1. Wuthering Heights Introduction
AS Prose Unit 2
Wuthering Heights
Introduction

2. Setting Bleak moors of Yorkshire – desolate landscape.
This is a metaphor for the uncertain moral landscape which the characters inhabit.
Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange are structural oppositions. WH is a dark forbidding hillside property whereas TG is lighter and situated in a valley. The short journey between the two is perilous and fraught.
Both settings represent social status with Heathcliff, the outsider, ending up welcome in neither.
The difficulty of mobility – class, exclusion, property and identity are central themes.
The Romantic view of the open landscape is in contrast to the confining walls of the houses.
The hostile weather and bleak settings reflect the social hardships of the 19th century and also the nature of some of the characters – this use of pathetic fallacy created an atmospheric and haunting backdrop for Bronte’s classic love story.

3. The Gothic Genre Combines horror and romance
Features supernatural encounters, ghosts, desolate landscapes and the strange mix of passionate love and terror.
WH is described as a Gothic novel. Heathcliff’s profound passion and desire for Catherine, which extends beyond the grave and transcends the conventional boundaries of class and time. The novel is full of passionate moments alongside fear and violence, but also unexplained dreams and unquiet ghosts.

4. Social Context – 19th century
Mass unemployment as a result of the Industrial Revolution.
Decay of rural lifestyle in face of increased urbanisation and new technology.
Industrial Revolution changed the social structure of Britain – families forced to leave countryside and work in factories.
Family life eroded and there was widespread poverty and unrest.

5. Time
Bronte clearly dates the events of the novel – grounding the story to reality. It sets expectations for the reader.
Critic QD Leavis (‘A fresh Approach to Wuthering Heights’): ‘The point about dating this novel as ending in is to fix its happenings at a time when the old rough farming culture based on a naturally patriarchal family life, was to be challenged, tamed and routed by social and cultural changes’

6. Types of Love to Explore
Childhood love (Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw)
Passionate love/transcendent love/obsessive love/destructive (Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw)
Catherine Earnshaw and Edgar (more expectation than love?)
Heathcliff and Isabella (her infatuation/his need for revenge?)
Cathy and Linton (dutiful love)
Cathy and Hareton (true love)

7. Task 1
Find the WH ‘Family Tree’ in your course booklet – study it and ensure that you know who is related to who/who dies/who marries – quick test next lesson.
Write up your context research as first section of notes – also for next lesson.

8. Narrative Voice
Lockwood – established as the first narrator in first 3 chapters (new tenant of TG). Hostile relationship with Heathcliff/vivid and terrifying dreams.
Narration then shifts to Nelly Dean – she takes the reader back to Heathcliff’s arrival at the Heights as an orphaned child.
The story is framed by two narrators: Lockwood, who commences and concludes the narrative, and Nelly Dean, who provides the narration.
Neither narrator is reliable – Lockwood’s perspective is that of an educated man intent on seeing the world in conventional terms. Nelly Dean’s narration is biased and intuitive. Nelly’s style is intimate and dramatic. Lockwood is complex – full of adjectives and many clauses. Nelly is oral storytelling, whereas Lockwood is literary – like a diary entry.

9. Heathcliff – first impression
AO2 analysis
Lockwood’s narration
Reader interpretation of the protagonist
Animalistic/dogs

10. Key Quotation chapter 2
‘A sorrowful sight I saw; dark night coming down prematurely, and sky and hills mingled into one bitter whirl of wind and suffocating snow’
Bronte uses external descriptions here to indicate and internal state: Lockwood feels himself to be at the mercy of potentially threatening conditions, and cannot see his way to what is familiar territory.
P.5 AO2 analysis (pathetic fallacy/dogs)

11. Task 2
To keep track of the events at this stage of studying the novel – concisely bullet point the key events of the first 7 chapters. (by end of term 2)

12. Dreams Lockwood’s dream – chapter 3
Research Challenge - psychoanalytic reading of Wuthering Heights.
The names of the windowsill – mark Catherine’s journey from childhood to adulthood (Catherine Earnshaw (child)/Catherine Heathcliff(passionate love)/Catherine (adulthood and marriage) P.13 AO2 analysis.
The dreams show an unpredictable and disturbing world. P.15 ‘What else could it be that made me pass such a terrible night? I don’t remember another that I can at all compare with it since I was capable of suffering’
Bronte uses dreams to explore subjects taboo in 19th century – religion/love versus passion. Some contemporary critics greeted novel with outrage.
Discussion Focus – P.17/18/19/20: Gothic/structural device/tension/characterisation of Heathcliff – two sides/love transcending death/trapped