‘I Hate Everybody!’: The Unnatural Consumptive in Wuthering Heights (1847)

Abstract

In a novel of 1847, one might expect piety and sentimentality---the moral lessons of suffering and sympathy---to dominate, but the narrative structure of Wuthering Heights ensures that the sentiments being expressed always belong to a wide array of narrating characters with varying emotional responses to the consumptive, ranging from pity to revulsion to outright abuse, without privileging any one. I still remember the physical tug of horror I felt, probably 20 years ago, when I first read Heathcliff's response to young Catherine begging for help to nurse a dying consumptive: `None here care what becomes of him; if you do, act the nurse; if you do not, lock him up and leave him!' (II. XVI, p. 259) I had never imagined a Victorian novel in which an invalid might be locked up to die alone---in which the sacred sickbed scene could be violated so callously (I had not yet read Jude the Obscure).