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 , 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 are fourteen very brief references to Heathcliff's appearance overall; Mr Earnshaw calls him "as dark almost as if it came from the devil", 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", 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 of the fall of Eve in
Paradise Lost by
John Milton 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, 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. Subsequent feminist critics, especially
Gayatri Spivak, have questioned this thesis as obscuring the imperialistic subtext of the Brontës' writings; while others have developed the thesis further in proposing that the canon and experience of patriarchally-aware writers should be extended wider by race and class – to include 19th century writers in English such as
Elizabeth Gaskell and
Krupabai Satthianadhan. The house of Wuthering Heights in the novel – set within an active
grouse moor, maintained for the 'manly' sports of the landed gentry and imperial elite – is as entrenched in male lineage inheritance and land possession as is Thrushcross Grange. With particular relevance to 'Wuthering Heights', Gilbert and Gubar's thesis that the second generation subverts their parents' rebellion and untameability is called into question. Carol Margaret Davison proposes that Gilbert and Gubar had improperly vilified and marginalised the earlier Female Gothic tradition stemming from
Ann Radcliffe, leading to an undervaluation of the degree to which the revenge and abduction narrative of the second volume may celebrate rebellion and emancipation as much as does the freedom and fall narrative of the first. now sexually experienced, bold, self possessed, and fierce. The Cathy who faces down Heathcliff, exposing his claimed possessions as brutality and bluff, is the fierce witch and slut who shows no subsequent indication of reverting into a domestic angel. Beth Newman notes that Gilbert and Gubar, in their treatment of Cathy, had characterised her as continuing throughout as the 'dutiful daughter' of Heathcliff's demands, serving the purposes of 'culture' where her mother had subverted it. They had maintained that this Cathy had merely 'impersonated' witchcraft when Lockwood first saw her, as Heathcliff had been merely 'impersonating' a gothic villain. Newman proposes rather that Cathy's 'witchcraft' encapsulates a very real challenge to Heathcliff's, very real, regime of surveillance and confinement; her resistance effected in substance through what Lockwood terms her "regardless look", Joseph calls her "bold een", and Heathcliff says are her "infernal eyes"; so undermining the "specular economy" of male domination. Newman proposes that Hareton's eventual acknowledgement of this gaze, and developed capacity to respond to it (through eyes that are "precisely similar") in congeniality and humour, is envisaged to presage a relationship of "mutuality" that resists the structures of male dominance; even though it may still be unable actively to supplant the generality of wider patriarchal culture. As for their 'parents', so to for Cathy and Hareton, sexual awareness results in their leaving 'nature' for 'culture', but for them this transformation is a sharing, not a severing, enterprise.
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". 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". 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"; She suggests that, because there is no possibility of sexual or domestic fulfillment in this relationship, it inexorably drives the two principals towards mutual annihilation amid the careless destruction of anyone else in their way. More recently
Terry Eagleton suggests their relationship is sexless, "because the two, unknown to themselves, are half-siblings, with an unconscious fear of incest".
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". 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:
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. but Edgar's tactic is frustrated in that his lawyer, Mr Green, turned out to have been suborned by Heathcliff; so finding a reason not to attend Edgar's bedside, which we subsequently understand to be witnessing Linton's will. Cathy and Linton marry, and ownership of the moveable property of Thrushcross Grange must pass through Cathy to Linton on Edgar's subsequent death. As too must the landed property by Mr Linton's will. But Linton himself is also sickening badly; so, in the final Act of Heathcliff's revenge, he pressurises Linton into making a will by which all his (and so Heathcliff intends Cathy's and Edgar's) moveables would be bequeathed on Linton's death to Heathcliff himself. By contrast, the statutory expectation was that a widow should receive in the will, at least a third of all her husband's moveables for life – as this was the standard where a husband died intestate – but a lower widow's share might be allowed by will where she was otherwise already provided for. The ecclesiastical probate courts will seek confirmation from the executors that this is the case. In some 90% of Yorkshire wills in this period, either a man's widow or his daughter is named as his executor (or executrix in the terminology of the ecclesiastical courts); and indeed it appears that Cathy is named in the unaltered will as Edgar's sole executrix, with his moveables at her "own disposal". There was no bar on a minor serving as executrix. Still, if the sole named executrix is a minor of marriageable age (as was a common occurrence when either a daughter or widow was named), then the probate court will require them to choose a 'curator', an adult male who would act both as their legal guardian and with them as co-executor until they come of age. As Linton's widow, Cathy's choice of curator is entirely her own; consequently, without Cathy's active co-operation, Heathcliff would not be able to legally access property devised either in Edgar's will or in Linton's. Heathcliff conceals Linton's will's having been made from Cathy – and the rest of the household – until after Linton's death; so it may be understood that Heathcliff himself is named in that will as sole executor; with Cathy apparently ignored as executrix, which the probate court would consider highly irregular, and would have discretion to remedy. This is the point at which Lockwood first enters the narrative of events, as Heathcliff boasts of his power and property and Cathy responds to his claims with defiance, undisguised hostility and contempt. Although Heathcliff's victory may have appeared complete, the same legal doctrines and procedures he had exploited could also be used against him. Heathcliff may well boast that he has been able to acquire the Thrushcross Grange moveables through Linton's will, but this is only the moveables; Linton, as a minor, could not bequeath the Thrushcross Grange land, nor before 1834 could a son of any age bequeath land to his father (which the common law barred as 'unnatural'). With Linton's death, and once it is apparent that Cathy is not carrying his child, the second entail in the will fails; and ownership of the Thrushcross Grange estate must instead pass by
intestate succession to the only surviving direct descendant of old Mr Linton, who is Cathy Heathcliff herself. Unbeknownst to Lockwood (or the reader), Heathcliff's dream of supplanting the Linton and Earnshaw families with his own progeny now rested on Cathy's being pregnant. Otherwise, Heathcliff's continued possession of the Thrushcross Grange estate after Linton's death is legally questionable; depending as it does on claiming a lifetime income as 'curtesy' from his marriage to Isabella, even though Isabella was never herself in possession of it. If Cathy were not a minor, destitute, and alone, she could readily overturn Heathcliff's possession. Equally, Heathcliff's continued possession of Wuthering Heights is legally questionable, as the profits from the estate – had they been applied to his mortgages in accordance with Heathcliff's legal obligations – would most likely have paid them off by now. Moreover, Heathcliff is clearly defaulting on his rent and is improperly continuing to act as Hareton's guardian, though he is now twenty-three. If Hareton, though of age, were not utterly uneducated, destitute, and alone, he could readily overturn Heathcliff's possession. The
common law applied for the ownership and inheritance of agricultural '
freehold' land, debts and commercial contracts;
ecclesiastical law (and the ecclesiastical courts) applied for the ownership and inheritance of moveables, and the probate of wills; while
equity and the
Court of Chancery applied for marriage settlements, guardianships, trusts and mortgages, but also provided remedies for some clearly unfair (inequitable) systematic outcomes from the rigidity of the common law. In addition, inheritance of property in towns was commonly subject to the application of local
manorial courts and laws (though these play no part in the plot of this novel). So, while Heathcliff's claim to a lifetime income from Thrushcross Grange, from Isabella's curtesy, would be determined in common law, his claim to Wuthering Heights, from Hindley's mortgages, would be determined in the courts of equity. In contrast, his claim to Edgar's moveables, from Linton's will, would be determined in the ecclesiastical courts. Guiding principles in one body of law might be disregarded – or contradicted – in another. The common law doctrine of
coverture may have acted to bar married women and minors from having a distinct legal personality, but in the courts of ecclesiastical law, for the majority of litigants receiving grants of probate or administration were female, married or not. So long as Cathy does not access her inheritance from Edgar for her own purposes, she may hold it indefinitely as his executrix without its falling to Linton (or Heathcliff) under coverture. If contested by actions in the courts of ecclesiastical law or equity, Heathcliff's acquired possessions of property would be notably less secure than they may have appeared for actions in common law courts. Each of the four bodies of English property law could assure a lifetime income to support a widow out of their husband's estate; '
freebench' from copyhold land in manorial law, 'reasonable parts' from moveables in ecclesiastical law, '
jointure' from a
marriage settlement in equity, and '
dower' from freehold land in common law. In administering a deceased's estate, these rights in widowhood took priority over unsecured creditors or stipulations in the will. Dower and jointure functioned as legal alternatives; a widow without a jointure could always claim dower (assuming her husband owned real property), though at this date, as almost all propertied daughters married with a settlement, they would expect jointure rather than dower in widowhood. Equally, 'separate estate' and 'reasonable parts' were legal alternatives; a widow with a separate estate could not claim reasonable parts of her husband's moveables. But as Heathcliff has prevented Cathy from being provided with a marriage settlement and jointure in Edgar's will, and as she has no share in the moveables from Linton's, she must consequently be legally entitled to claim
dower from Linton's freeholds. This dower would constitute lifetime possession of one third of the Thrushcross Grange lands; and Linton's executors' assurance of this would be a condition of their being granted probate. As Heathcliff has no next of kin and makes no will, at his death his
real property must
escheat to the
Crown. It would seem that Cathy's and Hareton's ownerships of the two landed estates should not be at risk of escheat, but that the possibility of Edgar's moveables being included with Heathcliff's escheat as
bona vacantia would rest on Linton's dying will. In respect of which, both Edgar's and Linton's estates-at-death would first need to have undergone probate before the
ecclesiastical courts; a process that could take a year, would require Heathcliff to have obtained grants of
probate or
letters of administration and to have commissioned a thorough inventory of Thrushcross Grange and its contents; and would likely also include an investigation by the
Rural Dean (as the
ordinary of the ecclesiastical court) into the circumstances in which Linton's will had been made, into the choice of a co-executor alongside Cathy for Edgar's will, and into Cathy's standing as Linton's widow. in its kirkyard:
Thornton-le-Beans Chapel 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.
Derek Traversi, for example, sees in
Wuthering Heights "a thirst for religious experience, 'which is not Christian'. It is this spirit which moves Catherine to exclaim, 'Surely you and everybody have a notion that there is, or should be, an existence of yours beyond you. What were the use of my creation if I were entirely contained here? (Ch. IX). Thomas John Winnifrith, author of
The Brontes and Their Background: Romance and Reality (Macmillan, 1977), argues that the allusions to Heaven and Hell are more than metaphors, and have a religious significance, because "for Heathcliff, the loss of Catherine is literally Hell... 'existence after losing her would be Hell' (Ch. xiv, p. 117)." Likewise, in the final scene between them, Heathcliff writhes "in the torments of Hell (XV)". Otto links the "daemonic" with "a genuine religious experience". Lisa Wang argues that in both
Wuthering Heights, and in her poetry, Emily Brontë concentrates on "the non-conceptual", or what Rudolf Otto has called 'the non-rational' aspect of religion... the primal nature of religious experience over and above its doctrinal formulations". This corresponds with the dictionary meaning: "of or relating to an inner or attendant spirit, esp. as a source of creative inspiration or genius". This meaning was important to the
Romantic movement. However, the word
daemon can also mean "a demon or devil", and that is equally relevant to Heathcliff, whom Peter McInerney describes as "a Satanic
Don Juan". Heathcliff is also "dark-skinned", "as dark almost as if it came from the devil". Likewise Charlotte Brontë described him "'a man's shape animated by demon life – a Ghoul – an Afreet'". In Arabian mythology, an "afreet", or
ifrit, is a powerful jinn or demon. However, John Bowen believes that "this is too simple a view", because the novel presents an alternative explanation of Heathcliff's cruel and sadistic behaviour; that is, that he has suffered terribly: "is an orphan;... is brutalised by Hindley;... relegated to the status of a servant; Catherine marries Edgar".
Possession Anne Jamison plots the continuing theme of landed 'possession' throughout the novel, and, by extension, the theme of possession in general. The first volume chronicles the developing relationship between Catherine and Heathcliff as one of mutual possession: voracious, all-encompassing, and disregarding all others. Not only are the two principals intensely possessive of one another, their possessiveness extends all around them; for Catherine as possession of other persons – Edgar Linton and his family in particular; for Heathcliff as material possession of land, money and valuables. == Adaptations ==