An Analysis on Identity and Love in Bronte's Wuthering Heights

Victoria Colozzi

INTD 105 Explicative Essay #2

Dr. Caroline Beltz-Hosek

October 25, 2012

I Am Other:

An Analysis on Identity and Love

What is identity and how does one recognize it? According to an online dictionary, identity is "the sense of self providing sameness and continuity in personality over time . . . " (Dictionary.com). In the case of the female sex in 19th and 20th centuries, how could one develop this personal "sameness" if one wasn't even considered fully human? In Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex she argues that women are considered the other: an incomplete entity of which man creates to support himself (Beauvoir 713). According to Beauvoir, for every subject in life there must be an object to define it as subject. Man, therefore, has created woman as object to define himself as subject, and because woman's role for man is that of an object she must give up a part of her humanity to complete that role as other (Beauvoir 715). Therefore, Beauvoir suggests that a woman who accepts her role as other doesn't own her identity; she does not identify through her own self but through her subject, man (Beauvoir 715). But is other something a woman chooses to become, or is it something that naturally evolves as a woman falls in love? Emily Brontë's fictitious lovers, Catherine and Heathcliff, in her novel Wuthering Heights challenge that idea of what is one's identity while in love. Brontë's ideal love is one in which today's society would deem unhealthy: one in which each party chooses to lose their own identity and instead identify themselves through their relationship.

Brontë's characters Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff are as tumultuous as the blustery Yorkshire moors they reside in. Both are powerful, selfish individuals whose untamed emotions literally consume them, and their relationship. Their dependence for one another is one that had been cultivated as children; nothing could separate Catherine and Heathcliff because they chose early on they could not identify themselves as individuals without the other; "' . . . he is more myself than I am.'" Catherine exclaims, "'Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same'" (Brontë 80). By identifying through their relationship, Catherine doesn't develop a sameness in her identity through her own self but rather only sees herself tied with Heathcliff. How can Heathcliff be more Catherine than Catherine herself? Because she only sees herself through Heathcliff and can only survive when he's present; she lives through Heathcliff. This is extensively seen when Heathcliff disappears after Catherine choose to marry Edgar Linton, " . . . [she] would not be persuaded into tranquility. She kept wandering to and fro, from the gate to the door, in a state of agitation that permitted no repose . . . She beat . . . any child in a good passionate fit of crying" (Brontë 84). It was as if the sky fell and Catherine was no longer a fully functioning human without Heathcliff due to the fact that she associates her own being through him. This type of identification where a woman gives up part of her own identity and instead chooses to identify herself through her man is the transition into Beauvoir's other. In Catherine's mind, nothing is a great as Heathcliff for he is the subject of her life and she the object of his.

Hopeless romantics see this transition into becoming the other as a means of celebration; Catherine and Heathcliff's love is everlasting and true and nothing, not even death, could come between them. But how is an individual to function without knowing how to function on one's own? If a woman is so dependent on her man for everything, even her own identity, how is she to become her own being? A healthy relationship is one in which two individuals with separate identities coexist and support each other, one in which each party is subject and the other doesn't exist. Conversely, Catherine and Heathcliff's relationship was so unhealthy that it literally made Catherine sick! On her deathbed she cries out, "'You . . . have broken my heart, Heathcliff . . . I shall not pity you, not I. You have killed me . . .'" (Brontë 157), but in retaliation Heathcliff argues that it was not he that killed Catherine, but Catherine herself; "'I love my murderer - but yours! How can I?'" (Brontë 160). Catherine cannot survive without Heathcliff just like a leech cannot survive without a host. Then again, that is what Beauvoir's other is, a type of parasite that can't exist without its host. If these two could coexist and flourish as individuals creating their own personalities while supporting each other, Catherine would not have been an other but instead an equal.

Though Beauvoir's argument for the other only argues that women are the objects of men, but in the case