Is Cathy undead?

[Anselm]

I'm a newbie to this forum, but a real lover of classic literature - especially the divine Jane Austen, the Shakespeare of the novel.

However, I've just been carefully reading Wuthering Heights, and I can't make out the issue of Cathy's non-decaying corpse. Apologies if this has been addressed before, but if it has, my search skills aren't good enough to pick it up.

If I read Chapter 29 (Vol. II ch.15, for those with the "proper" numbering) correctly, immediately after Edgar's funeral Heathcliff takes the lid off Cathy's coffin and discovers that she has not decomposed at all. Three things surprise me about this:

1. The fact that for 18 years she's been in the earth in Yorkshire, not in the Sahara, Siberia, the Swiss Alps or the Peruvian Andes, where you might expect corpses to be preserved, at least by mummification, instead of putrefying.
2. The fact that none of the participants actually seems surprised by this. Heathcliff simply states that that's how he found her, the sexton says "it would change if the air blew on it" and Nellie merely reproves him for disturbing the dead.
3. The fact that I can't find anything in the literature about this.

Shouldn't someone have gone: "OMG, that corpse is still fresh"? And if it is something extraordinary, shouldn't there be some comment about it in the literature on this novel?

Assuming I haven't missed something blindingly obvious (and I wouldn't be surprised, but for the moment...), the only explanation I can think of is that Emily wanted to portray the continued presence of Cathy's spirit on earth as having implications for her physical form: it cannot decay until her spirit unites with Heathcliff's (remember "I am Heathcliff" in Vol.1 ch.9?)

If this is so, Emily would have got the idea from what was by 1845 a common feature of the literary vampire: she made Cathy undead. Polidori's The Vampyre, one of the works chiefly responsible for generating the literary vampire, appeared in 1819, and Rymer's penny dreadful Varney the Vampire: or The Feast of Blood was being serialised at exactly the same time that Emily was writing her novel. The presumably common vampiric trait of staking to pin the body until the onset of decay appears in the latter work. Was Emily referring to this trait (but no other, obviously) when she wrote this chapter?

[JCamilo]

Vampires are representend as decaying corpses too (Varney, even Dracula), but yes, Emily is writting with the Gothic Influence (Vampire was not a major undead, but ghosts or even faeries - like Heathcliffs is compared) so she represents the trait of "ghost like" presence, but this is rather psychological than supernatural.

[FrenchCheese]

I believe that Heathcliff was crazy and sees her as she was the day she died. The sexton wished not to disagree with him.

[kiki1982]

I agree about all the Gothic stuff. I don't think you need to read a lot into it. Heathcliffe was probably fantasising (to me) or maybe it was a reminiscent of Hamlet's chat with that skull (can't remember the name).

But as to the fact that it is extraordinary. Things like that do occur. Inexplicably. Normally, you put a body inside a coffin into the ground, the body decays and then the coffin. After twenty years the coffin would probably be still intact more or less, depending on the type of wood (a pine box of course lasts shorter than an oak one), but the body not (hence the Romans still in their stone caskets, but not in full shape).

However, for example my great grandmother was put in the moist ground of Flanders. They dug her up to move her and my grandfather was present to indentify the body. Also twenty years after her burial. Everyone got ready to see a skull. Perfect, as the day she died. Shows you that inexplicable things like that do occur. Bodies of Celts have been found in Denmark, in water, preserved. Because no air has touched them. No air = is no bacteria/bugs = no decay.

But I think there can be a better explanation. Back in those days, they used to enbalm the dead (as they do now, modestly). I am pretty sure that was with arsenic. Arsenic preserves. To the point that Napoleon also was perfect when they looked in on him several decades after his burial. That way they could determine he had been poisoned with arsenic, as he was never enbalmed.
Maybe Catherine, as the wife of a rich land owner, was enbalmed with arsenic? Or she got it as a medication for madness? Or otherwise just plain lucky.

Although I agree, it is probably a paranormal feature.

[prendrelemick]

I always thought it was how Heathcliff saw her too. Although the narrator described a different Cathy visiting him in the night.

However everyone has made good points here - about the Gothic influence and about the soul and body still lingering on earth - being bound to Heathcliff. I'm not sure about the Vampires though.

Here's a bit of local knowledge, the soil around Haworth is peaty, extremely acidic and often water-logged, so I wouldn't be suprised if Emily had seen remarkably preserved corpses when graves were reopened for the interrment of kin.

[Anselm]

Thanks for these really interesting replies. I hadn't realised that it was perfectly possible for corpses in waterlogged or wet ground to be preserved as well as ones in dry conditions, and I'd forgotten about the Danish bog man.

I'm not sure I agree that Heathcliff hallucinates or imagines things in Ch.29. His conversation with Nellie recounting what he did the previous day is perfectly calm, lucid and down-to-earth - quite unlike, for example, his reaction to Lockwood's encounter with Cathy's ghost in Ch.3 or some of his expressions in the last two chapters, as he draws closer to his ultimate goal of union with Cathy. There is not the slightest question in his mind about what he has seen in Ch.29.

I can just imagine the sexton agreeing with him out of nervousness or even fear of his demeanour. I can't, however, imagine Nellie not querying it to any degree, even as she retells it to Lockwood weeks later, but simply taking it for granted. (Even Lockwood doesn't express any surprise.) The explanations in this thread about how such preservation could happen quite naturally strike me as fitting best with the text, even if they do render anything to do with the Gothic convention of the undead as superfluous. What we're left with, then, is a purely physical and natural counterpart to the supernatural union of Heathcliff and Cathy.

It also renders superfluous a parallel that had occurred to me between this incident and Rochester's call to Jane in Jane Eyre. If I remember correctly, Charlotte insisted that this call was nothing less than physically real - there was nothing supernatural, mystical or "imagined" about it. A questionmark obviously remains about this. However, if Cathy's corpse was quite naturally preserved, and if such preservations were, if not common, then at least not unknown, there remains nothing to explain about an "extraordinary" event that was, after all, perfectly normal if not actually ordinary.

What do others think? Is the connection with Gothic convention too important to let go? None of this necessarily negates a possible origin for this episode in the Gothic literature regarding the undead - such references could easily have given Emily the idea for the incident.

[JCamilo]

It is gothic- you do not need to put apart some of your conjectures, like for example, the influence of Byron on her work Like him, Emily is quite morbid and in all narrative she suggests the feeling of supernatural surrounding Heathcliff, which is part of the book, even the weather seems to relate to his state of mind.

Also, she would be less interessed in why a corpse is preserved, rather that Heathcliff egoistical passion is able to weaken and kill Cathy and also keep her (the famous, do not let her rest and go), represented by a fresher corpse, by the second generation emulating him and cathy, etc. Nellie is hardly someone with power to censor him, specially due the fact, all of t hem are stuck in Heathcliff web in a way or another.

It is not a supernatural novel, but neither a very realistic one. She is closer to Melville than to Flaubert and cia.

[kiki1982]

I agree that Emily would not be bothered about the body. We know certain stuff now (bog men, Ötzis, knowledge about certain substances), but back then it was just a(n) (remarkable) occurrence.

However, on the note of Rochester's cry and Heathcliffe's communication with Cathy... I once did some investigation into Jane Eyre and Platonic philosophy. Jane Eyre could be read as a journey (hence the label Bildungsroman) in terms of emotional development and finding the ideal balance between body (earth), passion (fire), mind (air) and emotion (water). Rochester and Jane are looking for this at the same time (as we all do for our whole lives) and meet each other on the way, only Rochester has strayed off the road and gone towards the passion-side of things too much and too long. The end, where Rochester calls Jane, she calls back and they hear each other, could be seen as the time they both reach that ideal balance or aether. They meet each other at that level.
On a more Romantic and straightforward level (and maybe closer to Charlotte's own religious ideas), you could argue that Rochester went seriously off the straight-and-narrow and is at total odds with himself as well as God (great importance in Brontë's life). He cannot find a purpose, cannot find peace of mind. Jane has that peace of mind, has a purpose or at least is confident God will guide her so she will find it. Hence, she leaves at the point where she sees that the only thing that will happen if she stays after the thwarted wedding is getting off the straight and narrow and stray away from that purpose, blinded by passion only. She is not going to do that, because that will make her unhappy.
At the point where Rochester finds that peace, that he has recognised where his problem lies, he can accept Jane unselfishly, even selflessly and she hears him. Before, he searches for her high and low, but she is concealed from him.

Emily, to say something about Wuthering Heights now , believed in a Rousseau-esk God, omnipresent, more like the Hindu Brahma, only a Christian God. She regarded the largest part of her congregation as a bit hypocritical (I guess a bit similar to Robert in her novel: reads the bible, but doesn't seem to learn from it, unlike Nellie who labours on Heathcliffe; never shies away from advising him, talking to him, and does not shun him). Heathcliffe is a mix between Rochester (the man who went off the straight and narrow because he takes revenge too far; he has been likened to the Count of Monte Cristo) and a deeply mischievous/demonic faerie. At the end, he gets a revelation and decides to become better than he was, hence why Cathy can reach him. Before, she taps at the window, but cannot get in. A window is often a symbol for the mind. Heathcliffe wants her to haunt him, but he cannot let her in. At the point where he reads the bible (I think he does, doesn't he?) and he sees Catherine and his son's love which makes them strong enough to rebel, he sees the errors of his ways. He reaches that level where Cathy roams and thus can join her, unselfish.
The reason why he decided to take revenge was because Cathy said that marrying Heathcliffe would be degrading herself. That is a social truth. He decided that it meant that 'loving me is degrading herself', which is not what she meant. His love was selfish. He wanted to possess her, but coud not let her go. That sounds really really soggy, but you would not want to condemn your wife to a life of deprivation if you truly loved her.

[kelby_lake]

I think it's mainly just there for effect rather than Emily exploring the concept of the undead.