Religion in ‘Wuthering Heights’ & ‘The Color Purple’
March 30, 2012
Orthodoxy in ‘Wuthering Heights’
Wuthering Heights takes orthodox Victorian Christian religion and turns it on its head. The narrative is delivered to us by Lockwood, who gets his narrative from Nelly Dean. Nelly is an orthodox Christian and gives us a biased viewpoint, calling Heathcliff a ‘devil’ and associating him with the demonic. With his black hair and unbridled wrath, violence, greed and lust, Heathcliff is an embodiment of everything Victorians feared. His passion was completely unacceptable.
Heathcliff lures Catherine from being an acceptable Victorian girl to being brutally passionate as well. Catherine’s big choice in the novel whether to marry Heathcliff or Edgar reflects society’s pressure. She chooses Edgar despite the fact that her sense of identity is bound up in Heathcliff. That’s why she suffers so much when she marries Edgar.
One issue in the novel is discerning the author’s voice. Bronte’s voice is not the voice of Lockwood, who in many ways is a farcical character who doesn’t understand at all the relationships of Wuthering Heights he has stumbled upon. Nelly Dean’s voice doesn’t seem to be one that Bronte wants us to trust; there are several incidents where Nelly lies, or at least conceals the truth of Catherine’s real situation from Edgar. Nelly tells us that Catherine dies and rests in peace, but her words are contradicted by the reports of Catherine and Heathcliff being seen walking upon the moors, and by the appearance of Catherine’s ghost to Lockwood in Chapter 3 in a very Gothic situation. The events of the novel suggest that Catherine waits for Heathcliff to die so that they can walk on the moors together in their version of heaven.
Catherine explicitly rejects the Christian notion of heaven: ‘If I were in heaven I would be extremely miserable’. She tells Nelly of her dream of heaven, where she was miserable, and the angels were angry with her and flung her back to Wuthering Heights, where she sobbed for joy. Bronte confirms Catherine’s rejection of heaven by showing how Catherine and Heathcliff find their identity in the natural environment, and that is where they find their rest after they have died.
Orthodoxy in ‘The Color Purple’
In the Color Purple we see a similar rejection of orthodox Christianity. Celie’s letters to God show her ignorance of who God is. Her conception of God as she later reveals to Shug is that he is a white man. For a black woman in 1930s America, that isn’t a particularly positive image. When Celie starts writing letters to Nettie instead, this shows her rejection of God. Through Shug’s teaching, Celie realises that her lack of faith is linked to her lack of appreciation of the natural world. In failing to forgive others, she is harming herself. The idea of reconciliation is crucial because ‘meanness kills’.
Celie’s suffering is what makes her question God’s existence and the violence she suffers at the hands of her stepfather parallels the violence of Wuthering Heights. Isabella is subject to Heathcliff’s violence and anger and frustration that he couldn’t marry Catherine. She asks ‘is he a man? …is he a devil?’ She embodies the typical Victorian response to Heathcliff’s violent behaviour. His strength as a character is disturbing because he becomes the hero of the novel, even though he is the villain as well. Isabella represents the conventional Victorian heroine, but she is very peripheral in the novel and Catherine is the heroine despite her unconventional behaviour.
Fall and Redemption – structure in ‘Wuthering Heights’ & ‘The Color Purple’
Many of the charactesr in Wuthering Heights are obviously ‘fallen’ and much has been said to link them to Adam and Eve and ‘outcasts’. From the beginning of the Color Purple, Celie is ‘fallen’ because she has been raped by her stepfather. She has lost her innocence, yet she retains a naivety. Readers feel sorry for her and identify with her in her suffering. We don’t condemn her for her response to what has happened to her. The turning point of the novel when she lives with Shug and starts to become independent, making pants, is when we begin to admire her. There is redemption for her and she is rewarded at the end, once she has become independent, by her sister and children returning from Africa.
In Wuthering Heights, we might compare this with Catherine, going from innocence to experience. After she has married Edgar, Catherine quickly descends into madness when Heathcliff returns and she realises she cannot have them both. She calls herself an exile, and asks ‘Why am I so changed?’ In marriage she has been plunged into the world of female domesticity and sexuality which is completely unfamiliar. Catherine wants to be pre-pubescent, free from Victorian constraints of morality and social status. She wants to be free and wild with Heathcliff, running on the moors, and by going back to being a child she can enjoy that without any sexual pressure even from Heathcliff himself. The demands that Heathcliff makes upon her are demands she cannot meet.
As a man, Heathcliff had freedom to leave Wuthering Heights and make a fortune. Catherine didn’t have any other options, and that’s why she has to die. She can be linked with Eve because she makes the wrong choices, chasing the wrong things (Heathcliff instead of Edgar).
Pantheism
Catherine wants to escape into the ‘glorious world’ of nature. Many see Pantheism and transcendentalism in Bronte’s ideas, and Walker also holds these values. The colour purple is the colour of violence (Sofia’s bruise is compared to an ‘eggplant’), but is also part of Celie’s religious revelation when Shug teaches her to appreciate the colour purple in nature. She tells Celie that ‘God is inside you and inside everybody else… But only them that search for it inside find it.’ It annoys God when people ‘walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it’.
Setting: heaven and hell in Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange
It is useful to look at the use of setting in Wuthering Heights. Wuthering Heights is the embodiment of hell, right from Lockwood’s first visit there: the violence of the dogs, the sense of misery there all build up a picture of Wuthering Heights as ademonic place. ‘The herd of possessed swine’ could have had no worse spirit than that of Heathcliff’s dogs! His anti social malevolence dominates the landscape.
Thrushcross Grange is a desirable paradise of wealth described in luxurious terms ‘a splendid place carpeted with crimson’ and a ‘pure white’ ceiling. When Catherine and Heathcliff are outside looking in through a window they compare it to ‘heaven’. They both desire the luxury, elegance and social security of Thrushcross Grange, and this is what drives Cathy to marry Edgar and what drives Heathcliff to go away to make his fortune.
Wuthering Heights is a place of suffering for all the generations in the novel. Hindley rules with violence and later Heathcliff makes it a place of misery for Hareton, Linton and young Cathy as well. At the end of the novel there is the suggestion that in Cathy and Hareton’s marriage will break the cycle of misery and redeem Wuthering Heights as a place of happiness now. Lockwood says they would ‘brave Satan and all his legions’. They have fought off the demonic in Heathcliff and won victory with his death. But the novel doesn’t end with the happy image of Cathy and Hareton, it ends with Lockwood’s idyllic interpretation of Wuthering Heights’ ‘quiet earth’. Given the resonating image of Catherine and Heathcliff’s spirits walking on the moor, it seems that the earth is anything but quiet! It is full of passion and the love of Catherine and Heathcliff. The world of the novel is one of storms and violence, not benignity as Lockwood suggests.
The Color Purple centres around Celie’s home which is unhappy, and when she leaves to go to Shug’s luxurious home, this is point where she really finds herself and becomes happy. Catherine, however, discovers that Wuthering Heights was her heaven, but she only discovers this once she has left it to marry Edgar. She always wants her window open because she wants that connection with the natural environment, which she always had at Wuthering Heights. By contrast, Celie’s journey is one of finding connection with nature even when she is enduring difficult situations.
In The Color Purple, the characters have to go through suffering to find redemption and fulfilment. Nettie has to go to Africa and endure the hardship of missionary work before she can return home. As the colonizers build roads and destroy the village, Nettie watches the natural environment turn into a place of suffering as iron replaces the roofleaf (which the villagers worshipped as their god). The Edenic paradise has been destroyed, along with their missionary hopes. Nettie has to learn to shelve her religious orthodoxy and find God in nature before she can return home and be reunited with her sister, who has learnt the same lesson.