Heathcliff Vs. The U-Man: Vengeance

“I have no pity! I have no pity! The more the worms writhe, the more I yearn to crush out their entails!”, warns Heathcliff, the vengeful antihero of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights as he vows to avenge his thwarted love. In Notes from Underground, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Underground Man takes a more unconventional approach to revenge, focusing more on the idea than on the actual act. Dostoevsky and Brontë use characterization of two very different, almost antonymous characters, Heathcliff and the Underground Man to depict how differently they interpret the universal theme of revenge.

Heathcliff, a man who, in his childhood went from rags to riches to rags again is bred in the perfect environment for revenge. He grows up crooked, twisted by the evil winds of Hindley and Catherine Earnshaw. Heathcliff, a poor orphan, is adopted by Mr. Earnshaw and brought to Wuthering Heights. Mr. Earnshaw loves Heathcliff and favors him over Hindley, Earnshaw’s own son. Because of this, Hindley hates Heathcliff, even though his sister Catherine loves Heathcliff. After Earnshaw dies, Hareton forces Heathcliff to work as a common laborer. Because Heathcliff is poor, Catherine marries Edgar Linton, a wealthy man, because “he will be rich, and [she] shall like to be the greatest woman of the neighborhood.” Catherine chooses social class over natural love, leaving Heathcliff alone and heartbroken. At Catherine’s deathbed, he laments, “I have not broken your heart--you have broken it; and in breaking it, you have broken mine.” Hindley makes Heathcliff poor, and then because of this, Catherine doesn’t marry him. Losing Catherine spearheads Heathcliff’s vengeance.

Heathcliff becomes vengeful because of lost love whereas the Underground man becomes bitter and vengeful because he grows up abandoned and alone, alienated from everyone around him. The underground man, like Heathcliff, is an orphan. He is sent to boarding school by distant relatives. There, everyone makes fun of him because he is different. He is unable to relate to or get along with anyone. “I could not endure ridicule,” the underground man explains, “[so] I conceived an immediate hatred for them and shut myself away from everyone in timid, wounded, and inordinate pride.” Because he is frequently humiliated, the Underground Man starts to hate everyone around him. He starts to alienate himself, harboring feelings of cynicism and revenge. Ultimately both men have been rejected, but while Catherine’s rejection drives Heathcliff to vengeance, the Underground Man becomes vengeful because society rejects him.

To the Underground man, Heathcliff is “l’homme de la nature et de la vérité” because when such men “are seized with feelings of revenge, nothing exists within them at the moment except those feelings.” Heathcliff is completely obsessed with revenge. He exhibits his revenge by getting control over everything that controlled him. When Heathcliff returns to Wuthering Heights, he has acquired money from an unknown source. He uses this money to gain ownership of Wuthering Heights. Then he raises Hareton, Hindley’s son, as a servant with no education. “Let's see if one tree won't grow as crooked as another, with the same wind to twist it,” remarks Heathcliff. Because Hindley treats him like a servant and he becomes wretched, he does the same to Hareton, hoping that the latter will become as evil as the former. This is still not enough for him. He is so consumed with revenge that he will stop at nothing to get everything he wants. Finally, he gets possession of Thrushcross Grange, Edgar Linton’s home, by marrying Linton’s sister Isabella, having a son Linton, and forcing his son to marry Linton’s daughter Catherine. Heathcliff’s obsession with revenge continues even after Catherine dies. This makes him less of a well-rounded character and more of a personification of revenge.

The Underground Man’s revenge is more passive. He speaks of a man who has such “heightened consciousness” that he feels himself to be a mouse. This mouse is almost often mistreated, so he harbors pent-up feelings and longs to avenge them. He develops an elaborate plan of revenge, but in the process, he is so overcome by questions and doubts that he gives up at the last second. At first he believes that he has successfully carried out his revenge, but he later sees that he hasn’t. Then he goes over every single detail of this event again and again, until he starts to loathe himself. The Underground Man is the mouse. He recalls an event that happened twenty years earlier that makes him a mouse. One day, he stands in the way of an officer, but the officer casually moves him out of the way and ignores him. The Underground Man vows to avenge this and he spends months looking for a way to do so. He stalks the officer, gathering information about him. Then he decides to stand in the officer’s way again. He buys new clothes and dresses up so that he can look like the officer’s equal. He stands in the officer’s way again, but “just two inches away from him, [the Underground Man loses] courage.” Like the mouse, he feels victorious at first, but then he becomes angry at himself because the officer doesn’t even care enough to react. Events like this push the Underground Man underground. He is alienated from society, so he goes underground, where he can watch the world through a crack in the wall. This is his revenge. He abandons the society that has rejected him. He stays in his underground world with all his ideas and complexities. His form of revenge makes him more of a complex character than Heathcliff is.

Heathcliff is obsessed with revenge, which he manifests with actions. On the other hand, the Underground Man is more obsessed with the idea of revenge than the actual act of vengeance. With his heightened consciousness, he is too indecisive to execute an active form of revenge. L’homme de la nature et de la vérité, Heathcliff, avenges his loss of Catherine until he reaches his wall, “something calming, final, morally absolving; something perhaps even mystical.” The ghost of Catherine is Heathcliff’s wall. When he sees her again, he gives up on his obsession. Here, he is redeemed in a way. However, the Underground Man’s vengeance is more quiescent, and he demonstrates it by hating everyone, detaching himself from society, and torturing himself. Because of this, no “wall” can resolve his obsession. He remains cynical and vengeful for the rest of his life. This way, he doesn’t redeem himself like Heathcliff does. Sometimes, an active form of revenge is more helpful because it provides room for redemption.