Acts of custody in incarceration in Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Fall 1996 by Berry, Laura C

Wildfell Hall, superficially at least, constructs custody much as we saw Sergeant Talfourd do during the 1830s: as a struggle between a tyrannical father whose concerns are either financial or vengeful, and a loving mother who has only the child's interest at heart. The profligate Arthur fights for his son for form's sake, while Helen appears to embrace the by now familiar idea of the child as priceless possession. Little Arthur thus serves to define a category that directly opposes property: "I am not going to sell my child for gold, though it were to save both him and me from starving: it would be better that he should die with me, than that he should live with his father" (399).

Wuthering Heights, on the other hand, while it represents this struggle in similar structural terms, locates the battle not between father and mother, but rather between a tyrannical power that would enforce its will through a punishing and often physical brutality, and a coercion evoked by way of persuasion. This novel stages its battles for custody between Nelly's disciplinary tactics and Heathcliff's torturing acts. At one time or another, Nelly and Heathcliff vie for control over most of the bodies that pass through their world, particularly in the case of the younger generation-Hareton Earnshaw, Catherine Linton, and Linton Heathcliff. In each of these "cases," Nelly pleads directly with Heathcliff to allow her to be protector to these children, and to maintain them at Thrushcross Grange. In each case, Heathcliff insists upon what is his right to custody.

To describe the workings of Wuthering Heights in this way is, of course, to gesture toward a reading of the disciplinary tactics of the novel.l' But it should also be to deny that those tactics, however succinctly they may be displayed in the novel, hold sway. More important than the poles of torture and discipline that the novel figures in its examination of custody is the fact that discipline is hardly triumphant; indeed it is often subjected to a severer scrutiny than the brutalities of Heathcliff. Nell that is, doesn't define the normative in this novel, and her "disciplinary" tactics are suspect and troubling. Wuthering Heights questions persuasion as much as it does violence, in representing Nelly as both guardian and guard. Just as houses keep turning into prisons, parental figures keep metamorphosing into prison guards. When Catherine Linton says, "The Grange is not a prison, Ellen, and you are not my jailer" (275), she is voicing a suspicion shared by some critics that Nelly is neither innocent observer nor nurturing nursemaid.

It will be important to compare Nelly's coercion in the nurseries over which she presides with the pedagogic relationship that eventually sparks and sustains the relationship between Hareton and Catherine Linton Heathcliff, and is allowed at last to form narrative resolution.

The debunking of discipline is equally evident in Wildfell Hall, for that novel refuses to endorse "restraint" as resolution. Excess may lead to disaster, but too much restraint is just as disturbing, as we have opportunity to observe in the pinched and lifeless portrayal of Helen's aunt. For her, love is war, and "when the citadel of the heart is fairly besieged, it is apt to surrender sooner than the owner is aware of, and often against her better judgment" (149). Her prescription for a sterile union that ignores the body is rejected as soundly as is Huntingdon's abandonment to fleshly appetites. Lord Lowborough is the novel's Victorian precursor to the recovering alcoholic, viciously addicted to the "hell-broth," but the fearsome self-control he exercises over mind and body keeps him from drinking, only to suck the vitality from him as thoroughly as dissipation kills the out-ofcontrol Huntingdon. Alternatively, Richard Wilson leads a "temperate" existence but pays a heavy price. His self-improvements impoverish, for, like the overeager student, he lives with an internal taskmaster, and must lie about even in his free hours "with a pocket edition of some classic author in his hand. He never went anywhere without such a companion wherewith to improve his leisure moments ... he could not abandon himself to the enjoyment of that pure air and balmy sunshine ... not even with a lady by his side ... he must pull out his book, and make the most of his time while digesting his temperate meal" (89). Richard Wilson's "temperate meal" is disprized as much as is Huntingdon's stuffing himself with sensual pleasures. It is possible not only to be taken into custody as prisoner, but also to be too much in possession of oneself.