The Literature Book

134

E

mily Brontë’s Wuthering

Heights is considered

one of the most famous

love stories in Western culture.

This is, however, a questionable

assessment: while the intense

but doomed affair between its two

main characters, Catherine and

Heathcliff, is certainly captivating,

readers soon discover that—rather

than romance—the novel presents

a tale of violence, haunting, and

abuse. In this book, Emily Brontë

expands and reworks gothic

themes in a way that exposes

Victorian concerns about gender,

class, poverty, and domesticity.

Myth on the moors

The story told in the novel is one

of revenge, dependence, and

passionate longing, centered on the

manor called Wuthering Heights,

set in the harsh landscape of the

Yorkshire moors. It follows the life

of the antihero, Heathcliff, an

orphan adopted from the streets of

Liverpool by the Earnshaw family.

Heathcliff is brought up alongside

the family’s daughter, Catherine,

and son, Hindley, and the book tells

of their complex relationships and

power struggles over the following

years, Heathcliff’s loss of his

soulmate, Catherine, to Edgar

Linton, and the revenge he takes.

Structurally, the novel uses

a framing device—a separate

story within which the main

narrative is presented. This frame

consists in the tale of the visit of

a gentleman named Lockwood to

Wuthering Heights. An unsettling

encounter with what he believes to

be Catherine’s ghost traumatizes

him deeply, and he quizzes Nelly

Dean, a former servant of Catherine,

about the history of the house. The

story recounted by Nelly unfolds for

the reader as it does for Lockwood.

Emily Brontë Born on July 30, 1818, Emily

Brontë was the fifth daughter of

the Reverend Patrick Brontë. The

family lived in the village of

Haworth, on the edge of the moors

in Yorkshire, a location that had

a profound influence on Emily’s

writing, and that of her literary

sisters, Charlotte and Anne.

Her mother died in 1821, and

in 1824 Emily was sent with her

sisters to the Clergy Daughters’

School in Lancashire. After the

death of her eldest sisters,

Elizabeth and Maria, from

typhoid, the remaining three

siblings returned home. Later, at

Haworth, they decided to start

publishing their work under

male pseudonyms, Emily’s being

“Ellis Bell.” Her only published

novel was Wuthering Heights

(1847), although she and her

sisters had brought out a volume

of their poems the previous year.

Tragically, Emily never lived to

witness the success of her novel

since she died from tuberculosis

just a year after its publication.

Other key works

1846 Poems by Currer, Ellis, and

Acton Bell

WUTHERING HEIGHTS

IN CONTEXT

FOCUS

Victorian gothic

BEFORE

1837–39 Charles Dickens’

Oliver Twist shifts the gloomy

atmosphere of early gothic

fiction to the streets of London.

1840 Edgar Allan Poe writes

stories of intense relationships

mixed with gothic themes of

unsettling, crumbling houses;

ghosts; and corpses coming

back to life.

1847 Charlotte Brontë’s Jane

Eyre is published: its themes

of gothic domestic abuse and

confinement are mirrored in

Wuthering Heights.

AFTER

1852–53 Charles Dickens

writes Bleak House and

reworks the ruined gothic

castle of earlier fiction as the

slum tenements of London in

the development of the

Victorian urban gothic.

Oh I am burning! I wish I were

out of doors—I wish I were a

girl again, half savage and

hardy, and free.

Wuthering Heights

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