Escape from expectations
Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and “Riches I hold in light esteem”
Circulating within some of the most widely read and beloved stories of the Victorian era are complicated themes surrounding the role of woman in society and efforts undertaken by characters to fulfill or eschew those roles. These explorations of the female would come to form a prototypical sort of feminist cultural analysis, and would one day offer scholars a wealth of material from which they might extrapolate various gender interpretations of the famous texts. Shortly before she dies, Catherine of Wuthering Heights expresses her acute desire to “escape” from her “shattered prison” and enter “into that most glorious world” (192)1. Here, she likely touches upon the problematic situation facing her regarding her dual love for both her husband Edgar and her childhood companion Heathcliff. Contrary to the expectations of the society she operates within and those of both men concerned, she is uninterested in finally choosing either man. However, building on the simplistic plot-based interpretation of her sentiment, readers can glean that Catherine also yearns for an exodus from the unrealistic or unsatisfactory pressures set upon her as a Victorian age woman. Both Emily Brontë’s timeless novel Wuthering Heights and a brief poem ascribed to her seem preoccupied with issues of societal expectations and women’s rejection of or resistance to them.
In a similar piece, the poem “Riches I hold in light esteem” balks at those myriad temptations—wealth, notoriety, love—that so many men have chased their entire lives with varying degrees of success. Here Brontë rejects the societal convention of lusting after such achievements, despite admitting that she, too, once “lusted” for fame but that her desire “vanished with the morn” (lines 3–4)2. She contends that the only thing she might pray for would be possession of her own “heart that now [she] bear[s]” and for “liberty” (lines 7–8)2, presumably to aim her heart’s passions in whichever direction she pleases and to make decisions with some level of autonomy. Here, again, is the rejection of societal expectations in the derision of love or status and the emphasis instead on having a “chainless soul” “through life and death” (lines 11–12)2.
The same escape that Catherine wishes for is larger and more significant than merely an escape from this realm into the afterlife or even than a reunion with her beloved Heathcliff. Rather, her desired escape is one from the roles and expectations dictated to her from societal pressures and also from the fallout of other people’s—likely men’s—decisions. Despite the fact that Catherine even confides in Nelly that she’d rather marry Heathcliff because she feels they share a kindred soul, she fears it would “degrade [her] to marry Heathcliff now” that Hindley has “brought him so low” in societal standing (96–97)1. She is influenced by class and gender expectations to marry the more eligible—that is, the more affluent and socially powerful—suitor rather than following her heart and marrying the man she felt stronger feelings for. As she pores over her regrets on her deathbed, Catherine realizes that what would have been truly valuable in her estimation would have been an “unchained soul” with which she might escape her societal expectations and obligations to be with Heathcliff instead. If only she’d possessed the “courage to endure” that Brontë describes, perhaps scholars would be discussing a much more optimistic tome.