Chapter 5 Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights: At Home

Chapter 5 Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights: At Home
Prepared by: Dr. Hend Hamed Assistant Professor of English Literature

Wuthering Heights: A Synopsis
In the late winter months of 1801, a man named Lockwood rents a manor house called Thrushcross Grange in the isolated moor country of England. Here, he meets his dour landlord, Heathcliff, a wealthy man who lives in the ancient manor of Wuthering Heights, four miles away from the Grange. In this wild, stormy countryside, Lockwood asks his housekeeper, Nelly Dean, to tell him the story of Heathcliff and the strange denizens of Wuthering Heights.

Nelly consents, and Lockwood writes down his recollections of her tale in his diary; these written recollections form the main part of Wuthering Heights. Nelly remembers her childhood. As a young girl, she works as a servant at Wuthering Heights for the owner of the manor, Mr. Earnshaw, and his family. One day, Mr. Earnshaw goes to Liverpool and returns home with an orphan boy whom he will raise with his own children.

At first, the Earnshaw children—a boy named Hindley and his younger sister Catherine—detest the dark-skinned Heathcliff. But Catherine quickly comes to love him, and the two soon grow inseparable, spending their days playing on the moors. After his wife’s death, Mr. Earnshaw grows to prefer Heathcliff to his own son, and when Hindley continues his cruelty to Heathcliff, Mr. Earnshaw sends Hindley away to college, keeping Heathcliff nearby.

Three years later, Mr. Earnshaw dies, and Hindley inherits Wuthering Heights. He returns with a wife, Frances, and immediately seeks revenge on Heathcliff. Once an orphan, later a pampered and favored son, Heathcliff now finds himself treated as a common laborer, forced to work in the fields. Heathcliff continues his close relationship with Catherine, however.

One night they wander to Thrushcross Grange, hoping to tease Edgar and Isabella Linton, the cowardly, snobbish children who live there. Catherine is bitten by a dog and is forced to stay at the Grange to recuperate for five weeks, during which time Mrs. Linton works to make her a proper young lady. By the time Catherine returns, she has become infatuated with Edgar, and her relationship with Heathcliff grows more complicated.

When Frances dies after giving birth to a baby boy named Hareton, Hindley descends into the depths of alcoholism, and behaves even more cruelly and abusively toward Heathcliff. Eventually, Catherine’s desire for social advancement prompts her to become engaged to Edgar Linton, despite her overpowering love for Heathcliff. Heathcliff runs away from Wuthering Heights, staying away for three years, and returning shortly after Catherine and Edgar’s marriage.

When Heathcliff returns, he immediately sets about seeking revenge on all who have wronged him. Having come into a vast and mysterious wealth, he deviously lends money to the drunken Hindley, knowing that Hindley will increase his debts and fall into deeper despondency. When Hindley dies, Heathcliff inherits the manor. He also places himself in line to inherit Thrushcross Grange by marrying Isabella Linton, whom he treats very cruelly.

Catherine becomes ill, gives birth to a daughter, and dies. Heathcliff begs her spirit to remain on Earth—she may take whatever form she will, she may haunt him, drive him mad—just as long as she does not leave him alone. Shortly thereafter, Isabella flees to London and gives birth to Heathcliff’s son, named Linton after her family. She keeps the boy with her there.

Thirteen years pass, during which Nelly Dean serves as Catherine’s daughter’s nursemaid at Thrushcross Grange. Young Catherine is beautiful and headstrong like her mother, but her temperament is modified by her father’s gentler influence. Young Catherine grows up at the Grange with no knowledge of Wuthering Heights; one day, however, wandering through the moors, she discovers the manor, meets Hareton, and plays together with him.

Soon afterwards, Isabella dies, and Linton comes to live with Heathcliff. Heathcliff treats his sickly, whining son even more cruelly than he treated the boy’s mother. Three years later, Catherine meets Heathcliff on the moors, and makes a visit to Wuthering Heights to meet Linton. She and Linton begin a secret romance conducted entirely through letters. When Nelly destroys Catherine’s collection of letters, the girl begins sneaking out at night to spend time with her frail young lover, who asks her to come back and nurse him back to health.

However, it quickly becomes apparent that Linton is pursuing Catherine only because Heathcliff is forcing him to; Heathcliff hopes that if Catherine marries Linton, his legal claim upon Thrushcross Grange—and his revenge upon Edgar Linton—will be complete. One day, as Edgar Linton grows ill and nears death, Heathcliff lures Nelly and Catherine back to Wuthering Heights, and holds them prisoner until Catherine marries Linton. Soon after the marriage, Edgar dies, and his death is quickly followed by the death of the sickly Linton.

Heathcliff now controls both Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange. He forces Catherine to live at Wuthering Heights and act as a common servant, while he rents Thrushcross Grange to Lockwood. Nelly’s story ends as she reaches the present. Lockwood, appalled, ends his tenancy at Thrushcross Grange and returns to London. However, six months later, he pays a visit to Nelly, and learns of further developments in the story.

Although Catherine originally mocked Hareton’s ignorance and illiteracy (in an act of retribution, Heathcliff ended Hareton’s education after Hindley died), Catherine grows to love Hareton as they live together at Wuthering Heights. Heathcliff becomes more and more obsessed with the memory of the elder Catherine, to the extent that he begins speaking to her ghost.

Everything he sees reminds him of her. Shortly after a night spent walking on the moors, Heathcliff dies. Hareton and young Catherine inherit Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange, and they plan to be married on the next New Year’s Day. After hearing the end of the story, Lockwood goes to visit the graves of Catherine and Heathcliff.

Earliest Reviews According to one of the earliest reviews of the novel, “the incidents [in Wuthering Heights] are too coarse and disagreeable to be attractive, the very best being improbable, with a moral taint about them, and the villainy not leading to results sufficient to justify the elaborate pains in depicting it”. Other reviews were more generous in their assessments of the ‘power’ of the unknown writer Ellis Bell (Emily Bronte’s pseudonym).

Earliest Reviews The Spectator’s view, for example, was that the novel was too extreme, and marred by detailed and protracted depictions of violence. However, it praised the novel’s originality and imaginative power. Other critics saw the author as having the making of ‘a great dramatic artist’.

Earliest Reviews The earliest reviewers of the novel tended to discuss the ‘home’ setting of Wuthering Heights more than the landscapes it evoked (or anything yet further abroad). Critic Henry Chorley described the home at Wuthering Heights as ‘a prison which might be pictured from life … let us hope [the author] will spare us further interiors so gloomy as the one here elaborated with such dismal minuteness’.

Home at Wuthering Heights: Lockwood’s First Description
Read P. 2 /3 There is minuteness of description (dishes, jugs, tankards). These bright, un-dismal objects suggest a life of prosperity and plenty. The hanging above the chimney and the dog lurking beneath the dresser, could be ominous, but the impression upon Lockwood is one of rustic, decency.

Lockwood’s eye is drawn to the tea canisters (tea being a relatively expensive commodity in 1801 and an implicit sign, too, of connections between the domestic world of the novel and the world of imperial trade ‘abroad’). Wuthering Heights clearly has the appearance of a well- ordered home: arguably it is a well-ordered home within which is revealed the full domestic chaos of a disordered family.

Lockwood reflects that ‘the apartment and furniture would have been nothing extraordinary as belonging to a homely, northern farmer … But Mr. Heathcliff forms a singular contrast to his abode and style of living’. (P.3) Indeed, the reviewer noted that the gloomy and prison- like atmosphere of Wuthering Heights was largely determined by the pervasive presence of ‘the brutal master of the lonely house’.

Home at Wuthering Heights: Chapters I, II, III
On Lockwood’s next visit, he is pleased to find himself, after his frozen walk, once again ‘in the large, warm, cheerful’ sitting room at Wuthering Heights. There is an extreme – and comic – discrepancy between the expectations inspired by this interior and his rude reception by its inhabitants and the most unconventional tea party that follows.

Home at Wuthering Heights: Chapters I, II, III
A comic conversation takes place between Lockwood and young Catherine and the comedy plays over several pages where Lockwood’s social platitudes come up against Catherine’s overt hostility, Hareton’s boorishness, and Heathcliff’s increasing savagery. By the time Lockwood finds himself pinned down by Heathcliff’s dogs in the snow outside, comedy has transmuted into something more brutal. (Read this part on P. 3/4)

Outside the Home While some reviewers’ attention was focused on the interior of the house, a few of the early reviews dwelt on the joint significance of Wuthering Heights as both a wild, abandoned landscape and a house, noting connections between events taking place inside and the exterior weather and landscape.

Outside the Home: Lockwood’s Description of the Exterior Setting
Read the opening of the novel again (P.2): What does Lockwood’s account of the exterior of the house and the first sighting of its inhabitants lead us to anticipate? Given Lockwood’s definition of ‘wuthering’ as ‘descriptive of the atmospheric tumult to which [the house’s] station is exposed in stormy weather’ (p.2), the effects of the north wind are paramount in this paragraph.

Outside the Home: Lockwood’s Description of the Exterior Setting
On Lockwood’s second visit, as the snowstorm sets in, the ‘bleak hill top … hard with a block frost’ and the locked gate over which he has to climb before ‘running up the flagged causeway bordered with straggling gooseberry bushes’ and knocking ‘vainly for admittance’ (P.6) on the farmhouse door, is very obviously a reminder of the chilly reception he previously enjoyed and a premonition of turbulence to come.

The Significance of the Natural Setting of Wuthering Heights
This wild external landscape has a pervasive presence in the text. Its significance for readers nowadays tends to be overlaid by the moorland settings that dominate film adaptations. (Have a look at Fig. 5.1 on P. 357: The 1939 film adaptation of the novel). Nelly Dean tells us that Catherine and Heathcliff loved to ‘run away to the moors’ as children, but there are, in fact, very few scenes in the novel featuring Catherine and Heathcliff on the moors.

In the novel itself, exterior landscapes tend to be symbolic of events in the story rather than the immediate location for its action. The landscapes in Wuthering Heights certainly work in this way on the reader – as a spatial expression of the themes and emotions portrayed – regardless of the fact that most of the atmospheric tumult after the opening storm takes place indoors.

In her preface to the 1850 edition of Wuthering Heights, Charlotte Bronte emphasized that Emily is a ‘nursling of the moors’ – much as the Romantic poet William Wordsworth portrayed his imagination as nurtured by his native Lakeland landscape. It is hardly surprising that the director would realise this aspect of the novel in the medium of film by resituating some of the drama outdoors.

Home at Thrushcross Grange
Read pages 41/42: The first description in the novel of Thrushcross Grange as observed by Catherine and Heathcliff. This first description of the Grange is Heathcliff’s narration retold by Nelly. We get an account at this stage only of the interior of this house, intensifying the contrast between the wild, exuberant race and the glories and constraints of its domestic space.

Heathcliff’s account begins with the obvious contrast with the miseries of the house at Wuthering Heights, where he and Catherine spend their Sunday evenings ‘standing shivering in corners’ while Hindley and his wife sit ‘eating and drinking, and singing and laughing, and burning their eyes out before the fire’. ‘Heaven’ is how Heathcliff describes the Thrushcross Grange.

If contemporary readers were inclined to view the Grange in terms of some of the ideals of home, this was likely to be unsettled by the fact that the inhabitants of the Grange seem only marginally less badly behaved than those of Wuthering Heights. Readers might reasonably wonder whether the inhabitants of this home are really more civilized than those at Wuthering Heights, since competition is clearly rife in both households and both employ brutal animalistic means to protect their interests, whether directly or indirectly: the Lintons’ dogs savage Catherine just as Heathcliff’s later fell Lockwood.

Nelly’s Account of the Grange
Read Nelly’s brief account of the situation of the Grange: P. 83 Nelly’s account includes one of many lyrical descriptions of the seasons, weather and landscape that appear throughout the novel. Although Nelly’s description is of the exterior landscape and the contrasting situations of Wuthering Heights and the Grange, the house if simultaneously imagined as viewed by Catherine and Edgar.

Nelly’s Account of the Grange
Nelly’s account combines precise topographical features of the Grange’s valley setting with a poetic evocation of its green softness, wrapped in a protective silver mist above which Wuthering Heights stands exposed.

The Inhabitants of Wuthering Heights
Lockwood’s narrative shows him as entirely disconcerted by the inhabitants of the house. Lockwood cannot understand the behavior of the Wuthering Heights family, or even work out what their relationships are one to the other. They are strange and mysterious enough in themselves even before the apparition appears on his window. Strangest of all is Heathcliff. His origins remain unexplained, as does the source of the wealth and education he acquires when he temporarily disappears. The main emotion he inspires is fear.

Heathcliff: Lockwood’s First Physical Description
Read the descriptions of Heathcliff’s appearance, speech, and behavior in the first chapter of the novel (P. 1-3): ‘He is dark-skinned gypsy in aspect, in dress and manners a gentleman – that is, as much a gentleman as many a country squire … he has an erect and handsome figure – and rather morose – possibly some people might suspect him of a degree of under-bred pride’.

Heathcliff: Lockwood’s First Physical Description
Within the ordinary domestic setting that Lockwood has just detailed, Heathcliff’s strangeness stands out, despite a degree of familiarity as to his ‘dress and manners’. Heathcliff, with his gypsy-like appearance, suggests a mysterious wealth of possible origins which, for Lockwood, would contradict a gentlemanly status.

Heathcliff: Genealogy
Dark, gypsy-like Heathcliff is a foreign thing: his origin a mystery in a novel, where genealogy (the study of family history) is vital. The centrality of genealogy is reinforced by the incessant repetition and interchange of first names as well as family names: Hareton, Catherine, Linton. (Page 362 – Paragraph 1)

Heathcliff: At Home in Literature
While foreign in numerous ways in this novel, in other respects Heathcliff is at home in literature. His ‘erect and handsome’ figure’, and even the fact that Heathcliff is ‘morose’ suggest that he might share the characteristics of a hero, or indeed villain. Heathcliff as a Byronic hero as demonstrated in ‘The Corsair’ and ‘Manfred’ (P. 363) Heathcliff as resembling the hero-villains of popular Gothic Romances as incarnated in Ann Radcliffe’s The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (P. 364).

Heathcliff: At Home in Literature
Thus, while in some respects Heathcliff is mysterious, in others he can be identified with character types familiar to Victorian readers, and from whom extreme behavior was to be expected. Heathcliff as a recognizable Byronic or Gothic hero-villain might be manageable – but far more unsettling was the way in which the novel represented all the occupants of his house in their ‘wild state’.

The Structure of Wuthering Heights I. Home and Structure
The novel is structured along highly organized lines with a clearly indicated span of dates both for Lockwood’s narrative and for the events that Nelly Dean narrates. There is a constant symmetrical patterning of contrast and repetition between characters. For example, characters are related not just through naming and genealogy, but through the similar-yet-different experiences (Catherine’s daughter and Catherine, Hareton and Heathcliff, Catherine feels trapped at the Grange and Isabella feels imprisoned at Wuthering Heights). These examples all contribute to a sense of a tightly-organized literary structure.

The Structure of Wuthering Heights II. Narrators and Narrative Frames 1. Lockwood
Lockwood, a man who comes from the South, is the initial filter for our own disorienting introduction to Wuthering Heights. The people whom Lockwood encounters are (to his perspective) foreign as to their mode of living, manners, and speech, which in Joseph’s case is a Yorkshire dialect impenetrable to outsiders (Joseph’s language remains a challenge for most readers today).

We could consider the sense of estrangement that this produces as a useful parallel with the unfamiliarity of so much in the novel to its readers and the frame-narrator. Lockwood is not at home at Wuthering Heights, and in this he is representative of the geographical and class location of the majority of the novel’s readership.

Externally, Wuthering Heights was a three-volume novel like any other that Victorians were accustomed to read in the comfort of their homes. Within its covers, however, they encountered a confusing disregard of social and literary codes. In her preface, Charlotte Bronte stresses the ‘alien and unfamiliar’ nature of the inhabitants, customs, and landscapes of Yorkshire to those ‘unacquainted with the locality where the scenes of the story are laid’. For such readers, the language and the manners of those inhabitants were not only strange, but repulsive.

In Lockwood, we find a representative of ourselves as readers. Lockwood’s initial bewilderment is understandable, but his foppish (cares only for appearances) limitations rapidly make him the subject of satire rather than sympathy, and the central narrative is carried forward instead by his housekeeper, Nelly Dean, who takes the story back 20 years.

The Structure of Wuthering Heights II. Narrators and Narrative Frames 2. Nelly Dean
Nelly was seen as a wholesome and nurturing presence. She is at home at Wuthering Heights, and later also at the Grange. She can move readily between these 2 worlds and, as is fairly universally the case with servants, knows much more about her masters than they – or we, for that matter, can ever know of her. However, Nelly has her own opinions of the tale she tells, and readers find it difficult to depend on and believe all her tale. Like so many first-person narrators, she is less than entirely reliable.

The Structure of Wuthering Heights II. Narrators and Narrative Frames 2. Nelly Dean
Nelly’s sympathies are certainly not to be identified with the novel’s romantic protagonists, Catherine and Heathcliff. She tells Lockwood that she was always predisposed to take Linton’s side in any dispute. Critics have often read Nelly as the voice of convention and narrow-minded prejudice. Nelly represents the domestic, ‘home’, but home in this novel is something other than merely benevolent, as readers know.

The Structure of Wuthering Heights II. Narrators and Narrative Frames 3. Other Multiple Voices (Catherine’s Diaries) In Chapter 3, Lockwood readers Catherine’s diaries in the form of her annotations in the books in the chamber where he spends the night. We gain the impression of Catherine’s as yet mysteriously disembodied voice in direct communication with us. Lockwood’s reading of her diary provokes the apparition of the waif-like child Catherine trying to get back into the house.

The Structure of Wuthering Heights II. Narrators and Narrative Frames 3. Other Multiple Voices (Isabella’s Letter) In this letter, Isabella writes of Hindley’s drunken attempt on Heathcliff’s life, of the savage physical injuries that Heathcliff inflicts in retaliation, or her apparently casual mention of Hareton hanging a litter of puppies from a chair as she passes him when making good her escape from the Heights. We are given only Isabella’s account without authorial comment: The burden of interpretation lies firmly with the reader.

The Structure of Wuthering Heights II. Narrators and Narrative Frames 3. Other Multiple Voices (Isabella’s Letter) Here, the novel calls to mind the form of earlier epistolary novels (novels told in the form of letters). Thus, these multiple narrative viewpoints in Wuthering Heights mean that readers tend to experience a lack of authoritative stance – about the events and, most notably, the violence depicted in the novel.

The Structure of Wuthering Heights III. Chronology
With Lockwood’s initial narrative dated 1801 and his closing section 1802, the time span of the novel is explicitly defined. Within this frame, the events narrated retrospectively by Nelly cover a much longer period; the first 20 years of which is occupied by the story of Catherine and Heathcliff, the second half of the novel is given to the second-generation plot.

The Structure of Wuthering Heights III. Chronology
Wuthering Heights has a highly-organized coherence. Along side its tight chronological organization, the opposing locations and voices in the novel help to structure the narrative, as do the genealogical ties that are of such thematic importance to the story. The formal unity of the novel has long been admired by critics. Terry Eagleton, for example, describes it as offering ‘a unified vision of brilliant clarity’.

Romance and Realism The novel is seen as a hybrid – a mixture between romance and realism. Some critics maintain that Wuthering Heights could have been a better ‘romance’ if Heathcliff alone had been a being of stormy passions.

Wuthering Heights as Romance
The novel could be described as romance because: 1- It is a love story 2- It is a work of the imagination 3- It has an important relationship to the Romantic period in literature 4- Romance means novel Catherine and Heathcliff’s declarations of romantic union have convinced generations of readers that theirs is a love story, despite the fact that the novel contains almost no scenes of physical passion between the protagonists.

Wuthering Heights as Romance: The Notion of Romance
Originating as a term for fictional adventures and tales of courtly love in the Middle Ages, the notion of ‘romance’ came, during the Romantic period, to describe works of introspection and imagination. As its most fundamental level, the term ‘romance’ is used as a synonym for the term ‘novel’ and generally denotes a mode of writing that engages with the desires and imaginative lives of its characters and readers.

Wuthering Heights as Romance: Gothic Romances
Wuthering Heights has strong connections with Gothic romances over and beyond the Gothic characteristics of Heathcliff: 1- Gothic novels cultivated an atmosphere of terror, using remote and rugged settings and a paraphernalia of storms, shadows, apparitions, and portents. 2- The threat of violence is generally integral to the atmosphere of these novels, in which women are constantly incarcerated in castle vaults and required to escape. (Isabella and young Catherine’s imprisonment in Wuthering Heights is an aspect of the Gothic).

Wuthering Heights as Romance: Gothic Romances
However, there are many contrasts between the novel and the Gothic genre: 1- Gothic heroines are usually virtuous and passive, not major characteristics of Catherine Earnshaw. Instead of the expected feminine contrast to Heathcliff’s savagery, readers encountered a stubborn heroine who, like the other residents of Wuthering Heights, is no model of refined behavior. 2- One reviewer in 1857 described the inhabitants of Wuthering Heights in the same animalistic language as Heathcliff’s dogs, forever fighting and devouring food. None of the female characters meets expected standards for a romantic heroine, any more than they serve as ideal domestic role models.

Wuthering Heights as a Realistic Novel
In Wuthering Heights, Bronte brings together the romance elements of genres such as the Gothic with realistic depictions of character, dialogue, and behavior. Much of the force of Wuthering Heights seems to arise precisely because Bronte made startling transpositions of a variety of different modes of writing to represent what she saw as reality.

Critic George Henry Lewes found in Wuthering Heights a combination of heightened description and a telling engagement with real issues and emotions, which for him was the basis for the realist novel’s claim to ‘truth’. Lewes develops an analogy with painting to convey Bronte ‘strange wild pictures of incult (wild, unrefined) humanity.

Lewes’ review was a defence of the novel’s realism: ‘although there is a want of air and light in the picture, we cannot deny its truth; sombre (dark), rude, brutal, yet true’. The brutal truths which Wuthering Heights presents include the realities of domestic life, social exclusion, and economic dispossession.

In this respect, Wuthering Heights can be linked with other novels more obviously concerned with what was termed ‘the condition of England’, particularly those dealing with the plight of homeless, displaced children, like the novel Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens.

Conclusion In this chapter, we looked at:
The portrayal of the theme of home in Wuthering Heights Some of the narrative and generic complexities of the novel (such as its borrowings from a range of genres and its multiples narrators) The reader: the critical responses to the novel, the ways in which the text’s formal narrative and generic qualities engender particular expectations and responses.

Chapter 5 Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights: At Home

Similar presentations

Presentation on theme: "Chapter 5 Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights: At Home"— Presentation transcript:

Similar presentations

About project

Feedback

Log in

Auth with social network:

Chapter 5 Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights: At Home

Similar presentations

Presentation on theme: "Chapter 5 Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights: At Home"— Presentation transcript:

Similar presentations

About project

Feedback