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13 - The Romantic Ascent: Emily Brontë

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

Martha C. Nussbaum
Martha C. Nussbaum
Affiliation:
University of Chicago
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Summary

THE LEAP OF DESIRE

“‘If I were in heaven, Nelly,’” she said, “‘I should be extremely miserable.’”

I dreamt, once, that I was there … [H]eaven 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's soul cannot live in the Christian Heaven. For her soul, she explains, is the same as Heathcliff's soul, and the heavenly soul of Linton is as different from theirs “‘as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire’” (95). Much later, as she lies on her deathbed, now the wife of Edgar Linton, thinking the Linton thought that what she wants is an escape into “‘that glorious world’” of paradise and peace, Heathcliff watches her with burning eyes. At last she calls to him:

In her eagerness she rose and supported herself on the arm of the chair. At that earnest appeal he turned to her, looking absolutely desperate. His eyes, wide and wet, at last flashed fiercely on her; his breast heaved convulsively. An instant they held asunder, and then how they met I hardly saw, but Catherine made a spring, and he caught her, and they were locked in an embrace from which I thought my mistress would never be released alive: in fact, to my eyes, she seemed directly insensible. […]

Type
Chapter
Information
Upheavals of Thought
The Intelligence of Emotions
 , pp. 591 - 613
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2001

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