Wuthering Heights

Story

Opening

In 1801, Mr Lockwood, the new tenant at Thrushcross Grange in Yorkshire, visits his landlord, Heathcliff, at his remote moorland estate, Wuthering Heights. There he meets a reserved young woman (later identified as Cathy Linton), Joseph, a sanctimonious, ill-tempered servant, and Hareton, an uneducated young man who appears to be a servant. Everyone is sullen and inhospitable. Snowed in for the night, Lockwood reads diary entries of the former inhabitant of his room, Catherine Earnshaw, and has a nightmare in which a ghostly Catherine begs to enter through the window. Awakened by Lockwood's yells, Heathcliff is distraught.

Lockwood returns to Thrushcross Grange and falls ill. While he recovers, Lockwood's housekeeper, Ellen "Nelly" Dean, tells a strange story about the Earnshaw family, who she once served.

Nelly's tale

Thirty years earlier, the Earnshaws live at Wuthering Heights with their two children, Hindley (aged fourteen) and Catherine (aged six), and their servant, Nelly. Returning from a trip to Liverpool, Earnshaw brings home an orphan whom he names Heathcliff. Heathcliff's origins are unclear but he is described as "like a gipsy" and, possibly, a Lascar or an American or Spanish castaway. Earnshaw treats the boy as his favourite and neglects his own children, especially after his wife dies. Hindley beats Heathcliff, who gradually becomes close friends with Catherine.

Hindley departs for university and returns three years later as the new master of Wuthering Heights after his father's death. He and his new wife, Frances, force Heathcliff to live as a servant.

Edgar Linton and his sister Isabella live nearby at Thrushcross Grange, and Heathcliff and Catherine spy on them after one of their rambles across the moors. When Catherine is attacked by their dog, the Lintons take her in but send Heathcliff home. When the Lintons visit, Hindley and Edgar make fun of Heathcliff, and a fight ensues. Heathcliff, banished to an attic, swears that he will one day have his revenge.

Frances dies after giving birth to a son, Hareton. Two years later, Catherine accepts Edgar's marriage proposal. She confesses to Nelly that she loves Heathcliff deeply but cannot marry him because of his low social status. Nelly warns against associating with Heathcliff. Heathcliff overhears part of the conversation and, misunderstanding Catherine's feelings, flees the household. Distraught, Catherine falls ill.

Three years after his departure, with Edgar and Catherine now married, Heathcliff returns unexpectedly, now mysteriously wealthy. He plays upon Isabella's infatuation as revenge on Edgar. Enraged by Heathcliff's presence at the Grange, Edgar banishes him. Distraught, Catherine locks herself in her room and refuses food for three days. At Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff exploits Hindley's gambling addiction and becomes mortgagee of the estate. Heathcliff tricks Isabella into eloping, but they soon return.

Heathcliff visits the gravely ill and pregnant Catherine in secret. She dies shortly after giving birth to a daughter, Cathy. Heathcliff rages, calling on Catherine's ghost to haunt him. Isabella, embittered by Heathcliff's obsession and having suffered mental and physical abuse, flees south where she gives birth to Heathcliff's son, a sickly boy named Linton. Hindley dies six months later of alcoholism, and Hareton inherits Wuthering Heights, although Heathcliff takes possession.

Ending

Lockwood moves away, returning eight months later to pay his rent. Nelly, now the housekeeper at Wuthering Heights, updates him.

Cathy seeks Hareton's forgiveness – their reconciliation leading to love – and subsequently confronts Heathcliff with unlawfully taking both their properties. Declining physically, and increasingly fixated by the dead Catherine, Heathcliff avoids the young couple. He eventually stops eating, and some days later is found dead in Catherine's old room.

Hareton has reclaimed Wuthering Heights, and Cathy has been teaching him to read. They plan to marry and move to the Grange, of which she is now the undisputed owner, with Joseph having left to take care of Wuthering Heights. Locals report having seen the ghosts of Catherine and Heathcliff together on the moors. Lockwood seeks out the graves of Catherine, Edgar, and Heathcliff, side-by-side, and is convinced that all three are finally at peace.

Characters

Heathcliff

A dark-featured, ethnically ambiguous foundling from Liverpool, who is taken by Earnshaw to Wuthering Heights, where he is reluctantly cared for by the family and spoiled by his adoptive father. He and Mr Earnshaw's daughter, Catherine, grow close, and their love and mutual possession is the central theme of the first volume. On discovering Catherine's engagement to marry Edgar, Heathcliff leaves, only to return three years later, having acquired both wealth and legal expertise, which he then applies with ruthlessness and great cruelty. His revenge against Edgar and Hindley, and its consequences, are the central theme of the second volume. Once both his enemies are dead, Heathcliff resolves to carry on his campaign of vengeance against their offspring, Cathy (whom he reviles), and Hareton (of whom he is personally fond). He is 20 when he marries Edgar's sister Isabella, and 38 when he dies intestate. Since he has then no next of kin, Heathcliff's estate will escheat to the crown; although, as Thrushcross Grange and Wuthering Heights must revert to their true owners, and as his inheritance of Edgar's personal property through first Edgar's will and then that of his son Linton, could not by then both have completed probate, the bulk of the wealth he has amassed in Gimmerton is unlikely to be escheated. Heathcliff has been considered as a Byronic hero, but critics have pointed out that he reinvents himself at various points, making his character hard to fit into any single type. He has an ambiguous position in society, and his lack of status is underlined by the fact that "Heathcliff" is both his given name and his surname. The character of Heathcliff may have been inspired by Branwell Brontë. An alcoholic and an opium addict, he would have indeed terrorised Emily and her sister Charlotte during frequent crises of delirium tremens that affected him a few years before his death. Even though Heathcliff has no alcohol or drug problems, the influence of Branwell's character is likely.

Catherine Earnshaw

Addressed as Cathy by Heathcliff, and as Catherine by Edgar. First introduced to the reader after her death, through Lockwood's discovery of her diary and her carvings. As a child she is, like Heathcliff, wild and untameable; as she grows into adulthood, her behaviour may appear sociable and conventional, but wildness, self-centredness, and even cruelty are never deeply buried. She is 17 when she marries Edgar. The description of her life is confined almost entirely to the first volume, but her increasingly powerful possession of Heathcliff (both from beyond the grave and physically in it) becomes the driving force of the second volume. She seems unsure whether she is, or wants to become, more like Heathcliff or more like Edgar. Some critics argued that her decision to marry Edgar Linton is allegorically a rejection of nature and a surrender to culture, a choice with unfortunate, fateful consequences for all the other characters. She dies hours after giving birth to her daughter.

Publication history

1847 edition

The original text as published by Thomas Cautley Newby in 1847 is available online in two parts. The novel was first published together with Anne Brontë's Agnes Grey in a three-volume format: Wuthering Heights filled the first two volumes and Agnes Grey made up the third. In the 1850 edition, the Wuthering Heights chapters were renumbered as a single volume: Volume I of the 1847 edition corresponds to chapters 1 to 14, while Volume II corresponds to chapters 15 to 34.

1850 edition

In 1850 Charlotte Brontë edited the original text for the second edition of Wuthering Heights and also provided it with her foreword. She addressed the faulty punctuation and orthography but also diluted Joseph's thick Yorkshire dialect. Writing to her publisher, W. S. Williams, she said that It seems to me advisable to modify the orthography of the old servant Joseph's speeches; for though, as it stands, it exactly renders the Yorkshire dialect to a Yorkshire ear, yet I am sure Southerns must find it unintelligible; and thus one of the most graphic characters in the book is lost on them. Irene Wiltshire, in an essay on dialect and speech, examines some of the changes Charlotte made.

Critical response

Contemporary reviews

Early reviews of Wuthering Heights were mixed. Most critics recognised the power and imagination of the novel, but were baffled by the storyline, and objected to the savagery and selfishness of the characters. In 1847, when the background of an author was given great importance in literary criticism, many critics were intrigued by the authorship of the Bell novels.

The Atlas review called it a "strange, inartistic story", but commented that every chapter seems to contain a "sort of rugged power."

Graham's Lady Magazine wrote: "How a human being could have attempted such a book as the present without committing suicide before he had finished a dozen chapters, is a mystery. It is a compound of vulgar depravity and unnatural horrors".

The American Whig Review wrote: Respecting a book so original as this, and written with so much power of imagination, it is natural that there should be many opinions. Indeed, its power is so predominant that it is not easy after a hasty reading to analyze one's impressions so as to speak of its merits and demerits with confidence. We have been taken and carried through a new region, a melancholy waste, with here and there patches of beauty; have been brought in contact with fierce passions, with extremes of love and hate, and with sorrow that none but those who have suffered can understand."

Douglas Jerrold's Weekly Newspaper wrote: Wuthering Heights is a strange sort of book,—baffling all regular criticism; yet, it is impossible to begin and not finish it; and quite as impossible to lay it aside afterwards and say nothing about. In Wuthering Heights the reader is shocked, disgusted, almost sickened by details of cruelty, inhumanity, and the most diabolical hate and vengeance, and anon come passages of powerful testimony to the supreme power of love – even over demons in the human form. The women in the book are of a strange fiendish-angelic nature, tantalising, and terrible, and the men are indescribable out of the book itself. The Examiner wrote: This is a strange book. It is not without evidences of considerable power: but, as a whole, it is wild, confused, disjointed, and improbable; and the people who make up the drama, which is tragic enough in its consequences, are savages ruder than those who lived before the days of Homer.

Twentieth century

Until late in the 19th century, "Jane Eyre was regarded as the best of the Brontë sisters' novels". This view began to change in the 1880s with the publication of A. Mary F. Robinson's biography of Emily in 1883. Modernist novelist Virginia Woolf affirmed the greatness of Wuthering Heights in 1925: Wuthering Heights is a more difficult book to understand than Jane Eyre, because Emily was a greater poet than Charlotte. ... She looked out upon a world cleft into gigantic disorder and felt within her the power to unite it in a book. That gigantic ambition is to be felt throughout the novel ... It is this suggestion of power underlying the apparitions of human nature and lifting them up into the presence of greatness that gives the book its huge stature among other novels.

Similarly, Woolf's contemporary John Cowper Powys referred in 1916 to Emily Brontë's "tremendous vision". In 1926 Charles Percy Sanger's work on the chronology of Wuthering Heights "affirmed Emily's literary craft and meticulous planning of the novel and disproved Charlotte's presentation of her sister as an unconscious artist who 'did not know what she had done'." However, for a later critic, Albert J. Guerard, "it is a splendid, imperfect novel which Brontë loses control over occasionally". Still, in 1934, Lord David Cecil, writing in Early Victorian Novelists, commented "that Emily Brontë was not properly appreciated; even her admirers saw her as an 'unequal genius'," and in 1948 F. R. Leavis excluded Wuthering Heights from the great tradition of the English novel because it was "a 'kind of sport'—an anomaly with 'some influence of an essentially undetectable kind.'" The novelist Daphne du Maurier argued the status of Wuthering Heights as a "supreme romantic novel" in 1971: There is more savagery, more brutality, in the pages of Wuthering Heights than in any novel of the nineteenth century, and, for good measure, more beauty too, more poetry, and, what is more unusual, a complete lack of sexual emotion. ... Emily Brontë, striding over the Yorkshire moors with her dog, did not conjure from her imagination any cozy tale of happy lovers to console women readers sitting snugly within doors.

Twenty-first century

Writing in The Observer in 2003, writer and editor Robert McCrum placed Wuthering Heights in his list of 100 greatest novels of all time. In 2015, he placed it in his list of 100 best novels written in English. He said that

Wuthering Heights releases extraordinary new energies in the novel, renews its potential, and almost reinvents the genre. The scope and drift of its imagination, its passionate exploration of a fatal yet regenerative love affair, and its brilliant manipulation of time and space put it in a league of its own. Writing for BBC Culture in 2015, author and book reviewer Jane Ciabattari polled 82 book critics from outside the UK and presented Wuthering Heights as number 7 in the resulting list of 100 greatest British novels. In 2018, Penguin presented a list of 100 must-read classic books and placed Wuthering Heights at number 71, saying: "Widely considered a staple of Gothic fiction and the English literary canon, this book has gone on to inspire many generations of writers – and will continue to do so". Writing in The Independent journalist and author Ceri Radford and news presenter, journalist, and TV producer Chris Harvey included Wuthering Heights in a list of the 40 best books to read during lockdown. Harvey said that "It's impossible to imagine this novel ever provoking quiet slumbers; Emily Brontë's vision of nature blazes with poetry".

Setting

Novelist John Cowper Powys notes the importance of the setting:

By that singular and forlorn scenery—the scenery of the Yorkshire moors round her home—[Emily Brontë] was, however, in the more flexible portion of her curious nature inveterately influenced. She does not precisely describe this scenery—not at any length ... but it sank so deeply into her that whatever she wrote was affected by it and bears its desolate and imaginative imprint.

Likewise, Virginia Woolf suggests the importance of the Yorkshire landscape of Haworth to the poetic vision of both Emily and Charlotte Brontë:

[Who] if they choose to write in prose, [were] intolerant of its restrictions. Hence it is that both Emily and Charlotte are always invoking the help of nature. They both feel the need of some more powerful symbol of the vast and slumbering passions in human nature than words or actions can convey. They seized those aspects of the earth which were most akin to what they themselves felt or imputed to their characters, and so their storms, their moors, their lovely spaces of summer weather are not ornaments applied to decorate a dull page or display the writer's powers of observation—they carry on the emotion and light up the meaning of the book.

Wuthering Heights is an old house high on the Pennine moorland of West Yorkshire. Lockwood, the new tenant of the nearby Thrushcross Grange, provides the first description:

Wuthering Heights is the name of Mr Heathcliff's dwelling, "wuthering" being a significant provincial adjective, descriptive of the atmospheric tumult to which its station is exposed in stormy weather. Pure, bracing ventilation they must have up there at all times, indeed. One may guess the power of the north wind blowing over the edge by the excessive slant of a few stunted firs at the end of the house, and by a range of gaunt thorns all stretching their limbs one way, as if craving alms of the sun.

Lord David Cecil in Early Victorian Novelists (1934) drew attention to the contrast between the two main settings in Wuthering Heights:

Inspiration for locations

There is no evidence that either Thrushcross Grange or Wuthering Heights is based on an actual building, but various locations have been speculated to have inspired them. Top Withens, a ruined farmhouse in an isolated area near the Haworth Parsonage, was suggested as the model for Wuthering Heights by Ellen Nussey, a friend of Charlotte Brontë. However, its structure does not match that of the farmhouse described in the novel. High Sunderland Hall, near Law Hill, Halifax where Emily worked briefly as a governess in 1838, now demolished, has also been suggested as a model for Wuthering Heights. However, it is too grand for a farmhouse.

Ponden Hall is famous for reputedly being the inspiration for Thrushcross Grange, since Brontë was a frequent visitor. However, it does not match the description in the novel and is more similar in size and appearance to the farmhouse at Wuthering Heights. The Brontë biographer Winifred Gerin believed that Ponden Hall was the original of Wildfell Hall, the old mansion in Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Helen Smart, while noting that Thrushcross Grange has "traditionally been associated with ... Ponden Hall, Stanbury, near Haworth", sees Shibden Hall, Northowram, in Halifax parish, as more likely, referring to Hilda Marsden's article "The Scenic Background of Wuthering Heights".

Point of view

Most of the novel is the story told by housekeeper Nelly Dean to Lockwood, though the novel uses several narrators (in fact, five or six) to place the story in perspective, or to present it from a variety of perspectives. Emily Brontë uses this frame story technique to narrate most of the story. Thus, for example, Lockwood, the first narrator of the story, tells the story of Nelly, who herself tells the story of another character. The use of a character like Nelly Dean is a literary device, a well-known convention taken from the Gothic novel, the function of which is to portray the events more mysteriously and excitingly.

Thus, the point of view comes from:

... a combination of two speakers who outline the events of the plot within the framework of a story within a story. The frame story is that of Lockwood, who informs us of his meeting with the strange and mysterious "family" living in almost total isolation in the stony uncultivated land of northern England. The inner story is that of Nelly Dean, who transmits to Lockwood the history of the two families during the last two generations. Nelly Dean examines the events retrospectively and attempts to report them as an objective eyewitness to Lockwood.

Critics have questioned the reliability of the two main narrators. The author has been described as sarcastic toward Lockwood, who fancies himself a world-weary romantic but comes across as an effete snob, and there are subtler hints that Nelly's perspective is influenced by her own biases.

The narrative, in addition, includes an excerpt from Catherine Earnshaw's old diary, and short sections narrated by Heathcliff, Isabella, and another servant.

Influences

Brontë possessed an exceptional education in classical culture for a woman of the time. She was familiar with Greek tragedies and was a good Latinist. In addition she was especially influenced by the poets John Milton and William Shakespeare. There are echoes of and allusions to Shakespeare's tragedies, King Lear, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth and Hamlet in Wuthering Heights.

Another major source of information for the Brontës was the periodicals that their father read, the Leeds Intelligencer and Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine. Blackwood's Magazine provided knowledge of world affairs and was a source of material for the Brontës' early writing. Emily Brontë was probably aware of the debate on evolution. This debate had been launched in 1844 by Robert Chambers. It raised questions of divine providence and the violence that underlies the universe and relationships between living things.

Romanticism was also a major influence, which included the Gothic novel, the novels of Walter Scott and the poetry of Byron. Some feminist critics see the Brontës' fiction as prime examples of Female Gothic. It explores the domestic entrapment and subjection of women to patriarchal authority, and the attempts to subvert and escape such restriction. Emily Brontë's Cathy Earnshaw and Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre are both examples of female protagonists in such a role.

According to Juliet Barker, Walter Scott's novel Rob Roy (1817) had a significant influence on Wuthering Heights, which, though "regarded as the archetypal Yorkshire novel ... owed as much, if not more, to Walter Scott's Border country". Rob Roy is set "in the wilds of Northumberland, among the uncouth and quarrelsome squirearchical Osbaldistones", while Cathy Earnshaw "has strong similarities with Diana Vernon, who is equally out of place among her boorish relations".

From 1833, Charlotte and Branwell's Angrian tales began to feature Byronic heroes. Such heroes had a strong sexual magnetism and passionate spirit, and demonstrated arrogance and black-heartedness. The Brontës had discovered Byron in an article in Blackwood's Magazine from August 1825. Byron had died the previous year. Byron became synonymous with the prohibited and audacious.

Romance tradition

Emily Brontë wrote in the romance tradition of the novel. Walter Scott defined this as "a fictitious narrative in prose or verse; the interest of which turns upon marvellous and uncommon incidents". Scott distinguished the romance from the novel, where (as he saw it) "events are accommodated to the ordinary train of human events and the modern state of society". Scott describes romance as a "kindred term" to novel. However, romances such as Wuthering Heights and Scott's own historical romances and Herman Melville's Moby Dick are often referred to as novels. Other European languages do not distinguish between romance and novel: "a novel is le roman, der Roman, il romanzo, en roman". This sort of romance is different from the genre fiction love romance or romance novel, with its "emotionally satisfying and optimistic ending". Emily Brontë's approach to the novel form was influenced by the gothic novel.

Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764) is usually considered the first Gothic novel. Walpole's declared aim was to combine elements of the medieval romance, which he deemed too fanciful, and the modern novel, which he considered to be too confined to strict realism. Characteristically, 18th century gothic fiction in English placed their narrations in continental Europe, and set them firmly in the past.

More recently Ellen Moers, in Literary Women, developed a feminist theory that connects female writers such as Emily Brontë with gothic fiction. Catherine Earnshaw has been identified by some critics as a type of gothic demon because she "shape-shifts" in order to marry Edgar Linton, assuming a domesticity that is contrary to her true nature. It has also been suggested that Catherine's relationship with Heathcliff conforms to the "dynamics of the Gothic romance, in that the woman falls prey to the more or less demonic instincts of her lover, suffers from the violence of his feelings, and at the end is entangled by his thwarted passion". See also the discussion of the daemonic below, under "Religion".

At one point in the novel Heathcliff is thought a vampire. It has been suggested that both he and Catherine are, in fact, meant to be seen as vampire-like personalities.

Syndy McMillen Conger credits Brontë for liberating traditional gothic plot forms, which had become "overly rigid," and for bringing an "aesthetic respectability" to the gothic tradition. Conger further notes that Catherine Earnshaw is a departure from traditional gothic heroines, who were usually caught between a "dark seducer" and a "fair lover" in an external conflict, whereas Catherine differs in that she is "not simply placed between two lovers; she feels divided between two lovers."

Themes

Childhood

Childhood is a central theme of Wuthering Heights. Emily Brontë "understands that 'The Child is 'Father of the Man' (Wordsworth, 'My heart leaps up', 1. 7)". Wordsworth, following philosophers of education, such as Rousseau, explored ideas about the way childhood shaped personality. One outcome of this was the German bildungsroman, or "novel of education", such as Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847), Eliot's The Mill on the Floss (1860), and Dickens's Great Expectations (1861). Brontë's characters "are heavily influenced by their childhood experiences", though she is less optimistic than her contemporaries that suffering can lead to "change and renewal".

Class and money

Heathcliff leaves Gimmerton as a penniless labourer, but returning, three years later, he has both the wealth and manners of a gentleman. Nevertheless, Edgar initially refuses to admit him to the family rooms at Thrushcross Grange. Catherine, both angered and amused, mocks Edgar's class fastidiousness, proposing that they put up two tables in the parlour; one for the 'gentry' – Edgar and Isabella, and one for the 'lower orders' – herself and Heathcliff.

Lockwood arrives at Thrushcross Grange in 1801, a time when, according to Q.D. Leavis, "the old rough farming culture, based on a naturally patriarchal family life, was to be challenged, tamed and routed by social and cultural changes". By this date the Industrial Revolution was well underway and by 1847 was a dominant force in much of England, especially in West Yorkshire. This caused a disruption in "the traditional relationship of social classes" with an expanding upwardly mobile middle class, which created "a new standard for defining a gentleman" and challenged the traditional criteria of breeding and family, as well as the more recent criterion of character.

Marxist critic Arnold Kettle sees Wuthering Heights "as a symbolic representation of the class system of 19th-century England", with its concerns "with property-ownership, the attraction of social comforts", marriage, education, religion, and social status. Driven by a pathological hatred, Heathcliff uses against his enemies "their own weapons of money and arranged marriages", as well as "the classic methods of the ruling class, expropriation and property deals".

Later, another Marxist, Terry Eagleton, in Myths of Power: A Marxist Study of the Brontës (London: McMillan, 1975), further explores the power relationships between "the landed gentry and aristocracy, the traditional power-holders, and the capitalist, industrial middle classes". Haworth in the West Riding of Yorkshire was especially affected by changes to society and its class structure "because of the concentration of large estates and industrial centers" there.

There has been debate about Heathcliff's race or ethnicity. In the novel, Heathcliff is first described as a "dark-skinned gipsy" with "black eyes", as well as later being said to be "as white as the wall behind him" and "pale...with an expression of mortal hate". Mr Linton, the Earnshaws' neighbour, suggests that he might be "a little Lascar (a 19th-century term for adult Indian or Malysian sailors, specifically those working for the East India Company), or an American or Spanish castaway". There are fourteen very brief references to Heathcliff's appearance overall; Mr Earnshaw calls him "as dark almost as if it came from the devil", and Nelly Dean speculates fancifully regarding his origins thus: "Who knows but your father was Emperor of China, and your mother an Indian queen?" Novelist Caryl Phillips suggests that Heathcliff may have been an escaped slave, noting the similarities between the way Heathcliff is treated and the way slaves were treated at the time: he is referred to as "it", his name "served him" as both his "Christian and surname", and Mr Earnshaw is referred to as "his owner". Brontë had, though, already used such a method of naming characters several times in her Gondal writings. Maja-Lisa von Sneidern states that "Heathcliff's racial otherness cannot be a matter of dispute; Brontë makes that explicit", further noting that "by 1804 Liverpool merchants were responsible for more than eighty-four percent of the British transatlantic slave trade." However, it has been pointed out that the slave trade was triangular in structure and no enslaved people were held or processed there, only the goods for which they had been traded, that gypsies are officially designated as white in the UK, and that Heathcliff's description conforms to Dark Celts native to Britain, or Dark Irish (this latter is Terry Eagleton's conclusion). Michael Stewart sees Heathcliff's race as "ambiguous" and argues that Emily Brontë "deliberately gives us this missing hole in the narrative".

Feminist

Until the 1970s, feminist readings of Wuthering Heights were rare, reflecting a persistent tendency to see Heathcliff, rather than Catherine, as the centre of the novel. The landmark change came in 1979; as Chapter 8, 'Looking Oppositely; Emily Brontë's Bible of Hell', in The Madwoman in the Attic by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar. Gilbert and Gubar read the novel as a mythic response to, and proto-feminist correction of, Milton's patriarchal Christian myth of human origins in Paradise Lost, where the figure of Eve is presented as subsidiary, behaviourally pliable, and ultimately destined for domestication. They acknowledge that there is no explicit citation of Milton in the novel, but maintain their argument from the numerous references to angels and devils, heaven and hell, salvation and damnation; pointing especially to the passage in volume one in which Heathcliff overhears Catherine's confessing to Nelly her intention to marry Edgar, where she recalls finding herself in heaven in a dream, "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."

For Gilbert and Gubar, the figure of Catherine Earnshaw is intended as a counterpart and direct opposite to Milton's figure of Satan; whereas Satan is a heavenly angel who falls through envy from a place of order, into Hell a place of chaos, Catherine is an untameable daughter of nature who falls from a place of apparent 'chaos' – Wuthering Heights; into a place of heavenly 'order' – Thrushcross Grange. But this 'fall' (in conventional Christian terms a fall into 'Grace') destroys Catherine; as for her, "the state of being [that] patriarchal Christianity calls "hell" is eternally, energetically delightful, whereas the state called "heaven" is rigidly hierarchical, Urizenic, and "kind" as a poison tree." Puberty and increasing sexual awareness lead to her being seduced into eating the 'cooked' foods of culture, and her consequent choice to marry Edgar severs her from her full self (and from Heathcliff, her girlhood alternative self) and imprisons her as a woman into a state of incapacity; locked into a culture destined for "tea-tables, sofas, crinolines and parsonages", yearning unavailingly to return to the enclosed-bed in her room in Wuthering Heights.

It was a commonplace at this time to associate literary creativity with male engenderment, such that the author 'fathers' his work; with the explicit corollary that female writing is marginalised either as trivial (and so uncreative), or unnatural (and so unfeminine). Gilbert's and Gubar's underlying thesis is that this patriarchal formulation of literary creativity was confronted in the nineteenth century by a canon of women writers, who proposed patriarchal understandings of creativity as forcing women into polarised artefactual categories; in the roles either of 'domestic angels', or of 'voracious monsters'. Consequently, in Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë is understood as establishing a primal, counter-cultural, natural, and 'gynandrous' shared self of Catherine and Heathcliff, who then 'fall' through being separately absorbed into the world of patriarchal culture. Both of these sundered persons then 'fragments', through division into a destroyed and destructive remnant – Catherine as mad and dead, Heathcliff as bad and dangerous to know; and into a conformable, lesser and uncreative successor – for Catherine as Cathy (or Catherine II), and for Heathcliff as Hareton. For Gilbert and Gubar, the Victorian status quo of parlours and parsonages is a given destiny; so a mythic account of its origins must present the failure of 'nature' and the success of 'culture', within which the story of the second generation must progress as anticlimactic, predetermined, and tame.

Love

A 2007 British poll named Wuthering Heights the greatest love story of all time. However, "some of the novel's admirers consider it not a love story at all but an exploration of evil and abuse". Helen Small sees Wuthering Heights as being both "one of the greatest love stories in the English language" and at the same time one of the "most brutal revenge narratives". Some critics suggest that reading Wuthering Heights as a love story not only "romanticizes abusive men and toxic relationships but goes against Brontë's clear intent". Moreover, while a "passionate, doomed, death-transcending relationship between Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw Linton forms the core of the novel", Wuthering Heights:

... consistently subverts the romantic narrative. Our first encounter with Heathcliff shows him to be a nasty bully. Later, Brontë puts in Heathcliff's mouth an explicit warning not to turn him into a Byronic hero: After ... Isabella elop[es] with him, he sneers that she did so "under a delusion ... picturing in me a hero of romance".

"I am Heathcliff" is a frequently quoted phrase from the novel, and "the idea of ... perfect unity between the self and the other is age-old", so that Catherine says that she loves Heathcliff "because he's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same" (Chapter IX). Likewise Lord David Cecil suggests that "the deepest attachments are based on characters' similarity or affinity", However Simone de Beauvoir, in her famous feminist work The Second Sex (1949), suggests that when Catherine says "I am Heathcliff": "her own world collapse(s) in contingence, for she really lives in his." Beauvoir sees this as "the fatal mirage of the ideal of romantic love ... transcendence ... in the superior male who is perceived as free".

Despite the passion between Catherine and Heathcliff, critics have, from early on, drawn attention to the absence of sex. In 1850 the poet and critic Sydney Dobell suggests that "we dare not doubt [Catherine's] purity", and the Victorian poet Swinburne concurs, referring to their "passionate and ardent chastity". Elizabeth Hardwick characterises the novel as a "virgin's story"; "Cathy is as hard, careless, and destructive as Heathcliff. She too has a sadistic nature. The love the two feel for each other is a longing for an impossible completion. Consolations do not appear; nothing in the domestic or even in the sexual life seems to the point in this book"

Morality

Some early Victorian reviewers complained about how Wuthering Heights dealt with violence and immorality. One called it "a compound of vulgar depravity and unnatural horrors".

Brontë was supposedly unaware of "the limits on polite expression" expected of Victorian novelists. Her characters use vulgar language, "cursing and swearing". Though the daughter of a curate, Brontë shows little respect for formal religious observance in the novel; the only strongly religious characters in Wuthering Heights are Joseph, who is usually seen as satirizing "the joyless version of Methodism that the Brontë children were exposed to through their Aunt Branwell"; Nelly Dean, who persists fruitlessly in urging Heathcliff to repent; and also Cathy, whose expressed love for both Linton and Hareton displays strong elements of religious redemption. But both Catherine and Heathcliff apparently embrace "heathenism". A major influence on how Brontë depicts amoral characters was the stories her father Patrick Brontë told, about "the doings" of people around Haworth that his parishioners told him, "stories which 'made one shiver and shrink from hearing' (Charlotte's friend Ellen Nussey reported)", which were "full of grim humour" and violence, stories Emily Brontë took "as a truth".

Shortly after Emily Brontë's death G.H. Lewes wrote in Leader Magazine:

Curious enough is to read Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and remember that the writers were two retiring, solitary, consumptive girls! Books, coarse even for men, coarse in language and coarse in conception, the coarseness apparently of violence and uncultivated men – turn out to be the productions of two girls living almost alone, filling their loneliness with quiet studies, and writing their books from a sense of duty, hating the pictures they drew, yet drawing them with austere conscientiousness! There is matter here for the moralist or critic to speculate on.

Property

As Anne Jamison points out, when Lockwood visits Heathcliff in October 1801, his first words are "Thrushcross Grange is my own, sir", introducing a major theme of property ownership. At the end of the novel, when Lockwood returns to Wuthering Heights the following October, he finds Hareton as master, while the Michaelmas rents for the Thrushcross Grange estate are being collected by Cathy Heathcliff (or rather by Nelly Dean on her behalf). Heathcliff is now dead, as is his ambition to seize ownership of both great estates and their contents, and then to pass these on to his descendants. In Emily Brontë's narration, this is a long-drawn-out campaign of revenge; ruthlessly exploiting the English laws of property that empowered men to control women and enforce compliance on their offspring. At intervals, the characters are presented as arguing over the legalities of Heathcliff's possessions of property; with Heathcliff's claims being challenged by both Nelly and Cathy. It is unclear in these places whether Heathcliff is to be understood as bluffing, or as misconstruing the (then) law.

Heathcliff's attentions were turned first to Thrushcross Grange. By eloping with Isabella, he acquires control of her own inheritance of personal property through the common law doctrine of coverture. Furthermore, he knows that the Grange estate is entailed in the male line by Mr Linton's will, so that if Edgar fails to produce a son, the ownership of the landed estate must pass by a second entail through Isabella to her son and his, which indeed happens. Under the will, Edgar has possession of Thrushcross Grange, but only as a tenant for life; his daughter, Cathy, has no inheritance in her grandfather's will, from which Heathcliff wrongly concludes that she cannot inherit at all. Heathcliff then turns to Wuthering Heights, where his old enemy Hindley is drinking and gaming his inheritance away. Heathcliff, now mysteriously wealthy, can return to the house as a rent-paying tenant, offering to pay Hindley's debts through pressing on him a succession of mortgages on his lands, such that when Hindley dies in questionable circumstances, the whole estate is mortgaged to the full.

Mortgages were then the standard instrument for raising capital from land as, for instance, for a daughter's marriage portion or a son's university tuition. The mortgagor (Hindley) conveyed the land to the mortgagee (Heathcliff) by an indenture, that would be accompanied (commonly on the reverse) by a counterpart conveyance back from mortgagee to mortgagor once the loan principal had been fully repaid with accumulated interest (usually at 5% per year). There was commonly no fixed term; annual repayments would be higher in good years and lower in poor ones, but repayment might well be expected to extend over two decades or more if the land were mortgaged for its full value of 'twenty years' purchase'. Crucially, the indenture would be qualified by the phrase 'providing always' that the re-conveyance would still be activated if ever the full principal and interest were to have been repaid, even if the mortgagor may have defaulted on expected annual payments in the meantime. This unfailing right of 'equity of redemption' is the essence of an early modern mortgage. When Hindley dies, and the land passes to his six-year-old son, Hareton, the law will support Heathcliff's taking temporary possession of the Wuthering Heights estate to ensure that his mortgages are repaid, but while Hareton retains equity of redemption, Heathcliff cannot have unimpeded ownership of the land or sell it. So long as the mortgaged land is yielding its regular income, the courts of equity will assume that a full repayment remains a possibility, and will not allow an order for foreclosure. C.P. Sangar concludes however, that Heathcliff should be understood to have intended to establish eventual full ownership of the land for himself through the principle of adverse possession; but for him to do so he must have controlled the estate without challenge from Hareton continuously for twenty years, and as matters occur Heathcliff dies after eighteen.

Religion

Emily Brontë came from a religious family, though she was an infrequent churchgoer and, unlike her sisters, did not teach in Sunday School. Throughout the novel, she keeps a clear tally of which characters regularly attend church services, and which children are also attended at home for religious and educational instruction by the curate. It transpires that, without the extra income from educating the Earnshaw and Linton families, and because these families have been failing to augment the chapel's endowments, the stipend for the chapel-of-ease at Gimmerton has become insufficient to support an assistant curate, so that by the end of the narrative the chapel has ceased to be open for Sunday services for any churchgoing residents of the area. Nelly upbraids Heathcliff towards the end of his life for his destructive irreligion.

Nevertheless, the kirkyard around the Gimmerton chapel continues to be used for burials throughout the narrative, including that of Heathcliff himself, so that the last words in the text, 'that quiet earth', refer to this ground. For the most part, the Linton family is buried within a sculptured family vault inside the chapel, while the Earnshaws' forebears are buried alongside the chapel, amongst the graves of the Gimmerton population in general. Catherine, however, had requested that her grave should be at the far corner of the kirkyard, at a point where the moorland heathers and bilberries had climbed over the wall. Edgar, at his request, was eventually interred on one side of her, while Heathcliff was buried on the other; at his own instruction, without religious ceremony. Adjoining the kirkyard is a two-roomed curacy house, which, when Lockwood first arrived, had become ruinous, the chapel itself still then being in repair. However, by his return visit, this too is becoming dilapidated. Maintaining the chapel and kirkyard (though not the curacy house) is the responsibility of the chapel sexton; we are to assume that Edgar had continued to pay him for the upkeep of the chapel, but that Heathcliff had not.

Where the deceased had made a will, responsibility for burial arrangements and any funeral service rested with their executors; otherwise, it was the duty of their next-of-kin. In the novel, Nelly is asked to arrange the burial of Hindley – indicating that there cannot have then been a will; and also undertakes the same office for Heathcliff, for the same reason. Edgar does leave a will, but again it is Nelly who organises the burial, resisting Green's attempt to meddle with the arrangements. It is highly unlikely, though, that Nelly, a servant, would have been nominated in Edgar's will; so she must have been acting under the authority of a named executrix, almost certainly Cathy.

Storm and calm

Critics have explored the contrasts between Thrushcross Grange and the Wuthering Heights farmhouse, and between their inhabitants. Lord David Cecil argued for "cosmic forces as the central impetus and controlling force in the novel" and suggested that there is a unifying structure underlying Wuthering Heights: "two spiritual principles: the principle of the storm, ... and the principle of calm", which he further argued were not, "in spite of their apparent opposition", in conflict. Dorothy Van Ghent, however, refers to "a tension between two kinds of reality" in the novel: "civilized manners" and "natural energies".

Adaptations

Film and television

The earliest known film adaptation of Wuthering Heights was filmed in England in 1920 and was directed by A.V. Bramble. It is unknown if any prints still exist. The most famous is 1939's Wuthering Heights, starring Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon and directed by William Wyler. This acclaimed adaptation, like many others, eliminated the second generation's story (young Cathy, Linton, and Hareton) and is rather inaccurate as a literary adaptation. It won the 1939 New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Film and was nominated for the 1939 Academy Award for Best Picture.

Nigel Kneale's script was produced for BBC Television twice, first in 1953, starring Richard Todd as Heathcliff and Yvonne Mitchell as Cathy. Broadcast live, no recordings of the production are known to exist. The second adaptation using Kneale's script was in 1962, starring Claire Bloom as Catherine and Keith Michell as Heathcliff. This production exists in the BFI, but has been withheld from public viewing. Kneale's script was also adapted for Australian television in 1959 during a time when original drama productions in the country were rare. Broadcast live from Sydney, the performance was telerecorded, although it is unknown if this kinescope still exists.

In 1958, an adaptation aired on CBS television as part of the series DuPont Show of the Month starring Rosemary Harris as Cathy and Richard Burton as Heathcliff. The BBC produced a four-part television dramatisation in 1967 starring Ian McShane and Angela Scoular.

Les Hauts de Hurlevent is a French mini-series in six 26-minute episodes, in black and white, created and directed by Jean-Paul Carrère based on the novel, and broadcast between 1964 and 1968 on the first ORTF channel.

The 1970 film, with Timothy Dalton as Heathcliff, is the first colour version of the novel. It has gained acceptance over the years, although it was initially poorly received. Hindley's character is portrayed much more sympathetically, and his story arc is altered. It also subtly suggests that Heathcliff may be Cathy's illegitimate half-brother.

In 1978, the BBC produced a five-part TV serialisation of the book starring Ken Hutchinson, Kay Adshead and John Duttine, with music by Carl Davis; it is considered one of the most faithful adaptations of Emily Brontë's story.

Theatre

The novel has been adapted as operas composed by Bernard Herrmann, Carlisle Floyd, and Frédéric Chaslin (most cover only the first half of the book) and a musical by Bernard J. Taylor.

In 2021, Emma Rice directed a theatrical version that was shown online and at the Bristol Old Vic. This production was then put on at the National Theatre in 2022.

Works inspired by Wuthering Heights

Literature

Mizumura Minae's A True Novel (Honkaku shosetsu) (2002) is inspired by Wuthering Heights and might be called an adaptation of the story in a post-World War II Japanese setting.

In Jane Urquhart's Changing Heaven (1990), the novel Wuthering Heights, as well as the ghost of Emily Brontë, feature as prominent roles in the narrative.

In her 2019 novel, The West Indian, Valerie Browne Lester imagines an origin story for Heathcliff in 1760s Jamaica.

K-Ming Chang's 2021 chapbook Bone House was released by Bull City Press as part of their Inch series. The collection functions as a queer Taiwanese-American retelling of Wuthering Heights, in which an unnamed narrator moves into a butcher's mansion "with a life of its own."

Canadian author Hilary Scharper's ecogothic novel Perdita (2013) was deeply influenced by Wuthering Heights, particularly in the narrative role of powerful, cruel, and desolate landscapes.

The poem "Wuthering" (2017) by Tanya Grae uses Wuthering Heights as an allegory.

Maryse Condé's Windward Heights (La migration des coeurs) (1995) is a reworking of Wuthering Heights set in Cuba and Guadeloupe at the turn of the 20th century, which Condé stated she intended as an homage to Brontë.

In 2011, a graphic novel version was published by Classical Comics. It was adapted by Scottish writer Sean Michael Wilson and hand painted by comic book veteran artist John M. Burns. This version, which stays close to the original novel, was shortlisted for the Stan Lee Excelsior Awards.

Music

Kate Bush's 1978 song "Wuthering Heights" is most likely the best-known creative work inspired by Brontë's story that is not properly an "adaptation". Bush wrote the song when she was 17 and chose it as the lead single from her debut album. It was primarily inspired by her viewing of the 1967 BBC adaptation when she was 8. The song is sung from Catherine's point of view as she pleads at Heathcliff's window to be admitted. It uses quotations from Catherine, both in the chorus ("Let me in! I'm so cold!") and the verses, with Catherine admitting she had "bad dreams in the night". Critic Sheila Whiteley wrote that the ethereal quality of the vocal resonates with Cathy's dementia, and that Bush's high register has both "childlike qualities in its purity of tone" and an "underlying eroticism in its sinuous erotic contours". Singer Pat Benatar covered the song in 1980 on her Crimes of Passion album. Brazilian heavy metal band Angra released a version of Bush's song on its debut album Angels Cry in 1993. A 2018 cover of Bush's "Wuthering Heights" by Jimmy Urine adds electropunk elements.

Wind & Wuthering (1976) by English rock band Genesis alludes to the Brontë novel not only in the album's title but also in the titles of two of its tracks, "Unquiet Slumbers for the Sleepers..." and "...In That Quiet Earth". Both titles refer to the closing lines of the novel.

Songwriter Jim Steinman said that he wrote the 1989 song "It's All Coming Back to Me Now" "while under the influence of Wuthering Heights". He said that the song was "about being enslaved and obsessed by love" and compared it to "Heathcliff digging up Cathy's corpse and dancing with it in the cold moonlight".

The 2008 song "Cath..." by indie rock band Death Cab for Cutie was inspired by Wuthering Heights.

Wuthering Heights is also the name of a Danish-Swedish power metal band.

In 2024, an indie band "Mili" released a single "Through Patches of Violet". The song features themes that Wuthering Heights explores, mainly poorly communicated love. Two voices, sung by Cassie Wei, are Heathcliff and Catherine. Originally made for a game "Limbus Company", which features Wuthering Heights's other characters and story elements.