Wuthering Heights Dreams
The Dreams in Wuthering Heights
[This discussion is a slightly altered section from John P. Farrell, “Reading the Text of Community in
Wuthering Heights,” ELH 56 (1989), 173-208. The essay argues that Brontë’s novel deals with the complex layering in human identity of a private self, a social self (largely a construction of the social system), and an intersubjective self whose actions locate an alternative social realm that the nineteenth-century theorized as
“community.” The essay thus borrows the familiar terms of Ferdinand Tönnies who distinguished the alienating and programmatic social sphere of Gesellschaft from the sense of interdependence upon which the communal (the
Gemeinschaft) depends. The co-existence of these selves is explained in the essay as an instance Mikhail
Bakhtin’s dialogism. In Brontë’s novel, the dialogic enactment of identity so conceived is instanced in the figure of the reader. The essay contends that the reader reads (1) as an indecipherable private self, (2) an alienated social self, and (3) an intersubjective communal self simultaneously. In the passage printed here, the dreams—and their crucial aftermath, the “script in the snow”—are interpreted as a preliminary sorting out of the distinctions among these three figures of identity.]
Lockwood dreams at the site of textual stimulus and production. Taken by chance to the inner sanctum of the novel, he immediately finds himself dealing with books, diaries, carved writing, and fearful dreams that come to him from his idle reading. His very first experience, his reading of the carved initials, confers on the whole scene a provocative correspondence between the interior of the paneled bed and the interior of a text. The initials Lockwood reads return to him, in his semiconscious state, as a "glare of white letters" that stare from the dark "as vivid as spectres." Frank Kermode has shown that the sequence of letters encodes the novel's double plot structure so that Lockwood
[This discussion is a slightly altered section from John P. Farrell, “Reading the Text of Community in
Wuthering Heights,” ELH 56 (1989), 173-208. The essay argues that Brontë’s novel deals with the complex layering in human identity of a private self, a social self (largely a construction of the social system), and an intersubjective self whose actions locate an alternative social realm that the nineteenth-century theorized as
“community.” The essay thus borrows the familiar terms of Ferdinand Tönnies who distinguished the alienating and programmatic social sphere of Gesellschaft from the sense of interdependence upon which the communal (the
Gemeinschaft) depends. The co-existence of these selves is explained in the essay as an instance Mikhail
Bakhtin’s dialogism. In Brontë’s novel, the dialogic enactment of identity so conceived is instanced in the figure of the reader. The essay contends that the reader reads (1) as an indecipherable private self, (2) an alienated social self, and (3) an intersubjective communal self simultaneously. In the passage printed here, the dreams—and their crucial aftermath, the “script in the snow”—are interpreted as a preliminary sorting out of the distinctions among these three figures of identity.]
Lockwood dreams at the site of textual stimulus and production. Taken by chance to the inner sanctum of the novel, he immediately finds himself dealing with books, diaries, carved writing, and fearful dreams that come to him from his idle reading. His very first experience, his reading of the carved initials, confers on the whole scene a provocative correspondence between the interior of the paneled bed and the interior of a text. The initials Lockwood reads return to him, in his semiconscious state, as a "glare of white letters" that stare from the dark "as vivid as spectres." Frank Kermode has shown that the sequence of letters encodes the novel's double plot structure so that Lockwood