“I wish I could annihilate it from the face of the earth”: Property Law, Bodies, and Acts of Marking in Wuthering Heights

This article brings together property law and bodies through the concept of marking. Patterns in the language of marking—of land, by engraving, writing, and through violence—draw our attention to the ways in which bodies, objects, and land become interchangeable in Wuthering Heights. Such patterns are read here within the context of property laws, inheritance laws, and laws regarding suicides. These parallel markings—of bodies and property—in the novel, prods us to think not only about feudalism and the human risks of a rising capitalism, but also the boundaries around legal constructs of person and object. Brontë’s critique of systems that confuse people and property is revealed in characters’ intertwined impulses to create and destroy, most notably demonstrated by Heathcliff and Catherine. Their desire to fuse with others, through the process of making a mark, is driven by a desire for recognition and self-determination, but also for erasure, or, as Heathcliff suggests during his final decline, annihilation. Thus marking is both an act that claims, produces, and obliterates, often in the same moment. Heathcliff ’s last act, paired with the disfiguring of the Heights’s garden by young Catherine and Hareton, suggests that systems based on patriarchy and feudal property laws are not healthy or satisfying for anybody, not even the patriarchs themselves.