Mystical Feminine – Snottor's Phlox

February : A Jungian Look at Heathcliff and Gender (part two)

(missed the first part of this conversation? find it HERE)

Perhaps Heathcliff, as I said, is not really a man at all. In general, men don’t sympathize with him—women do. Sometimes the sympathy comes from romantic feeling, or because we identify with him, but there is a connection.

What I now think is that Cathy’s love for Edgar is perhaps Emily Brontë’s statement on all romantic love; it will change, it will have seasons, etc. Cathy and Edgar are two very different, highly imperfect people. Although they loved each other (and, as Nelly thought, were actually on their way to happiness before Heathcliff came back and stepped into their marriage), they didn’t have that wild, transcendental attachment of Heathcliff and Cathy that leave so many fans swooning.

But perhaps Heathcliff and Cathy’s love is not romantic at all. Perhaps it is, instead, the deeper relationship that Brontë seems to value above that of marriage—the relationship between a woman and her inner man (or vice versa).

When looked at in this way, Cathy’s speech makes complete sense. Let’s look at part of this passage again:

“My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it, I’m well aware, as winter changes the trees.” Although rather unromantic, this could be Brontë’s overall statement on romantic love. Seeing as she never married and seemed content in herself, it’s not that surprising that she might see it in a more removed and secondary way. And it is pretty realistic—long-term relationships do change like the seasons. “My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary.” Just as one’s relationship with one’s self would be. “Nelly, I am Heathcliff!” Heathcliff is her Animus! He is a part of her. “He’s always, always in my mind:” because he’s a part of her. “not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being. So don’t talk of our separation again: it is impracticable;” it is impracticable, because he is contained within her.

Now this is just one interpretation of many, I am well aware, and it is one I personally did not buy a few months ago. But keep it in the back of your mind! Think about it! It’s pretty interesting.

Part of Jung’s theory is that if a person is not in touch with their Anima/Animus, or if they are letting problems with this other part of themselves fester, that this part of a person becomes destructive and sabotages their relationships, that it holds them back from their full potential in all areas of life. Heathcliff certainly becomes a destructive force.

Now this is a concept I find pretty complex and do not yet completely understand. So let me just talk about this in the simpler terms I am currently more comfortable with—as the masculine and the feminine.

I think every person has a mix of both genders within them; some people’s are suppressed, or they’re afraid of or not in touch with one part of themselves. Emily Brontë (as far as we know; there isn’t as much information on her as many would like) did not have any romantic relationships; she hated teaching, and was most happy alone on the moors. Talk about someone who would be very comfortable with themselves—both sides of themselves.

Heathcliff is intense emotion, and intense pain. He is left without the one source of love he enjoyed, Cathy, and is not able to change or break free from his painful feelings and can do nothing but destruct.

At the end, as we know, Heathcliff does change. He tells Nelly he feels some kind of change on the horizon; he feels he has nearly attained his heaven, that of being united to Cathy, and at the end, when their gravestones are alongside Edgar’s, peace can be restored.

All in all, Wuthering Heights has recently been making me think about one’s relationship to one’s self. Perhaps, the idea that, by acknowledging and coming up against the uglier sides within you, you can achieve a greater synthesis of your entirety. How about you guys?

February : A Jungian Look at Heathcliff and Gender (part one)

For previous discussion of Heathcliff, and background on Wuthering Heights, click HERE and HERE.

I must confess that I did not at all expect to return to Heathcliff (at least so soon)! But Emily’s character is indelible, I fear. I must have read Wuthering Heights in October and here I am, still wrapped up in processing and thinking about it. It puts most other books to shame by contrast.

So, last time we looked at Heathcliff we were taking him on his literal terms. We were taking the story on its literal terms as well—Heathcliff was Heathcliff, Cathy was Cathy, every character a separate entity and complete human being living in an ordinary (if Gothic and amazing) world.

Back when I was reading Wuthering Heights, I was also indulging in some Jung. In the chapters on the Anima and Animus (every man’s inner feminine, and every woman’s inner masculine), there was a stormy black-and-white picture of Heathcliff and the moors from some older adaptation, with a caption below stating that some people think that Heathcliff, so shocking to so many readers, was in fact a representation of Emily Brontë’s Animus subconsciously coming forth.

When I first read that it sounded ridiculous to me. Mind you, I was still mid-read of Wuthering Heights, taking everything at face-value, taking everything in, reacting to the first impressions of the characters. My sympathy for Heathcliff has taken awhile to develop; when I read the book I empathized with Isabella and the spaniel Heathcliff tried to hang; he became gradually unforgivable to me and I boxed him out of any sympathies just as one would to an abuser/antagonist in real life.

But, as you all know, I have gradually come to feel much more understanding for Heathcliff; although many of his actions remain equally unforgivable, I have gone from viewing his character as a separate entity, to someone I deeply identify with and learn from.

Many are quite troubled by Cathy’s conflicting feelings for Edgar and Heathcliff. It can be hard to understand how Cathy could be so shallow—anyone who at all believes in true love is horrified by her throwing a way a love for Heathcliff so deep just so she could have the flashy Edgar and be the finest woman in the neighborhood.

Here is Cathy’s famous speech, as she tries to decide whether to go through with Edgar’s proposal (which she has already accepted):

“I cannot express it; but surely you and everybody have a notion that there is or should be an existence of yours beyond you. What were the use of my creation, if I were entirely contained here? My great miseries in this world have been Heathcliff’s miseries, and I watched and felt each from the beginning: my great thought in living is himself. If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger: I should not seem a part of it.—My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it, I’m well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff! He’s always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being. So don’t talk of our separation again: it is impracticable;” (Cathy speaking to Nelly, from chapter 9 of Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë).

While Cathy’s comparisons of her love for Heathcliff and that for Edgar are often construed as describing two types of romantic love (I have read of it before being defined as Transcendental versus Empirical love), I can’t help but wonder if Emily Brontë is making a broader statement entirely.

What if Heathcliff is not really a man at all? Now I’m not saying he’s a woman, what I’m saying is this: in general, men tend not to like Wuthering Heights. I know there are lots of men out there who appreciate the book, but in general I (and others) have noticed that men are more likely to dislike the book, and women are more likely to have an affinity to it. Now one could boil this down to the simple fact that many women-fans are in love with Heathcliff. But really? Are we going to leave it at that?

January : Waterhouse’s Boreas (part two)

But remember how I called him radical? Find the first part of this post HERE.

Ovid, Waterhouse’s most likely source material, tells. He tells who Orithyia’s related to, what her sons do; he tells of Boreas’ anger, he tells of Boreas’ actions—it is all telling, it is all what happens to her. Victorians did a lot of telling themselves; deciding the proper sphere of women, telling them the ideal they ought to live up to.

Waterhouse, however, does no telling at all. He eschews the plot that Ovid, and most other treaters of this tale, focus on. The story is cast aside for the moment Waterhouse depicts.

The girl is aligned with the nature around her. The colors of her clothes echo those around her, she like the nature around her is buffeted by the wind. The deep, soulful colors and textures connect her to her environment; the viewer’s eyes are drawn to her face, framed by her arm, by the billow of her mantle. Her face, her expression, and the daffodil in her ear.

In such a dark, deep color palette, the yellow is surprising. Daffodils are spring, a season far removed from the setting of the painting. Spring is rebirth, and change, and generally, in the language of flowers, that is just what the daffodil symbolizes.

The Metamorphoses is all about rebirth. Characters meet life anew in changed forms, with their life situations changed drastically—and often tragically—along with it. As Peter Trippi puts it, in his book J. W. Waterhouse:

“it was Ovid’s Metamorphoses to which he [Waterhouse] returned in every phase of his career, celebrating physical transformations as emblems of the passage from suffering to acceptance, from death to eternal life”.

The point?

In his portrayal of this girl, Waterhouse accepts the unknown. He does not tell us what is happening to her, how she relates to other aspects of the story. He does not tell anything about her, as his time could be so wont to do. Instead, Waterhouse accepts the silence of the moment, focusing in on the girl’s mysterious expression, an expression showing deepness, deep as the colors she wears, as the circles throughout the painting. The daffodil he places behind her ear suggests her own possibilities for transformation, for metamorphosis, subtly transcending the views of his society and time to create a gorgeous exploration of the mystical feminine.

What do you think about all this? Are you a hardcore Waterhouse fan, hater, or new initiate? Comment below!

January : Waterhouse’s Boreas (part one)

“it was Ovid’s Metamorphoses to which he [Waterhouse] returned in every phase of his career, celebrating physical transformations as emblems of the passage from suffering to acceptance, from death to eternal life” (Peter Trippi, from his book J. W. Waterhouse)

John William Waterhouse is perhaps best known for his paintings of women, particularly in Classical and Medieval settings, retelling classic tales. He often retold stories from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the Ancient Roman Epic about magical physical changes. Ovid’s stories tend to focus on the chaos in the transformations, the fragility of life and the status quo of anyone’s experience, and the randomness of suffering.

One of the hundreds of short tales winding throughout the Metamorphoses is that of “Boreas and Orithyia”. Ovid’s telling of this tale, most likely Waterhouse’s source material, corresponds to the purpose: it is a short transition piece to tie the previous story to the next section, in order to retain his goal of all the smaller stories in his work being connected. Ovid tells the thread matter-of-factly; Boreas, the North Wind, desires to marry the mortal Orithyia, but her father, having a grudge against Northerners (which is how it connects to the previous story, in which a Northerner harms Orithyia’s father’s family), forbids it. Boreas resorts to his customary violence and carries Orithyia off; he forces her to become his wife, and their children (who have wings—the Boreads) join Jason and the Argonauts, tying into the next part of the saga.

Orithyia is never focused on for herself. It is a highly technical story.

But now’s where we get to the actual painting: Waterhouse retells the story, painting a girl being buffeted by the wind. It is not strictly identifiable with the original tale at all, and the only reason we know what Waterhouse is retelling is by the title, Boreas.

It is a completely different composition than Ovid’s, and certainly different from many of the other artistic retellings of the story, all of which depict the moment of abduction. No, Waterhouse’s take is so different as to be unrecognizable from the original plot—not only a different take, I would say, but a radical one.

John William Waterhouse is not usually someone tagged with that appellation, “radical”. To many he is a stuffy old Victorian Gentleman, who, beginning with his own lifetime, often found himself out of fashion and certainly is today. Recently, his painting Hylas and the Nymphs was temporarily taken down to invite museum-goers to participate in a discussion on the portrayal of women’s bodies in art, a good illustration of the negative way some people perceive his portrayals of women—as erotic objects to be looked at.

*Hylas and the Nymphs*, by J. W. Waterhouse

At first glance, Waterhouse’s painting seems completely in-step with his time. Women in the Victorian Era had limited rights and were idealized, especially idealized for being the center of the home and sexually pure. Women were expected to be modest, and were not encouraged to act in the outside world.

The girl in Waterhouse’s painting is similarly modestly clad; she is beautiful and feminine, she is highly idealized. It is easy to look at this—and many of Waterhouse’s paintings—and write them off as highly aesthetic erotic portraits of the female body unrealistic to the full experience of being a woman. It is easy to look at him and his work and feel no connection between the idealized, Victorian females he portrays and the real woman you might be or know.

But remember how I called him radical?

(tune in next time for the second part of this post!)