Psychopathy is a mental illness that
has been most recently characterized by a general lack on empathy for
other humans. This may be counter-intuitive to the view that many
people have of psychopaths, which is generally that they are those
people that intentionally harm others for the pleasure of it. But
this is not the case. One percent of our current population is most
probably psychopathic, and while this concentration jumps to 33
percent in our prison population, it does not account for the
entirety of the psychopathic population. The rest of this subset
concentrates in areas of business and media that require the ability
to make decisions that could destroy the lives of other people, a
spot light or that involve control over a large group of people, such
as cooperate executives, media, the political arena, and even clergy,
which spike at ranges of four percent to 15 percent.
This is because psychopathy is a
illness that is related with either the inability to empathize with
other human beings, thus making it easier to manipulate or harm
others that are simply seen as obstacles, which is where we see many
of the violent psychopaths. Or to control and compensate for their
lack of empathy so that they may put on a front for the whole of
society, which is many “victim” psychopaths and manipulators come
from.
Now, what does this have to do with
Wuthering heights? Well, many of the characters in the novel
displayed psychopathic tendencies, and together they covered a wide
spectrum of psychopathy. Heathcliff took the role of what we think
of as the traditional psychopath, violent, manipulative, and
generally apathetic to the feelings of others. Catherine Earnshaw and
Linton took on the more manipulative mentality that fed off of the
kindness of others to get what they wanted and then discarded them.
But my fascination in this book is not with the characters, it is
with the author that imagined these characters without meeting more
than a few dozen people in her entire life. The fact that Emily
Bronte was able to recreate the spectrum of psychopathy with her
characters suggests that many people around her displayed similar
tendencies, or that even she herself was a psychopath. This would
mean that the area that Emily lived in would have had a psychopathy
rate somewhere between law school and prison, which is an interesting
scale in its own right. It is not hard to imagine that a person
capable of creating such characters must project themselves onto the
page as well, but it is an interesting prospect none the less.
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