperation’ is of course Cathy, who married him with every intention of ensuring that her slightest whim was law to him, and whom she now sees as an obstacle to her continuing her friendship with Mr Heathcliff. Isabella is quick to realize that Mr Heathcliff is not motivated by any human law known to her. And she questions Nelly: ‘Is Mr Heathcliff a man? If so, is he mad? And if not, is he a devil? I shan’t tell you my reasons for making this inquiry; but I beseech you to explain, if you can, what I have married.’ (p. 136)

‘He’s not a human being,’ she affirms on more than one occasion (p. 152, 172). She is right, but she cannot guess why. He is an archetypal image. But he does not even belong at Wuthering Heights: he is an ‘interloper’ there. And the ‘revenge’ he proposes to pursue is but a projection of the vindictive streak in Cathy’s nature that once again takes possession of her when she fears that she might lose the only meaningful reality she knows: not sexual, but archetypal intercourse with Mr Heathcliff, who embodies the world of archetypal images that she prefers to the all too human humdrum of social reality. His hostility to Edgar amplifies the implications of Cathy’s complete indifference to Edgar’s feelings. In

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other words, the threat to Edgar does not come from Heathcliff; it comes from Cathy. Heathcliff might taunt Isabella: ‘If I let you alone for half-a-day, won’t you come sighing and wheedling to me again?’ (p. 151). His question is a projection not only of Cathy’s inability to free herself from the ‘fabulous notion’ that she has of Heathcliff – which also explains why Isabella is tied to him – but also of her contemptuous assumption vis-a`-vis Edgar: that if she leaves him alone for half a day, he will come sighing and wheedling to her. Only, this time, Edgar doesn’t. She has overstepped the bounds and must now face the consequences. Cathy’s Death Archetypal images have no volition of their own, but the logic that drives them – the logic of the unconscious – is relentless. As soon as Heathcliff returns from his honeymoon to Wuthering Heights, he seeks an interview with Cathy. Nelly tries to impress on him that the present Cathy Linton is no longer the Cathy Earnshaw whom he once knew. In one sense, she is right. Just how different is implied by what has happened to Isabella. Nelly is afraid that another encounter between Heathcliff and Edgar will kill Cathy. But Heathcliff will not be deterred: he insists that Cathy take responsibility for her decision, not so as to disturb her further, but to provoke her into assuming responsibility for her dilemma. He assures Nelly: ‘ ‘‘I don’t desire to cause any disturbance, or to exasperate or to insult Mr Linton; I only wish to hear from herself how she is, and why she has been ill.’’ ’ (p. 152). In other words, Cathy must once again confront the figure that personifies her own ungovernable attitudes, for it is these that have led her into the impasse in which she finds herself. This introduces a problem arising from one of Jung’s more irritating mannerisms of style. He would often describe archetypal images as if they had entirely autonomous personalities and a great many of his followers continue to do this. For example, Jung writes: Like the anima, the animus is a jealous lover. He is an adept at putting, in place of the real man, an opinion about him, the exceedingly disputable grounds for which are never submitted to criticism. (CW 7: 334)

It is, of course, very unlikely that archetypal images should have any other personality than that with which they are invested either by a collective or a personal unconscious, or by some fusion of the two. The only possible reason why an animus-figure might behave as if it were a

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jealous lover is because the ego has an unconscious tendency to think in a more or less similar or else metaphorically related fashion. When one writes of them as if they were autonomous, it is because, like Mr Heathcliff, they do not always act in a predictable fashion. In a narrative fiction, the ‘jealousy’ of an animus-figure reflects the effective protagonist’s more or less unconscious desire to be loved uniquely. The thoughts akin to jealousy that are ascribed to Heathcliff reflect, in the first instance, Cathy’s desire to be loved for her archetypal personality and, by extension, also Catherine’s desire to be loved in the same way as her father loved her uniquely in her childhood. Such tendencies are very often expressed in bombast. Heathcliff is scornful of Edgar’s constancy and decency: ‘If he loved with all the powers of his puny being, he couldn’t love as much in eighty years, as I could in a day’ (p. 149). This is not a ‘factual’ comparison. It is bombast and, according to Jung, bombast is often indicative of an archetype: ‘Archetypes speak the language of high rhetoric, even of bombast’ (Jung, 1965, p. 178). As the sequel makes amply clear, Edgar’s love is both deep and constant. But human feelings cannot compare with archetypal bombast. Heathcliff’s madly inflated boast is a representation of the contempt that Cathy expresses for Edgar’s love during her hunger strike. What Heathcliff needs to know is whether Cathy would miss Edgar: that is, whether her ego-structure is still important to her. It is to establish this that he seeks a meeting. And his reasons are revealing, for they have little or nothing that is typically human about them. He tells Nelly: ‘I never would have banished [Edgar] from her society, as long as she desired his. The moment her regard ceased, I would have torn his heart out, and drunk his blood!’ (p. 148). The bombast requires no further comment. The important point to note is that Heathcliff would have accepted Edgar, if only Cathy had not turned her back on him. How many human lovers would be as forbearing? This is not the logic that drives human passions. It is the logic of archetypal interactions. Thus it is no coincidence that as soon as she betrays Edgar, Cathy falls sick. As she worsens, even her appearance is altered: ‘The flash of her eyes had been succeeded by a dreamy and melancholy softness; they appeared always to gaze beyond, and far beyond – you would have said out of this world’ (p. 156). She is no longer a ‘lady’ with a tendency to gloomy moods. She has surrendered to an overwhelming desire to enjoy a dreamy communion with an archetypal un-consciousness. Cathy has difficulty focusing her attention even on Heathcliff. When she does, her reception of her childhood friend is as ambivalent as ever. On the one hand, she receives him with kisses and wishes she could hold him until they are both dead (p. 158). On the other, she is ‘possessed

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with a devil’ of wild vindictiveness (p. 159). The key to her subsequent death is contained in this conflicting reaction. Heathcliff turns his back on her in order to hide his emotion. Cathy cannot understand why. She cannot see how this image of Heathcliff with his back to her is a representation of the manner in which she has turned her back on a ‘human’ relationship with Edgar: ‘Oh, you see, Nelly! he would not relent a moment, to keep me out of the grave! That is how I’m loved! Well, never mind! That is not my Heathcliff. I shall love mine yet; and take him with me – he’s in my soul.’ (p. 160)

She has no wish to acknowledge the figure whose clumsy and primitive emotions mirror her own as ‘her’ Heathcliff. She sees in him something beyond him, that is, something from an archetypal domain. The Heathcliff whom she wishes to take with her into Death – ‘her’ Heathcliff – is the young Heathcliff, who corresponds both to Cathy’s petted will and to her girlhood vitality. Far and away the most curious and yet revealing moment in this final interview is when Mr Heathcliff reveals his indignation: ‘You teach me how cruel you’ve been – cruel and false. Why did you despise me? Why did you betray your own heart, Cathy? I have not one word of comfort – you deserve this. You have killed yourself . . . You loved me – then what right had you to leave me?’ (p. 161)

As a protagonist whose ‘task’ was to escape from the animus-structure, Cathy had to abandon Heathcliff. Her error is not really hers at all. She has no freedom of choice. She is a protagonist in a ‘myth’; her end is predetermined. Her refusal to cling to life is an archetypal representation of Catherine’s inability to see any need to escape from her ‘present’ imprisonment at Wuthering Heights. As we have already indicated, however, there are two Cathys: (1) the protagonist and (2) the image that she has of herself, which also corresponds to Heathcliff’s image of her. It is important to understand which is responsible for her suicide. Heathcliff tells her: ‘I love my murderer – but yours! How can I?’ (p. 161). The Cathy who ‘murders’ him is the Cathy who abandons him in order to marry Edgar, and it is must be noted that it is this Cathy that Heathcliff loves. He loves the Cathy who leaves him. The latter refers to the Cathy who, by turning her back on Edgar, brings about her own death. It is this second Cathy – who is now dying – whom Heathcliff cannot love. Thus, paradoxical as it might seem, Heathcliff loves the Cathy who abandons him and has no love at all for the Cathy who abandons Edgar.

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As she approaches death, she dreams of Wuthering Heights again. And what she yearns for has often been equated with the goal of mysticism: for example, by Cecil W. Davies (1969), who suggests that the identity of Cathy and Heathcliff is a ‘mystical experience’ consisting of acceptance of the shadow self (cf. Blondel, 1985). What Cathy says is: ‘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.’ (p. 160)

The experience of true mysticism is the humility that comes with surrendering to an experience incommensurably greater than oneself. Cathy’s yearning shows no such humility. On the contrary, it is grossly inflated: ‘I shall be sorry for you. I shall be incomparably beyond and above you all’ (p. 160). The echo of 1 Corinthians 13:12 is misleading. The glorious world that Cathy sees through her tears and for which she yearns with an aching heart is not the world of St Paul or of Christian mysticism. It is the world of archetypal imagery, the world that one enters in one’s dreams and fantasies and with which reality can never compare. To long for escape into such a world is to yearn to be swallowed by one’s own unconscious, for the idea of death – death not as a bio-physical event, but as an image – is symbolic of a return to the primal condition of unconsciousness. When Edgar’s imminent arrival is announced, Cathy loses consciousness. The mere thought of having anything further to do with an ordinary mortal, who is also a representative of the ‘ego-structure’, overcomes her. But when Heathcliff tries to get news from Nelly about her last words, he is disappointed. The reason is important. He cannot bear to think that she died ‘quietly as a lamb’ (p. 167); that is, without struggling against immersing herself in unconsciousness. Heathcliff is indignant: ‘May she wake in torment! . . . Why, she’s a liar to the end . . . [Cathy] may you not rest, as long as I am living! . . . Be with me always – take any form – drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, . . . I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!’ (p. 167)

On this occasion, the bombast harbours a significance that requires consideration. Cathy is dead and Heathcliff knows this. He is not addressing her as a protagonist. He is yearning to be reunited with his soul; that is, his childhood companion, with whom he once escaped from an oppressive atmosphere at Wuthering Heights and discovered Thrushcross Grange. He is yearning for Cathy as an archetypal image of eternal girlhood and/or vitality – for only if Catherine can reconnect

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with this aspect of her archetypal personality will she be able to free herself of the ‘oppression past explaining’ that she suffers at Wuthering Heights in the present. And one notes that Heathcliff’s yearning on the day of Cathy’s death corresponds to the older Heathcliff’s ‘passion of tears’ following Lockwood’s second dream (p. 27). Isabella’s Flight Cathy’s terrible end produces a ‘season of deliverance’ at Wuthering Heights (p. 173). Heathcliff is so disoriented with grief that he leaves off tormenting the imprisoned Isabella, whose assessment of the event is revealing: ‘it seemed as if all joy had vanished from the world’ (p. 174). Once again, one notes how this defies the logic of ordinary human interactions. Isabella and Cathy had never been close. And Cathy’s death might have allowed Isabella to hope that her situation might change for the better. Instead, she feels that it has worsened, as indeed it has: for Cathy determines the events in the myth and her death leaves Isabella – the representative of the ‘ego-structure’ – in an alien ‘animus-structure’ and firmly in the hands of a male figure who loathes her. And this, of course, both ‘anticipates’ and represents the situation in which Catherine exists in the present. As soon as Cathy dies, Isabella becomes a protagonist. And now that she is imprisoned in the animus-structure, she betrays the same mad craving to exercise power as had possessed Cathy. And partly because Isabella belongs to the ego-structure, and partly because this tendency is in such marked contrast to her ordinary character, it is particularly ugly. She describes Heathcliff as ‘absorbed in his anguish’ and ‘insensible to anything around him’ (p. 180). This relates of course to his recent loss. But, paradoxically, this also reflects not only Isabella’s exaggerated egocentrism and indulgent self-pity, but also her increasing vindictiveness. The reason she discovers increasingly repellent traits in Heathcliff is because her attitude toward him is as childishly vindictive as Cathy’s toward Edgar. She describes Heathcliff’s grief to Nelly: ‘Had it been another, I would have covered my face in the presence of such grief. In his case, I was gratified: and ignoble as it seems to insult a fallen enemy, I couldn’t miss this chance of sticking in a dart; his weakness was the only time I could taste the delight of paying wrong for wrong.’ (p. 179)

Like Cathy, she knows that she is ‘wrong’, and she too has no idea why. Like Cathy, she had expected to be able to ‘play the little mistress’ at

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Wuthering Heights. When she discovers that she is unable to, she vents her power-complex in a most unseemly manner. She wishes to injure Heathcliff because he has shown weakness. We remember Heathcliff’s assertion that ‘no brutality [in him] disgusted her’, and his conclusion: ‘She even disgraces the name of Linton’ (p. 151). In a woman’s fiction, the male characters always reflect the attitudes of the effective female protagonist. Isabella has become a personification of the ‘wild vindictiveness’ that Cathy demonstrated during her parting from Heathcliff (p. 159). She says: ‘On only one condition can I hope to forgive him. It is, if I may take an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, for every wrench of agony return a wrench, reduce him to my level. As he was the first to injure, make him the first to implore pardon . . . But it is utterly impossible I can ever be revenged, and therefore I cannot forgive him.’ (p. 179)

She wants to see him as miserable as she now feels, to make him sue for pardon, and reveals a corresponding ‘unconsciousness’ of her own responsibility for her predicament. But Heathcliff is an archetypal image; she cannot hope to be revenged. Her inability to forgive him, however, is significant, for it prevents her not only from assuming responsibility for her attitudes, but also from moving on. The evening of Cathy’s funeral, a strange confrontation occurs at the Heights. Hindley determines to ‘revenge’ himself on Heathcliff. In other words, the death of Cathy provokes the animus into a desperate attempt to reclaim its rightful home from the interloper. And one notes Isabella’s part in the failure of his plan. She neither aids Hindley, nor prevents his attempted revenge. She merely foils its efficacy by warning Heathcliff. She explains this to Nelly: ‘[Hindley] swore passionately at me; affirming that I loved the villain yet . . . And I . . . thought what a blessing it would be for him, should Heathcliff put him out of his misery, and what a blessing for me, should he send Heathcliff to his right abode!’ (pp. 175–6)

Just as Cathy cannot choose between Edgar and Heathcliff, so Isabella cannot take sides one way or the other. She expects ‘them’ to decide the issue for her, hoping to gain either way. The parallel with Hindley is evident: she is so absorbed by her own misery that she cannot reflect rationally, and as a result she gambles herself into an impasse. The nature of her indifference to the outcome is revealing, but Hindley is incorrect about her continued allegiance. For she is not tied to Heathcliff by ‘love’ so much as by the same law as ties Heathcliff to his ‘murderer’ (Cathy). Infatuation is not resolved when it moves to its opposite,

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‘abhorrence’ (p. 145): it can only be resolved by facing up to the image that occasions it – in her case, Heathcliff – and modifying the deficiency which he personifies and compensates. Immediately after her ‘escape’, she tells Nelly: ‘I’ve recovered from my first desire to be killed by him. I’d rather he’d kill himself!’ (p. 172). In contrast with Cathy, she resists the temptation to allow herself to be annihilated by him, but only by washing her hands of all responsibility for his behaviour. This is why Heathcliff orders her out of his sight, until she can learn better. Instead, she runs to the Grange, tells Nelly her story, then, together with her dog – an emblem of her misplaced fidelity – is ‘driven away, never to revisit the neighbourhood’ (p. 181). The hurt that one wishes on an archetypal image will always rebound on oneself. Isabella is forced to flee. She escapes from her ‘imprisonment’ in the animus by moving to the south. Which not only ‘mirrors’ Cathy’s escape into ‘that glorious world’, but also represents a retreat to even greater unconsciousness. Conclusion The purpose of this section of my argument is to illustrate how the second part of Cathy’s ‘odyssey of experience’ is inextricably related not only to its consequences for Isabella, but also, and crucially, to Catherine’s plight in the present. The central events of the novel are composed of an extraordinary dialectic between two narrative patterns that tell the same story from opposite points of view, both of which comment on the dilemma facing Catherine in November 1801. In the present, the effective protagonist is still in thrall to an illegitimate interloper in the animus, and Nelly’s story about the distant past constitutes a two-part myth directly related to her predicament. Cathy and Isabella represent different aspects of her deeply unconscious personality: her ego-structure and her animus-structure. The events involving Cathy and Isabella are predetermined. They must bring the story back to Catherine’s imprisonment in the present. They must both begin and end at Wuthering Heights. In the first part of the myth, Cathy has to choose between Heathcliff, who is always ‘in [her] mind’, and Edgar, who appears to belong to a far more credible social world. The function of these early events is ambivalent. On the one hand, it is to suggest a possible way in which the effective protagonist could escape from her imprisonment: that is, by an alliance with a male figure from the real world (Lockwood). On the other, because Thrushcross Grange represents the novel’s ego-structure, it is to lead her toward the (re)discovery of her own feminine roots.

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The second part of the myth explains why she is unable to settle at Thrushcross Grange: because her innermost nature is still tied to the imaginal and archetypal world of Wuthering Heights. What Cathy and Isabella have in common is that they are both irresistibly drawn by Heathcliff’s archetypal nature, and neither shows sufficient loyalty to Thrushcross Grange, the novel’s ego-structure. Cathy’s history ends in her desire to return to Wuthering Heights, where Catherine is imprisoned in the present. But significantly, the unconscious (which seeks a resolution to every impasse) will not allow her to attain her desire. She might die at Thrushcross Grange, but her ghost is caught on the moors because the unconscious will not allow her to present herself at a time when Heathcliff would let her in. For this would signal that Catherine were resigned to her imprisonment in the animus-structure. And Isabella’s fate is equally significant. The representative of the ego-structure has to flee, that is, to abandon her home, but at least she does not die. If she had, it would signal that Catherine had lost not only all hope, but all possibility of ever recovering her home, which is the novel’s egostructure. Nelly’s story, however, is composed of two ‘histories’. We have now examined the first, which indicates both ‘how’ Catherine could escape from Wuthering Heights and ‘why’ she is unable to do so. The second consists of an imaginal anamnesis (¼ history of her condition), and this is the subject of the next section.

4. Catherine’s History: (I) The Evolution of a Father-Complex ‘I fret about nothing on earth except papa’s illness, . . . I care for nothing in comparison with papa. And I’ll never – never – oh, never, while I have my senses, do an act or say a word to vex him. I love him better than myself.’ (Catherine to Nelly, p. 231) My heart belongs to daddy. (Cole Porter, from Leave It to Me, 1938)

One of the many striking features about Wuthering Heights is that the nature of the problem so vividly depicted in its opening chapters only begins to be explicated more than half-way through the novel. Criticism has never shown any great interest in the events that unfold in the second generation, and it is not hard to fathom why. Catherine is not nearly as captivating a character as her mother. Whatever his

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intrinsic merits, there is little to recommend Hareton as a fictional character. And Nelly’s description of Linton is gloriously apt: ‘The worst-tempered bit of a sickly slip that ever struggled into its teens’ (p. 242). At the level of story, one has no difficulty understanding why the focus of critical attention has always been, and very emphatically, on the first half of the novel. None the less, at the level of plot, there can be no question: it is the second half of Nelly’s story that provides the key to the extraordinary coherence of this novel. Catherine is the effective protagonist of the entire novel. This is implied by the most arresting of the differences between the two heroines, which concerns their role in their respective histories. Once past childhood, when Heathcliff always ‘followed’ her (p. 127), Cathy never initiates a situation. She may determine the interactions in the ‘myth’, but never deliberately. When she acts, it is either irrationally (for example, her ‘wrong’ engagement to Edgar) or compulsively (for example, taking Mr Heathcliff’s side during his quarrel with Edgar, pp. 114–16). She is swept away by her renewed interest in the ‘transformed’ Mr Heathcliff, and this renewed attachment leads relentlessly, inevitably, to her death. In contrast, Catherine always initiates the situations in which she is involved. She takes the initiative of going to Penistone Craggs. On her sixteenth birthday, in spite of Nelly urging her not to, she accepts Mr Heathcliff’s invitation to rest a while at Wuthering Heights. She initiates her correspondence with Linton, which leads to her being imprisoned. She accepts the terms of Mr Heathcliff’s blackmail: ‘Why should you wish to force me to do what I’ll willingly do of myself?’ (p. 274). And her ‘release’ from Mr Heathcliff’s tyranny coincides with her making her peace with Hareton. In other words, perhaps surprisingly, Catherine is far more of an agent in the novel than Cathy. If Cathy’s history, being predetermined, has the characteristics of myth, Catherine’s history resembles a Bildungsroman. It begins with a brief account of her early childhood, concentrates on the crucial episodes in her adolescence, climaxes with her being kidnapped by Mr Heathcliff, and ends with her engagement to Hareton. In other words, it tells the story of how a lively young woman from Thrushcross Grange is drawn to Wuthering Heights, where she finds herself imprisoned in a house that very quickly becomes hateful to her. Her physical imprisonment is a representation of the debilitating psychological impasse in which she finds herself. And we note that the novel (process?) comes to its tentative resolution only when she finally secures her release from the ‘oppression past explaining’ from which she suffers. If the first part of her history may be regarded as a failed ‘education’, the last part implies that something has been learned: it remains to define what this is.

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In spite of its realistic trappings, however, Catherine’s history is not a Bildungsroman. For it has no more to do with the ‘outer’ world than the history of her mother. As we shall see, it illustrates a dilemma between conflicting aspects of her ‘inner’ world. And it too is predetermined: for the first part must end with her imprisonment, since this is her situation in November 1801, when Lockwood calls on his landlord. In this section of my argument, my contention is that although the events of Catherine’s history reflect an inner world, the world in question lies ‘closer’ to consciousness than that depicted in the earlier generation. In other words, they belong to the personal unconscious. Catherine: Between Cousins and Fathers Far and away the most persuasive reason for regarding Catherine as the effective protagonist is provided by the novel’s evident symmetries. The first-generation events are straightforward when compared to those in the second generation. Cathy’s history is very highly charged, utterly unforgettable, but essentially uncomplicated: a young woman marries, but remains strongly, perhaps over-strongly attached to a childhood companion. That is all. Catherine’s history may be considerably less memorable, but is (as we shall see) considerably more complex. Moreover, and this cannot be sufficiently emphasized, the tightly knit symmetrical patterns at the heart of this novel pertain to her. The most important characters in her history fall into two categories: the cousins and the father-figures. And how one reads this novel depends in large part on the value one accords these four figures. Hareton is Catherine’s cousin on her mother’s side and he is the rightful owner of Wuthering Heights. As we have already indicated, he is also her animus. Catherine and Hareton have identical eyes (pp. 194, 322) and, even more suggestively, they are equally devoted to their father: Catherine to Mr Linton; Hareton to Mr Heathcliff, his ‘Devil daddy’ (p. 109, cf. p. 321). The ignorance of other men in which Catherine’s father keeps her corresponds to the ignorance in which Mr Heathcliff keeps Hareton (p. 219). It is towards Wuthering Heights that Catherine is drawn from the time she enters puberty. Her story begins at age thirteen, when she rudely rebuffs Hareton, and it ends when she finally acknowledges him as her cousin and they become engaged. At the outset of the novel, both have been cheated of their homes by Mr Heathcliff; the novel ends when they recover their respective ancestral properties. Linton Heathcliff is Catherine’s cousin on her father’s side. In spite of her father’s disapproval, Nelly’s disapproval, and his own disagreeable character, it is to him that she is drawn from the moment she meets him.

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It is to compel her to marry him that Mr Heathcliff kidnaps her, and the period of her ‘imprisonment’ corresponds to the time she spends as ‘Mrs Linton Heathcliff’: this is her title at both the outset of the novel (in November 1801) and at the end (in September 1802). She is Mrs Linton Heathcliff from beginning to end of the novel. To understand Linton’s role in the events, one must recall his parentage. He is the child of Isabella and Mr Heathcliff; that is, of a young woman who ‘belongs’ at Thrushcross Grange and an ‘interloper’ in the house towards which she is irrationally and compulsively drawn. We have already noted that, prior to meeting Mr Heathcliff, Isabella is a charming, even if infantile young lady of eighteen (p. 100). But as soon as she becomes infatuated with Mr Heathcliff, her character undergoes a change. Nelly says: We had all remarked . . . that Miss Linton fretted and pined over something. She grew cross and wearisome, snapping at and teasing [Cathy] continually, at the imminent risk of exhausting her limited patience. We excused her to a certain extent, on the plea of ill health – she was dwindling and fading before our eyes – But, one day when she had been peculiarly wayward, rejecting her breakfast, complaining that the servants did not do what she told them; that the mistress would allow her to be nothing in the house, and Edgar neglecting her; that she had caught a cold with the doors being left open, and we let the parlour fire go out on purpose to vex her; with a hundred yet more frivolous accusations. (pp. 100–101)

The behaviour Isabella begins to evince after being drawn to Mr Heathcliff very obviously anticipates Linton’s character. For example, when Catherine visits him to explain why she has had to put an end to their correspondence, Linton acts very much as her mother did when she was enamoured of Mr Heathcliff: ‘I can’t speak to you,’ he murmured, ‘you’ve hurt me so, that I shall lie awake all night, choking with this cough! If you had it you’d know what it was – but you’ll be comfortably asleep, while I’m in agony – and nobody near me! I wonder how you would like to pass those fearful nights!’ And he began to wail aloud, for very pity of himself. (p. 240) ‘Will you shut the door, if you please? you left it open – and those – those detestable creatures won’t bring coals to the fire. It’s so cold!’ (p. 237) ‘I want to drink,’ he exclaimed, fretfully, turning away. ‘Zillah is constantly gadding off to Gimmerton since papa went. It’s miserable! And I’m obliged to come down here – they resolved never to hear me up-stairs.’ (p. 237)

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Linton thus personifies a young woman’s sickly and misplaced infatuation with ‘Mr Heathcliff’ (cf. p. 150). And the relation of this to Catherine is evident. Catherine also ‘belongs’ at Thrushcross Grange and she too is irrationally drawn towards Wuthering Heights. She too is normally a likeable girl (pp. 188, 213), but when her ‘petted will’ is crossed, she becomes cross and wearisome, snaps at those around her, and complains of them not doing her bidding (cf. ‘Mustn’t he be made to do as I ask him?’ p. 194). And very shortly before the opening scenes of the novel, Catherine also prefers to stay in an upstairs room at Wuthering Heights, and would never have condescended to speak with the other residents of Wuthering Heights were it not for the cold (see page 234). The implications are evident: Linton also personifies Catherine’s least attractive characteristics. Catherine’s father – and the centre of her world – is Edgar. She looks like him, he dotes on her, and her history stems from her overattachment to him. An important proviso, however, must be made. At a literal level of presentation, he is her biological father. But as the events unfold, it becomes increasingly clear that it would be more accurate to describe him as an archetypal image of a ‘benign’ father. The other father figure in her life is Mr Heathcliff. After his three-year absence, Mr Heathcliff returns to the vicinity of Gimmerton in September 1783. Catherine is born on the night of 19–20 March 1784. As she is ‘a puny, seven months’ child’ (p. 164), the events following his return correspond to Cathy’s pregnancy. There is no textual evidence for the view that Mr Heathcliff might be Catherine’s biological father, but he is a father of a kind. The coincidence of the time period covered by the events in the second part of Nelly’s story is significant. Mr Heathcliff is Cathy’s dominant interest throughout her pregnancy. And the metaphorical relationship between Catherine and Mr Heathcliff is further underlined when he kidnaps her, and tells her: ‘I shall be your father to-morrow – all the father you’ll have in a few days’ (p. 271). And after Edgar’s funeral, even Nelly refers to him as Catherine’s ‘new father’ (p. 291; see Kavanagh, 1985, pp. 71–86). There are therefore two ‘fathers’ in this section of the novel. Mr Linton is not only Catherine’s father in a literal sense; he is also an image of an indulgent father, contrasted in her imagination with Mr Heathcliff, an image of a tyrannical father. Edgar Linton is fair-haired and indulgent; Heathcliff, dark haired and tyrannical. The importance of their psychological implications is suggested not only by their polarization, but also by the dynamics of Catherine’s relation with them. As we shall see, the more she clings to her biological father (a ‘light’ father), the more she is drawn towards Mr Heathcliff (a ‘dark’ counterpart).

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My contention is that the ‘main plot’ of Wuthering Heights – which somewhat unusually is not revealed until the second half of the novel – explores the consequences of Catherine’s over-attachment to a benign father. The Anamnesis We have seen how the first half of Nelly’s story can be regarded as a myth: that is, an archetypal representation of what Catherine might/must do if she is to escape from her situation in November 1801. And we predicated the two following, and contradictory movements: . .

A movement from Wuthering Heights to Thrushcross Grange, which reflects the challenge facing Catherine in November 1801, and A movement from Thrushcross Grange to Wuthering Heights, which explains why Catherine is unable to rise to this challenge.

But Cathy’s history is not Catherine’s history. No matter how much we insist that it represents a challenge facing Catherine, we need to know how Catherine herself came to be brutally kidnapped by Mr Heathcliff. This is the story we shall now explore. And as we shall see, Catherine’s history is a great deal more ambivalent than is usually recognized. Catherine’s history has two aspects, each of which corresponds to a different definition of anamnesis. In its literal sense (horizontal movement), the story of the key events in Catherine’s childhood provide a ‘history’ of the condition in which Catherine finds herself in November 1801. In other words, the narrative account of these events constitutes an anamnesis in its clinical sense. It explains how the effective protagonist came to be imprisoned in an alien masculine household: that is, how her over-attachment to a ‘benign’ father unwittingly leads her into the clutches of a ‘tyrannical’ father and, from there, into the psychological impasse in which Lockwood discovers her. In the previous sections, we noted how the two parts of a mythic structure are often self-reflexive. Paradoxical though it might seem, there exist such startling parallels between the story that moves from Wuthering Heights to Thrushcross Grange and the story that moves from Thrushcross Grange to Wuthering Heights that they must be considered as a single, albeit highly complex pattern.

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The Anamnesis and its Archetypal Amplification In an article published in 1955, Le´vi-Strauss raised the question: ‘What if patterns showing affinity, instead of being considered in succession, were to be treated as one complex pattern and read as a whole?’ (p. 212). The ideas he went on to outline in Structural Anthropology were to have a short-lived but significant impact on literary criticism. Nevertheless, in spite of the close affinity between the two stories in Wuthering Heights, the novel has never been subjected to a rigorous analysis in this light. This essay seeks to demonstrate that such an approach is particularly appropriate to Emily Bronte¨’s novel. Instead of assessing its two plots as belonging only to a chronological continuum, I shall look at them as composed of discrete units related not only ‘horizontally’ but also ‘vertically’. C.P. Sanger was the first to establish the coherence of the novel’s chronology; others have fine-tuned but not essentially challenged his findings (Sanger, 1926; Clay, 1952; Power, 1973; Daley, 1995). All the dates and ages to which I shall refer are borrowed from their conclusions. A comparison of the episodes in each generation reveals that they take place at similar intervals. And this, of course, is suggestive. Catherine is thirteen when she discovers Wuthering Heights, she is sixteen when she meets Mr Heathcliff for the first time, and she will be just short of nineteen when she marries Hareton. Cathy Earnshaw is twelve when she goes to Thrushcross Grange for the first time, she is fifteen on the day when she becomes engaged to Edgar and Heathcliff disappears, and she is just short of eighteen when she marries Edgar. The intervals are identical, but the ages are not. And yet this latter difference is not as great as one might think. Although we do not know the date of Heathcliff’s birth, he is about one year older than Cathy. This implies that the most significant events in the two histories occur when Catherine and Heathcliff are more or less exactly the same ages. When Catherine is thirteen years and three months, she discovers Wuthering Heights; when Heathcliff is about the same age, he leads Cathy to Thrushcross Grange. On Catherine’s sixteenth birthday, she meets Mr Heathcliff for the first time; when the young Heathcliff is sixteen, he disappears from Cathy’s life. Catherine will be eighteen years and nine months when she marries Hareton, which is very close to Heathcliff’s age when Cathy marries Edgar. This raises an obvious question: why should the main events of Catherine’s history correspond with the main events of Cathy’s ‘history’, but at Heathcliff’s age?

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Cathy’s history has to do with a part of a woman’s personality that is not an aspect of her own female identity so much as an aspect of her personality that reflects her relationship with the world of masculinity. Everything that takes place at Wuthering Heights has to do with Catherine’s animus, her multiple image of men. Heathcliff is the ‘interloper’ into this structure that is responsible for all the events depicted in the novel. Cathy’s history is thus an archetypal amplification of a part of the story of Catherine’s problematic relationship with her animus. And this problem stems not from her authentic animus (Hareton), but from Heathcliff, the interloper. This is why the events in the earlier generation occur at Heathcliff’s age: because he is the factor that indicates the nature of Catherine’s problem with the animus. But because Wuthering Heights was written by a woman, the protagonist of the early events must be female. Hence, not only the curious parallel between Catherine’s and Cathy-at-Heathcliff’s age, but also the essential ‘identity’ of Cathy and Heathcliff (‘I am Heathcliff’). As many have noted, the distinguishing feature of Wuthering Heights is the way in which its various narrative levels relate to one another (for example, Pykett, 1989, p. 78). In the following pages, I argue that the two histories ‘mirror’ each other even more closely than has been recognized to date. And the easiest way in which to demonstrate this is to superimpose them (see Figure 3.4). I place Catherine’s history above Cathy’s history partly because Catherine is the effective protagonist and partly because her story is a kind of Bildungsroman. In contrast, Cathy’s history, which has an archetypal power and simplicity that suggests it pertains to a ‘deeper’ level of experience, is a kind of myth. The diagram makes the point. So closely do the two stories correspond to one another that one must wonder whether they are not more tightly interconnected than is usually realized. Indeed, as we shall see, the parallels between the events in each generation are truly startling.

Figure 3.4

Parallel Histories

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An anamnesis, we remember, also means a recollection of ‘a supposed previous existence’ (OED). In the third section of this essay, we looked at the early events in Cathy’s history and related them to Catherine’s situation in November 1801. Catherine is ‘stalled’: the unconscious suggests a possible way out of the predicament in which she finds herself. We described this narrative (Cathy’s history) as a myth whose function is to urge Catherine to discover a reason to escape from the ‘oppression past explaining’ in which she finds herself. But this novel is endlessly, and unnervingly ambivalent. There is another – and utterly unexpected – way of reading the events in the distant past. It is to consider them as the recollection of ‘a supposed previous existence’; that is, as an archetypal representation of the main events in Catherine’s history. This chapter takes a close look at the main events of Catherine’s history and notes the startling analogies with the corresponding events in Cathy’s history. It argues that the events in Cathy’s childhood constitute an archetypal amplification of the most significant episodes in Catherine’s childhood, especially of the implications underlying her attitudes and behaviour at crucial moments in her development. My aim is to demonstrate that the two apparently contradictory movements we have identified reflect different tendencies of the same process. In other words, the novel rests on the tension between narrative as an expression of ‘horizontal repetition’ and narrative as an expression of ‘vertical correspondence’. Wuthering Heights is not – or at least, not only – a ‘dynastic novel’ in the same sense, for example, as the Forsyte Saga, in which the decisions of the older generation determine the lives of the younger. It is also a projection of a psychological process in which the dilemma of the effective protagonist determines the lives of her parents. Thus, paradoxical as this may seem, my contention is that the alternately mawkish and disturbing experiences of Catherine’s childhood determine the events and relationships in the earlier generation. It is an unusual argument, but one for which the evidence is overwhelming. A Perverse Will (a)

The Anamnesis

If one wants only a causal explanation of Catherine’s later difficulties, it is not hard to come by. Everything that happens to her is a direct result of her secluded upbringing: Till she reached the age of thirteen, she had not once been beyond the range of the park by herself. Mr Linton would take her with him a mile or so outside, on rare occasions; but he trusted her to no one else. Gimmerton was an unsubstantial name in her ears; the chapel,

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the only building she had approached or entered, except her own home; Wuthering Heights and Mr Heathcliff did not exist for her; she was a perfect recluse; and, apparently, perfectly contented. (pp. 188–9)

In other words, she grows up in almost total isolation. And we learn almost nothing about her early years, except that Edgar . . . took her education entirely on himself, and made it an amusement: fortunately, curiosity and a quick intellect urged her into an apt scholar; she learnt rapidly and eagerly, and did honour to his teaching. (p. 188)

And yet it is a happy childhood. Catherine is described as ‘the most winning thing that ever brought sunshine into a desolate house’. As a child, she is ‘always ‘‘love,’’ and ‘‘darling,’’ and ‘‘queen,’’ and ‘‘angel,’’ with everybody at the Grange’ (p. 197). And we note two further facts about her childhood. First, that in the corresponding period in the first generation, Wuthering Heights is also a happy home. And secondly, that these years are the ‘happiest’ time in Nelly’s life. Nevertheless, even in Nelly’s choice of words, there is an indication that all is not quite what it seems. She describes Catherine as ‘apparently, perfectly contented’. Nelly goes on to tell Lockwood that before her charge ‘could stammer a word or totter a step, [she] wielded a despot’s sceptre in [her father’s] heart’ (p. 183; cf. pp. 188, 197). He spoils her and, as a result, Nelly concedes, ‘it must be acknowledged, she had faults to foil her gifts’: A propensity to be saucy was one; and a perverse will that indulged children invariably acquire . . . If a servant chanced to vex her, it was always: ‘I shall tell papa!’ And if [her father] reproved her, even by a look, you would have thought it a heart-breaking business. (p. 188)

Catherine is the kind of girl who expects her father to castigate anyone who does not jump to her every whim (p. 188, cf. p. 194). The parallel with her mother’s tendency to wield a whip is evident. One recalls Jung’s view that a father can unwittingly develop one aspect of his daughter’s character at the expense of others: . . . the father exerts his influence on the mind or spirit of his daughter – on her ‘Logos’. This he does by increasing her intellectuality, often to a pathological degree which in my later writings I have described as ‘animus possession’. (CW 5: 272)

The wording is clumsy to the point of being offensive. Today, no one can countenance the argument that ‘intellectuality’ is a potentially dangerous thing for a woman. But Jung was a man of his time, not ours. His

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language is often tactless. But there may be a germ of truth in what he writes. Let us not be distracted by the possible dangers of ‘intellectuality’. The question begged by Jung’s claim is whether there might be a connection between Catherine’s behavioural tendencies in childhood and her later predicament. Certainly, Catherine grows up without a mother, and possibly over-attached to a father who dotes on her and is, we must remember, her only teacher. And we have already defined the situation in which she finds herself in November 1801 as an expression of animus possession. As a child, Catherine is not only ‘curious’ but also has a ‘quick intellect’. While still a child, she begins to express a desire to know what lies beyond Thrushcross Park. And as she approaches puberty, she becomes increasingly interested in Penistone Craggs. She asks Nelly: ‘And what are those golden rocks like, when you stand under them?’ she once asked. The abrupt descent of Penistone Craggs particularly attracted her notice, especially when the setting sun shone on it and the topmost Heights, and the whole extent of landscape besides lay in shadow. I explained that they were bare masses of stone, with hardly enough earth in their clefts to nourish a stunted tree. ‘And why are they bright so long after it is evening here?’ she pursued. ‘Because they are a great deal higher up than we are,’ replied I; ‘you could not climb them, they are too high and steep. In winter the frost is always there before it comes to us; and, deep into summer, I have found snow under that black hollow on the north-east side!’ ‘Oh, you have been on them!’ she cried gleefully. ‘Then I can go, too, when I am a woman.’ (p. 189)

Heights are always suggestive. From very early times, human beings have identified regions of height with ‘spirit’. The word of God – the Logos – was given to Moses on Mount Sinai (Exodus 19 ff.) and, in ancient Greece, the gods lived on Mount Olympos. And just as many gods have both a ‘light’ and a ‘dark’ aspect, so too do Penistone Craggs. And we have already noted that the two father-figures can be similarly defined. It has long been acknowledged that Catherine’s biological father, Edgar, might correspond to the ‘light’ aspect of the Craggs toward which she is drawn and Mr Heathcliff to the ‘dark’ aspect, its inevitable shadow. Indeed, Nelly’s description invites this parallel. For the juxtaposition of ‘bare masses of stone’ (¼ heath) and ‘abrupt descent’ (¼ cliff) compose Heathcliff’s name. Could it be that Edgar’s influence (‘light’) is thus unwittingly responsible for Catherine’s yearning to explore a peak that is suggestive of Mr Heathcliff (‘shadow’, ‘frost’)? Could it be that Mr Heathcliff personifies the attraction that the unexplored shadow side of

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spiritual heights (that is, the shadow side of ideas instinctively associated with her benign, biological father) have for a girl as she enters puberty? Nelly tries to dissuade Catherine from pursuing her interest in the outside world. She tells her that the moors on which she sometimes wanders with her father are ‘much nicer; and Thrushcross Park is the finest place in the world’. To which Catherine replies: ‘But I know the park, and I don’t know those,’ she murmured to herself. ‘And I should delight to look round me from the brow of that tallest point – my little pony, Minny, shall take me some time.’ (p. 189)

Interestingly, the metaphor of spirit is continued in Catherine’s reflection. For she imagines going to Penistone Craggs on a pony, and a pony is also suggestive of instinctual ‘spirit’ (Jung, CW 5: 422). And repeated references to Minny suggest the importance that Minny has for Catherine (pp. 194, 204, 210, 235, etc.). In other words, as a young girl, she is compulsively drawn in the direction of Wuthering Heights, not because she is attracted to it (at this stage, she does not even know of its existence), but because, like a moth to a candle, she is attracted by the ‘light’ that shines on the Craggs that lie beyond it. She is drawn there by an instinctive attraction. Her curiosity about the neighbouring peaks would thus appear to anticipate the dilemma in which she later finds herself. But the crucial issue here is whether there exists a link between an excessive paternal influence on a young woman and later behavioural tendencies. The facts are that Catherine grows up in total isolation, her father spoils her, and her ‘perverse will’ is associated with an image of her father: ‘If a servant chanced to vex her, it was always: ‘‘I shall tell papa!’’ ’ It is no coincidence that we meet all of these elements in the corresponding events in the first generation. Catherine and the young Heathcliff grow up in similar isolation, they hold a comparable sway over their respective households, they both have a ‘perverse will’ and they each achieve what they want by threatening others with telling a father. All of which strongly suggests that the earlier events may be read as an archetypal amplification of the significance of Catherine’s anamnesis. (b)

Archetypal Amplification

Heathcliff is brought to Wuthering Heights when he is about seven. There is no reference to either him or Cathy going anywhere except to ‘church’ (p. 48). In other words, like Catherine, they too live in virtual isolation. Their behaviour also corresponds to Catherine’s. Cathy has a

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similar tendency to be saucy. For example, when Mr Earnshaw asks ‘Why canst thou not always be a good lass, Cathy?’ she replies ‘Why cannot you always be a good man, father?’ (p. 41). Just as Catherine’s father spoils her, all three children at Wuthering Heights in the first generation reveal a propensity to get their own way. In play, Cathy ‘liked, exceedingly, to act the little mistress; using her hands freely, and commanding her companions’ (p. 40). And she never frees herself of this tendency: even after marrying Edgar, she wants him and Isabella to ‘anticipate’ all her desires (p. 98). Catherine has ‘a perverse will that indulged children invariably acquire’. In the myth, Mr Earnshaw takes to Heathcliff ‘strangely, petting him up far above Cathy, who was too mischievous and wayward for a favourite’ (p. 36). As a result, the young Heathcliff ‘had only to speak and all the house would be obliged to bend to his wishes’ (p. 37). This allows him to develop a perverse will that is disturbingly similar to Catherine’s. Interestingly, his perverse will is best illustrated in his quarrel with Hindley over the colts that Mr Earnshaw buys them: Heathcliff took the handsomest, but it soon fell lame, and when he discovered it, he said to Hindley, ‘You must exchange horses with me; I don’t like mine, and if you won’t I shall tell your father of the three thrashings you’ve given me this week.’ (p. 37)

In other words, he too expects a father figure to castigate anyone who does not fall in with his whims. And Hindley, who is seven years older, gives way. The motif of hostile brothers appears here in its simplest form: the older boy’s tyranny stems from his fear lest the younger boy expose his absence of vitality and merit (cf. Jung, CW 5: 422). That this is so is underlined, for it is immediately after this episode that Mr Earnshaw describes his son as ‘naught’ (p. 39). In other words, the interloper is in effect blackmailing the rightful heir of Wuthering Heights to renounce his primogeniture. The consequences are horrendous and almost immediate. For as soon as his father dies, Hindley, who may be lacklustre but is basically good (see Nelly’s comments, pp. 109, 184), becomes a tyrant, almost equally determined to get his way. This quarrel over a colt (in the ‘myth’) occurs when Heathcliff is the same age as Catherine is (in the main plot) when she loves to ride her pony. The coincidence suggests that there is a deep-rooted inadequacy in her animus, an inadequacy of which a ‘perverse’ interloper is taking every advantage. And this inadequacy stems from the foibles of an overtolerant father (Edgar; cf. old Mr Earnshaw). The parallels between these otherwise very different events strongly suggest that the tendencies of the three children in the earlier generation

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constitute an archetypal amplification of Catherine’s character at a corresponding age. Cathy’s tendency to ‘act the little mistress’ is a vivid representation of the implications of Catherine’s attitude towards her father’s servants. Heathcliff’s ‘perverse will’ is an archetypal representation of a deep-rooted tendency in Catherine’s character (cf. pp. 188, 37). And Hindley’s bullying illustrates the nature and implications of her always telling her father whenever a servant displeases her. That all three children in the first generation should behave in a way that corresponds to defining aspects of Catherine’s personality suggests that they personify various tendencies that she has developed as a result of her isolated upbringing and her strong attachment to her father. The conclusion is inescapable: Heathcliff’s appearance at Wuthering Heights is an archetypal amplification of the tendency in Catherine’s personality that will eventually lead her to her imprisonment there by Mr Heathcliff. There is a sense in which Moser is right when he says that Heathliff is ‘essentially anthropomorphized primitive energy’ (1962, p. 4), but this energy is not his. It pertains to Catherine, the novel’s effective protagonist. The dilemma in which she finds herself in the ‘present’ stems from her readiness to exercise her ‘perverse will’ as a child – even to ‘acknowledge’ it as hers (cf. Medoro, 1996) – rather than compel herself to come to terms with it. In short, the novel begins with the arrival of the child Heathcliff, who personifies the origin of the problem that the tyrannical Mr Heathcliff represents for Catherine in ‘1801’. How then can we best define Cathy? Cathy has two aspects to her: on the one hand, she is an embodiment of Catherine’s girlhood energy; on the other, she is an archetypal representation of that aspect of Catherine’s personality that ties her to her dark father-in-law. As such, she is a carrier of an aspect of the dilemma that faces Catherine, who is ‘imprisoned’ by an ‘interloper’ in the animus-structure. The events in the archetypal myth must tell Cathy’s history (this is a woman’s novel), but at Heathcliff’s age (the dilemma facing her has to do with a problem he personifies). An analysis of the subsequent events in each generation substantiates this contention. The Discovery of the Contrasexual Other (a)

The Anamnesis

As long as her father is at hand, Catherine is content to postpone her exploration of what lies beyond Thrushcross Park. Shortly after her thirteenth birthday, Edgar has to go and tend his sister Isabella at her death and to take charge of her son, Linton. It is the first time that he has

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left Catherine alone. As soon as he withdraws, she becomes restless. Nelly says: . . . the first day or two, my charge sat in a corner of the library, too sad for either reading or playing: in that quiet state she caused me little trouble; but it was succeeded by an interval of impatient, fretful weariness. (p. 190)

It is to distract Catherine from this state of irritability that Nelly proposes that she play at ‘travels round the grounds’, in the course of which Catherine one day breaks bounds. On her first adventure outside her own ego-structure, Catherine is mounted on her galloway pony with ‘a hazel switch’ – reminiscent of her mother’s whip – which she orders a labourer to cut for her immediately before leaving her father’s land. Accompanied by her dogs, she rides out ‘to cross the Desert’ (p. 191). This is an extraordinary image to find here. The biblical implication is that Penistone Craggs represents a ‘promised land’: nothing could more clearly indicate how deeply rooted Catherine’s problem is. Even as a child, she is drawn compulsively, unwittingly toward Wuthering Heights, which is already firmly in the hands of a tyrannical interloper. As she approaches the building, her pointers are attacked by Hareton’s dogs and are left ‘limping, and hanging their heads’ from the fray. Once again, we note how the dogs provide a clue to the significance of the encounter: an instinctual aspect of the animus is endeavouring to prevent a personification of the effective protagonist as a child from drawing any closer to Wuthering Heights. Hareton is a ‘great, strong lad of eighteen’ whose mind (animus) has never been developed. His physical appearance suggests his potential worth; his intellectual ignorance mirrors Catherine’s complete ignorance of the world of men. Edgar has never allowed her to meet any other man and, as a result, her animus is a social clown utterly dominated by a tyrannical father. In other words, Hareton’s subjugation to Mr Heathcliff represents the unintentional effect that Edgar has had on an important aspect of Catherine’s maturation. He has prevented her from gradually developing an appropriate image of the world of men. She cannot conceive of any other order of things than that instilled in her by her father. In contrast with his dogs, Hareton is not at all hostile: indeed, he is happy to show her what she has come to see. When Nelly catches up with Catherine, she finds her with Hareton ‘perfectly at home’ at Wuthering Heights, ‘laughing and chattering, in the best of spirits imaginable’ (p. 192). This well-being results from Catherine’s willingness to submit herself to learn what this neighbour of hers – who,

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apart from her father, is also the first man she has ever met (the parallel with Cathy and Edgar needs no insistence) – can teach her. Their chatter consists in ‘questions which her tongue never ceased pouring forth’ (p. 192). And as long as she regards her animus as a ‘guide’ – he opens ‘the mysteries of the Fairy cave’ for her (p. 197) – their relation, if somewhat unsophisticated, is none the less harmonious. Their enjoyment, however, is interrupted by Nelly, who unwittingly draws attention to the fact that Hareton is not – as Catherine had supposed – the master’s son. Catherine is indignant that he did not make his station plain. As soon as she thinks she has been conversing with an inferior, she behaves like a spoiled brat. She tries ordering him as if he were a servant. But as soon as she does so, the harmony they were enjoying is disrupted. Hareton refuses to do her bidding. ‘Mustn’t he be made to do as I ask him?’ she asks Nelly, before rounding on Hareton again. ‘You wicked creature, I shall tell papa what you said! – Now then!’ (p. 194). When Hareton takes no notice of her threat, tears spring into her eyes. Next she learns that her companion is her cousin. She cannot bear such a thought, and scorns all relation with him: ‘He’s not, he’s not my cousin, Ellen!’ (p. 195). She is ‘upset at the bare notion of relationship with such a clown’ (p. 195, cf. p. 222). She only wants to be related to her cousin on her father’s side. And in the course of her peevish outburst, she lets slip that her father has gone to fetch her ‘real’ cousin from London (p. 199): my cousin, she tells him, ‘is a gentleman’s son’ (p. 195). She bursts into tears and returns home in a sulk. In psychoanalytic terms, her response suggests that she wishes to ‘repress’ Hareton, and that Linton corresponds to a ‘wish-fulfilment’; that is, she has an unconscious desire to meet a cousin who resembles her father. Her ‘peevish’ behaviour towards Hareton is followed almost immediately by the appearance in her life of a ‘peevish’ cousin who is the child of Isabella and Mr Heathcliff; that is, the child of a young woman who ‘belongs’ at Thrushcross Grange (as does Catherine) and an ‘interloper’ in the house towards which she is being compulsively drawn. And we note the resemblance. Catherine has the same ‘sparkling spirit’ as her aunt. She too is irrationally drawn towards Wuthering Heights. And when her ‘petted will’ is crossed, she gets as angry and wearisome as Isabella. In other words, Catherine behaves not only like Isabella, but also like Linton, which implies that he personifies her least attractive tendencies. And all of these stem from her having been spoiled by her father. Catherine is not the least upset to learn of the death of an aunt whom she never met. But she runs ‘wild with joy’ at the thought of being once more reunited with her father and her ‘real’ cousin. Nelly describes Linton as:

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A pale, delicate, effeminate boy, who might have been taken for my master’s younger brother, so strong was the resemblance, but there was a sickly peevishness in his aspect that Edgar Linton never had. (p. 200)

In other words, Catherine is instinctively drawn towards Linton because he strongly resembles her father. She does not understand that his ‘sickly peevishness’ is a projection of her own undeveloped relationship with masculinity. Just as Edgar has kept Catherine in total ignorance of other men, so Heathcliff has prevented Hareton from developing any social graces. And because Catherine is over-attached to her father, she finds herself irrationally drawn towards not her authentic animus (Hareton), but a cousin who both resembles her father and personifies the peevish disposition she has developed as a result of her over-attachment. The evening of Linton’s arrival, Heathcliff sends Joseph to inform Edgar that he wants to ‘hev his lad’ (p. 203). The following morning, Nelly takes Linton to Wuthering Heights. In literal terms, this makes little sense: Heathcliff has no more interest in Linton than he had in Isabella. But in psychological terms, it has an evident logic. Linton personifies Catherine’s nascent problem with her animus. As such, he does not belong at Thrushcross Grange (the ego-structure); he belongs at Wuthering Heights (the animus-structure), for he embodies his mother’s ‘mad infatuation’ with an interloper in the animus. And yet, on seeing his son for the first time, Heathcliff utters a scornful laugh: ‘Oh, damn my soul! But that’s worse than I expected – and the devil knows I was not sanguine! . . . Thou art thy mother’s child, entirely! Where is my share in thee, puling chicken?’ (p. 207; cf. p. 256)

What he sees is the embodiment of what he regards as Isabella’s ‘puling’ behaviour. And as Isabella is an archetypal representative of an aspect of Catherine’s ego, Joseph comes uncannily close to the mark when he remarks: ‘Surely . . . he’s swopped wi’ ye, maister, an’ yon’s his lass!’ By reclaiming Linton, Mr Heathcliff has, in effect, secured a major part of Catherine’s personality. And we remember that her title is ‘Mrs Linton Heathcliff’ from beginning to end of the novel. Just as Cathy ‘is’ Heathcliff, so Catherine ‘is’ Linton. As a result of her over-attachment to her father, she becomes the sickly image of masculinity that she has in her ‘mind’. And it is with the consequence of this that she must now deal. But first, let us illustrate how these crucial events are represented in the myth.

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Archetypal Amplification

Catherine discovers Wuthering Heights when she is exactly the same age as Heathcliff when he leads Cathy to Thrushcross Grange for the first time. The parallels between the two forbidden expeditions are extraordinary. In the first place, one notes that neither protagonist takes any great initiative in her first major expedition outside her known world. Something happens to trigger the event: just as the combination of Edgar’s absence and Nelly’s well-intentioned suggestion leads Catherine toward Wuthering Heights, so the combination of Hindley’s tyranny and Heathcliff’s prompting leads Cathy to Thrushcross Grange. Heathcliff is thirteen when, to get away from Hindley for a few hours, he suggests to Cathy that they go and see how the Lintons spend their Sunday evenings. They peer through the windows of Thrushcross Grange, greatly attracted by the house: ‘ah! it was beautiful . . . We should have thought ourselves in heaven!’ (p. 46), but scornful of its inhabitants: ‘The idiots! . . . We laughed outright at the petted things, we did despise them!’ They are heard and dragged inside, where the Lintons stare at the two young intruders. Heathcliff is rudely dismissed, but not Cathy. When Heathcliff looks through the window again, he notes that she seems already to have forgotten him. He finally leaves her ‘as merry as she could be . . . kindling a spark of spirit in the vacant blue eyes of the Lintons . . . I saw they were full of stupid admiration’ (p. 49). Cathy’s pleasure thus stems from her willingness to see what these new acquaintances will do for her. And note that this does not irritate Heathcliff, or make him jealous. Apart from her father and the Grange servants, Hareton is the first man whom Catherine has met. Other than Heathcliff, Edgar is the first young man whom Cathy has met. Both heroines are attracted to the house they discover, and are similarly scornful of its residents (Catherine of Hareton; Cathy of the Lintons). In spite of this, they both derive pleasure from the ‘curiosity’ and ‘stupid admiration’ that they arouse in Hareton and the Lintons respectively (pp. 192, 49). In both stories, the heroine’s happiness comes from her readiness to learn about a life different from her own. And crucially, Catherine’s rebuff of Hareton and preference for ‘a gentleman’s son’ corresponds to Cathy abandoning Heathcliff – the first time that she does so – in favour of Edgar, who is of course the ‘gentleman’ in question. We are not given very much indication of how Catherine felt on returning home after her expedition to Wuthering Heights. But we are given a vivid description of an ensuing event in the ‘earlier’ generation.

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And it provides a striking indication of the significance of what is happening to Catherine at this crucial moment in her development. When Heathcliff and Cathy are dragged into the Grange drawingroom, Isabella is troubled by the ‘boy’. She describes him to her father: ‘Frightful thing! Put him in the cellar, papa’ (p. 48). Isabella, we remember, is a female representative of a woman’s ego-structure, which makes her remark unusually significant. For it suggests (not very surprisingly) that it is a part of Catherine’s ego that seeks to ‘repress’ Heathcliff. And there is a curious echo of this incident five weeks later, when Edgar and Isabella spend Christmas Day at Wuthering Heights. Although Heathcliff has promised to be good, Hindley quickly turns on him and confines him to the garret (pp. 57–9). We note that on both occasions, his best friend Cathy remains in Edgar’s company. In other words, just as Catherine turns her back on Hareton because she wants an alliance with a cousin who looks like her father, so Isabella promotes the expulsion of Heathcliff and tacitly consents to the development of Cathy’s relationship with Edgar. It has been argued that social class is an important issue in the relationships in this novel (for example, by Kettle, 1967, pp. 130–45; Eagleton, 1975) and there is some justification for this view (see p. 208). Catherine does indeed emphasize that her cousin is ‘a gentleman’s son’ (p. 195). But the fact that the cousin in question looks so astonishingly like Edgar must make us wonder whether the determining factor is not psychological rather than social. The coincidence cannot be fortuitous. Catherine expresses a desire to meet a cousin more like her father than Hareton at a moment that corresponds exactly with Cathy becoming attracted to Edgar who is, of course, Catherine’s father as a young man. The parallel strongly suggests that the scenes in the earlier generation constitute an archetypal amplification of Catherine’s rejection of Hareton and her growing interest in Linton, both of which stem from her over-attachment to her father. And the subsequent events in her history would seem to corroborate this. An Unnatural Isolation (a)

The Anamnesis

If Catherine’s history can be described as a Bildungsroman, we note a significant lacuna. We learn little or nothing about Catherine between the ages of thirteen and sixteen except that, during these crucial years in any young woman’s formation, she continues to live in total isolation. She appears to enjoy no social life of any kind during this time apart, of

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course, from her relation with her father. But she is no longer a child: it is time that she face up to the effect of her spoiled nature. (b)

Archetypal Amplification

Between the ages of thirteen and sixteen, Cathy and Heathcliff continue to live in almost complete isolation. But for the first time, a difference arises between them: for this is the time that Cathy begins to spend more and more time with Edgar. As a result, Heathcliff finds himself increasingly isolated at Wuthering Heights and he becomes careless of his education. We note the parallel with Catherine. For Catherine’s unnatural isolation between the ages of thirteen and sixteen corresponds, in the earlier generation, to Heathcliff’s gradual degradation and ‘almost idiotic excess of unsociable moroseness’ (p. 68). There is, however, one very significant event that occurs in the early generation during this period. About seven months after Cathy and Heathcliff discover Thrushcross Grange, Hareton is born and his mother (Frances) dies almost immediately after giving birth. We remember that Catherine is described as a ‘puny, seven months’ child’ (p. 164) and that Cathy dies, still in a coma, two hours after her birth. This parallel is suggestive, and draws our attention to others. Catherine is the child of a single-parent home. Her father dotes on her, but keeps her in such isolation that she is never able to develop a relationship with either a boy or a man from the social world. Instead, she develops an increasingly strong attachment to her father. Hareton’s mother also dies soon after childbirth. He too grows up in a single-parent home, but in his case, his father is a bully who dies when he is six years old. From which time, Mr Heathcliff takes over his education and Hareton becomes irrationally attached to him. Such parallels strongly suggest that the ignorance in which Hareton is kept by Mr Heathcliff is determined by the ignorance of the world of masculinity in which Catherine is kept by her father Edgar. And thus his irrational attachment to his ‘devil daddy’ mirrors her over-attachment to her father. And this, in turn, suggests the significance of Hareton’s birth. For we note that it is seven months after Catherine first meets Hareton (the first man she has met apart from her father) that, at an archetypal level of representation, her animus is born. This implies that meeting her animus in the Bildungsroman triggers the gestation and birth of her animus at an archetypal level of representation. But Hareton is not born into a happy home. The death of his mother Frances unhinges Hindley, who turns increasingly to drink. And as Hindley is the legitimate owner of Wuthering Heights at this time, this is significant. It suggests that the total isolation to which Edgar confines Catherine is doing her developing image of

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masculinity increasing harm. And she is fast approaching an age when she will have to face the consequences of her immaturity in this respect. The Age of Responsibility (a)

The Anamnesis

On her sixteenth birthday, Catherine wanders onto the moors in order to see whether the game birds have already built their nests. Before Nelly realizes it, they are closer to Wuthering Heights than she had intended, and Catherine finds herself confronted by Mr Heathcliff for the first time. The latter is quick to put the meeting to his purpose. He invites her to meet his ‘son’ and, although he asks Hareton to escort her, she hurries on to the house by herself and Hareton ‘vanishes’. The significance of this is evident. In everything else, Hareton obeys Heathcliff, but he will not help introduce the effective protagonist either into the animus-structure or to Linton. Catherine must enter Wuthering Heights of her own accord. Mr Heathcliff’s intention is to see if Catherine will fall in love with Linton ‘and get married’ to him. What this means in literal terms needs no clarification; but in psychological terms, it is by no means certain that his intention is malicious. For it might be argued that Mr Heathcliff’s function at this moment is to compel Catherine to confront the reality of her own tendencies. For only by doing so might she be brought to realize how misplaced her over-attachment to her father is. She does not immediately recognize her ‘real’ cousin. But as soon as they are told who the other is, ‘they gazed with wonder at the change time had wrought in the appearance of each’ (p. 216), whereupon Catherine kisses him fervently. She then challenges Heathcliff: ‘And you are my uncle, then!’ she cried, reaching up to salute him. ‘I thought I liked you, though you were cross, at first’ (p. 216; cf. the insistent ‘my uncle,’ p. 221). And before he can explain why he doesn’t visit the Grange, she has leaped up to kiss him too and formed a determination to visit Wuthering Heights ‘every morning in future’. When Heathcliff explains that it might be better not to mention her visit to her father, she retorts that she has ‘no share’ of the quarrel between him and her father. Heathcliff is utterly contemptuous of Linton’s ‘paltry’ behaviour. He tells Nelly how much he values Hareton, and even sends Catherine round the farm with him. And then turns to Nelly to boast of his achievement in having degraded Hareton more than Hindley was ever able to degrade him. But, whatever he might do to Hareton, he continues to recognize Hareton’s worth. He describes the difference between the two cousins: ‘one is gold put to the use of paving stones, and the other is tin polished to ape a service of silver’ (p. 219).

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What are we to make of his assertions and intentions? In literal terms, they are of course part of the revenge theme. But in psychological terms, they are far more interesting. For in psychological terms, the actions of a fictional character must always be read in relation to the effective protagonist. Hareton’s fondness for Heathcliff is simply a reflection of Catherine’s fondness for her father. And Heathcliff’s deliberate degradation of Hareton mirrors the effect of the complete ignorance of other men in which Edgar keeps Catherine. She has no desire to develop any allegiances not directly associated with her father. Heathcliff’s revenge is a powerful compensatory urge, whose ‘function’ is to make Catherine face the consequences of her misplaced attachment. That Heathcliff knows Hareton’s worth suggests that Catherine’s ‘dark’ father knows the value of her animus. But this is not enough. The question is: does she? As soon as Catherine discovers that Hareton is illiterate (p. 220), Linton is by her side, teasing his cousin and laughing for the first and last time in the novel. Instead of sending him packing, Catherine relishes ‘his pert and spiteful sayings, without considering the ill-nature they evinced’ (p. 221). And it need scarcely be added that his ill-nature reflects her pert and spiteful tendencies. Linton’s contempt of Hareton represents her own scorn of anyone who lacks the intellectual accomplishments that she owes to her father. The talent that she admires in him corresponds to her love of what Hareton derides as ‘book-larning’ (p. 220). When Catherine and Nelly return to Thrushcross Grange, Edgar tries to convince his daughter that Heathcliff has an ‘evil disposition’. He instances Heathcliff’s conduct towards Isabella (p. 223). But Catherine is ‘conversant with no bad deeds except her own slight acts of disobedience, injustice, and passion, arising from hot temper and thoughtlessness, and repented of on the day they were committed’. She is therefore shocked by her father’s tale. She is . . . amazed at the blackness of spirit that could brood on and cover revenge for years, and deliberately prosecute its plans without a visitation of remorse. She appeared so deeply impressed and shocked at this new view of human nature – excluded from all her studies and all her ideas till now – that Mr Edgar deemed it unnecessary to pursue the subject. He merely added: ‘You will know hereafter, darling, why I wish you to avoid his house and family; now return to your old employments and amusements, and think no more about them.’ (p. 223)

This is an extraordinary speech. Edgar is utterly unconscious that his own one-sided and peremptory explanation is as tyrannical as the behaviour of the man he detests. He is entirely unaware that his

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stranglehold on Catherine’s affections is beginning to do her serious harm. He projects culpability onto Heathcliff. As an archetypal image himself, he has no idea that Heathcliff has no existence except as another archetypal image that compensates his own possessive attitudes towards Catherine. He cannot see that by trying to cement Catherine’s loyalties to him, he is reinforcing the hold that Mr Heathcliff will one day exercise over her. (b)

Archetypal Amplification

The events on the days of Catherine’s sixteenth birthday and Cathy’s engagement to Edgar would seem to have little in common. There are, however, several striking and significant parallels between them. Heathcliff ‘had reached the age of sixteen’ (p. 67) when a succession of three ‘scenes’, which all occur on the same day, puts an end to his childhood at Wuthering Heights. Scene One: Taking advantage of Hindley’s absence, Heathcliff decides to spend the afternoon with Cathy only to discover that she has invited Edgar to call on her. Without thinking about what she is saying, Cathy reveals to Nelly her scorn of Heathcliff’s ignorance (p. 69). Edgar arrives at this moment. When Nelly makes it clear that she intends to keep an eye on her, Cathy pinches her and then denies it. Edgar intercedes and receives a slap for doing so. And yet, when he tells her that he will not call again, she threatens to cry herself sick. A moment later, the two young friends ‘confess themselves lovers’ (p. 72). How does this relate to Catherine? At a corresponding moment in each generation, the heroine is faced by a choice between two men, during which she reveals an unpleasant side to her personality. Catherine is scornful of Hareton’s rusticity and ignorance (pp. 216, 218), and Cathy, ‘impelled by the naughty spirit within her’, is scornful of Heathcliff’s ignorance, violent towards Nelly and Edgar, and lies when challenged (p. 70). Hareton’s retreat – ‘he was conscious of being insulted and embarrassed how to resent it’ (p. 221) – corresponds to Heathcliff’s identical confusion and disappearance. Catherine admires Linton and Cathy becomes engaged to Edgar. All of which suggests that the young Heathcliff’s disappearance (p. 80) is an archetypal amplification of Catherine’s total absence of interest in Hareton. And this, of course, helps to explain one of the big problems of the novel: the question of why Cathy turns her back on Heathcliff. We commented on Heathcliff’s merciless questions to Cathy during their last interview:

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‘You teach me how cruel you’ve been – cruel and false. Why did you despise me? Why did you betray your own heart, Cathy? I have not one word of comfort – you deserve this. You have killed yourself . . . You loved me – then what right had you to leave me?’ (p. 161)

In the second section, we saw how Cathy belongs to a myth provoked by the dilemma facing Catherine in the present. Catherine must be born at Thrushcross Grange, and so she must marry Edgar. But this myth is unusually ambivalent. In relation to Catherine’s own history, Cathy’s change of attitude toward Heathcliff is determined by Catherine’s interest in a cousin who looks like her father. And she despises Hareton because he enjoys none of those talents, such as reading, that she associates with her father. She cannot grasp Hareton’s worth, and so derides him cruelly. And this provides us with a further explanation why Cathy ‘turns her back’ on Heathcliff: for the events in the first generation are merely an archetypal amplification of those that unfold in the second. Because Catherine is scornful of Hareton, Cathy has to turn her back on Heathcliff. This reading also provides an answer to one of the silliest questions asked by readers of this novel: ‘Where does Heathcliff go when he disappears from Cathy’s life?’ He does not go to the colonies, or into commerce, or into the army. He simply moves to a different level of imaginal representation (see Figure 3.4 (p. 206): he moves from the myth to the Bildungsroman; in other words, from the archetypal to the personal unconscious. And the reason why is evident. A young girl cannot be expected to take responsibility for problems created for her by a combination of environmental factors and parental pressures. This is why the young Catherine never gets to meet Mr Heathcliff, even though he is her closest neighbour, and even though his later character is already suggested in the archetypal myth (that is, deep in the unconscious). But at age sixteen, symbolic of the age of responsibility, a young woman has to face the consequences of any imbalance in her education for herself. When Catherine turns sixteen, the young Heathcliff disappears from the myth and she finds herself face to face with Mr Heathcliff, who is an archetypal image of a father. And his function is to urge her – and to compel her if necessary – to confront the consequences of her over-attachment to her biological father. Scene Two: Hindley enters the main room in a drunken stupor and drops Hareton over the gallery banister. Had it not been for Heathcliff’s instinctive intervention, the boy might have been killed (pp. 73–4). Hindley’s drunken behaviour is an archetypal representation of Catherine’s contemptuous high-handedness toward Hareton; the young

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Heathcliff’s instinctive gesture – which prevents the premature death of the animus – corresponds to the high opinion that Mr Heathcliff has of Hareton and his attempt to get Catherine to take an interest in him by suggesting he take her round the farm (p. 218). Scene Three: Later, during the evening of the same day, Cathy tells Nelly that Edgar has proposed to her. She admits to feeling that she is ‘wrong’ to have accepted him, but adds that it would ‘degrade’ her to marry Heathcliff (pp. 79–80). Heathcliff, overhearing this last remark, disappears into the night. Marianne Thorma¨hlen describes Cathy as ‘pathologically egotistical’ (1997, p. 186). She has a point, but it must be pursued further. For Cathy’s ‘wrong’ engagement to Edgar – that is, to Catherine’s father as a young man – corresponds exactly to Catherine’s renewed interest in Linton; that is, the sickly young man to whom she is drawn as a result of her over-attachment to her father (cf. pp. 217, 224). And this brings us to what has been described as ‘perhaps the most perplexing critical dilemma’ surrounding the novel (Macovski, 1987, p. 379). For it is soon after the young Heathcliff slips out of Wuthering Heights that Cathy makes her cryptic claim: ‘ ‘‘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’’ ’ (p. 82). We have already commented on these famous lines. But there is more to it than we had occasion to note. They are an archetypal amplification of something of which Catherine is still unconscious. She is as indissolubly tied to Hareton, who is her animus (¼ mind), as Cathy is to Heathcliff. The novel traces the process necessary for her to free herself of a damaging over-attachment to her father so as to enable her to finally, at the end of the novel, acknowledge her animus. And Mr Heathcliff, we note, has a potentially purposeful function: for in the course of his first meeting with Catherine, when he sends her round the grounds with Hareton, he effectively challenges her to recognize the worth of her animus. But she is too strongly attached to her father to do so. A ‘Wrong’ Engagement (a)

The Anamnesis

Catherine’s first secret from her father is her brief correspondence with Linton. And the importance of this episode is indicated by an unexpected coincidence that occurs soon after Nelly forces it to a close: Edgar’s health rapidly begins to decline.

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On her returning home, Edgar prohibits Catherine from thinking any more about either her cousins or her uncle. That evening, Nelly finds her weeping and asks her why: ‘ ‘‘I’m not crying for myself, Ellen,’’ she answered, ‘‘it’s for him – He expected to see me again to-morrow, and there, he’ll be so disappointed – and he’ll wait for me, and I shan’t come!’’ ’ (p. 224). In other words, she identifies so much with Linton that she weeps not at her own loss, but at the idea of his disappointment. She wants to write Linton ‘one little note’. Nelly forbids it: she foresees where it would lead. She fails to take account of Catherine’s stubbornness. That evening, Nelly leaves her in one of ‘her worst, most peevish humours’. Given this description, it is no coincidence that the following morning the first letter is forwarded to her equally peevish cousin. We can deduce something about the evolution of Catherine’s character during this time from what is happening in Wuthering Heights. Linton – who is now called ‘young Heathcliff’ (p. 212) – becomes increasingly selfish and disagreeable. In other words, partly as a direct result of Edgar spoiling her and partly as a consequence of her own unnatural seclusion, Catherine is also becoming more and more egocentric and peevish. And yet we note that Mr Heathcliff abominates Linton’s whining, and will do everything possible not to come in contact with him. This suggests that an aspect of Edgar cannot abide Catherine’s whining. And when he begins to avoid having any contact with her, he falls sick. Several weeks elapse before Nelly discovers the secret correspondence, and gives Catherine a piece of her mind for being so silly as to think that she ‘loves’ Linton. She threatens to show the letters to Edgar, but Catherine cannot bear the thought of his reaction and so, albeit grudgingly, she allows Nelly to burn them. In the course of the following weeks, she becomes ‘considerably sadder and duller’. Soon after, in the autumn, her father catches a cold that settles on his lungs and confines him indoors. Her frustration at losing touch with Linton is quickly transformed into anxiety about her father’s health. One afternoon in late October/early November, even though it is raining, she insists that Nelly accompany her on a walk to ‘the bottom of the park’. In other words, instinct takes Catherine to the outer gate, which is usually kept locked. This too is ambivalent. On the one hand, it suggests that Edgar thinks there is a need to keep her inside the egostructure (p. 191). On the other, it suggests he will not tolerate his daughter having any contact with the outside world. The choice of location is thus revealing. When she gets to the gate, Nelly asks her why she is crying. Because she foresees her father’s death: ‘How life will be changed,’ she moans, ‘how dreary the world will be, when papa and you are dead’ (p. 231). To which Nelly replies:

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‘All you need do, is to wait well on your father, and cheer him by letting him see you cheerful; and avoid giving him anxiety on any subject – mind that, Cathy! I’ll not disguise but you might kill him, if you were wild and reckless, and cherished a foolish, fanciful affection for the son of a person who would be glad to have him in his grave.’ (p. 231)

Leave aside the fact that this is a beastly thing to say to a girl of Catherine’s age. The point, surely, is that by preventing Catherine from communicating with Linton, Edgar has not weakened Linton’s hold on her affection: he has only weakened his own positive influence. Without intending to, Edgar has become as tyrannical as Mr Heathcliff. In short, he has Catherine in his grip as firmly as Heathcliff has both Linton and Hareton in his. Catherine’s response to Nelly takes us to the centre of the novel: ‘I fret about nothing on earth except papa’s illness, . . . I care for nothing in comparison with papa. And I’ll never – never – oh, never, while I have my senses, do an act or say a word to vex him. . . . I would rather be miserable than he should be – that proves I love him better than myself.’ (p. 231)

No sooner has she spoken than she finds herself at the very edge of the park. She climbs to the top of the wall, inadvertently drops her hat, scrambles down to collect it. But the gate is locked and it is not so easy to climb back up. Nelly is about to go to fetch the key from the Grange when she hears a horse approaching. It is, of course, her ‘other’ father, Mr Heathcliff, who tells her that Linton is wasting away as a result of her neglect. Although Nelly derides Heathcliff’s account, Catherine insists on finding out the truth for herself. Mounted again on Minny, she sets off for Wuthering Heights. The question she reiterates to Linton when she arrives is: ‘Are you glad to see me?’ (pp. 237, 238). It is a curious question, for in psychological terms, it does not matter whether Linton is glad to see her or not. She is the protagonist: it is for her to assess how she feels, and to react accordingly. She admits that she is attached to him, but she is even more attached to Edgar: ‘if I could only get papa’s consent, I’d spend half my time with you – Pretty Linton! I wish you were my brother!’ (p. 238). She is worried because she has learned that ‘people hate their wives, sometimes, but not their sisters and brothers’ (p. 238). This hints at a deep-rooted fear of relationship, to which Linton immediately contributes by telling her the history of their parents’ relation. Catherine is aghast. She cannot admit that her mother might have been more attracted to Heathcliff than to her father. She gives Linton a

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push; he nearly chokes. Nelly urges her to return home, but she cannot pull herself away from him. It is a crucial moment, for Linton thereby gains sway over her in exactly the same way as her father is currently doing: that is, by depending on her nursing. A father who induces – or even just allows – his daughter to dance attendance on his needs thereby draws her ever deeper into a relationship with a sickly image of himself, causing everything extraneous to this relationship to be severely repressed. When Nelly threatens to ensure that she is confined within the Park walls, Catherine’s retort reveals an extraordinary mixture of headstrong independence and immaturity: ‘The Grange is not a prison, Ellen, and you are not my jailer. And besides, I’m almost seventeen. I’m a woman – and I’m certain Linton would recover quickly if he had me to look after him – . . . And he’ll soon do as I direct him with some slight coaxing – He’s a pretty little darling when he’s good. I’d make such a pet of him, if he were mine.’ (p. 242)

She may be seventeen and a woman, but she is both speaking and acting in a very childish fashion. She describes not a ‘human’ relationship, but a girl’s love for a pet or a doll. It is a parody of maternal feeling, and reveals an underlying ‘power-complex’ comparable to that which motivates Cathy at precisely this period in the corresponding ‘myth’. Like her mother, Catherine wants to play ‘the little mistress’. It is at this moment that Nelly provides her succinct definition of Linton’s character: ‘The worst-tempered bit of a sickly slip that ever struggled into its teens!’ And she looks forward to his impending death. Catherine immediately draws a parallel between him and her father: ‘It’s only a cold that ails him, the same as papa has,’ she tells Nelly indignantly (p. 243). She does not realize that she too is becoming a badtempered ‘bit of a sickly slip’. All she wants is to nurse Linton, exactly as she nurses her father. And she does, for Nelly also catches a cold as a result of this expedition to the Heights, and during her convalescence, Catherine finds herself nursing everyone who ‘exists’ for her. She explains her interest in Linton: ‘It was not to amuse myself that I went; I was often wretched all the time’ (p. 247). She goes because she needs to be needed, a tendency that stems from her never having developed sufficient confidence in herself to relate to an ‘other’ who is an equal. She prefers to relate to people that ‘need’ her; that is, whose ‘need’ reassures her of an identity in which she has no confidence. This is borne out by the imagery on one occasion when they almost come to a quarrel. For the most part, Catherine and Linton spend their

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meetings in ‘silly’ chatter, but on one occasion they become involved in a dispute concerning ‘the pleasantest manner of spending a hot July day’. In common with the dying Edgar, Linton prefers ‘to lie in an ecstasy of peace’. Given that Linton personifies Catherine’s spoiled nature, this implies that she is reluctant to develop a more vital image of the masculine. His passivity reflects her ignorance – or unconsciousness – of any need to correct her peevish tendencies and so to discover a more appropriate image of men. She learns to value ‘book-larning’ (p. 220), but feels no need to commit herself to a male ‘other’ who is not associated with her father. In contrast, Catherine wants to spend the day rocking in a tree with ‘the whole world awake and wild with joy’ and everything around her dancing in ‘a glorious jubilee’ (p. 248). The image seems more positive, until we read on. For what she means by a ‘jubilee’ is immediately illustrated by a game of ball which she plays with Linton, and which she constantly wins. In other words, her idea of ‘heaven’ is having her skill recognized. This suggests that she has not outgrown her desire to impress her ‘papa’, who was her only teacher. At almost seventeen, she reacts like a girl of three ‘showing off’ the tricks she has learned in the course of the day to her father, and who gets petulant if not loudly praised for them. There is one short respite, which occurs as the result of a slight improvement in her attitude. In order to visit Linton, Catherine persuades the Grange groom to prepare her pony for her, in exchange for some of her books (cf. p. 247). Her initiative signals a slight independence from Edgar. And this is soon reflected in Hareton’s corresponding attempt to teach himself to read. He soon learns to read his name, but when he fails to decipher the date beneath, Catherine is as contemptuous as before. A change, however, has taken place. Now that Hareton can read his name, he knows who should be master of Wuthering Heights (cf. p. 251). Later that evening, he bursts in on Linton and Catherine. He sends Linton to his room and Catherine back to her home. Whereupon Linton becomes hysterical and Catherine weeps until she is ‘almost blind’. When she threatens to get her ‘papa’ to have Hareton put in prison and hanged, he too begins blubbering. As she prepares to leave, he endeavours to make amends to her, but she lashes at him with her whip. The irony of the episode is that she is ready to help her groom to educate himself and, for the simple reason that he is a servant, she has no other interest in this groom. And yet merely because he too is a kind of servant, she is unable to encourage Hareton to develop himself in similar fashion. She has no interest in any male ‘other’ apart from her father, or one who looks like her father. When Linton accuses her of being responsible for the previous evening’s uproar, she is so offended that she determines never to visit

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him again. She will not assume responsibility for her part in the proceedings. They quarrel, but – like Cathy and Edgar in the myth – they are soon reconciled. Afraid of the way things are going, Nelly seeks to put an end to the affair by telling Edgar. And to her surprise, although her father forbids Catherine to communicate with Linton at Wuthering Heights, he agrees to allow him into Thrushcross Grange. This, of course, is a repetition of his similar – and equally mistaken – forbearance of Heathcliff visiting Cathy inside the ego-structure. The consequence of Catherine treating Hareton contemptuously and of her growing attachment to Linton is not long in revealing itself: both Edgar and Linton take a turn for the worse. Gradually Catherine’s world is reduced to Edgar’s chamber and to the Grange library ‘where her father stopped a short time daily’. Nelly tells Lockwood: ‘She grudged each moment that did not find her bending over his pillow, or seated by his side’ (p. 265). Her increasing reluctance to leave her father is reflected in Linton’s increasing importunity. Finally, Catherine gives way to Linton’s request, and their joint pleas convince Edgar that they be allowed to meet once a week between the two houses. When she arrives for the first rendez-vous, she finds Linton so morose that she soon proposes to depart. She is anxious to return to her father (p. 262), whereupon Linton immediately comes ‘under the spell’ of his father’s voice (p. 263). The following week, he manifests such fear that Catherine snaps at him, to which he replies: ‘hate my father, and spare me for contempt’ (p. 266). Catherine rounds on him as if she were Heathcliff: ‘You needn’t bespeak contempt, Linton; anybody will have it spontaneously, at your service . . . Ellen, tell him how disgraceful this conduct is. Rise, and don’t degrade yourself into an abject reptile – don’t.’ (p. 267)

She is unaware that her conduct is equally disgraceful, for Linton’s terror of Heathcliff is only a representation of her own unconscious fear of offending her father. Linton’s terror of Heathcliff’s reprisal for failing to do his bidding is a projection of Catherine’s ‘terror’ of not tending her ‘papa’ to his satisfaction. And Linton’s fear materializes: Heathcliff appears. But before we examine the sequel, we must pause to have a quick look at the corresponding events in the myth. (b)

Archetypal Amplification

Interestingly, we are told virtually nothing about Cathy’s three-year-long engagement to Edgar. But what we do know is significant: in the

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archetypal myth, the period of Cathy’s engagement corresponds to Wuthering Heights becoming increasingly uncongenial as a result of Hindley’s drinking. And this provides a further inducement for Cathy to enter into her ‘wrong’ engagement. Thus, just as Cathy’s decision to marry Edgar leads to her hollow marriage and her settling at Thrushcross Grange, so Catherine’s ‘fantastic preference’ for Linton leads to her marriage – and to her imprisonment at Wuthering Heights. Imprisonment at Wuthering Heights ‘Leave all hope, ye that enter.’ (Dante, Inferno III)

Heathcliff contrives that Nelly and Catherine accompany Linton to Wuthering Heights. As soon as they are inside, he locks the door behind his ‘guests’ and threatens not to release them until Catherine agrees to marry Linton. He knows that Linton, who is Edgar’s heir, is dying. And that Linton’s property will pass to him. Catherine’s imprisonment by a tyrannical father and the marriage he imposes on her are an imaginal representation of her ‘over-attachment’ to a benign father. Nothing could more clearly illustrate this than the events that succeed on Catherine’s imprisonment. Determined to retrieve the key, Catherine grabs hold of Heathcliff’s fist and, in order to get him to drop the key, bites him ‘pretty sharply’. Whereupon he pulls her onto his knee and gives her ‘a shower of terrific slaps on both sides of the head, each sufficient [to have knocked her down] had she been able to fall’ (p. 271). She is left trembling like a reed. And it is at this point that he underlines the relationship he has to her: ‘I know how to chastise children, you see,’ said the scoundrel, grimly . . . Go to Linton now, as I told you; and cry at your ease! I shall be your father to-morrow – all the father you’ll have in a few days – and you shall have plenty of that – you can bear plenty – you’re no weakling.’ (p. 271)

In other words, the more that Catherine expresses her attachment to a ‘benign’ father, the more completely she comes under the control of a ‘tyrannical’ father. Nelly is dumbfounded at Linton’s account of what Heathcliff proposes: that Catherine stay the night and marry Linton the following day. She cannot believe ‘that beautiful young lady, that healthy, hearty girl, will tie herself to a little perishing monkey’ such as Linton. But Linton begs Catherine to do as he asks:

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‘Won’t you have me, and save me – not let me come to the Grange? Oh! darling Catherine! You mustn’t go, and leave me, after all. You must obey my father, you must!’ ‘I must obey my own,’ she replied . . . Linton, I love papa better than you!’ (p. 273)

Heathcliff immediately reappears and sends his son to bed. He taunts Catherine, who has instinctively raised her hand to her cheek: ‘Oh! you are not afraid of me? Your courage is well disguised: you seem damnably afraid!’ ‘I am afraid now,’ she replied, ‘because, if I stay, papa will be miserable: and how can I endure making him miserable – when he – when he – Mr Heathcliff, let me go home! I promise to marry Linton – papa would like me to, and I love him – and why should you wish to force me to do what I’ll willingly do of myself?’ (p. 274)

Patricia Yaeger asserts that ‘all of us, at one time or another, have identified with Heathcliff’s victimization, with his gorgeous, sadistic rage’ (1988, p. 203). I’m not sure about this: I cannot see that there is anything ‘gorgeous’ about Mr Heathcliff’s treatment of Catherine either at this moment or any other. It is a truly awful moment, and all the more shocking because one realizes that she has brought it upon herself. The more she expresses concern for her father, the more she ties herself to Mr Heathcliff. She is so imprisoned by her love for her father that she ‘willingly’ agrees to the marriage that Heathcliff forces on her, if only she can return to her father, to be with him as he dies. She falls to her knees to implore him. But he is not moved. ‘How the devil can you dream of fawning on me?’ he asks her. ‘I detest you!’ And yet, Heathcliff cannot really be accused of acting out of ‘mere malice’ (p. 275). He is an archetypal image: his function is to promote life by compensating the effective protagonist’s attitude. It is because Catherine is so over-attached to her father that Mr Heathcliff must express his loathing of her. For, albeit unwittingly, Edgar has in effect brutally prevented Catherine from growing into independent adulthood. But she still cannot think beyond her father. As Mr Heathcliff cruelly but correctly tells her: ‘ ‘‘it is quite natural that you should desire amusement at your age; and that you should weary of nursing a sick man, and that man only your father’’ ’ (p. 275). Catherine’s tragedy is not that she has no such amusement, but that she does not even desire it. Heathcliff’s treatment of her is a powerful representation of what she is unconsciously doing to herself as a result of her over-attachment to her father: she must rebel not against him, but

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against her own father, whose treatment of Catherine Mr Heathcliff only mirrors. As soon as the marriage has been affected, Linton reveals just how covetous he is: ‘ . . . papa says everything she has is mine. All her nice books are mine – she offered to give me them, and her pretty birds, and her pony Minny, if I would get the key to our room, and let her out: but I told her she had nothing to give, they were all, all mine. And then she cried, and took a little picture from her neck, and said I should have that – two pictures in a gold case: on one side her mother, and on the other, uncle, when they were young.’ (pp. 280–81)

As Juliet McMaster has argued: Catherine’s marriage with Linton ‘carries its share of the force and meaning of the novel’ (1992, p. 1). Indeed, it carries far more than has been noted to date. For read literally, this is perhaps the bleakest moment in the novel. Linton speaks these words to Nelly Dean. Significantly, Catherine is absent from the scene, which suggests her complete ‘unconsciousness’ of what is happening to her. Not only has she lost possession of all her property, but – and much more significantly – she has also lost all her possessions that are associated with ‘spirit’; that is, with her father’s influence. Her love of books she owes to her father, her pony symbolizes her ‘spirit’, and birds too are symbols of thought, the ‘ideal’ and spiritual fantasy (see Jung, CW 6: 458; 12: 305). In other words, Linton here claims not only everything that she has inherited from her father, but also the entire content of her ego-structure. Everything is forfeited to this loathsome creature that personifies the unconscious image of the masculine that Catherine has as a result of being over-attached to her father. She has become ‘Linton’: indeed, she has become Mrs Linton Heathcliff, as she is throughout the novel’s frame. She is so anguished that she offers Linton her portraits of her parents. He passes them to Heathcliff, who tramples on the image of her father as a young man (that is, an image uncannily similar to Linton) and keeps the image of her mother. And this of course represents how an archetypal aspect of her own nature is now tied to him, Heathcliff, ‘her new father’ (p. 291, cf. p. 271). Terrified by the strength of Catherine’s anguish at the thought of her father’s imminent death, Linton contrives her release. And she returns to Thrushcross Grange just in time to watch Edgar quietly and peacefully die. She is so drained by the experience that she has gone through that she cannot even shed a tear.

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Return to Wuthering Heights The evening after her father’s funeral, Heathcliff comes to Thrushcross Grange to collect her. And Nelly draws an analogy between the scene and that of Mr Heathcliff’s sudden reappearance eighteen years earlier: It was the same room into which he had been ushered, as a guest, eighteen years before: the same moon shone through the window; and the same autumn landscape lay outside . . . Heathcliff advanced to the hearth. There was the same man; his dark face rather sallower, and more composed, his frame a stone or two heavier, perhaps, and no other difference. (p. 286)

But this time, there are no preliminaries. On seeing Catherine rise to leave the room, Heathcliff prevents her: ‘ ‘‘Stop!’’ he said, arresting her by the arm. ‘‘No more runnings away! Where would you go? I’m come to fetch you home: and I hope you’ll be a dutiful daughter.’’ ’ (p. 287). Home, in this sentence, does not just refer to Wuthering Heights, which is not of course her own home: it is also living with Linton; that is, with her own peevish nature. In other words, Mr Heathcliff is now going to compel her to face herself as she really is. And this, of course, fits with Jung’s view that archetypal images compensate the one-sidedness of conscious orientation. Catherine thinks of herself as a very likeable young lady. She must now return ‘home’ and face the consequences of her own personality. And if one is shocked at the way in which she has worked herself into this situation, one also has to admire the courage with which she is prepared to face up to the reality of her prospects. She agrees to go bravely, for Linton, as she says, is ‘all I have to love in the world’ (p. 287). She even defies Heathcliff to make her hate Linton. She still cannot see that it is her perverse attachment to him that is responsible for her imprisonment. She deludes herself: ‘I know he has a bad nature,’ said Catherine; ‘he’s your son. But I’m glad I’ve a better, to forgive it; and I know he loves me, and for that reason I love him. Mr Heathcliff you have nobody to love you; and, however miserable you make us, we shall still have the revenge of thinking that your cruelty arises from your greater misery! You are miserable, are you not? Lonely, like the devil, and envious like him? Nobody loves you – nobody will cry for you, when you die! I wouldn’t be you!’ (p. 288)

Linton is no more capable of love than an image seen in a mirror: his nature is entirely determined by Catherine’s attitudes. Even more

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pertinently, her love has little worth: for, like her mother, she loves because she is loved. And what she says of Mr Heathcliff is of course no more true than it was of her father throughout her life. For Edgar and Mr Heathcliff have something in common: their great misery is that they are both, and almost equally, tied to a woman who is dead. And Heathcliff’s loneliness is only the shadow of the loneliness that has afflicted Edgar ever since Cathy’s death. We remember that Edgar counts the years not by Catherine’s growth, but by his day spent in the library and the evening visit to her mother’s grave (p. 212). Catherine’s readiness to accompany Heathcliff to the animus-structure is followed immediately by the latter’s grotesque account, to Nelly, of how the previous evening, he had gone to Cathy’s grave, dug it open, and held the long-dead Cathy in his arms. His reunion with her begins on the eve of Edgar’s funeral. Nelly tells him that he is wicked to have disturbed his former companion’s remains in order to see her face. Heathcliff replies: ‘Disturbed her? No! she has disturbed me, night and day, through eighteen years – incessantly – remorselessly – till yesternight – and yesternight, I was tranquil. I dreamt I was sleeping the last sleep, by that sleeper, with my heart stopped, and my cheek frozen against hers.’ (p. 289)

For eighteen years, Catherine has had to live with a father whose heart was always tied to a woman who died giving her birth. All she could think of was her father, and she loved him all the more because he had no one else to love him. And if Heathcliff is a projection of her unconscious attitudes, then it would seem that a large part of her cannot forgive her father for not being able to love her as completely as she loves him. But with his death comes peace. She now has no further need to measure herself against a mother whose name she dare not even mention (cf. p. 212). But it is a restless tranquillity that she has found: for her father’s death has left her in the hands of the tyrannical father. Nelly says: ‘She seemed to have made up her mind to enter into the spirit of her future family’ (p. 288). The combination of ‘mind’ and ‘spirit’ ( ¼ animus) is suggestive. When she is ready to accompany her new father back to her animus-structure, she announces that her pony can be saddled. Whereupon Heathcliff checks her: ‘you’ll need no ponies at Wuthering Heights, for what journeys you take, your own feet will serve you’ (p. 291). Like Isabella before her, she discovers that a woman can have no servants to wait on her in the animus. Her task is to ‘wait’ on Linton (p. 293).

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And since Linton personifies Catherine’s over-indulged nature, and this is allowed no expression at Wuthering Heights, it is not long before he dies. And when he dies, she tells the other inmates: ‘ ‘‘He’s safe, and I’m free . . . You have left me so long to struggle against death, alone, that I feel and see only death! I feel like death!’’ ’ (p. 294). She has been through a terrible ordeal, and yet she betrays not the least sign that she is aware that she is responsible for her situation. The death she feels is not only the chill of having had to nurse Linton as he died; it signals her unconsciousness of ‘why’ she finds herself in her situation. She has turned in on herself, and is now so fully absorbed by a dialectic with the various aspects of her animus that she is, in effect, no longer ‘conscious’ of reality. Conclusion One Sunday afternoon a fortnight after Linton’s death, unable to bear the cold any longer, Catherine descends from her room to the main ‘house’. She finds Hareton as anxious to please her as he had been the day she first met him on her way to Penistone Craggs some four-and-ahalf years earlier. She accepts his offer to pass the books down to her from the dresser. But as soon as he is drawn too close – ‘like a child to a candle’ – she snaps at him: ‘How dare you touch me?’ (p. 296). Abashed but undaunted, Hareton begs Zillah to plead on his behalf: ‘ ‘‘Will you ask her to read to us, Zillah? I’m stalled [¼ bored, weary] of doing naught – and I do like – I could like to hear her! Dunnot say I wanted it, but ask of yourseln’’ ’ (p. 297). Catherine rounds on them: ‘Mr Hareton, and the whole set of you, will you be good enough to understand that I reject any pretence at kindness you have the hypocrisy to offer! I despise you, and will have nothing to say to any one of you! When I would have given my life for one kind word, even to see one of your faces, you all kept off. But I won’t complain to you! I’m driven down here by the cold, not either to amuse you, or enjoy your society.’ (p. 297)

Catherine is now as imprisoned by her ungovernable and unforgiving nature as she was by her misplaced over-attachment to her father. Her words illustrate the arrogant self-isolation of animus-possession. But, as Zillah continues: ‘the frost had set in, and, in spite of her pride, she was forced to condescend to our company, more and more’ (p. 297). None the less, she is slow to mend her temper and Zillah ends her tale: ‘the more hurt she gets, the more venomous she grows’ (p. 298).

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This scene returns the action to the situation described by Lockwood at the outset of the novel. This situation represents how Catherine has allowed herself to be crushed by overpowering and negative images of the masculine: a tyrannical father, a rough and uncultivated animus, and a pharisaic old man. A woman in such a condition can no longer speak with her own ‘voice’. She speaks with the ‘voices’ belonging to the male figures in her dreams and fantasies. She becomes as rough and domineering as Heathcliff, as careless of herself as Hareton, and as self-righteous as Joseph. The ‘frost’ vividly symbolizes what she has allowed to happen to her. Zillah’s description of her is appropriate: ‘as chill as an icicle, and as high [¼ haughty] as a princess’ (p. 296). We are reminded of the telling phrase with which Lockwood describes Catherine’s eyes on the occasion of his first meeting with her: ‘the only sentiment they evinced hovered between scorn and a kind of desperation, singularly unnatural to be detected there’ (p. 9). With the end of Nelly’s story, the narrative returns to the ‘present’. Lockwood is rapidly recovering strength after his illness, and he determines to visit Wuthering Heights once more: to inform Heathcliff that he intends to return to ‘the busy world’ (p. 256). It would seem as if nothing has changed; nothing has been achieved. But although slight, as we shall see, the change is real.

5. Catherine’s History (II): A Tentative Deliverance ‘Con-trary!’ said a voice, as sweet as a silver bell – ‘That for the third time, you dunce! I’m not going to tell you, again – Recollect, or I pull your hair!’ ‘Contrary, then,’ answered another, in deep but softened tones. ‘And now, kiss me, for minding so well.’ (Catherine and Hareton, p. 307)

The resolution to the process depicted in the novel unfolds in two phases. The first concerns the slight but very significant change that occurs at Wuthering Heights while Nelly is telling her story to Lockwood. The second occurs between the time that Lockwood leaves Thrushcross Grange and his unexpected return to the vicinity some eight months later. The first is triggered by Lockwood; the second takes place in Lockwood’s absence. And yet the crucial role that he plays in bringing about the change affected in the novel, and his significance in the process described by the novel have never been adequately explained. Critics have been unkind to Lockwood: all they see is his gaucherie. Many have noted the crucial parallels between him and Catherine, but neither the nature nor the extent of their implications.

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Possibly the most interesting aspect to Lockwood is that he is aware that he might be projecting his own feelings onto others and, as we have seen, the novel is built upon this tendency. Both representatives of the ego-structure fall in love at first sight. Isabella becomes infatuated with Mr Heathcliff almost immediately after his return to the vicinity; Catherine becomes inseparably attached to Linton on seeing him for the first time and, later, when she first meets Mr Heathcliff, she announces that she likes him: ‘you are my uncle, then! . . . I thought I liked you, though you were cross, at first,’ she tells him, as she throws her arms around him to give him a kiss (p. 216). In each case, the subject is attracted to the other for psychological reasons: Isabella is attracted to Mr Heathcliff because she personifies Cathy’s renewed interest in Mr Heathcliff; Catherine to Linton, because he personifies her own spoiled nature, and Catherine to Mr Heathcliff because he personifies her own over-attachment to her father. Their various inclinations are all determined by psychological projection. In similar fashion, the first time they meet, Lockwood thinks that Mr Heathcliff is ‘a capital fellow’ (p. 10). And the reasons he gives are revealing: I know, by instinct, his reserve springs from an aversion to showy displays of feeling – to manifestations of mutual kindliness. He’ll love and hate, equally under cover, and esteem it a species of impertinence to be loved or hated again – No, I’m running on too fast – I bestow my own attributes over-liberally on him. Mr Heathcliff may have entirely dissimilar reasons for keeping his hand out of the way when he meets a would-be acquaintance, to those which actuate me. Let me hope my constitution is almost peculiar. (p. 4)

First he projects qualities into Mr Heathcliff; then he realizes that he might be doing this. And interestingly, whilst the character with the most obvious aversion to ‘showy displays of feeling’ is Edgar (Catherine’s father), the characters who most obviously have a tendency to love and hate ‘under cover’ are both representatives of the ego-structure (Isabella, vis-a`-vis Heathcliff; and Catherine, vis-a`-vis both Linton and Hareton). It is impossible not to relate this pattern to the effect of Edgar’s influence on his daughter. Lockwood goes on to tell the reader about his amatory experiences: . . . my dear mother used to say I should never have a comfortable home; and only last summer I proved myself perfectly unworthy of one. While enjoying a month of fine weather at the sea-coast, I was thrown into the company of a most fascinating creature: a real goddess in my eyes, as long as she took no notice of me. I ‘never told

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my love’ vocally; still, if looks have language, the merest idiot might have guessed I was over head and ears: she understood me, at last, and looked a return – the sweetest of all imaginable looks – and what did I do? I confess it with shame – shrunk icily into myself, like a snail, at every glance retired colder and farther; till, finally, the poor innocent was led to doubt her own senses, and, overwhelmed with confusion at her supposed mistake, persuaded her mamma to decamp. By this curious turn of disposition I have gained the reputation of deliberate heartlessness, how undeserved, I alone can appreciate. (p. 4)

A great many critics have commented on this passage. Martha Nussbaum, for example, writes scathingly about the ‘self-protective snail-like character of Lockwood’ (1996, p. 380). Certainly, but the important point, surely, is that one only has to reverse the sex of the speaker to realize that this passage almost exactly describes Catherine’s behaviour toward Lockwood. She is unexpectedly ‘thrown into’ his company. Although it might be difficult to think that she ever thought of him as a ‘god’, this notion may be borrowed from the regard she has for her father. And as soon as Lockwood allows her to intuit his interest in her, she retires ‘icily’ into herself, like a snail: she is ‘as chill as an icicle, and as high as a princess’ (p. 296). She behaves as if she were ‘heartless’. Lockwood’s gaucherie, therefore, can also be seen as a projection of Catherine’s own clumsiness vis-a`-vis a representative of ‘the busy world’. His character mirrors Catherine’s ‘self-protective snail-like’ tendencies; tendencies that she has developed as a result of her over-attachment to her father. In other words, the novel begins not only with the effective protagonist virtually imprisoned in the animus-structure, but with the ego-structure rented out to a male character that both personifies her own tendencies, and also compensates her total indifference to the outer world. He represents, for her, an implicit challenge. Wuthering Heights consists of a tale about an ‘inner’ world told to its only representative of the ‘outer’ world. It begins when Lockwood makes his first visit to his landlord. It consists of two successive ‘myths’: the first indicates what Catherine must do if she is to find her way back to her ego-structure (connect with someone from a social reality: namely Lockwood); the second, why she is unable to (because she has never freed herself of her over-attachment to her father). And Nelly’s story seems to end as soon as she has brought the events back to the present. Her immediate task is done: she has explained what Lockwood asked her to explain. And he has heard enough. Catherine is not the young lady he would have wished her to be. He decides to return to London. The man to whom the author has entrusted her narrative has lost any interest

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he had in her effective protagonist. And this, somewhat sadly, suggests that Catherine (and by extension Emily Bronte¨) cannot believe that anyone who knows her could possibly take any interest in her. Nevertheless, Wuthering Heights is endlessly ambivalent. The unconscious requires Catherine to make a more concerted effort to return to Thrushcross Grange. But as long as Lockwood is resident there, she has little reason to make this effort. Thus, Lockwood needs to vacate the premises, even if his departure also signals Catherine’s complete abandonment of interest in the outer world. Before he can leave, however, he must call once more upon his landlord. Lockwood’s Farewell On the surface, very little seems to change at Wuthering Heights between late November 1801 and mid-January 1802. Catherine looks ‘more sulky and less spirited’ than before, and pays even less attention to Lockwood, ‘never returning my bow and good morning by the slightest acknowledgement’ (p. 299). She is so bound up with her imaginal world that this time she totally ignores him. He tries to pass her a note from Nelly. Instinctively, she throws it to the floor and before she can realize what she has done, Hareton has picked it up. He threatens to show it to Mr Heathcliff, whereupon she turns away and ‘very stealthily, drew out her pocket-handkerchief and applied it to her eyes’ (p. 300), a gesture far more eloquent of her despair than her previous outbursts. And it is not lost on Hareton. Albeit ‘as ungraciously as he could’, he returns her the letter. She peruses it, and then begins to ask Lockwood questions about the inmates – both ‘rational and irrational’ – of her former home. He enquires whether she has any message for Nelly. But she tells him that she has ‘no materials’ for writing a reply to Nelly’s note, ‘not even a book from which I might tear a leaf’ (p. 300). He is aghast at the thought of living in such a wilderness without either a book to read or paper on which to write. She explains: ‘Mr Heathcliff never reads; so he took it into his head to destroy my books’ (p. 301). Although this sounds like gratuitous tyranny, Mr Heathcliff may have a more positive purpose. For only by totally destroying Edgar’s legacy (that is, Catherine’s ‘booklarning’) will he be able to bring Catherine to a complete standstill and thereby force her to make a new beginning. Heathcliff does however allow Hareton to keep her books in order to improve himself. It is by preventing Catherine from ‘escaping’ into books, and promoting Hareton’s interest in them, that Heathcliff finally brings about a change in Catherine. At last, she is exhausted by her self-

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imposed isolation. And yet, even as she registers this, her behaviour reflects how turned in on herself she is. In the midst of her conversation with Lockwood, but without any indication that she has stopped speaking with him, she turns to gaze out of the window ‘towards the hills’ and murmurs: ‘I should like to be riding Minny down there. I should like to be climbing up there – Oh, I’m tired – I’m stalled, Hareton!’ And she leant her pretty head back against the sill, with half a yawn and half a sigh, and lapsed into an aspect of abstracted sadness, neither caring nor knowing whether we remarked her. (p. 300)

This soliloquy is extraordinary. She is speaking to a representative of the outer world, but interrupts herself to address her purely imaginal animus. She is in the middle of a conversation with Lockwood about ‘the inmates, rational and irrational, of her former home’ and yet she addresses Hareton, not even in expectation of a reply, but as if speaking to herself. Nothing could more clearly signal the nature of her problem. She lives in a world of archetypal reverie. Even so, this moment marks the beginning of the impending change. The key word is of course an echo of Hareton’s earlier expression to Zillah (‘I’m stalled of doing naught’, p. 297). This suggests that he is unable to develop further until she takes the initiative. In the world of the imagination, she will be ‘stalled’ until she takes responsibility for her own tendencies. The reader notes the echo of Cathy, shortly before her death, yearning to return to Wuthering Heights. Catherine is yearning for the pastimes (riding Minny) and fascinations (with Penistone Craggs) that she enjoyed in childhood. In one sense, she has made no progress. Her desire is regressive. But it is not only negative, for it has the merit of connecting her with a time when she was ‘alive’, and this, self-evidently, is preferable to feeling like death. One notes, however, that her longing is still not linked with Hareton. She mocks his efforts to teach himself to read. Lockwood tries to defend him. She is unimpressed. She mimics Hareton’s drawling tone until the latter can endure the humiliation no further. He slaps her, hurls the books into the fire and rushes out. This moment is axial: Hareton acts out of character. This is corroborated by Lockwood’s observation: ‘I read in his countenance what anguish it was to offer that sacrifice to spleen’ (p. 302). Why, then, does he act in this way? He is himself a model of loyalty and forbearance. But he cannot make any impression on Catherine. Every effort has been greeted with renewed scorn. He must somehow make her understand that she cannot treat him in this manner. We remember

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how, in Chapter 3, provoked by Catherine’s fiery declaration of independence, Heathcliff had lifted his hand to strike her when Lockwood stepped forward (p. 29). When Heathcliff returned his ‘fists’ to his pockets, she curled up her lip in scorn. She now receives, from Hareton, the ‘manual check’ that she invited from Heathcliff (cf. Jung, CW 9ii: 29). Hareton has ‘become’ Heathcliff or, rather, has become that positive aspect of the young Heathcliff who helped Cathy rebel against Hindley’s tyranny. Inevitably, as he leaves the room in a fluster, Heathcliff enters. Unaware of being overheard, he mutters some of the strangest lines in the novel: ‘ ‘‘But, when I look for his father in his face, I find her every day more. How the devil is he so like? I can hardly bear to see him.’’ ’ (p. 303). It is not immediately evident why he should think that Hareton is becoming increasingly like Cathy, and nor is it explained. One is left to infer that the combination of Hareton’s constancy, and yet his increasing inability to restrain himself once aroused reminds Heathcliff of Cathy (cf. pp. 65, 71, 19). We are reminded that Cathy is a child of the animusstructure, and thus it is only to be expected that Hareton and she will share many qualities. Heathcliff’s strange reflection thus prepares the way for the ambivalence of the subsequent resolution. On the one hand, by ‘seeing’ Cathy in Hareton, the animus becomes a promoter of Catherine’s revolt against Mr Heathcliff (¼ the tyrannical father). On the other, the event anticipates Catherine’s ominous identification with a pattern of behaviour similar to that of her mother. Lockwood announces his presence and informs his landlord of his plans to spend the remainder of his year’s tenancy in London. The only representative of ‘the busy world’ is appalled at the thought of spending another winter in the North. As he rides away from Wuthering Heights, he reflects, ‘How dreary life gets over in that house!’ Musingly, he then adds: ‘What a realization of something more romantic than a fairy tale it would have been for Mrs Linton Heathcliff had she and I struck up an attachment, as her good nurse desired, and migrated together into the stirring atmosphere of the town.’ (p. 304)

Even though uttered by someone who is perhaps a little too pleased with himself, Lockwood’s reflection is not vain idiocy. Catherine is a virtual prisoner inside an animus-structure whose residents reflect various aspects of her personality. There are only two ways out of such a psychological impasse. One is by ‘thrashing things out’ with these representations of her own character and thus coming to terms with the

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tendencies responsible for her present predicament. The other is by forging ties with a representative of a social world. Lockwood’s conclusion reflects the fact that Catherine has lost all interest in him. His quiet acceptance of the lost opportunity is a projection of the equally quiet despair now felt by the effective protagonist. Even so, Lockwood’s first and second visits may have triggered the minor change that has occurred: now at least Catherine knows she is ‘stalled’. And note that this realization coincides with a change in Mr Heathcliff: he begins to lose weight. He is also more restless than he was only a few months earlier, with an ‘anxious expression in his countenance’. In short, a change is in the air, although it is still not clear what the change might be. It would have been most unlikely for the events to be left at this point. The ‘challenge’ facing Catherine – to free herself from the imprisonment inflicted on her by Mr Heathcliff – is too specific to be left without some kind of resolution. And thus one notes not only the oddity, but also the significance in it being achieved during the eight months of his tenancy that Lockwood spends in London. Catherine does not opt to forge a relationship with an ‘other’ from a social world; she turns in on herself and, by doing so, finds a tentative solution to her impasse. The Death of Mr Heathcliff In September, Lockwood returns to the North for a shooting-party. Happening to overhear the name ‘Gimmerton’, he decides to visit Thrushcross Grange and settle his outstanding rent. He finds the Grange virtually closed up, except for an old woman and a girl. While they make up a bed for him, he sets off to Wuthering Heights. What he learns from Nelly, who is once again housekeeper there, brings the novel to a close. The events she describes are concerned with the simultaneous establishment of peace between Catherine and Hareton, and Heathcliff’s joyful acceptance of death, for in death he will be reunited with Cathy. This coincidence of events provides a tentative – but only tentative – resolution to the dual challenge facing Catherine and Heathcliff at the outset. After Lockwood’s return to London, Nelly is allowed to resume her post at the Heights. In the course of the next few months, she endeavours to smuggle some books from the Grange so as to occupy her young mistress. The house is grim and taciturn, because Catherine is. But, like her mother, Catherine is unable to accept any condition in which she finds herself: she soon grows ‘irritable and restless’ (p. 310). And her moodiness is reflected in Heathcliff often wanting the entire ‘house’ – that is, the central room – to himself. At these times, Hareton is forced

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into the kitchen where he becomes the victim of Catherine’s spleen. She teases him ‘commenting on his stupidity and idleness; expressing her wonder how he could endure the life he lived’ (p. 310). This illustrates the perverse logic of animus-possession. The tyrannical father-figure is the ‘cause’ of her behaviour, but it is the potential partner who is the ‘object’ of her unnecessarily aggressive jibes. None the less, a change is imminent. Catherine cannot bear to be ‘stalled’ for long. She recognizes that Hareton never speaks because she has always laughed at his previous efforts to teach himself to read. She taunts him with another book, but is rudely rebuffed. This unpromising beginning soon leads to another attempt. She tells him: ‘I can’t tell what to do to make you talk to me, and you are determined not to understand. When I call you stupid, I don’t mean anything – I don’t mean that I despise you. Come, you shall take notice of me, Hareton – you are my cousin, and you shall own me.’ (p. 313)

Nothing could more clearly demonstrate the extent of her unconsciousness. Even her attempt to change their relation only demonstrates her insensitivity. For this reason, Hareton is not convinced, and tells her he wants nothing to do with her ‘mucky pride’ and ‘mocking tricks’. What finally makes the difference is when Catherine learns that Hareton has taken her part ‘a hundred times’ in argument with Heathcliff. This finally convinces her that he is her friend. He still won’t accept her hand, so she kisses him, and sends him a neatly wrapped book, and addresses it to ‘Mr Hareton Earnshaw’ (p. 314). Soon they are sworn allies. The effective protagonist has finally established a relationship of equality with her rightful animus. The remainder is, so to speak, an epilogue, a consequence of their new-formed union. From the moment that Catherine initiates a relationship with Hareton, the dark archetypal father no longer dominates her. The new allies clear a garden together in which to plant shrubs from the Grange. But if this is suggestive of their future growth together, it must be noted that they will abandon their garden when they move, in the New Year, to Thrushcross Grange. Only one inmate of the animus still resists this development. Joseph – a personification of her pharisaic self-righteousness – complains to Heathcliff. And when Heathcliff shows his fury at what she has done, Catherine retorts: ‘You shouldn’t grudge a few yards of earth for me to ornament, when you have taken all my land!’ (p. 319). ‘And my money,’ she adds. ‘And Hareton’s land, and his money’. She tries to rouse her new friend against his old protector. Whereupon Heathcliff, mad with rage, grabs hold of her:

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He had his hands in her hair; Hareton attempted to release the locks, entreating him not to hurt her that once. His black eyes flashed, he seemed ready to tear Catherine in pieces, . . . when of a sudden his fingers relaxed, he shifted his grasp from her head to her arm, and gazed intently in her face. (p. 320)

What he sees is Cathy’s face. He releases her, and orders them all to leave him alone. He has already ‘seen’ Cathy in Hareton. A process now begins whereby he ‘sees’ her in Catherine, and not just in his ‘mind’s eye’, but standing before him. And as soon as this happens, he becomes powerless. Once we understand the effect, the mechanism is obvious. If Catherine is to escape from the animus-structure, she must rediscover a desire to return to her ego-structure. It is towards this change that the process has been striving insistently since the beginning of the novel. Catherine has at last recognized that she belongs at Thrushcross Grange. She faces up to Heathcliff and accuses him of theft. Whereupon Heathcliff ‘sees’ Cathy before him. And one notes that he sees the Cathy whom he loves – that is, the Cathy whom he led to Thrushcross Grange and who had to turn her back on him in order to enter the ego-structure – standing before him. Inevitably, as soon as this happens, he becomes powerless to act against her. And her subjection to Mr Heathcliff comes to an end. But as we shall see, the ‘problem’ has not been resolved. Catherine’s new-found desire is as ‘hollow’ as Cathy’s engagement. Even a reprieve, however, is better than her previous impasse. Catherine learns one lesson: Hareton immediately tells her she must never speak ill of Heathcliff again, for ‘if he were the devil it didn’t signify; he would stand by him’ (p. 321). She finally understands that the archetypal images of the ‘father’ and the ‘animus’ are bound by ‘ties stronger than reason could break–chains, forged by habit, which it would be cruel to attempt to loosen’ (p. 321). She does not understand ‘why’ this should be so. She simply acknowledges it as a fact, and confesses her regret that she had endeavoured to raise a bad spirit between them. From this crude apprehension – notable for being perhaps the only ‘lesson’ that the effective protagonist learns in the course of her painful odyssey – the end ensues. It is a magnificent ending, but requires little further comment. Heathcliff tells Nelly that ‘a strange change is approaching’: ‘It is a poor conclusion, is it not . . . An absurd termination to my violent exertions? . . . when everything is ready, and in my power, I find the will to lift a slate off either roof has vanished!’ (p. 323)

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It is significant that he refers to the two houses first, and only subsequently to their representatives. The question is: What has occurred to change his mind? In Catherine, he ‘sees’ Cathy; and in Hareton, he ‘sees’ not ‘a human being’, but ‘a personification’ of his own youth (p. 323). They alone retain a ‘distinct material appearance’ to him. The rest of the world becomes increasingly dim. Heathcliff’s ghoulish death by starvation is vividly described. And he is mourned by only one inmate of his home: ‘poor Hareton, the most wronged, was the only one that really suffered much. He sat by the corpse all night, weeping in bitter earnest’ (p. 336). And yet, however much the ending might appear to free Catherine from her horrendous ordeal, as so much else in this novel, it is far more deeply ambivalent than is usually assumed. On the one hand, Catherine has at last identified with her archetypal inner nature sufficiently to protest against tyranny. Just as it was by protesting against Hindley’s tyranny that Cathy discovers Thrushcross Grange, so it is by protesting against Heathcliff’s tyranny that Catherine discovers the value of her own feminine ego-structure. On the other hand, as we shall now demonstrate, she is virtually repeating the error of her mother. The Sense of the Ending ‘‘Glad comforter, Will I not brave ‘‘Unawed, the darkness of the grave – ? (Emily Bronte¨, ‘Anticipation’, 2 June 1845)

The novel ends with Lockwood learning that Catherine intends to marry Hareton on New Year’s Day of the coming year (1803). And, after bidding farewell to Nelly and leaving Wuthering Heights for the last time, he pauses in the grounds of the kirk: I sought, and soon discovered, the three head-stones on the slope next the moor – the middle one grey, and half buried in the heath – Edgar Linton’s only harmonized by the turf, and moss creeping up its foot – Heathcliff’s still bare. I lingered round them, under that benign sky; watched the moths fluttering among the heath, and hare-bells; listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass; and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth. (p. 338)

This justly famous ending suggests that the process has finally come to a satisfactory conclusion: it is assumed that the revenge has been thwarted and that Catherine and Hareton will live (more or less) ‘happily ever after’. But, as many have observed, it is doubtful whether Catherine has achieved any real ‘serenity’ (Gold, 1985, p. 71; cf. Gorsky, 1999, p. 189).

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Indeed, there are several reasons for doubting whether this can be described as a desirable conclusion. To begin with, one notes that the last words Lockwood overhears between the two cousins are: ‘Con-trary!’ said a voice, as sweet as a silver bell – ‘That for the third time, you dunce! I’m not going to tell you, again – Recollect, or I pull your hair!’ ‘Contrary, then,’ answered another, in deep but softened tones. ‘And now, kiss me, for minding so well.’ (p. 307)

As Sandra Gilbert has observed, ‘Catherine takes over [Hareton’s] education because he meets her needs for power’ (p. 295). But there is more to it than this. The exchange suggests that Catherine has become not only a castigator, but also an educator. In other words, she is behaving in a manner modelled on her notions of her father, her only teacher and the castigator of those who ‘vexed’ her in childhood. Far from freeing herself from her attachment to him, she has assumed his attributes; she now identifies with him. The relation between Hareton and Catherine at the end of the novel reminds one of Nelly’s image when describing the early months of the marriage between Cathy and Edgar: It was not the thorn bending to the honeysuckles, but the honeysuckles embracing the thorn. There were no mutual concessions; one stood erect, and the other(s) yielded; and who can be illnatured and bad-tempered, when they encounter neither opposition nor indifference? (p. 91)

The parallel is disturbing: even in play, it is clear that Catherine has a tendency to be as ‘imperious’ as Cathy toward her prospective husband. And we remember that there have been several times when she would have liked to give Hareton ‘a smart chastisement’ (p. 98). But the strongest argument for doubting whether the ending is desirable comes from Hareton’s value. Hareton represents Catherine’s animus. And if we can assume that Hareton is drawn not to Catherine as peevish protagonist, but to her ‘essential’ nature (¼ her anima or soul), then the relation between them is disturbingly similar to that between Cathy and Heathcliff, but with Lockwood in place of Edgar. This is illustrated in Figure 3.5: Although this diagram appears very similar to Figure 3.3 (p. 170), there is a significant difference. As we have seen, Edgar is not really a representative of a social world: he is a representative of an ego-structure to which Cathy, as carrier of an aspect of Catherine’s personality, must attach herself if the effective protagonist is to free herself from Mr

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Figure 3.5

The Quaternio at the heart of Wuthering Heights

Heathcliff. Lockwood, on the other hand, however much he might mirror Catherine’s behaviour, truly belongs to a social world. And this constitutes a significant difference. We have seen that Cathy’s commitment to her ego-structure is very tenuous indeed. Catherine is even more indifferent to Lockwood – and it cannot be sufficiently emphasized that he is the only representative of a credible social world in the entire novel. In other words, Catherine is so tied to her animus that she is totally indifferent to the novel’s only representative of a credible, social world. This suggests that there is a sense in which Catherine should have ‘migrated’ with Lockwood ‘into the stirring atmosphere of the town’. This, of course, is his fantasy (cf. p. 304), but given the parallels we have drawn between Catherine and Lockwood, his fantasy must be regarded as a projection of a deeply unconscious compensatory desire within herself. In this sense, his fantasy is also hers, only she is utterly unconscious of it. Even so, it must be insisted that the critic’s task is not to advocate a course of action different from that taken by a protagonist, but to better understand the implications of the decisions he or she takes. The only possible way in which Catherine might have broken the spell that her ‘inner’ world has over her would have been for her to do exactly as Lockwood fantasizes. In psychological terms, the ending of Wuthering Heights is deeply disturbing. By marrying Hareton, Catherine will become Mrs Catherine Earnshaw: that is, she will assume the same name as Cathy in the first part of the archetypal myth. By becoming as assertive as Cathy, she has found the way to repossess her home. This has to be for the good. But we also note that Catherine Earnshaw ‘belongs’ at Wuthering Heights. And this strongly suggests that the ‘second’ Mrs Catherine Earnshaw might very well find herself drawn back to Wuthering Heights. Some critics have shown a willingness to believe the ending is a happy one. But the archetypal attraction that links Catherine to Hareton has nothing to do with ‘love’. It is based on a misapprehension of his nature. A young woman can no more marry her animus (an image of the masculine) than a man can marry his anima. To do so is evidence of an alarming engrossment with one’s own inner world. A female effective protagonist cannot share her ego-structure with her animus. It is ‘wrong’ for Catherine to persuade Hareton to abandon his ancestral home and move with her to Thrushcross Grange. She thinks she can shut up the

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animus-structure and leave it in the hands of Joseph as its housekeeper. But her intention suggests that the condition of animus possession with which the novel opens is, in a sense, even more complete at its close. And this brings us to what is possibly the most astonishing parallel in the entire novel: the marriages in each of the respective histories fall at exactly the same moment. In January 1803, the date of her intended marriage to Hareton, Catherine will be eighteen years and nine months old, which is Heathcliff’s age in April 1783, when Cathy marries Edgar (see Figure 3.6). The implications are disturbing. For if the marriages occur at a corresponding time, the axial scenes that are set between the return of the ‘transformed’ Mr Heathcliff and the death of Cathy are far more ambivalent than is usually recognized. In literal terms, they provide the background necessary to understanding how Catherine came to find herself in the predicament in which Lockwood discovers her. But in psychological terms, they also provide an archetypal representation (or amplification) of the future course of Catherine’s marriage with Hareton. In other words, they can also be read as an archetypal ‘continuation’ of the novel. Indeed, the tragic dialectic we have already examined (Section 4, above: pp. 171–199) anticipates the probable course of Catherine’s marriage with Hareton. Several critics have intuited something akin to this possibility, commenting on the ending: for example, ‘There is no lysis, only a lull . . . There is no solution, no assurance that, should another stranger intrude, it would not all happen again’ (Klingopulos, 1947, p. 272; cf. Bersani, 1976, p. 199); ‘The tones are those of someone aware that the claims of heart and head remain unreconciled’ (Allott, 1958, p. 47). The diagram above not only corroborates but elaborates on these intuitions: it indicates not only who the stranger might be, but also the nature of the flaw in Catherine’s attachment to Hareton.

Figure 3.6 The Ambivalence of the Central Events

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The function of the unconscious is to promote a balance between the ‘inner’ and the ‘outer’ worlds. In the novel’s closing scenes, as her schoolmistressly ways suggest, Catherine has not freed herself of her overattachment to her father. ‘Mr Heathcliff’ – his dark counterpart – will reappear. And the course of the horrendous ordeal that still awaits her is indicated by the events that follow upon Mr Heathcliff’s ‘previous’ return to the vicinity, which lead to the various ‘deaths’ of both Cathy and Isabella. The ending suggests that Catherine has won only a temporary respite.

6.

Conclusion Everything primary, and consequently everything genuine, in man works as the forces of nature do, unconsciously. (Arthur Schopenhauer, from Parerga and Paralipomena, 1851) Once drinking deep of that divinest anguish, How could I seek the empty world again? (Emily Bronte¨, ‘Remembrance’,3 March 1845)

As countless previous essays have demonstrated, a literal reading of the relation between the two generations generates a powerful – but not altogether coherent – story about Mr Heathcliff’s revenge. And of course: there is no question. Wuthering Heights is very obviously ‘about’ Heathcliff. The story is set in motion when old Mr Earnshaw introduces the young Heathcliff into his home and it comes to an end soon after the death of Mr Heathcliff. There is no question: Heathcliff pervades the novel, but – and this is the important point – it does not tell his story. Nor is it an ‘Earnshaw Saga’: it is not primarily about the fortunes, or otherwise, either of Cathy or the adopted Heathcliff or even Hareton. Wuthering Heights is an unusually polyvalent text. It requires consideration from several points of view. This essay, of course, is concerned with only one. It addresses the question: what are the psychological implications of the specific narrative structure that is Wuthering Heights? And the conclusions it arrives at are as shocking as they are unexpected, for they foreground the plight of a character that has never been considered central to the novel’s psychological implications. My contention is that all the events of the novel, including those that are ostensibly set in the previous generation (and in which she therefore has no part), are entirely determined by the nature of the dilemma confronting the second-generation Catherine. She is the novel’s effective protagonist. Paradoxical though it must seem, the mother’s story is dictated by the daughter’s. And this, of course, is why I have chosen in

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this essay to reverse usual practice and to give the full name to the effective protagonist, and to use the abbreviated form for the essentially archetypal image of her mother. Previous readings of the novel have always assumed that the principal structural device of the text is ‘repetition’: that the conflict which begins in the first-generation (Cathy, Heathcliff, Edgar) is at least partially resolved in the second-generation narrative (Catherine, Linton, Hareton). And certainly, repetition constitutes a major feature of the text. But it is only one of many and very different structural devices. Wuthering Heights rests on an intricate dynamic relation between two narratives that are dependent on ‘horizontal repetition’ with two other altogether unexpected narratives that are dependent on ‘vertical correspondence’. It opens with a scene depicting the challenge facing Catherine in the present and the ensuing narrative must be read in three necessarily complementary ways: 1. Literally; and as innumerable previous interpretations have demonstrated, even when the events are considered in this way, they are endlessly problematic. 2. As a myth that explains both what Catherine must do if she is to free herself from her imprisonment at Wuthering Heights in ‘November 1801’ (commit herself to her own ego-structure) and also why she is unable to do this (because she is over-deeply tied to her own imaginal world). 3. As a tightly interrelated combination of an anamnesis elaborated on two distinct levels of fictional representation: one (Catherine’s history) pertaining to the personal unconscious; the other (the second part of Cathy’s history) constituting an archetypal amplification of the inevitable implications of Catherine’s determination to marry her animus. The daughter–father relationship is not only central to the second half of the novel – this has long been recognized – but, more surprisingly perhaps, it also determines the interactions in the first half. The archetypal interactions of Cathy’s history suppose, and are entirely determined by, the dilemma facing Catherine at puberty and adolescence. Thus the narrative of ‘linear’ repetition is also a narrative of ‘vertical’ interconnection. Wuthering Heights consists of a harrowing dialectic between the inhabitants of two houses that not only have an emphatically psychological value, but also the same psychological value throughout the narrative. Thrushcross Grange represents Catherine’s ego-structure, and Wuthering Heights, her animus-structure. The novel is about her

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confrontation with various aspects of her ‘world within’: a benign fatherfigure (who belongs at Thrushcross Grange), a tyrannical father/figure, her authentic animus, and the sickly image toward which she is drawn as a result of her over-attachment to her father (who all belong at Wuthering Heights). Mr Heathcliff’s behaviour illustrates the horrendous reality of the damage that she has brought upon herself as a result of her over-attachment to her father, Edgar Linton. No other novel provides a more devastating exploration of the problem that a father can pose for his daughter. Catherine grows up over-attached to her father. Consequently, at puberty and adolescence, she finds herself faced by figures that represent the ‘shadow’ side of her over-attachment. The events almost seem to illustrate Jung’s contention that ‘’what has been spoiled by the father’ [that is, Edgar] can only be made good by a father [that is, Mr Heathcliff]’ (CW 14: 232). And, as we have seen, if the novel traces her unconscious struggle to free herself from her own misplaced allegiances – first to her father and then to Linton – it must be added that its resolution is very tentative indeed. The events both begin and end at Wuthering Heights. Significantly, the novel does not record Catherine’s return to Thrushcross Grange. The entire novel unfolds within the animus-structure. Catherine is Mrs Catherine Heathcliff in the frame-story and throughout the telling of her terrible story. And we note that the text is disturbingly cyclical (see Harris, 1980): her birth leads inevitably to Cathy’s death, which is also Catherine’s birth. Indeed, it presents a structure worthy of Zeno, for it begins in the middle with the ending. It begins with Catherine’s birth in the middle of the novel, which occurs only a few hours before the death of her mother, which is an archetypal representation of the fate awaiting Catherine as a result of her projected marriage to Hareton. Catherine has not resolved the dilemma that confronts her. She has obtained only a very temporary respite. This reading owes nothing to biography, and yet it begs at least two ‘biographical’ questions. Charlotte gives a thumbnail character sketch of her sister in her preface to the ‘new edition’ of the text: I am bound to avow that she had scarcely more practical knowledge of the peasantry amongst whom she lived, than a nun has of the country people who sometimes pass her convent gates. My sister’s disposition was not naturally gregarious; circumstances favoured and fostered her tendency to seclusion; except to go to church or take a walk on the hills, she rarely crossed the threshold of home. Though her feeling for the people round her was benevolent, intercourse with them she never sought; nor, with very few exceptions, ever experienced. (p. 368)

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There is no reason to doubt the gist of Charlotte’s view, which lends some weight to the insistence that the characters of Wuthering Heights be read as personifications of Emily Bronte¨’s inner world. We note the parallel between the author and Catherine’s secluded childhood and it clashes with our image of Emily Bronte¨. There is a part of us that would much rather assume a close identity between the author and Cathy. But that Charlotte can describe Emily’s habits in almost exactly the same terms as her sister describes Catherine’s upbringing, and that Emily, like Catherine, was very deeply attached to her father, strongly suggests that Catherine might indeed be the primary carrier of the author’s unconscious personality, whereas Cathy would seem to embody the implicit nature of her deeply mistaken allegiances. Indeed, each of the novel’s female characters (Catherine, Cathy, Isabella, Nelly, even Frances) personifies a different aspect of the author’s complex unconscious personality: hence the number of biographical echoes in the text (see Ge´rin, 1971; Barker, 1994; Chitham, 1987 and 1998). In spite of the evident differences between the argument outlined here and Edward Chitham’s meticulous textual investigation into the ‘birth’ of the novel, we agree on the key point: ‘the first three chapters were the first section of the book to be written’ (1998, p. 97). This essay explains why this must have been the case. Wuthering Heights tells a deeply disturbing story about a woman’s fixation with her inner world. It explores not only the origins, but also the devastating implications of a condition that Jung described as animus possession. It is tempting, very tempting to see Emily Bronte¨ as she appears in some of her best poetry: as a champion of liberty, as a ‘free woman’ (Davies, 1983). But this reading of her only surviving novel suggests the opposite: that she was completely in thrall to her own creative imagination; that she was entirely taken up by the drama unfolding in her waking fantasies. And, correspondingly, that she had no interest whatsoever in the outer world. She appears to have been utterly unconscious that the unfolding events of her waking-fantasy/novel provide a vivid commentary on the nature of the challenge implicitly confronting her in the mid-1840s: to free herself of an over-attachment to her inner world, and perhaps especially of all that she associated with her father (see Barker, 1994) and, correspondingly, also to reconnect with the outer world. Wuthering Heights is a story about a fixation with the inner world that is told to the only male representative of a credible social world. In this sense, it can be described as an unconscious plea to be heard, to be rescued from an over-engrossment with ‘the world within’. And so we come to something that must be said. However reluctantly, it must be admitted that the relation between Catherine, Linton and

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Hareton is suggestive of an almost unbelievable immaturity. Many critics have been confused that a woman who could produce poetry and prose of such power as Emily Bronte¨ could also be engrossed with somewhat childish obsessions such as her ongoing fascination with Gondal. Indeed, Catherine’s history is not only childish, but mawkish. The mawkishness, however, comes not from her interest in Gondal per se, so much as from the author’s almost alarming candour. She approaches her only novel without a trace of self-consciousness. She never attempts to disguise or suppress her material for fear of it being a little too obviously sickly or autobiographical. She never poses, never cheats, never embellishes. She records what she ‘sees’ in her vivid waking-fantasy exactly as she experiences it. She writes as if she had absolutely no persona, no intermediary ‘mask’ between her ego and the only world in which she had any interest: her own ‘world within’. No other novelist has ever been so completely, so unabashedly candid about her personal unconscious (cf. p. 16). This is what makes the novel so terribly poignant; but it also makes it uneven. Whether Wuthering Heights can be considered a great novel may always be open to debate. But it is certainly a great testament. It is one of the very greatest testaments in world literature. Emily Bronte¨ was more deeply conversant with the figures of her inner world than possibly any other writer (yes, including Blake). And this is what gives her only novel its indelible power. It bears witness to an experience that very few would have been able to sustain, let alone record. Most writers can only guess at the undercurrents of their waking fantasies. Emily Bronte¨ allows us access to imaginal spaces in which we can observe every detail of an extraordinarily tightly argued and complex process that unfolds on three distinct levels of imaginal experience. No other novel is more tightly structured. No other novel follows the logic of the unconscious more relentlessly. No other novel offers a more harrowing exploration of the deeper and more disturbing ‘levels’ of the creative imagination. And no other novel better illustrates the devastating consequences of ‘misreading’ its compensatory (and thus self-regulating) promptings.

CHAPTER FOUR

‘Light Enough To Trusten By’: Structure and Experience in Silas Marner A woman’s love is always freezing into fear. She wants everything, she is secure in nothing . . . What is the use of a woman’s will? – if she tries, she doesn’t get it, and she ceases to be loved. God was cruel when he made women. (George Eliot, Felix Holt, 1866) The art of letting things happen, action through non-action, letting go of oneself as taught by Meister Eckhart, became for me the key that opens the door to the way. We must be able to let things happen in the psyche. (C.G. Jung, ‘Commentary on The Secret of the Golden Flower’, 1929)

Until recently, Silas Marner elicited far more praise than serious critical interest. In spite of the admiration with which many writers referred to it (for example, Henry James, 1866; Virginia Woolf, 1921), for the first hundred years following its publication, it was considered too obvious and too lightweight to merit sustained discussion. In 1949, F.R. Leavis echoed the views of many when he described it as ‘that charming minor masterpiece’, an evident ‘moral fable’ (p. 60). Only in one respect was it seen – and, for some years, continued to be seen – as unusual. In contrast with almost all her other novels, it appeared to have no direct bearing on its author’s life (Harvey, 1964, p. 296; cf. Jones, 1970, p. 31; Buckler, 1972, p. 159). In the mid-1950s, however, Silas Marner gradually began to gather advocates who have shown that it is not only as rich in ideas, but also as firmly rooted in George Eliot’s personal concerns as any of her other works. And somewhat surprisingly, these two issues were increasingly seen as one (Thale, 1959; Thomson, 1965; Milner, 1966; Carroll, 1967). In 1975, Ruby Redinger explored the theme of hoarding and concluded that ‘the transformation of gold into Eppie justified George Eliot seeking and accepting money for her writing’ (1976, p. 438). Lawrence Jay

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Dessner looked at a wide range of parallels between the events of the novel and the author’s circumstances at the time of writing, and noted that ‘Fear of being abandoned, fear of having one’s secret revealed, antagonism toward a brother, love for a lost sister, concern for moral reputation [are all] common to the fact and the fiction’ (1979, p. 264; but see Welsh, 1985, p. 167). Peggy Fitzhugh Johnstone (1994), from a psychoanalytical perspective, and Frederick R. Karl (1995), in his recent biography, have further elaborated on the importance of these issues to Silas Marner. The first to explore the specific implications of the relationship between Eppie and Silas for a woman was Sandra Gilbert (1985). She argues that Eppie is the central character and that the novel’s principal theme is the riddle of daughterhood. Through Silas, she affirms, George Eliot was able to examine ‘the dispossession that she herself had experienced as part of the empty pack of daughterhood’ (Gilbert, 1985, p. 360). More recently, Rosemarie Bodenheimer (1994) has shown how the portrayal of motherhood in the novel is very much based on George Eliot’s own experiences at the time of its composition. Albeit in very different ways, both these studies see the text as the product of the author’s concern with her own female identity. All these otherwise different readings have in common that they are principally – indeed, almost exclusively – concerned with either motifs or themes. They have established that many of the issues that can be identified in the text are pertinent to the situation in which George Eliot found herself in 1860. They are altogether less persuasive when it comes to explaining either the implications of its narrative structure, or why she might have chosen to write such an evidently ‘moral fable’ about an elderly male weaver at this precise moment in her life. Faced by a novel in which there are two distinct plots, the critic’s first task is to discover the connection between them. On the surface, the main plot would seem to be about the regeneration of a middle-aged weaver through love and his reintegration into the community in which he lives. And a secondary plot would appear to trace the story of Godfrey Cass, the local squire’s eldest son, who turns over something of a new leaf in the course of the events described. One definition of the relation between the two stories in Silas Marner is that they are parallel, but move in opposite directions (Preston, 1980, p. 121; cf. Cohen, 1983, p. 414). This view, however, is not only too vague to be helpful, it is also misleading. There is no similarity whatsoever between Silas’s situation at the beginning and Godfrey’s at the end, or vice versa. Nevertheless, the two plots are unquestionably related – indeed, I shall be arguing that they show many more similarities than have been identified to date. In purely narrative terms, the main events of the novel

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do trace the parallel stories of the weaver and Godfrey Cass: I do not wish to argue otherwise. But the novel was written by a woman. For this reason, a psychological approach to it must at least consider the possibility that it reflects a woman’s experience. My purpose here is to establish possible connections between the events of the novel and the nature of a dilemma uppermost in its author’s mind at the time of writing. In late 1860, George Eliot had completed her preliminary studies for Romola, a novel about the Florence of Savonarola. Then she fell into one of her periodic fits of depression and was unsure how to proceed. Next, as every essay ever written on Silas Marner reminds us, something happened to make her lay her planned novel aside and start work immediately on a new project. In her journal for 28 November she notes: ‘I am engaged now in writing a story, the idea of which came to me after our arrival in this house, and which has thrust itself between me and the other book [Romola] I was meditating’ (1954–56, vol. 3, p. 360). We shall never know just how much of the action of Romola she had sketched when the idea for Silas Marner ‘thrust’ itself upon her so insistently. All that is certain is that Savonarola occupied a major place in her thoughts immediately prior to the vision – the word is not too strong – of ‘a linen-weaver with a bag on his back’, which provided the initial seed from which Silas Marner quickly grew (1954–56, vol. 3, p. 382). This, of course, begs a question. Is there any connection between George Eliot’s pre-occupation with Savonarola and her unexpected vision of a linen weaver? One possibility suggests itself. Savonarola might be described as a ‘dark’ father-figure who influences Romola for as long as she is attracted to the worthless Tito. Silas might be described as a ‘benevolent’ father figure who looks after Eppie when the latter needs her. Could it be that her vision of a linen weaver was a spontaneous compensation (in Jung’s sense of this word: see p. 13) for her own gloomy thoughts about Savonarola? In other words, that its ‘function’ was to shake her out of the depression into which she had sunk? Clearly, before this could be maintained, one would need to establish in what sense Silas Marner might be said to reflect a dilemma facing the author in late 1860 and to demonstrate that it has a strong thematic link with the historical novel.

The Argument My primary aim is to demonstrate that everything that happens in Silas Marner – not only the events of the main plot, but all the major episodes,

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including the wonderfully comic conversation in the Rainbow Inn – can be shown to be directly related to an apparently minor female character almost completely ignored by previous critics. This character is Nancy Lammeter. Not only is the so-called sub-plot principally about a process affecting her, but so too is the entire novel. In other words, my contention is that Nancy Lammeter is the novel’s effective protagonist. By extension, she is also a ‘carrier’ of a major aspect of the author’s unconscious personality, and the novel thus gives expression to a psychological dilemma pertinent to George Eliot at the time of writing. The first task, therefore, is to show that its narrative structures invite the reader to regard it as an expression of a woman’s psychological concerns. The theme of a novel is often discovered by comparing the situations with which it opens and closes. What, then, does each of the main characters achieve between the outset of the events and their conclusion? The earliest events described at any length are those that take place in Lantern Yard, but they belong to an already remote past: they are not the first stage of the plot (see Martin, 1972, p. 481). Silas Marner begins in late November or early December of about 1803, with a description of Silas as a recluse and a miser, and it ends in May or early June of about 1819, with an account of Eppie’s marriage to Aaron. The most obvious transformation effected in the course of these events is Silas’s integration into the community. But he is not, as Joseph Wiesenfarth asserts, the only character to change significantly (1970, p. 228). There are three other principal characters – Godfrey, Eppie and Nancy – whose situations are radically altered in the course of the novel. Godfrey also undergoes a significant change. At the outset, he has ruined his chance of marrying the woman he loves, and yet still continues to court her; at the end, he reaffirms his love for her. Because the early chapters give more prominence to Godfrey, critics have been tempted to ask how the weaver’s story relates to his. But it is not at all certain that he really learns anything in the course of the events, and even less certain why any reader should be interested in him. One of the most striking features of the text is the way in which it shifts from an almost exclusive emphasis on male characters, especially in the first nine chapters, to an emphasis on female characters, especially in the much shorter Part Two. The most obvious example of this is Eppie. At the outset, she is an infant whose mother, Molly Cass (ne´e Farren), is not in a condition to take proper care of her, and the novel ends with an account of her marriage. But Eppie is a toddler during the major scenes, and even in Part Two is never truly individuated. It would be difficult to relate any of the events of Part One (for example the

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Lantern Yard episode or the scene in the Rainbow) directly to her change of circumstances. Nancy’s role in Part One is not immediately evident. She is first mentioned in Chapter 3, where the narrator describes the villagers’ collective supposition that ‘if Mr Godfrey didn’t turn over a new leaf, he might say ‘ ‘‘Good-bye’’ to Miss Nancy Lammeter’ (p. 23). A few moments later, it is revealed that Godfrey is already married. In other words, not only has Nancy been jilted, she is being cruelly cheated: she has no idea that the man who continues to court her attentions has married another. Although it is not until Chapter 11, almost half-way through the text, that Nancy makes her first major appearance at Squire Cass’s New Year party, from this moment onwards her importance increases. Part One closes with a reference to her marriage with Godfrey and, at the beginning of Part Two, the narrator all but tells the reader to pay special attention to her. This is how she is reintroduced: Perhaps the pretty woman, not much younger than [Godfrey], who is leaning on his arm, is more changed than her husband . . . to all who love human faces best for what they tell of human experience, Nancy’s beauty has a heightened interest . . . The firm yet placid mouth, the clear veracious glance of the brown eyes, speak now of a nature that has been tested and has kept its highest qualities. (p. 132)

Given this signalling, it is astonishing how few critics have found anything substantial to say about her. Lilian Haddakin is one of the very few who have even noticed her importance. She writes that Nancy is ‘vitally important in the rendering of ‘‘feeling and form’’ on the realistic level’ (1970, p. 74). But, somewhat surprisingly, she thereupon drops the point. In Part Two of the novel, Nancy plays a much more significant role than her husband. In short, she undergoes a change of circumstances just as decisive as that affecting either Silas or Eppie, and far more substantial than that affecting Godfrey. At the outset of the novel, although she doesn’t know it, the man whom she loves is cheating on her. At the end, she hears him reconfirm his love for her. And yet her crucial function in the text has never been adequately explained. Nancy is very obviously a figure of some amusement to George Eliot and so the claim that she is the novel’s effective protagonist might surprise some readers. But a moment’s reflection should remind them that this is not an obstacle to her being a central character. Maggie Tulliver did not escape the author’s gentle irony; nor do Nancy and Eppie. And this gentle irony should not be allowed to obscure her centrality in the text. Paradoxical as this might seem, my aim is to show that the events concerning Godfrey should be read in relation not to him, but to Nancy.

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Even when she does not actually feature in an episode, or plays only a minor role in it, the insistence with which its theme is related to her suggests that the entire narrative may be seen as an expression of the dilemma facing her. As we shall see, every major episode in the novel reveals a thematic parallel with the dilemma confronting her. In the following pages, first I explore the relation between the stories affecting Silas and Nancy, and then I show how some of Jung’s terms provide an intriguing reading of the parallels and other narrative patterns. Interest in Jung has concentrated too much on his ideas about archetypal images (the object of experience), and not enough on the need to identify the subject of the experience in question: in other words, the effective protagonist. In the first section, I look at the parallels between the two ‘plots’ to show that the events in which Godfrey features are told from Nancy’s point of view. In the second and third, I use some of Jung’s key concepts to explore the nature of the dilemma confronting her. In the fourth, I examine the relation of the Silas-plot to the way in which Nancy achieves a tentative resolution to this problem. And, finally, as my reading tacitly implies that the experience at issue was highly relevant to the author, I briefly relate the conclusions to George Eliot’s situation in 1860–61. I have two main aims. The first is to demonstrate that the effective protagonist of the novel is Nancy Lammeter; in other words, that the novel gives expression to the way in which she responds to the dilemma facing her at the outset. The second is to suggest that Silas Marner occupies a much more significant place in its author’s literary development than is generally recognized.

The Parallels Between the Two Plots Let us begin by reminding ourselves of the main stages in Silas’s story. At the outset of the novel, he is living in complete isolation, nursing the hurt of a wrong done to him some fifteen years previously by William Dane and the arbitrary result of the drawing of lots by the Lantern Yard brethren. The day of Mrs Osgood’s birthday party, his gold is stolen. A month later, he sees lying on his hearth a baby girl, the sight of which awakens ‘old quiverings of tenderness’ in him (p. 109). Sixteen years later, contrary to his fear that she might abandon him, Eppie chooses to stay with him, and the novel ends with her marrying Aaron. This pattern is remarkably similar to that of Nancy’s story. At the time the novel opens, Nancy is privately nursing the hurt of a wrong done her by Godfrey. The night of Mrs Osgood’s birthday party, she appears to take pleasure in dancing with Godfrey, and some four weeks later,

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Molly dies while on her way to claim recognition, thus making it possible for Nancy to marry the man whom she loves. Fifteen years later, Godfrey, afraid that she might want to leave him, reveals his past to her. To his surprise, she forgives him and they reaffirm their love for one another. These similarities are striking. Each plot begins with a contrast between two men, one of whom is well-intentioned but weak (Silas, Godfrey); the other, more dynamic but morally reprehensible (William Dane, Dunstan). The men are either brothers or the very best of friends (Silas and Dane are called ‘David and Jonathan’ by the Lantern Yard brethren: p. 8). Both stories are thus instigated by a similar combination of factors. In the ‘past’, when falsely accused of theft by William Dane, Silas is cast out by the community to which he belongs. In the ‘present’, Godfrey’s only remaining possession is his horse, appropriately called Wildfire. Even this he is prepared to sacrifice rather than admit to his marriage with a barmaid, Molly Farren, because he knows that his father would disinherit him for such a folly. In each case, a more vital ‘daring and cunning’ brother endeavours to steal something equivalent to the birthright of a better but weaker brother (p. 36). There is however a very considerable difference between the two situations. Godfrey does not want his ‘degrading marriage’ with Molly Farren brought to light; he is guilty of deceiving not only his wife, but also Nancy whom he has continued to court. Silas, on the other hand, does not commit the crime he is accused of. If there is a parallel between the events in the ‘past’ and those in the ‘present’, it is between Silas and Nancy, who are equally blameless. One notes that Godfrey’s conduct is being excused constantly. We are asked to believe that he really is ‘a fine, open-faced good-natured young man’ (p. 23). The facts do not bear this out: he is secretive and has behaved abominably towards both Molly and Nancy. He deserves to be disgraced. Why, then, should he not be exposed? Who stands to gain by his behaviour not being revealed? He does, of course. But so too does Nancy. She is proud and could not stand knowing that Godfrey has been deceiving her. At the end, he reminds her why he didn’t tell her about his marriage with Molly Farren: ‘With your pride and your father’s, you’d have hated having anything to do with me after the talk there’d have been’ (p. 158). He is of course making excuses, but he is also probably right. Everything we learn about Nancy in Part One seems to corroborate his assertion. If she reacts differently in Chapter 18, it is because, by the time he reveals his past to her, she has ‘changed’. In other words, it is essential that Nancy does not learn of his affair with Molly until she is ready to assimilate such information. Nancy would like Godfrey to be exonerated

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from as much censure as possible. And he can only be the man that she wants him to be if his shoddy behaviour is not a reflection of his own personality but has been provoked by another character. Thus Dunstan’s function is ambiguous. At one level of reading, he seeks to dishonour and inculpate Godfrey. He wants to see Godfrey ‘turned out of house and home’ by their father, and ‘traps’ him into a marriage with a barmaid of whom he is ashamed (pp. 24, 29). But at another level, by his very existence, Dunstan serves to extenuate Godfrey’s guilt. And in this latter capacity, no matter how paradoxical this may seem, Dunstan serves Nancy’s interests. We shall look more closely at the similarities between Dunstan and William Dane in a moment. Meanwhile, it is worth noting those between Molly and Sarah. Both are associated with the stronger but morally reprehensible man. Molly becomes involved with Godfrey through Dunstan, and Sarah marries William Dane. The most striking feature that they have in common is their weakness. Sarah slips into marriage with William Dane and is never mentioned again. And Molly is kept away from Raveloe, in a neighbouring village called Batherley, where she slides into laudanum addiction until she finally succumbs to a longing for oblivion (p. 106). There is an evident parallel with Nancy’s situation. When Godfrey fails to propose to her, Nancy determines not to marry him and withdraws to her own home. Molly’s isolation thus corresponds to Nancy’s isolation, and Sarah’s preference for William Dane corresponds to Nancy’s continuing interest in Godfrey after his behaviour has become as hypocritical as that of William Dane. The parallels suggest that, in metaphorical terms, the fifteen years of Silas’s self-imposed isolation correspond to the period of about three years of Nancy’s bitter doubts. In corroboration of this, one notes the parallels between the ways in which Silas and Nancy react to the various wrongs done to them. They both ward off despair by devoting themselves to work. When the lots pronounce against him, Silas ceases to trust in a ‘God of lies’ (p. 12). To forget his pain, he abandons his home town, settles in a community as isolated as possible, and devotes himself to his work. Weaving, one of the dominant images of the novel, symbolizes the slow growth of a pattern through the patient interconnection of opposites. Similarly, when Godfrey fails to propose to her, Nancy deliberately crushes her hope of marrying him. To forget her pain, she buries herself in domestic duties: her hands ‘bore the traces of butter-making, cheese-crushing, and even still coarser work’ (p. 90). Like linen, butter and cheese are the products of patient toil. At the outset of the events, therefore, both Silas and Nancy have been wronged and they have reacted to this wrong in a

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similar fashion. They have both chosen to lead isolated and restricted lives, immersing themselves in transformative work in order to forget their hurt. Nancy is equally central to the crucial events that take place on the evening of Mrs Osgood’s birthday party and at Squire Cass’s New Year party. Godfrey’s relations play virtually no part in the story: Mrs Osgood is Nancy’s aunt. The night of her birthday party, we learn that Godfrey is very pleased to see Nancy. The same evening, Silas’s gold, which stands in lieu of a ‘purpose’ in his life and is the visible symbol of his ‘hard isolation’ (p. 40), is stolen, causing him for the first time since his selfimposed exile to become aware of a ‘lack’ in his life. A few moments later, the thief, Dunstan, disappears from view (we subsequently learn that he fell to his death). This not only frees Godfrey from the negative influence upon him that Dunstan represents, but thereby opens the way for him to make things up with Nancy. We know that Nancy is still deeply attached to Godfrey. We can safely infer that his pleasure in seeing her causes Nancy to become conscious of the distance that has grown between them, that is, of a ‘lack’ in her life. The theft of Silas’s gold thus coincides with Nancy becoming dimly aware of how she too has ‘undergone a bewildering separation from a supremely loved object’ (p. 108). The parallelism between the two plots is even more apparent on the night of Squire Cass’ New Year party. In the course of the festivities at the Red House, Ben Winthrop comments to Mr Macey: ‘Well, I think Miss Nancy’s a-coming round again’ (p. 102). This remark tells the reader two things. First, that Nancy’s determination not to marry Godfrey is not as firm as she would like people to believe (p. 87). And secondly, that at least in the eyes of one villager, it is not Godfrey, but Nancy who has been responsible for delaying the wedding. This is so contrary to one’s assumptions about the situation that it requires attention. Only Dunstan knows about Godfrey’s secret marriage. No one else suspects Godfrey of anything other than coming under Dunstan’s influence (p. 23). Ben’s comment tells us that Nancy now appears to have resolved to end her self-imposed isolation by responding to Godfrey’s devotion. The dance in the Red House coincides with two crucial events that occur just outside, and inside, the weaver’s cottage. Molly dies of laudanum intoxication and Silas discovers Eppie on his hearth and begins to feel ‘old quiverings of tenderness’ for the first time in several years (p. 109), thereby rediscovering a ‘purpose’ in life. Nancy’s change of heart thus coincides not only with the death of the woman who is an obstacle to her ambition to marry Godfrey, but also with the beginning of Silas’s redemption through love. And the phrases used to describe Silas’s emotions are equally applicable to Nancy. She also feels ‘old

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quiverings of tenderness’ towards Godfrey, and thereby discovers a new ‘purpose’ in her life. The ending of the novel reveals further parallels. Sixteen years later, when the stone-pits are drained, Dunstan’s body is found and Godfrey confesses to Nancy that Eppie is his daughter. There is no obvious reason why the salving of Godfrey’s conscience is either a satisfactory resolution to the events of the novel or in any way relevant to the Silas-Eppie-Aaron story. The ending is much more significant if it is seen as the resolution of a conflict that has faced the two female characters. Eppie forgives her father for his behaviour, even though she cannot consider leaving Silas, the only father whom she has known. Her decision prepares the way for her marriage with Aaron. Less obviously but no less significantly, Nancy also forgives Godfrey his deception. The thought of leaving him does not enter her head; indeed, the suggestion is that their union is strengthened by the confession. The ending of both stories thus involves a similar combination of factors: it puts the commitment and loyalty of the two female characters to the test. And the two characters that gain by this situation are Nancy and Silas, for nothing further can now threaten their happiness. There are, therefore, both remarkable and unexpected parallels between the two plots. Nancy’s story moves in the same direction as that of Silas. In the first stage, Nancy and Silas are living in isolation and devoting themselves to transformative work in order to forget their hurt. The night of Mrs Osgood’s birthday party, Nancy’s intimation of Godfrey’s continuing affection for her coincides with Silas becoming conscious of a lack. On New Year’s Eve, her ‘a-coming round again’ in her attitude towards Godfrey coincides with the awakening of Silas’s love for another human being. Sixteen years later, when facts come to light that might have been expected to result in Nancy once again shunning Godfrey and Silas being abandoned by Eppie, Nancy reaffirms her love for her husband and Eppie reaffirms her love for Silas. Neither Nancy nor Silas have any reason to fear the future. That such extraordinary parallels should exist between these two very different plots implies that Nancy is very much more central to the novel than has been recognized. My contention is that the interconnected plots of Silas Marner tell one story on two distinct ‘levels’ of fictional representation and that, in psychological terms, both pertain to Nancy.

Nancy, the Animus, and the Shadow We have discovered a pattern; it begs interpretation. If the first part of my argument is derived from structuralism, then the second stems from

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Jung’s theory of unconscious processes. For to ask what a novel signifies when considered as an expression of a dilemma confronting its author is to read it as if it were a product of its author’s creative imagination. Now, according to Jung, the meaning of a dream lies in the symbolic value that its characters and situations have for the dreamer at that particular moment in his or her life. In offering a reading of Silas Marner in the light of some of Jung’s major ideas, I have two aims. First, to illustrate how the combination of structuralism and Jungian theory can provide a useful means for unmasking a novel’s structural patterns and their psychological significance. And secondly, to uncover the possible origin of the dilemma that gave rise to the novel. In the following pages I shall be arguing that the dilemma from which this novel stems is a painful, self-destructive tendency pertinent to Nancy Lammeter and, by extension, also to George Eliot at the time of writing. We have looked at some parallels between Silas’s story and Nancy’s story. There is, however, one all important difference. Silas is acted upon. Things happen to him. He is expelled from the Lantern Yard brethren. His money is stolen and he later discovers Eppie on his hearth. He is not abandoned at the end. When he acts – for example, when he decides to leave the Lantern Yard community, or to look after Eppie – it is compulsively. Silas is never an agent. In contrast, each of the main stages in Nancy’s story is characterized by a decision that she makes. Her isolation corresponds to her determination not to marry Godfrey. Her resolve then wavers; she warms to him once again; at exactly the same time (although she knows nothing of this), she is liberated to marry him. At the end, when provided with a reason which, earlier, would have been sufficient for her to abandon him, she chooses to stay with him. The main events in Nancy’s story thus correspond to her various attitudes and decisions. She is an agent. In this section, through an analysis of the relation between Nancy and the other characters, I want to show that all the events are directly related to her. The opening situation offers a symbolic representation of a challenge facing her, and the course of events described in the novel reflect how she reacts to this implicit challenge. The surprising number of attributes that Nancy and Godfrey have in common provides the most striking indication of the nature of their relation one to the other. Nancy is chided by her sister Priscilla for ‘sitting on an addled egg for ever, as if there was never a fresh un in the world’ (p. 93). Godfrey is defined by his similar vacillation and moral cowardice (pp. 27, 71, 85–6, 157). His father describes him as a ‘shillyshally fellow’ and adds: ‘you take after your mother. She never had a will of her own’ (p. 70). Nancy’s mother died when she was a small child, and so too did Godfrey’s. Although Nancy is reluctant to admit she loves

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him, she does not want to marry anyone else (pp. 94, 159), and Godfrey constantly puts off declaring that he loves her, while conceding that there is ‘no other woman’ whom he wants to marry (p. 70). One way of looking at the characteristics they have in common is to maintain that they are drawn to one another because of their similar backgrounds. Such an explanation is insufficient. The parallels suggest rather that they ‘mirror’ one another; in other words, that their relationship is conditioned by psychological factors. Because the Nancy–Godfrey plot tells her story, one must conclude that Nancy is drawn to Godfrey largely because he ‘personifies’ or ‘mirrors’ aspects of her own weaknesses. And this, in turn, implies that Godfrey is not so much an autonomous male character as a type or, more specifically, an ‘image of a man’ to which she is instinctively drawn. According to Jung, just as every man has an inherent, albeit unconscious image of the feminine that reflects his relationship with women, so every woman has a similar image of the masculine that mirrors her relationship with men. The image of a man encountered by a woman in her dreams and waking fantasies, personifying her inner or unconscious attitudes towards men, he called the animus (CW 9ii: 29– 33). That Godfrey’s attributes so clearly mirror Nancy’s suggests that he may be defined as an animus figure. And the need to define him as such is self-evident. For, if one is reading the novel in psychological terms, then one should be wary of assuming a one-to-one relation between any character and a possible real-life original. Although Godfrey shares at least one major attribute of G.H. Lewes – devotion – it would be seriously mistaken to infer from this that ‘Godfrey ¼ G.H. Lewes’. Instead, let us consider the possibility that Godfrey is an image of masculinity towards which the effective protagonist (Nancy Lammeter) is instinctively, almost irrationally drawn and that this animus figure, spontaneously produced by the author’s imagination, reflects an aspect of her personality. For not only do the events in which Godfrey features tell Nancy’s story, but this story may be defined as essentially psychological. It is not so much about two individuals, as about the relation between a young woman and her own inherent image of masculinity: her animus. And this invites one to read the novel not as a succession of episodes that represent a real situation, but as a reflection of a psychological process pertinent to Nancy, and in which Nancy serves as the carrier of an aspect of the author’s unconscious personality. The elements that compose the initial situation symbolize the impasse in which Nancy finds herself. At the time the novel opens, both Nancy and Godfrey live in houses dominated by a father figure: The Warrens, by Mr Lammeter; and The Red House, by Squire Cass. And one notes

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that Nancy’s sister, Priscilla, is entirely contained in her relationship with her father. Indeed, proud that she ‘features’ his family, she spurns all other men: The pretty uns do for fly-catchers – they keep the men off us. I’ve no opinion o’ the men, Miss Gunn – I don’t know what you have. And as for fretting and stewing about what they’ll think of you from morning till night, and making your life uneasy about what they’re doing when they’re out o’ your sight – as I tell Nancy, it’s a folly no woman need be guilty of, if she’s got a good father and a good home . . . As I say, Mr Have-your-own-way is the best husband, and the only one I’d ever promise to obey. (p. 91)

This is not the speech of a liberated woman; it is an expression of Priscilla’s over-attachment to her father and a corresponding confusion of ‘father’ and ‘home’ that prevents her from even contemplating a relation with a male ‘other’. And Priscilla does not change in the course of the events described: at the end of the novel, she is as attached to her father as she was sixteen years before. She thinks of him as unique and is correspondingly scornful of other men: ‘But joyful be it spoken, our father was never that sort o’ man’ (p. 148). She never distances herself from him. Indeed, at the end of the novel, she is treating her father almost as if he were a substitute child (p. 147). At the outset, in spite of her continuing love for him, Nancy has turned her back on Godfrey and is living at home with her sister and father: in other words, she has adopted her sister’s maxim. This suggests that Priscilla personifies an attitude that Nancy has adopted in spite of it being detrimental to her happiness. Jung used the term shadow to describe an alter-ego figure of the same sex as the dreamer, which he or she encounters in dreams and waking fantasies. The shadow personifies ‘the ‘‘negative’’ side of the personality, the sum of all those unpleasant qualities we like to hide’ (CW 7: 103 n. 5). More specifically, it illustrates the way in which an individual actually is behaving, even when he or she is utterly unconscious of acting in such a manner. Nancy would like to marry Godfrey; instead, she is sitting at home pretending that she has forgotten him. If Priscilla personifies an aspect of Nancy’s character of which she is unaware, then her opinion about men in general tells the reader of what it is that Nancy is unconsciously afraid. Nancy is worried at what Godfrey might be doing when he is out of her sight. And given that Nancy has no inkling of Molly’s existence, her fears must represent tendencies in her own character. The corresponding events in the Silas plot not only corroborate this claim, but also constitute a direct comment on what she is doing. One remembers that it is on becoming engaged to Silas that Sarah’s manner

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towards him ‘began to exhibit a strange fluctuation between an effort at an increased manifestation of regard and involuntary signs of shrinking and dislike’ (p. 10). That is, as soon as Sarah becomes engaged to him, she begins to have negative feelings towards him. She is afraid of his epilepsy, and epilepsy may be defined as an ‘absence’ from oneself. Silas’s ‘absences’ are equivalent to Nancy’s feeling of emptiness when Godfrey goes away for ‘days and days together’ (p. 23). We are told that everyone in Raveloe thinks they would make ‘a handsome couple’ (pp. 23, 101), but Nancy turns her back on him in much the same way as Sarah abandons Silas. Imagining that Godfrey is unreliable, she retires to her own home and pretends that she does not want to marry him. And yet she continues to treasure some dried flowers for his sake (p. 94). She cannot bring herself to forget him. Later, she asserts that there is no other man that she would ever have contemplated marrying (p. 159). In other words, she has surrendered herself to Godfrey – but only in her imagination. In reality, she is shunning him. Silas Marner offers a vivid representation of how and why such opposite tendencies arise. The key to an individual’s conflicting tendencies is the nature of their shadow-personality. We have defined Priscilla as Nancy’s shadow, but an individual’s shadow is often multiple. Priscilla represents Nancy’s specific shadow. Molly Farren, in contrast, can be defined as an archetypal aspect of her shadow. In realistic terms, the events surrounding Molly are implausible. That a young village barmaid should have had access to laudanum, and that Godfrey’s relation with her could have been kept secret for so long in such small and tightly-knit communities as Raveloe and Batherley, are equally improbable. But none of the villagers learns of it. And the reason why Godfrey’s interest in her must remain secret is that Nancy could not bear it being disclosed. As Dunstan says to Godfrey, ‘Miss Nancy wouldn’t mind being a second, if she didn’t know it’ (p. 26; my emphasis). Even at the end, when Godfrey tells her about his first marriage, she asks him not to tell either her father or Priscilla about his affair with Molly (p. 169). In other words, she does not want to face the fact of Molly’s existence. And, according to Jung, whatever aspect of our personality we seek to repress belongs to our shadow. Molly can therefore be defined as another, deeper or more archetypal aspect of Nancy’s shadow. If Molly’s concealed existence corresponds to Nancy’s self-imposed isolation, then her addiction to laudanum symbolizes the narcotic quality of Nancy’s fantasy surrender to Godfrey. She personifies a deeply unconscious aspect of Nancy, whose unnatural isolation and exaggerated fantasies about the man she loves are psychologically destroying her. Not surprisingly, it is Priscilla who provides an explanation of why Nancy is doing this. Priscilla clings to the image she has of her father;

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Nancy does the same. For, although we are told little about Nancy’s relationship with her father, there is much we can deduce about it. The narrator, describing Nancy’s attitude, tells us that her father ‘was the soberest and best man in that countryside, only a little hot and hasty now and then, if things were not done to the minute’ (p. 87). Squire Cass also thinks of his family as being the best in the neighbourhood, and he too easily loses his temper (pp. 66, 68). Godfrey lives in constant fear of being censured and perhaps disinherited by his father. If he is an animus figure, it follows that his weakness (¼ lack of confidence in himself) can be ascribed to Nancy’s lack of confidence in herself owing to her equal fear of being reproved by her father or of separating herself from him. The doubts she entertains about Godfrey are therefore directly related to her over-attachment to her father. Thus, for Nancy to ‘imagine’ Godfrey married to a woman who would degrade him signals not so much a petty jealousy as a lack of confidence in her own worth – cf. her ‘perpetually recurring thought’: ‘I can do so little – have I done it all well?’ (pp. 149–50). Nancy, while isolating herself from Godfrey unconsciously thinks of herself as an unsuitable partner for such an eligible young man as Godfrey. On the surface, everything pertaining to Nancy is ‘of delicate purity and nattiness’ (p. 90), but the other elements that compose the initial situation leave room to doubt whether this is the whole picture. They suggest, rather, that she is unconsciously projecting her doubts and suspicions onto those around her, and even weaving plots in order to disguise her fear of committing herself to Godfrey. Indeed, so unconscious is she of this tendency that she ascribes it not to any female character ( ¼ aspect of her female identity), but to male characters: not only to Godfrey, but also to Dunstan and William Dane (¼ aspects of her animus). The connection between Dunstan and William Dane needs little insistence. Dunstan ‘traps’ Godfrey into a degrading marriage and William Dane has ‘woven a plot’ in order to have Silas expelled from the Lantern Yard brethren (pp. 29, 12). Just as Godfrey falls easy prey to Dunstan’s blackmail because he does not have the courage to stand up to his father, so Silas falls easy prey to William Dane because he does not have the courage to stand up to the arbitrary decision of the Lantern Yard brethren. Indirectly, however, this trait reflects something happening to Nancy. For in the same way as Nancy has adopted Priscilla’s views, so Godfrey has come under Dunstan’s negative influence. Dunstan can be defined as a destructive aspect of her animus that has undermined Godfrey’s worth. He is, so to speak, the ‘shadow’ of the animus. Thus, the quarrel between the two brothers can be seen as a conflict between two components of a woman’s animus.

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The question, then, becomes ‘What reason does the text offer to explain why Nancy should imagine men as behaving in this way?’

Nancy and Animus Possession Surprisingly, the answer is provided by the two scenes that feature groups of men: the description of the Lantern Yard brethren and the conversation in the Rainbow Inn. And significantly, both are related to Nancy. The Lantern Yard brethren are defined by their manner of arbitrarily judging a man by drawing lots. Although they are called ‘brethren’, they act towards Silas more like father figures. According to Jung, the animus very often functions ‘rather like an assembly of fathers or dignitaries of some kind who lay down incontestable, ‘‘rational’’, ex cathedra judgments’ (CW 7: 332). And he noted that a woman whose animus manifests such a tendency is prone to act upon just such arbitrary opinions as she unconsciously ascribes to all father figures. We remember that Mr Lammeter is described as a ‘grave and orderly senior’ (p. 96) – a phrase which could equally apply to the Lantern Yard brethren who fill Silas with awe – and that Nancy is described as having an opinion about everything: her opinions ‘were always principles to be unwaveringly acted on. They were firm, not because of their basis, but because she held them with a tenacity inseparable from her mental action’ (p. 151; cf. pp. 91–3). Thus the brethren’s arbitrary judgement of Silas symbolizes the manner in which a woman whose animus is dominated by father figures might arrive at a decision of significance to her. Even so, Silas’s expulsion from Lantern Yard is far more ambivalent than it might appear. On the one hand, it represents the cause of the debilitating isolation in which Silas finds himself at the outset of the novel (late in the year, about 1803). And, as we have seen, this is an archetypal representation of the cause of Nancy’s self-imposed isolation. On the other hand, however, it represents an implicit challenge, for it offers an archetypal representation of Nancy’s need to free herself from domination by the ‘assembly of fathers’ that make up such a large part of her animus. Jung defined the condition in which a woman sometimes manifests uncharacteristic and irrational opinions as animus possession. By this term, he meant to indicate that such behaviour does not reflect a woman’s essential personality so much as a maladjustment in her notions about men (see CW 7: 331; CW 9ii: 29). He also noted that animus possession usually stems from an exaggerated attachment to her father in her childhood (see CW 14: 232). And not only is Nancy still very much

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attached to her father, but her father is associated with an extraordinary string of arbitrary opinions that correspond exactly to the tendency described by Jung: they ‘have the character of solid convictions that are not lightly shaken, or of principles whose validity is seemingly unassailable’ (CW 7: 331). Although the conversation at the Rainbow has occasioned a great deal of critical interest, no one has ever offered a reason why it should be entirely about Nancy’s father. It consists almost exclusively of groundless and tenaciously defended opinions. The butcher, the farrier, Mr Macey, Mr Tookey and Mr Winthrop all argue fiercely, each convinced that he alone knows what is right (p. 45). And its most significant feature is that it is entirely about Mr Lammeter: first, about his cows, then about his father’s arrival in Raveloe, then about his unusual ‘Janiwary’ marriage, and finally about the previous owner of his home. One need scarcely add that this is not because he is a close friend of any of them: Mr Lammeter lives a retired existence. A literal reading of the events leads to observations about either social life in an isolated community or typically masculine attitudes. But given the tendency we have noted in Nancy, who is ‘as constant in her affection towards a baseless opinion as towards an erring lover’ (p. 91), we can infer that the villagers constitute yet another aspect of her animus. The culminating tale in the extraordinary conversation at the Rainbow is about the previous owner of the Warrens, and it provides the only lengthy description we are given of Nancy’s home. Nancy, we remember, is described as ‘slightly proud and exacting’ (p. 91). She is interested only in ‘the young man of quite the highest consequence in the parish’ and dreams of one day becoming ‘ ‘‘Madam Cass’’, the Squire’s wife’ (p. 94). Her pride seems to come from her father. Mr Lammeter, like Godfrey, ‘always would have a good horse’ (p. 148). Appearances matter to them. It is fitting, therefore, that the previous owner of Nancy’s home was a jumped-up tailor with an exaggerated concern with appearances. Determined to impress his neighbours at no matter what cost, Mr Cliff (or Cliff, as he is usually called) built and ran an enormous stables. He so bullied his son into acting like a gentleman that the boy died and, mentally unbalanced, he himself died soon after. The Warrens, where Nancy lives, is still haunted by the sound of stamping horses and cracking whips, which the terrified locals call ‘Cliff’s holiday’ (pp. 50– 51). Nancy has a similar determination to have her own way. Priscilla reminds her of how she behaved as a child: ‘If you wanted to go to the field’s length, the field’s length you’d go; and there was no whipping you, for you looked as prim and innicent as a daisy all the while’ (p. 150). The reference to ‘whipping’ is perhaps not entirely fortuitous. The tale of

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Cliff’s holiday, with the stamping of horses and the cracking of a whip, symbolizes Nancy’s periodic fits of irrational, headstrong determination, a tendency that has emotionally isolated her. Thus, Mr Cliff’s relationship with his son may be read as a symbolic representation of the psychological effect that Mr Lammeter has had, unwittingly, upon Nancy. The son who dies is ‘equivalent’ to the Godfrey on whom Nancy has turned her back. Cliff’s holiday is a symbolic description of the irrational aggression that can take possession of a woman and its origin in the foibles of a doting father. That the Lantern Yard brethren function as father-figures for Silas, and the conversation in the Rainbow is entirely about Mr Lammeter suggest that Nancy’s problem with Godfrey stems from her relation with her father. The Lantern Yard brethren offer an archetypal representation of the consequences of arbitrary opinionatedness. The villagers tell us that this tendency is connected with Nancy’s father. On the surface, we assume that the reason for Nancy’s self-imposed isolation is that her fiance´ has jilted her, that the Lantern Yard brethren are just a narrow-minded sect, and that the villagers represent the conversation of rustics. A literal reading of the events can lead only to the conclusion that we should not look too closely at the novel’s coherence. A psychological analysis of both structures and themes allows one to admire its coherence. It suggests that Godfrey’s irregular attentions correspond to Nancy’s fears and that the two groups of men described in the novel serve to explain the reason for these fears: she is still so attached to her father that she is reluctant to trust any other man. In other words, she is suffering from a form of animus possession. The situation at the outset of the novel, in which Nancy is living in self-imposed isolation, in a home that is haunted by the sound of stamping horses and cracking whips, thus symbolizes a ‘loss’ of her own female identity. She has withdrawn into herself to the point of being almost invisible, and Eppie (the other important female character) is suffering from inadequate attention. In a novel written by a woman, their situation is not only significant, but also disturbing. The novel thus springs from the impasse in which Nancy finds herself as a result of an over-attachment to her father. Her anamnesis is easily deduced. She has grown up, like Priscilla, in an isolated home without a mother, with a tendency to overvalue her father and a corresponding tendency to undervalue other men. And this has led to a fear of committing herself to another man. Her fear that Godfrey might not be the kind of man her father would be proud of (p. 96) and a related suspicion of what he might be doing when out of her sight signal a fundamental lack of confidence in her own worth. Silas Marner opens with a symbolic expression of the terrible emotional isolation into which

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a woman who is over-attached to her father can be plunged, causing her to become unconsciously reluctant to marry, and to ‘weave’ fantasies that risk causing her increasing hurt. It is time to look again at the way in which the two plots are connected and to further examine the part played by Silas, the weaver of Raveloe, in the events.

‘Light Enough To Trusten By’ Existent definitions of the relation between the two plots are unsatisfactory. It has always been assumed that the events concerning Silas form the main plot, and that those concerning Godfrey form the sub-plot (Thale, 1959, pp. 65–6; Martin, 1972, p. 487). It is also generally held that the Godfrey plot is the more ‘realistic’ and that the Silas plot is ‘fairy-tale-like’, ‘mythic’ or even ‘archetypal’ (Thale, p. 59; Swann, 1976, pp. 101–21; Preston, 1980, p. 112). When considered separately, there is nothing surprising about either of these claims; but when considered together, there is. For if one defines the main plot as archetypal and the sub-plot as realistic, in effect one is claiming that the ‘realistic’ story serves to elucidate the ‘archetypal’ events. This is the opposite of what one would expect: for, by definition, archetypal interactions are a symbolic representation of a ‘real’ dilemma. In psychological terms, it is very much more likely that the more realistic story will determine the nature of the archetypal interactions and there is good reason to describe the story that ‘gives shape to’ all the events described (however deeply concealed it might be) as the main plot. And this plot, of necessity, will also be the one whose interactions are the most realistic. Therefore, if the plot concerned with Nancy is indeed the more realistic, one would expect the archetypal events to be a symbolic portrayal of its central concern. In this section, I want to demonstrate that, in psychological terms, the more realistic events of the Nancy-plot may be defined as the main plot; and that the archetypal events of the Silas-plot are a symbolic representation of the dilemma facing Nancy. Furthermore, I want to propose that it is Nancy’s gradually changing attitude that ‘gives shape’ not only to the events in which, both directly and indirectly, she is involved, but also to the weaver’s story. This is a bold claim and needs some clarification. Such a relation as I am suggesting might exist between the two plots clearly cannot, in sensu strictu, be ascribed to any character (for example, Nancy): ultimately, any such relation must stem from the nature of the dilemma confronting

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the author. However, if the thematic content of the events in the archetypal narrative can be shown to correspond at all times and in all important features with the concerns of the more realistic narrative, then it is very probable that the more realistic events are determining the course of the archetypal events. My contention is that Nancy is the central figure of the realistic events and the events of the Silas-plot are determined by her changing attitudes. My first task, then, is to demonstrate in what ways the Nancy-plot can be said to ‘give shape to’ the course of Silas’s story. At the outset, Silas is a miser. It is generally conceded that one cannot separate his money from Eppie; in other words, if his affection for Eppie represents a positive quality, then the hoarding of his golden guineas represents a misplaced sense of value (see McLaverty 1981, pp. 318–36 and Chapter 1 of this study, p. 49). The parallel with Nancy’s situation is evident. Silas’s purposeless counting of his money symbolizes Nancy’s equally purposeless sense of satisfaction during her self-imposed isolation. And such a parallel suggests that Silas also personifies an aspect of a woman’s personality. It is therefore significant that Silas is defined solely by feminine attributes. Weaving is a craft traditionally associated with women, a point made explicit by one of the villagers: ‘ ‘‘you’re partly as handy as a woman, for weaving comes next to spinning’’ ’ (p. 128). His only social dealings are with the women of Raveloe (pp. 7, 17). His rich knowledge of herbs comes from his mother (p. 8). The instance given that his ‘sap of affection was not all gone’ is his love of an earthenware pot, an evidently feminine symbol (pp. 19–20). He becomes not only a father, but also a mother to Eppie (p. 136). Like Nancy, he comes from the North. Silas is described as ‘one of those impressible self-doubting natures’ (p. 9). Nancy is similarly impressible (cf. Priscilla’s influence) and equally given to self-doubt (p. 149). The ‘unpropitious deity’ from which Silas flees is equivalent to the Godfrey whom Nancy shuns. Silas’s sense of benumbed pain is identical to Nancy’s, and just as Silas does not want to believe in ‘a God of lies’, neither does she. The ‘clinging life’ he leads during his period of hard isolation corresponds to her comparable isolation, during which she ‘clings’ to her domestic duties. And thus, paradoxical though it may seem, these parallels suggest that Silas personifies a significant aspect of Nancy’s personality. Weaving, we remember, is a motif frequently found in creation myths (see Kirk, 1983, pp. 60–66; also von Franz, 1972, pp. 88–9). And this would suggest that the story of Silas is a ‘creation myth’ pertinent to Nancy. When the lots declare Silas guilty, he shows himself willing to carry the burden of his friend’s guilt. He tells William Dane ‘ ‘‘you stole the money, and you have woven a plot to lay the sin at my door. But you

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may prosper, for all that’’ ’ (p. 12). This parallels Nancy’s desire to exonerate Godfrey from the very guilt that she unconsciously attributes to him. Indeed, this is perhaps the cornerstone of the novel. For although Nancy feels deeply hurt and imagines the worst about Godfrey, she keeps sufficient hold on herself not to spoil all chance of reconciliation by openly accusing him. This raises two questions. The first concerns the relation between Nancy and Dunstan. In the course of a seminar given in 1934, Jung described a woman analysand who was unconscious of her shadow personality in terms that might have come directly from Silas Marner: You see, the feminine mind is not as a rule fully occupied, and so – like Penelope when [Odysseus] was travelling around on the Mediterranean – women spin webs, they weave plots, which are apt to be . . . of a very immoral kind from the standpoint of respectability . . . usually women are very innocent and know nothing about these plots, but they are there and of course in analysis they are trained to become aware of them. (Jung, 1997/1998, Vol. II, p. 1371)

The irritating sexism of these lines probably owes more to the fact that most of those attending the seminar were women: the remark was gratuitously provocative. Jung was aware of possible misunderstanding, and continued: ‘This is not a devaluation of the mind of woman . . . men have an anima who has her own special devices’ (ibid.). And certainly, Nancy’s fears do seem to be coupled with the motif of weaving plots, and vice versa. The weaving of a plot by Dunstan (a shadow figure) is an archetypal amplification of her unconscious tendencies. The second question concerns the delicate mechanism at work here. On the one hand, I assert that Nancy is projecting guilt onto Godfrey; on the other, I am claiming that she never accuses him. There is no contradiction here. What one imagines is not under one’s conscious control. My contention supposes that Nancy is unconscious of the fears that lead to her imagining Godfrey as married to Molly. It is how she reacts to her situation that is important. It would have been easy for her to become vindictive of this animus/man whose irregular attentions she cannot decipher. That Silas seeks no revenge on William Dane suggests that Nancy nurtures no ill-feeling toward Godfrey. Later, we learn that even when he settles in Raveloe, nothing that the villagers say can ‘stir Silas Marner’s benumbed faith to a sense of pain’ (pp. 14–15). That is, he remains (deliberately?) unconscious of the injury done him, just as Nancy seems determined to believe the best of Godfrey. Instead of challenging Godfrey (which would probably have led to their permanent separation), she buries herself in cheese-making. Silas’s faith in the outcome of his patient toil symbolizes Nancy’s unconscious belief that

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her patient toil will reveal a solution to her problem. As Jung writes, ‘We must be able to let things happen in the psyche’ (CW 13: 20). One cannot change the past, Nancy realizes at the end (pp. 150, 170). At the outset of the events, Eppie is a neglected child, symbolizing Nancy’s neglect of her own feminine worth. Eppie is Molly’s child, and Molly personifies Nancy’s unconscious doubts. And the child must be cared for, even if Nancy is not ready to take responsibility for the ‘fantasies’ she has spun. Just as Mr Lammeter has unwittingly had a detrimental effect on his daughter’s emotional development, so Godfrey abandons Eppie. Another father figure is therefore needed to right the balance. Jung made this point in a phrase both succinct and extraordinarily appropriate to Silas Marner: ‘For ‘‘what has been spoiled by the father’’ can only be made good by a father’ (CW 14: 232). Silas is a father-figure willing to carry the burden of responsibility for Nancy’s shadow-personality, represented by William Dane’s guilt and Molly Farren’s child; and he nurtures Eppie until Nancy is strong enough to resign herself to the ‘lot that has been given [her and Godfrey]’ (p. 170). This is the sense of the ‘mysterious burden’ carried by weavers in ‘that far-off time’ (p. 3). At critical moments and in times of emotional stress, we all need an ‘other’ (that is, to ‘trust’ in an archetypal figure) who will carry the burden of our suffering until we are strong enough to assume the responsibility for ourselves. Silas fulfils this role. In other words, he belongs to a deeper level of imaginal experience than Nancy: he is an archetypal image of a father willing to care for Eppie until Nancy is ready to fully accept the specific conditions of her lot. His readiness to assume the burden of Nancy’s shadow personality has obvious parallels with one of Christ’s defining attributes, which is further evidence that Silas is an essentially archetypal figure. As Sandra Gilbert has pointed out, the daughter–father relationship is the key to the novel, but Eppie is not the only daughter figure. Nancy, who spans the entire novel, is of far greater significance to the overall structuring of narrative events. The two key events occur in the midst of festivities. Dunstan robs Silas while Nancy is dancing with Godfrey at Mrs Osgood’s (pp. 43, 58), and Eppie finds her way to the weaver’s door while Nancy and Godfrey are dancing at Squire Cass’s New Year party. Festivities symbolize a ritual ekstasis (¼ a suspension of ego-consciousness). The harmony of the villagers at this event signals that Nancy’s tendency to act upon arbitrary opinions is temporarily inoperant. It is often upon the slightest decisions that everything hinges. It is this crucial change of attitude that allows Nancy to accept Godfrey’s invitation to dance with him, which symbolizes their imminent union.

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Silas’s discovery of Eppie on his hearth, and the unexpected birth of his love for an abandoned creature represent the renewal of Nancy’s love for Godfrey. In other words, Eppie personifies an aspect of her nature that Nancy had been denying or, in psychoanalytic terminology, repressing. Thus, if the rehumanization of Silas corresponds to Nancy’s warming again to Godfrey, then Eppie personifies Nancy’s burgeoning love. This is why Eppie has – and requires – no depth of character. She is an archetypal image of a daughter figure in an older woman’s imagination. It is because Nancy’s difficulties stem directly from her over-attachment to her father that Eppie’s education is entirely entrusted to a symbolic foster-father. Silas’s growing devotion to Eppie signals a process deep inside Nancy’s unconscious, working towards the correction of her self-doubts. The implication is only a hypothesis, but it is clear. Had Godfrey acknowledged Eppie at his father’s New Year’s party, Nancy would have withdrawn still further from society and become another Priscilla – competent, no doubt, but never having had the experience of a relationship. In other words, Godfrey would have taken Eppie into the Red House, and Nancy would have spurned him. She would have been left still longing to marry him and to have his child, but – in reality – with only the dried leaves that she treasured for his sake. The novel traces the ‘process’ she has to go through before she is ready to overcome her tendency to long for ‘what was not given’ (p. 150). Her dilemma determines not only the course of its two separate stories, but also the nature of the interconnections between them. Silas’s redemption through love is a symbolic representation of the way in which Nancy gradually overcomes instinctive tendencies in her personality that might have become detrimental to both her aims and her happiness. Within a year of Nancy ‘a-coming round again’, she and Godfrey marry. Her continuing desire to do everything ‘well’ is represented in the archetypal story by the untiring assistance that Eppie’s godmother lends Silas. Dolly Winthrop personifies an unconscious level-headed matronly devotion to duty that allows Nancy to retain her self-respect throughout both her period of isolation and her childless marriage. Dolly thus functions as a positive aspect of Nancy’s shadow. No matter how positive a figure Silas may be, he is none the less an aspect of her animus. And thus it is wholly appropriate that it should be an aspect of Nancy’s feminine personality (a woman’s shadow is an image of a woman) that should chide Silas for not having more trust: that he must learn to ‘trust i’ Them as knows better nor we do’ (p. 81). He is partly, but not entirely convinced. Fifteen years after their marriage, Godfrey confesses to Nancy the truth about Eppie. By forgiving him – or, more accurately, by not using

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his confession as a reason for destroying their present relationship – Nancy reveals that, in spite of her still being guided by ‘rigid principles’, she will no longer cling to them if given evidence that they don’t apply. She has accepted that she and Godfrey are not going to have any further children: ‘When you saw a thing was not meant to be, said Nancy, it was a bounden duty to leave off so much as wishing for it’ (p. 151). Even so, she is willing to support Godfrey in his determination to claim Eppie and bring her back to live at The Red House. Eppie’s decision to stay with Silas prevents this. Godfrey’s willingness to allow Eppie to stay with Silas thus reflects Nancy’s final acceptance of the lot given to her and her husband. If she has failed to become ‘the Squire’s wife’ as she once wanted – she is plain Mrs Cass, childless but content (p. 133) – she has also resisted the temptation of thinking she can change the past by adopting a child. Instead, she recommits herself to Godfrey, a gesture symbolized by Eppie’s marriage to Aaron. The purely symbolic nature of the latter union is indicated by it being between a motherless woman and a gardener (Eve and Adam; see Wiesenfarth, 1970, pp. 243–4). Equally significant is the fact that Aaron is Dolly’s son, that is, the fruit of the simple creed, unadulterated by intellectual preconceptions, held by this positive aspect of Nancy’s shadow, and which has always been at hand to assist Silas with Eppie. But in effect, their marriage is only one half of the ending. The novel ends not just with their wedding, but with an archetypal quaternity (Silas, Dolly, Eppie, Aaron), which, according to Jung, is an age-old symbol of psychic wholeness (see CW 7: 186; 9i: 278, 425; 9ii: 245). This quaternity is an archetypal representation of the successful outcome of the process in which Nancy has been unwittingly involved at the realistic level of the narrative: her immeasurably strengthened union with Godfrey. It implies that, like Silas, Nancy has at last consciously discovered ‘light enough to trusten by’ (p. 173).

Conclusions This reading of the relation between the two plots of Silas Marner not only provides a frame for the examination of the many intricate features of this particular novel, but also raises a great many issues relevant to the analysis of women’s writing in general. If one is to understand the psychological implications of a text for its author, one must first establish the identity of the effective protagonist. And the effective protagonist is not always one of the main characters of the surface structures. Nancy would appear to be a very minor character in Part One of the novel; but, as we have shown, even the events of Part One are

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directly related to her and to the dilemma confronting her. And so too are all the events of Part Two. In psychological terms, the novel is not composed of two ‘plots’ of equal value. It tells one story on two distinct levels of fictional representation. It is about Nancy’s relationship with Godfrey, which has been made difficult as a result of an over-attachment to her father and a corresponding tendency to suspect the worth of any other man. It tells how she gradually overcomes a self-destructive propensity to indulge in unconscious fears, fantasies and arbitrary decisions detrimental to the happiness she desires. By ‘working at’ her relationship with Godfrey, she gradually overcomes those deeply ingrained tendencies in her character which could so easily have led her into increasing emotional isolation and prevented her from making her peace with Godfrey, as she so evidently wants to do. The novel traces the process that she unconsciously goes through before she finally, albeit only tentatively, comes to terms with her situation: she is (and in all likelihood will remain) childless, but she now knows that the ‘partner’ in her own imagination fully accepts their situation. Although I have endeavoured to show that one can deduce Nancy’s central function in the novel only from textual evidence, my argument supposes that the dilemma facing Nancy must also be relevant to George Eliot. There are, however, few obvious parallels between Nancy and Marian Evans. The fictional character is clearly not the carrier of the author’s conscious personality, but the carrier of an aspect of her unconscious personality. A good description of the distinction between these two concepts is supplied by Edward Whitmont’s definition of the difference between the ego and the dream-ego: In any normal person’s dream the ‘I’ as identity-carrier may appear altered and dissociated. It may seem to have lost the conscious ego’s values and action capacities and to have taken on strange new ones; the dream-ego frequently feels and acts in a way which is uncharacteristic of the waking ego, or it cannot act at all, as in the dream of wanting to run away but instead standing paralyzed on the spot. (1978, p. 234)

There is no reason why there should be any resemblance between the author and the pivotal character in any given literary work. If there is a link between an individual’s ego (¼ author) and their dream-ego (¼ a fictional character), it is not in their characters, but in the nature of their reactions to the dilemmas confronting them. And in this there are many parallels between Nancy and George Eliot. Silas is about forty years old at the beginning of the novel, and Nancy is about forty years old at the end, that is, George Eliot’s age at the time

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of writing. We know that the novelist’s early life was considerably affected by her relation with her father (see Haight, 1968, esp. Chapters 2 and 10; also Uglow, 1987; Ashton, 1996). When Nancy separates herself sufficiently from her father to set her hopes on Godfrey, she is about the same age as Marian Evans was in 1842, when her refusal to go to church led to a violent quarrel with her father. In spite of this, however, he continued to influence her greatly, even after his death. Marian met G.H. Lewes in October 1851: he was still married, even though he was no longer attached to his wife. She knew the indignity of having to keep her affair with him secret – the parallel with Molly is obvious. And Nancy, one notes, suffers no less for her ‘secret’ love for Godfrey. Her instinct to withdraw into herself and to cross-question herself mercilessly was shared by her creator, who was unusually depressed throughout 1860, occasioned at least in part by society’s continued refusal to accept her relation with Lewes. In spite of all the love by which she was surrounded, and for all her literary success, she continued to be prey to an astonishing lack of confidence in herself. Dessner and others have drawn attention to a great many parallels between the life and the fiction (Dessner, 1979; Redinger, 1976). There is ample evidence to suggest that the dilemma we have identified as confronting Nancy is comparable to that which faced George Eliot in 1860. The ending of Silas Marner represents a tentative resolution to an enormously painful personal experience that ‘thrust’ itself upon George Eliot in 1860 (see 1954–56, vol. 3, p. 360). Perhaps the most significant feature of this reading, however, is that it provides a substantial link between George Eliot’s previous and her subsequent novels. Maggie Tulliver loses her chance of true happiness when she rejects Stephen Guest and Romola is attracted to an opportunist who conceals both his character and Tessa from her: the parallel with Nancy’s situation is self-evident. The vulnerability of both Maggie and Romola stems from their relationship with their respective fathers – a relationship which prevents them from discovering their own independent worth until they have forfeited any possibility of the happiness they sought. All three works are centrally concerned with a father’s unwittingly negative influence on a female character: the same, one might add, could also be held for Middlemarch. Thus, whilst in many ways surprising, this reading of Silas Marner in effect re-places the novel in its context. As to why it assumed the form it has, which seems to centre on two male characters, one can only speculate: for my part, as I suggested at the outset, I believe that the figure of Savonarola so weighed upon George Eliot’s spirits that her creative imagination spontaneously produced a compensatory image that gave her ‘light enough to trusten by’. One of Jung’s major theories was, of course, that the unconscious

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‘compensates’ the one-sidedness of the individual’s conscious attitude(s): ‘The unconscious processes that compensate the conscious ego contain all those elements that are necessary for the self-regulation of the psyche as a whole’ (CW 7: 279, 282–3; cf. CW 6: 574–5). If this is indeed so, Silas Marner is no less therapeutic than her other novels. This conclusion begs one further question, and one must touch on it even though it cannot be satisfactorily resolved. To what extent was George Eliot conscious of the nature of the dilemma I have outlined? We can never know, but that Nancy never fully realizes the debt that she, no less than Godfrey, owes to Silas suggests that the ending represents only a tentative solution to the problem with which the novel is concerned. Nancy may never again give way to such fears as occasioned her initial withdrawal from life, but her author might. And indeed, a considerable part of Felix Holt is a development of the theme explored in Silas Marner, which would suggest that George Eliot only very partially integrated the lesson learned by Nancy at the end of her tale about the weaver of Raveloe. One remembers Mrs Transome’s bitter remark ‘A woman’s love is always freezing into fear. She wants everything, she is secure in nothing . . . God was cruel when he made women’ (Eliot, Felix Holt, p. 488; for a discussion of parallels between Romola, Silas Marner, and Felix Holt, see Ermarth, 1985). Nancy’s ‘longing for what was not given’ is an expression of the psychological origin of George Eliot’s own deep-rooted insecurity. And Silas Marner illustrates how a woman who is uncertain of her own feminine worth risks falling victim to negative fantasies of her own devising. It tells how a woman whose love has frozen into fear unconsciously discovers a ‘light enough to trusten by’ that allows her to achieve at least a partial escape from her own self-doubts, and a partial fulfilment of her desires.

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Bibliography Note: All in-text references to the Collected Works of C.G. Jung are to volume and paragraph (thus CW 16: 470 indicates volume 16, paragraph 470).

Introduction Barthes, Roland (1981 [1967]), ‘The Discourse of History’, trans. S. Bann, Comparative Criticism, Vol. 3, pp. 7–20. Dawson, Terence (1997), ‘Jung, Literature, and Literary Criticism’, in Young-Eisendrath, P. and T. Dawson (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Jung, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, pp. 255–80. Douglas, Claire (1993), Translate this Darkness: The Life of Christiana Morgan, the Veiled Woman in Jung’s Circle, Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP. Fellini, Federico (1965), ‘On autobiographical nature of his films’, Atlantic, December. von Franz, Marie-Louise (1982), An Introduction to the Interpretation of Fairy Tales (1970), Dallas, TX: Spring Publications. von Franz, Marie-Louise (1975), C.G. Jung: His Myth in our Time, New York: C.G. Jung Foundation/Putnam’s. von Franz, Marie-Louise (1993), Psychotherapy, Boston, MA: Shambhala. Gallant, Christine (1996), Tabooed Jung, London: Macmillan. Goethe, J.W. von (1971), Elective Affinities (1809), trans. R.J. Hollingdale, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Hall, James A. (1983), Jungian Dream Interpretation, Toronto: Inner City Books. Hall, James (1986), The Jungian Experience: Analysis and Individuation, Toronto: Inner City Books. Hannah, Barbara (1981), Encounters with the Soul: Active Imagination as Developed by C.G. Jung, Santa Monica, CA: Sigo Press. Hauke, Christopher (2000), Jung and the Postmodern: The Interpretation of Realities, London: Routledge. Hillman, James (1979 [1967]), ‘Senex and Puer: An Aspect of the Historical and Psychological Present’, in Hillman, J. (ed.), Puer Papers, Irving, TX: Spring, pp. 3–53.

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Jung, C.G. (1953–76), The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, eds Herbert Read, M. Fordham, G. Adler and W. McGuire, trans. R.F.C. Hull (except Vol. 2), 20 vols, Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. —, CW 7, Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, 2nd edn, 1966. —, CW 8, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, 2nd edn, 1969. —, CW 9i, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 2nd edn, 1968. —, CW 10, Civilization in Transition, 2nd edn, 1970. —, CW 16, The Practice of Psychotherapy, 2nd edn, 1966. —, CW 18, The Symbolic Life: Miscellaneous Writings, 1976. —, ‘The Meaning of Psychology for Modern Man,’ in CW 10. Jung, C.G. (1973 and 1975/76), Letters, eds Gerhard Adler and A. Jaffe´, trans. R.F.C. Hull, 2 vols, Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Jung, C.G. (1976), The Visions Seminars, eds M. Foote, J.A. Pratt, and P. Berry, 2 vols, Zu¨rich: Spring Publications. Jung, C.G. (1997/1998), Visions: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1930– 1934, ed. Claire Douglas, 2 vols, Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, London: Routledge. Jung, Emma (1957), Animus and Anima, Zu¨rich: Spring Publications. Kirsch, Thomas B. (2000), The Jungians: A Comparative and Historical Perspective, London: Routledge. McGowan, Don (1994), What Is Wrong with Jung, Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books. McMaster, Graham (1981), Scott and Society, Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Noll, Richard (1994), The Jung Cult: Origins of a Charismatic Movement, Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP. Noll, Richard (1997), The Aryan Christ: The Secret Life of Carl Jung, New York: Random House. van der Post, Laurence (1975), Jung and the Story of our Time, New York: Pantheon Books. Richards, I.A. (1924), Principles of Literary Criticism, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Rowland, Susan (1999), C.G. Jung and Literary Theory: The Challenge from Fiction, Houndmills, Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan. Samuels, Andrew (1985), Jung and the Post-Jungians, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Samuels, Andrew (1997), ‘Introduction: Jung and the post-Jungians’, in Young-Eisendrath, P. and T. Dawson (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Jung, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, pp. 1–13.

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Samuels, Andrew (1998), ‘Will the Post-Jungians Survive?’, in Casement, Ann (ed.), Post-Jungians Today: Key Papers in Contemporary Analytical Psychology, London: Routledge, pp. 15–32. Stern, Paul J. (1976), C.G. Jung: The Haunted Prophet, New York: George Braziller. Stevens, Anthony (1990), On Jung, London: Routledge. Whitmont, E. (1978), The Symbolic Quest (1969), Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP. Young-Eisendrath, Polly and T. Dawson (1997), The Cambridge Companion to Jung, Cambridge: Cambridge UP.

Chapter 1

Scott: Ivanhoe

Text cited: Scott, Walter (1998), Ivanhoe, ed. Graham Tulloch, Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP. Augustine, St (1992), Confessions, tr. Henry Chadwick, Oxford: Oxford UP, p. 146. Bagehot, Walter (1996), ‘The Waverley Novels’ (1858), in Harry E. Shaw (ed.), Critical Essays on Walter Scott: The Waverley Novels, New York: G.K. Hall, pp. 21–46. Bolton, Philip H. (1992), Scott Dramatized, London: Mansell. Cagidemetrio, Alide (1989), ‘A Plea for Fictional Histories and OldTime ‘‘Jewesses’’ ’, in Werner Sollors (ed.), The Invention of Ethnicity, New York: Oxford UP, pp. 14–43. Carlyle, Thomas ([1838]), ‘Sir Walter Scott (1838)’, in Scottish and Other Miscellanies, London: J.M. Dent, pp. 54–111, 1915. Chandler, James (1998), England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism, Chicago, IL: Chicago UP. Cockshut, A.O.J. (1969), The Achievement of Walter Scott, London: Collins. Coleridge, S.T. (1970), ‘Coleridge on the Novels 1820s’, in J.O. Hayden (ed.), Walter Scott: The Critical Heritage, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, pp. 178–84. Duncan, Ian (1996), ‘Introduction’, in W. Scott, Ivanhoe, Oxford: Oxford UP, pp. vii–xxvi. Duncan, Joseph E. (1955), ‘The Anti-Romantic in Ivanhoe’, NineteenthCentury Fiction 9 (March), pp. 293–300. von Franz, Marie-Louise (1993), The Feminine in Fairy Tales (1958–59), rev. edn, Boston: Shambhala.

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Frye, Northrop (1976), The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance, Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP. deGategno, Paul J. (1994), Ivanhoe: The Mask of Chivalry, New York: Twayne. Ibsen, Henrik (1960–77), ‘The Wild Duck’, in Ibsen, ed. and trans. James Walter McFarlane, 8 vols, Oxford: Oxford UP, vol. 6, pp. 127– 242 (p. 227). James, Henry (1864), ‘Review of Nassau Senior, Essays on Fiction’, in J.O. Hayden (ed.), Walter Scott: The Critical Heritage, London: Routledge, 1970/1995. Johnson, Edgar (1973), ‘Scott and the Corners of Time’, Virginia Quarterly Review 49, pp. 46–62. Jung, C.G. (1953–76), The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, eds Herbert Read, M. Fordham, G. Adler and W. McGuire, trans. R.F.C. Hull (except Vol. 2), 20 vols, Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. —, CW 7, Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, 2nd edn, 1966. —, CW 9i, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 2nd edn, 1968. —, CW 16, The Practice of Psychotherapy, 2nd edn, 1966. Kerr, James (1989), Fiction Against History: Scott as Storyteller, Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Luka´cs, Georg (1950), The Historical Novel, trans. H. and S. Mitchell, Lincoln, Nebraska: Nebraska UP, 1983. McMaster, Graham (1981), Scott and Society, Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Mergenthal, Silvia (1993), ‘The Shadow of Shylock: Scott’s Ivanhoe and Edgeworth’s Harrington’, in J.H. Alexander and D. Hewitt (eds), Scott in Carnival: Selected Papers from the Fourth International Scott Conference, Edinburgh, 1991, Aberdeen: Association for Scottish Literary Studies/U Aberdeen, pp. 320–31. Millgate, Jane (1984), Walter Scott: The Making of the Novelist, Toronto: Toronto UP. Morillo, John and Wade Newhouse (2000), ‘History, Romance, and the Sublime Sound of Truth in Ivanhoe’, Studies in the Novel 32 (Fall), pp. 267–95. Ragussis, Michael (1993), ‘Writing Nationalist History: England, The Conversion of the Jews, and Ivanhoe’, ELH (English Literary History) 60, pp. 181–215. Rosenberg, Edgar (1961), From Shylock to Svengali: Jewish Stereotypes in English Fiction, London: Owen. Rubenstein, Jill (1993), ‘Scott Scholarship and Criticism: Where are We Now? Where are We Going?’, in J.H. Alexander and D. Hewitt (eds),

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Scott in Carnival: Selected Papers from the Fourth International Scott Conference, Edinburgh, 1991, Aberdeen: Association for Scottish Literary Studies/U Aberdeen, pp. 594–600. Shaw, Harry E. (1983), The Forms of Historical Fiction: Sir Walter Scott and His Successors, Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP. Sutherland, John (1995), The Life of Walter Scott, Oxford: Blackwell. Twain, Mark (1883), ‘Life on the Mississippi (1883)’, in Mississippi Writings, New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1982. Vanden Bossche, Chris R. (1987), ‘Culture and Economy in Ivanhoe’, Nineteenth-Century Literature 42.1, pp. 46–72. Welsh, Alexander (1993 [1963]), The Hero of the Waverley Novels, rev. edn, Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP. Wilt, Judith (1985), Secret Leaves: The Novels of Walter Scott, Chicago, IL: Chicago UP.

Chapter 2

Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray

Text cited: Wilde, Oscar (1974), The Picture of Dorian Gray, ed. Isobel Murray, London: Oxford UP. Albeaux-Fernet, M. (1972), ‘Cantate a` trois voix’, Revue des Deux Mondes (de´cembre), pp. 564–71. Amor, A. (1983), Mrs Oscar Wilde, London: Sidgwick & Jackson. Apollodorus (1970), The Library, trans. J.G. Frazer [1921], 2 vols, Loeb Classical Library, London: Heinemann, Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP. Baker, Houston A. jr (1969), ‘A Tragedy of the Artist: The Picture of Dorian Gray’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction 24, pp. 349–55. Bentley, J. (1983), The Importance of Being Constance, London: Robert Hale. Bradway, K. (1982), ‘Gender Identity and Gender Roles: Their Place in Analytic Practice’, in Murray Stein (ed.), Jungian Analysis, La Salle: Open Court, pp. 275–93. Buber, Martin (1970), I and Thou, trans. Ronald Gregor Smith, Edinburgh: Clark. Casement, Ann (1998), ‘Introduction’, in Ann Casement (ed), PostJungians Today: Key Papers in Contemporary Analytical Psychology, London: Routledge, pp. 1–12. Dawson, Terence (1987), ‘The Dandy in The Picture of Dorian Gray: Towards an Archetypal Theory of Wit’, New Comparison 3, pp. 133– 42. Dawson, Terence (1990), ‘Fear of the Feminine in The Picture of Dorian Gray’, The Psychoanalytic Review 77, pp. 263–80.

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Dyson, A.E. (1965), ‘Oscar Wilde: Irony of a Socialist Aesthete’, in The Crazy Fabric: Essays in Irony, London: Macmillan, pp. 138–50. Ellmann, Richard (1963), ‘Romantic Pantomime in Oscar Wilde’, Partisan Review 30, pp. 342–55. Ericksen, Donald H. (1977), Oscar Wilde, Boston: Twayne. Fernandez, Diane (1971), ‘Oscar Wilde et le masque’, Les Lettres nouvelles, (mars), pp. 129–54. Foldy, Michael S. (1997), The Trials of Oscar Wilde: Deviance, Morality, and Late-Victorian Society, New Haven, CT: Yale UP. von Franz, Marie-Louise (1971), ‘The Inferior Function’, Lectures on Jung’s Typology, Zurich: Spring Publications. von Franz, Marie-Louise (1981), Puer Aeternus, 2nd edn, Santa Monica, CA: Sigo Press. Frazer, James G. (1922), The Golden Bough, Part IV, Adonis/Attis/ Osiris, 2 vols, London: Macmillan. Goethe, Wolfgang von (1808), Faust: Part One, tr. David Luke, Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987. Gonza´lez, Antonio Ballesteros (1994), ‘The Mirror of Narcissus in The Picture of Dorian Gray’, in George Sandulescu (ed.), Rediscovering Oscar Wilde, Gerrard’s Cross, UK: C. Smythe. Hillman, James (1967), ‘Senex and Puer: An Aspect of the Historical and Psychological Present’ (1967), in James Hillman, H. Murray and T. Moore (eds), Puer Papers, Irving, TX: Spring Publications, 1979. Homeric Hymn ‘To Dionysos’, in Hesiod, Homeric Hymns, Epic Cycle Homerica (1936), trans. Hugh G. Evelyn-White, Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, pp. 429–31. Hyde, H. Montgomery (1948), The Trials of Oscar Wilde, London: William Hodge. Jung, C.G. (1953–76), The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, eds Herbert Read, M. Fordham, G. Adler and W. McGuire, trans. R.F.C. Hull (except Vol. 2), 20 vols, Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP/London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. —, CW 5, Symbols of Transformation, 2nd edn, 1967. —, CW 6, Psychological Types (1921), 1971. —, CW 8, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, 2nd edn, 1969. —, CW 9i, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 2nd edn, 1968. —, CW 9ii, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, 2nd edn, 1968. —, CW 10, Civilization in Transition, 2nd edn, 1970. —, CW 11, Psychology and Religion: West and East, 2nd edn, 1969. —, CW 12, Psychology and Alchemy (1944), 2nd edn, 1968. —, CW 14, Mysterium Coniunctionis (1955–56), 2nd edn, 1970.

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—, CW 16, The Practice of Psychotheraphy, 2nd edn, 1966. —, CW 18, The Symbolic Life: Miscellaneous Writings, 1976. Jung, C.G. (1965), Memories, Dreams, Reflections, recorded and edited by Aniela Jaffe´, trans. Richard and Clara Winston, New York: Vintage Books. Jung, C.G. (1973 and 1975/76), Letters, eds Gerhard Adler and A. Jaffe´, trans. R.F.C. Hull, 2 vols, Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Jung, C.G. (1997/1998), Visions: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1930– 1934, 2 vols, ed. Claire Douglas, Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, London: Routledge. Kere´nyi, C. (1976), Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life, trans. Ralph Manheim, Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976, p. 78 Lester, John A. jr (1968), Journey Through Despair 1880–1914: Transformations in British Literary Culture, Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP. Liebman, Sheldon W. (1999), ‘Character Design in The Picture of Dorian Gray’, Studies in the Novel 31, pp. 296–316. Moore, Tom (1979), ‘Artemis and the Puer’, Puer Papers, ed. James Hillman, Irving, TX: Spring Publications. Mylonas, George E. (1961), Eleusis and the Eleusinian Mysteries, Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP. Nassaar, Christopher (1974), Into the Demon Universe: A Literary Exploration of Oscar Wilde, New Haven, CT: Yale UP. Nethercot, Arthur H. (1944), ‘Oscar Wilde and the Devil’s Advocate’, PMLA (Publications of the Modern Language Association of America) 59, pp. 833–50. Otto, Rudolf (1950 [1917]), The Idea of the Holy, Oxford: Oxford UP. Otto, Walter F. (1955), The Homeric Gods, London: Thames & Hudson. Ovid (1977 and 1984), Metamorphoses, trans. Frank Justus Miller, 2 vols, Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP. Ovid (1959), Fasti, trans. J.G. Frazer, Loeb Classical Library, London: Heinemann. Paglia, Camille (1990), Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, New Haven, CT: Yale UP. Poteet, Lewis J. (1971), ‘Dorian Gray and the Gothic Novel’, Modern Fiction Studies 17.2, pp. 239–48. Powell, Kerry (1983), ‘Tom, Dick and Dorian Gray: Magic Picture Mania in Late Victorian Fiction’, Philological Quarterly 62, pp. 147– 70.

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Roditi, Edouard (1947), Oscar Wilde, The Makers of Modern Literature Series, Norfolk, CT: New Directions. Rossi, Dominick (1969), ‘Parallels in Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and Goethe’s Faust’, College Language Association Journal 13 (December), pp. 188–91. San Juan, Epifanio Jr (1967), The Art of Oscar Wilde, Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP. Schmidgall, Gary (1994), The Stranger Wilde: Interpreting Oscar, New York: Dutton/Penguin. Shewan, Rodney (1977), Oscar Wilde: Art and Egotism, London: Macmillan. Showalter, Elaine (1991), Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Sie`cle, London: Bloomsbury. Sinfield, Alan (1994), The Wilde Century, London: Cassell. Small, Ian (1993), Oscar Wilde Revalued: An Essay on New Materials and Methods of Research, Greensboro, NC: ELT Press. Wilde, Oscar (2000), The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, eds Merlin Holland and R. Hart-Davis, New York: Henry Holt. Wilde, Oscar (1966), The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, ed. G.B. Foreman, 2nd edn, London: Collins. Yeoman, Ann (1998), Now or Neverland: Peter Pan and the Myth of Eternal Youth, Toronto: Inner City.

Chapter 3

Emily Bronte¨: Wuthering Heights

Text cited: Adler, Gerhard (1961), The Living Symbol: A Case Study in the Process of Individuation, London: Bollingen/Pantheon. Allott, Miriam (1958), ‘Wuthering Heights: The Rejection of Heathcliff?’ Essays in Criticism 8, pp. 27–47. Barker, Juliet (1994), The Bronte¨s, New York: St Martin’s. Barreca, Regina (1990), ‘The Power of Excommunication: Sex and the Feminine Text in Wuthering Heights’, in Regina Barraca (ed.), Sex and Death in Victorian Literature, Basingstoke: Macmillan, pp. 227–40. Benvenuto, Richard (1982), Emily Bronte¨, Boston, MA: Twayne. Berg, Maggie (1996), ’Wuthering Heights’: The Writing in the Margin, New York: Twayne. Bersani, Leo (1976), A Future for Astyanax: Character and Desire in Literature, Boston: Little Brown. Blondel, Jacques (1985), ‘Wuthering Heights as a Spiritual Pilgrimage’, Reparages 7, pp. 1–18.

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Bronte¨, Emily (1995), The Poems of Emily Bronte¨, eds Derek Roper and Edward Chitham, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Bronte¨, Emily (1995), Wuthering Heights, ed. Ian Jack, intro. Patsy Stoneman, Oxford World’s Classics, Oxford: Oxford UP. Carson, Joan (1975), ‘Visionary Experience in Wuthering Heights’, The Psychoanalytic Review 62, pp. 131–51. Cecil, David (1934), ‘Emily Bronte¨ and Wuthering Heights’, in Critical Essays on Emily Bronte¨, ed. Thomas John Winnifrith, New York: G.K. Hall, 1997, pp. 144–50. Chitham, Edward (1987), A Life of Emily Bronte¨, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Chitham, Edward (1998), The Birth of Wuthering Heights: Emily Bronte¨ at Work, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan Press, New York: St Martin’s Press. Cirlot, J.E. (1971), A Dictionary of Symbols, trans. Jack Sage, 2nd edn, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Clay, Charles T. (1952), ‘Notes on the Chronology of Wuthering Heights’, Bronte¨ Society Transactions 12, pp. 100–105. Daley, A. Stuart (1995), ‘A Revised Chronology of Wuthering Heights’, Bronte¨ Society Transactions 21:5, pp. 169–73. Davies, Cecil W. (1969), ‘A Reading of Wuthering Heights’, Essays in Criticism 19, pp. 254–72. Davies, Stevie (1983), Emily Bronte¨: The Artist as a Free Woman, Manchester: Carcanet. Dawson, Terence (1989a), ‘The Struggle for Deliverance from the Father: The Structural Principle of Wuthering Heights’, The Modern Language Review 84, pp. 289–304. Dawson, Terence (1989b), ‘An Oppression Past Explaining: The Structures of Wuthering Heights’, Orbis Litterarum 44, pp. 48–68. DeLamotte, Eugenia C. (1990), Perils of the Night: A Feminist Study of Nineteenth-Century Gothic, New York: Oxford UP. Donoghue, Denis (1970), ‘Emily Bronte¨: On the Latitude of Interpretation’, in M.W. Bloomfield (ed.), The Interpretation of Narrative, Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, pp. 105–33 (p. 131). Eagleton, Terry (1975), Myths of Power: A Marxist Study of the Bronte¨s, London: Macmillan. Ge´rin, Winifred (1971), Emily Bronte¨: A Biography, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Gezari, Janet (1999), ‘Fathoming ‘Remembrance’: Emily Bronte¨ in Context’, ELH (English Literary History) 66 (Winter), pp. 965–84. Gilbert, Sandra and Susan Gubar (1979), The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, New Haven, CT: Yale UP.

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Gold, Linda (1985), ‘Catherine Earnshaw: Mother & Daughter’, English Journal 74.3 (March), pp. 68–73. Gorsky, Susan Rubinow (1999), ‘ ‘‘I’ll Cry Myself Sick’’: Illness in Wuthering Heights,’ Literature and Medicine 18.2 (Fall), pp. 173–91. Gose, Elliott B. (1966), ‘Wuthering Heights: The Heath and the Hearth’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction 21, pp. 1–19. Hall, James A. (1983), Jungian Dream Interpretation, Toronto: Inner City Books. Hannah, Barbara (1971), Striving Towards Wholeness, New York: C.G. Jung Foundation/G.P. Putnam’s. Harding, M. Esther (1965), The ‘I’ and the ‘Not-I’: A Study in the Development of Consciousness, New York: Bollingen/Pantheon. Harris, Anne Leslie (1980), ‘Psychological Time in Wuthering Heights’, International Fiction Review 7, pp. 112–17. Hillman, James (1967), ‘Senex and Puer: An Aspect of the Historical and Psychological Present’ in James Hillman, H. Murray and T. Moore (eds), Puer Papers, Irving, Texas: Spring Publications, 1979. Holbrook, David (1997), ’Wuthering Heights’: A Drama of Being, Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press. Jung, Carl Gustav (1953–79), The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, eds Herbert Read, M. Fordham, G. Adler, W. McGuire, trans. R.F.C. Hull (except Vol. 2), 20 vols, Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. —, CW 5, Symbols of Transformation (1912), 1956. —, CW 6, Psychological Types (1921), 1971. —, CW 7, Two Essays on Analytical Psychology. 2nd edn, 1966. —, CW 8, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, 2nd edn, 1969. —, CW 9i, The Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, 2nd edn, 1968. —, CW 10, Civilization in Transition, 1970. —, CW 12, Psychology and Alchemy (1944), 2nd edn, 1968. —, CW 14, Mysterium Coniunctionis (1955–56), 2nd edn, 1970. —, CW 16, The Practice of Psychotherapy, 2nd edn, 1966. —, CW 18, The Symbolic Life: Miscellaneous Writings, 1976. Jung, C.G. (1965), Memories, Dreams, Reflections, recorded and edited by Aniela Jaffe´, trans. Richard and Clara Winston, New York: Vintage Books. Kavanagh, James H. (1985), Emily Bronte¨, Oxford: Blackwell. Kettle, Arnold (1967), ‘Emily Bronte¨: Wuthering Heights’, in An Introduction to the English Novel, 2nd edn, Vol. 1, London: Hutchinson, pp. 130–45. Klingopulos, G.D. (1947), ‘The Novel as Dramatic Poem (2): Wuthering Heights’, Scrutiny 14, pp. 269–86.

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Knapp, Bettina L. (1991), The Bronte¨s: Branwell, Anne, Emily, Charlotte, New York: Continuum/Frederick Ungar. Lavabre, Simone (1991), ‘Feminisme et liberte´ dans Wuthering Heights’, Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens 34 (Oct.), pp. 63–70. Leavis, Q.D. (1969), ‘A Fresh Approach to Wuthering Heights’, in G. Singh (ed.), Collected Essays: Volume 1: The Englishness of the English Novel, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983, pp. 228–74. Le´vi-Strauss, Claude (1963), Structural Anthropology, trans. C. Jacobson and B. Grundfest Schoepf, New York: Basic Books. Levy, Eric P. (1996), ‘The Psychology of Loneliness in Wuthering Heights’, Studies in the Novel 28 (Summer), pp. 158–77. Lucas, Peter D. (1943), An Introduction to the Psychology of ‘Wuthering Heights’, London: Guild of Pastoral Psychology. Macovski, Michael S. (1987), ‘Wuthering Heights and the Rhetoric of Interpretation’, ELH (English Literary History) 54.2 (Summer), pp. 363–84. McMaster, Juliet (1992), ‘The Courtship and Honeymoon of Mr. and Mrs. Linton Heathcliff: Emily Bronte¨’s Sexual Imagery’, Victorian Review 18.1 (Summer), pp. 1–12. Medoro, Dana (1996), ‘ ‘‘This Thing of Darkness I / Acknowledge Mine’’: Heathcliff as Fetish in Wuthering Heights’, English Studies in Canada 22 (Sept.), pp. 267–81. Miller, J. Hillis (1982), ‘Wuthering Heights: Repetition and the ‘‘Uncanny’’ ’, Fiction and Repetition: Seven English Novels, Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, pp. 42–72. Moers, Ellen (1977), Literary Women, Garden City, NY: Doubleday/ Anchor. Moser, H. (1962), ‘What is the Matter with Emily Jane?’, NineteenthCentury Fiction 17, pp. 1–19. Musselwhite, David (1977), ‘Wuthering Heights: The Unacceptable Text’, in Francis Barker, John Coombes, et al. (eds), Literature, Society, and the Sociology of Literature: Proceedings of the Conference Held at the University of Essex, July 1976, Colchester, England: University of Essex, pp. 154–60. Nussbaum, Martha (1996), ‘Wuthering Heights: The Romantic Ascent’, Philosophy and Literature 20 (Oct.), pp. 362–82. Power, S.A. (1973), ‘The Chronology of Wuthering Heights’, Bronte¨ Society Transactions 16, pp. 139–45. Prentis, Barbara (1988), The Bronte¨ Sisters and George Eliot: A Unity of Difference, London: Macmillan. Pykett, Lyn (1989), Emily Bronte¨, Basingstoke, Hants.: Macmillan.

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Reed, Donna K. (1989), ‘The Discontents of Civilization in Wuthering Heights and Buddenbrooks’, Comparative Literature 41.3, pp. 209– 29. Sanger, C.P. (1926), ‘The Structure of Wuthering Heights (1926)’, in T.J. Winnifrith (ed.), Critical Essays on Emily Bronte¨, New York: G.K. Hall, 1997, pp. 132–43. Schopenhauer, Arthur (1970 [1851]), Essays and Aphorisms, Harmondsworth: Penguin, pp. 165, 175. Sinclair, May (1912), The Three Bronte¨s, London: Hutchinson. Thorma¨hlen, Marianne (1997), ‘The Lunatic and the Devil’s Disciple: The ‘‘Lovers’’ in Wuthering Heights’, Review of English Studies 48 (May), pp. 183–97. Traversi, Derek (1949), ‘Wuthering Heights After a Hundred Years’, Dublin Review 222 (Spring), pp. 154–68. Van Ghent, Dorothy (1953), The English Novel: Form and Function, New York: Harper & Row, 1961. Vine, Steve (1998), Emily Bronte¨, New York: Twayne. Yaeger, Patricia (1988), Honey-Mad Women: Emancipatory Strategies in Women’s Writings, New York: Columbia UP.

Chapter 4

George Eliot: Silas Marner

Text cited: Eliot, George (1998), Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe, ed. Terence Cave, Oxford UP, Oxford. Ashton, Rosemary (1996), George Eliot: A Life, London: Allen Lane/ Penguin. Bodenheimer, Rosemarie (1994), The Real Life of Mary Ann Evans: George Eliot, Her Letters and Fiction, Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP. Buckler, William E. (1972), ‘Memory, Morality, and the Tragic Vision in the Early Novels of George Eliot’, in George Goodin (ed.), The English Novel in the Nineteenth Century: Essays on the Literary Mediation of Human Values, Urbana, IL: Illinois UP. Carroll, David R. (1967), ‘Silas Marner: Reversing the Oracles of Religion’, in Eric Rothstein and T.K. Dunseath (eds), Literary Monographs 1, Madison, WI: Wisconsin UP. Cohen, Susan R. (1983), ‘ ‘‘A History and a Metamorphosis’’: Continuity and Discontinuity in Silas Marner’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language 25, pp. 410–26. Dessner, Lawrence Jay (1979), ‘The Autobiographical Matrix of Silas Marner’, Studies in the Novel 11, pp. 251–82.

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Eliot, George (1972), Felix Holt, ed. Peter Coveney, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Eliot, George (1954–56), The George Eliot Letters, ed. Gordon S. Haight, 7 vols, Oxford: Oxford UP. Ermarth, Elizabeth Deeds (1985), ‘George Eliot’s Conception of Sympathy’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction 40, pp. 23–42. von Franz, Marie-Louise (1972), Patterns of Creativity Mirrored in Creation Myths, Zu¨rich: Spring Publications. Gilbert, Sandra M. (1985), ‘Life’s Empty Pack: Notes Towards a Literary Daughteronomy’, Critical Inquiry 11, pp. 355–84. Haddakin, Lilian (1970), ‘Silas Marner’, in Barbara Hardy (ed.), Critical Essays on George Eliot, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Haight, Gordon S. (1968), George Eliot: A Biography, Oxford: Clarendon. Harvey, W.J. (1964), ‘George Eliot’, in Lionel Stevenson (ed.), Victorian Fiction: A Guide to Research, Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, pp. 294– 323. James, Henry (1866), ‘The Novels of George Eliot’ (Atlantic Monthly 18, Oct. 1866), in Gordon S. Haight (ed.), A Century of George Eliot Criticism, Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1965, p. 46. Johnstone, Peggy Fitzhugh (1994), The Transformation of Rage: Mourning and Creativity in George Eliot’s Fiction, New York: New York UP. Jones, R.T. (1970), George Eliot, Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Jung, C.G. (1953–76), The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, eds Herbert Read, M. Fordham, G. Adler and W. McGuire, trans. R.F.C. Hull (except Vol. 2), 20 vols, Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. —, CW 6, Psychological Types (1921), 1971. —, CW 7, Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, 2nd edn, 1966. —, CW 9i, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 2nd edn, 1968. —, CW 9ii, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, 2nd edn, 1968. —, CW 13, Alchemical Studies, 1967. —, CW 14, Mysterium Coniunctionis (1955–56), 2nd edn, 1970. Jung, C.G. (1997/1998), Visions: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1930– 1934, ed. Claire Douglas, 2 vols, Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, London: Routledge. Karl, Frederick R. (1995), George Eliot, Voice of a Century: A Biography, New York: Norton. Kirk, G.S. et al. (1983), The Presocratic Philosophers: A Critical History with a Selection of Texts, 2nd edn, Cambridge: Cambridge UP.

294

THE EFFECTIVE PROTAGONIST

Leavis, F.R. (1970 [1949]), The Great Tradition, Harmondsworth: Pelican. Martin, Bruce K. (1972), ‘Similarity Within Dissimilarity: The Dual Structure of Silas Marner’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language 14, pp. 479–89. McLaverty, James (1981), ‘Comtean Fetishism in Silas Marner’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction 36 (December), pp. 318–36. Milner, Ian (1966), ‘Structure and Quality in Silas Marner’, Studies in English Literature 6, pp. 717–29. Preston, John (1980), ‘The Community of the Novel: Silas Marner’, Comparative Criticism 2, pp. 109–30. Redinger, Ruby (1976), George Eliot: The Emergent Self, London: Bodley Head. Swann, Brian (1976), ‘Silas Marner and the New Mythus’, Criticism 18, pp. 101–21. Thale, Jerome (1959), ‘George Eliot’s Fable: Silas Marner’, The Novels of George Eliot, London: Oxford UP. Thomson, Fred C. (1965), ‘The Theme of Alienation in Silas Marner’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction 20, pp. 69–84. Uglow, Jennifer (1987), George Eliot, London: Virago Press. Welsh, Alexander (1985), George Eliot and Blackmail, Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP. Whitmont, Edward C. (1978), The Symbolic Quest, Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP. Wiesenfarth, Joseph (1970), ‘Demythologizing Silas Marner’, ELH (English Literary History) 37, pp. 226–44. Woolf, Virginia (1921), ‘George Eliot (1819–1880)’, The Daily Herald, 9 March, p. 7.

Index Actaeon, 111, 112–15, 118, 119, 120, 122 Adler, Gerhard, 144 Adonis, 73, 74, 77, 78, 96, 97, 104, 111, 116, 117–19, 120 Aeschylus Oresteia, 32 Albeaux-Fernet, M., 116 Allott, Miriam, 143 Amor, A., 125 anima/animus, 11–13 anima, 14 confusion of anima and self, 121–2 definition, 268 definition, 11–12, 17, 56 anima possession, 17, 18 consequences, 57, 66 definition, 57 in Ivanhoe, 55–7 animus animus-structure Wuthering Heights as, 21, 22, 25, 146, 154, 156, 157, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 172, 173, 174, 178, 187, 188, 190, 194, 196, 198, 199, 212, 215, 219, 233, 237, 240, 243, 247, 249, 250 definition, 12–13 animus possession, 17, 18, 147, 177, 209, 247, 251, 270 consequences, 152 definition, 250–52, 208, 268 origins, 162, 166, 268 Antinous, 73, 77, 78, 93, 94, 96, 97, 104 Apollo, 20, 69, 92, 97, 100, 101, 102, 103, 100–103, 104, 108, 113 Apollodorus The Library, 102, 118 archetypal images, 9–13 anima/animus. See anima/animus self. See self (archetypal image)

shadow. See shadow (archetypal image) Artemis, 111, 112, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 124, 125, 126, 162, 163, 168, 170, 175, 187, See also Actaeon Ashton, Rosemary, 278 attachment, misplaced, 2, 18–23, 24–5 in Ivanhoe, 49, 52 in Silas Marner, 265, 267, 270, 275, 277 in The Picture of Dorian Gray, 72–4 in Wuthering Heights, 22, 139, 157, 173, 203, 204, 215, 217, 218, 219, 222, 223, 229, 230, 234, 236, 237, 248, 250, 251 Augustine, St, 29, 46, 52 Bagehot, Walter, 30 Baker, Houston A. Jr., 93 Barker, Juliet, 251 Barrie, J.M. Peter Pan, 109 Barthes, Roland, 1 Beazley, Samuel Jr., 30 Bentley, J., 125 Benvenuto, Richard, 143, 144 Berg, Maggie, 153 Bodenheimer, Rosemarie, 254 Bolton, Philip H., 30 Bradway, Katherine, 126 Bronte, Emily and Wuthering Heights, 250–52 Gondal saga, 252 Buber, Martin, 102 Buckler, William E., 253 Cagidemetrio, Alide, 40 Carlyle, Thomas, 29 Carroll, David R., 253 Carson, Edward H., 94, 95, 109, 124 Carson, Joan, 136 Cecil, David, 143 Chandler, James, 30 Christ, Jesus, 40, 94, 103, 274

296

THE EFFECTIVE PROTAGONIST

Cirlot, J.E., 63, 189 Cockshut, A.O.J., 30 Cohen, Susan R., 254 Coleridge, Samuel T., 30 compensation, psychological, 13–15, 16–17, 48, 50, 64, 65, 71, 76, 77, 78, 83, 84, 90, 151, 157, 198, 220, 221, 230, 232, 237, 246, 252, 255, 278–9 complexio oppositorum. See self (archetypal image) cruelty, 2, 3, 19, 20, 41, 44, 45, 48, 51, 53, 54, 55, 56, 60, 84, 98, 120, 154, 232 Dante Alighieri, 229 Davies, Stevie, 251 Dawson, Terence, 9 DeLamotte, Eugenia C., 148 Dessner, Lawrence J., 254, 278 Diana. See Artemis Dibdin, Thomas, 29 Dionysus, 92, 97, 99, 100, 103, 104, 108 the young Dionysus, 97–100 Donoghue, Denis, 143, 156 Douglas, Claire, 14 Douglas, Lord Alfred, 124 dream (obsessive fantasy), 37–9, 42–3, 45, 51–5, 57–8, 65, 72, 79, 95 dream(s), 8–16, 56, 124, 126, 133, 144, 153, 263, 277 amplification, 6 Cathy’s dream in Wuthering Heights, 167–8 dreaming a dream onwards, 77 in literature, 148 Lockwood’s dreams in Wuthering Heights, 148–54, 156 represents an implicit challenge, 14 Duncan, Ian, 30, 31 Eagleton, Terry, 143, 217 Echo. See Narcissus effective protagonist, 18, 19–23, 25 definition, 8–9 dilemma facing, 14 in Ivanhoe, 32, 33, 37, 44, 49, 50, 65 in Silas Marner, 255–8, 264, 276

in The Picture of Dorian Gray, 68, 77–8, 79, 80, 88, 90, 91, 103, 123 in Wuthering Heights, 137, 139–43, 145, 146, 148, 153, 154, 159, 165, 172, 186, 193, 198, 200, 201, 206, 212, 213, 219, 220, 230, 237–8, 242, 243, 246, 248–9 ego-structure as home, 11, 21 Thrushcross Grange as, 144, 146, 156, 162, 163, 165, 168, 172, 173, 174, 175, 178, 179, 180, 182, 184, 185, 187, 189, 190, 193, 195, 196, 198, 199, 213, 215, 217, 224, 228, 231, 236, 237, 243, 244, 245, 246, 249 Eliot, George interest in Savonarola, 255 works Felix Holt, 253 Romola, 255, 278, 279 Ericksen, Donald H., 91 Ermarth, Elizabeth Deeds, 279 Eve, 11 Foldy, Michael S., 95 Frazer, James G. The Golden Bough, 118 Freud, Sigmund, 4, 12, 13, 36, 124, 159 Gallant, Christine, 4 Galsworthy, John The Forsyte Saga, 207 Gautier, Theophile, 81 Gezari, Janet, 158 Gide, Andre´ Les Caves du Vatican, 109 Gilbert, Sandra, 143, 156, 163, 254, 274 Goethe, Johann W. von, 14, 70, 80, 91 Elective Affinities, 14 Faust. See Picture of Dorian Gray, The: and Goethe’s Faust Gonza´lez, Antonio B., 116 Gose, Elliott B., 136 Grosvenor Gallery, 95 Gubar, Susan, 143

297

INDEX

Haddakin, Lilian, 257 Haight, Gordon S., 278 Hall, James A., 10, 11, 144 Hannah, Barbara, 15, 136, 151 Harding, M. Esther, 144 Harvey, W.J., 253 Hauke, Christopher, 4 Helen of Troy, 11 Hellenistic art, 94 Hesiod, 97 Hillman, James, 5, 22, 67, 105, 139 ‘odyssey of experience’, 22, 67, 139, 198 Holbrook, David, 136 Homer The Odyssey, 136–7 house/home. See ego-structure, and Wuthering Heights Hyde, H. Montgomery, 95 Iacchus (Iakchos), 98–100 Ibsen, Henrik, 29, 63 imaginal, 7, 10, 11, 12, 13, 24, 25, 49, 55, 103, 134, 135, 136, 147, 154, 157, 170, 172, 182, 199, 222, 229, 238, 239, 249, 252, 274 Ivanhoe, 63–5, 29–66, 77 Ashby-de-la-Zouche, 43–6 aspects of the shadow, 46–57 Bois-Guilbert and Rebecca, 53–5, 58 Cedric of Rotherwood and Bois-Guilbert, 39–43 and Isaac, Rebecca, 49–50 and Lucas de Beaumanoir, 60–61 and psychological compensation, 16–17 as effective protagonist, 35–7 as thrall to his own dream, 37–9 de Bracy as shadow, 52–3 Front-de-Boeuf as shadow, 52 reluctance to learn, 57–9 chivalry, 34–5, 36, 38, 50, 60–63 conclusions, 65–6 critical argument, 31–3 defiance, 32–3, 52, 53, 55 dramatizations, 29–30 England and the Temple, 33–5 nature of coincidence, 43–6 Normans and Saxons, 33–4 Rebecca and Ulrica, 55–7

archetypal representation of Cedric’s plans for Rowena, 55 Rotherwood, 39–43 Rowena, 49 and Rebecca, 49, 55, 63–5 Cedric and, 46 Templestowe, 60–63 the Jewish theme, 29, 30, 31, 40, 41, 48, 49, 51, 52, 54, 58, 62, 64 Torquilstone, 46–57 Ulrica and anima possession, 55–7 Jacob, at Peniel, 97 James, Henry, 29, 253 Johnson, Edgar, 29 Johnstone, Peggy Fitzhugh, 254 Jones, R.T., 253 Jung, Carl Gustav, 3 works Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 71 Psychological Types, 71 Symbols of Transformation, 104 The Secret of the Golden Flower, 253 Visions Seminars, 6, 273 Jung, Emma, 12 Karl, Frederick R., 254 Kere´nyi, C., 98 Kerr, James, 30 Kirsch, Thomas B., 6 Kleinian analysis, 4 Knapp, Bettina L., 136 Lavabre, Simone, 143 Leavis, F.R., 253 Leavis, Q.D., 131 Lester, John A. Jr, 91 Lewes, G.H., 264, 278 London school, 4 Lucas, Peter D., 136, 143 Luka´cs, Georg, 30 Mann, Thomas, 109 Marian Evans. See Eliot, George Marschner Der Templer und die Ju¨din, 30 Marsyas, 100, 101, 102 Martin, Bruce K., 256

298

THE EFFECTIVE PROTAGONIST

Mary, the Virgin, 11 McGowan, Don, 3 McLaverty, James, 272 McMaster, Graham, 19, 32 Mergenthal, Sylvia, 40 Miller, J. Hillis, 131, 132, 139 Millgate, Jane, 30 Milner, Ian, 253 Moncrieff, W.T., 30 Morillo, John, 30 Moses in the Tabernacle, 97 Murray, Henry, 6 Musselwhite, David, 148 Myers-Briggs Type Indicator test, 71, 72 Mylonas, George E., 98 myth Actaeon and Artemis (Ovid), 112– 15 Adonis and Venus (Ovid), 117–19 ambivalence of myth, 157–60 evolution of mythological motifs, 118–19 Homeric hymn ‘To Dionysos’, 92 Narcissus and Echo (Ovid), 115–17, 158–9 of Marsyas and Apollo, 103, 100– 103 Napoleon Bonaparte, 94 Narcissus, 73, 74, 77, 78, 96, 97, 104, 111, 115–17, 118, 119, 120, 158, 159, 160 narrative structure, 7–8, 23, 70 and psychological structure, 25–6 in Ivanhoe, 43 in Silas Marner, 254, 256 in Wuthering Heights, 132–7, 248 of myths, 156 Nassaar, Christopher, 93 Nethercot, Arthur H., 70, 80 Newhouse, Wade, 30 Noll, Richard, 3 Nussbaum, Martha, 153 Otto, Rudolf, 97, 100 Ovid, 20, 69, 99, 102, 113, 114, 115, 117, 118, 119, 120, 158 works Fasti, 102

Metamorphoses, 99, 113, 115, 158 Paglia, Camille, 84 Paris, 78 personal unconscious, 15–16 Picasso, Pablo, 2 Minotaur and Dead Mare before a Grotto, 2–3 Picture of Dorian Gray, The, 67–127 aesthetics, escape into, 86–7 and Goethe’s Faust, 70, 80, 91 Basil Hallward, 69–92 a curious confession, 95–7 as effective protagonist, 77–8 as introverted intuition type, 72–4 challenge facing him, 78–80 cult of personality, 93–5 confusion of anima and self, 121–2 critical argument, 67–9 dandy and wit, 106–8 Dorian Gray and Sibyl Vane, 110–27 as extraverted intuition type, 81–4 feminine, fear of the, 119–21 Lord Henry as introverted sensation type, 74–6 music, as emotion and feeling, 111– 12 myth of Actaeon and Artemis, 112–15 of Adonis and Venus, 117–19 of Marsyas and Apollo, 100–103 of Narcissus and Echo, 115–17 portrait, as the self, 103–4 psychological typology, 72 Basil as introverted intuition type, 72–4 compensation, 71 Dorian as extraverted intuition type, 81–4 fear of the inferior function, 88– 90 identification with the inferior function, 84–6 Lord Henry as introverted sensation type, 74–6 puella aeterna, 123–4

INDEX

puer aeternus fascination by archetypal image, 97–100 the psychology of a middle-aged man, 104–6 wit characteristic of, 106–8 un-psychological, 105–6 Plato, 122 Porter, Cole ‘My heart belongs to daddy’, 199 post-Jungian psychology, 4–5 a post-Jungian methodology, 6–16 archetypal school, 5 classical school, 4–5 developmental school, 4–5 different schools of, 4–5 Prentis, Barbara, 143 Preston, John, 254, 271 projection (psychological), 31, 49, 114, 121, 176, 179, 186, 191, 192, 207, 215, 228, 233, 236, 237, 241, 246 psychological typology. See Picture of Dorian Gray, The puer aeternus (archetypal image). See Picture of Dorian Gray, The Queensberry, Marquis of, 94, 126 Ragussis, Michael, 40 Redinger, Ruby, 253, 278 Reed, Donna K., 143, 144 Roditi, Edouard, 91 Ross, Robert, 124 Rossi, Dominick, 70, 80 Rowland, Susan, 4 Rubenstein, Jill, 30 Saint Exupe´ry, Antoine Le petit Prince, 109 Samuels, Andrew, 253–79 the term ‘post-Jungian’, 5 San Juan, Epifanio Jr., 104 Sanger, C.P., 132, 153, 205 Schmidgall, Gary, 125 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 131, 248 Schumann, Robert, 111, 112, 113 Scott, Walter and popularity of Waverley Novels, 29–30 fascination with chivalry, 62

299

self (archetypal image) as complexio oppositorum, 103 definition, 103 shadow in Ivanhoe, 43 shadow (archetypal image), 10–11 aspects of the general shadow (in Ivanhoe), 47–50 aspects of the specific shadow (in Ivanhoe), 51–55 Shakespeare, William works As You Like It, 114, 122 Richard III, 148 Shaw, Harry E., 30 Shewan, Rodney, 111 Showalter, Elaine, 93 Silas Marner, 253–79 ‘light enough to trusten by’, 271–6 critical argument, 255–8 Nancy Lammeter and animus possession, 268–71 as effective protagonist, 255–8 her shadow and animus, 262–7 parallels between the two plots, 258–62 Sinclair, May, 143, 144 Sinfield, Alan, 93 Soane, George, 30 Sophia (Wisdom), 11 Stern, Paul J., 3 Stevens, Anthony, 3 Sullivan, Arthur Ivanhoe, 30 Sutherland, John, 40 Swann, Brian, 271 Thackeray, William M. Rebecca and Rowena, 31 Thale, Jerome, 253, 271 Thomson, Fred C., 253 Traversi, Derek, 143 Twain, Mark, 29 Uglow, Jennifer, 278 van der Post, Laurence, 3 Van Ghent, Dorothy, 143, 156 Vanden Bossche, Chris R., 33 Venetian art, 94 von Franz, Marie-Louise, 3, 9, 47, 84, 104, 105, 106, 109, 272

300

THE EFFECTIVE PROTAGONIST

von Franz, Marie-Louise – continued works Puer Aeternus, 104 Wainewright, T.G., 106 Welsh, Alexander, 30, 32, 254 Whitmont, Edward, 10, 277 Wiesenfarth, Joseph, 256, 276 Wilde, Oscar and The Picture of Dorian Gray, 124–7 and un-psychological nature of puer, 105–6 Bunburyism, 108 works ‘Pen, Pencil, and Poison’, 106 ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’, 105 De Profundis, 101 Lady Windermere’s Fan, 107 Letters, 101, 123, 125 The Importance of Being Earnest, 107 The Picture of Dorian Gray. See Picture of Dorian Gray, The Wilt, Judith, 30 Woolf, Virginia, 253 Wundt, Wilhelm, 101 Wuthering Heights, 74 animus possession, definition, 146–8 animus-structure, conflict within, 160–63 Catherine (ne´e Linton) anamnesis and its archetypal amplification, 204, 205–29 parallel histories, 206 as effective protagonist, 140–43, 199–201 between cousins and fathers, 201–4 challenge facing, 154–6 discovery of her animus (Hareton), 212–17 her ‘wrong’ engagement, 223–9 her perverse will, 207–12 her unnatural isolation, 217–19 imprisonment at Wuthering Heights, 229–31

returns to Wuthering Heights, 232–4 turns sixteen (age of responsibility), 219–23 Cathy (ne´e Earnshaw) a ‘wrong’ engagement, 165–9 an incomplete ‘initiation’, 169–71 discovers Thrushcross Grange, 163–5 her brain fever, 185–8 her death, 192–6 the young Cathy, 162–3 critical argument, 136–9 Edgar his quarre with Mr Heathcliff, 183–5 Heathcliff Mr Heathcliff his death, 158–9 his desire for revenge, 182 his return to vicinity, transformed, 174–8 the young Heathcliff, 160–61, 163–9 houses/homes. See anima/ animus:animus:animusstructure the two houses, 144–6 Thrushcross Grange as egostructure. See ego-structure Isabella her elopement and marriage, 188– 92 her flight, 196–8 her importance, 173–4 her infatuation with Mr Heathcliff, 178–80 Lockwood he bids farewell, 238–41 his two nightmares, 148–54 about Catherine Linton, 152–4 about Jabes Branderham, 148–52 myth ambivalence of myth, 157–60 narrative structure, 132–6 present and past, 133–6 sense of the ending, 244–8 Zu¨rich school, 4