Timelines in Emily Brontës «Wuthering Heights». Michael Weber
is the first year of the narration. In fact, the two ages can be discredited, and a plausible explanation can be found for the deception, based on Ellen Dean’s intention to use chronological ambiguity to conceal certain correlations in the story. Nevertheless, or precisely because of this, Ellen Dean herself provides the opportunity for her misleading statements regarding these ages to be recognised as such. She does this by referring to discrepancies regarding the wedding month of Catherine and Edgar Linton and the birth months of Cathy and Hareton.
The first refutable assertion:
Ellen Dean states at the end of the first section of her story that Hareton Earnshaw is “nearly five years old” when she leaves him to move to Thrushcross Grange with the newly married Catherine (WH, 108). Since Hareton is born in June ←49 | 50→1778, according to the hypothesis to be tested, the move would have taken place before June, sometime in the spring of 1783. Immediately before this relativised age, Ellen Dean also states that the wedding of Catherine Earnshaw and Edgar Linton takes place three years after the death of Edgar Linton’s father:
Edgar Linton […] believed himself the happiest man alive on the day he led her to Gimmerton chapel, three years subsequent to his father’s death. (WH, 108)
The usability of Hareton’s age is thus compromised by two interlinked additional details: what does “nearly” mean and when exactly did Edgar Linton’s father die? Why does Ellen Dean not simply say that three years after the death of Edgar Linton’s father in the November after Heathcliff’s disappearance, Hareton was such and such an age? This lack of clarity must give pause for thought in view of the unambiguousness of the other two temporal references already discussed.
Mr. Lockwood and readers have to assume up to this point in the story that Ellen Dean’s move to Thrushcross Grange takes place one November or December because before she begins her story, one November or December, Ellen Dean tells Mr. Lockwood that she has lived at Thrushcross Grange “eighteen years”.14 It will be concluded from this that Edgar Linton’s father also dies in November or December. The fact that Ellen Dean then also temporally links Hareton’s birthday with the wedding of Catherine and Edgar Linton one spring raises questions. This new temporal association of the month of death in winter with the month of birth inevitably plunges the reader into chronological confusion.15 So, when in fact do the move and the wedding take place? As will shortly ←50 | 51→be made clear, the wedding takes place in spring, and from this it can only be concluded that something is incorrect regarding Hareton’s age.
In the attempt to resolve the chronological confusion, it becomes apparent that the date of the wedding and the move up until the account of the move itself is based on only two imprecise (because they are approximate or are to be understood as approximate) time references by Ellen Dean. Ellen Dean states only a very long time after the move and only in a veiled way that the wedding took place in March. In Chapter 21, when Ellen Dean describes how Mr. Heathcliff catches Cathy plundering “moor-game” nests on the anniversary of her mother’s death in 1799, she states that it was the “twentieth of March” (WH, 262). This date matches Ellen Dean’s statements in Chapters 15, 16 and 17 regarding the weather in the days before Catherine’s death. She mentions that at that time the branches on the trees already had buds, the blackbirds were beginning to build their nests and the primroses and crocuses were in bloom (WH, 193, 205, 209). Since Catherine, in view of the one-year span, dies exactly one year after her wedding, March is clearly the wedding month. Only with this knowledge can the relevance and validity of the two imprecise time references be analysed.
The first imprecise time reference is the “eighteen years” which Ellen Dean specifies rather generally as the duration of her time at Thrushcross Grange, without providing further details regarding the month. She makes this statement in November just before beginning her story, which could suggest to readers that the wedding takes place in November. Since the wedding actually takes place in spring, Ellen Dean should have said “eighteen years and seven months” or at least “for eighteen years”. From the beginning of the story until the time of the move, readers have absolutely no reason to think about or even question the implications of Ellen Dean’s time reference. It is only with the mention of the date 20 March that readers are reliably informed that the “eighteen years” reflects the number of years that Ellen Dean spends with Catherine and Cathy at Thrushcross Grange and that it does not mark the exact month of the wedding and the move, and thus not the month of Mr. Linton Snr’s death. For the following line of argument, it is important to keep in mind that November has ←51 | 52→not been proved to be the month of his death and that, due to the course of the disease, October is the most likely month in which he dies.
The second imprecise time reference is the “subsequent” used by Ellen Dean to date the death of Mr. Linton Snr, which readers understand as “after” and thereby conclude that Catherine marries in November 1783. However, the question is whether this interpretation is correct or whether the “three years subsequent to his father’s death” could be read in the sense of “in the course of the third year after…”. With regard to November and the March following the November, the “subsequent” would then mean two years and four months: November 1779 plus four months = March 1780, March 1780 plus two years = March 1782. There would then be coherence as to month and year, the contradiction with the theory that the wedding takes place in 1782 would be resolved and the hypothesis that 1783 is the wedding year would be refuted. Of course, these calculations apply not only to November, but also to October. Taking October as the month of Mr. Linton Snr’s death, “subsequent” means five months. In Chapter 17, much later, Ellen Dean uses the word “subsequent” again, this time in connection with the birth of Linton Heathcliff, which is “a few months subsequent to [Isabella’s] escape” (WH, 226). At this point, Mr. Lockwood and readers cannot yet know that Isabella flees Wuthering Heights on 25 April 1783 and that Linton Heathcliff is born in September 1783. In this case, “subsequent” stands for “five months after”. If this is applied to the “subsequent” regarding Catherine’s wedding, it follows – provided that Ellen Dean uses “subsequent” both times instead of the number five – that Edgar Linton’s father dies in October.
The time references “eighteen years” and “three years subsequent” are not in themselves incorrect, but they are misleading in their vagueness. The “temporal vagueness” of the two time spans is seven months each: the “eighteen years” are seven months too few, the “three years” seven months too many. The month “November” is undeniably correct, as month specifications in the text always are – but only as the month in which Ellen Dean begins her story, not as the month of Mr. Linton Snr’s death and not as the month of Catherine Earnshaw’s wedding.
The statement under discussion is itself imprecise, too. What does the “nearly” in “Hareton was nearly five years old” mean? According to standard language usage and sense of time, “nearly five years old” means less than five years and significantly more than just four years. Mathematically, “nearly” means less than half of the year in between, i.e. less than six months before the fifth year. Looking in the text of Wuthering Heights for other time references which are preceded by the word “nearly”, the phrase that stands out is “nearly twenty-three years ago”, which is mentioned in relation to the time span between the birth of Hareton ←52 | 53→Earnshaw and the beginning of Ellen Dean’s narration (WH, 75). In the phrase “nearly twenty-three years ago”, “nearly” means seven months less than twenty-three years. The chronological equation is: June 1778 to June 1800 = 22 years, June 1800 to November 1800 = 5 months. “[N];early” = 23 years less 22 years + 5 months = 7 months. Ellen Dean therefore uses “subsequent” synonymously for five months and “nearly” synonymously for seven months. Thus, she divides the span of a year into two sections of different lengths. She calls the first section of five months calculated additively from the beginning of the year “subsequent” and the second section of seven months subtracted from the end of the year “nearly”. She therefore contravenes common language usage and the readers’ sense of time with disastrous consequences for their understanding of the chronology. Assuming that the “nearly” in the phrase “nearly five years old” means seven months less than five years (instead of the usual “fewer than six months less than five years”), then Hareton’s age is four years and