Timelines in Emily Brontës «Wuthering Heights». Michael Weber
Ellen Dean know in November what year Mr. Lockwood would write down the following January? There is no indication whatsoever that Mr. Lockwood lets Ellen Dean know of his intention to write a diary. Without explicitly mentioning the year, because of course for her it goes without saying, Ellen Dean’s comments pertain to the year in which Mr. Lockwood appears at Thrushcross Grange when she is required to take care of him. At the time of the narration, the two periods she mentions have no year of reference at all and therefore cannot be used to determine the year of the wedding and the move. The time spans on the timeline can be arbitrarily moved forwards or backwards; they have no value for the reader as far as the chronology of Ellen Dean’s story is concerned. This realisation is the third crucial step on the way to achieving the aim of this analysis – that of resolving the chronological muddle.
When it comes to chronologically analysing Ellen Dean’s references to time, Mr. Lockwood has an advantage over readers: he knows, of course, in which year Ellen Dean is telling him her story. Because it is year-independent, the only chronologically relevant information for readers is the time of year “winter”, which indicates that Ellen Dean begins her story in November or December.
Clay interprets Ellen Dean’s time span as “for eighteen years” when he writes: “[Ellen Dean] states that she had come to Thrushcross Grange eighteen years earlier” (1952, p. 101) – as do many other authors before and after him. In the text, however, there is neither an “earlier” nor a “for”. Neither does Mr. Lockwood ask whether Ellen Dean has lived at Thrushcross Grange “for 16 years”, as Chitham (1998, p. 164) assumes, quoting Mr. Lockwood inaccurately. In fact, Mr. Lockwood only says, “did you not say sixteen years?” Mr. Lockwood and readers are not yet able to recognise that Ellen Dean’s laconic “eighteen” (without the assumed “earlier”) does not specify a time span exact to the month, but only refers to the year of the move.
In this light, the time scheme of Ellen Dean’s story must be examined to see how consistent it is as a self-contained system, that is, it must be checked to see whether its year dates are coherent and in particular whether the year 1778 holds true both as Hareton Earnshaw’s birth year and as the reference year for the two time periods mentioned by Ellen Dean before she begins her story. Without using data from outside the self-contained system, which is a methodological must, it can be proved from the following difficult to detect time references that the dates are coherent and that, contrary to first appearances, Ellen Dean has lived at Thrushcross Grange since 1782, not since 1783.
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Time references based on textual content (internal evidence)
Starting from the premise that 1778 is the year of Hareton Earnshaw’s birth, the major episode described above must have taken place in either 1779 or 1780. The course of events, that is the internal evidence, rules out a time before 1779 and after 1780. The three-year absence of Heathcliff specified by Ellen Dean establishes that three years elapse between the major episode and Catherine Earnshaw’s wedding and her move with Ellen Dean to Thrushcross Grange. Four years pass until Catherine’s death because the time between her wedding and her death amounts to one year (from one March to the next), as shown by the following details: Catherine is described as having “seasons of gloom and silence, now and then” after her marriage. Edgar Linton attributes the moods to her “perilous illness” (WH, 112) (after the major episode) and has a “deep-rooted fear of ruffling her humour” (WH, 111). He ensures that consideration is given to Catherine, and “for the space of half a year, the gunpowder lay as harmless as sand, because no fire came near to explode it” (WH, 112). This comes to an end on a “mellow evening in September”. Things are therefore relatively calm in the first six months of the marriage between March and September. If Sanger thinks he can conclude from this that Catherine is “happily married”, he is mistaken and reveals some rather peculiar ideas about marriage. There follow another six months until Catherine’s death, from September until the following March, as will be calculated in the biographies of Catherine Earnshaw and Mr. Heathcliff (Chap. IV). The twelve months between Catherine’s wedding and death make up the one-year time span that is so important for the chronology.
In order to calculate the year of the wedding, the year of the major episode must be determined. The fact that the major episode takes place in 1779, not in 1780, is shown as follows: if the major episode had taken place in the summer of 1780, there would be two years between Hareton Earnshaw’s birth in 1778 and the major episode, but this is too long. The text makes it clear that the time span could only have been one year, the period in which the young Edgar Linton undertakes his rare visits to the Heights before his engagement to Catherine during the major episode (WH, 80). There is no evidence in the text for an additional year. The chronological sequence is rigorous: the birth of Hareton in 1778, the major episode in 1779, the absence of Heathcliff and the engagement of Catherine for the period up until 1782, the death of Catherine and the birth of Cathy in 1783. A further year would be superfluous. These fictional facts thus make it clear that the major episode takes place a little more than a year after Hareton Earnshaw’s birth in June 1778, namely in the summer of 1779. ←44 | 45→Sanger and Daley, who argue that the wedding takes place in 1783, overlook this crucial point.
The fact that the major episode takes place in 1779 is also reinforced by two aspects of Hareton Earnshaw’s developmental physiology.
At the time of the episode, Hareton is an infant sitting on the ground at Ellen Dean’s feet during the dramatic events. He can follow her around, which means that he can crawl and walk, and he can say the words “wicked aunt Cathy” (WH, 85f.).10 Ellen Dean calls him “[l];ittle Hareton” and tries to hide him from his drunken father in the kitchen cupboard. He is a “little wretch” and her “little lamb” (WH, 88, 90, 92). When his father carries him upstairs and holds him over the banister, he screams and tries to squirm away. This all fits with the theory that he is only about fifteen months old at the time. If the major episode had taken place in the summer of 1780, Hareton – as a child over the age of two – would have behaved differently. He would have been psycho-motorically more advanced and it would not have been possible to hide him from his father in a kitchen cupboard, even if he had already learned to fear his father’s emotional outbursts and to behave quietly (cf. Baumann 2007, p. 366).
Time references based on numerical data (external evidence)
Two unambiguous time references in the story confirm the fact that 1779 is indeed the year of the major episode and thus 1782 the year of the move.
First time reference:
Regarding Hareton Earnshaw’s date of birth, June 1778, Ellen Dean says in the first section of the first part of her story:
[…] and instead of leaping three years, I will be content to pass to the next summer – the summer of 1778, that is nearly twenty-three years ago. (WH, 75)
This date proves that she tells her story in the year 1800, because “nearly twenty-three” stands for twenty-two plus X, which means June 1778 plus twenty-two is June 1800 plus X. X then corresponds to five months, less than half a year (from June to November). “Nearly” accordingly means seven months less. If 1801 were the correct year of reference, it would read “more than twenty-three years ago” or “nearly twenty-four”. Thus, 1782 is the year of the wedding and the move, not 1783.
Clay (1952, p. 101) blames the discrepancy between the “nearly twenty-three years ago” and his hypothesis that 1801 is the year of the writing of the report on ←45 | 46→an inaccuracy by Ellen Dean, which he calls “a slight slip”. He turns the “nearly” into “rather more than”, leaving aside the fact that he should have continued the sentence with “twenty-three years”, or that he should have written “nearly twenty-four years ago” in the manner of Ellen Dean.11
Before Clay, Sanger (1926, p. 11) discusses this important time reference. In contrast to Clay, he does not reinterpret it, but he does make a miscalculation in its interpretation: he adds the twenty-three to the 1778 according to the arithmetic of the decimal system and thus