I Think - Therefore, I Am Heathcliff

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I Think; Therefore, I Am HeathcliffAuthor(s): Daniel CottomSource: ELH, Vol. 70, No. 4 (Winter, 2003), pp. 1067-1088Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30029913

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I THINK;THEREFORE,I AM HEATHCLIFFBY DANIEL COTTOM

Under Gothic conditions, thinking comes to be defined by way ofthe unhuman, especially in the form of art. Allowances must be madefor the various aspects and kinds of Gothic literature, but keyexemplars of the genre are consistent on this point.' In the activity ofthought, one finds the unhuman coming alive and, in doing so,ruining not only the perspectives and sympathies but also thearchitecture of humanity. This ruination can then be made out to bethe very proof of that humanity. Portraits stir and look back at theirbeholders, statues bleed, suits of armor walk, costumes disguise,invisible minstrels tantalize, picturesque scenes open themselves tonightmares: every mechanism of this genre adumbrates the proposalthat, if thinking is to be, it will exist only through the aestheticanimation, sufferance, and internalization of that which is supposedto be foreign to thought.2 By emphasizing its own romance nature,which is designed to be enlivened through its readers' imaginativeimprisonment in extravagantly hostile situations, the remote past, orexotic environments, the Gothic novel further embodied this pro-posal for its audience. As Ingmar Bergman recognized when headapted this technique to the screen in his Gothic Seventh Seal(1957), in which Death appears to the Knight as the chess player hehas seen him to be in a painting, all those restless works of art figureas synechdoches for the novel itself, which finds its fantasy of originsin the vivification of mouldering manuscripts into an appropriatelymodern genre.An emphasis on this genre's artifice could figure as that which isexterior, anterior, or foreign to thought because of the immemorialtraditions in which art was considered to be fundamentally irrational.In addition, the historical conditions of the late eighteenth and earlynineteenth centuries made it possible to see art as specificallyemblematic of all that was irrelevant, anachronistic, or distant inrelation to the utilitarian tendencies of modern life. (It was with goodreason that Immanuel Kant chose this historical moment to draw acordon sanitaire around art that would sequester it from crafts,decorations, and commodities, and in his own fashion Georg WilhelmELH 70 (2003) 1067-1088 2004 by The JohnsHopkinsUniversityPress 1067


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Friedrich Hegel was addressing the same set of circumstances whenhe proclaimed art to be "a thing of the past.")3This is not to say,however, that the Gothic novel was opposed to the emerging de-mands of modern life-for instance, as a rebellion against Enlighten-ment reason-or in some other way strikingly at odds with contempo-rary historical developments.4 On the contrary, the challenge thisgenre took up was that of justifying the ways of modernity to man."Inthe Gothic novel artdiscovers its misanthropy, ts unhuman motivation,as that which enables the modern sense of humanity to be instituted.It follows that this genre may be read as a series of footnotes to thewritings of Rend Descartes. Although Horace Walpole's Castle ofOtranto (1764) is generally regarded as having inaugurated thisgenre, which crested in popularity at the end of the eighteenth andthe beginning of the nineteenth century, Descartes's Meditations(1641) was actually the first Gothic novel. Understandably, its presen-tation and reception as a work of philosophy composed in the genreof the meditation has obscured its claim to this distinction, as has thecentury and a half delay between its publication and the great wave ofimitations that popularized Gothicism as a cultural style. These mightseem to be inconvenient facts for my argument. Nonetheless,Descartes's Meditations can be said to have laid the foundations notonly for modern philosophy but also for influential works like AnnRadcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and their revisionary succes-sors such as Emily Bronti's Wuthering Heights (1847). Comparisonof the Gothic novel with this precursor text serves to illuminate boththe one and the other. As the Gothic comes to seem a machinedesigned to manufacture the world of modern humanity, the com-parison also serves to highlight the worldliness of Descartes's cogito:its implication in a specific history and will. We can see how theconfrontation of the Cartesian ego and demon prefigures the Gothicencounter with the misanthrope and all that this entails in terms ofthe family and society at large. This comparison also clarifies thesupremacy of aesthetic over logical premises in Descartes's thoughtand thus enables us to comprehend the vital role of art in Gothicmetaphysics. We are then in a better position to appreciate theculmination of this relation between Cartesian and Gothic thought inthe achievement of Wuthering Heights, which rewrites the Gothic inmuch the same way that this genre had rewritten Descartes: bydrawing out the worldly implications of what seems to be its mostclear and simple device, which in this case is the romantic love that issupposed to bring one human to identify with another.1068 I Think; Therefore, I Am Heathcliff


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Like certain Gothic novels, such as the Marquis de Sade's Historyof Juliette (1797), Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland (1798), andWilliam Godwin's St. Leon (1799), the Meditations takes the form ofa personal narrative interspersed with extended passages of philo-sophical reflection and argument. As in all Gothic literature, theprotagonist of Descartes's treatise (Pierre Gassendi puckishly nick-named him "Mind") experiences a melancholy seclusion from theworld.6 At first the seclusion is freely chosen, just as it is in manyGothic novels; but then it comes to bear all the trappings of theinvoluntary isolation that is one of the trademark motifs of Gothicplots. In this isolated state of being Descartes can no longer trust theevidence of his own senses. As he is forced to trade the presumptionof a consentient perceptual reality for solipsistic and paranoid self-doubt, his thought-experiment sets the stage for every Gothic pro-tagonist in centuries to come who would suffer the fate of losingconfidence in his or her perceptions. ("Every thing now appeared tome an object of suspicion" is a sentence that could have been writtenby the seventeenth-century metaphysician but was in fact written, toregister a characteristically Gothic moment, by the eighteenth-century celebrity Matthew "Monk"Lewis.)' Moreover, in many if notall Gothic novels, just as in the Meditations, the greatest crisesassociated with one's suspension in uncertainty are attributed to themachinations of an evil figure conceivably possessed of supernaturalpowers.In the Gothic novel, as in the Meditations, Descartes's malignantdemon is the figure of misanthropy through which the thought ofmodernity must pass if it is adequately to establish and estimate itself.For Descartes, as for those who followed him, the consequence isthat the question of identity is driven into the foreground ofconsciousness by virtue of being put into extreme jeopardy. In bothcases this jeopardy does not really arise from a preexisting crisis; it isitself the heuristic positing of a crisis that provides the imaginativerationale for the demand that identity be renovated. On this basis,identity is so terrorized that individuals may not be sure whether theyare dreaming, may wonder whether they have fallen into madness,and may even become so hysterical as to lose all sense of connectionwith their own bodies. This experience of uncertainty may go so far asseemingly to cast into doubt the fundamentals of Christian belief,and the entertainment of such doubts would threaten authors of theGothic works under consideration here with opprobrium and hostil-ity, as well as fame, even as Descartes had been so threatened.Daniel Cottom 1069


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Finally,we maynote that,in mostcases,divineprovidence s rituallyreestablishedby the end of Gothic novels; in this respect, too,Descartes set the patternfor theirprotagonists' ourneys.Ofcourse, n making hiscomparison do not mean to suggestthatthe Meditationswas an influence, in the conventionalsense of thatterm, on writers of Gothic fiction, many of whom were probablyignorant of Descartes's name, not to mention his metaphysics.Despite the similaritiesbetween his Meditationsand Gothicnovels,Descartes did not literallydevise the form of these works,but he didanticipate heir definingobsession with thinkingof and throughtheunhuman,asexemplifiedmostnotably n the workof imaginativeart.The Meditationsdeserves to be called the first Gothic novel becauseit asked ts readers o prepare hemselvesformodernityby entertain-ing the thought that their very selves might be works of art, theunhumanproductof a misanthropicdemon. Like the Gothicnovel,the Meditationsarguedthat art must come to life so that doubtmaydie. Credulousnesswas to be assignedto a past thenceforth to bedefined in terms of superstition,while modernitywould be definedas the era that is able to confine the incrediblewithin the realmof art,whichessentiallybelongsto the pastand so maybe licensed to thrillthe present.Yet at the same time that it follows the model developed byDescartes,the Gothic novel significantly eformulateshis project.Ineffect, it sets out to demonstratewhythe meditativemethodoughttogive wayto that of the romanceas the appropriatenstrument or theformation of identity. Most notably,the modern romance makesseclusiona different state of affairs han the innocent readerof thephilosophicalworkmaytake it to be. Crucialto the entire series ofDescartes'smeditationswas the overt premise that they concernedonly thought,not action, since he had taken care to isolate himselffrom all encumbrances and from all knowledge of and concernsabout others-from all "worries,"n a word-before he began thisexercise. This seclusion was to providethe "freetime"necessarytothe rigorous ests of thoughtbut was also requiredto safeguard hatthought from accusationsof irresponsibility r, worse, sinfulness orheresy (M, 2:12). (Galileo Galilei'sexperiencewith the Inquisition,which had led Descartes to suppressthe writingspublished posthu-mouslyas The Worldand the Treatise n Man[1664],was still a livingmemory for him-as well it had ought to have been, consideringsome of the initialresponsesto his work.)8 "Iknow thatno dangerorerrorwill result frommy plan,"he wrote,"and hatI cannotpossibly1070 I Think; Therefore, I Am Heathcliff


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go too far in my distrustful attitude," since meditation "does notinvolve action" (M, 2:15). Saying so, however, did constitute anaction, a very complex one, in fact, which the formal disavowal of anyrelation between one's literary self and other persons is designed toforestall the unequivocally real possibility that the author might beidentified with and punished for his words. The overt premise of theMeditations thus undoes itself or, in Gothic terms, turns out to havea secret interior. The cogito is revealed (in Gassendi's formulation) asa creation of "artifice, sleight of hand and circumlocution" (M, 2:180).If it were not social through and through-even, and especially, in itsdisavowal of the existence of others-it would be unimaginable.Catching a glimpse of this problem as it played itself out in

Descartes's work, another of his commentators noted, "ifyou had notgrown up among educated people, but had spent your entire lifealone in some deserted spot, how do you know that the idea [of aperfect being] would have come to you? ... [T]he fact that thenatives of Canada, the Hurons and other primitive peoples, have noawareness of any idea of this sort seems to establish that" (M, 2:88).9Descartes simply dismissed this anthropological argument: "theobjections you raise cannot occur to those who follow the road whichI have indicated" (M, 2:109). As the Gothic novel would show,however, that which Descartes preferred to style as a road was, infact, a labyrinth in which the cogito and evil demon were artfullyimplicated in one another, just as these critics had suggested.In the world of the Gothic, no asylum is to be had. There is nosuch thing as free time, and seclusion is where the action is. Whatmight otherwise appear as one's private study, that objective correla-tive to the philosophical promise of certainty in one's identity, isredesigned within the Gothic novel into something like a monasticcell or a chamber in a castle: sites emphatically impressed with asense of communal relations, even for individuals locked in isolationwithin them. One is never less alone than when singled out in suchcircumstances, especially when one comes to recognize (as Gothicprotagonists must) that seclusion is always doubtful. One can neverbe sure that rooms do not have a secret entrance invisible even to theclosest inspection and yet accessible to unknown others on theoutside. For this reason, even a seemingly willing seclusion is neversecure as such; one can never be certain of being safe from others'eyes, ears, hands, or general influence.

Accordingly, the indubitable mark of history in Descartes's defen-sive mise-en-scene, which was designed to protect his hyperbolicDaniel Cottom 1071


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doubt from reproach, was itself made hyperbolic in the role of theInquisition in novels such as Lewis's The Monk (1796), Radcliffe's TheItalian (1797), Percy Bysshe Shelley's Zastrozzi (1810), and CharlesRobert Maturin'sMelmoth he Wanderer (1820). Even as it followsthe plot wrought by Descartes, the Gothic novel outdoes his medita-tions by faithfully calling into doubt their enabling premise and thusrevealing his reasoning as always having been more dramatically thanlogically compelling.10 Contingent as it is on its self-contradictorydisavowal of home and all that pertains to it, from one's immediatefamily to the structures of wealth, rank, religion, and law in society atlarge, Descartes's cogito must be seen as having been tormented by ademonic other from the very beginning, before the evil genius waseven introduced as such.In the Gothic novel this disavowed society, or demon, finds itssummary figure in the misanthrope. As if recognizing the unclear andindistinct social relations within the clear and distinct ideas appre-hended through the light of reason in the Meditations, the Gothicregisters the inescapability of misanthropy, the constitutive role ofthe unhuman, in the imagining of human existence within this work.In the Gothic misanthrope we can see the necessity of Descartes'scontingencies, the tyrannical power of his identity, even his meta-physical desire for the experience of paranoia-and thus, in short, theart of his reason, uncannily alive. Thought simply cannot be isolatedfrom action, much less from worries, the Gothic novel maintains-even as it honors Descartes by suggesting that to imagine otherwise isnatural to the heroes and heroines of its drama, who could not playtheir roles if they were not susceptible to this delusion.As logical premises turn out to be aesthetic, in Gothic literature'srewriting of Descartes, so, too, does the issue of identity turn out tobe one of multiple, disjunctive, and contradictory identifications.This revision does not establish the Lacanian "fragmented subject"described by Robert Miles, however, but rather the misanthropicsubject of unhuman motivations presupposed by the countervailingdesire for humanity and registered in the Gothic preoccupation withthe artwork that comes alive." This unhuman subject is retrospec-tively created, called on to have existed, so that humanity may begiven a distinctively modern place in metaphysics, history, andpsychology. This subject's character, its unhuman lack of comprehen-sible agency and coherence, is an imaginative fiction necessary to theseeming proof of humanity's existence within a distinctively modernconception of thought. Like the spanking new ruins that typify1072 I Think;Therefore, Am Heathcliff


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Gothic aesthetics, this disaggregation is a sign not of an identity indistress or under assault but rather of one under construction. It is amodern humanity to be created through, as it is saved from, art.Taken to the Gothic extreme, then, as Oscar Wilde recognized in hisreworking of this genre in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890),modernity is created as an ageless contemporaneity that assigns livingart to the sequestered past and multiple, disjunctive, and contradic-tory motivations to the realm of aesthetic reflection, as distinct fromthe logic of everyday life. Thus is Gothic horror-the Frankensteinianhorror of viewing the unholy arts that go into the making ofhumanity-turned into modern entertainment.Accompanying the definitively insecure seclusion in the realm of

the Gothic is the inability to draw a clear distinction between others'existence and one's own. This existence in the other is the definingpromise and distress of humanity. Therefore, if an inalienable cer-tainty is to be found in this genre, it must be looked for in the factthat there exists a desire that humanity should be materializedthrough art, not in the recognition that a discrete I exists in reality.Because identity is thought by demonic historical agencies such asthose of gender, class, religion, and nationality, epistemologicalquestions are proven to be indissoluble from dramas in whichcharacters must strive to identify themselves through their relationswith others. In the Gothic novel, it is through the institution of thefamily that these unhuman agencies do their most creative thinking,and so the family is to this genre what the cogito is to the Meditations,the indubitable ground of primitive self-consciousness.Along with social position, economic condition, religious denomi-nation, and other kinds of historically specific identifications,Descartes's Meditations initially assigned the family to the categori-cally doubtful realm of imagination and brute materiality-which,after all, is precisely where it belongs, as far as the Gothic novel isconcerned. When his respondents tried to bring family and commu-nity into their discussions of the mind, Descartes summarily dis-missed their reasonings by declaring that any recourse to the sup-posed determinations of such contexts could lead only to an infiniteregress in the search for certain knowledge. (Any authority attributedto one's immediate ancestors must in turn be accounted for inrelation to their ancestors, and so on.)12 Again, the Gothic novel isfully in agreement with him-one's familial relations are infinitelysuspicious-but the significance of this point is construed ratherdifferently. Instead of allowing protagonists to conceive of themselvesDaniel Cottom 1073


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as unique and disembodied intelligences, this recognition drivesthem into a congeries of shifting identifications in a world sosaturatedwith mysteryas to provideno basis even for the axiomaticCartesian definition of bodies as substancesextended in space. Infact, the presumptivedifference between immaterial dentities andphysicalbodies is preciselywhat the imaginary nd brutematerialityof the family throws into confusion.'13 When he sees Catherine'sfeatures not only in the floor under his feet and in "everycloud, ineverytree-filling the air at night, and caught by glimpsesin everyobject by day,"but also in his own features, Bronti's Heathcliff isdoinglittle more thanrestating he literary radition hat arose out ofthis recognition.14In The Italian, for instance, it is not sufficient to Radcliffe'spurposesthat her plot should be set in motionby a disputeover thenature of the family,with the hero'sparents objectingto his fanciedheroine because her background s insufficiently grand. Nor is itenough that the mother'sagent in this family dispute, the misan-thropicFatherSchedoni,should be a mysterious igurewho comes tobe thoughtof as"ademonin the guiseof a monk"and whose actionsmaybe "more hanhuman,"withconsequencesthat throwthe hero'smind into "a tempest of conjecture and of horror."'5t is stillinsufficient hatthe hero,VicentiodiVivaldi, houldconfuseSchedoniwith a second monk who had repeatedlyemerged from shadowyruins to utter enigmaticwarningsto Vivaldithat he had best keepawayfrom the heroine, Ellena Rosalba.It is not even enough thatSchedoni shoulddiscover,at the very momentwhen he is abouttomurderEllena,that she is his daughter-who thenwillbe brought olove him not onlyas her fatherbut as the manwho has deliveredherfrom the unknownassailant,whom readersknowis none other than

himself. Furthermore,we cannot rest easy in the revelation thatSchedoniwas born Count Ferando di Bruno and marriedEllena'smother after murderingher firsthusband,who happenedto be hisownbrother;and we are notyet at an end whenwe learn thatEllenawas raisedin obscurityby an auntbecause Schedonithen went on,for good measure,to slayher mother.Readers are not allowedanyrespiteuntil they learnwhy the proof"thatremovedeverydoubt of[Schedoni's] dentity"as Ellena'sfatherwas, in fact, deceptive, andthat he is actuallyEllena'suncle andstepfather,not her progenitor.16(Theconfusionon this scoreis owingto the fact that her mother hada daughterby each di Brunobrother, he death of the second childhavingbeen mistaken or that of the first.)As a bonus,we learn that1074 I Think;Therefore, Am Heathcliff


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even thoughhe had tried to do awaywith his wife and hadthoughthimself successful, Schedoni failed. She has survived to greet herlong-lostchild and to usherher into the novel'spious conclusion, nwhich she serves neatly to counterbalance the Marchesa,whosefierce characterhad set this work into motion,muchin the waythatHareton and CatherineLinton, at the end of WutheringHeights,providea formalcounterbalanceo the pairformedby HeathcliffandCatherineat the beginningof the events recountedin that novel.In short, n The Italianthe statement"I think"logicallyentails theconclusion, "Therefore,I am bedevilled with a family." Broadlysketched as being placed in conflict between stereotypicallyaristo-cratic andemergentmiddle-classconceptions,which are also associ-ated with the differencesbetween Italy,Catholicism,andthe past,onthe one hand, and the inference of an English and Protestantmodernity,on the other,the family n this novel completelycircum-scribes self-consciousnesswithout giving it a place to stand, muchless safely seclude itself. In a world of families,we learn, multiple,disjunctive,and unstable identifications are normative. Far fromofferingcomfort, he imageof a self-assuredcogitoin thisworld mustbe positively errifying,disrupting ather hansecuring he differencebetween mindandbody.In otherwords,this imagemust turn out tobe a Heathcliff-likeSchedoni,whose"contemptandmalignity" llowhimto act as if he is not boundby familyrelationships, ssociation,orname. Rather than comporting himself as a proper family man,Schedoni acts as a plotter,an artistwho is able to manipulateVivaldifor so long because this hero has yet to learn that superstitionproperlybelongs to the past and to art. "Theopinionsyou avowedwere rational," ays Schedoni to Vivaldi,"but the ardourof yourimaginationwas apparent,and what ardent imaginationever wascontented to trust to plain reasoning, or to the evidence of thesenses?"Vivaldi ailsto knowartificewhen he sees it becausehe hasnot learned to confine his desire for the incredibleto art-and toaccept that life as thus defined throughits sequestrationof art is anendlessly regressive,doubtful,and dissatisfyingrealm of conjoinedimaginationand brute materiality."7This sketch of TheItaliancannotbeginto cover the representationof the familyin all of Radcliffe'snovels, much less in all of Gothicliterature.Nevertheless,it should give some indication of why it isfair to say that this literature discovers the unclear and indistinctfamilialrelations hat await heirreadingwithin the clear anddistinctidentity apprehended through the natural light of reason in theDaniel Cottom 1075


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Meditations. To be sure, other examples would bring other empha-ses. In The Castle of Otranto, for instance, Manfred insists that hewill marry Isabella, who was to be his daughter-in-law before a gianthelmet squashed her intended, despite the fact that he labors underthe impediment of already being married. (Manfred goes on to slayhis own daughter, Matilda, with the consequence that he freesIsabella to marry Frederic, who had been in love with Matilda butwho now finds in Isabella "one with whom he could forever indulgethe melancholy that had taken possession of his soul.")'"In Godwin'sSt. Leon, having been rejected by his son and having recognizedhimself as the inadvertent cause of his wife's death, the titularprotagonist feels duty-bound to protect his daughters by absentinghimself from their lives, even by feigning his own death, only to findthat it is his non-presence that then becomes a torture for them,because of the cloud it casts over their ancestral name and maritalprospects. In Eleanor Sleath's Nocturnal Minstrel (1810), haunted bymusic from an unknown origin as well as by other apparitions, thewidowed Baroness Fitzwalter must strive to negotiate for her inde-pendence, not only with her father and her king but also with suitorsas importunate as Penelope's; the ghost who tells her that he willclarify "the mysterious fate of this family"turns out to be her undeadhusband, who has taken the opportunity afforded by the exaggeratedreport of his demise to test his wife's fidelity by spying upon her whilealso engaging her guests in spooky tricks.'9Whatever the case may bein a particular work, however, the family in this genre cannot bebracketed off through a phenomenological reduction or through anyother means, because it is impossible to isolate oneself from aninstitution constituted through identifications that can be neitherdelimited nor fully known. The advice one character in The Monkoffers another typifies this Gothic condition: "But you must listen tome with patience. You will not be less surprised, when I relate someparticulars of your family still unknown to you."20 The family lives inthe very walls that offered Descartes the illusion of quiet, peace, andfree time in which to reflect upon himself while supposing "that noother human beings were yet known" to him (M, 2:102). When histhoughts were most focused on what he could know with certainty ofhimself, the Gothic novel suggests, Descartes was unthinkingly beingthought by the institution of the family and all the other social powersrepresented in and through it-and his confusion on this score isexemplary of that which constitutes humanity as such. From theGothic perspective, then, individuals are still likely to claim that1076 I Think; Therefore, I Am Heathcliff


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identity is a discovery made through the natural light of reason. Morefully represented, however, it is an effect created through imaginativeart or, more specifically, through the unhuman motivations of artaptly represented by the overpowering, and hence terrifying, abstrac-tion of the family,which is the most intimate version of the society hismalignant genius represented in reality.So the identity of modern humanity is portrayed as the product ofa fundamental misanthropy. From this perspective, one might saythat it was with good reason that Thomas Love Peacock satiricallysuggested, in Nightmare Abbey (1818), that the "delicious misan-thropy and discontent" of modern books makes them "veryconsola-tory and congenial."21 For all its claim to the natural light of reason,the identity of modern humanity is drawn out of a drama ofdissimulation, like that in which a monk takes a new name and leavesthe world behind, as the saying goes, so that he may eventually berevealed as the very demon he was supposed to oppose. Despite thediversity of Gothic plots, The Italian is paradigmatic in this respect,and as viewed from the perspective thus afforded to us, we can seethat Descartes's meditations prove too much. In defining the activityof thought by first willing away the influence of the family and all thesocial distinctions appertaining to it (rank, wealth, religion, national-ity, and so on), he undoes himself in a distinctively modern way. Heshows the necessity of a recourse to the very art that he willnonetheless disavow when he attributes all ruinous manipulations ofbodies, images, and thoughts to the figure of the malignant demon.Just as his isolation anticipates the role of the dangerous confine-ment, romantic past, and exotic lands in Gothic literature, so doesthis demon play the role of the Gothic villain.As if recognizing that the Cartesian I is dependent on thisaesthetic creation, the malignant genius, and, even prior to that, onthe aesthetics of a misanthropic seclusion prefiguring that demon,the Gothic novel portrays the ego and its challenging adversary asmutually constitutive characters in a literary drama, not as intellec-tual figures in a logical demonstration. In doing so it practicallyinvites a Freudian reading, in which ego and demon are distinctagencies within the same psychic apparatus,as well as the Foucauldianrevision of that reading, in which the repressive hypothesis that maylead to sympathy for the demon is shown to overlook how fully andopenly this other's co-creation with the ego has been effected. At thesame time, though, the Gothic novel thwarts such readings inadvance through its insistence on identifying cultural with biologicalDaniel Cottom 1077


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and social reproduction. In portraying thinking as historical actionfashioned through unhuman motivations-the motivations of agen-cies that seem sadistically to lord it over the human figure, such assexual impulses, kinship structures, economic systems, legal codes,and religious institutions-the Gothic genre takes for granted thatconsciousness holds no exalted privilege in its world. (From JaneAusten on, the lapses of consciousness featured in its drama havebeen the most obvious targets for mockery in this genre, but thissatire appears more naive than its intended target if one considers theassumptions it conveys about consciousness as a continuous andsecure state of self-possession.) Moreover, this genre takes forgranted that power is productive and jubilant in the creation ofidentities, not simply repressive, as nothing shows more clearly thanits portrayalof the powerful nexus of relations that is the family, thatthoroughly dubious thing compounded of imagination and brutemateriality. In other words, far from being confronted and surpassedin these novels, misanthropy is made out to be the unsettling powerthat modernity must labor to confine to an art symbolically marked asdead, relegated to the past, even though it is this ghostly conceptionof artistic form that makes possible the invention of modernity and allits privileged figures, including that favorite term of Radcliffe's,"humanity."To think, in the Gothic novel, is to recognize one's existence in theother, the reality of one's present in the romance of the past. Theimplications of Descartes's proof of identity, through its testing at thehands of the malignant demon, thus become, for example, theidentification of universal humanity through the creation of a Conti-nental, Catholic, aristocratic demon. Of course, the design of Gothicmisanthropyaries romwork o work, ustas Gothicplotsdo. Forinstance, in The Recess (1783-1785), embroiling her protagonists inreligious factionalism, illegitimacy, secret marriages, and threats ofincest, rape, and insanity, not to mention murder, Sophia Leerepresented this existence in the other through the relation betweenMary, Queen of Scots (the protagonists' mother) and Queen Eliza-beth. (With characteristic Gothic logic, this relationship could thenbe reproduced within the aesthetic furnishings of the mind of one ofthe protagonists, Ellinor: "Taste, genius, and science, those richcolumes with which enthusiastic fancy creates in peaceful minds athousand light aerial structures, deep sunk, and broken in my heart,presented to the mental eye a ruin ... -Misanthropy, black-visagedmisanthropy, reigned there like a solitary savage, unconscious of the1078 I Think;Therefore, Am Heathcliff


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value of those treasures his rude hand every day more and moredefaced.")22The beginning of The Monkfinds the renowned FatherAmbrosio overhearing a novice's tormented exclamation-"Oh God!What a blessingwouldMisanthropye to me!"-counseling henovice that such a condition is wholly "imaginary,"and then becom-ing a complete misanthrope himself-as well as the rapist of his sisterand murderer of his mother-after he is seduced by the novice, whoturns out to be a crossdressed and dreamily lubricious young woman.23Melmoth the Wanderer opens with John Melmoth leaving Dublin'sTrinity College to visit the manse of his dying uncle, a confirmedmisanthrope, where he first encounters the ancestral figure that iscursed forever to wander the earth, haunt his family, and corrupt hisown existence-"that being, I will not call him a man," as anothercharacter refers to it. At one point, when "the demon of hissuperhuman misanthropy had now fully possessed" the ancestralwanderer, as he maliciously pours an account of the evils of moderncivilization into the ear of an innocent island maiden, Maturin evenfelt it necessary to add a footnote complaining that the "worstsentiments" of his "worst characters" had been attributed, against allreason, to him. Bitterly and amusingly, with perfect Gothic logic, hethus reproduced the ego-demon as an author-reader relationship.24The generically distinctive constant through all such variations isthe recognition of oneself in the misanthropic other and thus thediscovery of oneself in the unhuman and of the unhuman withinoneself. Precisely because it mimes humanity, serving as its shadowydouble, art is the exemplary figuration of the unhuman; and art'sassumed distinction from nature, inanimation, secondary or repre-sentational mode of being, and suspect status in Platonic, Christian,and other metaphysics are accordingly brought to life in the Gothic.Melmoth, for instance, is introduced to the perturbations of hisdemonic ancestor through a portrait whose eyes seem to move, anduncannily affecting portraits appear as well in The Monk and TheRecess, among other works. (As in Clara Reeve's 1778 "Preface to theSecond Edition" of The Old English Baron, the animated picture andsimilar devices have long been criticized as excesses of the Gothicgenre, but it is this criticism that appears excessive if one examines itsgoverning assumptions about the existence of clear cut divisionsbetween subjects and objects and between the probable and themarvelous.)25It is through such figurations of the undead nature ofart that the Gothic defines modernity-defines modernity despite,and because of, the fact that the Gothic imperils its definition.Daniel Cottom 1079


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In WutheringHeights,which is by no means the last but which isarguably he most brilliantwork in this tradition, he undead natureof art is so powerfullyrealizedthat CharlotteBrontW,n her "Editor'sPreface" o the second editionof her sister'snovel, seemed terrifiedby it. Charlotteherselfwas no mean hand at the Gothic,of course,but she evidentlycould not accept how openly Emilyhad acknowl-edged the misanthropy t the heartof Gothic art and of the modernidentity t wasdesignedto entertain.Therefore, nwritingof how herlate sisterhadwrought"creationsike Healthcliff, ikeEarnshaw,ikeCatherine" W, 368), she denigratedher ("Iam bound to avowthatshe had scarcelymorepracticalknowledgeof the peasantryamongstwhom she lived,than a nunhas of the countrypeoplewho sometimespass her convent gates"[W, 368]), patronizedher ("Having ormedthese beings,she didnot knowwhat she had done"[W,368-69]), andlovinglycondemnedher ("Whethert is rightor advisable o createbeingslike Heathcliff,I do not know:I scarcely hink t is"[W,370]).Even if it had not been provided,one mighthavewished to imaginesuch an editorial ntroduction o Emily Brontt'swork,in which onesisterplays ego to the other'sdemon;for the wayCharlotte nsistsonplacingher sister'sidentity n a familycontext thatdefines it in termsof ignorance,unreliability, nd suspect morality-terms that cannothelp but alsosuggestsiblingrivalry-reproducein the form of denialpreciselywhatEmilyBronti'smasterpieceaffirms o be the natureofGothic identity.26The opening sentences of WutheringHeights focus in on thesubjectof the Gothic as subjectto misanthropy: InallEngland,I donot believe that I could have fixed on a situation so completelyremovedfrom the stir of society.A perfect misanthropist'sHeaven:and Mr. Heathcliff and I are such a suitable pair to divide thedesolationbetweenus"(W, 1). Hindleyand CatherineEarnshawwillalsoappearas exemplarsof misanthropy, ndeven EdgarLinton fitsthe bill when, recoilingfrom Heathcliff,he betakeshimself and hisdaughterto a melancholyseclusion like that of the protagonist nFriedrichSchiller'splay TheMisanthropistReconciled(1790). Thusevokedfrom the outset, the generalspiritof misanthropys concen-trated in the history of Heathcliff, who incarnates its unhumanagencyin every aspectof his being, from the dubiouscircumstancesof his birth andhis disruptivensertion nto a familyon through o hisanimalic,devilish,andmonstrousappearance s anobjectof supersti-tion to Nelly Dean, amongothers,when he is an adult:"'Butwheredid he come from,the little darkthing,harbouredby a good man to1080 I Think;Therefore, Am Heathcliff


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his bane?' muttered Superstition"W, 330). "It" s what Nelly callshim when Mr. Earnshawfirst brings him home (W, 35), and asCharlotteBronti recognized,an it is what he is and whathe remainsthroughout he novel. "He'snot a humanbeing,"his wife will flatlydeclare (W, 177): and as goes Heathcliff in this novel, so goeshumanity.For instance,he is like the it that Lockwoodexperienceswhen his sleep at WutheringHeightsis interruptedby an apparitionat the window by his bed: "Asit spoke, I discerned, obscurely,achild's acelooking hrough he window-Terror made me cruel;and,finding t useless to attemptshaking he creatureoff, I pulledits wriston to the brokenpane, and rubbed it to and fro till the blood randown and soaked the bed-clothes"(W, 23). Since this scene takesplace three decades after that which introduces Heathcliff into theEarnshawhousehold but actuallyprecedes it in the narrative,withonlya few pages separating he two,readersaregiventhe impressionof an "itness"that is at once subjective and intersubjective-animpression hat the rest of the novel is designedto elucidateas thecondition of identity wrought through the unhuman agencies ofidentification. In Emily Bronte's portrayal,the unhuman is thefoundation of modern identity; the misanthropeis the characterdemandedby its world;and the characteristicart of misanthropysromantic ove.It is throughthis last intuitionthat her workin this genre outdoesher predecessors'.For the most part, love in Gothic novels is aperfunctorybusiness, characterizedformulaicallyas an index ofvirtue, sensibility,or morality.(Recall, for instance, how thin theincest-tinged ove storyis in MaryShelley'sFrankenstein 1818], ascomparedto the impassionedrelation between Victor and his cre-ation.) It was Emily Bronti's genius to see that, instead of beingportrayedas a sign of the consciousness established through theaesthetic invention, sufferance, and internalization of otherness,romantic ove couldbe portrayedmore accuratelyas itself being theindubitablyGothic machinerythat instituteshumanitythroughtheparlousprocessof identityformation.It would be through ove thatwe would come to see the revelationof logicalas aestheticpremises,the appearanceof disturbing dentifications n the place of certainidentity,the emblematic embodimentof these identifications n theimageof art that stirs tself intolife, and-through all these aspectsofthe novel-the mutuallyconstitutiverelationof ego and demon.BroughtforwardthroughGothic terror and the allied Romanticfeelings represented by worksas disparateas JohannWolfgangvonDaniel Cottom 1081


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Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) and Charlotte Dacre'sConfessions of the Nun of St. Omer (1805), the romantic love ofAndreas Capellanus, which must be gratuitous and so can be mani-fested only in adulterous or extramaritalpassion, was thus legitimizedas art. By showing Gothic art coming alive in love and so giving theexperience of love the place traditionally occupied in the Gothicnovel by that of dramatic uncertainty, Brontoreinterpreted herpredecessors in this genre as effectively as they had reinterpretedDescartes. Like earlier Gothic novels, Wuthering Heights shows thefamilial dramas lurking in the dreamy architecture of the thinker'sroom, but Bronti also saw the sadomasochistic institution of roman-tic love in the structuring of the Gothic plot.27What is more, she sawthe value of estimating such love as a matter that properly belongs tothe past and that is supposed to appear in the present only in theform of art. It is this insight that accounts for what Terry Eagleton hasdescribed as "the curious impersonality of the relation betweenCatherine and Heathcliff," its famously "ontological"or "metaphysi-cal" quality.28 Catherine's and Heathcliff's love can be consummatedonly in imagination or in brute materiality-only in ghostly visitationsor in the commingling of their remains-so that it may be formallyassigned to the realm of art, as distinct from life. Like the mockery ofromantic love that runs throughout the nineteenth-century novel,from the portrayals of Marianne Dashwood and Hetty Sorrell tothose of David Copperfield and Emma Bovary and TuanJim, amongso many others, this love story signifies modernity, which emergesfrom its dramatized failure. As distinct from many other novels thatemploy this device, however, Wuthering Heights keeps faith with theGothic through its dramatized insistence that modernity recognize itsexistence in the other that is art. The unhuman motivations of art,BrontW uggests, are still those of the humanity that defines itself byframing the image of art's life as superstition.In his response to Descartes's Meditations, Johannes Caterus hadexplained the argument about identity on which he agreed with thephilosopher by making an allusion to Terence's Andria: "Davus isDavus and not Oedipus" (M, 2:67).29 Like her predecessors in theGothic genre, BrontWwould have none of this. "I am Heathcliffl"Catherine Earnshaw exclaims, recognizing the foundation of heridentity in the necessary existence of the other. Whereas her love forEdgar Linton "is like the foliage in the woods," subject to time andchange, her love for Heathcliff "resembles the eternal rocks be-neath-a source of little visible delight, but necessary" (W, 82).1082 I Think; Therefore, I Am Heathcliff


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Brontimarks this identity through identifications with irony even asCatherine proclaims its perdurability, however, so as to make clearthat love, like the Gothic family, is bound to be as unstable as it isfundamentally unhuman, no matter whether that unhuman nature isimaged as being animal, vegetable, or mineral-or demon or ghoul.At the very moment that Catherine is proclaiming her identificationwith Heathcliff and characterizing his existence as hers-"my ownbeing" (W, 82)-he is stealing away, having heard only her earlierremarks that to marry him now would be a degradation for her. Likethe events that followed upon his entrance into her family's house-hold, his disappearance from it and subsequent fairytale transforma-tion into a gentleman serve to emphasize that in being Heathcliff,Catherine is and yet is not Catherine, and in being Catherine,Heathcliff is and is not himself.3 Accordingly, Heathcliff may reversethe subjects and objects in her statements-"I have not broken yourheart-you have broken it-and in breaking it, you have brokenmine" (W, 161)-and in her last meeting with him Catherine may sayof Heathcliff, "That is not my Heathcliff. I shall love mine yet; andtake him with me-he's in my soul" (W, 160).

Upon Heathcliff's return, Catherine had expressed her sense ofthings in a gleeful moment of self-dramatization: "The event of thisevening has reconciled me to God and humanity! I had risen in angryrebellion against providence" (W, 99). Yet this quip is actually aserious riposte to the proof of divine security that Descartes consid-ered himself to have found through his cogito. As much a blasphemyto God and insult to the family as it is a misanthropic rejection ofhumanity, the identification of Catherine and Heathcliff demands theGothic ghost as its defining figure. No image could be adequate totheir love that did not register its profoundly unhuman motivations,which can "take any form" because they derive their existence fromthe overwhelming and infinitely regressive number of cultural,biological, and social forms that reproduce themselves through theidentifications out of which identity is composed. So Heathcliff, notreally himself, calls out to the dead Catherine, "I know that ghostshave wandered on earth. Be with me always-take any form-driveme mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you!"(W, 67).This Gothicism that comes to life in the love of Catherine andHeathcliff is specifically literary in nature, in keeping with the natureof Wuthering Heights as a self-conscious reworking of literary tradi-tion. Instead of paintings or statues or other objets d'art, the letters ofDaniel Cottom 1083


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the alphabetare the unhumanstuffthat becomes animated,aswhenLockwoodhas his nightmarevisionof CatherineLintonafterreadingher name scratched on a window ledge and scrawled n the booksrestingon that ledge.31 The way letters become animated does notappearat alllogical("whydidI thinkof Linton?I had read Earnshawtwentytimes for Linton" W, 23]), and Lockwood'sresponseto thisevent is as lackingin humanityas was the reaction of Catherine,Hindley,and Nelly to the suddendeliveryof Heathcliff fromwithinMr. Earnshaw'scoat. By the end of the novel, of course, as theeighteenthhasturned to the nineteenthcentury, he sadomasochistictropes of the Gothic will have been toned down to the comicdimensionsof the playful slaps and kissesexchanged n the readinglesson given to Hareton Earnshawby the second Catherine. How-ever, it is notable that BrontW id not reestablisha Providentialsecurity for the senses, in accordance with the Gothic pattern.Instead,as in the twentiethcentury's ilm noir versionsof the Gothic,Bronti's narrative tructurehas the violent prehistory o this scenewith Hareton and Catherine come out of the past to modify ourimpressionsof thatscene, and we areleft with the imageof a child'sterrifiedblubberingat the sightof "Heathcliffand a woman,yonder,under t'Nab"(W, 336). To be sure, Lockwood's inal words, as hedescribes the gravesof Catherine,EdgarLinton,and Heathcliff,domakea gesturetowardsomethinglike divine assurance:"I lingeredround them, under that benign sky;watched the moths flutteringamongthe heath,andhare-bells; istened to the softwindbreathingthroughthe grass;and wondered how any one could ever imagineunquietslumbersfor the sleepers in thatquiet earth" W, 338). Themutedandwillfulnatureof this assurance anhardlygo unremarked,however,especiallysince readerswillhavenoted fromthe firstwordsof the narrative hat Lockwood, he urbane moderngentlemanwhohas decided to vacationamongthe moors,is not one whose percep-tions can be trusted,to saythe least.Lockwood'simpercipience s made clear when he makesembar-rassingmistakeson his first visit to Heathcliff'shousehold,as whenhe takes a pile of dead rabbitsto be cherishedcats;and he actuallyintroduceshimself with a storythat illustrates he confoundingcross-purposes n his actionsof the immediatepast.Nonetheless,althoughhe has pronounced himself a misanthropist, n accordancewithGothicfashion,and secluded himself in this place farremovedfrom"society,"s the contemporarydiom wouldhaveit,he is no Descartesmetaphysically ryingto sorthimselfout. As a manof the presentin1084 I Think;Therefore, Am Heathcliff


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thisnarrative'sime scheme,Lockwood s comicallyself-assured venas he detailshis confusionsand errors.It wouldappear hat Cartesiandoubtis a thing of the past,a matter that cannot touch a gentlemanwho knows how to dismiss a nightmare with the same absurdconfidencewith which he lets hisreadersknowthat,if he had been soinclined,he mighthave stolen a march on Haretonin the matter ofthe second Catherine's ffections.In short,Lockwooddoes not think,and he is not Heathcliffor anything ike him.Instead, Lockwoodand Nelly figure as the dispiritingmoderncounterpartsto the ego and demon of Descartes's Meditations.Lockwood s the silly ego that does not have the art to question tself,Nelly the tormentoras mere busybody(andso her "hiddenenemy"[W, 129], says the first Catherine, not because Nelly Dean is ofsupernatural onsequencebut because she so decidedlyis not). Thefact that the structuringof Wuthering Heights has Nelly's oralnarrative etold n Lockwood'swritingreduces the demonictestingofidentityto a gossip's est of one'spatience.As told by Nelly to divertthe ailingor bored Lockwoodand as retoldby Lockwood or what wecan infer to be an intended audience of personswith pretensionstoeducationandculture,thisstory s orientedto the need forentertain-ment, not to the need for such certaintyas was sought by Heathcliffand CatherineEarnshaw.It is significant,n thisregard, hat Lockwoodappearsas a failed orindecisivemisanthrope-as so much of a dilettante n this respect,infact, that he takes Heathcliff'svehement rejectionof any desire forhis companyas a perverse incitement to pester him further.LikeNelly's tale, Heathcliff is entertainment to him. Lockwood'sveryexistence as a touristin this countryside,a consumer of the experi-ences it may provide,shows us that WutheringHeights and every-thingaround t have the natureof a resortforhim,like the spahe hadgracedwith hispresence shortlybeforecomingthere. Hisrecoursetosuch entertainment s necessarilyambivalent,however,for he mustlet it come alive enough to divert him with its power while stillmaintaining he criticaldistance from it that will assurehim that heneed not questionhis ownidentity-and so need not doubt thatart isessentiallya thingof the past.As a narrator,hen, Lockwood s also astand-in orWutheringHeights's eaders,whomBronto ocksthroughLockwood'spatronizingaffection for CatherineLinton and Haretonand throughthe sentimental closure to the narrative hat he takesthem to have bestowed upon the gravesof their forebears.At thesame time, she offersreaderswho know better than to identifywithDaniel Cottom 1085


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Lockwood'smodernity-the modernityshe deliberately places al-most half a centurybefore her novel'spublication,as if it oughtto beregardedas being no less remotethanany genericGothicsetting-athoroughly elf-mortifying onceptionof art.In this conception,it isa damnedgood thingthat artshouldhave the makingandunmakingof us, for who could face the unimaginablealternative of simplybelonging to humanity,like Nelly and Lockwood,without beingscared to death?Universityof Oklahoma

NOTES1 For analyses of the qualifications important in the discussion of the Gothic as agenre, see Jacqueline Howard, Reading Gothic Fiction: A Bakhtinian Approach(Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1994); James Watt, Contesting the Gothic: Fiction,Genre and Cultural Conflict, 1764-1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press,

1999); and Michael Gamer, Romanticism and the Gothic: Genre, Reception, andCanon Formation (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000). Although to someextent the very term "Gothic novel" is doubly anachronistic, especially in relation toeighteenth-century works, the family resemblance among the writings on which Ifocus, as well as common scholarly usage, sufficiently justifies its use for my purposeshere.

2 On this topic of art becoming life in the Gothic, see Maggie Kilgour, The Rise ofthe Gothic Novel (New York: Routledge, 1995), 85-87, 156-58.3 G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox, 2 vols.(Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1998), 1:11.4 On this point, though not on all others, I am in agreement with the entertaining

polemic against "a continuing consensus" that "subsumes the Gothic into an anti-Enlightenment rebellion." See Chris Baldick and Robert Mighall, "Gothic Criti-cism," in A Companion to the Gothic, ed. David Punter (Oxford: Basil Blackwell,2000), 215.

5 See the valuable argument about the creation of "an autonomous realm of theaesthetic," in relation to "the historical coincidence of the expanding taste forcommercial fictions of the supernatural and the project of a supernaturalised theoryof capitalism." E. J. Clery, The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 1762-1800 (Cambridge:Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995), 9.

6 [Pierre Gassendi,] "Fifth Set of Objections," in the "Objections and Replies," inRene Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, The Philosophical Writings ofDescartes, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch, 2 vols.(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1984), 2:179-240. Hereafter abbreviated Mand cited parenthetically by page number.

7 Matthew Lewis, The Monk, ed. Howard Anderson (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press,1980), 107.8 See, for example, the danger of appearing impious suggested by the theologianAntoine Arnauld in the "Fourth Set of Objections," in Descartes, Meditations,2:151-53.

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9The editorsnote that these replieswere collected andlargelycomposedby MarinMersenne.10 On the question of how the aesthetic conventionsof the meditationfigure inDescartes'swork, see the volume edited by AmdlieOksenbergRorty:Essays on

Descartes'Meditations,ed. Rorty (Berkeley:Universityof CaliforniaPress, 1986)." RobertMiles, GothicWriting1750-1820: A Genealogy(New York:Routledge,1993),3. For anothercharacterizationkin to Miles's,see VijayMishra,The GothicSublime(Albany:State Univ.of New YorkPress, 1994).12 See the "SecondSet of Objections,"and Descartes'sresponse, in Descartes,Meditations,esp. 2:98, 109.13 See the discussionof a partial"collapseof Cartesiandualism"n the writingsofAnn Radcliffeand Edmund Burke. Steven Bruhm,Gothic Bodies:The PoliticsofPain n RomanticFiction(Philadelphia: niv. of Pennsylvania ress,1994),99-100.14 Emily Bronti, WutheringHeights,ed. Ian Jack(Oxford:Oxford Univ. Press,

1995), 324. Hereafter abbreviatedW and cited parentheticallyby page number.Inrelationto this point, see TerryCastle's "TheSpectralization f the Other in TheMysteriesof Udolpho,"n The Female Thermometer:Eighteenth-CenturyCultureand the Inventionof the Uncanny(New York:OxfordUniv.Press, 1995), 120-40.15Radcliffe,TheItalian,ed. FrederickGarber Oxford:OxfordUniv.Press,1981),18 ("ademon"),19 ("morethan human"),367 ("atempest").The first quotationshere are initiallymade in reference to an unknowntormentor,but Schedonisooncomesto be suspectedeither of beingthispersonor,aseventually urnsout to be thecase, of being the agentbehind his actions.16 Radcliffe,239.17Radcliffe, 52, 397-98.18 HoraceWalpole,The Castleof Otranto,ed. W. S. Lewis (Oxford:OxfordUniv.Press, 1982), 110.19 EleanorSleath,The NocturnalMinstrel,2 vols. (New York:ArnoPress, 1972),2:18.20 M. Lewis, The Monk, 130.21 Thomas Love Peacock, NightmareAbbey, in The Works of Thomas LovePeacock,ed. H. F. B. Brett-SmithandC. E. Jones, 10 vols. (New York:AMSPress,1967), 3:41.22 SophiaLee, TheRecess,3 vols. (New York:ArnoPress, 1972), 3:11.23 M. Lewis,TheMonk, 51, 53.24 Charles RobertMaturin,Melmoth he Wanderer,ed. DouglasGrant(London:OxfordUniv.Press, 1968),39 ("thatbeing"),303 ("thedemon";"worst entiments";"worstcharacters").As Grant notes, Samuel Taylor Coleridge had published acritique of one of Maturin'sworks ("Critiqueon Bertram"), n his BiographiaLiteraria, n which he accused the authorof immoralityand impiety(303).25 The unease withsuchdevicescontinueson intocontemporary riticism; ee, forexample, George E. Haggerty'scomment on "an incongruityof technique andsubjectthat reachesalmost to self-parody."Gothic Fiction/GothicForm(UniversityPark:The PennsylvaniaState Univ. Press, 1989), 16.26 See the commentaryon CharlotteBronti's"Editor'sPreface,"on her editingof

her sister'swork(U. C. Knoepflmacher,WutheringHeights:A Study[Athens:OhioUniv. Press, 1994], 111-13), and on her "BiographicalNotice" of Emily (whichisdescribedas being"shapedby a dynamicsimilar o that of WutheringHeights tself"[Knoepflmacher, ]).

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27 The sadomasochisticaspects of Gothic literature have been much remarked;see, forexample,WilliamPatrickDay,In the Circlesof Fear and Desire:A StudyofGothicFantasy(Chicago:Univ. of ChicagoPress,1985).ForWutheringHeights, nparticular,see Laura Hinton, The Perverse Gaze of Sympathy:SadomasochisticSentimentsfrom Clarissa o Rescue 911 (Albany:State Univ. of New YorkPress,1999), 147-70.28 Terry Eagleton, Myths of Power: A MarxistStudy of the Brontls (London:Macmillan,1975), 107 ("curious"),108 ("ontological"; metaphysical"). ee alsoNancy Armstrong's rgument hatWutheringHeights"locatesdesire elsewhere,inan extrasocialdimension of humanexperience";n Desire and Domestic Fiction:APoliticalHistoryof the Novel (New York:OxfordUniv.Press, 1987), 196.29 Iowe the identificationof the allusion o Terence to the translators f this work.30 This transformation s suggestive not only of fairytales,of course; see, forinstance, Eagleton's argument about this transformationas that of a bourgeois

parvenu(114-17), and SusanMeyer'sargumentaboutits relationto the AmericanRevolutionaryWar, and to anti-imperialist hreats generally, in Imperialism.atHome: Race and Victorian Women's Fiction (Ithaca:Cornell Univ. Press, 1996),115-16.31 See the analysisof issues of textuality n WutheringHeights,in CarolJacobs,UncontainableRomanticism:Shelley,Bront, Kleist(Baltimore:The JohnsHopkinsUniv. Press, 1989),61-84. See alsoJamesH. Kavanagh's rgumentabout how "thebook" n this novel figures"asa complex image, the nexus of multipleassociationslinkingcultural order and the control of languagewith sublimationand the self-control of desire"(Emily Bront"[Oxford:Basil Blackwell,1985], 19), as well asRobert C. McKibben,"TheImageof the Bookin WutheringHeights,"Nineteenth-CenturyFiction 15 (September1960):159-69.

1088 I Think;Therefore, Am Heathcliff

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I Think - Therefore, I Am Heathcliff