The dead they do not die; they look on and help, wrote Lawrence, in a letter to a grieving friend, attempting to provide comfort.
But for those who subscribe to the possibility of ghostly love - or spectrophilia, as it is now commonly known - the dead might be said to look on and perv and, in fact, they very often do more than this; engaging in non-consensual sexual activities that range from the nocturnal masturbation of sleepers and the inducement of erotic dreams, to violent spectral rape as in the famous case of Doris Bither whose traumatic story was the inspiration for early-eighties supernatural thriller, The Entity (dir. Sidney J. Furie and starring Barbara Hershey).
Perhaps the most famous spectro-romance in English literature is that between Heathcliff and the ghost of poor Catherine Earnshaw with her ice-cold fingers, forever begging to be readmitted into life. She may give the idiot Lockwood cause for alarm, but Heathcliff is as in love with the spectral figure of Cathy as he was with the flesh and blood version. He calls her to him through his bedroom window with an uncontrollable passion of tears: "Come in! Come in! Cathy, do come. Oh do - once more! Oh! my heart's darling ..." [29]
Heathcliff, in other words, yearns to be haunted and voluntarily engages in a posthumous relation; he denies Cathy the right to rest in peace or ascend unto heaven, just as she prevents him from living happily on earth without her: "Be with me always - take any form - drive me mad! Only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! ... I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!" [167]
Having begged thus to be haunted by Cathy's ghost, this is precisely what happens to him for the next twenty years and, it has to be said, it's no picnic. For to take a ghostly lover is an intolerable torture at times. And if, as he does, Heathcliff twice digs up Cathy's corpse, Wuthering Heights remains essentially a novel in which the dead are guilty of disturbing the living rather than vice versa.
Note: The lines quoted are from the Penguin edition of Wuthering Heights, ed. Pauline Nestor, (2000).
