Family Systems Theory and Wuthering Heights
A critic informed by the family systems theory derived from the treatment of chemical dependence can add many insights to standard crticism of Wuthering Heights. He or she would emphasize that as soon as Lockwood asks that he be told their stories by Nellie, the novel becomes the histories of several family systems and all the characters in the systems, male as well as female, living and dead. Focusing on the family as a unit at Wuthering Heights we discover one of the best illustrations of a closed system in literature. They are not merely extremely isolated from others, they are actively hostile: instead of welcoming the protoreader, Lockwood, they refuse to come to his aid as six dogs attack him inside the house. Even the reader is excluded from some of the activity at the Heights, for at times it is presented in a dialect almost unintelligible to all but those raised in the neighborhood. Even members of the family at times find Joseph's "speech difficult to understand" when he got excited and "his jaws worked like those of a cow chewing its cud."
When Lockwood does manage to get past some of the rigid boundaries, Hareton Earnshaw is instantly angry at him and "Mrs. Heathcliff" at first won't even speak to him. Many readers no doubt identify with Lockwood's sarcastic understatement, "I began to feel unmistakably out of place in that pleasant family circle." When Lockwood tries to escape from the system, a dog prevents him, as in the Leary household. In his case, two dogs attack and pin him to the ground and a servant asks, "Are we going to murder folk on our very door-stones?" The family motto, "Every man's hand was against his neighbor," appears to Lockwood in a dream and he adopts it has his own. When one of the ancestors, a recently dead family member. comes to him as a child in the dream, crying "Let me in .... I'm come home," Lockwood, already imitating the others, slashes her wrists on the broken window and replies, as the blood stains his bed, "I'll never let you in."
Lockwood proclaims to the family, "I'm not going to endure the persecutions of your hospitable ancestors," but as soon as one enters a family system of any age one is in the presence of ancestors. "Before passing the threshold" for the first time" Lockwood looked up and "detected the date `1500' and the name `Hareton Earnshaw'." He then confronted the latest incarnation of that name who, when he was learning to read, began by reading his own name carved on the door. This is an example of transgenerational repetition in the same house for centuries almost beyond the imagination of readers in America, which had just been discovered in 1500. At Wuthering Heights names are simply repeated, as if there were little difference between the generations, as if they kept adopting the same roles and following the same script century after century. When we add to name repetition the habit of cousins marrying cousins in a complicated genealogy, we can see why readers of the novel are as confused as Lockwood was when he first entered the family. Readers get to feel exclusion from a closed system as they wonder which Catherine, for example, is being discussed. Because of "the thousand forms of past associations, and ideas" a family member "awakens, or embodies," even the inmates become bewildered: Heathcliff, for example, at times believed that Catherine II was Catherine I and often "Hareton seemed a personification of my youth, not a human being; I felt to him in such a variety of ways, that it would have been impossible to have accosted him rationally."
A critic informed by the family systems theory derived from the treatment of chemical dependence can add many insights to standard crticism of Wuthering Heights. He or she would emphasize that as soon as Lockwood asks that he be told their stories by Nellie, the novel becomes the histories of several family systems and all the characters in the systems, male as well as female, living and dead. Focusing on the family as a unit at Wuthering Heights we discover one of the best illustrations of a closed system in literature. They are not merely extremely isolated from others, they are actively hostile: instead of welcoming the protoreader, Lockwood, they refuse to come to his aid as six dogs attack him inside the house. Even the reader is excluded from some of the activity at the Heights, for at times it is presented in a dialect almost unintelligible to all but those raised in the neighborhood. Even members of the family at times find Joseph's "speech difficult to understand" when he got excited and "his jaws worked like those of a cow chewing its cud."
When Lockwood does manage to get past some of the rigid boundaries, Hareton Earnshaw is instantly angry at him and "Mrs. Heathcliff" at first won't even speak to him. Many readers no doubt identify with Lockwood's sarcastic understatement, "I began to feel unmistakably out of place in that pleasant family circle." When Lockwood tries to escape from the system, a dog prevents him, as in the Leary household. In his case, two dogs attack and pin him to the ground and a servant asks, "Are we going to murder folk on our very door-stones?" The family motto, "Every man's hand was against his neighbor," appears to Lockwood in a dream and he adopts it has his own. When one of the ancestors, a recently dead family member. comes to him as a child in the dream, crying "Let me in .... I'm come home," Lockwood, already imitating the others, slashes her wrists on the broken window and replies, as the blood stains his bed, "I'll never let you in."
Lockwood proclaims to the family, "I'm not going to endure the persecutions of your hospitable ancestors," but as soon as one enters a family system of any age one is in the presence of ancestors. "Before passing the threshold" for the first time" Lockwood looked up and "detected the date `1500' and the name `Hareton Earnshaw'." He then confronted the latest incarnation of that name who, when he was learning to read, began by reading his own name carved on the door. This is an example of transgenerational repetition in the same house for centuries almost beyond the imagination of readers in America, which had just been discovered in 1500. At Wuthering Heights names are simply repeated, as if there were little difference between the generations, as if they kept adopting the same roles and following the same script century after century. When we add to name repetition the habit of cousins marrying cousins in a complicated genealogy, we can see why readers of the novel are as confused as Lockwood was when he first entered the family. Readers get to feel exclusion from a closed system as they wonder which Catherine, for example, is being discussed. Because of "the thousand forms of past associations, and ideas" a family member "awakens, or embodies," even the inmates become bewildered: Heathcliff, for example, at times believed that Catherine II was Catherine I and often "Hareton seemed a personification of my youth, not a human being; I felt to him in such a variety of ways, that it would have been impossible to have accosted him rationally."
