The Dual Nature of Will in Wuthering Heights

Introduction

Wuthering Heights is a novel largely concerned with property. Its plot turns on testament, debt, and marriage, legal mechanisms through which estates pass between parties and across generations. Sanger’s reconstruction established Brontë’s legal structures as internally consistent and aligned with the period, and thus the property plot can be explored at a purely legal register. Yet the legal alone does not constitute the events of the novel. Each turn, marriage, inheritance, coercion lies on the surface of energy that legal form cannot contain.

“Will” typically takes on two meanings: the legal will, the testament, a statement on property disposal after death; the psychological will, volition, is the inner force by which one moves toward their aims. The novel brings both wills to the forefront and, sometimes, stages them in conflict. Heathcliff’s scheming deploys the legal will in service of his psychological will. Catherine’s “I am Heathcliff” declares a dual identity uncaptured by her marriage (that legal arrangement) she will soon enter with Edgar.

We claim that the legal will fails fundamentally to contain the psychological will, and that the Gothic is the formal mode through which the surplus psychological force can be referenced in the work. We use a Schopenhauerian framework to describe the psychological, metaphysical will, and attempt to apply it across a number of clearly legal and Gothic events of the novel.

The argument proceeds in five sections. §1 establishes the psychological will via Schopenhauer’s distinguished Wille and Willkür, the will-to-life as thing in itself and the ordinary individual motive, respectively. §2 establishes the legal will in accordance with Sanger’s analysis and Watkins’s potential failure mode. §3 frames our thesis with existing scholarship; we lie closest to Aristodemou and Ward in placing passion above the law, and call on Punter in the dual definition of will. §4 analyzes three key moments in the text: Linton’s coerced will, Heathcliff’s unwritten will, and the novel’s closing. We finish in §5 naming the Gothic precisely as the formal register which takes on what the legal cannot in aid of representation.

§1 The psychological will

The novel’s account of psychological will aligns with that of Schopenhauer, despite his The World as Will and Representation lacking an English translation before 1883. Brontë cannot have read it; our analysis is thus an anachronistic claim of conceptual convergence rather than direct influence.

Schopenhauer distinguishes two registers of will. Willkür is the ordinary will: volition, “intention towards initiating a chosen action” (“Will, N. (1)”). This is defined in contrast to the Wille, the metaphysical will driving reality, which “has absolutely no ground” and “lies outside of time and space, outside the principium individuationis, i.e. the possibility of multiplicity” (Schopenhauer 138). Brontë’s characters operate primarily at the Wille register. They possess an unalterable striving, in conflict with one another and themselves, not unlike that force of nature.

Further, the body and the will are identified as intrinsically linked, a single item in two modes:

Every true act of his will is immediately and inevitably a movement of his body as well: he cannot truly will an act without simultaneously perceiving it as a motion of the body. An act of the will and an act of the body are not two different states cognized objectively, linked together in a causal chain, they do not stand in a relation of cause and effect; they are one and the same thing, only given in two entirely different ways: in one case immediately and in the other case to the understanding in intuition. (Schopenhauer 124-125)

On this frame, conflict in the novel is the will itself playing out in the only way it can. The will appears both represented and embodied in each figure. Catherine’s confession to Nelly on the evening of her engagement to Edgar plays at this connection:

Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same, and Linton’s is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire. . . . 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. (Brontë 63-64)

Plainly, the speech is sentimental metaphor; Catherine’s feelings for Heathcliff are so strong that she identifies him as a part of herself. Read through the Wille, it recognizes the underlying fact that the will revealing itself in Heathcliff is the same revealing itself in her. They appear separate only from the principium individuationis, a property of cognition rather than of material reality. Schopenhauer’s claim that the will “reveals itself just as fully and completely in a single oak tree as in millions” is the metaphysical form of Catherine’s (153). She moves from a vocabulary of love to one of identity. In her contrast with Linton, she describes an empirical character difference, the result of individuation. While under a Schopenhauerian lens, each of the three share the Wille, what Catherine’s words distinguish is her sight of Heathcliff’s sameness. She recognizes, over and across individuation, their base connection in a way that she cannot with any other.

The same body-will identity is manifested in Heathcliff before his death:

I have to remind myself to breathe—almost to remind my heart to beat! And it is like bending back a stiff spring; it is by compulsion that I do the slightest act not prompted by one thought, and by compulsion, that I notice anything alive, or dead, which is not associated with one universal idea. I have a single wish, and my whole being and faculties are yearning to attain it. (Brontë 248)

The will, narrowed to one object and physiologically emergent, casts every other function as obstructive. Heathcliff is possessed, in that sense, by his fundamental wanting. Catherine’s early claim of soul-identity is embodied here by Heathcliff.

John Reed maps the Victorian Will, but explicitly excludes Brontë: “In discussing the literature of the Victorian period, I have tried to be representative, in the process eliminating some interesting and worthwhile figures like Charles Reade and Emily Brontë” (x). This omission, and his recognition of the value of reading the will into Brontë, leaves a gap to be filled.

§2 The legal will

Charles Percy Sanger argued in 1926 that Wuthering Heights operates within a coherent legal structure, that of the setting’s period, not of its writing. “The Inheritance Act of 1834, the Wills Act of 1837, and . . . the Game Act of 1831, had changed the law” in the time between the events of the novel and Bronte’s authorship (Sanger 14). Within that frame, property transfer in the novel aligns with real- and personal-property doctrine. Earnshaw dies presumably intestate, and the Heights are handed down to Hindley. Heathcliff later acquires the Earnshaw property as mortgagee given Hindley’s debt (Sanger 15). After Edgar’s and Linton’s deaths, he takes the Grange, “though wrongfully,” since “Isabella was never in possession” (Sanger 17-18). “What is remarkable about Wuthering Heights,” Sanger writes, “is that the ten or twelve legal references are, I think, sufficient to enable us to ascertain the various legal processes by which Heathcliff obtained the property” (15). The novel rewards close legal reading.

Note this structural feature of the testament (the term here used to denote the legal will, one’s “formal declaration as to the disposal of his or her property . . . after his or her death,” in separation from the psychological will [“Will, N. (1)”]): it is a document that operates in the absence of its author. This implies that the will-state it expresses is no longer present upon its administration. Dawn Watkins points to the result: “the authenticity of the testator’s voice must be sacrificed for the sake of institutional certainty” (63). The Wills Act of 1837 formalized such stringent requirements: writing, signature, two simultaneous witnesses. Minor formal mistakes can invalidate intent. Once executed, the testament is read strictly textually; outside evidence is generally inadmissible. Watkins concludes that even where “a will is considered valid and is not defeated by excessive formalism, a formalist approach to the interpretation of the will can nevertheless produce an outcome that is plainly contrary to the testator’s intentions” (77). This failure to preserve the psychological will or intent in testament is endemic to the instrument.

Hume notes that property transfer carries a symbolic gloss. Where physical delivery is impossible, “the giving of stone and earth represents the delivery of a mannor. This is a kind of superstitious practice in civil laws, and in the laws of nature, resembling the Roman Catholic superstitions in religion . . . lawyers and moralists have run into like inventions” (Hume 331). The testament, too, falls under this symbolic umbrella: its word represents the invisible intent of an absent party, satisfying a demand for present meaning and action. The document fails to represent the will, as it were, a fleeting rather than tractable thing.

This limitation is raised throughout the novel: Edgar, dying, sends for his attorney to alter his will to prevent Heathcliff’s claim; Heathcliff intercepts and Edgar dies before the alteration can be executed. Heathcliff then coerces the dying Linton, a minor whose capacity to make a will in personalty was permitted by pre-Wills Act doctrine, to leave everything to him. Finally, before his own death, after years of legal scheming, Heathcliff “thinks of making a will but does not do so” (Sanger 18). The first testament is thwarted by interception, the second is made but coerced, and the third is refused. Each reveals a point at which the law fails to capture the psychological will it is meant to channel.

§3 The scholarly conversation

The closest existing reading is Maria Aristodemou’s taken up by Ian Ward in Law and the Brontës: “when human passion engages the fragile pretence of law and reason, as it so often will, it is the latter that devours the former” (68). Ward endorses her diagnosis in his closing: “The triumph of passion over prejudice and patriarchy, necessarily liberating and necessarily violent, matters. And so does the intrinsic, and inevitable, failure of the law” (70). This structural claim lies close to our own, though different in vocabulary. Where Ward and Artistodemou refer to “passion,” we refer to the psychological will and locate it in Schopenhauer’s Wille. Similarly, their “failure of the law” is narrowed to a particular legal instrument, the testamentary will, which structurally enforces such failures. Our argument thus specifies theirs rather than displacing it, and the feminist register remains present in the coercion of Linton.

Gothic critic David Punter, too, alludes to the dual-will framing in death, the “end of the line,” “resisting all legal simplifications, beyond the ‘will’ in both of its most common meanings” (127). We seek to narrow in on this connection, past simple wordplay.

We diverge from prior analysis at Heathcliff’s failure to testate. Ward calls it “exhaustion of indecision” (61); Katherine Anne Gilbert, in similar terms, reads Heathcliff at the end as “simply exhausted” and finding “no meaning, no real reward in continuing to destroy those around him” (77). We posit that it is instead a deliberate refusal of the form, an expression of freedom that the testament cannot confer.

§4 Textual cruxes

§4.1 Linton’s coerced will

Heathcliff marries Cathy to his son to secure her inheritance through coverture. Edgar Linton, near death, identifies what he needs to do to protect Cathy: “instead of leaving Catherine’s fortune at her own disposal, he determined to put it in the hands of trustees, for her use during life, and for her children, if she had any, after her” (Brontë 215). This would have worked, if the lawyer Mr. Green had not “sold himself to Mr. Heathcliff . . . the cause of his delay” (Brontë 217). While the legal mechanism was available, its officer was compromised.

Thus, the revision is never carried out. Heathcliff then engineers a second instrument: during Cathy’s confinement and Edgar’s final week, Linton is “threatened, or coaxed” into making a will which “bequeathed the whole of his, and what had been her, moveable property to his father” (Brontë 224). We’ve noted Sanger’s doctrinal explanation: pre-1838, the minor Linton could will away personal but not real property (18). The law is perfectly shaped to Heathcliff’s exploitation, and vice-versa; Bronte’s awareness of the law, and its limits, shows itself.

The testamentary failure is made clear. Rather than bypassing the legal, Heathcliff deploys it to nefarious ends. The validity of Linton’s will makes way for coercive force. It presumes a free testator, an agent’s Willkur matching the text; Heathcliff’s individuated desire overrides Linton’s, signalling a triumph of the Wille over the law, unable to be checked. The lack of specificity in Nelly’s account (“threatened, or coaxed”) reveals the limits of the document, inadequate in recording the circumstances of its creation (Brontë 224). Watkins’s diagnosis is inverted: while she describes the valid will as defeated by formalism, here a valid will succeeds by formalism, but the success belongs to a third party. Where a young man’s testamentary capacity is weaponized to legally dispossess a young woman, the document gives concrete form to the era’s legal patriarchy. Cathy, “destitute of cash and friends, cannot disturb his possession” (Brontë 225).

§4.2 Heathcliff’s unwritten will

Heathcliff stops short of writing his own will. In this we see the inverse of Linton’s, where the legal mechanism is deployed against the testator’s interest. Here, Heathcliff refuses the mechanism itself. The man whose existence has been so centered on legal manipulation, exploiting Hindley’s debt, marrying Isabella, coercing Linton, ceases to act on his most direct opportunity.

As he nears his end, Heathcliff’s will has narrowed, as noted, towards a single object and “devoured [his] existence” (Brontë 248). He hasn’t yet given up the intention: “When day breaks, I’ll send for Green . . . I wish to make some legal inquiries of him while I can bestow a though on those matters, and while I can act calmly. I have not written my will yet, and how to leave my property, I cannot determine! I wish I could annihilate it from the face of the earth” (Brontë 254). Yet the document is never drafted. In its place, Heathcliff delivers his burial instructions to Nelly, that he is laid beside Catherine but without the ceremony of ministry or speech (Brontë 255). His intentions are fulfilled extralegally through Nelly’s reception and her obedience in carrying them out.

Standard readings view the non-writing as exhaustion; we’ve seen Ward’s “exhaustion of indecision” and Gilbert’s “simply exhausted” explanations (61; 77). This is natural; Heathcliff displays the strongest Willkür, and its collapse looks like a failure in motivation. Yet his indecision does not prevent his instructions to Nelly. There he expresses his posthumous desire precisely, above the material. He refuses not the opportunity to will, but the legal methodology. Heathcliff, embodying the Wille, seeks something outside property relations: to merge with Catherine, to be next to her in death, for the principium individuationis to dissolve, recognizing her “I am.” Where the testament is concerned with the disposal of belongings, the Wille is Heathcliff, and grants him true posthumous existence after the disposal of the self, that which is far beyond what the law can offer. By refusing testation, he accepts this freedom. Watkins notes that in cases where the “living voice triumphs over . . . textual interpretation,” it does so by displacing the will rather than reinterpreting it (76). Heathcliff achieves something like this: his living testimony, with no document to mediate, gives way to a new category of fulfillment.

The property plot resolves without the document, but not towards Heathcliff’s initial aims. He seems to prefer his belongings cease to exist rather than leave him, but this too is outside of the realm of legal representation. This portion of his desire cannot be done regardless; the form misrepresents him in use or refusal. A signed declaration that passed his property to another would only cut against this prior contempt.

Where there is no expressed will, or here where the expressed will is either indeterminate or outside of reality, “the person’s children naturally present themselves to the mind; and being already connected to those possessions by means of their deceas’d parent, we are apt to connect them still farther by the relation of property” (Hume 329-330). Such applies at Heathcliff’s death, the Heights with Hareton by blood; the Grange with Cathy as Linton’s widow. The succession is that “natural” form, and while not Heathcliff’s preferred outcome, it produces what seems to be a return to the natural state of things. Punter describes “the will at last testement . . . in some ways not so differently from the apparently different meaning of the will . . . is a magical sourec of wealth; and within the family system that dissemination of riches is figurable only as a resoponse to death” (132). Heathcliff acquires and holds this wealth throughout, but its dissemination does not require and does better lacking his input; the natural family structure holds the proper form.

Heathcliff’s intestate death reveals that his psychological rather than physical wants cannot be written into the legal form, as evinced by his refusal, in spite of his past legal maneuvering. The instrument which succeeded against Linton, that Edgar failed to deploy against Heathcliff, fails to meet the height of wanting, that is, Wille.

§4.3 The novel’s closing

Catherine’s declaration, “I am Heathcliff,” we’ve read as Wille-recognition asserted against the legal arrangment that will constrain it (Brontë 63-64). Her marriage to Edgar will subordinate her legal personhood to his by coverture; her claim insists on a unindividualized identity that would exceed legal structure or assignment. The novel’s closing attends to the same category of connection.

Joseph delivers the legal resolution: he “returned thanks that the lawful master and the ancient stock were restored to their rights” (Brontë 256). Hareton recovers the Heights; a widowed Cathy recovers the Grange. The legal apparatus, given Heathcliff’s intestacy and the resulting natural succession, allows for the repair of its prior displacements. Rumor delivers the Gothic resolution: “the country folks . . . would swear on their Bible that he walks. There are those who speak to having met him near the church, and on the moor, and even within this house” (Brontë 257). Lockwood adds some ambiguity, or his own interpretation: “I lingered round them, under that benign sky . . . and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth” (Brontë 258).

None of these three readings cancels the others. While legal succession is restored, it was driven not by legal will along; it required Heathcliff’s death and the failure of his revenge project. Haunting persists, but is portrayed only through the talk of the town, no longer as direct spectral appearance. His walking on the moor is representative of the Wille surviving the death of its individuation. The actual and legal existence of Heathcliff has ceased, yet a piece of him remains. Lockwood’s expectation of quiet slumber is an attempt at rationalization, a return to the natural, but the novel spends much of its length leaning towards the existence of something underneath. Heathcliff’s bare headstone marks the otherwise peaceful scene with an object unfinished (Brontë 258). With the legal will refused, the psychological reportedly walks.

§5 The Gothic register

In attempting to read Schopenhauer’s establishment of the Wille as invisible will-to-life outside the principium individuationis into the written word, an unavoidable problem arises: the Wille cannot enter representation directly; representation relies totally on individuation. Bert Olivier identifies this issue and one potential response. In applying Schopenhauer to Beckett, he sees the latter’s writing as containing “allusion to unrepresentable ‘missing contents’” which are “in this case the Schopenhauerian will . . . the unrepresentable, irrational, abysmal ground of being” (Olivier 338). Brontë’s approach is different in kind. Where Beckett achieves Wille-allusion stripping down representation, Wuthering Heights, in more classic form, preserves a surface of realism alongside the Gothic. The portrayed haunting is not necessarily direct representation of the Wille, but a mode in which the supernatural (and thus certainly extralegal) universal will exceeding realism finds some formal reflection.

Punter names the antagonism of the legal and the Gothic: “the law is thus there to will away the body; where the law is, bodies cannoty exist or plead. Similarly, the law can have no cognisance of ghosts; . . . it takes its sights along a single trajectory, and in doing so it seeks to exile hauting, seeks to fine a pure line of explanation” (3). The surplus will can only appear in the Gothic register as such; the law is necessarily blind to it. What the testament cannot carry overflows into this more suitable mode.

Lockwood’s ghost child defines the form early on. The figure seeks entry (“Let me in!”), identifies itself to be “Catherine Linton,” the name a result of the marriage which severed her from the property, and reports its twenty-year being (Brontë 20). In this, the ghost seems to portray an everlasting claim, an agent of the Wille capable of outlasting the individuated Cathy, on what the law could not capture.

Heathcliff at the ash tree extends the structure. “Be with me always—take any form—drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss;” he pleads with the deceased Catherine to haunt him, with some formal structure: he offers justification (“you said I killed you”) and term (“as long as I am living”) (Brontë 130). Without the availability of legal recompense, he seeks something outside it. He seeks solace in the superstition that “the murdered do haunt their murderers” (130). The Gothic gives him a form that the law cannot.

Our reading of the closing is the culmination of this modal application. Schopenhauer’s metaphor for death, in which “the earth turns from day into night; the individual dies: but the sun itself burns its eternal noontime without pause,” may apply itself to our characters’ ends (307). Lockwood’s “quiet earth” is the perspective from which night has arrived, yet the sun, the Wille and its supernatural agents, live on. The Gothic provides the Wille this form, not pure superstition or adornment but a mechanism to extend representation beyond the boundries of a realist-legal frame.

Conclusion

The legal will, on the reading we offer, fails to contain the psychological will. The testament’s structural failure is sharpest when deployed coercively against one’s Willkür, as for Linton. Heathcliff’s refusal of the form, too, gives rise to doubt of the instrument’s feasability. In each instance the Wille runs past legal structure in a manner unchecked by the law, or seeks a goal with no corresponding legal support. It is thus doubly insufficient to a Wille-driven figure (that is, all consciousness); it cannot carry their total disposition, and its absence does not prevent the imposition of another. Catherine’s earlier declaration to Nelly stands as a recognition of both failures to come in its sight of the Wille connection, prior to the legal arrangment that would constrain it, identifying the extraindividual identity underlying all, but exemplified in Catherine and Heathcliff’s connection; such cannot be reconciled with legal personhood.

What the law cannot register, then, is left to the Gothic, which handles it well. Haunting in Wuthering Heights is portrayed as an act of unresolved desire, prior Wille cut off by marriage, coercion, or death, given representational reflection. Catherine Linton’s appearance before Lockwood, Heathcliff’s attempt at supernatural communication and posthumous walks on the moor provide space for this surplus Wille to enter the work, if not directly.

This lens describes one application of Gothic form, present in *Wuthering Heights. The genre’s supernatural structures are well-suited to incorporate what a realist-legal frame cannot represent.

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