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Wise Blood and Wuthering Heights: A Comparative Analysis of Hazel Motes and Heathcliff
Lucas Fernandes

Everything is all one, OConnor writes, A bastard wouldnt be any different from
anyone else. (OConnor 120). If this is the case, then what separates Hazel Motes, the alienated
protagonist of Flannery OConnors first novel Wise Blood, from Heathcliff, the alienated
protagonist/antagonist of Emily Brontes first and last novel Wuthering Heights? If a bastard is
no different from anyone else, then it must be fair to argue that Hazel and Heathcliff are one in
the same -- of the same story, of the same blood. From their attitudes to their behaviors, Hazel
and Heathcliff are literary relatives, brothers of an obscure and complicated origin: they are two
of the strongest fictional reflections of mans confrontation with the futility of action. This
thought comes to greater fruition with deeper analysis: what quickly becomes evident is the
profound relationship between these two characters and the unifying story they may tell us of
man in conflict with himself and his struggle to understand his own existence, and even his own
being. Expressed by both authors is a strong understanding of mans existential nausea, anxiety,
and inability to contend with the absurd. This understanding and this fascination with man will
be the root of our analysis.

Firstly, we must note both characters are driven by obsession: love and revenge on the
part of Heathcliff, truth and sacrifice on the part of Hazel. These obsessions drive their behavior,
slowly evolving to become the essence of their existences.

Hazel is spiritually uncomfortable. He is uncomfortable with the lie Jesus has told, the lie
others blindly accept; he says, Every one of you people are clean and let me tell you why if you
think its because of Jesus Christ Crucified youre wrong. I dont say he wasnt crucified but I
say it wasnt for you (50). He is unsettled by the price tag others have placed on truth, by what
can be best described as religious capital. Steve Pinkerton -- author of Profaning the American
Religion: Flannery OConnors Wise Blood -- and others have commented heavily on
OConnors critical approach to spiritual exploitation. Pinkerton catches these associations
between salesmen and religious symbols, or sacralized commerce, citing examples such as the
potato-peeler salesman working from behind an altar of cardboard boxes, and later of Hoover
Shoats exploiting Hazels sermons (Pinkerton 456). Hazel promises, It dont cost you any
money to know the truth! You cant know it for money! (154). What drives him, what ultimately
exhausts him is his lone search for truth; it is a paradoxical kind of hope embedded in passive
nihilism. His self-blinding perhaps would have been described by Friedrich Nietzsche as a will
to nothingness. But how revealing is this ascetic act? Is the fact that Mrs. Flood experiences
nothing short of something similar to Stendhal syndrome (when watching Hazel die) a way for
us to consider the revelatory strength in sacrifice? Im not clean, Hazel says when asked why
he wrapped barbed wire around his chest. If he is not clean, then what are we?

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Heathcliff, on the other hand -- what is to be said of him? Allow us to reference Nietzsche
once more, who is credited with having said, What is done out of love always takes place
beyond good and evil. Love and revenge are for Heathcliff two sides of the same rusty coin.
Though he makes no effort to save Hindley or his son, he is not directly involved with their
deaths. His revenge is a revenge fueled entirely by his love for Catherine, and the consequences
of this love enable him to undermine any retaliation. Does this make him clean or unclean? It is
easy to pity him, afterall, so this may suggest that he his also unclean. When Hazel says, Im
going to preach there was no Fall because there was nothing to fall from and no Redemption
because there was no Fall and no Judgement because there wasnt the first two, he is echoing
Heathcliffs own fate. Emily Brontes sister Charlotte Bronte observes this pity and says, in her
preface to the new edition, Heathcliff, indeed, stands unredeemed; never once swerving in his
arrow-straight course to perdition (Bronte liii).

But why is this important? Perhaps because it is within their essences that we realize both
of these men are what many scholars and academics would consider Byronic heroes. Both
express deep dissatisfaction with their environments, both are brooding and thoughtful, dark and
subversive. Though it is in these ways that others are drawn to them, attracted to them. Lily
Sabbath of Wise Blood says in regards to Hazel, Im crazy about him. I never seen a boy that I
liked the looks of any better (OConnor 106). Isabella Linton of Wuthering Heights, in her own
way, becomes infatuated with Heathcliff, evincing a sudden and irresistible attraction towards
him (Bronte 102). They both seem to have eyes that dont look like they see what [theyre]
looking at but they keep on looking (OConnor 105). They both resort to manipulating their
attractors, and use them as means to an end. In the same way Lockwood [beholds] Heathcliffs
black eyes withdraw so suspiciously under their brows (Bronte 15), so too does Enoch Emery
notice Hazels eyes are like two clean bullet holes (OConnor 85). Jeffrey Gray notes in Its
Not Natural: Freuds Uncanny and OConnors Wise Blood that Hazels own gaze, [is]
like that of a doll and sees nothing. That he ultimately blinds himself is almost
redundant (Gray 62). Can the same be said of Heathcliff? Is not love blind -- blinding? Perhaps
jealousy is the appropriate word. Kitty Carlisle harks upon this thought, claiming, [Heathcliffs]
jealousy causes him to disappear for three years in order to become more like Edgar, because he
believes that is what Cathy wants (Carlisle 47). She argues that Heathcliffs vengeful attitude
-- his driving obsession -- has only matured during his absence (47). Hazels vengeful attitude
on the other hand matures with each sermon. He recognizes that the people around him listening
as he preaches have been lied to, have been tricked by Jesus -- and this angers him, insults his
nature, and spits in the face of truth itself: he says, Nothing matters but that Jesus was a
liar (OConnor 101); Heathcliff says, If he [Edgar] loved with all the power of his puny being,
he couldnt love as much in eighty years as I could in a day (Bronte 145). These are perhaps the
two most revealing lines in each book, and serve as entrances into a greater analysis of character
and being.

They are alienated characters, outcasts. What both characters come to realize is that
action can be best described as futility. Their driving obsessions exhaust them, and the boulder
returns to its starting position at the foot of the mountain of absurdity. In one of the closing
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scenes of Wise Blood, Hazel Motes is pulled over for no reason except that the officer in
question just [didnt] like [Hazels] face (OConnor 210). The officer proceeds to push Hazels
beloved Essex over an embankment as he watches. Here, at the peak of amalgamated struggles,
Hazel is left alone, looking over the scene. His face seemed to reflect the entire distance across
the clearing and on beyond, the entire distance across that extended from his eyes to the blank
gray sky that went one, depth after depth, into space (211). Simply, Hazels face reflects
nothingness, and he is thus impelled to realize the absurd through revolt; by revolting, by
blinding himself, he gives proof of his only truth, which is defiance (Camus 37). Heathcliff, at
the culmination of his plot for revenge, fails to express any remaining desire to raise [his]
hand. He says, I have lost the faculty of enjoying ... destruction, and I am too idle to destroy
for nothing (Bronte 291).

Their exhaustion can be understood as an existential exhaustion, heavily correlated with

the symbolic associations between both characters and religion, animals and animosity, and
violence. William Rodney Allen comments on OConnors brilliantly fused images of
confinement with animal imagery so as to intensify Wise Bloods theme: that the world, without
its spiritual dimension, is merely a prison for an odd collection of inmates -- a zoo for the human
animal (Allen 257). The same fascination with and fear of confined spaces can be applied to
the environments within the world of Wuthering Heights. Is not Wuthering Heights itself a zoo
for the human animal? Heathcliffs relationships with those around him can surely be
considered animalistic, especially his relationship with Catherine. His obsession fuels animosity
and tension, and the consequences of his love resonate throughout. Heathcliff is a bird of bad
omen (Bronte 104). He imprisons Cathy and Nelly in his home is even driven to dig up
Catherines coffin, an image and symbol which holds meaning in both texts. It is expressed in
Wise Blood, firstly, when little Hazel sees a naked woman in a coffin-like box. Allen points out
that this experience set off the unfortunate linking in the boys mind of sexuality and
death (Allen 259). Interpreters of Wuthering Heights have been keen on relating Catherines
exhumation as pretext for necrophilia.

In Andrea Arnolds film adaptation of Wuthering Heights, this bond between sexuality
and death is only vaguely and briefly explored. In the closing minutes of the film, Heathcliff is
seen lingering over Catherines dead body when a few fleeting frames capture an expression
which suggests a melancholic, frustrated ecstasy. John Hustons film version of Wise Blood takes
the same quick approach: young Hazel witnesses, in a dream-like haze, a smiling naked woman
in a coffin-like box. He punishes himself for this experience by lining the insides of shoes with
rocks. Thus, what is taken from these interpretations is that beneath our conscious efforts to
expel frustration or to cathartically punish ourselves in the face of sexuality or death or their
related implications is our unconscious desire for redemption, our hope that our actions are
rewarded and not ignored. However, what is blatantly obvious and distressing is that there is no
redemption, no reward. We are like Hazel, moving farther and farther away, farther and farther
into the darkness until we become the pin points of light (OConnor 236).

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Furthermore, when Bronte and OConnor use the image of the animal, it is to emphasize
mans reverse evolution and, as Allen notes, to undermine his pretensions that he is
god (Allen 259). Graeme Tytler, author of The Role of Religion in Wuthering Heights,
recognizes that Heathcliff is sometimes presumptuous about Gods attitudes (Tytler 46). He
marks the scene in which Nelly disapproves of Heathcliffs plan to pay Hindley back, that it is
for God to punish wicked people; Heathcliff replies, No, God wont have the satisfaction that
I shall (Bronte 66).

Interestingly, Heathcliff could have been Hazels strongest candidate in this search for a
new jesus. Hazel tells Lily Sabbath that he believes in a new kind of jesus one that cant
waste his blood redeeming people with it, because hes all man and aint got any God in
him (119). Or perhaps that Hazel never finds one suggests that there cannot be one to find. That
they both die so pitifully drives home the thought Jean-Paul Sartre had, that man is a useless
passion.

Though the origins of their violence, self-inflicted or otherwise, are radically different,
both characters engage in it or fantasize about it. Hazel, in the final chapters of the novel, runs
down and kills what some have considered his double, Solace Layfield. Gray discusses this
violence in greater detail, relating Hazels talk of conscience to Freuds concept of the uncanny.
He argues that the it Hazel hunts down and kills (Hazel himself says, your conscience is a
trick it dont exist though you may think it does, and if you think it does, you had best get it
out in the open and hunt it down and kill it (OConnor 166)) is his repressed longing for Jesus
(Gray 64). That he blinds himself, lines his shoes with rocks and shattered glass, and wraps
barbed wire around his chest is an extension of Hazels theological understanding of
Redemption (Pinkerton 464). His self-inflicted pain is his form of payment, his way of
rectifying the imbalance of Americas economic prosperity and its spiritual poverty (Pinkerton
464). Though some have interpreted Hazels death as transcendent-in-itself-for-itself, it may be
more appropriate to consider it transcendent-in-itself-for-others; by this I mean there is no way,
not even symbolically, for Hazel to have been given insight by becoming blind, but that by
becoming blind, he has given us insight. For Hazels landlady it was as if she had finally got to
the beginning of something she couldnt begin (OConnor 236). Can the same be said of us?

Heathcliffs violence can also be seen as outward and inward violence. From hanging
Isabellas dogs (Bronte 147) to dashing his head against a tree (160), Heathcliff is an explosion
of tension and anger, fueled only by love and revenge. Nelly recounts him saying, I have no
pity! The more the worms writhe, the more I yearn to crush out their entrails! (148). His is a
moral teething, until finally it exhausts him. He dies, as Hazel did, atheologically and pitifully.
Though, unlike Hazel, Heathcliff had a strange joyful glitter in his eyes (295). Locked in his
room, Heathcliff died with his hand extended out his window, and Nelly, trying to close his dead
eyes, trying to extinguish that frightful, like-like gaze of exultation could not (302). Had
Heathcliff succeeded where Hazel failed? Does the joyful glitter in his eyes suggest we too may
experience this fleeting exultation? Why shouldnt we girn at death (302)?

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To summarize, their deaths can be considered their final [liberations] from the cage of
matter (Allen 269).

Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there,
and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it. Where is there a place for you to
be? No place (OConnor 165).

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Works Cited

Allen, William Rodney. "The Cage Of Matter: The World As Zoo In Flannery O'connor's Wise
Blood." American Literature 58.2 (1986): 256-270. Print.
Bront, Emily, and Richard J. Dunn. Wuthering Heights: The 1847 Text, Backgrounds and
Contexts, Criticism. 4th ed. New York: Norton, 2003. Print.
Bront, Emily, and Pauline Nestor. "Editor's Preface to the New [1850] Edition of Wuthering
Heights." Preface. Ed. Charlotte Bront. Wuthering Heights. London: Penguin, 2003. Liii. Print.
Camus, Albert. "An Absurd Reasoning." The Myth of Sisyphus, and Other Essays. New York:
Vintage, 1955. 37. Web.
Carlisle, Kitty. "Emily Bront's Heathcliff: His Journey of Jealousy." Explicator 70.1 (2012):
46-48. Print.
Gray, Jeffrey. "`It's Not Natural': Freud's `Uncanny' and O'Connor's Wise Blood."Southern
Literary Journal 29.1 (Fall 96): 56-69. Print.
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, and R. J. Hollingdale. Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a
Philosophy of the Future Friedrich Nietzsche. London: Penguin, 2003. Print.
O'Connor, Flannery. Wise Blood. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007. Print.
Pinkerton, Steve. "Profaning The American Religion: Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood." Studies
In The Novel 43.4 (2011): 449-469. Print.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Existentialism and Human Emotions. New York: Philosophical Library, 1985.
Print.
Tytler, Graeme. "The Role Of Religion In Wuthering Heights." Bronte Studies 32.1 (2007):
41-55. Print.