Today, Wuthering Heights has a cure position in the canon of world literature, and Emily Brontë is revered as one of the finest writers—male or female—of the nineteenth century. Like Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights is bad partly on the Gothic tradition of the late eighteenth century, a style of literature that featured supernatural encounters, crumbling ruins, moonless nights, and grotesque imagery, eking to create effects of mystery and fear. But Wuthering Heights transcends its genre in its sophisticated obrvation and artistic subtlety. The novel has been studied, analyzed, discted, and discusd from every imaginable critical perspective, yet it remains unexhausted. And while the novel’s symbolism, themes, structure, and language may all spark fertile exploration, the bulk of its popularity may rest on its unforgettable characters. As a shattering prentation of the doomed love affair between the fiercely passionate Catherine and Heathcliff, it remains one of the most haunting love stories in all of literature.
Analysis of Major Characters
Heathcliff
Wuthering Heights centers around the story of Heathcliff. The first paragraph of the novel provides a vivid physical picture of him, as Lockwood describes how his “black eyes” withdraw suspiciously under his brows at Lockwood’s approach. Nelly’s story begins with his introduction into the Earnshaw family, his vengeful machinations drive the entire plot, and his death ends the book. The desire to understand him and his motivations has kept countless readers engaged in the novel.
Heathcliff, however, defies being understood, and it is difficult for readers to resist eing what they want or expect to e in him. The novel teas the reader with the possibility that Heathcliff is something other than what he ems—that his cruelty is merely an expression of his frustrated love for Catherine, or that his sinister behaviors rve to conceal the heart of a romantic hero. We expect Heathcliff’s character to contain such a hidden virtue becau he rembles a hero in a romance novel. Traditionally, romance novel heroes appear dangerous, brooding, and cold at first, only later to emerge as fiercely devoted and loving. One hundred
years before Emily Brontë wrote Wuthering Heights, the notion that “a reformed rake makes the best husband” was already a cliché of romantic literature, and romance novels center around the same cliché to this day.
However, Heathcliff does not reform, and his malevolence proves so great and long-lasting that it cannot be adequately explained even as a desire for revenge against Hindley, Catherine, Edgar, etc. As he himlf points out, his abu of Isabella is purely sadistic, as he amus himlf by eing how much abu she can take and still come cringing back for more. Critic Joyce Carol Oates argues that Emily Brontë does the same thing to the reader that Heathcliff does to Isabella, testing to e how many times the reader can be shocked by Heathcliff’s gratuitous violence and still, masochistically, insist on eing him as a romantic hero.
It is significant that Heathcliff begins his life as a homeless orphan on the streets of Liverpool. When Brontë compod her book, in the 1840s, the English economy
was verely depresd, and the conditions of the factory workers in industrial areas like Liverpool were so appalling that the upper and middle class feared violent revolt. Thus, many of the more affluent members of society beheld the workers with a mixture of sympathy and fear. In literature, the smoky, threatening, mirable factory-towns were often reprented in religious terms, and compared to hell. The poet William Blake, writing near the turn of the nineteenth century, speaks of England’s “dark Satanic Mills.” Heathcliff, of cour, is frequently compared to a demon by the other characters in the book.
Considering this historical context, Heathcliff ems to embody the anxieties that the book’s upper- and middle-class audience had about the working class. The reader may easily sympathize with him when he is powerless, as a child tyrannized by Hindley Earnshaw, but he becomes a villain when he acquires power and returns to Wuthering Heights with money and the trappings of a gentleman. This corresponds with the ambivalence the upper class felt toward the lower class—the upper class had charitable impuls toward lower-class citizens when they
were mirable, but feared the prospect of the lower class trying to escape their mirable circumstances by acquiring political, social, cultural, or economic power.
Catherine
The location of Catherine’s coffin symbolizes the conflict that tears apart her short life. She is not buried in the chapel with the Lintons. Nor is her coffin placed among the tombs of the Earnshaws. Instead, as Nelly describes in Chapter XVI, Catherine is buried “in a corner of the kirkyard, where the wall is so low that heath and bilberry plants have climbed over it from the moor.” Moreover, she is buried with Edgar on one side and Heathcliff on the other, suggesting her conflicted loyalties. Her actions are driven in part by her social ambitions, which initially are awakened during her first stay at the Lintons’, and which eventually compel her to marry Edgar. However, she is also motivated by impuls that prompt her to violate social conventions—to love Heathcliff, throw temper tantrums, and run around on the moor.
Edgar
Just as Isabella Linton rves as Catherine’s foil, Edgar Linton rves as Heathcliff’s. Edgar is born and raid a gentleman. He is graceful, well-mannered, and instilled with civilized virtues. The qualities cau Catherine to choo Edgar over Heathcliff and thus to initiate the contention between the men. Nevertheless, Edgar’s gentlemanly qualities ultimately prove uless in his ensuing rivalry with Heathcliff. Edgar is particularly humiliated by his confrontation with Heathcliff in Chapter XI, in which he openly shows his fear of fighting Heathcliff. Catherine, having witnesd the scene, taunts him, saying, “Heathcliff would as soon lift a finger at you as the king would march his army against a colony of mice.” As the reader can e from the earliest descriptions of Edgar as a spoiled child, his refinement is tied to his helplessness and impotence.
