ELH

In the early years of the Victorian period, writers of fiction looked for ways to challenge the authority of the definition of human nature within the new science of political economy: namely, the view of human beings as individuals chiefly related to one another by means of economic exchange. In doing so, writers needed access to an alternative rhetoric that would be at once intuitive and universal. One of these rhetorics exists in the ethic of the neighbor as expressed in the Levitical injunction to love thy neighbor along with its expansion in the parable of the Good Samaritan.¹ Novelists of the 1840s such as Benjamin Disraeli and Elizabeth Gaskell found this ethic ready to hand—as did also young Karl Marx when, in his notes on economy, he challenged James Mill's Elements of Political Economy.² A second such rhetoric exists in the ethic of friendship as formulated in the Classical tradition of male friendship writing, which was drawn upon by novelists throughout the period.³ In an important recent book, Alan Bray has demonstrated that this ethic also exists within Catholic ritual and material culture up to the death of Cardinal Newman in 1890.⁴ Both ethics bring into play a powerful resource in grounding demands for social justice across lines of class and other interests.

In this essay, it will become evident how these ethics function within both particularist and universal terms in relation to a leading novel of the 1840s, Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (1847). Late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century reflections on the ethics of the neighbor have reemphasized its contexts within Jewish and Christian religious belief.⁵ Many critics from the late Victorian period to the present have perceived the novel to be radical; this essay will find one ground of Brontë's radicalism in Protestant theology. Contemporary theorists of the ethics of the neighbor have also emphasized what Judith Butler refers to as its pre-ontological character.⁶ Emmanuel Levinas argues that the ethic of the neighbor cannot be reduced to a law or understood within the terms of a psychology of the ego and hence is not recoverable for a politics of identity, either individual or collective. When a lawyer asks Jesus "Who is my neighbor?" he is looking for a [End Page 535] law that will define those who are to be called neighbors.⁷ But Jesus, answering with the parable of the Good Samaritan, indicates that the biblical injunction is not about belonging to a particular set. Rather, the concept is performative. For Jesus, it is by becoming a neighbor that one recognizes another, a stranger or even an enemy, as one's neighbor. The Good Samaritan's actions enact neighborliness, and it is only in this performance that one can recognize another as one's neighbor. Putting the onus on the individual not the law, Jesus turns the lawyer's question around and asks: which of those who passed by on the road "proved neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?" When the lawyer answers, "The one who showed mercy on him," Jesus replies: "Go and do likewise."⁸ Go and do. . . .

Levinas argues that the ethics of the neighbor comes into existence as a result of an existential perception of "substitution, the possibility of putting oneself in the place of the other."⁹ The perception inaugurates "a relationship with a singularity without the mediation of any principle or any ideality." The relation is sensate and embodied. "What concretely corresponds to this description is my relationship with my neighbor," a relationship that Levinas sums in the notion of seeing "the face of a neighbor."¹⁰ This moment of recognition puts in play a precarious existential situation since it inaugurates a sense of oneself as defined in one's active relation to a particular other. Levinas regards this new sense as terrifying since it exists without qualification. Once recognition is proffered, it can't be taken back; and it exists independently of who the neighbor is or what s/he intends or does. To paraphrase the words of Ivan Illich, love...