Sssh! Let the cruelty begin: Wuthering Heights and the Child Abuse of Yesterday and Today

by Nicolette Westfall

I’ll never forget one of the first times I came over to The Gentleman’s house, where he lived with his parents while going through his doctorate program. He told me I couldn’t use the front door because it would disturb his father, who liked to sleep there after work every evening. I think I forgot and rang the front anyway. Later, he also told me to use the washroom on the main floor; otherwise the creaking of the stairs to the one above would wake his father.

I thought it very odd that a 20 year old male would fear his father that much. Afterwards, as I got to know the family, I experienced drunken family meetings that did not include his father—the rest sat around the kitchen table, cursing him for his tyranny. From what I hear, to this day, The Gentleman gives his father verbal abuse in kind, though it does not and will not ever even the score—he is his father’s son.

Had I even taken the time to think about my own childhood, where my mother and her addiction to benzodiazepine also left the household children in a perpetual state of silenced fear, I might have reversed my steps and left The Gentleman’s house, to never return. However, love is blind and the self, well, we are conditioned to destroy it, not protect it.

There were bits of history about The Gentleman that I blocked out, like the fact that he was a cutter, and that he spent whole days locked in his room, away from the world. What events lead to this state of mind certainly sprang from his father’s cruelty. It was akin to my mother’s, in which she inflicted various cruel tools of continuous physical and mental punishment upon me in order to erase the fact that she’d had me at such an early age. I don’t know his father’s reasoning behind the cruel and cold upbringing.

The Gentleman was no less cruel than his own father. Often, I’d ground the offspring to his room for the most trivial thing, just to keep him safely away from The Gentleman. Though he never hit us, his verbal manipulations were so devastating that he left us with barely any self-worth and this odd feeling of walking on egg shells even when he wasn’t in our presence.

When the man of the house kicks the woman, she kicks the child, who kicks the dog. After the end of the relationship with The Gentleman, I couldn’t keep my mouth shut about what went on behind closed doors. Talking to the girlfriends was not only therapeutic; it got them to open up about the frustrations and stressors they also tried to function with. We found that whenever we’d done something like yell at offspring, the best thing to do was call someone in the support system and confess it. Many women, however, don’t like to admit that they aren’t June Cleaver, and so, they struggle on with guilt and fear their only companions.

These memories started to bloom inside my head when I recently reread Emily Bronté’s Wuthering Heights, a story originally published in 1847 under the pen name Ellis Bell. Within it, the cyclical child abuse seems almost absurd—but for the fact that it goes on in all parts of the world even to this day. Grounding my son to his room to protect him from The Cruel Gentleman is not anything new, if Emily’s Nelly has anything to say about it—she puts Hindley Earnshaw’s son, Hareton, in a cupboard to hide him from drunken Hindley.

Heathcliff, another character violently abused by Hindley when he was young, goes on to torture anybody he can get his hands on. Well, as lord and master over the property (which includes male servants, women, and children), he has the legal right to do whatever he wants to them. Near the end of the story, he sees Hareton and Catherine II together and it reminds him of his long dead love, Catherine I, and himself. All the years of bitter hatred and the blood thirsty need for revenge turn into a self-realization moment of fasting until he dies, which leaves them heirs to his properties (which lawfully belonged to them in the first place). Quite the short, happy little ending –not really any compensation in return for reading an entire novel stuffed with abuses and triggers.

Today, the abuser does not need to die in order to stop or prevent cruelty. There are anti-abuse measures, like laws, which attempt to protect people and children from the devastating actions of traumatic domestic abuses. One of the major obstacles to preventing and eradicating abuse, however, is the silence which promotes and guarantees its cyclical nature. Fear of death, for some women, is enough to keep them silent as well. No easy solution can be reached, for each case is difference, but if we as a society can start to publicly talk about our collective experiences, then we will have taken the first step to acknowledging that child abuse is far more common than we are willing to acknowledge.