Is Heathcliff a Murderer? Great Puzzles in Nineteenth-Century Literature / Can Jane Eyre be Happy? More Puzzles in Classic Fiction

Papers on Language and Literature, Spring 2000 by Hill, James

Sutherland, John. Is Heathcliff a Murderer? Great Puzzles in Nineteenth-Century Literature. Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1996. x 258 pp. $7.98.

-. Can Jane Eyre be Happy? More Puzzles in Classic Fiction. Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1997. xv 232 pp. $8.95.

One of my few pleasurable memories from a high school class was a discussion of the fight between Beowulf and Grendel. Some of us were also taking a physics class, and we put our rudimentary knowledge of Newton's laws to work in developing a theory of how the smaller Beowulf could have pulled Grendel's arm off, prolonging our discussion of the "problem" until we had used up the entire class period (which was, it must be admitted, our real aim). Our rather Victorian teacher was not amused, and after class warned us never to try such a stunt again. Professor Sutherland is no longer a teenager, but he retains some of the teenager's delight in balloon puncturing, albeit with more respect for great texts than we displayed. And by following Is Heathcliff a Murderer? with Can,Jane Eyre be Happy? he has indeed tried the same stunt again. Should Oxford continue to enlarge its World's Classics series, we might look forward to a third volume. Even the current titles offer more grist for his mill. I, for one, would look forward to a volume devoted entirely to a probing of those fictional deaths whose causes are veiled: Lady Dedlock-hypothermia? Heathcliff and Cathy-anorexia? Mr. Woodhouse-malnutrition?

These little essays on literary puzzles are jeux d'esprit, spinoffs of Sutherland's sleuthing as an annotator of fiction, which, both for scholars and novel readers, is an invaluable aid for those of us who feel that Thackeray's references to Mrs. Chapone and Guidetta Pasta in Vanity Fair may have some point lost on the late twentieth-century reader. In not a few cases, his solutions of the puzzles are almost witheringly funny. The ending of George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss, the flood with its machina sine Deo, has been a problem for readers since the novel was first published. But to learn that this most serious of novelists got the hydrody namics of the flood, the machinery of destruction, and the technique of managing a boat all completely wrong adds factual insult to structural injury. One can only say "Poor George" or "Poor Maryann" depending on one's theoretical commitment. Amusing as this is, I must quibble. Sutherland agrees with Henry James that there is no foreshadowing of Maggie's drowning. Both are mistaken; Maggie's drowning is foreshadowed, but so early in the novel that both appear to have forgotten it.

In a similar vein of fun is the essay on Lydia Gwilt's purple flask in Wilkie Collins's Armadale. In spite of Collins's fanatical concern for accuracy, Sutherland shows us that Lydia's suicide is a chemical and engineering impossibility. Collins is hoist on the petard of accuracy for trusting in an inaccurate article in the Times, the newspaper that had earlier caught Collins out for a chronological inaccuracy in The Woman in White.

Other essays inform rather than amuse, giving us more precise means of understanding the subtler implications of textual detail. "How vulgar is Mrs. Elton?" points to the probability of a printer's error in transcribing Mrs. Elton's Italian phrase caro sposo in Austen's Emma. I find convincing Sutherland's suggestion that the vulgarity that so offends Emma is not that Mrs. Elton's Italian is incorrect (caro sposo) , but that it is painfully passe. Similarly, in "How many pianos has Emilia Sedley?", his discussion of the contradictory accounts of Emilia's pianos tells us that we should not read Thackeray expecting the standards of consistency of later novelists. Instead, we should respond to Thackeray's "long perspectives and resonant recurrent detail."

And, in "What does Arabella Donn thrown" (Hardy's Jude the Obscure) , Sutherland's explanation that a barrow pig is castrated changes the sexual implication in Arabella's throwing the pig's dysfunctional penis at Jude, hitting him in the face. The standard take has been that her act is sexually provocative; now, thanks to Sutherland, we can see it as sexually taunting.

In a time when literary studies have moved steadily and sometimes remorselessly into a world of hyperserious commitment to theory, Sutherland's essays provide a refreshing respite. They remind us that reading, particularly careful reading, offers pleasure as well as the opportunity to put literature under the theoretical microscope. "Even Homer nods" is a salutary alternative to the prospect of works of literature as ideological doomsday machines that must, on principle, deconstruct themselves. Fallibility is perhaps, in the end, a more humane indictment of textual production than culpability. At any rate, Sutherland's essays, light as they are and are meant to be, result from enormous reading. If such reading is sometimes put to the service of sprezzatura, let us hope that room remains for it in the enterprise of literary studies.