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Wuthering Heights
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Contents
Introduction
Biographical Sketch
The Story Behind the Story
List of Characters
Summary and Analysis
Critical Views
Melvin R. Watson on Heathcliff’s Complex Personality
Muriel Spark and Derek Stanford on Characterization
in the Novel
J. Hillis Miller on the Significance of Animal Imagery
Q.D. Leavis on King Lear and Other Allusions in
the Novel
U.C. Knoepflmacher on Lockwood’s Unreliability
Carol Jacobs on Wuthering Heights as Metafiction
Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar on
Wuthering Heights and Milton’s Satan
Patsy Stoneman on “Romantic” Love
Bernard J. Paris on Heathcliff’s Character
Marianne Thormählen on Catherine’s Self-Obsession
Lisa Wang on Spirituality in Wuthering Heights
Works by Emily Brontë
Annotated Bibliography
Contributors
Acknowledgments
Index
Wuthering Heights is one of those canonical works or classics
that reward readers at every level of literary sophistication. I
suspect that this has to do with the strangeness or originality
that Emily Brontë’s idiosyncratic “northern romance” possesses
in such abundance. Wuthering Heights is like nothing else in the
language, though the closest work to it, the sister-book as it
were, is Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Yet Charlotte rejected the
affinity and regarded Heathcliff as “a mere demon.” Heathcliff
is much more than that; as a negative hero or hero-villain
he has the sublimity of Captain Ahab in Herman Melville’s
Moby-Dick and something even of the darkened splendor of
Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost. Emily Brontë’s implicit model
for Heathcliff was the long poem Manfred, a self-portrait by
Lord Byron in which the Romantic poet allows himself to
absorb aspects of Milton’s Satan. Despite Heathcliff’s sadism,
he is however satanic primarily in his wounded pride. His
obsessive love for Catherine Earnshaw is the only principle of
his being. This passion is so monumental and so destructive,
of everyone, that it seems inadequate and imprecise to call it
“love.” To define the mutual attachment between Heathcliff
and the first Catherine is a difficult enterprise but is essential to
understanding Wuthering Heights.
One hesitates to term the relationship between Heathcliff
and Catherine even potentially sexual, since sexual love unites
in act, but not in essence, and Catherine is capable of saying:
“I am Heathcliff.” As you reread Wuthering Heights, you come
to see that there are two orders of reality in the novel, with
only tenuous connectors between them. One is both social and
natural, while the other is neither, being the realm of dreams,
ghosts, visions, and (most importantly) the transcendental
yearnings of all our childhoods. That second realm is neither
psychological nor spiritual; Emily Brontë was neither a moral
psychologist nor a Christian, though she was a clergyman’s
daughter. Doomed, like all her siblings, to an early death from
tuberculosis, she learned to dwell in her deepest self, which is
the theater where the drama of Wuthering Heights is performed.
The two oldest Brontë sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, died in
1825, aged eleven and ten. Charlotte, the family survivor, died
at thirty-eight, after mourning the deaths of Emily, aged thirty,
her brother Branwell, at thirty-one, and Anne, at twenty-nine.
Wuthering Heights, completed when Emily Brontë was twentyeight, gives us a world in which everyone marries young
because they seem to know that they will not live very long.
Catherine Earnshaw dies at eighteen, Hindley at twenty-seven,
Isabella at thirty-one, Linton Heathcliff at seventeen, Edgar
at thirty-nine, and Heathcliff, probably, at about thirty-seven.
At the end of the book, Hareton and the second Catherine
are twenty-four and eighteen, respectively, when they happily
marry. While the urgency of all this has both its societal and
its natural aspects, the larger suggestion is a kind of doomeagerness, impatient alike of society and of nature.
Moral judgments, whether of her own day or of ours,
become rapidly irrelevant in the world of Emily Brontë’s one
novel. Though the book portrays both social and natural
energies, these are dwarfed by the preternatural energies of
Heathcliff and of the antithetical side of the first Catherine.
Where daemonic energy so far exceeds ours, then daemonic
suffering will also be present, perhaps also in excess of our own.
But such suffering is foreign to us; Emily Brontë accepts the
aesthetic risk of endowing Heathcliff with very little pathos
recognizable by us. We wonder at his terrible sufferings, as he
slowly dies from lack of sleep and lack of food, but we do not
feel his agony, because he has become even more distant from
us. We are partly moved by the first Catherine’s death, since
both society and nature are involved in her decline, but partly
we stand away from participation, because Catherine is also
very much of the realm she shares with Heathcliff. For the last
half-year of his life, she is a ghostly presence, but one not much
different from what she has been for him before.
The first Catherine is the only bridge we have to the mystery
of Heathcliff, since only Catherine lives both in the realistic and
occult worlds that confront one another in Wuthering Heights.
E.M. Forster, in his Aspects of the Novel (1927), remarked that:
“Wuthering Heights has no mythology beyond what these two
characters provide: no great book is more cut off from the
universals of Heaven and Hell.” That seems true to me, and
it makes Emily Brontë’s great narrative an anomaly; it is of
no clear genre. But it gives us, finally, something larger and
stronger even than Heathcliff, something that I would want
to call more than the personal vision of Emily Brontë. The
transcendental element in the book cannot be assigned any
traditional name, but its force and its persuasiveness cannot be
evaded or ignored. Emily Brontë prophesied no religion except
that of the “God within my breast,” and Wuthering Heights
profoundly implies that Heathcliff and Catherine reunite in a
here and now that yet is not our present world or any world to
come for most among us.
Biographical Sketch
Emily Jane Brontë was born on July 30, 1818, at Thornton,
near Bradford, Yorkshire. She was the fifth child and fourth
daughter of the Reverend Patrick Brontë and Maria Branwell
(Patrick later changed his name to Branwell Brontë). Emily’s
sisters Charlotte (1816–1855) and Anne (1820–1849) were
also writers, as was her brother, Branwell (1817–1848), to a
more limited extent. In 1820 the family moved to Haworth,
where Branwell senior obtained a curacy. The next year Emily’s
mother died; her sister Elizabeth kept house for the family
until she herself died in 1842. Emily briefly attended the
Clergy Daughters’ School at Cowan Bridge in 1824–25 but
thereafter was largely educated at home. Beginning in 1826
the Brontë children, fascinated by some toy soldiers their
father had brought home, conceived of an imaginary African
kingdom called Angria; later Emily and Anne invented a
separate kingdom in the Pacific called Gondal. They all wrote
poems and prose sketches about these kingdoms for the rest of
their lives.
For a period in 1835 Emily accompanied Charlotte as a
tutor at a school in East Yorkshire, but she was unhappy there
and quickly returned to Haworth. In 1837 or 1838 she worked
as a governess at Law Hill, near Halifax; a house near this
school, High Sunderland Hall, is thought by some scholars
to be the chief inspiration for Wuthering Heights. In 1842,
as part of a plan to open a school at Haworth, Emily went
to the Pensionnat Heger in Brussels with Charlotte to study
languages; but, although she was praised for her intellect
and especially her mastery of French, her forbidding manner
attracted few pupils.
Returning to Haworth late in 1842, Emily devoted herself
to the writing of poetry about Gondal. Much of this poetry
is full of the same violent, cruel characters that populate
Wuthering Heights. In the autumn of 1845 Charlotte discovered
a notebook containing this poetry; although Emily was at first
highly incensed at the discovery, she was gradually persuaded to
10
let Charlotte seek its publication. In 1846 a collection of verse
by Charlotte, Emily, and Anne appeared as Poems by Currer,
Ellis, and Acton Bell (their respective pseudonyms). Emily wrote
only one more poem in her lifetime, for by this time she was at
work on her one novel.
Wuthering Heights was written between October 1845 and
June 1846 and published in December 1847, again under
the pseudonym of Ellis Bell. It was not well received and
puzzled most of its readers; many of them regarded it as
excessively morbid, violent, and indelicate. In the years since
Emily Brontë’s death, the book has found its readership and
a steadily growing reputation. It is now considered one of the
masterpieces of nineteenth-century fiction and one of the most
original novels in English literature.
It is conjectured that Emily was working on an expanded
version of Wuthering Heights in the final year or so before
her death; but this version, if there was one, has not been
found. Otherwise, little is known of the final two years of her
life. Emily Brontë died of tuberculosis at the age of thirty on
December 19, 1848.
11
The Story Behind the Story
The history of the first publication and early reception of
Wuthering Heights is as tumultuous and fraught with speculation
as the events depicted in the novel. Sometime in July 1847
Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey (the latter by Emily’s sister
Anne) were sent to an obscure British publisher, Thomas
Cautley Newby, under the name of Ellis (Emily) and Acton
(Anne) Bell. Newby wrote back to Currer Bell (Charlotte
Brontë) that he would accept the manuscripts of Ellis and Acton
Bell on the condition that they would agree to share in the
costs of production. Left with no other offers, the sisters agreed
to this financial arrangement on July 15 of that year. The
agreement was that the sisters would advance Newby 50 pounds
and, upon the sale of the first 250 copies, he would refund them
the same. However, Newby, a newly established publisher and
printer who avidly sought unknown writers, proved himself
unscrupulous and fraudulent. He never refunded the Brontë
sisters the money rightfully due to them. Even more egregious
is that though Emily and Anne had made corrections to the first
proof sheets, which they received in August, Newby consistently
ignored their letters and, instead, delayed publication until after
Charlotte’s Jane Eyre, published on October 16, 1847, proved
to be successful. Once the disreputable Newby realized that he
could capitalize on the name of Bell, he proceeded to publish
their novels, albeit without having made the corrections they
had submitted and actually published fewer than the previously
agreed upon number of copies. Even the appearance of Newby’s
first edition was disappointing as there were two different
bindings, a ribbed deep claret for private purchasers and a
plain cloth one for privately funded circulating libraries such
as Mudie’s* of Oxford Street and W.H. Smith and Son, Strand,
which influenced Victorian literature. Though Charlotte would
later try to convince Emily that Newby was corrupt, Emily
remained misguidedly loyal to him, refusing to exchange him
for Charlotte’s far more reputable publisher, Smith, Elder &
Company.
12
In addition to his breach of the financial contract with Emily
and Anne Brontë, Newby’s deceptive practices extended to his
need to conceal the true identity of Ellis (and Acton) Bell so as
to exploit the initial confusion for his own financial gain. In his
unbridled greed, Newby went as far as purchasing newspaper
advertisements that implied that the three sisters were the same
person. This confusion was echoed in the earliest reviews of
Wuthering Heights. The Athenaeum, in its July 8, 1848, review,
surmised that all three novels (Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights,
and Agnes Grey) were possibly the work of the same author
while punning on their nom de guerre:
The three Bells, as we took occasion to observe
when reviewing Wuthering Heights, ring in a chime
so harmonious as to prove that they have issued from
the same mould. The resemblance borne by their
novels to each other is curious.€.€.€. The Bells must be
warned against their fancy for dwelling upon what is
disagreeable.€.€.€. Were the metal of this Bell foundry of
baser quality that it is, it would be lost time to point out
flaws and take exceptions. As matters stand, our hints may
not be without their use to future ‘castings.’
Two years following Emily Brontë’s death, Sydney Dobell, in
an article published in The Palladium, opined that Wuthering
Heights was the early work of Currer Bell, the female author
of Jane Eyre, characterizing the book as masculine and finding
cause to praise certain elements.
Who is Currer Bell? is a question which has been variously
answered, and has lately, we believe, received in wellinformed quarters, a satisfactory reply. A year or two ago,
we mentally solved the problem thus: Currer Bell is a
woman. Every word she utters is female. Not feminine, but
female. There is a sex about it which cannot be mistaken,
even in its manliest attire. Though she translated the
manuscript of angels—every thought neutral and every
feeling cryptogamous—her voice would betray her.
13
****
Laying aside Wildfell Hall, we open Wuthering Heights,
as at once the earlier in date and ruder in execution. We
look upon it as the flight of an impatient fancy fluttering
in the very exultation of young wings; sometimes beating
against its solitary bars, but turning, rather to exhaust, in
a circumscribed space, the energy and agility which it may
not yet spend in the heavens—a youthful story, written for
oneself in solitude, and thrown aside till other successes
recall the eyes to it in hope.
****
.€.€. [T]here are passages in this book of Wuthering Heights
of which any novelist, past or present, might be proud.€.€.€.
There are few things in modern prose to surpass these
pages for native power. We cannot praise too warmly the
brave simplicity, the unaffected air of intense belief .€.€. the
nice provision of the possible even in the highest effects of
the supernatural.€.€.€.
When Newby brazenly submitted Anne’s second novel, The
Tenant of Wildfell Hall, as the work of Currer Bell to the
American publishing house Harper Brothers, Charlotte and
Anne went to London in summer 1848 to meet with Smith,
Elder and confirm that the Bells were, in fact, three sisters.**
When Newby died in 1882, his name and notoriety were added
to a long list of opportunistic publishers before him, though he
managed, unbeknownst to him, to have delivered an abiding
literary classic that he could never appreciate. Ironically, his
disreputable and underhanded participation in publishing
Wuthering Heights served to augment the novel’s mystique.
Significantly, it was Sydney Dobell’s review in The Palladium,
shortly before a second edition appeared, that gave Charlotte
confidence that Wuthering Heights would now receive a more
favorable reception. It should be noted, however, that Dobell’s
review was not entirely complimentary. As Melvin Watson
points out (“Wuthering Heights and the Critics”), though
Dobell “expiated on the brilliance of the work more fully
14
than had anyone else, .€.€. he makes the gross error of failing
to perceive that it is the mature work of a sensitive artist.” In
1850, on the occasion of the issuing of the second edition of
Wuthering Heights, Charlotte made a final attempt to persuade
the readership that the Bells were three separate writers by
relating the circumstances in which they originally decided
upon the nom de guerre of Bell.
We had very early cherished the dream of one day
becoming authors.€.€.€. We agreed to arrange a small
selection of our poems, and, if possible, get them printed.
Averse to personal publicity, we veiled our own names
under Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell; the ambiguous
choice being dictated by a sort of conscientious scruple
at assuming Christian names, positively masculine, while
we did not like to declare ourselves women, because—
without at that time suspecting that our mode of writing
and thinking was not what is called “feminine”—we had a
vague impression that authoresses are liable to be looked
on with prejudice; we had noticed how critics sometimes
use for their chastisement the weapon of personality, and
for their reward, a flattery, which is not true praise.
Having explained the reasons for their assumed literary
identities, the remainder of her biographical sketch in the
new edition of Wuthering Heights is a eulogy to Emily Brontë’s
abundant imagination and absolute determination to remain
independent: “Under an unsophisticated culture, inartificial
tastes, and an unpretending outside, lay a secret power and
fire that might have informed the brain and kindled the veins
of a hero; but she had no worldly wisdom .€.€. she would fail to
defend her most manifest rights, to consult her most legitimate
advantage.” With Charlotte having settled the issue of true
identity and unequivocally set forth all the personal attributes
that she admired in her beloved sister, it would not be until
the second decade of the twentieth century that Emily Brontë
would be appreciated and acknowledged for what she achieved
in Wuthering Heights.
15
Notes
*In 1842 Charles Edward Mudie established “Mudie’s Select”
library where, for various sums, subscribers could borrow one or more
books at a time. Mudie proved to be an influential entrepreneur and
was therefore instrumental in making available novels and other works
of fiction to his members. Since he also advertised a list of “principal
New and Choice Books” he intended to stock, he also became an
unwitting publicist. Eventually, the advent of public libraries during
the nineteenth century weakened these private establishments.
**Newby’s shameful career lasted until 1874, at which time his
publishing house ceased operations. Indeed, in that very same year in
which he published Wuthering Heights, Newby also published Anthony
Trollope’s first novel, The Macdermots of Ballycloran, attributing it
to Trollop’s mother, Frances, already a successful novelist, as a means
to exploit the family name for his own financial gain.
16
List of Characters
Catherine (Cathy) Earnshaw is the beautiful, passionate, and
destructive heroine of Wuthering Heights. She finds her soul
mate in the dark, brooding Heathcliff but marries a much
weaker man and destroys their happiness. She has grown up
with Heathcliff, an adopted gypsy child, and their friendship
strengthens during an orphaned adolescence under the
tyrannical rule of her older brother. Defiant, domineering,
and impetuous, Cathy finds a new admirer in the delicate,
pampered Edgar Linton, but she grows delirious with grief
when a spurned Heathcliff leaves the Heights. Her joy at his
return, a year into her marriage to Edgar, is so great that her
husband’s jealousy is aroused. Violent arguments ensue, and
Cathy self-destructively hastens her own end through rage
and starvation. She dies in childbirth. Her spirit literally and
figuratively haunts the rest of the novel. Heathcliff is tortured
by her memory, farmers claim to see her ghost walking the
moors, and the narrator himself encounters her frightening
dream-figure. Cathy’s tragedy also threatens until the last to
haunt and repeat itself in the life of her daughter.
Heathcliff is the passionate, vengeful hero of Brontë’s novel.
His mysterious origin makes him a social outcast among the
landed gentry, and his destitute adolescence creates a stoical,
calculating temperament. He is Cathy’s physical and spiritual
equal, but when she accepts Edgar’s attentions, he deserts the
Heights. He returns mysteriously rich and educated, destroying
the equilibrium of Cathy’s marriage. He elopes with Isabella
Linton to destroy her brother, Edgar, and lures Hindley
Earnshaw into gambling away his rights to Wuthering Heights.
Heathcliff’s thirst for revenge is only checked when he senses
the imminence of his own death and, with it, a final reunion
with his ghostly beloved.
Nelly Dean is the housekeeper whose account of the events at
Wuthering Heights comprises the body of the narrator’s—Mr.
17
Lockwood’s—records. She is a sturdy local woman whose
common-sensical nature contrasts sharply with the unfettered
passions of her subjects. Having grown up in the Earnshaw
household and served as Cathy’s maid during her marriage,
Nelly has a privileged vantage point. She is a keen and critical
observer who is not above listening at doors or reading letters.
After Cathy’s death, Nelly becomes the nursemaid of her
daughter, Catherine, and witnesses the twists of fortune of her
new charge. She also witnesses Heathcliff’s strange and ghostly
death, which contradicts her own rational worldview.
Mr. Lockwood is the secondhand narrator of Wuthering
Heights. The novel consists of his diary entries during a period
as Heathcliff’s tenant and records the story he hears from
Nelly. Lockwood is a young London gentleman who rents
the old Linton estate from Heathcliff and soon grows curious
about his misanthropic landlord with the beautiful widowed
daughter-in-law. Lockwood is little more than a passive
listener, confined to his bed with a cold for most of the novel,
yet his impartial facade unsuccessfully hides his admiration for
the second Catherine Linton.
Edgar Linton is Cathy’s husband. He is a soft, effeminate
character completely in the power of his willful, temperamental
wife. He suffers through her rages and illnesses, and when
she dies he resigns himself to an isolated life devoted to his
daughter. His gentle, timorous nature contrasts entirely with
vengeful Heathcliff’s passion. His rival destroys his happiness a
second time by kidnapping his adolescent daughter, Catherine.
The blow is so devastating that Edgar soon dies of grief.
Isabella Linton is Edgar’s younger sister. She is a pampered
child and a selfish, reckless young woman. When Heathcliff
returns, Isabella falls in love with him and they elope, despite
her brother’s prohibitions and Cathy’s serious illness. She is
shocked by Heathcliff’s cruelty but counters with her own
viciousness and flees the Heights on the night of Cathy’s
funeral, when Heathcliff is overcome by grief. Here she exits
18
the story, moving to the south, giving birth to a son, and then
dying twelve years later.
Hindley Earnshaw is Cathy’s older brother and Heathcliff’s
hated enemy. He is jealous of Heathcliff as a child and tries
to ruin him once he becomes master of Wuthering Heights.
He reduces Heathcliff to abject poverty but falls into bad ways
himself after his wife dies. When Heathcliff returns a rich
gentleman after several years’ absence, Hindley takes him in as
a boarder to satiate his greed for gambling. He soon loses his
entire estate at cards. Until his death Hindley leads a violent,
drunken existence indebted to his enemy.
Catherine Linton is Cathy’s daughter and the heroine of the
second half of the novel. She has both Edgar’s gentleness,
playing the devoted daughter during an idyllic childhood,
and Cathy’s willful haughtiness, which manifests itself during
her enforced residence at the Heights. Heathcliff kidnaps her
and forces her when she is sixteen to marry his dying son,
Linton. She is soon widowed, orphaned, and stripped of her
inheritance, and her miserable life at the Heights begins to
parallel that of her mother’s under a tyrannical brother. The
love she eventually discovers for her rough, illiterate cousin
Hareton nonetheless leads to a brighter future.
Hareton Earnshaw is the son of Hindley, Cathy’s older brother.
When his mother dies soon after his birth, his father becomes a
violent drunkard. Hareton grows up angry and unloved. Clear
parallels are drawn between the downtrodden Hareton and the
sullen young Heathcliff. Hareton’s life threatens to end tragically
when the beautiful Catherine Linton arrives at the Heights
and scorns her cousin’s gestures of friendship. She eventually
overcomes her prejudices and Heathcliff dies before he can
destroy a union that returns Wuthering Heights to its rightful
heir and matches the second generation’s true hero and heroine.
Linton Heathcliff is Heathcliff’s sickly son, the product of the
unhappy union of Heathcliff and Isabella Linton. Raised for his
19
first twelve years by his mother, he is taken to the Heights after
her death. Linton is small-minded and cruel despite his physical
weaknesses. Terrified of his father and acting only out of selfpreservation, he helps Heathcliff kidnap Catherine and marries
her against her will. Linton soon dies, having impressed the
reader with his petty selfishness, which stands in sharp contrast
to Hareton’s rough but well-meaning generosity.
20
Summary and Analysis
Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is a love story set in the
desolate moorlands of northern England at the end of the
eighteenth century. It spans a period of some forty years,
following the repercussions of the fiery, doomed love of the
novel’s protagonists, Cathy and Heathcliff. Passion, both love
and hatred, erupt with ferocity in Brontë’s Gothic world, yet
she simultaneously creates a degree of critical distance from the
drama by using a disinterested secondhand narrator. Lockwood,
a newcomer from London, records the story in his diary after
hearing it from his housekeeper Nelly Dean. Because many
of Nelly’s characters are living people whom Lockwood meets
during the course of his stay, and because daily life interrupts
her tale several times—a hiatus of nine months postpones the
narration of the final events—Brontë also creates a troubling,
distorted sense of time. The present world is haunted not only
by past events; the novel is also framed by a pair of unresolved
ghostly visitations which leave the two most incredulous
characters—Lockwood and Nelly Dean—wondering at the
spiritual mysteries of Wuthering Heights.
The novel begins with Lockwood’s diary entry from the
winter of 1801. As a new tenant of the Thrushcross Grange
estate, he pays a visit to his landlord, Heathcliff. Both the
neighboring estate, Wuthering Heights—a grim thick-walled
farmhouse—and his host are singularly unwelcoming. Within
minutes of his arrival, an angry pack of dogs attacks him.
Heathcliff and the servant Joseph belatedly and ungraciously
save him and Lockwood leaves, disgusted. On a second visit he
meets Heathcliff’s beautiful but unfriendly widowed daughterin-law, Catherine, and her sullen, illiterate cousin Hareton
Earnshaw. Lockwood offends his hosts by mistaking Catherine
for Heathcliff’s wife and then for Hareton’s wife, and he poses
a further inconvenience by finding he must stay overnight: a
snowstorm begun during his visit prevents his departure.
His hosts make no effort to accommodate him until the
housekeeper, at the beginning of chapter three, shows him to
21
a small bedchamber. Lockwood finds the name of Catherine
carved on the old-fashioned paneled bed and discovers some
old schoolbooks, including a fragment of what proves to be
the late Cathy Earnshaw’s diary. Her youthful scribblings
describe a painful Sunday under the guardianship of her older
brother, Hindley. The interminable preaching of Joseph (a
servant whom Lockwood himself has met), memorization
of Bible passages, Hindley’s anger, and her imprisonment in
the washroom make up the familiar pattern of her day. In the
end she breaks off, deciding to escape to the moors with her
playmate Heathcliff.
Lockwood nods off and is plagued by nightmares. He
dreams that he hears a tree knocking on the window and that
he breaks the glass to tear off the branch. Reaching out into
the storm he is grabbed by an ice-cold hand. He sees a child’s
face outside, and a voice identifying itself as Catherine Linton
begs to be let in. When he panics and tries to release the grip
by rubbing the spirit’s wrist against the broken glass, his terror
at the sight of the blood jolts him awake with a loud yell. The
noise rouses Heathcliff. Horrified to find Lockwood in his dead
beloved’s bedchamber, he orders him to leave. Lockwood then
unwillingly witnesses Heathcliff’s desperate anguish. Thinking
himself alone, his host throws open the windows and tearfully
begs Cathy’s ghost to enter.
Heathcliff reappears for breakfast transformed from
wretched lover to an angry, brutish master, roughly upbraiding
Catherine, who lashes back. Lockwood leaves the grim
household with renewed disgust. He catches a bad cold on
his journey home. For most of the remaining novel (chapters
four through thirty) he lies in bed listening eagerly to his
housekeeper’s story of how Wuthering Heights arrived at its
present state.
Nelly was a servant at Wuthering Heights when she was
little, growing up with the Earnshaw family’s children. She
begins her story with the arrival of Heathcliff, when Hindley
Earnshaw was fourteen and his sister, Cathy, was six. Their
father returned from a trip to London with a mysterious,
ragged gypsy child, whom the family first greeted with horror.
22
Grudgingly accepted, Heathcliff, as he was called, became the
master’s favorite and grew to be Cathy’s ally and Hindley’s
hated enemy. Cathy was a willful, spontaneous child, “[h]er
spirits .€.€. always at high-water mark,” constantly in trouble or
playing the “little mistress.” Heathcliff was stoically hardened
and single-minded, in one instance withstanding Hindley’s
brutal thrashing to blackmail him into giving up his pony.
Cathy’s mother dies, Hindley leaves for college, and the
increasingly authoritarian master dies three years later. At his
father’s funeral Hindley arrives married to a weak, silly woman.
He takes over Wuthering Heights and immediately cuts off
Heathcliff’s education, forcing him to work as a destitute farm
laborer. Cathy also suffers under her cruel brother, but their
punishments only make the two friends more reckless and more
devoted to each other.
One Sunday evening (here in chapter six Nelly’s story
adroitly picks up where Cathy’s diary had left off) Cathy and
Heathcliff escape to the moors and sneak up to the neighboring
Linton estate, Thrushcross Grange. They see the spoiled
children Edgar and Isabella through the window in the throes
of a tantrum. Before they can leave the guard dogs attack; one
grabs Cathy’s ankle and the two are caught. When they are
brought inside, Edgar recognizes Cathy and the family rushes
to her aid. Meanwhile dark, ragged Heathcliff is declared “unfit
for a decent house” and thrown out, leaving Cathy surrounded
by a doting family.
This episode contrasts two distinctive spaces in Brontë’s
novel. Reversing anticipated associations, she describes the
cruel, unsheltering moor as a savage earthly paradise where
Cathy and Heathcliff are free and equal. But the Lintons’
comfortable parlor, “a splendid place carpeted with crimson,
and crimson covered chairs and tables,” is a site of unhappiness,
a wrongheaded, restrictive heaven. When Cathy abandons the
moor, her shared world with Heathcliff, the act has biblical
connotations, showing her choice as a fall from innocence.
In chapter seven Cathy returns at Christmas; after five weeks
at Thrushcross Grange, she has become a dignified young lady
dressed in furs and silks. Heathcliff, made acutely aware of their
23
different social stations, confides to Nelly that he envies Edgar’s
looks and breeding. Cathy is torn between her new and old
friends, attempting at a Christmas dinner to play a gay hostess
to the Lintons but inwardly suffering when Heathcliff, in anger,
throws sauce on Edgar and is banished from the table.
Nelly relates how Heathcliff’s cruel mistreatment escalates
when Hindley’s wife dies after giving birth to a son. The
husband’s grief drives him to drink and gambling. Nelly cares
for the boy, Hareton, and watches the dissipation of the once
prominent family. “I could not half tell what an infernal house
we had,” she remembers. Unchecked, Cathy leads a double life,
reckless at home but charming to the Lintons. Her mask drops
one afternoon when Edgar comes courting (chapter eight) and
Cathy, incited by a jealous Heathcliff and unindulgent Nelly,
takes out her rage on Hareton. Edgar intervenes and she boxes
his ear. Shocked, he tries to leave and Cathy breaks into tears.
Despite Nelly’s prompting, he cannot tear himself away. Their
fight leads to an open declaration of love.
The day of crisis continues violently. Hindley comes home
drunk, threatens Nelly with a carving knife, and nearly drops
Hareton to his death. He showers Heathcliff with more abuse,
and Heathcliff vows revenge. That evening an angry but
half-repentant Cathy seeks Nelly’s advice. She has accepted
Edgar’s proposal of marriage but feels uneasy. In an important
speech in chapter nine she explains why the engagement
makes her so unhappy. She tells how she had once dreamed she
was in heaven, and she had been so miserable and homesick
that the angry angels had flung her back to earth, where
she awoke on the heath “sobbing for joy.” She insists that
marrying Edgar would be like going to that heaven; she would
be unhappy and grieve for Heathcliff, her second half. She
proclaims, “He’s more myself than I am! Whatever our souls
are made of, his and mine are the same; and Linton’s is as
different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire.”
The speech recalls the imagery of the sixth chapter, reinforcing
the portrayal of the Linton’s house as an unhappy, restrictive
heaven. It also presents love, unconventionally for its time, as a
passionate union of equals and soul mates.
24
As Nelly listens, she notices that Heathcliff has overheard
from an adjoining room but has left before Cathy’s admission of
love, stung by her assertion that to marry him penniless would
degrade her. His departure is discovered at the evening meal. A
summer thunderstorm breaks out. Nature, as is often the case
in Brontë’s world, acts here as an empathetic participant in the
crisis of characters who are themselves so closely associated
with their surrounding landscape. Cathy, distraught, spends
the night looking for Heathcliff. In the morning, drenched
and grief-ridden, she becomes delirious and falls gravely ill.
He does not return, and a long period of convalescence ensues.
Nelly passes quickly over the events of the next three years:
Cathy’s recovery, the death of both Linton parents, Hindley’s
continued life of debauchery, and Cathy’s marriage. Nelly goes
to live with her mistress at Thrushcross Grange, regretfully
leaving Hareton in the hands of his negligent father.
Here (chapter ten) Nelly interrupts her story, leaving
Lockwood in a weak, fretful state. Several characters from her
narrative come to pay visits, oddly telescoping the passage of
time. They include the doctor who had overseen Hareton’s
birth and Cathy’s delirium and Heathcliff himself. After four
irksome weeks Lockwood calls Nelly to finish her story.
Resuming, Nelly skims over the first happy year of Cathy’s
marriage, when an indulgent Edgar and Isabella humored her
every wish. “It was not the thorn bending to the honeysuckles,
but the honeysuckles embracing the thorn.” Heathcliff soon
shatters this peace. He returns one September evening,
approaching Nelly, who at first does not recognize the tall,
well-dressed gentleman in the garden. Cathy is overwhelmed
with joy, but the enraptured reunion of his wife and guest
strains Edgar’s politeness to its limit. He unwillingly tolerates
Heathcliff ’s continued visits. Much to Nelly’s surprise
Heathcliff moves in with his old enemy Hindley, who has lost
to him at cards and is eager to reclaim his debts. Meanwhile,
eighteen-year-old Isabella develops a crush on Heathcliff,
eventually divulging her secret to Cathy. Cathy contemptuously
warns her sister-in-law of the dangers of her friend. Heathcliff,
she says, is “an unreclaimed creature, without refinement,
25
without cultivation; an arid wilderness of furze and whinstone.
I’d as soon put that little canary into the park on a winter’s
day, as recommend you to bestow your heart on him!” Isabella
insists that Cathy is simply jealous, and stung by this rebuke,
Cathy cruelly reveals her sister-in-law’s secret to Heathcliff. He
admits he detests her “maukish waxen face,” so like Edgar’s, but
learns that she would be her brother’s heir were Edgar to die
without a son.
In chapter eleven, Nelly is troubled by premonitions of
a crisis and visits the Heights. Hareton has turned into an
angry, violent child taught by Heathcliff to curse his own
father. On returning to Thrushcross Grange, Nelly catches
Heathcliff embracing Isabella in the garden. Cathy is called
and an argument ensues. Heathcliff accuses Cathy of having
treated him “infernally” but claims he seeks no revenge on
her, his tyrant, only on those weaker than himself.
When Nelly promptly tells Edgar of what has transpired,
he tries to throw Heathcliff out of the house. His guest is
incredulous: “Cathy, this lamb of yours threatens like a bull.€.€.€.
It is in danger of splitting its skull against my knuckles.” The
confrontation breaks up when Linton leaves for reinforcements
and Heathcliff escapes through the back. Cathy, angry at both
men, confides to Nelly that she intends to hurt them through
her own self-destruction: “I’ll try to break their hearts by
breaking my own.” When Edgar returns, Cathy explodes with
hysterical rage. Nelly is first convinced that she is acting, but
when Cathy overhears this speculation, she starts up with
renewed fury and locks herself in her room. In the novel,
her diabolical temper, which sends her husband cowering, is
matched only by Heathcliff’s pitch of vengeful anger.
Cathy’s self-imprisonment and starvation last for three days.
When she finally lets Nelly enter (chapter twelve), she is weak
and half-delirious, though still angry with Edgar. As she slips in
and out of lucidity, she tells Nelly of her anguish, continually
thinking she is back at the Heights and then realizing her
prison-like married state. “Oh, I’m burning!” she cries. “I wish
I were out of doors! I wish I were a girl again, half savage and
hardy, and free .€.€. and laughing at injuries, not maddening
26
under them!” Her premonition of losing the invulnerable
paradise of her youth has proved all too true. As she opens
the windows and calls for Heathcliff, Edgar enters. He is
astonished to see her so deteriorated and angrily sends Nelly
for the doctor. In the town she hears a rumor that Heathcliff
has eloped with Isabella. The news is confirmed the next
morning, and Edgar, crushed by his wife’s state, quietly disowns
his sister without an attempt at pursuit.
The emotional storm of the evening is followed, as after
Heathcliff’s first departure, by a recuperative lull in the story.
Two months of Edgar’s attentive care find Cathy well enough
to sit but permanently weakened. The reader learns that they
are expecting a child. Meanwhile, Heathcliff and Isabella
return to the Heights. Edgar refuses Isabella’s note, so she
writes a long letter to Nelly, which is read to Lockwood in
chapter thirteen. Isabella tells of her husband’s appalling
cruelty, the primitive conditions of the cold, stony Heights,
and its hostile occupants, Hindley, Hareton, and Joseph. She
asks Nelly, “Is Mr. Heathcliff a man? If so, is he mad? If not, is
he a devil?” Nelly visits, finding Isabella utterly destitute and
turned as cruel and vicious as her husband. Before Nelly leaves,
Heathcliff forces her to promise to help him see Cathy.
Heathcliff’s speech to Nelly relies on a repeated motif from
the novel, using imagery from nature to describe a character.
Cathy had likened Heathcliff’s soul to the arid wilderness of
the moors, while Nelly described the Lintons as honeysuckles,
cultivated and fragile. Here Heathcliff proclaims of Edgar’s
meager love: “He might as well plant an oak in a flower-pot
and expect it to thrive, as imagine he can restore her to vigor
in the soil of his shallow cares!” These metaphors reinforce
the contrast of wilderness and cultivation that dominates the
novel.
While Edgar nurses Cathy at the Grange, Heathcliff roams
the gardens outside. In chapter fifteen, Heathcliff spies his
chance when Edgar leaves for Sunday church. Cathy is a
beautiful, haunting vision of her former self. Heathcliff enters,
grasping her in his arms. In the scene that follows, both lovers
vindictively accuse and forgive each other, realizing that Cathy
27
is going to die. She says she hopes Heathcliff will suffer as he
has made her suffer and declares herself eager to escape life, her
“shattered prison.” In a second impassioned embrace Heathcliff
asks Cathy why she had despised him and betrayed her heart.
Meanwhile, Edgar returns from church and as Cathy, mad with
grief, clings to her lover, Nelly tries to force Heathcliff to leave.
They are discovered, Cathy falls in a faint, and Edgar forgets
everything to attend to her. That evening Cathy gives birth to a
daughter and dies without regaining full consciousness.
While the house is in mourning, Nelly finds Heathcliff in
the garden. He is angry and unrepentant. His one prayer is
that Cathy will not rest in peace while he is living. “You said
I killed you—haunt me then!” he calls to her. Cathy is buried
unconventionally in a corner of the churchyard overlooking
the heath.
The grief-stricken house is interrupted in chapter seventeen
by the giddy entrance of Isabella, who has run coatless through
a spring snowstorm from the Heights. She sees only Nelly
before continuing her escape, telling her of the violent past
days at the Heights. Hindley had tried to murder Heathcliff,
who had cut his attacker badly and then beaten him. The
next morning Isabella had taunted Heathcliff, accusing him
of having killed Cathy. In anger he had thrown a knife at her,
cutting the side of her head, and she had fled, wildly happy to
be free. Isabella leaves and Nelly eventually hears news that she
has settled near London and given birth to a sickly child named
Linton. Six months later Hindley dies, drunk to the last and
so deeply in debt to Heathcliff that his son, Hareton, is forced
into dependency on his father’s worst enemy.
Hindley’s death brings the events of the first half of the
novel to a close. While this part has a Gothic pitch sustained
by its two passionate protagonists, the second half begins
in the tone of a fairy tale. In a strange reversal, Heathcliff
becomes the vengeful, scheming villain, while a new romantic
triangle, uncannily reminiscent of his own, unfolds among the
second generation. Chapter eighteen begins with an idyllic
interlude, during which Catherine Linton, Cathy’s daughter,
grows to adolescence. Nelly is her nursemaid and a saddened
28
Edgar becomes a loving, watchful father. Catherine has both
her mother’s willful high spirits and her father’s tenderness.
She lives a secluded life for thirteen years, ignorant of
Wuthering Heights or its inhabitants. Then Edgar is called to
Isabella’s deathbed, leaving Catherine for three weeks. Against
Nelly’s orders she rides out past the park walls and comes
across Wuthering Heights. Nelly finds her happily drinking
tea with the housekeeper and a tall, bashful eighteen-year-old
Hareton. Catherine ignores Nelly’s scolding but leaves after
offending a smitten Hareton by mistaking him for the master
and then treating him like a servant. Nelly swears Catherine
to secrecy, worried of Edgar’s anger.
Isabella dies and Edgar returns with her peevish child.
Catherine dotes on her cousin Linton, but when Heathcliff
demands his son, Edgar has no choice but to comply. The next
morning Nelly sneaks Linton to the Heights before Catherine
can learn of his fate. The boy is terrified of his father, but
Heathcliff, although dearly disgusted with his progeny, tells
Nelly he plans to pamper Linton, the heir to Edgar’s estate.
Reports from the housekeeper confirm Nelly’s suspicion that
Linton is a selfish, spoiled inmate.
In chapter twenty-one, Catherine, on her sixteenth birthday,
goes for a walk with Nelly and meets Heathcliff and Hareton
on the heath. Heathcliff, against Nelly’s warnings, cajoles
Catherine into visiting Wuthering Heights. Catherine is
overjoyed to find her long-lost cousin. Linton, for his part, has
grown into a languid self-absorbed teenager, still in delicate
health. Heathcliff confides to Nelly that he hopes the two will
marry, as he worries that Linton may not live to inherit Edgar’s
estate. Hareton suffers under Catherine’s snubs and leaves
angrily when Linton makes fun of his illiteracy. Heathcliff
brags that he has reduced Hindley’s son to the same destitution
as Hindley had once reduced him.
When Edgar learns of Catherine’s visit, he forbids further
trips to the Heights, so Catherine begins a clandestine
correspondence with her cousin. Nelly soon discovers her
secret stash of love letters and forces her to burn them. Several
months later, Catherine, walking with Nelly by the park wall,
29
slips over to retrieve a fallen hat and is accosted by Heathcliff.
He accuses her of breaking Linton’s heart, insisting his son is
dying. Catherine determines to pay a secret visit.
Catherine and Nelly’s visit takes place in chapter twentythree. Sickly and self-absorbed, Linton tortures Catherine
by exaggerating a violent coughing fit and forces her to stay
and pamper him. Riding home, Nelly catches a bad cold. She
later discovers that during her three weeks in bed Catherine
had visited the Heights almost every evening. She extracts a
confession from Catherine after catching her returning from
another visit. Catherine tells of Linton’s temper and Hareton’s
bashful attentions and jealousy. Heathcliff appears to have been
a hidden but watchful audience.
Nelly reports Catherine’s visits to her father, who again
puts an end to them. The months pass and Catherine turns
seventeen. Her father, his health failing, worries for her future
and agrees to let the cousins meet on the moors. At the first
meeting, Linton is so weak he can barely walk; he dozes off but
wakes terrified that Nelly and Catherine should leave before
the allotted time.
Catherine is saddened by the meeting, and the next week, in
chapter twenty-seven, her father is so much worse that she sets
out for her visit unwillingly. She meets Linton who is almost
crazed with fear. Heathcliff appears, Linton falls limp, and
Catherine is forced to help escort him to his house, while Nelly
follows, scolding. At the Heights, Heathcliff, in his strongest
incarnation of a Gothic villain, kidnaps Catherine. He locks the
door and slaps her for resisting. Linton selfishly refuses to help
her. Heathcliff forces Nelly and Catherine to stay overnight
and in the morning takes Catherine away. Nelly remains locked
up for five days. When she is set free, she learns that Heathcliff
has forced Catherine to marry Linton. Nelly leaves to get help
and finds Edgar on his deathbed. That evening Catherine
escapes and is able to sit by her father as he dies.
After the funeral, Heathcliff arrives to take Catherine back
to the Heights to nurse Linton, forbidding Nelly to see her.
He also tells a horrified Nelly that, after Edgar’s burial, he had
dug up and opened Cathy’s coffin. He tells how he has been
30
haunted by her presence since the night of her funeral, when he
had gone to the graveyard to dig up her coffin and had heard
a distinct sigh at his ear. From that moment he had felt her
presence constantly. “And when I slept in her chamber .€.€.” he
recalls, “I couldn’t lie there; for the moment I closed my eyes,
she was either outside the window, or sliding back the panels,
or entering the room.€.€.€.” The sight of her still unmarred
beauty has eased his tortured nerves.
Nelly learns only through hearsay of her mistress’s new life.
Catherine is forced to nurse Linton alone and lives a sleepless,
grim existence until he dies. The experience turns her bitter
and hostile. She rarely leaves her room unless driven out by
cold. In the kitchen she antagonizes the housekeeper and
reviles Hareton’s acts of kindness. This dreary state of affairs
brings the story up to the present: Lockwood has witnessed
such scenes himself during his visits.
Here (chapter thirty-one) the frame narrative intervenes
again. Lockwood’s journal now dates from the second week
of January 1802; he has recovered from his cold and is
determined to leave his isolation for London. He pays a last
visit to the Heights, meeting a low-spirited Catherine, who
mourns for her old life and her books and cruelly taunts
Hareton for his attempts to read. Heathcliff’s entrance cuts
an admiring Lockwood’s overtures to Catherine short, and he
soon leaves. The diary then leaps eight months to September
of that year. Visiting in the neighborhood, Lockwood finds
himself near Thrushcross Grange and decides to spend the
night. He finds Nelly has moved to the Heights, and on going
to see her, he learns that Heathcliff is dead and Catherine is
engaged to marry Hareton. He first comes upon the lovers
engrossed in a reading lesson. Hareton, happy and well
groomed, dotes on his beautiful, playful teacher. Regretting
his own lost chance, Lockwood sneaks off to find Nelly and
hear the end of the story.
Nelly had been summoned to the Heights soon after
Lockwood’s departure. Her mistress, first delighted to see her,
had soon grown irritable and impatient. She constantly sought
out Hareton’s company in order to tease him. She had tried
31
underhandedly to entice him to read, but he had stubbornly
ignored her. Finally she had apologized to him, sealing her
peace offering with a kiss and a book, gifts he could barely
accept in his bashful confusion.
At the time this new alliance is formed, Heathcliff has
begun to act strange and distant, increasingly attracted by a
mysterious, otherworldly force. He forgets to eat or sleep. One
morning, after spending the night wandering the heath, he tells
Nelly, “Last night I was on the threshold of hell. Today I am
within sight of my heaven” (chapter thirty-three).
That morning he is startled by the sight of the happy
couple, Catherine and Hareton, who both share a marked
likeness to the late Cathy—Hareton in particular resembles
his aunt. Heathcliff confides to Nelly that Hareton reminds
him uncannily of his former self. Here he makes explicit an
important theme of the novel: the repeated pattern of the love
affairs. Heathcliff admits to Nelly that the attachment is a
“poor conclusion” to his plans, but his altered state has sapped
his desire for revenge. “I don’t care for striking, I can’t take the
trouble to raise my hand,” he says.
Heathcliff’s torturous, distracted existence continues. That
evening Nelly takes fright on finding him transfixed in a
deep reverie with ghastly, sunken eyes and a menacing smile.
His nocturnal wanderings continue, and during the day he
locks himself in Cathy’s paneled bedroom. After a further
night of wild storms, Nelly breaks into the room to find the
windows open, and when she pulls back the panels, she is
met with a fierce, unblinking gaze—Heathcliff is dead. To
the scandal of the community, Heathcliff is buried next to
Catherine. The country folk doubt that he rests in peace,
claiming that they have seen his ghost walking the moors. Nelly
is skeptical, although she has recently met a young shepherd
boy on the heath who, sobbing, reported that he had just seen
Heathcliff walking with a woman. The book ends with this
final suggestion that Cathy and Heathcliff have been reunited
in their moorland paradise.
In her novel, Brontë thus allows the love affair of the
second generation to be played out as a muted and happy
32
version of the first. Nonetheless, it is Cathy and Heathcliff’s
love story that remains branded on the reader’s memory.
Their fiery example idealizes love as an attraction of equal,
explosive forces, as a passion too savagely strong for the
confines of cultivated society, and ultimately as a bond more
powerful than life itself.
33
Critical Views
Melvin R. Watson on Heathcliff’s
Complex Personality
Wuthering Heights, then, is a psychological study of an
elemental man whose soul is torn between love and hate.
He is a creature about whose past nothing is known. A dark,
dirty beggar, he was picked up on the Liverpool streets by
Mr. Earnshaw and brought to the secluded part of the world
known as the moors, where he has ample space to work out
his destiny. Only the elemental passions of love and hate
receive any development in the elemental environment by
which he was molded. His strength of will and steadfastness
of purpose he brought with him to the moors, but there they
were prevented by external events from following their natural
course. There he was hardened by his physical surroundings,
toughened and embittered by the harsh treatment of
Hindley, disillusioned by what he considered the treachery of
Catherine, on whom he had poured love out of his boundless
store. Then he resolves to even scores by crushing everyone
who has stood in his way, everyone who has helped to thwart
his happiness, the specter of which haunts him for seventeen
long years during which he works out the venom which
has accumulated in his soul. As soon as part of the venom
is removed and the day of happiness begins to dawn, he no
longer has the will to keep up his torturing.
This is a daring theme, subject to much misinterpretation, for
during most of the action Heathcliff performs like a villain or
like a hero who has consciously chosen evil for his companion.
When completely understood, however, he is neither an Iago
for whom evil is a divinity nor a Macbeth who consciously
chooses evil because of his overpowering ambition, but rather
a Hamlet without Hamlet’s fatal irresolution. Like Hamlet,
he was precipitated into a world in which he saw cruelty and
unfaithfulness operating. His dilemma was not Hamlet’s, for
he has no father to avenge or mother to protect, but in a way
34
he has evil thrust upon him if he is to survive among harsh
surroundings. And Heathcliff was not one to hesitate when faced
with an alternative, however tragic the consequences might be.
Though Heathcliff is not perhaps more sinned against
than sinning, his actions are produced by the distortion of his
natural personality. This distortion had already begun when
Mr. Earnshaw brought him into Wuthering Heights, a “dirty,
ragged, black-haired child.” Already he was inured to hardship
and blows; already he uncomplainingly accepted suffering, as
when he had the measles, and ill treatment from Hindley if he
got what he wanted. From the very first he showed great courage,
steadfastness, and love. But with Mr. Earnshaw’s death Hindley
has the power to degrade Heathcliff to the status of a servant.
A weak, vindictive character, as cruel as Heathcliff without
Heathcliff’s strength, Hindley prepares for his own destruction
by his inhumanity to Heathcliff and the other inhabitants of the
Heights. Though Heathcliff was forced down to an animal level,
he took a silent delight in watching his persecutor sinking also
into a life of debauchery. Nor was he alone, for he had Cathy, on
whom he poured his devotion and love. They were inseparable.
On the moors by day or in the chimney corner by night, they
chatted and dreamed whenever Heathcliff was not busy with the
chores. But the visit to Thrushcross Grange introduced Cathy
to another world to which she opened her arms, and that world
contained Edgar Linton. Edgar held a superficial attraction for
Cathy which Heathcliff could never understand and which he
feared, for, having possessed Cathy for some years, he feared
losing even part of her attention. The final blow, a blow which
turns Heathcliff from sullen acquiescence to tragic determination,
comes when Cathy confesses to Ellen [Nelly] her infatuation with
Edgar and her resolve to marry him so that she and Heathcliff
can escape from the repressive world of Wuthering Heights.
Not once did she think of giving up Heathcliff, but Heathcliff
inadvertently overhears only the first part of the conversation.
Cathy has deserted him for a mess of pottage, for fine clothes and
refined manners; she is ashamed of his rough exterior, of his lack
of polish; she would be degraded to marry him as he is. Heathcliff
doesn’t stay to hear Cathy confess her oneness with him:
35
If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue
to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated,
the universe would turn to a mighty stranger: I should not
seem a part of it. My love for Linton is like the foliage in
the woods: time will change it, I’m well aware, as winter
changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the
eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but
necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff. He’s always, always in
my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a
pleasure to myself, but as my own being.
His mind is made up. If love alone is insufficient to hold Cathy,
he will secure the necessary money and polish; if his only
happiness is to be snatched from him, he will turn to hate;
and now not only Hindley will be the object of his wrath, but
Edgar also. As long as he had Cathy, his worldly condition,
his suffering, was as nothing; without her, all is chaff to be
trampled underfoot.
For three years, during which he vanishes from sight, he
prepares himself, the poison in his system increasing all the
time until love is submerged in a sea of hate which he must
drain off before love can reassert itself. Union with Cathy is
his one desire. Since physical union is made impossible by
her death—not that it was ever important,—the union must
be spiritual, but the world and the people of the world must
be subjugated before such happiness can be achieved. The
course is set, the wind is strong, the bark is sturdy, the journey
long. For seventeen years Heathcliff wreaks his vengeance on
Hindley, Edgar, and Isabella and on their children Hareton,
young Cathy, and Linton. The account of the trip is not pretty.
Even in the love scenes before the elder Cathy’s death there is a
savage passion which strikes terror to the heart of the beholder,
unlike any other scenes in the course of English fiction; and
before the masochistic treatment of Isabella, Hareton, young
Cathy, and Linton we cringe. Here is a man haunted by a ghost
of happiness for which he must exorcise his soul, a soul filled
with accumulated hatred. That he ceases his reign of terror
before Hareton and young Cathy have been completely broken
36
is due not to any loss of spiritual strength but to the realization
that the end of the voyage is near, that the tempest is subsiding,
and that reunion with Cathy is about to be consummated. In
Heathcliff one looks in vain for Christian morals or virtues; his
is a primitive, pagan soul; yet love conquers even a Heathcliff in
the end—after his soul has been purged of the hate in and with
which he has lived for decades. The evil that he does springs
not from a love of evil itself, but from the thwarting of the
natural processes of love.
Muriel Spark and Derek Stanford on
Characterization in the Novel
In a similar way, Catherine’s delirium marks a turning-point
in her existence. Not only does it indicate the crisis of her
illness—after which the currents of her life shift their direction
and flow towards death—but it marks also a mental change.
It serves as the symbol of a trauma, the experiencing of which
has led her nature wholly to reject her husband’s love. Until
that moment, her affection for Edgar had been real though
limited in scope. Physically, she had found him attractive; and
if there had never been any question of her sharing with him
that sympathy of soul which she had enjoyed with Heathcliff,
Edgar’s tenderness and kindness had given him no small claim
upon her heart.
“What you touch at present you may”; she tells her
husband, who comes to see her during her illness, after a
quarrel, “but my soul will be on that hill-top before you
lay hands on me again. I don’t want you, Edgar: I’m past
wanting you.”
What has happened is that her love for Heathcliff—buried
for so long—has burst to the surface again, on his reappearance.
But in the trauma which is expressed by her delirium, we find
few references to the grown Heathcliff. It is to the Heathcliff
37
of her youth that her wandering mind returns. Plucking the
feathers from her pillow, she ruminates fancifully upon them:
“And here is a moor-cock’s; and this—I should know it
among a thousand—it’s a lapwing’s. Bonny bird; wheeling
over our heads in the middle of the moor. It wanted to
get to its nest, for the clouds had touched the swells, and
it felt rain coming. This feather was picked up from the
heath, the bird was not shot: we saw its nest in the winter,
full of little skeletons. Heathcliff set a trap over it, and the
old ones dare not come. I made him promise he’d never
shoot a lapwing after that, and he didn’t. Yes, here are
more! Did he shoot my lapwings, Nelly? Are they red,
any of them! Let me look.”
But the course of her spirit is setting towards death, as much as
to the object of her rekindled love; and Heathcliff the boy, and
Heathcliff the man exist together in her mind when she looks
from her bedroom at Thrushcross Grange, imagining that she
can see the candle in her window at Wuthering Heights (some:
five miles away, and quite invisible):
“Look!” she cried eagerly, “that’s my room with the candle
in it, and the trees swaying before it: and the other candle is in
Joseph’s garret. Joseph sits up late, doesn’t he? He’s waiting till
I come home that he may lock the gate. Well, he’ll wait a little
while yet. It’s a rough journey, and a sad heart to travel it; and
we must pass by Gimmerton Kirk, to go that journey! We’ve
braved its ghosts often together, and dared each other to stand
among the graves and ask them to come. But, Heathcliff, if I
dare you now, will you venture? If you do, I’ll keep you. I’ll not
lie there by myself: they may bury me twelve feet deep, and
throw the church down over me, but I won’t rest till you are
with me. I never will!”
The full stream of her mind has turned back towards the
past. The present—save as a dimension of pain—possesses no
reality for her. The future holds only a sense of death.€.€.€.
In contrast to this dramatic portrayal of character, we have
in the minor figures of Wuthering Heights a static presentation
38
of personality. Joseph, the serving-man, and Nelly Dean, the
house-keeper, do not change their words or ways one iota.
They grow older, and in Nelly Dean’s case the occasional play
of nostalgia over memories of her youth is sometimes evoked.
But she is “a canty dame”; a busy, kindly, practical body,
seldom giving to thinking of herself. In her narrative of the
chief characters, we have a mirror held up to the past, a mirror
whose glass is sometimes dimmed with sadness for those whom
it reflects, but hardly on its own behalf at all.
Joseph, the serving-man, is presented yet more simply.
Apart from his attachment to Wuthering Heights, it is hard
to imagine him possessed of a past. He is, pre-eminently,
portrayed ‘in the flat’. Both he and Nelly Dean are bound by
ties of association to the environment of the drama, and this
rootedness in the place gives them an added stability in the
way that their image affects the imagination. “My mother had
nursed Mr. Hindley Earnshaw that was Hareton’s father”,
Nelly Dean tells Mr. Lockwood. While speaking of her early
days she says, “I ran errands, and helped to make hay, and hung
about the farm ready for anything that anybody would set me
to.” Our sense of the permanence of these characters may have
owed something to Emily’s reading of Wordsworth, in whom
the idea of the stabilising influence of one given place in the
growth of character is often enough encountered.
But the sense of permanence which Nelly Dean and Joseph
evoke is out of all proportion to the miscellany of moods and
mannerisms which go to make up a character in life. They are
largely functional figures (Nelly’s activity being that of narrator,
whilst Joseph’s purpose appears to be that of creating a kind
of humorous relief). This relief, it is true, is of a singularly
unbuoyant order. It is a grim and narrow humour that we get
from this Calvinistic servitor. “The wearisomest self-righteous
Pharisee that ever ransacked a Bible to rate the promises to
himself and fling the curses to his neighbours” is Nelly Dean’s
description of him. But for all the unpleasantness of his nature,
and the canting sententiousness of his speech, we must admit
that the language he uses shows Emily a master of dialect.
Compared with Joseph’s native invective, Heathcliff’s talk is
39
rhetorically Byronic. Joseph—the most undeveloped character
in this novel—expresses himself more authentically than any
of the other more complex figures. No doubt there is a touch
of caricature in Joseph, through whose creation Emily was
able to publish her scorn of Calvinism, and so get even with
her aunt, who was always thrusting such doctrines down her
throat. But, I think, there is more than satire in Joseph. Emily,
though intellectually rebellious, was attracted by harshness
and narrowness; 4 and when this went combined with the
local vigour of an altogether unsophisticated speech, I suspect
she found the material fascinating. In Joseph’s remarks and
monologues, she certainly achieved one of the most racy uses
of rustic speech in English fiction.
Of the major characters in this book, I have no doubt that
Catherine is the greatest—the fullest and most original in
creation. Besides her uniqueness, Heathcliff appears as a
tedious stock Byronic figure—his mouth filled with oaths and
his fist raised to strike—a perversely idealised adolescent in a
tantrum. How many lines of misanthropic rant by the author
of The Corsair, The Giaour, and Lara might be applied to
Heathcliff’s condition!
For I have buried one and all,
Who loved me in a human shape;
And the whole earth would henceforth be
A wider prison unto me.
“I learned to love despair,” says one of Byron’s heroes; and
despair and revenge make up the gamut of Heathcliff’s emotions
after Catherine’s death. To recognise the ‘note’ of the Byronic
type in Byron is to have recognised all one needs to know of the
character of Heathcliff, who is Byron in prose dress.
Catherine, it is true, has a prototype in literature; though it
is unlikely that Emily used the original figure as a base for her
creation. Or if she did, she so developed the traits of character
and their outcome in action, that there can be no suggestion
of a copy. None the less, it is interesting to notice that Emily’s
heroine bears the same name as Shakespeare’s Katharina, in
40
The Taming of the Shrew. But Emily’s shrew is a tragic one;
and Cathy (her daughter, who—in some ways—completes her
mother’s emotional intention) is not overcome by ring-master
tactics but by Hareton’s independent nature, thawing out into
co-operation and affection.
But if Catherine appears as the unbroken filly, the shrew
who is not tamed by her husband Edgar (even though we are
given to understand she loves him), this is only one aspect
of her make-up and a merely symptomatic one at that. For
Catherine, in fact, is a curious case of self-love carried to the
extreme; the degree of her obsession giving an almost paranoic
quality to what she observes. When she lies with a self-induced
frenzy, weak from want of food, she seems at times to be near
to arriving at the truth about herself:
“.€.€. I begin to fancy you don’t like me”, she tells Nelly
Dean during her illness. “How strange! I thought, though
everybody hated and despised each other, they could not
avoid loving me. And they have all turned to enemies in a
few hours. They have, I’m positive—the people here.”
The falsehood or illusion lies, of course, in imagining that
nobody could avoid loving her. They had not suddenly changed
to enemies merely because for a moment she was able to see
that they were not infatuated. She had chosen to believe that
everybody was under her spell, and when she sees that spell
denied, she concludes that her faithful devotées have now become
her adversaries. Her whole perspective is egoistic and unreal.
This ambiguous double-vision in which Catherine sees yet
does not see herself—in which she recognises the truth and
then straightaway distorts it—has its symbolic counter-part in
the scene where she catches sight of her face in the mirror but
does not identify it as her own. To her, it appears a strange and
frightening countenance—because she has willed not to recognise
herself. Catherine, indeed, represents the spirit of chaos in human
affairs. Only in nature does she find that freedom which her will
demands; only on the moors does she discover that liberty from
personal responsibility which her unbridled egoism insists upon.
41
And as she accepts no principle of inter-dependence during her
life, so in death she wishes to avoid it. She wants to be buried “in
the open air, with a headstone”, and not in the Lintons’ chapel
where her husband’s family have been laid.
Note
4. That Emily well understood the nature of such a repulsive
sympathy can be shown from many passages in her works. “But no
brutality disgusted her: I suspect she has an innate admiration of” says
Heathcliff of his wife Isabella.
J. Hillis Miller on the Significance of
Animal Imagery
The opening chapters of Wuthering Heights introduce the
reader, through the intermediary of the narrator, to a set of
people living in the state of nature as it is defined in “The
Butterfly.” This state also matches that of the Gondal poems,
with their wars and rebellions and sadistic cruelties. In Gondal,
as in the country of Wuthering Heights, every man’s hand is
against his neighbor.
Lockwood’s discovery of the nature of life at Wuthering
Heights coincides with his step-by-step progress into the
house itself. On his two visits he crosses various thresholds:
the outer gate, the door of the house, the door into the
kitchen, the stairs and halls leading to an upstairs room.
Finally he enters the interior of the interior, the oaken closet
with a bed in it which stands in a corner of this inner room.
Wuthering Heights is presented as a kind of Chinese box of
enclosures within enclosures. The house is like the novel itself,
with its intricate structure of flashbacks, time shifts, multiple
perspectives, and narrators within narrators. However far
we penetrate toward the center of Wuthering Heights there
are still further recesses within. When Lockwood finally
gets inside the family sitting-room he can hear “a chatter of
tongues, and a clatter of culinary utensils, deep within,”14 and
Joseph can be heard mumbling indistinctly in the “depths of
42
the cellar” (5). This domestic interior is, by subtle linguistic
touches, identified with the interior of a human body, and
therefore with another human spirit. Lockwood’s progress
toward the interior of Wuthering Heights matches his
unwitting progress toward the spiritual secrets it hides. Just
as the “narrow windows” of Wuthering Heights are “deeply
set in the wall” (2), so Heathcliff’s “black eyes withdraw .€.€.
suspiciously under their brows” (1), and Lockwood’s entrance
into the house is his inspection of its “anatomy” (3).
The nature of human life within this “penetralium” (3)
is precisely defined by the animals Lockwood finds there.
The shadowy recesses of these strange rooms are alive with
ferocious dogs: “In an arch, under the dresser, reposed a
huge, liver-coloured bitch pointer surrounded by a swarm of
squealing puppies; and other dogs, haunted other recesses”
(3). Lockwood tries to pet this liver-colored bitch, but her lip
is “curled up, and her white teeth watering for a snatch” (5),
and later when, left alone, he makes faces at the dogs, they
leap from their various hiding places and attack him in a pack.
In a moment the hearth is “an absolute tempest of worrying
and yelping” (6). The storm which blows at the exterior of the
house and gives it its name (2) is echoed by the storm within
the house, a tempest whose ultimate source, it may be, is the
people living there. Lockwood’s encounter with Heathcliff’s
dogs is really his first encounter with the true nature of their
owner, as Heathcliff himself suggests when he says: “Guests
are so exceedingly rare in this house that I and my dogs, I am
willing to own, hardly know how to receive them” (6).
The animal imagery used throughout Wuthering Heights
is one of the chief ways in which the spiritual strength of
the characters is measured. Heathcliff is “a fierce, pitiless,
wolfish man” (117), while Edgar Linton is a “sucking leveret”
(131), and Linton Heathcliff is a “puling chicken” (237). Such
figures are more than simple metaphors. They tell us that
man in Wuthering Heights, as in the essay on the butterfly, is
part of nature, and no different from other animals. Critics
have commented on the prevalence of verbs of violent action
in Wuthering Heights, verbs like “writhe, drag, crush, grind,
43
struggle, yield, sink, recoil, outstrip, tear, drive asunder.”15 No
other Victorian novel contains such scenes of inhuman brutality.
No other novel so completely defines its characters in terms of
the violence of their wills. In Wuthering Heights, people go on
living only if their wills remain powerful and direct, capable of
action so immediate and unthinking that it can hardly be called
the result of choice, but is a permanent and unceasing attitude
of aggression. Continuation of life for such people depends on
their continuing to will, for in this world destruction is the law
of life. If such characters cease to will, or if their wills weaken,
motion slows, things coagulate, time almost stops, and their
lives begin to weaken and fade away. Unless they can find some
way to recuperate their wills, their lives will cease altogether,
or tend slowly in the direction of death. So Lockwood, after
his terrifying dreams, says, as the hours crawl toward morning,
“.€.€. time stagnates here” (30). So the second Catherine, at the
low point of her life, when only her own action will save her,
says, “Oh! I’m tired—I’m stalled .€.€.” (342). And so Isabella,
one of the weak people in the novel, can only escape from the
tyranny of Heathcliff by precipitating herself into the realm
of violence inhabited by the other characters who survive.
The description of her escape from Wuthering Heights is a
condensed distillation of the quality of life in the novel: “In
my flight through the kitchen I bid Joseph speed to his master;
I knocked over Hareton, who was hanging a litter of puppies
from a chairback in the doorway; and, blest as a soul escaped
from purgatory, I bounded, leaped, and flew down the steep
road: then, quitting its windings, shot direct across the moor,
rolling over banks, and wading through marshes; precipitating
myself, in fact, towards the beacon light of the Grange” (208).
Lockwood learns when he makes his second visit to
Wuthering Heights what it means to say that the people there
live like ferocious dogs, and can survive only through the
strength of their wills. He finds that everyone at the Heights
hates everyone else with a violence of unrestrained rage which
is like that of wild animals. Anarchy prevails. Even that mild
Christian, Nelly Dean, accepts this universal selfishness when
44
she says, “Well, we must be for ourselves in the long run;
the mild and generous are only more justly selfish than the
domineering .€.€.” (105). At Wuthering Heights only force is
recognized as an intermediary between people, and each person
follows as well as he can his own whim. “I’ll put my trash
away,” says Catherine Linton to Heathcliff, “because you can
make me, if I refuse .€.€. But I’ll not do anything, though you
should swear your tongue out, except what I please!” (33). As in
Lockwood’s dream of Jabes Branderham’s sermon, every moral
or religious law has disappeared, or has been transformed
into an instrument of aggression. The “pilgrim’s staves” of
the church congregation are changed, in Lockwood’s dream,
into war clubs, and the service, which should be the model of
a peaceful community, collectively submitting to divine law,
becomes a scene of savage violence, recalling the two times
when Lockwood has been attacked by dogs, and giving an
accurate dream projection of the relations among the inmates
of Wuthering Heights (26).
This animality of the people at the Heights is caused by
the loss of an earlier state of civilized restraint. For a human
being to act like an animal means something very different
from a similar action performed by the animal itself. There
are no laws for an animal to break, and there is nothing
immoral in the slaughter of one animal by another. The
characters in Wuthering Heights have returned to an animal
state. Such a return is reached only through the transgression
of all human law. The inmates of Wuthering Heights have
destroyed the meaning of the word “moral,” so that it can be
used, as Heathcliff uses it, to define the most inhuman acts of
cruelty (174).
Notes
14. Wuthering Heights, “The Shakespeare Head Brontë” (Boston
and New York, 1931), p. 3. Numbers in parentheses after texts refer
to page numbers in this edition.
15. Mark Schorer’s list. See his introduction to the Rinehart edition
of Wuthering Heights (New York, 1950), p. xv.
45
Q.D. Leavis on King Lear and Other Allusions
in the Novel
I would first like to clear out of the way the confusions of the
plot and note the different levels on which the novel operates
at different times. It seems clear to me that Emily Brontë had
some trouble in getting free of a false start—a start which
suggests that we are going to have a regional version of the
sub-plot of Lear (Shakespeare being generally the inspiration
for those early nineteenth-century novelists who rejected
the eighteenth-century idea of the novel). In fact, the Learworld of violence, cruelty, unnatural crimes, family disruption
and physical horrors remains the world of the household at
Wuthering Heights; a characteristic due not to sadism or
perversion in the novelist (some of the physical violence is quite
unrealized)1 but to the Shakespearian intention. The troubles
of the Earnshaws started when the father brought home the
boy Heathcliff (of which he gives an unconvincing explanation
and for whom he shows an unaccountable weakness) and
forced him on the protesting family; Heathcliff ‘the cuckoo’
by intrigue soon ousts the legitimate son Hindley and, like
Edmund, Gloucester’s natural son in Lear, his malice brings
about the ruin of two families (the Earnshaws and the Lintons,
his rival getting the name Edgar by attraction from Lear).
Clearly, Heathcliff was originally the illegitimate son and
Catherine’s half-brother, which would explain why, though so
attached to him by early associations and natural sympathies,
Catherine never really thinks of him as a possible lover either
before or after marriage;2 it also explains why all the children
slept in one bed at the Heights till adolescence, we gather (we
learn later from Catherine (Chapter XII) that being removed at
puberty from this bed became a turning-point in her inner life,
and this is only one of the remarkable insights which Wuthering
Heights adds to the Romantic poets’ exploration of childhood
experience). The favourite Romantic theme of incest therefore
must have been the impulsion behind the earliest conception
of Wuthering Heights. Rejecting this story for a more mature
intention, Emily Brontë was left with hopeless inconsistencies
46
on her hands, for while Catherine’s feelings about Heathcliff
are never sexual (though she feels the bond of sympathy with a
brother to be more important to her than her feelings for her
young husband), Heathcliff’s feelings for her are always those
of a lover. As Heathcliff has been written out as a half-brother,
Catherine’s innocent refusal to see that there is anything in
her relation to him incompatible with her position as a wife,
becomes preposterous and the impropriety which she refuses
to recognize is translated into social terms—Edgar thinks
the kitchen the suitable place for Heathcliff’s reception by
Mrs. Linton while she insists on the parlour. Another trace
of the immature draft of the novel is the fairy-tale opening
of the Earnshaw story, where the father, like the merchant in
Beauty and the Beast, goes off to the city promising to bring his
children back the presents each has commanded: but the fiddle
was smashed and the whip lost so the only present he brings for
them is the Beast himself, really a ‘prince in disguise’ (as Nelly
tells the boy he should consider himself rightly); Catherine’s
tragedy then was that she forgot her prince and he was forced
to remain the monster, destroying her; invoking this pattern
brought in much more from the fairy-tale world of magic, folklore and ballads, the oral tradition of the folk, that the Brontë
children learnt principally from their nurses and their servant
Tabby.3 This element surges up in Chapter XII, the important
scene of Catherine’s illness, where the dark superstitions about
premonitions of death, about ghosts and primitive beliefs about
the soul, come into play so significantly;4 and again in the
excessive attention given to Heathcliff’s goblin-characteristics
and especially to the prolonged account of his uncanny
obsession and death. That this last should have an air of being
infected by Hoffmann too is not surprising in a contemporary
of Poe’s; Emily is likely to have read Hoffmann when studying
German at the Brussels boarding-school and certainly read the
ghastly supernatural stories by James Hogg and others in the
magazines at home. It is a proof of her immaturity at the time
of the original conception of Wuthering Heights that she should
express real psychological insights in such inappropriate forms.
47
In the novel as we read it Heathcliff ’s part either as
Edmund in Lear or as the Prince doomed to Beast’s form,
is now suspended in boyhood while another influence, very
much of the period, is developed, the Romantic image of
childhood,5 with a corresponding change of tone. Heathcliff
and Catherine are idyllically and innocently happy together
(and see also the end of Chapter V) roaming the countryside
as hardy, primitive Wordsworthian children, ‘half savage
and hardy and free’. Catherine recalls it longingly when
she feels she is dying trapped in Thrushcross Grange. (This
boy Heathcliff is of course not assimilable with the vicious,
scheming and morally heartless—‘simply insensible’—
boy of Chapter IV who plays Edmund to old Earnshaw’s
Gloucester.) Catherine’s dramatic introduction to the genteel
world of Thrushcross Grange—narrated with contempt by
Heathcliff who is rejected by it as a plough-boy unfit to
associate with Catherine—is the turning-point in her life
in this form of the novel; her return, got up as a young
lady in absurdly unsuitable clothes for a farmhouse life, and
‘displaying fingers wonderfully whitened with doing nothing
and staying indoors’ 6 etc. visibly separates her from the
‘natural’ life, as her inward succumbing to the temptations of
social superiority and riches parts her from Heathcliff.
Notes
1. v. Appendix B.
2. The speech (Chap. IX) in which Catherine explains to Nelly
why she couldn’t marry Heathcliff—on social grounds—belongs to
the sociological Wuthering Heights. But even then she intends, she
declares, to keep up her old (sisterly) relations with him, to help him
get on in the world—‘to rise’ as she significantly puts it in purely social
terms.
3. Tabby had, Mrs. Gaskell reports, ‘known the “bottom” or valley
in those primitive days when the faeries frequented the margin of the
“beck” on moonlight nights, and had known folk who had seen them.
But that was when there were no mills in the valleys, and when all the
wool-spinning was done by hand in the farm-houses round. “It wur
the factories as had driven ’em away”, she said.’
4. v. Appendix C.
5. I am referring to the invaluable book, The Image of Childhood, by
P. Coveney, though this does not in fact deal with Wuthering Heights.
48
6. This very evident judgment of Nelly’s on the gentility with
which Catherine has been infected by her stay at Thrushcross Grange
(lavishly annotated in the whole scene of her return home in Chap.
VII) is clearly endorsed by the author, since it is based on values
that are fundamental to the novel and in consonance with Emily’s
Wordsworthian sympathies. It is supplemented by another similar
but even more radical judgment, put into old Joseph’s mouth, the
indispensable Joseph who survives the whole action to go on farming
the Heights and who is made the vehicle of several central judgments,
as well as of many disagreeable Calvinistic attitudes. Resenting the
boy Linton Heathcliff’s contempt for the staple food, porridge, made,
like the oat-cake, from the home-grown oats, Joseph remembers the
boy’s fine-lady mother: ‘His mother were just soa—we wer a’most
too mucky tuh sow t’corn fur makking her breead.’ There are many
related judgments in the novel. We may note here the near-caricature
of Lockwood in the first three chapters as the town visitor continually
exposing his ignorance of country life and farming.
U.C. Knoepflmacher on
Lockwood’s Unreliability
Emily Brontë knew that her bent, like Charlotte’s, was romance;
yet she was also astute enough to recognize that the dominant
mode of the English novel was comic. Byron, who had written
“Childe Harold” and Manfred, had also composed the comic
Don Juan; Shakespeare, whose King Lear Lockwood remembers
so incongruously when he is beset by Heathcliff’s dogs, had
blended humor and melodrama, laughter and terror. Emily’s
dramatic powers allowed her to control the fantasy world she
had once shared with her brother and sisters. Her inventiveness
allowed her to devise a framework in which the outer veneer of
social comedy encases the truths of fantasy and myth.
In Vanity Fair, as we have seen, Thackeray was able to express
his pessimistic outlook within the traditional framework of the
comic novel by throwing out the dictionary definitions of good
and evil and thereby forcing the reader to reassess reality itself.
Though sharing this aim, Emily Brontë is far more radical in
her departures. Thackeray’s Showman refuses to act as our
moral guide; yet his equivocations help to establish definable
49
attitudes in the reader. The guide provided to the reader in
the opening pages of Wuthering Heights proves to be totally
unreliable. We cross the threshold of Heathcliff’s mansion
together with Lockwood only to find that the assumptions
we have shared with this city man become totally untenable.
Lockwood is a refugee from civilized society. His witty tone
and extreme self-consciousness make him a distinct cousin of
the jesting misanthropist who acts as Thackeray’s narrator.
Yet this Thackerayan figure, whose manners are urbane and
whose outlook is comic, cannot cope with the asocial world
he finds beyond the “threshold” of Wuthering Heights. His
education becomes the reader’s own, although, eventually, our
understanding will surpass his.
Once inside the mansion Lockwood commits one blunder
after another. Each overture, each phrase that he utters,
results in a new misconception. In desperation, Lockwood
cries out to the girl he has twice misidentified: “I want
you to tell me my way, not to show it” (ch. 2). He demands
to be led back to the sanity of Thrushcross Grange. After
Lockwood is imprisoned by the snowstorm, the guide he
demands will appear to him in a nightmare. Although the
disturbing dream which he defends himself against was
intended for Heathcliff—whose sensibilities are totally unlike
his own, despite Lockwood’s earlier, jocular identification of
his host—the dream, though not telling Lockwood the way
out of the labyrinth he has entered, begins to show us a new
way of creating order. Lockwood, however, bound by his
ordinary perceptions, fails to see that the creature outside the
window is, potentially, a guide whose call for pity can rescue
him from the “sin no Christian need pardon.” Next day he
relies on Heathcliff to conduct him back to the Grange. The
snow-covered landscape has become treacherous: a “billowy,
white ocean” has erased all landmarks, covering “rises and
depressions in the ground: many pits, at least, were filled to
a level” (ch. 3). Heathcliff follows stones erected to “serve
as guides in the dark”; he warns the stumbling Lockwood to
“steer to the right or left, when I imagined I was following,
correctly, the winding of the road.” Just as the external
50
topography has altered from what “yesterday’s walk left
pictured” in Lockwood’s mind, so has his neatly ordered
inner world been disrupted by contradictions he has yet to
sort out. Heathcliff stops at the gate of the Grange. Within
its confines the exhausted Lockwood yields to a new “guide,”
Nelly Dean. Yet even her more sedate attempts to impose
order and sanity on the reality he has experienced prove to
be insufficient.
The reader is lured with Lockwood into the irrational world
of Wuthering Heights. Like Lockwood, we have had barely time
to take note of the lavish engravings on the front door, the
date “1500,” and the name “Hareton Earnshaw” before we are
faced with incongruities we must decipher. The Heights lacks
any “introductory lobby or passage,” just as Emily Brontë’s
novel lacks the introductory passages furnished by a Trollope
or Thackeray. Lockwood’s initial experience is our own. As
we stand on the threshold with him we too ponder between
“speedy entrance” or “complete departure.” On crossing the
threshold we are mystified. Unsure of the causes for our
mystification, we, like Lockwood, make the mistake of being
overconfident. Soon, however, we are on the defensive. Our
instinctive reaction is to flee, to be told the way out. Emily
Brontë’s Victorian readers took this way out. Confused by
the discrepancy between Lockwood’s polite diction and the
atmosphere into which he is thrust, they must have been as
confused as he is to find that a lady’s furry “favourites” turn
out to be a heap of dead rabbits. Yet the modern reader,
more attuned to incongruity, gradually accepts the challenge.
Whereas Lockwood represses the meaning of the two dreams
he has experienced, we are willing to analyze their content.
While Lockwood is content to lie on his back for most of the
novel, willing to be entertained by Nelly’s account, we continue
to wander through a maze of conflicting attitudes, shifts in
point of view, and abrupt changes in tone.
For a long while the reader is thwarted. Expectations
misfire. Doors that seem open are shut; gates that seem closed
turn out to provide us with an unexpected means of passage.
Hovering between comic realism and the exaggerations of
51
melodrama, this novel constantly avoids either extreme. In
Thackeray’s scheme, too, satire and sentiment qualify each
other. But in Wuthering Heights these two modes merge and
interpenetrate. Unlike Vanity Fair, Emily Brontë’s novel
moves toward a resolution. The social-comical realism of
Lockwood and Nelly clashes with the asocial tragic myth
enacted by Cathy and Heathcliff, but a new comic mode—
represented by the idyll of the second Cathy and Hareton—
bridges the chasm and ultimately provides the passage that
seemed so impossible to find. In the novel’s closing scene,
Lockwood flees through the back door of the Heights. The
reader, however, is rewarded for his endurance. He welcomes
the restoration of order, and he wonders, with the departing
Lockwood, how anarchy could ever have disrupted the benign
face of “that quiet earth” (ch. 34).€.€.€.
By her willingness to interpenetrate opposites, Emily
Brontë achieves artistically what Catherine Earnshaw
was unable to do. Catherine wanted to retain Edgar and
Heathcliff, to live suspended between responsibility and
freedom, civilization and eros, Victorian acquiescence and
Romantic rebellion. Finding herself unable to span Edgar’s
social order and the life of instinct that she shared with
Heathcliff, Cathy chooses to die, hoping to transcend a finite
world of irreconcilables. The suspension she despairs of,
however, is made possible by the novelist’s construction of a
form which encompasses these same alternatives. Wuthering
Heights relies on the resemblances between opposites and
the disjunction of alikes. Opposites blend: the Heathcliff
who oppresses Hindley’s son eventually matches the Hindley
who oppressed Heathcliff; victim and tyrant become alike.
Similarities are sundered: the Catherine who vows that she
is Heathcliff survives, yet becomes altered, in the Linton
daughter hated by Heathcliff. Only Joseph, oblivious to
paradox and contradiction, always remains himself, unswerving
in his self-righteousness, as eager to depreciate Heathcliff in
the eyes of Hindley as he is to depreciate Hindley’s son in the
eyes of his new master. Joseph the fanatic, sure of his point of
view, is an anomaly in Brontë’s world.
52
Carol Jacobs on Wuthering Heights as
Metafiction
Like the entrance to Wonderland, the entrance to Wuthering
Heights is marked by the metaphor of the doorway. Passage
through that threshold will generate a crisis both in the voice
of the self and in the logic of the good text. As in Carroll’s text,
where the adventures in Wonderland ultimately fall under
the aegis of the dream, so in Wuthering Heights one dreams of
finding its center only to find that the center is a dream.
We enter Wuthering Heights through the voice of Lockwood,
who devotes the first three chapters of his narrative to what he
twice calls the “repetition of my intrusion.” These intrusions
are, to be sure, the literal incursions he makes into the house
of Wuthering Heights but they function no less as attempts to
penetrate Wuthering Heights-as-text. The outsider, conventional
in language as well as understanding, makes repeated efforts
to force his way to the penetralium. Yet one knocks vainly
for admittance at these locked doors and, on his second visit,
the intruder enters only by means of a violence which almost
matches that of Wuthering Heights itself. He penetrates to
the innermost chamber of the structure and to the enclosed
oaken bed within, and here he experiences the very center
of Wuthering Heights as a dream, or, more accurately, as
a series of nightmares. This dream-troubled night rapidly
results in Lockwood’s excommunication from Wuthering
Heights, for the illness brought on by these events confines
him to Thrushcross Grange. At the same juncture, Nelly
Dean replaces Lockwood in his role as narrator, for Lockwood
becomes the mere recorder of Nelly’s story.
How are we to interpret this curious point of articulation
between the first three chapters of the novel and the narrative
that follows? Certainly not by taking Lockwood at his word.
He organizes his explanation by suppressing all further
mention of the dreams and by linking the subsequent events
into a simplistic causal chain. A sleepless night and a difficult
journey through the snow bring on a bad cold. The illness, in
53
turn, incapacitates him, and so he calls in the housekeeper to
entertain him with her tales. A fiction surely, for if we return
to Chapter III, we find that the texts of the dream dislocate the
possibility of such explanation. The exclusion of Lockwood
from the Heights and the displacement of Lockwood as direct
narrator of the novel, his excommunication from Wuthering
Heights both as a banishment from its community and as a
relegation to a position outside of communication, are already
the common, if oblique, themes of the dreams themselves.
They mark the disjunction not only between Lockwood and
Wuthering Heights but also between Lockwood and Wuthering
Heights-as-text. For these passages offer a commentary on the
nature of the fictional space marked off as Nelly’s narrative, a
commentary which is made possible by setting off Lockwood
as that which lies outside the fictional realm. The exact locus
of this commentary will remain equivocal; for it lies somewhere
between Lockwood’s puzzlement and Nelly’s explanation, and
yet again at the heart of Wuthering Heights.
Finally closeted within the panelled bed, Lockwood imagines
he had delineated a protective boundary between himself and the
threatening realm without: “I slid back the panelled sides, got in
with my light, pulled them together again, and felt secure against
the vigilance of Heathcliff, and every one else” (WH, 25). The
diary records but two descriptive details of this apparently secure
inner space: “a few mildewed books” lie piled in the corner of
the window ledge, and the ledge itself is “covered with writing
scratched on the paint” (WH, 25). Having reached the very
center of Wuthering Heights, Lockwood finds it inhabited by
texts. And not just any texts. For the scratchings of Catherine
and the books of her library, whose margins also contain her
diary, figure most significantly in Lockwood’s dreams. Each
dream incorporates one of these three texts. In the first appear
the spectre-like letters etched on the sill. The second concerns
the pious discourse of Jabes Branderham, which Lockwood had
just begun reading. The third personifies the child Cathy, who
speaks from the pages of her diary.
Lockwood’s narrative elaborates a system of “careful
causality” to establish the relationship between text and dream.
54
He describes himself reading Catherine’s name and then
dreaming of it. He wakes to find his candle burning one of the
good books, and so peruses them. He dreams once again of
the text he has just been reading and is awakened by “a shower
of loud taps on the boards of the pulpit, which responded so
smartly that, at last, to my unspeakable relief, they woke me”
(WH, 29). He locates the dream-source in the title of Jabes’s
sermon, and its noisy conclusion is easily explained away by
assigning it to a referent in the “real world,” the branch of the
fir tree: “And what was it that had suggested the tremendous
tumult, what had played Jabes’s part in the row? Merely the
branch of a fir tree that touched my lattice, as the blast wailed
by, and rattled its dry cones against the panes!” (WH, 29).
Lockwood attributes his last dream to the reading of Cathy’s
diary: “↜‘The truth is, sir, I passed the first part of the night in—’
here, I stopped afresh—I was about to say ‘perusing those old
volumes;’ then it would have revealed my knowledge of their
written, as well as their printed contents .€.€.” (WH, 32).
Lockwood interprets his dreams by rooting them firmly in
his waking world. In this manner he attempts to establish the
ascendancy of reality over dream and to dispense with a merely
fictional terror by rational explication. Yet the terror of fiction
is otherwise. The “reality” by means of which Lockwood claims
deliverance is, after all, rather a series of texts. And looking to
the dreams themselves, we find they give those texts quite
another interpretation. In each of the dreams, the dreamer is
engaged in a violent struggle and it is precisely those apparently
innocuous texts which function as his vicious adversaries.
The waking Lockwood imagines himself victorious in
these conflicts, but the dreams themselves tell the story of
a different mastery. First, the glaring letters of Catherine’s
name swarm at Lockwood; then it is quite literally the text of
Jabes Branderham’s sermon which assaults him; and, finally, he
struggles unsuccessfully with a figure arisen from Cathy’s diary,
or “an impression which personified itself .€.€.” (WH, 32) out of
the name Catherine Linton.
In his second dream, Lockwood is condemned to endure the
endless sermon of Jabes Branderham. With each division of
55
the sermon, Lockwood rises to go, but is forced each time to
resume his seat:
Oh, how weary I grew. How I writhed, and yawned,
and nodded, and revived! How I pinched and pricked
myself, and rubbed my eyes, and stood up, and sat down
again, and nudged Joseph to inform me if he would ever
have done!
I was condemned to hear all out.€.€.€. (WH, 29)
The forgiveness demanded of Lockwood strangely figures
as forgiveness of the discourse itself rather than of the sins the
text names. The length of the text and especially the repetitive
nature of its structure make its textuality more prevalent than
its content:
“Sir,” I exclaimed, “sitting here, within these four
walls, at one stretch, I have endured and forgiven the
four hundred and ninety heads of your discourse. Seventy
times seven times have I plucked up my hat and been
about to depart—Seventy times seven times have you
preposterously forced me to resume my seat. The four
hundred and ninety-first is too much.” (WH, 29)
The four hundred and ninety-first attempt to deny the text,
this time by destroying Jabes Branderham, the refusal to forgive
the four hundred and ninety-first head of the discourse is the
sin for which Lockwood cannot be forgiven. As anticipated, the
sentence of excommunication is handed down:
“Thou art the Man!” cried Jabes, after a solemn pause,
leaning over his cushion. “Seventy times seven times
didst thou gapingly contort they visage—seventy times
seven did I take counsel with my soul—Lo, this is human
weakness; this also may be absolved! The First of the
Seventy-First is come. Brethren, execute upon him the
judgment written! such honour have all His saints!”
56
With that concluding word, the whole assembly,
exalting their pilgrim’s staves, rushed round me in a
body.€.€.€. (WH, 29)
Although its violence is initially masked, it is ultimately the
endless text which wields the power to destroy Lockwood.
Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar on
Wuthering Heights and Milton’s Satan
Milton, Winifred Gérin tells us, was one of Patrick Brontë’s
favorite writers, so if Shelley was Milton’s critic’s daughter,
Brontë was Milton’s admirer’s daughter.6 By the Hegelian law
of thesis/antithesis, then, it seems appropriate that Shelley
chose to repeat and restate Milton’s misogynistic story while
Brontë chose to correct it. In fact the most serious matter
Wuthering Heights and Frankenstein share is the matter of
Paradise Lost, and their profoundest difference is in their
attitude toward Milton’s myth. Where Shelley was Milton’s
dutiful daughter, retelling his story to clarify it, Brontë was the
poet’s rebellious child, radically revising (and even reversing)
the terms of his mythic narrative. Given the fact that Brontë
never mentions either Milton or Paradise Lost in Wuthering
Heights, any identification of her as Milton’s daughter may at
first seem eccentric or perverse. Shelley, after all, provided an
overtly Miltonic framework in Frankenstein to reinforce our
sense of her literary intentions. But despite the absence of
Milton references, it eventually becomes plain that Wuthering
Heights is also a novel haunted by Milton’s bogey. We may
speculate, indeed, that Milton’s absence is itself a presence, so
painfully does Brontë’s story dwell on the places and persons of
his imagination.
That Wuthering Heights is about heaven and hell, for
instance, has long been seen by critics, partly because all the
narrative voices, from the beginning of Lockwood’s first visit to
the Heights, insist upon casting both action and description in
57
religious terms, and partly because one of the first Catherine’s
major speeches to Nelly Dean raises the questions “What is
heaven? Where is hell?” perhaps more urgently than any other
speech in an English novel:
“If I were in heaven, Nelly, I should be extremely
miserable.€.€.€. I dreamt once that I was there [and] that
heaven did not seem to be my home, and I broke my
heart with weeping to come back to earth; and the angels
were so angry that they flung me out into the middle of
the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights, where I woke
sobbing for joy.”7
Satan too, however—at least Satan as Milton’s prototypical
Byronic hero—has long been considered a participant in
Wuthering Heights, for “that devil Heathcliff,” as both demon
lover and ferocious natural force, is a phenomenon critics have
always studied. Isabella’s “Is Mr. Heathcliff a man? If so, is
he mad? And if not is he a devil?” (chap. 13) summarizes the
traditional Heathcliff problem most succinctly, but Nelly’s “I was
inclined to believe .€.€. that conscience had turned his heart to an
earthly hell” (chap. 33) more obviously echoes Paradise Lost.
Again, that Wuthering Heights is in some sense about a fall has
frequently been suggested, though critics from Charlotte Brontë
to Mark Schorer, Q. D. Leavis, and Leo Bersani have always
disputed its exact nature and moral implications. Is Catherine’s
fall the archetypal fall of the Bildungsroman protagonist? Is
Heathcliff’s fall, his perverted “moral teething,” a shadow of
Catherine’s? Which of the two worlds of Wuthering Heights (if
either) does Brontë mean to represent the truly “fallen” world?
These are just some of the controversies that have traditionally
attended this issue. Nevertheless, that the story of Wuthering
Heights is built around a central fall seems indisputable, so that a
description of the novel as in part a Bildungsroman about a girl’s
passage from “innocence” to “experience” (leaving aside the
precise meaning of those terms) would probably also be widely
accepted. And that the fall in Wuthering Heights has Miltonic
overtones is no doubt culturally inevitable. But even if it weren’t,
58
the Miltonic implications of the action would be clear enough
from the “mad scene” in which Catherine describes herself as
“an exile, and outcast .€.€. from what had been my world,” adding
“Why am I so changed? Why does my blood rush into a hell
of tumult at a few words?” (chap. 12). Given the metaphysical
nature of Wuthering Heights, Catherine’s definition of herself
as “an exile and outcast” inevitably suggests those trail-blazing
exiles and outcasts Adam, Eve, and Satan. And her Romantic
question—“Why am I so changed?”—with its desperate straining
after the roots of identity, must ultimately refer back to Satan’s
hesitant (but equally crucial) speech to Beelzebub, as they lie
stunned in the lake of fire: “If thou be’est he; But O .€.€. how
chang’d” (PL l. 84).
Of course, Wuthering Heights has often, also, been seen as
a subversively visionary novel. Indeed, Brontë is frequently
coupled with Blake as a practitioner of mystical politics.
Usually, however, as if her book were written to illustrate
the enigmatic religion of “No coward soul is mine,” this
visionary quality is related to Catherine’s assertion that she
is tired of “being enclosed” in “this shattered prison” of her
body, and “wearying to escape into that glorious world, and
to be always there” (chap. 15). Many readers define Brontë,
in other words, as a ferocious pantheist/transcendentalist,
worshipping the manifestations of the One in rock, tree, cloud,
man and woman, while manipulating her story to bring about
a Romantic Liebestod in which favored characters enter “the
endless and shadowless hereafter.” And certainly such ideas,
like Blake’s Songs of Innocence, are “something heterodox,”
to use Lockwood’s phrase. At the same time, however, they
are soothingly rather than disquietingly neo-Miltonic, like
fictionalized visions of Paradise Lost’s luminous Father God.
They are, in fact, the ideas of “steady, reasonable” Nelly
Dean, whose denial of the demonic in life, along with her
commitment to the angelic tranquility of death, represents only
one of the visionary alternatives in Wuthering Heights. And, like
Blake’s metaphor of the lamb, Nelly’s pious alternative has no
real meaning for Brontë outside of the context provided by its
tigerish opposite.
59
The tigerish opposite implied by Wuthering Heights emerges
most dramatically when we bring all the novel’s Miltonic
elements together with its author’s personal concerns in an
attempt at a single formulation of Brontë’s metaphysical
intentions: the sum of this novel’s visionary parts is an
almost shocking revisionary whole. Heaven (or its rejection),
hell, Satan, a fall, mystical politics, metaphysical romance,
orphanhood, and the question of origins—disparate as some
of these matters may seem, they all cohere in a rebelliously
topsy-turvy retelling of Milton’s and Western culture’s central
tale of the fall of woman and her shadow self, Satan. This fall,
says Brontë, is not a fall into hell. It is a fall from “hell” into
“heaven,” not a fall from grace (in the religious sense) but a fall
into grace (in the cultural sense). Moreover, for the heroine
who falls it is the loss of Satan rather than the loss of God that
signals the painful passage from innocence to experience. Emily
Brontë, in other words, is not just Blakeian in “double” mystical
vision, but Blakeian in a tough, radically political commitment
to the belief that the state of being patriarchal Christianity calls
“hell” is eternally, energetically delightful, whereas the state
called “heaven” is rigidly hierarchical, Urizenic, and “kind” as a
poison tree. But because she was metaphorically one of Milton’s
daughters, Brontë differs from Blake, that powerful son of a
powerful father, in reversing the terms of Milton’s Christian
cosmogony for specifically feminist reasons.
Notes
6. Gérin, Emily Brontë, p. 47.
7. Norton Critical Edition of Wuthering Heights, p. 72. All
references will be to this edition.
Patsy Stoneman on “Romantic” Love
The English Romantic poets were the ‘modern’ writers of Emily
Brontë’s youth; she almost certainly knew about their sensational
lives and deaths, and read their works in editions published during
her teens. Shelley’s poem, ‘Epipsychidion’, has in particular been
60
recognized as relevant to Wuthering Heights.7 Its title seems
to mean ‘song for the soul outside the soul’, and thus matches
closely Catherine Earnshaw’s conviction that ‘there is or should
be an existence of yours beyond you’. Shelley feels such oneness
with his ‘other soul’ (Emilia Viviani) that he exclaims, ‘Ah me! I
am not thine: I am a part of thee’,8 just as Catherine tells Nelly,
‘Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same .€.€.
Nelly, I am Heathcliff’ (pp. 100–2). It is significant that when
Percy Shelley wrote ‘Epipsychidion’, Emilia (also called Emily)
was confined to a convent, so that their union was unlikely; this
kind of ‘Romantic love’ (which I shall give a capital letter to
distinguish it from the kind that leads to marriage) derives its
intensity precisely from unfulfilled desire.€.€.€.
Shelley extols spiritual oneness in the ‘aspiring’ terms typical
of the male Romantics:
We shall become the same, we shall be one .€.€.
In one another’s substance finding food,
Like flames too pure and light and unimbued
To nourish their bright lives with baser prey,
Which point to Heaven and cannot pass away:
One hope within two wills, one will beneath
Two overshadowing minds, one life, one death,
One Heaven, one Hell, one immortality,
And one annihilation. Woe is me!
The winged words on which my soul would pierce
Into the height of Love’s rare Universe,
Are chains of lead around its flight of fire—
I pant, I sink, I tremble, I expire! (lines 573–91)
Heathcliff’s exhumation of Catherine’s corpse deflates
Shelley’s airy rhetoric with the physical reality of death and
Catherine and Heathcliff both look for ‘the height of Love’s
rare Universe’ in or on the earth;11 nevertheless Emily Brontë’s
novel is widely read as an instance of Shelleyan mirror-like
Romantic love.12
If we accept the distinction outlined above between
‘romantic’ and ‘Romantic’ love, then logically there ought
61
to be two constituencies of readers, wishing for one of
two outcomes: either that Catherine should have married
Heathcliff instead of Edgar (romantic love); or that Catherine
should have preserved a spiritual affinity with Heathcliff by
not marrying anybody (Romantic love). Yet readers regularly
(if unconsciously) amalgamate these positions, finding in the
notion of reunion after death a promise of consummation
whose nature remains unspecific. We want, it seems, not to
choose between options, but to imagine lovers who are at
once transcendent and embodied.
What seems beyond dispute is that Catherine’s marriage
to Edgar provides the tragic machinery which precludes
earthly fulfilment for her and Heathcliff. Strictly, Catherine
and Heathcliff’s relationship is negated by Catherine and
Edgar’s only if we see it as ‘romantic’ (marriage-orientated)
love; as ‘Romantic’ (mirror-like) love it is merely different.
But because our social conventions endorse only exclusive
relationships between adult men and women, it seems
inevitable that we cast the story in terms of a competition
between Heathcliff and Edgar. In this competition, Edgar has
the advantage of legitimacy, but because our pervasive valuesystem ranks ‘soul’ more highly than ‘body’, the ‘sublime’
love of Catherine and Heathcliff is nevertheless generally
preferred.13 Most critics endorse Heathcliff’s judgement that,
in marrying Edgar, Catherine has ‘betray[ed her] own heart’
(p.€198).14 What I want to suggest is that, far from self-betrayal,
Catherine attempts a fulfilment so comprehensive as to be
uncomprehended by the other characters in the novel and by
her readers.
It is true that Catherine tells Nelly that ‘in my soul, and in
my heart, I’m convinced I’m wrong!’ in intending to marry
Edgar (p. 98) and her words here are famous: ‘Whatever our
souls are made of [Heathcliff’s] and mine are the same, and
Linton’s is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or
frost from fire’ (p. 100). What follows, however, has had less
critical attention. When Nelly asks how she thinks Heathcliff
will bear the separation, Catherine is amazed: ‘Who is to
62
separate us, pray? .€.€. Oh, that’s not what I intend—that’s
not what I mean!’ (p. 101). This strange speech has provoked
some readers into asking exactly what she does mean.
Q. D. Leavis can only explain it by supposing that in some
original plan for the novel, Heathcliff was to be Catherine’s
half-brother, which would clearly rule out their marriage,
while making it natural for them to be together. For Leavis,
‘Catherine’s innocent refusal to see that there is anything in
her relation to [Heathcliff] incompatible with her position as
a wife, becomes preposterous’ when their kinship is ‘written
out’ of the finished novel.15
Nevertheless, Catherine persists in her ‘preposterous’
assumptions. When Heathcliff returns to find her married
to Edgar, she is delirious with joy. No sense of tragic irony
seems to enter into her consciousness, nor any foreboding
of difficulties. After she asked Nelly who was to separate her
from Heathcliff, Catherine had continued, ‘I shouldn’t be
Mrs. Linton were such a price demanded! He’ll be as much
to me as he has been all his lifetime. Edgar must shake off his
antipathy, and tolerate him, at least’ (p. 101). Now she acts on
this assumption, telling Edgar that ‘for my sake, you must be
friends now’, and trying to force the two men to shake hands
(pp. 117–18). She continues in a state of high good humour
until it becomes obvious that neither Heathcliff nor Edgar is
willing to play their part in this triangular ‘friendship’.
Catherine’s behaviour here provokes epithets like
‘preposterous’ because she does not recognize that the code
appropriate for children who shared a bed is inappropriate
for a married woman and a male friend; and because she
seems unconscious of impropriety, her love has been seen as
sexless.16 The text gives us no clue whether Catherine sees
Heathcliff as a potential sexual partner; there is, however, a
literary model for such a triangle which is less evasive. This
is the very same poem that has been cited in evidence of the
‘oneness’ of two of the triangle. Shelley’s ‘Epipsychidion’ is in
fact much better known for its manifesto of free love than for
its ‘twin soul’ theme:
63
I never was attached to that great sect,
Whose doctrine is, that each one should select
Out of the crowd a mistress or a friend,
And all the rest, though fair and wise, commend
To cold oblivion, though it is in the code
Of modern morals, and the beaten road
Which those poor slaves with weary footsteps tread,
Who travel to their home among the dead
By the broad highway of the world, and so
With one chained friend, perhaps a jealous foe,
The dreariest and the longest journey go.
True Love in this differs from gold and clay,
That to divide is not to take away.
Love is like understanding, that grows bright,
Gazing on many truths; ’tis like thy light,
Imagination! which from earth and sky,
And from the depths of human fantasy,
As from a thousand prisms and mirrors, fills
The Universe with glorious beams, and kills
Error, the worm, with many a sun-like arrow
Of its reverberated lightning. Narrow
The heart that loves, the brain that contemplates,
The life that wears, the spirit that creates
One object, and one form, and builds thereby
A sepulchre for its eternity. (lines 149–73)
Notes
7. See F. B. Pinion, A Brontë Companion (Basingstoke, 1975),
216 n.; W. Gérin, Emily Brontë (Oxford, 1978), 44–5, 153–4;
E.€Chitham, ‘Emily Brontë and Shelley’, Brontë Society Transactions,
17 (1978), 195; E. Chitham, Emily Brontë (Oxford, 1987), 73, 99,
133–4.
8. Percy Shelley, ‘Epipsychidion’, line 52. Shelley quotations are
from Poetical Works, ed. T. Hutchinson (Oxford, 1967).
11. For accounts of Emily Brontë’s ‘literalizing’ of Romantic
spiritualities, see E. Moers, Literary Women (London, 1978);
M.€Homans, ‘The Name of the Mother in Wuthering Heights’, Bearing
the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-century Women’s
Writing (Chicago, 1986), 68–83; C. Senf, ‘Emily Brontë’s Version of
64
Feminist History: Wuthering Heights’, Essays in Literature, 12 (1985),
204–14; S. Davies, Emily Brontë (Brighton, 1988).
12. Edward Chitham, for instance, uses the lines quoted above
from ‘Epipsychidion’ as epigraph to his Introduction to Emily Brontë.
13. For similar reasons, the older Catherine and Heathcliff are
preferred to the younger Catherine and Hareton and, in the twentieth
century, Wuthering Heights has been regarded as a ‘greater’ novel than
Jane Eyre.
14. e.g. Visick, Genesis of Wuthering Heights, 9; A. Kettle, An
Introduction to the English Novel (London, 1951), i. 145.
15. Q. D. Leavis, ‘A Fresh Approach to Wuthering Heights’, Lectures
in America (Cambridge, 1969), i. 232.
16. Leavis, ‘A Fresh Approach’, 232.
Bernard J. Paris on Heathcliff’s Character
Unlike most critics, I believe that Heathcliff and Cathy are
imagined human beings whose behavior can be understood in
motivational terms. One of the major questions in both the
novel and the criticism is what kind of a being is Heathcliff.
In the novel, the question is posed most directly by Isabella:
“Is Mr. Heathcliff a man? If so, is he mad? And if not, is he a
devil?” (ch. 13). When she flees from the Heights, Isabella calls
him an “incarnate goblin” and a “monster” and wishes that “he
could be blotted out of creation” (ch. 17). Nelly replies, “Hush,
hush! He’s a human being” and urges Isabella to “be more
charitable.” Nelly is the chief proponent of Heathcliff’s human
status. Watching his agony at the death of Catherine, she
thinks, “Poor wretch! .€.€. you have a heart and nerves the same
as your brother men!” (ch. 16). Near the end, however, even
Nelly wonders if Heathcliff is “a ghoul, or a vampire” (ch. 34).
The issue for critics has not been whether Heathcliff is
a ghoul or a human being, but whether he is a realistically
drawn figure or some other kind of character about whom
it is inappropriate to ask motivational questions. A common
view has been that as a character in a Gothic romance, he is
an archetype, symbol, or projection of the unconscious who is
not supposed to be understood as though he were a person. I
believe that Emily Brontë meant Heathcliff to be perceived as
65
a human being, since despite the aura of mystery with which
she surrounds the question of his nature, she is at pains to make
his behavior seem naturalistically motivated. As Frances Russell
Hart observes, the Gothic represents not “a flight from novel to
romance,” but “a naturalizing of myth and romance into novel”
(1968, 103). The central experience it offers is a “dreadful,
sublime shock to one’s complacently enlightened idea of human
character and the reality to which it belongs” (88). In order
for the Gothic to achieve this shock, its characters must be
imagined human beings whose behavior, however strange, is
psychologically credible.
Heathcliff retains his human status, however fiendlike
he becomes, because Emily Brontë keeps telling us that he
has been victimized and that his viciousness arises from his
misery. Perhaps the strongest evidence that she meant us to
see his cruelty as a natural phenomenon is the fact that several
characters articulate the principle that bad treatment leads
to vindictiveness, and several others illustrate its operation.
Even the pampered, innocuous Linton girls turn savage after a
brief exposure to Heathcliff. After her escape, Isabella lusts for
revenge. Sounding much like Heathcliff, she wants to “take an
eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth; for every wrench of agony [to]
return a wrench, [to] reduce him to my level” (ch. 17). And Nelly
observes of the young Catherine that “the more hurt she gets,
the more venomous she grows” (ch. 30). Abuse quickly generates
powerful vindictive impulses in these girls, and their sufferings
are trivial compared to what Heathcliff endured in childhood.
I believe that the failure to understand Heathcliff as a person
has two main sources. The first is that many critics have
entertained a view of the novel as predominantly metaphysical,
lyric, or Gothic that has prevented them from even attempting
to make sense of Heathcliff’s behavior. The second is that
Heathcliff’s love for Cathy and his vindictiveness toward the
Earnshaws and the Lintons have seemed so extreme as to
be beyond the pale of human nature. Critics have deemed
Heathcliff unrealistic, in effect, because his behavior has
escaped their comprehension. There is always the possibility
that the author’s intuitive grasp of psychological phenomena
66
is deeper than our conceptual understanding. We can recover
Emily Brontë’s intuitions, I believe, with the aid of Karen
Horney, assisted by R. D. Laing and Abraham Maslow.
Heathcliff’s vindictiveness and devotion to Cathy are both
intelligible as defensive reactions to the deprivation and abuse
to which he was subjected in childhood.
According to Abraham Maslow (1970), all humans have a set
of basic needs that must be reasonably well met if they are to
develop in a healthy way. In the order of their potency, these
are physiological survival needs, needs for safety, for love and
belonging, for esteem, and for self-actualization. Frustration
of the basic needs arrests development and leads individuals to
develop defensive strategies for making up their deficiencies.
If we consider Heathcliff’s childhood with the basic needs in
mind, it is evident that he was severely deprived. Mr. Earnshaw
finds him at about the age of six “starving and houseless, and as
good as dumb in the streets of Liverpool” (ch. 4). He appears
to have been abandoned by his family and to have lost, or never
fully acquired, the art of language. When Mr. Earnshaw picks
him up, his very survival is in jeopardy. He has been living,
for we know not how long, in a state that is radically devoid of
safety, love and belonging, and esteem.
When Mr. Earnshaw brings him home, Heathcliff has a
protector at last; but he meets with contempt and rejection
from the other members of the household. Everyone refers
to him as “it”; and Nelly, the children, and Mrs. Earnshaw
would all like him to disappear. He gradually gains a place
in the family, but it is never a secure one, and he is always an
object of hostility. When Mr. Earnshaw dies, Heathcliff is
entirely dependent on Hindley, who hates him. He has only
one relationship that makes him feel secure, and that is with
Cathy. It is no wonder that he clings to her with such intensity.
Heathcliff is a severely deprived, frequently abused child
who develops all three of Horney’s interpersonal strategies
of defense. The very reserved Lockwood describes him as “a
man who seemed more exaggeratedly reserved than myself↜”
(ch. 1). In addition to his exaggerated withdrawal, Heathcliff
67
displays extreme forms of aggression and compliance. All the
suggestions of demonism, vampirism, and ghoulishness derive
from his unrelenting vindictiveness and his sadistic delight
in the suffering of his victims. His frantic dependency on
Cathy is one of the most intense emotions in all of literature.
It is so extreme that many critics feel it can be explained only
in metaphysical terms. Unlike most of the people Horney
describes, Heathcliff avoids inner conflict not by subordinating
any of his trends, but by a process of compartmentalization.
He moves toward Cathy, against Hindley and the Lintons, and
away from everyone else.
Heathcliff ’s initial defense is detachment. When Mr.
Earnshaw brings him to the Heights, he protects himself
against the hostility he meets there by trying to be invulnerable:
“He seemed a sullen, patient child,” says Nelly, “hardened,
perhaps, to ill-treatment: he would stand Hindley’s blows
without winking or shedding a tear, and my pinches moved
him only to draw in a breath, and open his eyes as if he had
hurt himself by accident, and nobody was to blame” (ch. 4).
Heathcliff is showing them, in effect, that they cannot hurt
him. His only way of gaining a sense of control in a hostile
world is by not reacting to what is done to him. He follows the
same pattern during his illness: whereas Cathy and Hindley
harass Nelly terribly, Heathcliff is “as uncomplaining as a lamb,
though hardness, not gentleness, made him give little trouble.”
He gives little trouble because he does not expect anyone to be
concerned about him, and it is important for him to feel that he
is not dependent on them.
Heathcliff practices a resignation to suffering that removes
him from the power of other people and makes him impervious
to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. He denies that
anything is impinging on him and distances himself from his
own feelings. Since he has no reason to trust other people or
to expect anything but pain from his dealings with them, he is
sullen, withdrawn, and unsociable. When his situation worsens
after the death of Hindley’s wife, “his naturally reserved
disposition was exaggerated,” says Nelly, “into an almost idiotic
excess of unsociable moroseness” (ch. 8).
68
Marianne Thormählen on Catherine’s
Self-Obsession
There is some thing decidedly odd about this supposedly
archetypal romance. What truly infatuated teenage girl tells
a confidante that marrying the boy from whom she claims to
be inseparable would degrade her? What of Catherine’s claim,
uttered at the same time, to ‘love the ground under [Edgar’s]
feet, and the air over his head, and everything he touches, and
everything he says’? And how can two people supposedly in
love torment each other so cruelly as Catherine and Heathcliff
do, recklessly repeating unloverlike assertions such as ‘I care
nothing for your sufferings’ and ‘I have not one word of
comfort—you deserve this’?
For anyone who turns his or her ‘attention to the human
core of the novel’, as Q. D. Leavis urged Wuthering Heights
critics to do, 3 a fundamental problem manifests itself: the
problem of sympathy. The varying views regarding the relative
degrees of evil exhibited by the characters in Wuthering Heights
reflect the issue, from the early condemnations of Heathcliff
to the twentieth-century attempts to assign the villain’s role to
Nelly Dean (or even Lockwood).4 Nelly herself illustrates the
difficulty: both Catherine5 and Heathcliff treat her as a friend
and confidante; but although she is capable of warmth, even
devotion (as is apparent in her love of her two charges, Hareton
and Cathy), she seems strangely unmoved by the sufferings
of the two ‘lovers’ whom she has known since childhood.
In fact, as James Hafsley and others have pointed out, her
actions sometimes exacerbate them. As for Catherine and
Heathcliff themselves, they have no tenderness or compassion
for anybody, not even for each other.
‘I own I did not like her, after her infancy was past.’6 Nelly’s
frank admission prepares the reader for her seeming callousness
in the face of young Mrs. Linton’s troubles. Catherine
Earnshaw never sets any store by being liked: during her
father’s decline, for example, she takes positive delight in
harassing him, and ‘she was never so happy as when we were
all scolding her at once’.7 Nor does she take much trouble to
69
win the friendship of the Lintons, and she does not have to: the
‘honeysuckle’ of the Grange dwellers is always all too ready to
wind itself around her ‘thorn’.8 Sure of Heathcliff’s, and later
Edgar’s, unconditional devotion, she is basically uninterested in
what anyone else might feel about her.
While the boy Heathcliff’s wrongs at Hindley Earnshaw’s
hands at least foster a feeling that he is the victim of harshness
and injustice, the growth of true sympathy for him is checked
by several circumstances, such as his lack of discernible
affection for his benefactor, old Mr. Earnshaw; the realization
that Hindley has cause to be jealous, having had his nose
cruelly put out of joint by the sudden arrival of the new
favourite; Heathcliff’s blackmailing effort over the colts; and
his intractable sullenness, even to Catherine, during his years
of degradation. It should be noted, though, that none of this
prevents Nelly from pitying the young Heathcliff even to tears
and from trying, unsuccessfully, to remedy his situation. It is
when the grown man resorts to deception and cruelty against
those whom she loves (and against herself, too) that Nelly
gradually withdraws from Heathcliff, to the point of refusing
to sit with him when he asks for someone to keep him company
shortly before his death.
Fortunately, interest in a person is not dependent on
sympathy for him or her, or Lockwood would never have
asked the housekeeper at Thrushcross Grange to tell him ‘the
history of Mr. Heathcliff’, and she could not have rendered
such a detailed narrative, down to reproductions of lengthy
conversations. The contrast between the humdrum narrators
in Wuthering Heights and the extraordinary main protagonists
of the story has been commented on for more than a hundred
years. The failures and foibles of the former ensure that a
reader’s sympathy is not naturally driven to fuse with any
viewpoint of theirs. The result is that the reader is liberated
from any pressure to identify with any person or persons in the
novel. Emily Brontë forces us to take up our own standpoint,
or to decide to forgo the adoption of any point of view at all.
There are several indications to the effect that this absence of
guidance towards an attitude is the outcome of a deliberate
70
authorial policy. Brontë does not even allow young Cathy—
warmhearted and courageous in herself, but stubborn, spoilt,
and inconsiderate, too—to ingratiate herself with the reader,
any more than she does with Lockwood on his first arrival at
the Heights.
The nature of the bond between Catherine and Heathcliff
has been the subject of much speculation. Several recent
commentators have picked up the suggestion, first put
forward—as far as I have been able to find out—by Eric
Solomon,9 that Heathcliff may have been an illegitimate child
of old Mr. Earnshaw’s, and hence Catherine’s half-brother.
This would go some way towards accounting for the kinship
one senses between them. In addition, it would explain Mr.
Earnshaw’s seemingly incomprehensible partiality for the
gypsy-dark foundling. The chroniclers of Gondal and Angria,
who were also admirers of Byron, were thoroughly familiar
with the existence of various kinds of forbidden love, including
that of half-siblings. The sexlessness of the Catherine–
Heathcliff relationship, noted (as ‘purity’) by early reviewers
and emphasized in Lord David Cecil’s seminal appraisal, 10
has been regarded in the light of possible blood ties. But if
Catherine and Heathcliff are indeed related by blood, they
will hardly know it themselves. Nor will anybody else after the
death of old Mr. Earnshaw, who does nothing to check their
intimacy. Consequently, talk of ‘incest’ seems a little off-target.
The only time when the closeness between Catherine and
Heathcliff is untroubled by anything except the interference of
elders is their childhood. It is a state of total alliance which ends
with Catherine’s first stay at the Grange, from which she returns
transformed into a young lady. Exposed to the attractions of
luxury, refinement, and flattery (Frances Earnshaw adopts
the latter strategy in her attempts to civilize her wayward
sister-in-law), the pathologically egotistical Catherine Earnshaw
begins to explore other avenues of self-gratification than the
ones she shared with her childhood companion.
‘Pathologically egotistical’ is a drastic expression, but
Catherine’s self-obsession is always more potent than the
ordinary self-centredness of the young. Not even Nelly’s
71
suggestion that the little girl means no real harm when
deliberately vexing family and servants is unproblematic: ‘when
once she made you cry in good earnest, it seldom happened
that she would not keep you company, and oblige you to
be quiet that you might comfort her.’11 In other words, she
compels her victims to devote their sympathy to the author
of their anger and pain. This hardly constitutes exculpatory
behaviour in any human being, regardless of age.
It is Catherine’s inability to regard her self and her conduct
from a distance, and to admit the possibility of other views of
reality than hers, that makes for her undoing and Heathcliff’s.
Not that she is totally insensitive to her surroundings; Nelly
is amused by the 15-year-old girl’s attempts to adapt herself to
the company she happens to be in, acting in a ladylike manner
among the Lintons and giving free rein to her ‘unruly nature’
at the Heights. Nelly is shrewd enough, though, to appreciate
that Catherine evinces this ‘double character without exactly
intending to deceive anyone’. 12 In her self-absorption, it
does not occur to the ‘heroine’ of Wuthering Heights that
she cannot have, and be, everything she wants whenever she
wants it.
Notes
3. Q.D. Leavis, ‘A Fresh Approach to Wuthering Heights’, from
F.R. and Q.D. Leavis, Lectures in America (New York, 1969); quoted in
the Norton Critical Edition of Wuthering Heights, ed. W. M. Sale, Jr.
(New York, 1972), 321.
4. Several commentators have remarked that modern criticism of
Wuthering Heights has tended to become increasingly sympathetic
towards Heathcliff; see e.g. J. Twitchell, ‘Heathcliff as Vampire’,
Southern Humanities Review, 11 (1977), 355–62. The best-known
attempt to rehabilitate Heathcliff at Nelly Dean’s expense is
J.€Hafsley’s ‘The Villain in Wuthering Heights’, Nineteenth-Century
Fiction, 13 (Dec. 1958), 199–215.
5. Like Edgar Linton, and many Brontë critics, I distinguish
between mother and daughter by calling the elder ‘Catherine’ and the
younger ‘Cathy’.
6. Nelly to Lockwood, vol. 1, ch. viii, p. 65 in the World’s Classics
edition of Wuthering Heights, ed. I. Jack (Oxford, 1981); all subsequent
references to the text of Wuthering Heights are to this edition.
7. Vol. 1, ch. v, p. 41.
72
8. See vol. 1, ch. x, p. 91. The only person who really likes
Catherine is her sister-in-law Isabella, whose parents died of
Catherine’s febrile illness and whose own life is subsequently ruined,
partly at Catherine’s malicious instigation.
9. ‘The Incest Theme in Wuthering Heights’, Nineteenth-Century
Fiction, 14 (June 1959), 80–3.
10. First printed in Early Victorian Novelists in 1935 and reprinted,
in excerpts, in several volumes of Wuthering Heights criticism,
including Allott’s Casebook and the Norton Critical Edition of the
novel.
11. Vol. 1, ch. v, p. 40.
12. Vol. 1, ch. viii, p. 66.
Lisa Wang on Spirituality in
Wuthering Heights
The poetry examined thus far has depicted the role of the Spirit
as life-giving wind, as comforter and advocate, and as charism,
most significantly in relation to the kind of numinous religious
experience involved in the poet’s epiphanic apprehension
of the divine nature. But the supreme value attached to
this experience is most clearly articulated in Emily Brontë’s
penultimate surviving poem, ‘No coward soul is mine’ (1846).34
The first half of this poem is a celebration of the power of the
poet’s ‘Faith’ in granting the ability to ‘see Heaven’s glories’
while at the same time ‘arming .€.€. from Fear’.35 Echoing the
words of Christ, ‘abide in Me and I in you’ (Jn 15:4), of Paul,
‘the Spirit of God dwelleth in you’ (I Co 3:16), and of John,
‘God dwelleth in us’ (I Jn 4:12), the poet declares:36
O God within my breast
Almighty ever-present Deity
Life, that in me hast rest
As I Undying Life, have power in Thee. (5–8)
The poet’s expression of confidence in this mutual
inter-relationship, with God resting in the poet and (s)he
concomitantly drawing on God’s power, appropriates the
73
biblical topos of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in the
believer: ‘Hereby we know that we dwell in him, and he in us,
because he hath given us of his Spirit’ (I Jn 4:13). The Spirit
thus takes on a central role in the believer’s experience of God.
It is no surprise, then, that in the second half of the poem the
poet’s understanding of the divine nature focuses on the figure
of the Spirit:
With wide-embracing love
Thy spirit animates eternal years
Pervades and broods above,
Changes, sustains, dissolves, creates and rears. (17–20)
As in the earlier poems, the idea of the Spirit’s creative or lifegiving power is expressed using biblical imagery of ‘the Spirit
of God’ as it ‘moved on the face of the waters’ (Ge 1:2), and
of ‘the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove’ (Jn 2:32).37
Similarly, the final lines of the poem make use of the idea of
the Holy Spirit as the breath of God: ‘Thou art Being and
Breath / And what Thou art may never be destroyed.’ What is
articulated in this poem, then, through the use of such biblical
tropes and topoi, is a confident belief in God’s all-pervasive,
life-giving Spirit; and what is celebrated (at the expense of the
‘vain’ and ‘worthless’ creeds which are the formal expressions
of such belief↜) is the empowering experience of a direct and
visceral relationship with such a Deity. These are themes
that will play an important role in the study of the religious
discourse in Wuthering Heights.
We have seen how, in Emily Brontë’s poetry, biblical tropes
and topoi relating to the Spirit inform the poet’s depiction of the
believer’s experience of and relationship to the divine nature. In
Wuthering Heights, the same concerns are present but without the
linguistic constructions which make the theological framework
so apparent in the poetry. Nevertheless, having considered the
way in which these issues are approached in the poetry, it is
possible to see more clearly their role in the novel’s depiction of
the relationship between Cathy and Heathcliff; in its treatment
of the idea of transgression, and in the closing of the narrative.
74
On being pressed by Nelly to justify her engagement to
Edgar Linton, Cathy attempts to describe the nature of her
relationship with Heathcliff:
there is, or should be, an existence of yours beyond you.
What were the use of my creation if I were entirely
contained here? .€.€. If all else perished, and he remained,
I should still continue to be; and, if all else remained,
and he were annihilated, the Universe would turn to a
mighty stranger. I should not seem a part of it.€.€.€. Nelly,
I am Heathcliff—he’s always, always in my mind—not
as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to
myself—but as my own being.38
Cathy insists that her ‘being’ is so closely linked to Heathcliff’s
that her very existence is somehow dependent on his. (Indeed,
Heathcliff seems to echo this idea when he raves to the
departed Cathy, ‘do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot
find you! Oh, God! it is unutterable! I cannot live without my
life! I cannot live without my soul!’ (204).) What is significant
about this formula of inter-relationship is that it utilises the
same language that the speaker of Emily Brontë’s poem ‘No
coward soul is mine’ (1846) uses to describe God:
Though Earth and moon were gone
And suns and universes ceased to be
And thou wert left alone
Every existence would exist in thee. (21–4)
This similarity suggests that the novel’s depiction of the
relationship between Cathy and Heathcliff draws on the
understanding, presented in the poem, of the relationship
between God and the believer. Since, as we have seen, the
poem uses biblical topoi of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit
to describe the inter-existential relationship of the believer to
God, it may be said that Cathy’s use of a similar paradigm to
describe her love for Heathcliff suggests that she ‘dwells’ in
him in a similar way that the Spirit does the believer. (In this
75
context Heathcliff’s statement that ‘existence, after losing her,
would be hell’ (182) may be seen to echo the theological notion
that hell is the eternal deprivation of God’s presence.)
However, the novel, though it does seem to endorse
the supreme value of some kind of transcendental experience
of relational existence, cannot be said to celebrate such a
relationship in the way that the poem does, for Cathy and
Heathcliff are tormented by the problematic nature of their
love. The indications of profound conflict in Heathcliff and
Cathy’s supposed unity seem to suggest that the spiritual
paradigm outlined in ‘No coward soul’ cannot be successfully
applied to personal relationships, if only because a finite,
imperfect being cannot perform the work of an infinite,
perfect being. This becomes apparent as Cathy finds herself
drawn to Edgar Linton. Initially, Cathy believes that since
her existence is ‘contained’ in Heathcliff’s, and his in hers, he
‘comprehends in his person’ her own ‘feelings to Edgar’ (101).
But this expectation proves to be unfounded, with disastrous
results. However much both Cathy and Heathcliff desire to
be ontologically one, they find themselves at odds, tormented
nearly until the very moment of her death by resentments,
regrets, and recriminations:
‘You have killed me .€.€. I care nothing for your
sufferings. Why shouldn’t you suffer?’ .€.€.
‘Don’t torture me .€.€. You know you lie .€.€. how cruel
you’ve been—cruel and false.€.€.€. I have not one word of
comfort—you deserve this.’ .€.€.
‘Let me alone. Let me alone .€.€. If I’ve done wrong,
I’m dying for it. It is enough! You left me too; but .€.€. I
forgive you. Forgive me!’ .€.€.
‘How can I?’ (195–8)
and so on. Even after Cathy’s death, indeed for the remainder
of his life, Heathcliff’s torment continues, as he goes on
seeking something which he cannot quite find, demanding
something which she cannot quite give: ‘I could almost see her,
and yet I could not! I ought to have sweat blood then, from the
76
anguish of my yearning, from the fervour of my supplications
to have but one glimpse! I had not one’ (350–1). Yet despite
this torture, he persists in his desire, saying: ‘I have a single
wish, and my whole being and faculties are yearning to attain
it.€.€.€. it has devoured my existence’ (395). In the end, ceasing
to eat and feverish with anguish, Heathcliff follows his desire
down the path to his own destruction in much the same way
Cathy did eighteen years before.
This question of the consequences of the love between
Cathy and Heathcliff raises the issue of the larger significance
of their relationship, its place in the novel as a whole. In
this context it is useful to regard the matter in terms of
transgression, that is, the overstepping of boundaries. The
everyday boundaries and distinctions which help us to define
and shape our understanding of the world are repeatedly
broken down and blurred in Wuthering Heights, creating a
constant state of fluctuation which is profoundly unsettling to
the reader, and which calls into question conventional notions
of reality.
Notes
34. See Hatfield, pp. 243–4.
35. Cf. Paul’s description ‘of the whole armour of God’ which
includes ‘above all .€.€. the shield of faith’ (Eph 6:11, 16).
36. See also John 14:17, ‘the Spirit .€.€. dwelleth with you, and shall
be in you’: I Corinthians 6:19, ‘your body is the temple of the Holy
Ghost which is in you’.
37. See also Job 26:12–13 and Psalm 104:30. The image of the
Holy Spirit as dove is common not only in Christian poetry but also
in hymns such as Charles Wesley’s well-known ‘Come, Holy Ghost,
our hearts inspire’: ‘Expand thy wings, celestial Dove, / Brood o’er
our nature’s night, / On our disordered spirits move, / And let there
now be light.’
38. E. Brontë, Wuthering Heights, H. Marsden and I. Jack (eds),
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976) pp. 101–2. All quotations from
Wuthering Heights are taken from this edition. Subsequent page
references to the novel are given parenthetically in the text.
77
Works by Emily Brontë
Novel Editions
Wuthering Heights, as Ellis Bell (2 volumes, London: T.C.
Newby, 1847; 1 volume, Boston: Coolidge & Wiley, 1848).
Wuthering Heights: An Authoritative Text, Backgrounds, Criticism.
Edited by William M. Sale, Jr. and Richard J. Dunn. New
York: Norton, 1990.
Wuthering Heights: Complete, Authoritative Text with Biographical
and Historical Contexts, Critical History, and Essays from
Five Contemporary Critical Perspectives. Edited by Linda H.
Peterson. Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press,
1992.
Wuthering Heights. Edited by Ian R. Jack; with an introduction
and notes by Patsy Stoneman. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1998.
Wuthering Heights: Complete Text with Introduction, Contexts, and
Critical Essays. Edited by Diane Long Hoeveler. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 2002.
Poetry
Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, by Charlotte, Emily and
Anne Brontë. London: Aylott & Jones, 1946; Philadelphia:
Lea & Blanchard, 1948.
Collections
The Life and Works of Charlotte Brontë and Her Sisters. Edited by
Shorter. New York: Holder & Stoughton, 1908; London:
Hodder & Stoughton, 1910.
The Complete Poems of Emily Jane Brontë. Edited by Shorter.
New York: Hodder & Stoughton, 1908; London: Hodder
& Stoughton, 1910.
78
The Shakespeare Head Brontë. Edited by T.J. Wise and J.A.
Symington, 19 volumes. Oxford: Blackwell, 1931–1938.
The Clarendon Edition of the Novels of the Brontës, Edited by I.R.
Jack, 3 volumes. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969.
79
Annotated Bibliography
Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. “Looking Oppositely:
Emily Brontë’s Bible of Hell.” The Madwoman in the Attic: The
Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination.
New Haven, CT: Yale Nota Bene (2000): 248–308.
Gilbert and Gubar’s essay is concerned with the wide range of
literary influences on Emily Brontë. Beginning with a comparison
of Wuthering Heights and Frankenstein, they discuss certain
common themes to be found in these two highly enigmatic
novels, such as the fate of subordinate female characters and a
dependence on “evidentiary narratives.” Milton’s Paradise Lost
is identified as the subtext for Emily Brontë’s exploration of the
theme of the pariah. “Given the metaphysical nature of Wuthering
Heights, Catherine’s definition of herself as ‘an exile and outcast’
inevitably suggests those trail-blazing exiles Adam, Eve, and
Satan.” Following their identification of this subtext, Gilbert and
Gubar point out many other important allusions, including Blake’s
Songs of Innocence, Shakespeare’s King Lear, and Jane Austen’s
Northanger Abbey.
Homans, Margaret. “Emily Brontë.” Women Writers and
Poetic Identity: Dorothy Wordsworth, Emily Brontë, and Emily
Dickinson. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press (1980):
104–161.
Homans focuses on the loss of individual identity, citing the
numerous transferences and dispersions that form a pervasive
theme throughout Wuthering Heights. Homans maintains
that self-alienation accounts for the death wish in the novel,
a drive that serves a compensatory function and that explains
Heathcliff’s anticipation of death as the means to reunite him
with Cathy, a time when they will “be lost in one repose.”
Jacobs, Carol. “Wuthering Heights: At the Threshold of
Interpretation.” Boundary II vol. 7, no.€3 (Spring 1979): 49–62.
Focusing on the metaphor of the doorway in the first three
chapters, Jacobs maintains that Lockwood’s entry and subsequent
80
banishment from both the fictional realm of Wuthering Heights
and as narrator of the events marks his exile from the text of the
novel. Jacobs further suggests that as a result of his exclusion
from the “text” of Wuthering Heights, Lockwood is able to arrive
at an understanding of the novel as a fiction upon a fiction.
In a series of dreams which function as the medium between
text and reality, Lockwood arrives a the heart of this irrational
world only to find himself enclosed in a space laden with a
variety dusty books, diaries and sermons. “Wuthering Heights
is an annunciation of excommunication, both a fabrication in
language of the real world—of that which is outside language (excommunication)—and then again an expulsion of the heretic from
its own textuality.”
Kiely, Robert. “Wuthering Heights: Emily Brontë, 1847.”
The Romantic Novel in England. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press (1972): 233–251.
Kiely discusses Wuthering Heights as a radical novel within the
English tradition and praises Brontë for having created a narrative
with no overt literary allusions though acknowledging that she has
assuredly drawn on predecessors. With respect to the function of
Nelly Dean as a narrator, Kiely sees her as the medium through
which the extreme and opposing perspectives of Lockwood
and Heathcliff are mediated, for neither one would be able to
tell the story “without focusing almost exclusively on himself.”
Ultimately, Kiely maintains that Wuthering Heights is composed of
a series of transformations whereby new situations and characters
are synthesized, yet the novel remains a text in which the true
nature of the relationship between Catherine and Heathcliff is
never disclosed, for it is beyond the scope of reason.
Knoepflmacher, U.C. “Wuthering Heights: A Tragicomic
Romance.” From Laughter & Despair: Readings in Ten Novels
of the Victorian Era. Berkeley: University of California Press
(1971): 84–108.
Knoepflmacher discusses Emily Brontë’s talent for
blending humor with melodrama. Focusing on Lockwood’s
characterization as an urbane man, “a refugee from civilized
81
society,” Knoepflmacher maintains that he functions as the
unreliable guide whose refined manners and comic perspective
prove erroneous and full of misjudgments from the outset.
Knoepflmacher concludes that Wuthering Heights consistently
vacillates between the comic and the tragic only to be resolved
vis-à-vis a new comic mode, namely the “quasi-Christian” love
story of Cathy and Hareton, which remains, nevertheless, a
diminutive version of the relationship between Catherine and
Heathcliff.
Leavis, Q.D. “A Fresh Approach to ‘Wuthering Heights.’↜”
Lectures in America by F.R. Leavis and Q.D. Leavis. London:
Chatto & Windus (1969): 83–152.
Identifying a wide range of English, American, and continental
literary influences, as well as ballads, Q.D. Leavis discusses the
way Emily Brontë draws from a rich and varied literary tradition
and argues that Wuthering Heights is a novel of penetrating
psychological insight. Leavis further maintains that Wuthering
Heights also responds to the Romantic theme of childhood
struggling against society, as well as the plight of border-farmers
who fought to survive the wild and desolate moors. “Wuthering
Heights thus became a responsible piece of work, and the writer
thought herself into the positions, outlooks, sufferings and
tragedies of the actors in these typical events as an artist.”
Miller, J. Hillis. “Emily Brontë.” The Disappearance of God: Five
Nineteenth-Century Writers. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap
Press of Harvard University Press (1963): 157–211.
J. Hillis Miller’s essay discusses Wuthering Heights in the context
of Brontë’s visionary poetry and maintains that Wuthering Heights,
which marked her communication with an anonymous reading
public, represents a betrayal of the personal world of her poems.
In a realm in which neighbor is set against neighbor, Miller states
that animals become the medium through which the individual
characters’ spirituality is measured. “The characters in Wuthering
Heights have returned to an animal state. Such a return is reached
only through the transgression of all human law.” Miller concludes
82
that though the society of Wuthering Heights is restored to a
benign status, spiritual restoration remains incomplete.
Oates, Joyce Carol. “The Magnanimity of Wuthering Heights.”
Critical Inquiry, vol. 9, no. 2 (December 1982): 435–449.
Lauding Wuthering Heights as a masterpiece of fiction
incorporating both gothic and Romantic elements, Oates
maintains that Emily Brontë succeeds in challenging
the assumptions of both of these literary traditions in her
presentation of two opposing yet intertwined tales at the same
time. In response to the Romantic valorization of childhood,
Wuthering Heights offers a nightmarish presentation of childhood
(and the cruelty and betrayal of which children are capable)
while simultaneously offering a counterbalancing narrative of
growth, maturity, and accommodation to the material world.
“It is this fidelity to the observed physical world, and Brontë’s
own inward applause, that makes the metamorphosis of the
dark tale into its opposite so plausible, as well as so ceremonially
appropriate.”
Paris, Bernard. “Wuthering Heights.” Imagined Human Beings: A
Psychological Approach to Character and Conflict in Literature.”
New York: New York University Press (1997): 240–261.
Arguing that Heathcliff’s character is entirely credible in human
terms—rather than serving a symbolic function, as some critics
have maintained—Paris focuses on his childhood as the motivation
for his cruel nature. Paris makes the case that Wuthering Heights
is ultimately about human attachments and suffering, “merger
and separation,” and that Emily Brontë demonstrates a keen
psychological insight in the display of extreme emotions and
behavior. Ultimately, Paris maintains that the novel proffers
a solution in which moderation is restored in the marriage of
the second Catherine to Hareton Earnshaw. “The members of
the second generation are better, in part at least, because they
have been better treated. The marriage of Hareton and Cathy
represents the triumph of love and forgiveness over hatred and
revenge.€.€.€.”
83
Sonstroem, David. “Wuthering Heights and the Limits of Vision.
PMLA vol. 86, no. 1 (January 1971): 51–62.
David Sonstroem discusses Wuthering Heights as an amalgam
of disparate and myopic points of view in conflict with one
another due to the characters’ limitations. He argues that this
shortsightedness is thematized in the many instances in which
people are invalidated and expectations proved erroneous.
Sonstroem concludes that Emily Brontë is depicting a Victorian
state of mind that is suffering in its refusal to confront its
own preconceived notions and intolerances—political, social,
religious, or otherwise—and therefore remains fragmented
beyond comprehension. Furthermore, he asserts that the author
can be found at the heart of her narrative. “The stumbling
shortsightedness she presents in her characters and induces in
her readers is in fact her own experience of the world and the
burden of her message.”
Stanford, Derek, and Muriel Spark. “↜‘Wuthering Heights’: Plot
and Players.” Emily Brontë: Her Life and Work. London: Peter
Owen (1953): 238–258.
Beginning his character analysis with an extended discussion of
Heathcliff’s dramatic manner of speaking, which he maintains
is comparable to that of the Byronic hero, Stanford contrasts
Heathcliff to the minor figures of Joseph and Nelly Dean,
who he describes as “static” personalities, in that neither one
changes his or her manner of speaking or behavior. Turning his
analysis to Catherine, Stanford finds her to be the most original
and fully developed character within the novel, a presence
that overshadows Heathcliff in terms of a unique personality.
Stanford maintains that she is comparable to Shakespeare’s
Katharina. “Catherine, it is true, has a prototype in literature.€.€.€.
None the less, it is interesting to notice that Emily’s heroine
bears the same name as Shakespeare’s Katharina, in The Taming
of the Shrew. But Emily’s shrew is a tragic one; and Cathy
(her daughter who—in some ways—completes her mother’s
emotional intention) is not overcome by ring-master tactics, but
by Hareton’s independent nature, thawing out into co-operation
and affection.”
84
Steinitz, Rebecca. “Diaries and Displacement in Wuthering Heights.”
Studies in the Novel, vol. 32, no.€4 (Winter 2000): 407–419.
Stressing the importance of immediacy and the first-person
accounts of events from the opening lines of Wuthering Heights,
which begins with Lockwood’s journal entry recording his return
from Wuthering Heights, Steinitz argues that the diary at first
functions as a framing device until the third chapter in which
it becomes a material instrument for cataloguing the novels
passionate and tumultuous history. Steinitz maintains that the
significance of the diary, having heretofore been subsumed by
such other critical rubrics of texts within texts, is essential to
understanding the text and the particularity to which it refers.
“Indeed, despite their many differences of status, both Catherine
and Lockwood .€.€. use their diaries to deal precisely with their
senses of displacement.€.€.€. [T]he diary itself becomes the
proverbial place of one’s own, but its very status as such reveals
how, psychologically, textually, and materially, one’s own place can
never be secured.”
Stoneman, Patsy. “Catherine Earnshaw’s Journey to Her Home
Among the Dead: Fresh Thoughts on Wuthering Heights and
‘Epipsychidion.’↜” The Review of English Studies, vol. 47, no.
188 (November 1996): 521–533.
Citing the English Romantic poets as the contemporaries of
Brontë’s youth, Stoneman argues that Percy Bysshe Shelley’s
poem “Epipsychidion,” the title and subject matter being
representative of a transcendent concept of “Romantic love” in
which two souls unite rather than traditional notions of romantic
love as courtship and marriage, is particularly relevant to an
understanding of Wuthering Heights. Stoneman states that though
the “Romantic love” exemplified in Shelley’s poem is problematic
for most readers, it is the only means for understanding
Catherine’s otherwise “preposterous” assumptions, such as her
joy that Heathcliff returns only to discover her marriage to Edgar.
“No sense of tragic irony seems to enter into her consciousness,
nor any foreboding of difficulties.”
85
Thormählen, Marianne. “The Lunatic and the Devil’s Disciple:
The ‘Lovers’ in Wuthering Heights.” The Review of English
Studies, vol. 48, no. 190 (May 1997): 183–197.
Thormählen discusses the doomed nature of the love relationship
between Catherine and Heathcliff by focusing on the monstrous
aspects of their individual characterizations. Describing
Catherine’s outrageous behavior as “pathologically egotistical,”
Thormählen contends that Catherine’s preoccupation with
herself is something beyond adolescent self-absorption, citing
such evidence as her complete identification with Heathcliff,
so that he becomes merely an extension of herself, “an integral
part of her egomania.” With respect to Heathcliff, Thormählen
maintains that his character is aligned with the devil from the
start. This is suggested by his first appearance at Wuthering
Heights, a “dark” child who brings disruption to the household,
to his rapid transformation into an educated man of means,
attended by such words as “devil” and “diabolical,” implying
some malevolent intervention on his behalf.
Wang, Lisa. “The Holy Spirit in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering
Heights and Poetry.” Literature & Theology, vol. 14, no. 2
(June 2000): 160–173.
Analyzing Wuthering Heights in terms of Emily Brontë’s education
and the biblical tropes in her poetry and citing the scarcity of
biblical allusions in the novel, Wang maintains that Wuthering
Heights privileges fundamental religious experience over specific
doctrinal issues. She argues that the spirituality of Wuthering
Heights presents a qualitative difference from Brontë’s poetry
in that there is no absolute resolution in the novel. Using the
symbolism of the wind, which remains in a state of flux at the
novel’s end, Wang concludes that the reader is not at all assured
a world of tranquility. “This is the final image of Wuthering
Heights, not an image of resolution or peace, nor of violence or
despair, but of a universe whose only element of constancy is its
everchangingness.”
86
Watson, Melvin R. “Tempest in the Soul: The Theme and
Structure of Wuthering Heights.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction,
vol. 4, no. 2 (September 1949): 87–100.
A recognized classic in Wuthering Heights criticism, Watson’s
essay discusses the novel as a psychological study of an
enigmatic man torn between the two opposing passions of
love and hate, the narrative structure of which resembles
the five-act tragedy of Elizabethan drama. Watson contends
that Heathcliff, the dominant personality to which all other
characters are subordinate, is an embittered soul capable of
transformation given time and more auspicious circumstances
and that, consequently, Wuthering Heights achieves a felicitous
conclusion in the second-generation love story of young Cathy
and Hareton. “The love which develops out of and in spite
of the hate which surrounds them—but develops as that hate
is subsiding—provides the calm and symbolic ending of the
book.”
Woodring, Carl. “The Narrators of Wuthering Heights.”
Nineteenth-Century Fiction, vol. 11, no. 4 (March 1957):
298–305.
Woodring begins with a discussion of the double narrative
convention of Lockwood and Nelly Dean as dual narrators: the
stranger who participates in the reader’s amazement and the
intimate who bears witness to the strange history of Wuthering
Heights, respectively. Having made this fundamental distinction,
Woodring further elucidates the differences in their characters
and the consequential viewpoints that they provide. Lockwood,
the “educated diarist from the city,” speaks in prose, while
Nelly Dean employs the simple language of a servant and
inhabitant of the moors, though serving a highly elaborate
function throughout the novel. “Attentive witness, narrator,
and elucidator of past events, Mrs. (that is, Miss) Dean not only
plays an active role economically designed, but also commands
interest as a personality.€.€.€.”
87
Contributors
Harold Bloom is Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale
University. He is the author of 30 books, including Shelley’s
Mythmaking, The Visionary Company, Blake’s Apocalypse, Yeats,
A Map of Misreading, Kabbalah and Criticism, Agon: Toward
a Theory of Revisionism, The American Religion, The Western
Canon, and Omens of Millennium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams,
and Resurrection. The Anxiety of Influence sets forth Professor
Bloom’s provocative theory of the literary relationships between
the great writers and their predecessors. His most recent
books include Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, a 1998
National Book Award finalist, How to Read and Why, Genius: A
Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds, Hamlet: Poem
Unlimited, Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?, and Jesus and Yahweh:
The Names Divine. In 1999, Professor Bloom received the
prestigious American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal
for Criticism. He has also received the International Prize of
Catalonia, the Alfonso Reyes Prize of Mexico, and the Hans
Christian Andersen Bicentennial Prize of Denmark.
Melvin R. Watson is professor emeritus of English and
comparative literature at Chapman University in California.
He is the author of Magazine Serials and the Essay Tradition,
1746–1820 (1956), “The Redemption of Peter Bell” (1964), and
“Wuthering Heights and the Critics” (1949).
Muriel Spark (1918–2006) was one of the most important
Scottish writers of the late twentieth century. In addition to
her literary criticism and essays, she wrote critical biographies,
poetry, and novels, most notably The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.
Derek Stanford has been a professor of writing and literature
at the University of Chester. He is the author of Poets of the
‘Nineties’ (1965), Dylan Thomas: A Literary Study (1954), and
Inside the Forties: Literary Memoirs, 1937–1957 (1977).
88
J. Hillis Miller has been a professor of English and comparative
literature at the University of California, Irvine. He is the
author of Versions of Pygmalion (1990), Ariadne’s Thread: Story
Lines (1992) and Reading Narrative (1998).
Q.D. Leavis (1906–1981) was an English literary critic and
essayist. She was the author of Fiction and the Reading Public
(1932), Dickens the Novelist (1970), and several volumes of
collected essays titled The Englishness of the English Novel (1983),
The American Novel and Reflections on the European Novel (1985),
and The Novel of Religious Controversy (1989).
U.C. Knoepflmacher has been a professor of English
at Princeton University. He is the author of Ventures into
Childland: Victorians, Fairy Tales, and Femininity (1998), Emily
Brontë: Wuthering Heights (1989), and Religious Humanism and
the Victorian Novel (1965).
Carol Jacobs has been Birgit Baldwin Professor of Comparative
Literature at Yale University. She is the author of In the
Language of Walter Benjamin (1999), Uncontainable Romanticism:
Shelley, Brontë, Kleist (1989), and The Dissimulating Harmony:
The Image of Interpretation in Nietzsche, Rilke, Artaud, and
Benjamin (1978).
Sandra M. Gilbert has been professor of English at the
University of California, Davis. Along with Susan Gubar, she
published Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the
Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination in 1979, a finalist for
both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle
Award. Gilbert is the author of a prose memoir, Wrongful
Death: A Medical Tragedy, and many books of poetry, including
Ghost Volcano, Inventions of Farewell: A Book of Elegies, and Kissing
the Bread: New and Selected Poems.
Susan Gubar has been Distinguished Professor of English and
women’s studies at Indiana University. Along with Sandra M.
Gilbert, she published The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman
89
Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. Gilbert
and Gubar also coauthored No Man’s Land: The Place of the
Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century; The War of the Words,
Sexchanges, and Letters from the Front. Gubar is the author of
Racechanges: White Skin, Black Face in American Culture and the
editor of Critical Condition: Feminism at the Turn of the Century.
Patsy Stoneman has been a reader in English at the University
of Hull. She is the author of Brontë Transformations: The
Cultural Dissemination of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights (1996)
and Elizabeth Gaskell (1987) and editor of Jane Eyre on Stage,
1848–1898: An Illustrated Edition of Eight Plays with Contextual
Notes (2007).
Bernard J. Paris has taught at Lehigh University, Michigan State,
and the University of Florida, where he is emeritus professor of
English and former director of the Institute for Psychological
Study of the Arts. He is the author of Character as a Subversive
Force in Shakespeare: The History and Roman Plays (1991) A
Psychological Approach to Fiction: Studies in Thackeray, Stendhal,
George Eliot, Dostoevsky, and Conrad (1974), and Experiments in
Life: George Eliot’s Quest for Values (1965).
Marianne Thormählen has been professor of English literature,
Lund University, Sweden. She is the author of The Brontës and
Education (2007), The Brontës and Religion (1999), and Rochester:
The Poems in Context (1993).
Lisa Wang is the author of “Unveiling the Hidden God of
Charlotte Brontë’s ‘Villette’↜” (2001).
Every effort has been made to contact the owners of
copyrighted material and secure copyright permission. Articles
appearing in this volume generally appear much as they did in
their original publication with few or no editorial changes. In
some cases, foreign language text has been removed from the
original essay. Those interested in locating the original source
will find the information cited above.
92
Index
Characters in literary works are indexed by first name (if any), followed by the
name of the work in parentheses.
A
Agnes Grey (Brontë, A.), 12–13
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
(Carroll), 53
Allusions in Wuthering Heights
to King Lear, 46–49
Animal imagery
in Wuthering Heights, 42–45
Aspects of the Novel (Forster), 9
Athenaeum, 13
B
Bersani, Leo, 58
Blake, William
Songs of Innocence, 59–60
Bloom, Harold
introduction, 7–9
Brontë, Anne, 8
Agnes Grey, 12–13
poetry, 10–11
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, 14
Brontë, Branwell, 8, 10
Brontë, Charlotte, 10, 58
death, 8
Jane Eyre, 7, 12–13
poetry, 10–11, 49
and the publication of
Wuthering Heights, 12, 14–15
Brontë, Elizabeth, 8, 10
Brontë, Emily Jane
biographical sketch, 10–11
death, 8, 11, 13, 15
influences on, 39–40, 46–47, 49,
57–60, 71
poetry, 10–11, 73–74
works by, 78–79
Brontë, Maria, 8
Brontë, Maria Branwell, 10
Brontë, Patrick, 10, 57
Byron, Lord George Gordon
Calvinism, 39–40
“Childe Harold,” 49
Don Juan, 49
influence of, 58, 71
Manfred, 7, 49
Nelly Dean (Wuthering Heights)
common sense, 18
memories, 17, 21–22, 24–25,
27–28, 31–32, 35, 37, 41, 47,
51, 53–54, 58–59, 61–63, 65–72,
75
premonitions, 26
religion, 44
speech, 39
and Young Catherine, 18, 28–30
Newby, Thomas Cautley, 12–14
P
Palladium, The, 13–14
Paradise Lost (Milton)
Adam and Eve, 59
Satan in, 7, 57–60
Poe, Edgar Allan, 47
Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell
(Brontës), 11
R
Reality in Wuthering Heights
two orders in, 7, 9
Romance tradition
and the childhood experience,
46, 48
gothic, 21, 28, 30, 65–66, 69
northern, 7
in poetry, 7, 46
rebellion, 52
in Wuthering Heights, 46–48,
59–65
S
Schorer, Mark, 58
Setting, Wuthering Heights, 21, 42
moors in, 22–23, 27, 29–30, 32,
34–35
96
Shakespeare, William
King Lear, 46–49
The Taming of the Shrew,
40–41
Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft
Frankenstein, 57
Shelley, Percy Bysshe
“Epipsychidion,” 60–61, 63–64
Smith, W.H., 12
Songs of Innocence (Blake), 59–60
Spirituality
in Wuthering Heights, 7, 9, 21,
36, 41, 59–62, 73–77
T
Taming of the Shrew, The
(Shakespeare), 40–41
Tenant of Wildfell Hall, The (Brontë,
A.), 14
Thackeray, William Makepeace
Vanity Fair, 49–51
V
Vanity Fair (Thackeray), 49–51
W
Wordsworth, William, 39, 48
Wuthering Heights
characterization in, 10,
37–42
character list, 17–20
critical views, 34–79
early reviews, 13–15
publication, 11–12, 15
story behind, 12–16
structure, 42, 53
summary and analysis, 21–33