Facets of Time Consciousness in Wuthering Heights

Abstract

One topic that deserves critical attention is the treatment of time consciousness in Wuthering Heights. Time consciousness is manifest, for example, in references suggesting the interplay between the conscious and the unconscious mind, as it is in the contradictions shown to exist between the formal meaning of some temporal adverbs and the anomalous interpretations to which they are subjected in certain emotional utterances. Time consciousness also plays an important part in characterization, most notably in the presentation of Nelly Dean and Heathcliff. Certainly it is through their respective attitudes to time, especially clock time, that they, no less than some of the other characters, tell us a good deal about themselves. It is noteworthy, too, that among a quite extraordinary number of references to time in the novel we may come across some occurring in negative contexts often enough to induce us to surmise that time itself is for Emily Brontë something of a metaphysical problem.Critical discussions on time in Wuthering Heights in the past several decades have centred chiefly on its structural or symbolic function in the art of narrative. 1 Comparatively little, on the other hand, appears to have been written by scholars concerned with this novel on the relationship between time and human psychology, or what might be designated simply as time consciousness. But if time consciousness is a universal human phenomenon, being part and parcel of our experience of the world through our awareness of time present, past and future, it may also be a signpost to one's character, one's mode of life, one's personal circumstances and so on. This notion is illustrated in Wuthering Heights in ways striking enough to warrant special critical attention. Emily Brontë also shows how complex, even complicated, is our relationship with time, principally owing to the limits and limitations of the human mind as manifest most palpably through our emotional, not to say careless, use of language. Noteworthy, too, is how, occurring as they do now and again in various negative contexts, a good many time references in the narrative seem to suggest that time itself is for the author something of a metaphysical problem.