Timelines in Emily Brontës «Wuthering Heights». Michael Weber

must not be ignored. To be arithmetically and calendrically correct, the equation must read:

      June 1778 + 22 years + X months = November 1800 =

      6 months + 1778 years + 22 years + X months = 11 months + 1800 years =

      21342 months + 264 months + X = 21611 months

      X = 21611 - (21342 + 264) = 21611 - 21606 = 5 months

      With any other number greater than five, one arrives in December, the following January, or an even later month. The text rules out these months as the possible beginning of the report and the story.

      Heywood (2004, pp. 433, 437) also focuses on this reference to “nearly twenty-three years ago” and its discrepancy with the year 1801 as the year of Mr. Lockwood’s first two visits to the Heights and the beginning of Ellen Dean’s story. He believes that the discrepancy was probably intended by Emily Brontë, and he even goes so far as to consider 1778 a misstatement. He entertains the idea that Hareton is not born until 1779, making this year the starting point of a hypothetical second timeline, which he calls the “1779 series” (ibid., p. 433). Instead of moving the year of the visits one year to the left on the timeline as he should, he moves Hareton’s year of birth one year to the right. He does not think of questioning 1801 as the year of Mr. Lockwood’s first two visits, changing instead one of the three absolute years on which the chronology of Wuthering Heights is irrefutably based.

      Second time reference:

      According to Ellen Dean in the second section of her story, Cathy is thirteen years old when she first meets Hareton Earnshaw one July. This age is extremely important for the chronology and is clearly evidenced three times in the text, ←46 | 47→once indirectly and twice directly (WH, 233, 234, 239). Hareton is eighteen years old at the time, which is categorically stated in the text (WH, 239). Since he is born in 1778 (as one of the three absolute years proves), their meeting must take place in 1796, which means that Cathy is born (and her mother Catherine dies) on 20 March 1783.¹² Accordingly, the wedding of Catherine Earnshaw and Edgar Linton must take place in March 1782, the conception of Cathy in September 1782 and the dramatic events of the major episode in 1779 because Mr. Heathcliff disappears for three years after these events, only reappearing in September 1782, Cathy is “a seven months’ child” and the period between Catherine Earnshaw’s wedding and death is the already specified one year. The reference to Hareton Earnshaw’s year of birth indicates the correct path through the time labyrinth. It is out of the question that Catherine marries in 1783 and dies in 1784.

      Clay (1952, p. 101) does not address these important chronological realities. He holds the view that the wedding takes place in 1783, justifying this with the “for eighteen years”, which has already been refuted. He feels corroborated by Edgar Linton’s remark to Catherine Earnshaw shortly before her death in March that at the same time one year earlier he had wanted her under his roof (ibid., p. 101). However, for methodological reasons, it is not possible to prove a particular year with this time span. The stated interval of one year is always correct because it is year-independent. The only thing that the time span proves is that – as stated – Catherine dies one year after her wedding. In his other calculations, Clay does not take into account this important one-year span, leading him to miss the fact that there are actually six months between the wedding and Mr. Heathcliff’s return. He does not specify the length of this time span, only describing it as “not long” (ibid., p. 101). Clay also sees 1783 corroborated as the alleged year of Catherine Earnshaw’s wedding when Mr. Heathcliff comes to take Cathy to Wuthering Heights on the evening of Edgar Linton’s funeral. Ellen Dean indicates at that time that eighteen years have passed since his return (WH, 352). Again, this is only correct in terms of the time span. The dating, however, must be based on 1782, not 1783. Later, Clay unacceptably uses another time span for dating: concerning the dream that she has during the hallucinations in the year of her death, Catherine Earnshaw declares that “the whole last seven years of my life grew a blank!” (WH, 154) – the seven years since her father’s death. Clay (ibid., p. 103) draws on these seven years to help date Mr. Earnshaw’s ←47 | 48→death to 1776, because he places Catherine’s illness at the end of 1783 instead of at the end of 1782.

      Because of the one-year span (the period between Catherine Earnshaw’s wedding and her death, and Cathy’s birth), Clay, proceeding from 1783, dates the year of Cathy’s birth to 1784 instead of 1783. This mistake inevitably brings with it a whole string of further misdating, because, although Clay quite correctly identifies the time spans, his year of reference is wrong. There is, therefore, a systemic error. To be correct, all his year dates need to be pre-dated by one year, i.e. they must be shifted to the left on the timeline. It is true that Cathy is seventeen years old in the year of Edgar Linton’s death (WH, 299), which is why he must have died in 1800 and not in 1801, as Clay (ibid., p. 102) thinks. It is also true that, in the November of the year before his death, Edgar Linton forbids Cathy from continuing her secret visits to Wuthering Heights. However, this is in 1799, not 1800. It is true that, in the second section of the first part of her story, Ellen Dean points out that she is describing the prohibition of the visits and its attendant circumstances exactly one year after the events. This necessarily dates the narration of the story to November 1800 and does not – as Clay (ibid., p. 102) thinks, in an unacceptable reverse conclusion – date the prohibition to 1800. Despite Ellen Dean’s indisputable time reference, Clay (ibid., p. 101) surprisingly dates this passage of the story to 1802 rather than one year after the prohibition, that is – to follow his incorrect approach, which is out by one year – to 1801. This is explained by the fact that, right at the beginning of his treatise, he decides that Ellen Dean relates this passage of her story in 1802 (ibid., p. 100), which is incorrect. This mistake in the dating of the narrative should have occurred to Clay when determining the time of the prohibition – either 1801 is correct or 1802. Both cannot be true. The systemic post-dating error by one year is of course also observable in the biographical data of the main characters, deduced from Catherine Earnshaw’s year of birth (cf. Chap. VI, ‘The Genealogies of the Earnshaw and Linton Families’). Thus, Clay (ibid., pp. 102f.) gives the year of Isabella Linton’s death as 1797 instead of 1796, the year of Hindley Earnshaw’s death as 1784 instead of 1783, etc.

      The fact that Cathy is thirteen years old when she first meets Hareton is also noted by Heywood (2004, p. 439). However, he is wrong to state that their meeting takes place on Cathy’s thirteenth birthday, i.e. in March. Cathy in fact meets Hareton for the first time in summer. Heywood is probably confusing this meeting with that of Cathy and Linton Heathcliff, which does actually take place on her birthday – but on her sixteenth. In neither the first nor second of Heywood’s editions of Wuthering Heights does he make any mention of Ellen ←48 | 49→Dean’s crucial statement that Hareton is eighteen years old at their first meeting, proven by the fact that their first meeting takes place in 1796.¹³

Time references based on misleading ages

      There are two places in Ellen Dean’s narrative that could indicate that 1801 is the first year of the narration – if they stand up to critical scrutiny. These two places suggest that Cathy is born in 1784, not in 1783, and contradict Ellen Dean’s two unambiguous statements mentioned above, that she narrates the first half of her story nearly twenty-three years after Hareton’s birth in June 1778 and that Cathy is thirteen and Hareton eighteen years old when they meet for the first time. The two discrepant statements concern Hareton’s age at the time of Catherine’s marriage to Edgar Linton (he is allegedly “nearly five years old” at the time) and Hareton’s age at a much later point when he is reconciled with Cathy on an Easter Monday in April (he is allegedly “twenty-three years old” at the time). Both ages are dubious from the very start because of their incompatibility with the unambiguous and proven ages already stated and they must therefore be examined particularly critically. In fact, both ages could simply be incorrect since Cathy cannot have been born in 1784 according to the textual information regarding the year of the major episode mentioned above, in other words according to the internal evidence: if 1784 were the year of her birth, Catherine’s wedding would have taken place one year earlier, in March 1783. But then, because of Heathcliff’s three-year absence, the major episode would have occurred