...between narrators, Nelly Dean and Lockwood, have been largely overlooked. In this outer constellation of erotic relationships, Bronte positions the woman as teacher--both in intellectual and sexual matters. Knowledge, literacy, and sexual potency become merged in these relationships, made radical and subversive in the gender reversal in which the female becomes the agent of penetration.

In the course of this essay, we will examine the connections between actual literacy and "reading" others through a discussion of Jessica Benjamin's concept of the dialectic of control. Applying her ideas to the relationships in Wuthering Heights, we see how the fate of the relationships depends largely on the man's efforts to attain knowledge, literal knowledge (i.e. increased literacy) which becomes equated with "knowledge," or recognition and respect for his lover. Heathcliff and Catherine's relationship fails because he stops "learning" her. Consequently, she "haunts" the external narrative through her efforts to "teach" or penetrate the ignorant Lockwood--who continuously misreads both situations and texts. However, Nelly Dean, through telling Lockwood the tale behind the living persons at Wuthering Heights, tries to teach him to "read" the texts before him and thus to recognize and identify with female agency. Nelly's efforts to make him literate are quasi-erotic, working as a sort of narrative seduction, a seduction which becomes paralleled by the young Catherine's efforts to bring Hareton from a dim illiterate world into an enlightened one in which he can both "read" texts and pay attention to her. These female teacher seductions of the male pupil which we see in the frame tale, try to make right the textual/sexual ignorance promoted by Heathcliff during his relationship with Catherine in the internal tale. Finally, as Lockwood proves resistant to his "lessons," he is "exiled" from the Heights upon the engagement of Hareton and Catherine. We see, in their promised union, restoration of mutuality between male and female at the Heights--and Bronte's ideal vision for the marital relationship.

Benjamin's Bonds of Love presents us with a clear feminist psychoanalytical representation of power and understanding of the other in relationships. Utilizing the Master-Slave pattern of Hegel and Freud's Oedipal Complex, Benjamin claims that all healthy relationships are maintained by an inherent interplay between the self and the other in which there is both mutual recognition and self assertion. The self, according to Benjamin, must be "aware of its distinctiveness from others" and yet it must be recognized by others. She states: "Recognition is that response from the other which makes meaningful the feelings, intentions, and actions of the self. It allows the self to realize its agency and authorship in a tangible way. But such recognition can only come from an other whom we, in turn, recognize as a person in his own right" (12). Benjamin goes on to claim that, "This struggle to be recognized by an other, and thus confirm our selves, was shown by Hegel to form the core of relationships of domination" (12). Failure to recognize the other denies agency and overthrows the balance of what Benjamin terms the dialectic of control: "If I completely control the other, then the other ceases to exist, and if the other completely controls me, then I cease to exist.... True independence means sustaining the essential tension of these contradictory impulses; that is, both asserting the self and recognizing the other. Domination is the consequence of refusing this condition" (53).

Unhealthy relationships, according to Benjamin's theory, emerge from a breakdown of mutual recognition. When one partner in an erotic relationship refuses to assert self or to recognize the other as a separate being, erotic domination results.

The problem with Catherine and Heathcliff's relationship is that there is no mutual recognition. If, as Benjamin states, "recognition makes meaningful the feelings, intentions, and actions of the self," we see Heathcliff refuse to recognize Catherine as a separate being. She becomes, to him, an extention of self, and rather than allow her to realize her "agency and authority in a tangible...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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