Excerpt: René Girard Meets Emily Brontë
The following is an excerpt from a LUCVS member's recent essay interpreting the revenge plot of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (1847) through the lens of twentieth-century French theorist René Girard's theories of mimetic desire.
Critical scholarship has yet to investigate the intersections of mimetic desire, as developed in the theoretical work of René Girard, and the work of the Brontës with the exception of two recent articles. In his inaugural book, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, Girard draws on a well-established theory of human learning and mīmēsis, namely that humans imitate each other, and extends this beyond speech and actions to desires. At first, the core principle of Girard’s work ostensibly seems a reductive hermeneutic of human interactions: people imitate the desires of others. Girard’s theory, however, explains human interactions ranging from the desires of the individual to the interworkings of myth and contemporary societies and cultures. [1] In Discovering Girard, Michael Kirwan draws out Girard’s concept of desire, which is triangulated [subject - mediator - object] as opposed to linear [subject - object]: “men and women learn from one another what it is they should desire. In this sense, humans copy one another…and when mimesis leads to a convergence of desires on the same object, the result will be rivalry and possibly outright conflict” (14). Girard’s insight, therefore, hinges on an understanding of desire that is not spontaneous or self-directed but determined by the desires of the other, the mediator / model / rival. A further classification of mimetic desire distinguishes two forms designated by the proximity of the subject to the mediator. In external mediation a distance separates the subject from the other, and, due to this distance between rivals, the eruption of violence becomes less likely--at times it is impossible--or remains less intense. [2] On the other hand, with internal mediation, the distance between rivals diminishes, and since “the closer the mediator comes, the more feverish the action becomes” (Girard, Deceit 85), violence necessarily erupts and deescalates the crisis, albeit provisionally until the pattern repeats. In the throes of mediated desire, lines distinguishing the rivals blur, and they become monstrous doubles of each other. Thomas Joudrey, in his 2015 article “‘Well, We Must for Ourselves in the Long Run’: Selfishness and Sociality in Wuthering Heights,” particularly treats the relationship of internal mediation between Heathcliff (subject), Edgar (model/rival), and Cathy (object), drawing on Girard as well as Eve Sedgwick’s theory of homosocial bonds. [3] Joudrey limits his consideration of the novel and “selfish desire,” however, by including neither a consideration of Heathcliff’s rivalry with Hindley--his first rivalry that oscillates between external and internal mediation--nor a more comprehensive consideration of the children’s interactions, for it is in these early moments that mimetic desire first gestates in the novel.
Beyond classifying mimetic desire according to the distance between subject and model, Girard offers a further designation according to the nature of the object desired: acquisitive desire and metaphysical desire, the operation of the latter in Wuthering Heights being one focus of Gary Lee Stonum’s 2011 article, “Emily’s Heathcliff: Metaphysical Love in Dickinson and Bronte.” Simply delineated, acquisitive desire centers on an object as the goal--the common example being two children vying for a toy or other object--yet an “impulse toward the object is ultimately an impulse toward the mediator,” therefore “the object is only a means of reaching the mediator. The desire is aimed at the mediator’s being” (Girard, Deceit 53). This is metaphysical desire, which focuses on the other’s essence, and the subject desires to “steal” or to “assimilate the mediator’s being…to be absorbed into the substance of the other” (Girard, Deceit 54). Stonum misidentifies such desire functioning in the works of Dickinson and Brontë; he believes these works chart desire that “needs to be understood as ‘metaphysical’ in the sense that René Girard pejoratively uses the term” (25). “Both Emilys,” Stonum continues, “share Girard’s view that metaphysical love promises a fullness of being that the lover recognizes as otherwise lacking” (25), and “love is reciprocal” in Brontë, meaning that Heathcliff and Cathy “provide the other’s completion” (26). Stonum’s assertion, clearly, operates under a limited understanding of metaphysical desire, which, in Girard’s sense of the concept, can never offer “completion,” can never offer stability or promote selfless affection. “As we know,” Girard says, “metaphysical desire always ends in enslavement, failure, and shame” (Girard, Deceit 176), and in it, “nothing is constant” (Girard, Deceit 83). Joudrey’s reading of Heathcliff and Cathy I as ensconced in a “metaphysical soul fusion,” however, seems closer to including a Girardian conception of the inextricable effects of metaphysical desire. As Joudrey says, the delusion of having fused souls “is precisely what maims them” (180), a reading that Girard’s conception of “the other” in terms of “difference” and “sameness” corroborates: “If lovers are never in accord...[it is] because they are too alike, because each is a copy of the other” (Deceit 106).
As Girard traced patterns of mimetic desire across narratives, he discovered that “the great novelists reveal the imitative nature of desire” (Girard, Deceit 14), meaning they understand “a mystery, transparent yet opaque, of human relations” (Girard, Deceit 2-3), an understanding that, I argue, Brontë also demonstrates in Wuthering Heights. For Girard, these novels--examples being those of Cervantes, Stendhal, Flaubert, Proust, and Dostoevsky--access the “novelistic truth,” meaning they denounce the Romantic lie that our desires are spontaneous, not mediated. In “Conversions in Literature and Christianity,” Girard further describes “novelistic conversions”--understanding “conversion” through the Greek metanoia, meaning “to change one’s mind about something” (267)--and the dual perspectives that operate in “great novels.” In the first, desire deceives the hero, “imprison(ing) him in a sterile process of jumping from one frustrated desire to the next over a period of many years…until he (falls) into a state of ennui that could be called a state of post-mimetic desire” (Girard, “Conversions” 269-270). In the second, the hero experiences a liberation from desire, “a post-conversion perspective that rectifies the pre-conversion perspective which is always some kind of self-deception” (Girard, “Conversions” 272), an experience exemplified by the deathbed retraction of Alonso Quixano in Don Quixote and the concluding confession of Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment. In an endnote, Stonum erroneously posits Brontë “never espies the novelistic truth he [Girard] credits Dostoevsky and Proust for having developed” (32). Of course, Girard believes not that Dostoevsky and others developed a “novelistic truth” but that they understand the nature of mediated desire inherent in human relations and represented this truth through the medium of fiction. Furthermore, Brontë does access this “novelistic truth” and both perspectives of it; however, it is not through the trajectory of a single hero, but through the character arcs of both Heathcliff and then Hareton.
Endnotes
[1] For a discussion on the anthropological extension of mimetic theory, see particularly René Girard’s Violence and the Sacred. Also, Michael Kirwan’s Discovering Girard offers a comprehensive overview of Girard’s three seminal works, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, Violence and the Sacred, and Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World.
[2] The rivals do not construct the distance between them: “although geographical separation might be one factor, the distance between the mediator and subject is primarily spiritual” (Girard, Deceit 9). Girard uses Don Quixote’s imitation of the fictional Amadis of Gaul as exemplification of insurmountable distance. Likewise, the “social and intellectual distance” that separates Sancho and Don Quixote as mediator is “insuperable” (Girard, Deceit 9). “Monstrous doubles” most directly reflect the meaning of “imitation” from the Latin imitatio, meaning a “copying.”
[3] In Between Men, Sedgwick develops Girard’s concept of triangulated desire and argues for considering gender in triangulated relationships. For Sedgwick, in the “mid-eighteenth to mid-nineteenth century novel…the emerging pattern of male friendship, mentorship, entitlement, rivalry, and hetero- and homosexuality was in an intimate and shifting relation to class; and that no element of that pattern can be understood outside of its relation to women and the gender system as a whole” (507).
References
Brontë, Emily. Wuthering Heights. Ed. Richard J. Dunn. 4th ed. Norton, 2003.
Girard, René. “Conversions in Literature and Christianity.” In Mimesis and Theory: Essays on Literature and Criticism, 1953-2005. Edited by René Girard and Robert Doran. Stanford University Press, 2008.
____. Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure. Trans. By Yvonne Freccero. Hopkins Pr., 1969.
____. Violence and the Sacred. Trans. Patrick Gregory. Johns Hopkins UP, 1979.
Girard, René, Jean-Michel Oughourlian, and Guy Lefort. Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World. Stanford UP, 1987.
Joudrey, Thomas. “We Must be for Ourselves in the Long Run”: Selfishness and Sociality in Wuthering Heights.” Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 70, No. 2, 2015, pp. 165-193.
Kirwan, Michael. Discovering Girard. Darton, Longman & Todd, 2004.
Sedgwick, Eve. “Introduction from Between Men.” In Feminisms: an Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism. Eds. Warhol-Down, Robyn, and Diane Price Herndl. Rutgers University Press, 1997.
