of the deliberations in Chapter II. Following this, the previous chronological theories are documented, and their shortcomings delineated. These can be resolved by the new proposal.
Chapter IV presents character-based chronologies. In the form of biographies of the individual characters, chronological details are reconstructed, which are linked to further observations, such as the fact that Mr. Heathcliff’s biographical dates show parallels with those of Lord Byron, which in turn provides insight into his character profile. Chapter V is devoted to the “ghost”, offering an interpretation of this phenomenon which eschews supernatural explanations. Chapter VI offers an overview of the family trees that have been developed so far. As will be shown, unresolved questions in this regard are directly connected with Ellen ←19 | 20→Dean’s narrative intentions. The critical genealogy proposed here takes these into account.
In Chapter VII, the findings from the previous chapters are brought together and consolidated into an interpretation which offers a succinct explanation for the remaining contradictions in the time schemes. This is largely based on an elucidation of Ellen Dean’s hidden intentions, which in turn Mr. Lockwood sees through in the course of his stay and which he goes along with in his writings. It becomes clear that it is possible to connect conclusively more time references than ever before and that an explanation can be found for the few remaining questionable time references, showing them to have been intentionally laid down as red herrings by Ellen Dean and Mr. Lockwood. Chapter VIII summarises the most important questions and answers once more, bringing them together at the end in a series of interpretational hypotheses on the text and answers to the practical questions which have long preoccupied the minds of readers of Wuthering Heights:
– who were Mr. Heathcliff’s parents?
– what does Mr. Heathcliff die of and when?
– what lies behind the ghost at the window of Catherine’s room at Wuthering Heights?
– was Mr. Heathcliff really the father of Linton Heathcliff, and Edgar Linton the father of Cathy?
←20 | 21→
1 Cecil (1958, p. 164).
2 Chitham (1998, p. 6).
3 Miller (1982, p. 50).
4 Cf. Daley (1990), (1995) and (2003).
5 Cf. Chitham (1998, pp. 5, 133, 204, 209).
6 Chitham (1998, pp. 6, 98, 135, 161, 162, 164, 186, 188, 189, 200).
7 Cf. Boyce (2013, p. 100), Clay (1952, pp. 100, 104), Frangipane (2016, p. 29), Power (1972, p. 142), Shunami (1973, p. 464). These two narratologically contentious adjectives are also used hereinafter, although – as M. Jahn (1998, p. 82) has established – their scientific relevance appears to be in inverse proportion to their prevalence.
8 The former is only tenable if by “very technical” one means “too detailed” as measured by the lack of a convincing result; the latter if one starts from the hypothesis that time plays a crucial but unclear role in Wuthering Heights (ibid., p. iii).
9 On 23/12/1903, Henry James (1984, p. 302) wrote to Lady Millicent Fanny St. Clair Erskine, Duchess of Sutherland, about his novel The Ambassadors: “[…] don’t break the thread. The thread is really stretched quite scientifically tight. Keep along with it step by step – and then the full charm will come out. […] I find that the very most difficult thing in the art of the novelist is to give the impression and illusion of the real lapse of time, the quantity of time represented by our poor few phrases and pages […].” Sanger felt this lapse of time when reading Wuthering Heights and used the wording verbatim. It is hardly likely that Sanger would have known James’s letter. Neither will Henry James have concerned himself with the chronology of Wuthering Heights. Indeed, he never mentions the novel or Emily Brontë in his published letters.
10 Relative time references are those which place two (or more) events in a temporal relationship with each other and indicate time spans through expressions like “tomorrow” or “three days later” and through indications of age like “x was 18 years old when…”. Sometimes two past events of the narrated story correlate with one other, but sometimes a reference point is the present time of the story or the narrator, which refers back to an earlier time with the help of a temporal modifier.
II. The Temporal Structure of the Novel
If narratological and chronological errors are to be avoided, a distinction must be systematically made between Ellen Dean’s story and Mr. Lockwood’s report.1 In the novel, Ellen Dean’s “story” is also referred to as a “narrative” and a “tale”, though significantly Mr. Lockwood does not use such terms to describe what he imparts. To a degree, Knoepflmacher (1994, p. 48) already makes this differentiation in his distinction between “Lockwood time” and “Earnshaw time”, by which he means Ellen Dean’s “chronicle”. Yet, he has no specific chronological objective in making this distinction, evidenced by the fact that the numerous, seemingly contradictory time references do not concern him as such. Miyoshi (1969, pp. 217f.) rightly points out that this “narrative duplication” allows “a subtle manipulation of time”. Solomon (1959, p. 81) recognises this potential ten years before Miyoshi when he speaks of the carefully handled “manipulation of time sequence and angle of vision”.
The Report and the Story – Formal and Functional Narrative Aspects
The report and the story are easily distinguished from one another thanks to the stylistic idiosyncrasies of the reporter and the storyteller. What is more, the story is composed exclusively in the past simple, and sections are indicated by breaks in the text. The present tense is only used when Ellen Dean speaks as if to herself at the end of a section, and therefore serves to distinguish between the narrated events of the past and the personal reflections of the narrator in the present, in other words between the narrated story and the “discourse story” (“Erzählgeschichte”, Schmid 2008, p. 280). The present tense signals “now-time” with regard to the telling of the story; it is the narrative present. In relation to the report, on the other hand, Ellen Dean’s narrative present is the past, as shown by Mr. Lockwood’s use of the past simple following every such passage in his report.
A typical passage is found at the end of the first part of the story:
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At first, on hearing this account from Zillah, I determined to leave my situation, take a cottage, and get Catherine to come and live with me: but Mr. Heathcliff would as soon permit that, as he would set up Hareton in an independent house; and I can see no remedy, at present, unless she could marry again: and that scheme it does not come within my province to arrange. (WH, 367)
This is followed by Mr. Lockwood’s remark in the past simple tense, “Thus ended Mrs. Dean’s story”. The distinct differences in style and grammar between the two characters make it unlikely from the start
