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[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 has, in effect, already read the tale Nelly
will tell him.27 It is as though Lockwood has passed like a microbe into the brain of the text and is shown,
in eerie disguise, the primitive formation of signifiers that will "plot" the passions and actions of Nelly's
story. The enigmatic quality of the story is also suggested by Lockwood's hallucination. The staring white
letters, aligned across a black page of psychic space, produce a maximum of narrative gaps and missing
pieces. And yet it is also the case that Lockwood's presence in the "penetralium" hints at the text's desire to
captivate its reader. In a novel that concentrates on the building and breaking of barriers, what we see in the
ensuing dreams of Lockwood is the naked action of the text's massed energies breaking across the
hopelessly anomic and emotionally pallid being of the intruder. The dreams signal the flickering trace of
responsive life that even Mr. Lockwood harbors within him and, in doing so, the dreams become
equipment for reading.
The key to the dreams is their instigating source in a commercially printed text whose margins are
overwritten by a secret manuscript diary. Lockwood's hallucination has led him to knock his candle over
and singe one of "the antique volumes" that rests on the ledge. As he examines "the injured tome" and the
other pious books, he discovers Catherine Earnshaw's personal memoir. The dominant symbol in the
paneled bed episode thus becomes the doubled text that juxtaposes a discourse in print with a discourse in
manuscript: the printed text is culturally based and rhetorically directed to a public, socially coded world;
the manuscript text is based in the secrecy of selfhood and is directed only to the undisclosable identity of
its own author. Lockwood's two dreams plumb the nature of each kind of discourse and the problem of
reading that each kind inherently possesses. His instinct with the printed book is to attach himself to the
forward thrust of the discourse; his instinct with the diary is to backtrack from the handwriting to its
originating subject. With both texts situated for him within the same margins, his "eye wander[s] from
manuscript to print" (64). As this happens, the dreams descend, each engaging him at a substrate of
consciousness and each making profound the instinctive and casual orientations he had adopted in his
waking state. In the process, the dreams penetrate Lockwood and turn his reading into a performative action
in spite of all his ordinary preferences for reading as a dilatory habit.
The first dream ushers Lockwood to a local house of worship that, we have already learned, is
down on its institutional luck because of the congregation's parsimony. But this condition is exactly re-
versed in the dream, for it is the profligacy of discourse by Jabes Branderham rather than the parsimony of
the audience that wrecks the chapel's public function. The Croesian profusion of utterance that Jabes invests
in his sermon on forgiveness makes discourse intolerable; all solicitude for the audience is missing. Jabes
founds his text on the authority of another text (Matt. 18:22). Textual authority then becomes for him a
gateway to discursive license at both the thematic and performative levels of his sermon. The charity of the
Word is thematized as a hounding moral quantum, while the quantitative limits of discourse are shattered
by a moralistic tyrant. Throughout the sermon we follow not Jabes' utterance but its punishing effect on
Lockwood.