137
first comes to Wuthering Heights,
he expects to find a typical
Victorian country house—the kind
of domestic home Dickens was
famous for writing about, with its
comforting fireside scenes of
familial bliss and harmony. Instead,
he seems to stumble into the pages
of a gothic novel, where strange
dogs attack him, a surly owner
banishes him, and a mysterious
housekeeper sends him to sleep
in a haunted room.
Lockwood’s encounter with
Catherine’s child-ghost in her old
bedroom culminates in a startling
and gory image of him deliberately
rubbing the ghost’s bare wrist
on the jagged glass of a broken
window. This violent, disturbing
image could be interpreted as
simple gothic melodrama were
it not for the fact that Catherine’s
relationship with her home is a
complex one. Throughout her
life, she experiences households
as sites of confinement. She
seeks escape from them and yet,
ironically, haunts the edges of
Wuthering Heights, seeking
entry into it after her death. Like
Heathcliff, she is a “homeless”
character who does not belonganywhere. For her, the real gothic
terror is the house’s inability to
accommodate her and her desires.
Instead, like Lockwood’s fracturing
of her skin in death, her identity is
broken in life. Through her, Brontë
reveals the limits of the Victorian
domestic ideology that was often
used to define women in the period.Imprisoned by the home
During the 19th century, women
were intimately linked with the
site of the home to the extent that
eminent Victorian critics such as
John Ruskin described women’s
bodies themselves as private
spaces of domesticity. This
claustrophobic limiting of women’s
lives is an issue that is echoed
in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre
through the literal imprisonment
of a woman within the household.
In Wuthering Heights, this gothic
theme of female imprisonment,
expressed through Catherine,
suggests that the only way out
for women is through a violent
self-destruction that results in
a permanent homelessness.
For Catherine, Victorian
domestic ideology is not only a
prison, it is also an existentialROMANTICISM AND THE RISE OF THE NOVEL
dilemma that makes her question
where she belongs and drains her of
her life and vitality, leaving only a
spectral “shadow” of her former self,
first metaphorically, then literally.
This is the power of Wuthering
Heights and its use of Victorian
gothic elements; it reveals that
the fundamental tragedy of the tale
lies not in the doomed relationship
between Catherine and Heathcliff,
but rather in the lack of a true space
of belonging for either of them. ■The Brontë sisters (Anne, Emily, and
Charlotte), shown here in a painting by
their brother Bramwell, collaborated on
literary works and explored similar
themes in their writing.Hareton
EarnshawCatherine
LintonLinton
HeathcliffEarnshaw LintonIsabella
LintonEdgar
LintonHeathcliff
(orphan)Frances
(family
unknown)Hindley
EarnshawCatherine
EarnshawThe destinies of two
families are intertwined in
Wuthering Heights. Brontë
tends to repeat names,
often causing confusion
in the minds of readers.US_132-137_WutheringHeights.indd 137 08/10/2015 13:05