Timelines in Emily Brontës «Wuthering Heights». Michael Weber
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:
←21 | 22→
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 that the narrator of the events has been invented by the reporter.
Speech marks are not used to mark Ellen Dean’s story, even though the indicative is used throughout. Furthermore, speech marks are not used when Ellen Dean addresses Mr. Lockwood in the course of her monologue – which is repeatedly the case – nor are they used for Mr. Lockwood’s insertions, such as “she said”. However, they are used in dialogue between Mr. Lockwood and Ellen Dean to mark direct speech, and for the conversations between Ellen Dean and other characters in her story. Only occasionally are speech marks used for the soliloquised reflections of Mr. Lockwood in his report or for those of Ellen Dean in her story.
Ellen Dean’s story is accordingly embedded in Mr. Lockwood’s report and presents the events preceding those which Mr. Lockwood witnesses during his stays and which he then records in his report.
On three occasions either a dotted, starred or continuous crossline occurs in the novel, both to separate the notes written by Catherine in 1775 from Mr. Lockwood’s report (WH, 24f.) and to distinguish between the report and Ellen Dean’s story (WH, 41). Only the first starred line appears in the Norton Critical Edition (2003, p. 18), while the Clarendon Edition has only the first two starred lines (p. 27). These typographical differences have no chronological meaning, however.
In contrast to Ellen Dean’s story, Mr. Lockwood’s report is composed using the present, past and perfect tenses, with the occasional inclusion of the future. Consequently, the construction of the report is much more complicated than that of the story in terms of the tenses used. Like Ellen Dean when she comes to the end of a section of her story, Mr. Lockwood lapses into the present tense when speaking to Ellen Dean, as if to himself, or to readers at the end of a passage of his report. In addition, he uses the present tense five times when commenting or describing: at the beginning of Chapters 1, 10 and 15, at the end of the first section of Chapter 4 before the crossline and at the end of Chapter 30. This is of great importance for the dating of events. The Lockwood-present of his reported experiences must not under any circumstances be equated with the real present, ←22 | 23→that is the reporting-present, unless correlated with other dates, and nor therefore may it be used for the reconstruction of the chronology.
It is not easy to determine when Mr. Lockwood visits Wuthering Heights and chronicles those visits or when Ellen Dean tells him her story. Mr. Lockwood visits Wuthering Heights four times in total, twice in quick succession in the winter of one year and twice six months