Wuthering Heights
Challenging the Victorian ideal of home
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As it seems that literally everyone is talking about Emily Brontë’s novel this month, mostly due to the release of the latest film adaptation, I wanted to examine an element of the book not always talked about.
Although I have long disagreed with the general “love story” angle of Wuthering Heights, leading many new readers to find the book….let’s just say, dark…I DO strongly believe that new versions of books can bring new readers to classic authors, something I discussed in my essay examining Taylor Swift’s music and the interest in Mary Shelley, and this, to my mind, is altogether a good thing.
I came to WH as a teenager, and I confess: returning to it as a mature student years later, I realised how much my attitude to its violence and darkness had changed. This story is toxic - like, really. It is also very confusing - many of the characters have the same or similar names. It is unrelentingly bleak, something that completely passed me by as a teenager, and I think that maybe life was just more easy and pleasant back then, so that I didn’t seem to absorb the darkness as I did as an adult.
All this to say: it is an absorbing and multilayered novel, which I personally love, but that isn’t necessarily an easy read.
I am returning in this essay to consider the Victorian ideal of ‘home.’
Often referred to as a haunting domestic novel, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is a complex and disturbing story. The novel takes place between two Victorian homes – Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange. The homes are set against the North Yorkshire Moors.
The story unfolds through several narrators, the main one being Nelly Dean, the servant who lives and works in both homes. The novel opens, however, narrated by Lockwood, who is to rent Thrushcross Grange and recalls his first visit to the Heights. He describes the setting of the house as:
‘a situation so completely removed from the stir of society.’1
Thus revealing he is viewing the wild landscape of Yorkshire for the first time. Lockwood goes on to describe the exterior of the Heights:
‘”wuthering” being a significant provincial adjective descriptive of the atmospheric tumult to which its station is exposed in stormy weather.’
He also points out the ‘grotesque carving’, over the doorway, referring to the Gargoyles which correspond with the Gothic genre.
Once inside, Lockwood is more flattering. He describes the home and furniture as typical of:
‘a homely, northern farmer…It glowed delightfully in the radiance of an immense fire.’
On Heathcliff’s arrival, however, Lockwood begins to feel uncomfortable. Heathcliff’s aggression towards the young Catherine, and the savage dogs, which Heathcliff appears to encourage, convince Lockwood (and the reader) that this home is far from ideal. By the end of the chapter, he is referring to:
‘the dismal spiritual atmosphere overcame me, and more than neutralized the glowing physical comforts round me’.
This portrays a stark contrast between the homely vision of the farmhouse and the strange characters which inhabit it. He initially describes a setting which would:
‘suggest a life of prosperity and plenty.’2
This is re-enforced not only by the pewter and other silverware but by the abundantly set tea table.
It is in chapter two, when Lockwood spends the night at the Heights, when the novel descends even further into the Gothic/horror genre.
He is visited by the ghost of the child Catherine Earnshaw. The force by which he deals with her, rubbing her ‘ghostly’ arm across the broken window pane, is a precursor of further violence in the novel.
Nelly is the most prevalent narrator and seems to be happy in both homes. Returning to the Heights later in the novel from Thrushcross Grange to care for the young Catherine, she makes herself comfortable, once they are re-united. It is Isabella Linton, in her letter to Nelly, who is the most scathing about the Heights, asking:
‘how did you contrive to preserve the common sympathies of human nature when you resided here?’
The second home is Thrushcross Grange and is the home of the Lintons. Critic da Sousa Correa observed the contrast between the two homes as ‘fundamental to the novel’.
We are first introduced to Thrushcross Grange through the eyes of the young Heathcliff. He and Catherine have ‘escaped’ one evening across the moors and spied upon the Linton children, Edgar and Isabella. It is Heathcliff’s description we get of the Grange:
‘Ah! It was beautiful – a splendid place carpeted with crimson’.
The colouring of the carpet here helps to convey to the reader the luxurious and expensive taste of the Lintons compared to the darkness of the Heights. It is again the inhabitants which Heathcliff speaks of disparagingly, rather than the home. This pairing of characters and parallels is noticeable in the novel and, just as Lockwood is an outsider, observing the homes of the characters, so is Heathcliff.
Also, Heathcliff is commenting on the bad behaviour of the Linton children as Lockwood did about the inhabitants of the Heights. Heathcliff claims that Isabella and Edgar are unappreciative of their surroundings and relative freedom when describing their argument over a small pet dog:
‘The Idiots! That was their pleasure! To quarrel who should hold a heap of warm hair.’
Even the civilised pet dog of the Lintons becomes a mirror for the much more savage animals kept by Heathcliff in the opening chapter.
Unlike Lockwood’s description of the Heights, the focus of Thrushcross Grange is from the interior. It isn’t until later, following the marriage of Catherine and Edgar, when we get a more detailed account of the Grange’s physical situation.
This is through Nelly who introduces the qualities of the setting. Nelly expresses affection for the house and grounds, speaking lyrically, taking the novel into a more Romantic register. She describes the weather, the landscape and the changing seasons:
‘a mellow evening in September.’
She also describes the specific topography of the Grange, situated:
‘...very soon after you pass the chapel.’
In this description she contrasts the unfavourable situation of the Heights:
‘Wuthering Heights rose above this silvery vapour;’
The use of ‘silvery vapour’ evoking a dark, sinister association, again resonant with the Gothic genre. This contrast between dark and light is heightened by the sudden arrival of Heathcliff: Nelly refers here to ‘undefined shadows’ in the moonlit garden which turn out to be him.
The two homes have previously been portrayed in three film versions. The Kosminsky film of 1992 sets up the first scene in a Gothic atmosphere, complete with creaking sound effects and sudden lightning which illuminates the ghostly figure of the second Catherine. In contrast, Kosminsky portrays Thrushcross Grange as sterile and austere.
Wyler’s 1939 version meanwhile is more enthusiastic about the grandeur of the Grange but also shows it as somewhat sterile.
All the film versions share one commonality: they privilege the outdoor landscape shots over the interiors of the homes.
This feels befitting of Emily Bronte’s own love of the Yorkshire moors in which to ramble and roam.
The Victorian readers of Wuthering Heights would have likely found elements of the book jarring against their expectations.
Though it has features of the Gothic, it is not entirely true to the genre; neither of the Catherines’ are the helpless heroines portrayed in Gothic fiction. It wouldn’t have fulfilled the Romantic ideal, either, having a main character as sadistic as Heathcliff. There is an element of the uncanny about the book, and the grotesque, particularly in the scene with Catherine’s ‘ghost’ and Heathcliff’s grimace after death.
Critics Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle commented on this, referring to the uncanny as:
‘concerns a sense of familiarity which appears at the very heart of the familiar.’3
The sinister happenings within the familiar settings of the homes in the novel would likely also have jarred against the Victorian idea of domestic comfort.
The original readers and critics were used to social commentators such as John Ruskin (1819-1900) and Coventry Patmore (1823-1896), and the ‘expert’ in domestic management, Isabella Beeton (1836-1865) espousing the need for a safe and comfortable ‘righteous’ home to be the:
‘expression of British Victorian morality and middle class respectability’.4
Whilst Patmore created the archetype of Victorian femininity as being:
‘pure, chaste, devoted to her husband and sympathetic’.
None of these ideals are realised in either home of the novel.
The first Catherine is hardly the ‘devoted’ or ‘sympathetic’ role model for Victorian women readers to identify with and Heathcliff is thoroughly lacking in morality throughout, though this could have been Brontë’s intention when introducing a character apparently ‘foreign’; Heathcliff’s origin is never known and he is disparagingly referred to as a ‘gypsy child’.
This could have been her way of playing with the anxieties of the expansion of the British Empire abroad and the dangers this could bring into safe, middle class homes. Ruskin suggested the correlation between an orderly, comfortable home with moral correctness. This, he thought, best expressed:
‘a virtuous society and, by extension, country’.
The publication of Wuthering Heights was largely at odds with the ‘moral correctness’ of the home supported by the social commentators. Critics found the characters:
‘...too coarse and disagreeable to be attractive...with a moral taint about them.’5
Though there were many similar comments about the unwholesome characters and violence, some pin-pointed the unhappy situation of the home at the centre. A review for Athenaeum described the Heights as:
‘a prison which might be pictured from life.’
It could be argued that Brontë was commenting on her own view of the ideal of the moral role of women in the home, as well as the differences between unknown ‘foreigners’. Both homes have an element of ‘prison’, particularly for both of the Catherine’s.
Wuthering Heights has been seen as many different types of novel and its representations on film have contributed to it becoming more prevalent in the minds of modern readers as a great romance story.
The portrayal of the two homes are integral to the response of readers who arguably find the Heights dark and foreboding and the Grange stale and confined. This can only add to the atmospheric nature of the novel, though it is perhaps Wyler’s 1939 film adaptation, of the rugged Yorkshire Moors, and the enduring image of Cathy and Heathcliff embracing on Penistone Craggs, which has permeated popular culture and draws visitors to the outside landscape of the novel more than the fictional homes themselves.
Brontë, E, Wuthering Heights, (Jack Ian, ed.), 2009, (1847), Oxford University Press, Oxford. (All further references to this edition).
Da Sousa Correa, D, (2012), Chapter 5, Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights: at home, and Chapter 6, Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights: abroad, in Watson, N, and Towheed, S. (eds), Romantics and Victorians, London, Bloomsbuery Academics/Milton Keynes, The Open University, p230. (All further references to this edition).
Bennett, A. And Royale, N. (1995) An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory, Hemel Hempstead, Harvester Wheatsheaf. (All further references to this edition).
Towheed, S, (2012), Introduction to Part 2, Home and abroad in the Victorian age in Watson, N. and Towheed, S. (eds.), Romantics and Victorians, London, Bloomsbury Academics/Milton Keynes, The Open University, p230. (All further references to this edition).
The Spectator, December 1847, quoted in Allott, 1974, p217).5Allott, M. (ed.) (1974) The Brontes: The Critical Heritage, London, Routledge.
Other sources:
Reading Wuthering Heights: from text to screen, (2011), A230 DVD, Milton Keynes, The Open University.
I feel I need to protect myself from any movie adaptation of this amazing novel. I will definitely not watch the film. I believe Wuthering Heights is unfilmable.
I recently reread this after several decades, and was shocked by the violence and darkness that had escaped me before. There was one television adaptation years ago that did include the violent aspects...can't recall the details, though.
It's a really startling novel.