Dickens and Brontë: comparative literary analysis

Dickens & Bronte

Keeping the Spirit of the Past, Present, and Future -- Bronte and Dickens

Both Emily Bronte's Victorian gothic novel Wuthering Heights and Charles Dickens's popular short seasonal story "A Christmas Carol" make use of innovative narrative strategies to suggest the persistence of the past in the present lives of the protagonists. Both novels make use frame tales in their respective structures whereby the majority of the narrative takes place in a kind of 'in between' place of past and present. In Bronte's tale, Lockwood offers an ear by which the reader may access the tale of the protagonist's conjoined and tormented pasts, as witnessed by the stalwart Nelly Dean. In Dickens, Scrooge's complex past as a young man rising to fortune explains his current stinginess, as through the spirit's intervention, the reader experiences his entire lifetime, over the course of a single day.

However, Dickens' tale, in contrast to Bronte's, is essentially individualistic. Scrooge can make good on the harms he has done in the past, and the evils that await the health of Tiny Tim, by resolving to reform his employment policies. By changing the individual, society is changed. But in Bronte, there is no such comfort. Catherine Earnshaw rejects Heathcliff because of his dirty hands, face, and uncertain parentage. Although Heathcliff attempts to redeem his rejection because of his social class and mannerisms by going to America and making good on his fortunes, he cannot exorcise his inner brutishness, no matter how hard he tries to.

Moreover, Catherine cannot either -- although her time in the Linton's household gives her superficial good manners and the appearance of delicacy and breeding, she says to Nelly Dean before she dies giving birth to young Cathy that she wishes she were a free, healthy young girl again, wandering about with Heathcliff. Upon the eve of her marriage to Edgar Linton she said that it would debase her to marry Heathcliff because of his class, but Catherine's own soul cannot be changed by societal or even spiritual influences in Bronte -- Catherine says she hates heaven because it has no Heathcliff.

The only real societal change that transpires in the present in Bronte is by the redemption of the next generation of Cathy and Hareton. However, these two characters are, although symbolically representative of Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw, not quite the same in their personality and substance, either in the ferocious intensity of their passion, or the scope of their reformation. Cathy is, although temporarily lowered to a servant when Lockwood first meets her, was brought up from birth by her father to be a refined young girl, and Hareton is the rightful owner of the estate he inherits, not a true orphan and stable boy like Heathcliff.

The shift in the individual and personal past cannot change society in Bronte -- perhaps because Bronte's tale is a romantic tale, embracing both female and male experience, and this acknowledges the limits of gender, of both partners in a relationship. In contrast, Scrooge's initially rejection of human kindness is solely told in male-directed, economic terms -- by providing a turkey and medical care for Bob Cratchit's family, Scrooge becomes a good man. Scrooge is more powerful, financially, even if he lacks a heart socially, than Catherine or Cathy is, as both are women who are possessed of an estate only through patrilineal inheritance.