Weird, very morbid bit in chap xxix

[kev67]

This bit from chapter xxix is a bit weird:

"I'll tell you what I did yesterday! I got the sexton, who was digging Linton's grave, to remove the earth off her coffin-lid, and I opened it. I thought, once, I would have stayed there; when I saw her face again - it is hers yet! - he had hard work to stir me; but he said it would change if the air blew on it, and so I struck one side of the coffin loose, and covered it up - not Linton's side, damn him! I wish he'd been soldered in lead. And I bribed the sexton to pull it away when I'm laid there, and slide mine out too; I'll have it made so; and then, by the time Linton gets to us he'll not know which is which!"

This is quite a complicated passage. What's Heathcliff doing?

• The gravedigger was burying Edgar Linton next to his dead wife, Catherine.
• He gets the gravedigger to uncover Catherine's coffin.
• He opens her coffin
• He discovers Catherine's face has not decomposed
• He loosens one side of Catherine's coffin, the other side to where Edgar is being laid.
• He bribes the gravedigger so that when Heathcliff dies he will bury Heathcliff the other side of Catherine and then remove the two facing sides of their coffins so that in effect they share the same coffin.

I am not sure what Heathcliff means when he says, "...by the time Linton gets to us he'll not know which is which!" I assume he means Edgar Linton, not Linton Heathcliff. Edgar Linton is dead though, so presumably he means he won't know which is which at the resurrection. But that does not make much sense, since at the resurrection it would be pretty obvious which is Heathcliff and which is Catherine. Maybe it was a strange joke.

I can see why Wuthering Heights is described as gothic.

[mona amon]

Necrophilia?

"...by the time Linton gets to us he'll not know which is which!"

I think what he means is by the time Edgar Linton turns to dust and the coffins also disintegrate, he (Heathcliff) would have died, turned to dust, and mingled with Catherine's dust. That's why he bribes the sexton to knock off the side of Catherine's coffin which will be next to his own (sideless) coffin.

[Jackson Richardson]

Parson's daughter and regular churchgoer though Emily was, I don't think the Christian doctrine of the resurrection counted here, and certainly not for Heathcliff. Mona is right - Heathcliff wants his remains to mingle with Catherine's before her husband's do.

I must say kev's enthusiasm for the book is almost tempting me to give it another go. "Seriously weird" and "necrophilia" are the two words that would spring to mind. As someone who has read Monk Lewis and Mrs Radcliff recently, "gothic" isn't quite the word. The setting of WH is totally domestic and unexotic * but the weirdness makes novels normally called gothic look conventional and cliche ridden.

* Edit - well not exactly with the wind sweeping over the moors. But it is more domestic than the conventional gothic novel.

[cacian]

Yuck what is going on.
That really is disturbing.
I could easily claim that language at this point does not deserve such spooky plots. It is anarchists to deplore language to fall to this.
Language is purer then that.

[Jackson Richardson]

The most famous C19 examples of sexual consummation in death (which is surely what we are talking about here) is Wagner's opera Tristan und Isolde (1865) where the lovers are only united at the end in their death - the closing music is often played as a concert piece as the Liebestod, ie Love/death.

Wagner had a whole load of highly sophisticated ideas from the philosopher Schopenhauer, which wouldn't have been in Emily's mind, writing in 1845. But as a romantic idea there are close similarities.

[cacian]

It is interesting how in As I Lay Dying there is a similarity of morbidity and coffins.
Here I quote:

''Addie, who, after dying, expresses her thoughts from the coffin.''
and
''Darl, who has been skeptical of their mission for some time, burns down the Gillespie barn with the intention of incinerating the coffin and Addie’s rotting corpse. Jewel rescues the animals in the barn, then risks his life to drag out Addie’s coffin. Darl lies on his mother’s coffin and cries.''

There seem to be a similarity of theme coffin based. Rather gruesome.