also through the later, more realist novels. Of these,Villette is the best, though the
reformer Harriet Martineau thought it too concerned with ‘the need for being loved’.
Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall successfully blends realism and the Gothic.
In the Brontë family, real life was Gothic.
Wuthering Heights
Those who come to Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights having seen a film version are
shocked by the complexity of a narration which even seasoned admirers find enig-
matic. That this is no simple first-person love story is clear from the opening comedy
of errors, in which Lockwood’s attempts to interpret his northern landlord’s goblin
household by genteel southern English conventions prove grimly wide of the mark:
Heathcliff ’s house, Wuthering Heights, is a demonic menagerie. The Romantic habit
of adopting the narrator’s point of view is dealt a rabbit-punch. The bewildered
Lockwood is put in a room with a closet bed; in a nightmare, Cathy’s spirit tries to
enter at the window. He ‘pulled its wrist on to the broken pane, and rubbed it to and
fro till the blood ran and soaked the bedclothes; still it wailed, “Let me in!” ’
Emotional extremity also characterizes Emily’s uncanny poems, published by
Charlotte as independent lyrics but originally composed for characters in the
‘Gondal’ saga of their childhood.
At the end ofWuthering Heights, Lockwood stands in the graveyard where Cathy
is buried between Linton and Heathcliff:
the middle one grey, and half buried in heath: Edgar Linton’s only harmonized by the
turf and moss creeping up its foot: Heathcliff ’s still bare. I lingered round them, under
that benign sky; watched the moths fluttering along the heath and harebells, listened to
the soft wind breathing through the grass, and wondered how anyone could ever
imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.The cadences are soothing. But attention to the word ‘heath’ here suggests that
Lockwood still does not understand what he sees.
Some of the intervening narration by the housekeeper Nelly Dean is as unreliable
as Lockwood’s. It unfolds a tale of three generations of two families whose relations
are wrecked by the ‘suitable’, but fatal marriage of Catherine Earnshaw of Wuthering
Heights to Edgar Linton of Thrushcross Grange. An opposition between wild
passion and pious gentility is found in the names of houses and their owners
(Earnshaw is Old Norse for Eagleswood). The passion of Catherine and her adopted
brother, the orphan Heathcliff (a significantly unChristian name), is an elemental
affinity rather than a romantic sexual love. As children, they play together on the
moor in a poetic landscape more firmly visualized than any before those of Thomas
Hardy. Catherine likens her love for Heathcliff to ‘the eternal rocks beneath’, telling
the housekeeper, ‘Nelly, I am Heathcliff!’Spurned, Heathcliff makes a fortune abroad
and returns to dispossess Edgar of Catherine, engineering two loveless marriages in
order to inherit Thrushcross Grange. But his long revenge turns sour, and he starves
himself to death in order to be reunited to Catherine – underground! The saga ends
in a love-match between the families in the next generation, thwarting Heathcliff ’s
will. Heathcliff ’s hatred dies with him, but the book’s madness and cruelty, though
carefully unendorsed by the author, remain disturbing.
Despite Heathcliff’s wolfish teeth, Emily’s writing is not hackneyed, and she
transmutes the grotesqueness of her Gothic materials far better than Charlotte. Her
complex narrative is filtered through several viewpoints and timeframes, and her
THE TRIUMPH OF THE NOVEL 289Charlotte Brontë
(1816–1855) and Emily
Brontë(1818–1848) were
daughters of Rev. Patrick
Brunty, an Irishman. Their
mother dying, they boarded at
a Clergy Daughters’ School,
returning after sickness had
cut short the lives of two elder
sisters. They were educated at
home, the parsonage of
Haworth, a village on the
Yorkshire moors, with their
sister Anne(1820–1849) and
brother Branwell. As
adolescents they wrote
fantasies set in the worlds of
Gondal and Angria. The girls
taught, acted as governesses,
and wrote. Charlotte: Poems
by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell
(ed., 1846), Jane Eyre
(1847), Shirley(1849),
Villette(1853), The Professor
(1857). Emily: Wuthering
Heights(1847). Anne: Agnes
Grey(1847), The Tenant of
Wildfell Hall(1848). Branwell
drank himself to death.
Charlotte married, dying a few
months later in pregnancy.
Patrick outlived them all.