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

"Custody" is rapidly assimilated, as if by necessity, into a discourse about guardianship; the legal issues of Heathcliff's or Arthur Huntingdon's rights become intertwined with the caretaking functions of Nelly Dean or Helen Huntingdon. At the same time, the novels never cease being about incarceration. They are always poised between the enforcement of punishment and the perils of a course of self-directed regulation. These Brontes make it clear that the family is the inevitable, and indeed the most threatening, site for relations of power both direct and indirect, and (not surprisingly) they introduce the idea of kidnapping frequently into their texts. Scenes of overt abduction reveal the covert power relations of domestic enclosures. In exposing the inevitably violent nature of "custody," these scenes preserve the idea of the cell in the fantasy of the home.l2 Violence is inherent in domestic relations of all kinds, and so are the operations of power that underlie that violence.

Those power relations are not restricted to certain individuals. It is clear in Cathy's diary that Hindley is a tyrant well before Heathcliff takes up the role.

The word "tyranny" is altogether a private affair in Bronte fiction; it conjoins connotations of revolution, absolute power, violent control, and political sovereignty with a notion of the inherent and unresolvable power relations that exist within the family, as well as the difficult position of any sovereign self. Lockwood reads Cathy's narration of Hindley's behavior: " 'You forget you have a master here,' says the tyrant. 'I'll demolish the first who puts me out of temper!"' (63). When Frances grows peevish, "Hindley became tyrannical" (87). Later, "[t]he servants could not bear his tyrannical and evil conduct long" (106). Perhaps the most memorable use of the word is Heathcliff s, addressed to Cathy, concerning his dalliance with Isabella: "I seek no revenge on you.... That's not the plan- 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" (151). In this passage power, tyranny, and enslavement are entirely personal, enabling Heathcliff to confuse not only the public and the private, but the relationship between love and violence as well. This is only one of many instances in which Heathcliff is named "tyrant" (214), for he "amuses" himself in Cathy's style often, as when Nelly cannot "picture a father treating a dying child as tyrannically ... as I afterwards learnt Heathcliff had treated" Linton (291). Eventually, Linton himself becomes "the little tyrant" (306) and seizes the opportunity to take up like amusements.

Similarly, Helen writes of Arthur Huntingdon: "I would not submit to be tyrannized over by those bright, laughing eyes" (173). He becomes, in their courtship, "the reigning tyrant of [her] thoughts" (181). But Arthur, in turn, calls her "ly]ou little exorbitant tyrant" (247), and a bit later, "my pretty tyrant" (269). After their marriage Helen discovers that, far from being a political property, tyranny can be exerted by the sheer force of appetite itself: "[h]is appetite for the stimulus of wine had increased upon him.... I succeeded in preserving him from absolute bondage to that detestable propensity, so insidious in its advances, so inexorable in its tyranny" (272). Finally, according to Helen, Arthur's parenting problems derive from the fact that his "selfish affection is more injurious than the coldest indifference or the harshest tyranny could be" (333). In Wildfell Hall, as in Wuthering Heights, the bloody revolution literally takes place at home, but no effective resistance, and certainly no solace, is successfully imagined.