This essay of Cunningham offers us a concrete summary of chapter 12 and an insightful glimspe into the symoblical threshold, the candlelight image, and much more in this haunted chapter of Wuthering Heights.
Summary
Following Heathcliff’s visit, Thrushcross Grange sits in tension. Catherine has locked herself in her room for days, while Edgar isolates himself among his books. They are not speaking. Edgar’s little sister Isabella feels humiliated after Catherine cruelly exposed her developing romantic feelings for Heathcliff in the last chapter. Nelly, our narrator, looks after Catherine, who refuses to eat and descends into a frenzied state.
Convinced she is going to die, Catherine can’t understand why Edgar has not come to see her. She seems to have lost her mind: she rips her pillows open and sorts through the feathers inside, calls Nelly a witch, and is frightened by her own reflection in the mirror. She calls the room haunted. Nelly, perplexed, decides not to tell Mr Linton how much Catherine’s condition has only gotten worse.
One night, at her very worst, Catherine senses her approaching death. She drifts into memories of her life before marriage, when she lived at Wuthering Heights, including the night Heathcliff first abandoned her (Chapter 9), now stirred up again by his brief, recent visit to her room. She longs to be outdoors again, and most of all, reunited with Heathcliff.
Edgar interrupts this frenzy and snaps at Nelly for not telling him sooner about Catherine’s illness. Catherine wishes Edgar away and openly declares her ongoing attachment to Heathcliff.
It then emerges— first through rumours, then through the discovery of her empty room— that Isabella has run off with Heathcliff that same night. There are reports of them spotted on horseback on their way out of town. Edgar, overwhelmed first by his wife and now by his sister, accepts that Isabella’s flight was her own decision.
An Analysis of Thresholds
A threshold is defined as the boundary between where one area stops and another begins. This novel is concerned with the thresholds that separate civilisation and wilderness, reflected in the divide between the two estates. This chapter explores what it means for Catherine to linger by the window, hanging over the threshold. Nearing the end of her life, she stands here and cries out to Wuthering Heights, across time and space.
The Window
At first, Nelly refuses to allow any such threshold to be crossed, and seeks to keep Catherine indoors:
[Catherine] tore the pillow with her teeth; then raising herself up all burning, desired that I would open the window. We were in the middle of winter, the wind blew strong from the north-east, and I objected.
Though, it is Nelly, not Catherine, who finally opens the window, to allow Catherine some fresh, cold air. Nelly facilitates Catherine’s partial transgression of the threshold between the inside and the outside. Catherine leans out the window. Though Nelly notes that 'everything lay beneath in misty darkness’, Catherine claims to see her old room and then the candle which Joseph, their servant, has apparently left on ('those at Wuthering Heights were never visible... still she [Catherine] asserted she caught their shining’). It is unclear whether Catherine really can see, is dreaming of a time long gone, or has gone completely mad. The candle she sees in her old room, and then the candle belonging to Joseph, the servant at Wuthering Heights, symbolise that her life, like a weak, flickering flame barely noticeable in the darkness, is also about to go out.
Speaking Across the Threshold
That she insists on finding and seeing that candle in the darkness symbolises her desire to find residual hope, even amid her mental crisis. Her sentences, like the fading candlelight, vanish into ellipsis, before getting energetic and powerful again (‘I won’t rest till you are with me… I never will!’). The dips and then bursts of energy represent her final effort at liberation from Edgar, and reunion with Heathcliff. This contrast between the candlelight and actual darkness is a classic gothic device; except here, one half of the contrast is entirely imagined by Catherine. Her memory-laden, inner world, projected onto the heath, is one neither Nelly nor the reader can see.
It is her voice— long sections of fragmented, question-filled speech— that reaches beyond the room. Though it is Nelly listening, Catherine directs her body and voice outwards and away from the house, as if Heathcliff can hear her. He is the intended listener ('I will not rest till you are with me’). By projecting her words over the boundary, Catherine finds mental escape.
Beyond the Physical
There is danger in reaching over this boundary. Nelly warns she will die of a chill. The weak Catherine is 'careless of the frosty air that cut about her shoulders as keen as a knife.' There is a subtle violence in the imagery of a sharp 'knife' on her exposed 'shoulders.' The alliterative c sound, 'careless,' 'cut,' and 'keen,' makes this danger audible. But what if this danger is more than a physical one? The barrier between the safe interior and unpredictable exterior represents the boundary from sanity to insanity; though Catherine might find escape, she is straying further and further from what was then acceptable behaviour for a married, genteel woman.
In this scene, Catherine reaches towards the spiritual, the invisible. 'What you touch at present, you may have; but my soul will be on that hill-top before you lay hands on me again.' Catherine speaks of her soul as separate from, and liberated from, her body. Though her husband Edgar might have physical possession of her, with his 'hands' literally on her, trying to calm her down, Catherine speaks of the escape of an abstract, metaphysical part of herself: her 'soul.' In this way, Catherine can imagine herself in the natural, rugged landscape despite her physical limitations.
Broken Boundaries
Heathcliff continuously steps onto the Grange without permission. His crossing over the threshold does not ask for permission, as Catherine does. He and Isabella were seen ‘walking in the plantation at the back’ of the Grange. This is a house in which the perimeters are permeable, allowing Catherine to lean over them and Isabella to flee away to the Heights. Edgar’s passivity at the end of this chapter, barely reacting to Isabella’s escape, suggests all authority has broken down at the Grange. The distinct boundaries of the Grange are not respected, as Heathcliff trespasses the property, Isabella leaves without announcement and Catherine leans carelessly over the edge.
Throughout the novel, look out for the crossing of thresholds in:
Chapter 6 - Catherine and Heathcliff spy through the Grange’s window, as children.
Chapter 10 - Heathcliff crosses over the threshold of the Grange as an invited visitor
Chapter 11 - Now, Heathcliff tricks his way inside, in a desperate attempt to see Catherine one last time.
Chapter 22 - Cathy loses her hat over the Grange’s boundary wall.
Chapter 29 - Heathcliff enters the Grange to fetch Cathy, commanding her, as her father-in-law, to return with him to Wuthering Heights.
Glossary
- Metaphysical: beyond, or surpassing, the limits of the physical world. (The prefix meta- means ‘above’ or ‘beyond’)
- Intended Listener: the person that the speaker designs and creates their message for.
If you have any thoughts or analyses of your own on this chapter, I'd love to hear them! More chapter guides on Wuthering Heights are available on request, get in touch for lessons or further literature help: faithcunningham@outlook.com
