^^^^^^^^^^
EMILY BRONTE:  THE AUTHOR AND HER TIMES 

  A graveyard nearly encircled the Haworth parsonage, where
Emily Bronte lived for most of her thirty years.  Emily's mother
died in that parsonage in 1821, when the girl was three.  Two
years later, Emily and her three older sisters were sent to
boarding school, where two of them, Maria and Elizabeth,
succumbed to typhus and died.  Other than such bare, depressing
facts as these, we know very little about Emily Bronte's life. 

  Jumping from the life of any writer into his or her work is
risky, but usually there is something to narrow the gap just a
bit:  letters, diaries, or confidences to friends.  There is
almost nothing like that of Emily's, so you have few clues as to
how she felt about any of these facts.  In part this is because
Haworth is in Yorkshire, in northern England, far from the
cultural circles of London.  But even by the standards of a
quiet country town, Emily was reclusive.  The other surviving
children--Charlotte, Branwell, and Anne--at least talked to
other people.  And since Wuthering Heights was not widely read
or appreciated in its day (in fact, it was not generally
recognized as a masterpiece until this century), no one bothered
to find out anything about its author.  The person who was
pressed for information was Charlotte, after the success of her
second novel, Jane Eyre.  In the strong light shed on her, you
catch glimpses of her more gifted younger sister. 

  The Bronte children were left largely to their own devices.
Their father Patrick, the vicar, was eccentric and domineering.
He spent most of his time in his study and even took his meals
there.  The children's aunt, who moved to the parsonage shortly
after their mother's death, didn't like the cold, bleak,
isolated town of Haworth, and stayed mostly in her room with the
fire banked high and the door firmly shut.  Discipline was lax;
circumstances seemed to foster an independence of spirit. 

  The practical Charlotte and the submissive Anne went to
school and found jobs as governesses; but Emily rarely left
home, and little is known of what she did at Haworth.  She
wandered over her beloved moors, did the ironing, baked the
bread, listened to the servants' stories. 

  How could such an inexperienced young woman as Emily Bronte
have written so convincingly in Wuthering Heights of passionate
love?  As far as is known, Emily showed no romantic interest in
anyone, but there were plenty of examples of the frustrations of
love around her.  (And surely she got some inspiration from
books she read.) A young curate was attentive and flattering to
all the sisters and to a friend Charlotte made at school; Anne
was the only one who took him seriously, and her heart was
broken.  Charlotte agonized over an unrequited passion for the
married head of the school in Brussels.  And then there was
Branwell. 

  A brilliant conversationalist, Branwell started hanging
around bars in his teens, and if a stranger stopped by, he would
entertain him for the price of a night's drinks.  At first all
the family's hopes were pinned on him, but it soon became clear
that he wouldn't even be able to hold down a job on his own.
Anne eventually got him a position as tutor for the Robinson
family of Thorp Hall, where she was governess, and he fell
wildly in love with the mistress of the place.  Either because
the husband found out, or because the wife tired of him, he was
dismissed, and spent the rest of his short life addicted to
alcohol and opium. 

  While Branwell was devoting himself to his love affair, his
three sisters were busy writing.  Charlotte had found some of
Emily's earlier poems, and persuaded Emily to contribute to a
book of verse by all three sisters, to be financed by money left
them by their aunt.  The three picked the pseudonyms of Currer
[Charlotte], Ellis [Emily], and Acton [Anne] Bell, and their
literary careers began.  Turning from poetry to fiction,
Charlotte wrote The Professor and Jane Eyre; Emily, Wuthering
Heights; and Anne, Agnes Grey--all under their pseudonyms.
Charlotte and Anne soon revealed their true identities; while
Emily, true to form, forbade her sisters to reveal anything
about her. 

  Two months after the "Bells" were unmasked, in September
1848, Branwell died.  His dissipation had been too much for the
frail Bronte constitution to bear.  Emily herself caught cold
the day of the funeral, the last day she ever went outdoors.
Consumption took hold quickly.  She wasted away before her
anguished sisters but continued to see to her chores, refusing
medical attention.  On December 19, at the age of thirty, she
died, unaware that her only novel would some day be recognized
as a masterpiece. 

  Anne died half a year later, at the age of twenty-nine.
Charlotte died at the age of thirty-eight.  Patrick Bronte
lasted another six years; he had outlived all his children. 

^^^^^^^^^^
WUTHERING HEIGHTS:  THE PLOT 

  Mr.  Lockwood, the narrator, has just rented a large,
secluded house called Thrushcross Grange in the desolate moors
of Yorkshire in northern England.  When he goes to visit his
landlord, a Mr.  Heathcliff, who lives a few miles away at a
smaller place called Wuthering Heights, he finds his new
neighbor surly and quarrelsome.  Forced to spend the night there
because of a snowstorm, he dreams of a ghost calling itself
Catherine Linton.  Back at the Grange, he asks his housekeeper,
Ellen (Nelly) Dean, to tell him about the strange household at
Wuthering Heights. 

  Mrs.  Dean's story begins thirty years before, when Wuthering
Heights was the home of a respectable family called the
Earnshaws.  After a visit to Liverpool, Mr.  Earnshaw has
brought home a stray gypsy lad, whom he calls Heathcliff, to
raise with his own children, Hindley and Catherine.  Catherine
feels a special closeness with Heathcliff, but Hindley hates him
because the gypsy boy is Mr.  Earnshaw's favorite.  Shortly
after his father dies, Hindley comes home from school with a new
wife, and forces Heathcliff into the role of servant.  Cathy
takes Heathcliff's side, and the two run wild together on the
moors, eventually falling in love.  On one of their rambles they
are caught peeking into the windows of Thrushcross Grange, where
the Lintons live.  The Linton children, Edgar and Isabella, are
afraid of the rough Heathcliff, but become fond of Catherine,
who is forced to stay with them for several weeks to recover
from the bite of their watchdog. 

  When Cathy returns home, she's dressed like a lady and has
given up her wild ways.  She laughs at Heathcliff's black, cross
look, and he runs off in anger.  Hindley's wife dies soon after
bearing a son, and in his grief Hindley treats Heathcliff worse
than ever.  Cathy and Heathcliff have also been arguing
intensely. 

  Thus when Edgar Linton proposes, Cathy accepts.  Afterward
she tells Ellen, the housekeeper, that Edgar is handsome and
cheerful, and that he's going to be rich one day.  It would
degrade her to marry Heathcliff now, she says, even though she
believes she belongs with him. 

  Unbeknownst to Cathy, Heathcliff has been listening, and when
he hears her say it would degrade her to marry him, he runs
away.  Cathy is beside herself when she learns he's gone, and
falls ill. 

  Three years later, Cathy and Edgar marry, and together with
Ellen, whom they persuade to come with them, make their home at
Thrushcross Grange.  The young couple have been happy together
for six months when Heathcliff returns, a rich and educated man.
He stays at Wuthering Heights with his old enemy Hindley, who's
now a drunk.  When Heathcliff visits Thrushcross Grange, Cathy
is delighted to see him.  Isabella Linton soon falls in love
with the transformed Heathcliff.  Cathy and Edgar, are both
enraged, but for different reasons.  Although Heathcliff thinks
that Isabella is silly and weak, he pursues her in order to get
revenge on Edgar and, perhaps, to get her property.  Shortly
after, Cathy falls ill.  Delirious with fever, she imagines
herself back with the young Heathcliff.  While she lies ill, he
and Isabella elope. 

  By the time the newlyweds return to live at Wuthering
Heights, Cathy is sufficiently recovered to recognize Heathcliff
when he sneaks into her room one day.  Each accuses the other of
betraying their love.  That night Cathy dies in premature
childbirth.  When Heathcliff learns of her death, he beats his
head against a tree and begs her ghost to haunt him. 

  Meanwhile, Isabella's love for Heathcliff has turned to hate.
The day after Cathy's funeral, Isabella flees to Thrushcross
Grange to confide her troubles in Ellen.  Hindley, driven mad by
the knowledge that he gambled away his property to Heathcliff,
had tried to kill him the night before.  In the ensuing
struggle, Heathcliff had seriously injured Hindley.  Isabella
escapes to the south of England, and six months later Hindley
dies. 

  Twelve years pass.  Hareton, Hindley's son, grows up at
Wuthering Heights with Heathcliff, who raises him to be proud of
his ignorance and bad temper.  Cathy and Edgar's daughter, also
named Catherine, grows up at Thrushcross Grange, where Edgar
gives her the love he once lavished on his wife.  Cathy's told
nothing about Wuthering Heights or Heathcliff. 

  Edgar hears that his sister Isabella is dying, and goes south
to see her and the son, Linton, she bore not long after leaving
Heathcliff.  Edgar brings Linton home to Thrushcross Grange
after Isabella dies, but the next day Heathcliff claims his son.
Cathy doesn't see Linton again until three years later, when she
meets Heathcliff for the first time. 

  Heathcliff takes Cathy to Wuthering Heights, where she is
briefly reunited with Linton.  Heathcliff tells Ellen that he
intends the two to marry.  Despite Edgar's ban on communication
between the two households, Cathy secretly exchanges love
letters with Linton until Ellen finds out and puts a stop to it.
The next time Cathy runs into Heathcliff, he tells her that
Linton is dying of love for her, but when she goes to see him,
they fight.  Heathcliff has turned Linton's natural peevishness
into maliciousness.  Cathy continues secretly to see the boy,
however. 

  Edgar is dying, and fears for Cathy's future.  Since he has
no male heir, the property will pass to Linton, his sister's
son.  The only way Cathy can stay at Thrushcross Grange is to
marry Linton.  Shortly after Edgar dies, Linton also succumbs,
and Heathcliff claims Thrushcross Grange in his late wife's
name. 

  The major portion of Ellen Dean's story ends here.  Lockwood
leaves Yorkshire for a while.  A year passes.  Then Lockwood
returns, and Ellen tells him what has happened in the interim.
When Hareton, Hindley's son, and Cathy fell in love, a strange
change came over Heathcliff.  He lost interest in his revenge,
yearning only to be again with his Cathy, and finally died. 

  As the story ends, Hareton and the younger Cathy are to be
married. 

  The characters in Wuthering Heights are sometimes compared to
figures in myths, ballads, fairy tales, or dreams because they
are rarely seen engaged in the more social commonplaces of
everyday life.  Edgar Linton, for instance, is said to be fun to
talk to, but you are given no idea what he talks about.  Nor are
you shown how characters act when they are outside the tight
knot of Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange, the two
households that dominate the novel.  Each character is generally
of one of two types--the Wuthering Heights type (strong,
passionate, stormy) or the Thrushcross Grange type (passive,
civilized, calm).  The obvious contrast is between Heathcliff
and Edgar. 

^^^^^^^^^^
WUTHERING HEIGHTS:  GENEALOGICAL TABLE 

  The Earnshaws The Lintons 

^^^^^^^^^^
WUTHERING HEIGHTS:   

  Frances m.  Hindley Catherine m.  Edgar Isabella m.
Heathcliff 

^^^^^^^^^^
WUTHERING HEIGHTS:   

  Hareton m.  Catherine m.  Linton 

^^^^^^^^^^
WUTHERING HEIGHTS:  HEATHCLIFF 

  Charlotte Bronte, in defending her sister's book to the
readers of her day, never defended the character of Heathcliff.
"He stands unredeemed," she wrote in her preface to the novel,
"never once swerving in his arrow-straight course to perdition."
She went on to question whether it was even right or advisable
to create such beings. 

  Although modern readers, on the whole, are more sympathetic
to Heathcliff, it's easy to understand Charlotte Bronte's
position.  To recite a catalogue of his sins is almost to retell
the novel.  You sympathize with him at first, when Hindley
mistreats him and he loses Cathy, but when he returns
transformed, and his plan of vengeance begins to unfold, your
feelings change.  You begin to question his love for Cathy.  Was
it selfish, not true love at all, but an obsession?  Can love
exist so intertwined with jealousy, hatred, and anger? 

  Mrs.  Dean says that Heathcliff is greedy, and Cathy herself
tells him he's close and covetous.  His name is generally
surrounded with words like hell, devil, diabolical, infernal,
and fiendish.  Worst of all, he's unrepentant.  "I've done no
injustice," he says at the end of the book. 

  The author's contemporaries were upset that such an evil
character loomed so large in her book.  In looking to identify
the source of that sense of evil, some modern readers claim that
Heathcliff represents a specifically sexual energy that Emily
Bronte, a true Victorian, was bound to denounce. 

  Simply to condemn Heathcliff, however, is to ignore the real
sympathy for him, even identification with him, that Emily
Bronte evokes from her readers.  People have seen Heathcliff in
two very different lights: 

  1.  As a rebel.  Heathcliff, a friendless laborer, is
mistreated by the landed gentry.  He loses his true love to a
man with wealth and a higher social position.  He takes revenge
by seizing control of Thrushcross Grange and Wuthering Heights.
In this view, his revenge is an assertion of his dignity as a
human being, and right is on his side. 

  2.  As a person committed to a higher love.  That is, a
person committed to a love beyond the conventional notions of
religion or morality.  When Heathcliff identifies himself with
Cathy ("I cannot live without my life!  I cannot live without my
soul!"), this is not selfishness; he is describing a love that
holds nothing back.  And he remains true to his love even when
Cathy has betrayed him for Edgar.  When he returns from his
three-year exile, he plans at first to have revenge only on
Hindley and to "look in" at Thrushcross Grange and make sure
Cathy is happy.  But his suffering overwhelms him, and he starts
to torment others, especially Isabella, Edgar Linton's sister. 

  His revenge is thus a horrible deflection of his love for
Cathy, and his greatest crime--and the source of all his later
ones--is not to forgive her on her deathbed.  It is only when he
finds himself reconciled to her spirit that he abandons his
cruelty toward Hareton and the younger Cathy. 

^^^^^^^^^^
WUTHERING HEIGHTS:  CATHERINE EARNSHAW, LATER MRS.
EDGAR LINTON 

  There are, in a sense, two Catherines:  the one who roams
wildly over the moors with Heathcliff, who races him barefoot
when she loses her shoes in a bog; and the one who returns from
Thrushcross Grange a lady, afraid that the dogs, and Heathcliff
too, might soil her grand new dress.  There is Heathcliff's
Catherine, and there is Edgar's Catherine.  They are not
mutually exclusive, of course; even the wild Catherine is
educated (unlike the young Heathcliff), and even the dressed-up
Catherine is saucy and indulgent (unlike Edgar Linton). 

  You can see Catherine as either untrue to her own untamed
nature, through pride or ignorance, or genuinely torn between
two ways of being. 

  She herself admits that Heathcliff is "more herself" than she
is, and that Edgar is as different from her "as a moonbeam from
lightning or frost from fire." Catherine's acceptance of Edgar's
proposal, then, is a betrayal of Heathcliff and of herself.  Why
does she do it?  Ellen says she's proud, and perhaps Cathy does
want to be a great lady.  Or perhaps Cathy's true desire is to
free Heathcliff from Hindley's clutches.  If so, her plan is
foolish; neither Heathcliff nor Edgar would have gone along with
it. 

  On the other hand, there is much evidence that Cathy is truly
in conflict.  She tells Ellen that Heathcliff's return has
reconciled her to God and humanity; yet she describes him to
Isabella as a "pitiless, wolfish man." When she tells Ellen of
Edgar's proposal, she wonders whether Heathcliff even knows what
being in love is, and despite the unconscious cruelty of the
question, you wonder, too.  His love seems so much larger, so
much wilder, than human love. 

  If Cathy married Edgar for reasons other than love--ambition,
or a desire to help Heathcliff--why doesn't she declare her love
for Heathcliff on her deathbed?  In that scene her passion is
obvious, but it's as complicated as ever. 

  In a more conventional novel Catherine would be the heroine.
Though her death comes before the midpoint of the story, her
capacity for love is so great that her spirit--if not her actual
ghost--haunts the rest of the novel. 

^^^^^^^^^^
WUTHERING HEIGHTS:  HINDLEY EARNSHAW 

  Readers who defend Heathcliff usually point to his
mistreatment at Hindley's hands.  You might think then that
Hindley is the villain.  However, nothing in this novel is that
simple.  Hindley is evil, cruel, dissolute; you can't deny or
excuse his cruelty.  But Hindley is also a victim--deprived of
his father's love by the usurper Heathcliff, deprived of his
beloved wife when she dies, and, finally deprived of Wuthering
Heights itself by his enemy Heathcliff. 

  There is no doubt that Hindley is weak-willed.  He is no
match for Heathcliff, when quarreling over a horse as a boy or
when gambling into the night as a man.  He does not have the
strengths usually associated with the other members of the
Wuthering Heights household. 

^^^^^^^^^^
WUTHERING HEIGHTS:  EDGAR LINTON 

  You first see Edgar through Heathcliff's eyes, as he peeks
through the window at Thrushcross Grange.  Edgar is weeping
after a fight with Isabella over a little dog neither has any
real interest in.  Ellen also initially describes him as a
coward and a weakling. 

  It's Cathy who responds to him from the beginning because
he's pleasant, polite, refined, and educated (all Thrushcross
Grange qualities).  Later, after going to work for him, Ellen
has nothing but praise for his kindness. 

  Edgar obviously loves Cathy, even though he doesn't always
understand her, and their married life seems pleasant until
Heathcliff returns.  Edgar is also a good father--just compare
him in this role to Hindley or Heathcliff. 

  And he is not quite the coward of Ellen's original
description.  When he orders Heathcliff out of his house, and
Heathcliff responds angrily, Edgar strikes the bigger, stronger
man. 

  Edgar, then, is the "angel" opposed to the "devil"
Heathcliff.  That, at least, is one way to see him.  But have
you ever known anyone who was too good?  Such a person might be
wonderful to be with--always charming and interesting, with good
looks and money.  Still, he or she may lack the ability to
understand one's own struggles and fears. 

  Edgar at times does seem to lack this crucial understanding.
Heathcliff speaks scornfully of leaving an ill Cathy to Edgar's
"duty" and "humanity." You get the impression that Edgar isn't
capable of the tumultuous passion that grips his rival. 

^^^^^^^^^^
WUTHERING HEIGHTS:  ISABELLA LINTON, LATER MRS.
HEATHCLIFF 

  You don't see much of Isabella before she becomes infatuated
with Heathcliff, and until then you assume she's much like her
brother Edgar.  When Ellen goes to live at Thrushcross Grange
she compares Isabella and Edgar to a honeysuckle bush embracing
a thorn (Cathy).  Ellen also says that Isabella is "a charming
lady of eighteen; infantile in manners, though possessed of keen
wit, keen feelings, and a keen temper, too, if irritated." 

  A shallow, weak creature, Isabella deceives herself into
believing that Heathcliff loves her, and she marries him despite
Edgar's warnings.  After their marriage, when Heathcliff
persecutes her, she exhibits behavior decidedly unlike the usual
Thrushcross Grange qualities associated with Edgar; she rants
and raves and speaks as fondly of revenge as does Heathcliff.
Finally, when she can stand his abuse no longer, she leaves
Heathcliff, displaying an unexpected strength of character, and
goes off to a suburb near London to have her baby by herself. 

^^^^^^^^^^
WUTHERING HEIGHTS:  HARETON EARNSHAW 

  Hindley's son Hareton, the young Cathy, and Linton Heathcliff
are often considered "echoes" of Heathcliff, the older Cathy,
and Edgar Linton, respectively.  Certainly Hareton has some
Heathcliff-like qualities.  He is rough, strong, foul-mouthed,
brave, bad-tempered.  Heathcliff himself compares his childhood
to Hareton's and finds much in the boy to admire. 

  Hareton is a more moderate character than Heathcliff.  He
loves Heathcliff and defends him against Cathy's attacks.
Hareton's love for the young Cathy, although strong, is not like
Heathcliff's wild, all-consuming passion for her mother. 

  What are you to make of this moderation?  You can see Hareton
as a pale, diminished Heathcliff, a person who lacks
Heathcliff's energy, craftiness, and commanding presence.  Or
you can see him as one of the few people in the novel who have
learned to love.  In the last scenes he and the young Cathy
tease, not torment, each other.  Perhaps it is the young lovers'
example that helps Heathcliff finally discover some strange kind
of peace in his own love. 

^^^^^^^^^^
WUTHERING HEIGHTS:  CATHERINE LINTON, LATER MRS.
LINTON HEATHCLIFF 

  Cathy can be seen, much like Hareton, as either a pale
version of her mother or as another person who truly learns how
to love. 

  Cathy is spirited, but is not as wild as her mother.  She may
wander over the moors, or go to the forbidden Wuthering Heights,
but you don't see her carelessly losing her shoes in a bog.  She
may get angry, but she doesn't throw the temper tantrums of the
older Cathy. 

  When Heathcliff arranges her marriage to Linton, he must take
advantage of her tenderness to do so.  This forces him to
recognize that such soft feelings exist.  Cathy may reject
Hareton out of pride at first, but they are the ones finally
able to escape the vicious circle of suffering in which the
other characters were trapped. 

^^^^^^^^^^
WUTHERING HEIGHTS:  LINTON HEATHCLIFF 

  Linton Heathcliff is sickly, spoiled, selfish, and sadistic.
When young Cathy--the only person in years to show him any
kindness--is locked up at Wuthering Heights by Heathcliff, her
tears don't move him; they annoy him. 

  Linton can be seen as an "echo" of Edgar:  he looks like him,
his achievements are mental rather than physical, and he does
get the girl.  But to push this comparison too far is unfair to
Edgar.  Linton seems to possess the worst qualities of Edgar and
Heathcliff. 

^^^^^^^^^^
WUTHERING HEIGHTS:  JOSEPH 

  Joseph, the servant at Wuthering Heights, is a surly
religious fanatic given to fits of highly articulate, if
dialect-ridden, rage.  (See "Glossary" for help in deciphering
his speeches.) You can almost hear him bellow as you read.  The
question is, How seriously are you to take all his bluster?
There is nothing amusing about the way Catherine presents him in
her diary or the way Isabella describes his treatment of her,
but Lockwood and Ellen's remarks about him are largely
satirical.  It may be that such a ridiculous figure is funny
only at a distance. 

^^^^^^^^^^
WUTHERING HEIGHTS:  THE NARRATORS:  MR.  LOCKWOOD,
ELLEN (NELLY) DEAN 

  Mr.  Lockwood is the only real stranger to the moors.
Presumably, he has had a life more like yours than like
Heathcliff's or Cathy's.  He's pleasant, courteous, and
educated.  Because of this, you can see him as a representative
of ordinary, or conventional, judgment.  Haven't you ever wanted
to be free of everyone, as he does in the beginning of the book?
And haven't you ever behaved as irrationally as he did when he
rejected the young lady as soon as she returned his affections?
So Lockwood's amazed horror at what happens when Heathcliff
takes these natural impulses to their limits is your amazement
and horror, too. 

  But there is another way to look at him.  Since Emily Bronte
is constantly undercutting him, you can see him as cold (his
love problems, unlike Heathcliff's, stem from the young lady's
returning his feelings), insincere (despite his declared love
for solitude, he craves company and returns to Wuthering Heights
when it's clear he's not wanted), and arrogant (he assumes that
the younger Cathy doesn't fall in love with him because she
can't recognize "a better class of people"). 

  Your perspective on Lockwood is especially important when you
read about his dream.  He pulls the icy little hand of Cathy's
ghost across a jagged windowpane until blood soaks the
bedclothes.  Certainly this is just as horrifying as anything
Heathcliff does in the book.  You can see Lockwood as an average
person caught against his will in the violence of Wuthering
Heights, or you can view him as no better than any of the other,
wilder, characters in the story. 

  Ellen Dean's tempered, scolding tone is a counterpoint to the
passionate ravings in the story she tells.  She's sensible,
pious without being fanatical, full of homespun wisdom, and
admits her faults.  She belongs to the moors; her position is
never undercut the way Lockwood's is.  Even Heathcliff respects
her. 

  Ellen tries to be fair, and often acts as the "bridge"
between the worlds of Thrushcross Grange and Wuthering Heights.
She's the one who goes to see the newly married Heathcliffs;
she's the one who takes Linton, and then the younger Cathy, to
Wuthering Heights. 

  So why shouldn't you take her many opinions at face value?
For one thing, she makes her bias obvious from the beginning,
when she refers to the Lintons as "we." She is a Thrushcross
Grange-type character, so you have to question her judgments of
the Wuthering Heights passions.  She is especially hard on the
older Cathy, harder than most readers are. 

  Her actions often expose her limitations.  Like Edgar, she
tries to shelter others from the truth.  She may not lie to
Lockwood (and to you), but she lies to those caught up in the
events of the story, especially to Edgar in the second half of
the book.  Her motives are good, but are her deceptions
necessary or desirable? 

  She's also a bit of a tattletale.  She tells Edgar that
Heathcliff and Cathy are quarreling over Isabella, and she tells
him that Cathy planned her fit.  Both times the results are
disastrous.  Again, her motives are good--she wants to prevent
greater violence later--but she only makes things worse.  Can
hers be a complete understanding of what's going on? 

^^^^^^^^^^
WUTHERING HEIGHTS:  SETTING 

  There are only two houses in this novel:  Wuthering Heights
and Thrushcross Grange.  The former is associated with the
stormy side of life, the latter with the calm.  Physically,
there is a great contrast between these houses.  Wuthering
Heights is a strongly built and fierce-looking farmhouse.  When
Linton first sees it he is frightened by the "carved front and
lowbrowed lattices, the straggling gooseberry bushes and crooked
firs." The building is battered by severe winds during the
frequent storms. 

  Thrushcross Grange, a large estate, is much more protected
from the elements.  It lies in a valley, and the park around it
is enclosed by a stone wall.  When Heathcliff first glimpses the
drawing room through a window, he thinks it's heaven--all
crimson, gold, and silver. 

  Yorkshire, where these houses are located, is a wild, bleak
spot.  There are few trees; slopes of black rock cut swathes
through the heather, which is dull brown most of the year;
little streams tumble everywhere.  There's a lot of rain, a lot
of mist, and a lot of snow.  The people are taciturn, close
fisted, and often brutal.  There is no other world in the novel,
and there was no other world for Emily Bronte. 

^^^^^^^^^^
WUTHERING HEIGHTS:  THEMES 

  Wuthering Heights has always been controversial.  Earlier
generations argued over the quality of the novel.  Readers today
generally regard it as a high-quality work but argue over the
meaning of its content.  Some readers believe the novel's most
significant theme is revenge.  Until just before the end of the
book, Heathcliff's revenge against those who have wronged him
taints all the relationships at Wuthering Heights and
Thrushcross Grange.  Other readers see Heathcliff in a more
favorable light and consider the most important theme to be
rebellion.  Heathcliff, a penniless outcase, eventually beats
his oppressors at their own game.  You can also widen your focus
and say that the book mainly explores the nature of love,
weighing definitions offered by Heathcliff and by Edgar.  Their
actions, and the feelings and actions of other characters, help
you understand these definitions.  You can also see Wuthering
Heights as principally concerned with the conflict between
stormy and calm sides of life.  Wuthering Heights generally
represents the stormy side, Thrushcross Grange the calm side.
The conflict between these two ways of life causes great
suffering until the marriage between Cathy and Hareton--a
marriage in which both approaches to life are recognized and
accepted. 

^^^^^^^^^^
WUTHERING HEIGHTS:  STYLE 

  Emily Bronte's language is both spare and dense, which is why
it's often compared to poetry.  When you finish the novel, you
have a firm sense of the bleak beauty of the moors, for
instance, yet there are remarkably few descriptions of the
landscape.  What is there is immediately evocative. 

  Her prose is also unusually rhythmic, often violent and
abrupt.  The verbs themselves are almost hysterical, until the
final paragraph, in which the moths "flutter" and the soft winds
"breathe." 

  Her two sources of imagery are nature (animals, plants, fire,
the land, the weather) and the supernatural (angel/devil,
heaven/hell).  These are evident in the words she uses and the
mental pictures she evokes. 

^^^^^^^^^^
WUTHERING HEIGHTS:  POINT OF VIEW 

  There is no single point of view in this novel.  The story is
told by Lockwood, by Catherine, by Ellen Dean, by Heathcliff, by
Isabella, by the younger Cathy, and by Zillah, the other
housekeeper.  Since the author never explicitly tells you what
to think, you must evaluate the story in the same way that you
evaluate each of the characters telling it. 

  Lockwood and Ellen, who tell most of the story, appear more
"normal" than most of the people they talk about (Lockwood is a
conventional man about town, despite his brief sojourn to
Yorkshire, and Ellen displays a practical, homespun wisdom), but
you can't overlook their biases.  Neither of them can appreciate
the passion between Heathcliff and Catherine.  You as a reader,
can, however.  You can see much more than any single character
can tell you.  Evaluating what each character says helps to draw
you into the book. 

^^^^^^^^^^
WUTHERING HEIGHTS:  FORM AND STRUCTURE 

  Part of what makes Wuthering Heights such an extraordinary
novel is its complicated narrative structure.  Although telling
a story from different, limited points of view has become common
in this century, when Emily Bronte was writing, most novels
featured an omniscient narrator--someone (often, but not always
the author) who was not a character in the book, but who could
address the reader, comment on the action, and describe the
thoughts and feelings of any of the people in the story.
Wuthering Heights broke the mold; it is told solely by
characters in the book, most notably Mr.  Lockwood and Ellen
Dean, although portions of Ellen's narrative include stories
told to her by others. 

  The narrative itself consists of
stories-within-stories-within-stories.  Take a look, for
instance, at Joseph's description of the dissipation at
Wuthering Heights after Heathcliff's return.  It is quoted in
Ellen's warning to Isabella against Heathcliff, which is in her
story to Lockwood, which is in Lockwood's story to you.  Early
readers were put off by this, seeing it as unnecessarily
complicated and confusing; but most readers today view it as one
of the novel's great strengths. 

  This book is full of doubles.  There are two generations,
each occupying half the chapters.  There are two households,
each with distinctive qualities.  And the actions revolve around
pairs of children (Heathcliff and Cathy, the younger Cathy and
Linton, the younger Cathy and Hareton). 

^^^^^^^^^^
WUTHERING HEIGHTS:  CHAPTER 1 

  It's through Lockwood's eyes that you first see Yorkshire,
Heathcliff, and Wuthering Heights.  He calls Yorkshire
beautiful, but only because he finds the region removed and
sparsely populated. 

  He calls Heathcliff a "capital fellow" and applauds him for
his reserve.  The unfriendlier Heathcliff is, the harder
Lockwood pushes his way into his house, all the while declaring
how much he sympathizes with Heathcliff's desire for solitude.
Lockwood imagines that this desire springs from an aversion to
emotional display (you'll soon see how wrong he is), and he
hints that Heathcliff's story may be similar to his own.  He
himself fell in love with a young lady at the seaside, and as
soon as she returned his affection, he lost interest. 

  NOTE:  As you read Lockwood's narrative, bear in mind his odd
personality and his often surprising (and inaccurate)
interpretations of events and people's motives. 

  Wuthering Heights is strongly built--fortunately so, since
"Wuthering" refers to the fierce winds that blow around the
house.  The name is symbolic, since the house is associated with
the stormy side of life, as opposed to the calm of Thrushcross
Grange.  The servant Joseph is peevish, and dogs skulk in the
recesses of the front room.  The place looks as though it
belongs to a farmer, but Heathcliff doesn't appear to be one.
He is dark skinned like a gypsy and he has the dress and manners
of a gentleman, or at least a country squire. 

^^^^^^^^^^
WUTHERING HEIGHTS:  CHAPTER 2 

  Lockwood visits Wuthering Heights again, although he knows
Heathcliff doesn't want him.  A sinister tone creeps in.
Heathcliff speaks so savagely to the young lady of the house
that Lockwood accuses him of having a genuinely bad nature.
Lockwood tries to figure out the relationships among his host,
this woman named Mrs.  Heathcliff, and another resident, a
rudely dressed young man with a boorish manner but an air of
haughtiness that seems out of place in a servant.  The woman, he
learns, is the widow of Heathcliff's late son.  The young man's
position remains unclear.  He says merely that he is Hareton
Earnshaw (you should recall, of course, that the inscription
over the door described in the first chapter reads "1500 Hareton
Earnshaw"). 

  Lockwood realizes that a rising snowstorm will prevent him
from finding his way home without help.  Heathcliff refuses to
guide him.  He tells Lockwood that he can't sleep in the parlor,
since he doesn't trust him.  The young lady hints darkly of
witchcraft.  (Is she teasing?  Everything seems possible in this
house.) 

  This chapter ends, as the first one did, with a dog incident,
but this one is much more frightening.  Thinking that Lockwood
has stolen a lantern, Joseph sets the dogs on him, and
Heathcliff laughs as his guest bleeds.  Lockwood is sick and
dizzy afterward, and when he is forced to spend the night you
get the first hint of the frustration that will play such a big
part in this story. 

^^^^^^^^^^
WUTHERING HEIGHTS:  CHAPTER 3 

  Zillah, the servant, leads Lockwood to a bedroom where, she
says, Heathcliff never willingly lets anyone stay.  She doesn't
know why. 

  NOTE:  Emily Bronte juxtaposes the mysterious with the
mundane, throwing both into relief.  Here it's a question of
where Lockwood will sleep.  Earlier, when he got such bizarre
reactions when he asked who was related to whom, he was simply
trying to have pleasant conversation over tea. 

  Before retiring, Lockwood notices a ledge on which "Catherine
Earnshaw" is written in many different ways, interspersed with
an occasional "Catherine Heathcliff" and "Catherine Linton."
This is the first indication of the rift in Catherine's soul.
(This also prefigures, in reverse, the history of the younger
Cathy, whose last name changes from Linton to Heathcliff to
Earnshaw.) 

  All the books, Lockwood notices, have a child's handwriting
in the margins.  Reading Catherine's words, he learns that now
that her father is gone, Hindley--whom you haven't met yet--is
treating Heathcliff atrociously.  She describes a sad day when
they rebelled against him and against Joseph's religious
fanaticism.  You may have identified with Lockwood up to
now--however unwillingly--but Catherine is the first character
really to engage your sympathies.  Through Catherine, you get a
different look at Heathcliff.  No wonder he's so surly, after
such an unpleasant upbringing. 

  Musing on the religious title of the book as well as on the
notes in the margin, Lockwood falls asleep.  He dreams that
Joseph takes him to church to hear a sermon in which the
preacher describes 490 sins, "odd transgressions that Lockwood
never imagined before." In the dream Lockwood is horribly bored
and finally calls on the parishioners to rise up and crush the
preacher.  At least for the present he is unconsciously siding
with the rebellion described in the diary, and with Catherine. 

  But when he dreams again, this time of a ghost named
Catherine Linton trying to get into the bedroom, Lockwood
smashes the pane and draws her icy hand across the broken glass
until the blood soaks the bedclothes.  The violence of this is
horrifying, especially since the ghost rouses your pity.
However, you also sympathize with Lockwood's terror.  When she
persists, Lockwood cries out, and Heathcliff wakes him up.
Lockwood screams that the house is haunted, describing the
"fiend" he saw in his dream.  Though Heathcliff yells back at
him, Lockwood later overhears Heathcliff throwing open the
window and sobbing for his dear Cathy to come in. 

  Notice how your picture of Heathcliff has changed.  First he
was "a capital fellow," then he had "a genuine bad nature," now
you see him anguished, suffering. 

  NOTE:  IS THE GHOST REAL?  Lockwood talks as if the ghost
were real, even though he sees it in a dream.  Heathcliff, too,
in the second part of the book, believes in the reality of
Cathy's ghost.  Does Emily Bronte want you to believe in ghosts?
Perhaps.  But there are rational explanations for their
appearances.  Lockwood for instance, is in an overwrought state,
and Heathcliff doesn't actually see the ghost until he's starved
himself. 

^^^^^^^^^^
WUTHERING HEIGHTS:  CHAPTER 4 

  This is the chapter in which Mrs.  Dean begins her story.
Lockwood has taken ill, and to pass the time he asks Mrs.  Dean
about his new neighbors.  She compares Heathcliff's history to
that of a "cuckoo." Cuckoo eggs are laid individually in the
nests of other, smaller birds.  When the eggs hatch, the young
cuckoo, larger than its nestmates, displaces the natural
offspring to become the sole focus of its foster parent's
care. 

  This is remarkably similar to what happened at Wuthering
Heights thirty years ago, when Mr.  Earnshaw promised to bring
his children presents from Liverpool, but instead brought back a
dirty, ragged, gypsy lad. 

  As Mrs.  Dean tells the story, they christened the boy
Heathcliff, the name of a son who died at birth.  Cathy soon
takes to him, but Hindley plagues him.  Hardened to such
treatment, Heathcliff takes Hindley's abuse without complaint.
By the time Earnshaw's wife dies, Heathcliff has wholly replaced
Hindley in his father's affections. 

  When the two boys fight, Hindley calls Heathcliff "an
interloper" and "an imp of satan," two epithets that will be
used against him for the rest of the book.  Heathcliff may be a
usurper, but it's hard to blame him at this point since it's
through no fault of his own. 

  A pattern is set:  love can be capricious, and its
consequences, devastating. 

^^^^^^^^^^
WUTHERING HEIGHTS:  CHAPTER 5 

  Mr.  Earnshaw rages so when he can't strike Hindley for being
mean to Heathcliff that he sends his son away to a boarding
school. 

  Cathy's faults, according to Ellen, arise from her high
spirits.  Ellen accuses her of loving Heathcliff too much--a
judgment you may want to question.  You have already heard
Cathy's point of view in her diary, long before you had Ellen's,
and Cathy was the first person with whom you really sympathized.
You tend to put Ellen's criticisms of Cathy aside, and you will
continue to do so even later, when Ellen's dislike becomes more
pointed. 

  Cathy's sauciness also bothers her father, though his
opinions may not count for much with you, given how unreasonable
he is regarding his own son. 

  NOTE:  In Mr.  Earnshaw's last conversation with Cathy he
asks her why she can't always be a good girl (she's quiet now
because she's been sick).  She replies, "Why cannot you always
be a good man, Father?" Keep this in mind as you read, and ask
yourself why these people behave so awfully to each other.
Because of their suffering?  Because of their evil natures?
Because of the presence of a "demonic" Heathcliff?  Is what the
world calls "good" merely the result of sickness, as is the case
here, or of a weak nature, as is the case with Edgar (which
you'll see later in the novel)? 

  Mr.  Earnshaw dies, with Cathy sitting beside him.  She,
Heathcliff, and Ellen cry out, broken.  Joseph will have none of
this grieving, for he pictures Mr.  Earnshaw as a saint in
heaven now.  Later Ellen hears Heathcliff and Cathy comforting
each other with beautiful images of heaven.  It's the last time
either will find comfort in anything conventional religion has
to offer. 

^^^^^^^^^^
WUTHERING HEIGHTS:  CHAPTER 6 

  Hindley comes home for his father's funeral with a wife,
Frances, who delights in everything she sees except the
preparations for the burial.  Frances is afraid of dying. 

  NOTE:  You know from movies the difference between the terms
surprise and suspense.  When a bomb goes off, you're surprised;
when you know a bomb has been planted, but you don't know when
it will explode, you're kept in suspense. 

  Ellen builds suspense by hinting at the future without
letting you know for certain what will happen.  She tells you,
for instance, that she didn't know what Frances' shortness of
breath and coughing meant.  You know, however, and are left
asking yourself, when will she die? 

  Emily Bronte gets you to turn the page by teasing you with
glimpses into the future.  You are always being given partial
explanations, and you read on, hungry for the full story.
Before you learn of Cathy and Heathcliff's early history, for
example, you are given a quick look into Cathy's diary.  And
long before it happens, you know Mr.  Earnshaw will die, and
Hindley will become a tyrant. 

  When Frances expresses a dislike for Heathcliff, Hindley
recalls his old hatred, and turns the boy into a laborer on the
farm.  Cathy teaches Heathcliff what she can as the two wander
together over the moors. 

  One day Heathcliff returns alone after dark.  Where is Cathy?
Heathcliff explains to Ellen that he and Cathy peeked into the
windows of Thrushcross Grange, and saw a beautiful room with
crimson furniture, a pure white ceiling, and a silver and glass
chandelier.  It should have been heaven, but instead the Linton
children--Edgar and Isabella--were fighting over a little dog.
When the children heard a noise at the window, they cowered and
cried for their parents. 

  NOTE:  Now is a good time to compare the children, while
there is still a "window" between them.  Heathcliff and Cathy
are wild, self-willed, strong, rebellious, and brave.  Their
passionate friendship excludes all others.  Edgar and Isabella,
who are safe inside a splendid house, are peevish, spoiled, and
cowardly.  At this point, choosing between the two sides is not
hard.  But as soon as Cathy is bitten by the Lintons' dog, and
the Lintons welcome her and scorn Heathcliff, the distinctions
begin to blur. 

  Because of the bite, which bleeds profusely, Cathy stays
inside and Heathcliff returns alone to his place outside the
window.  Cathy, he sees, is very happy, "kindling a spark of
spirit in the vacant eyes of the Lintons." 

  Because of this adventure, Hindley forbids Heathcliff to talk
to Cathy, and his wife flatters Cathy into becoming a lady. 

^^^^^^^^^^
WUTHERING HEIGHTS:  CHAPTER 7 

  When Cathy returns home after five weeks with the Lintons,
she's dignified and well dressed.  Heathcliff is still rough and
dirty, and Cathy laughs at his black, cross expression.  She
apologizes and takes his hand, but looks with concern at her
dress afterward to make sure it's still spotless.  Ellen makes
clear from her choice of details that she doesn't think much of
Cathy's transformation. 

  After brooding for a day, Heathcliff tells Ellen he's going
to be "good" (there's that word again--what does it mean to
you?).  Ellen helps him clean himself up, chatting happily. 

  Before Christmas dinner Edgar inadvertently insults
Heathcliff, who responds by throwing a tureen of hot applesauce
at him.  The house is divided:  Hindley beats Heathcliff, Ellen
spitefully scrubs away at the victim's face, and Cathy lashes
out at Hindley for speaking harshly to her old friend.  During
the carols Cathy sneaks off to where Heathcliff is locked up.
Despite her new ladylike demeanor, all seems well between them,
even better than before.  The fact that their love has survived
their separation makes it seem even more precious. 

  It's clear that Ellen, the voice of common sense, is still on
Heathcliff's side.  When Heathcliff announces that he'll have
revenge on Hindley some day, Ellen doesn't make his plan sound
evil.  She understands him. 

  NOTE:  Notice how Emily Bronte diverts your attention from
the Heathcliff-Edgar conflict to the Heathcliff-Hindley
conflict.  This allows you to sympathize with Heathcliff without
any slight to Edgar. 

  Mrs.  Dean now tries to stop her narrative--it's getting
late--but Lockwood presses her to continue. 

^^^^^^^^^^
WUTHERING HEIGHTS:  CHAPTER 8 

  In this chapter you learn the meaning of thwarted love in the
passionate world of Wuthering Heights.  Soon after Hindley's son
Hareton is born, his wife dies of consumption.  Hindley takes to
drink, cursing God and man alike.  Tortured himself, he in turn
treats Heathcliff in a way that would "make a fiend of a saint."
(This "passing on" of suffering will be explored more fully in
chapters 17 and 30.) 

  Catherine's conflicting feelings for Edgar and Heathcliff
become increasingly apparent.  She's cordial in the social world
of Thrushcross Grange, but unruly in the dissipated atmosphere
of Wuthering Heights.  Ellen, whose dislike for her has become
stronger, attributes Cathy's feeling for Edgar to ambition. 

  One afternoon when Hindley is gone from the house, Cathy
quarrels with Heathcliff.  She is still upset when Edgar
arrives.  In a fit of bad temper she pinches Ellen, slaps her
then shakes baby Hareton, and strikes Edgar.  When Edgar
protests, Cathy tells him that she did not mean to be violent,
and that she'll cry herself sick.  Edgar thinks he should leave,
but can't force himself to.  Ellen can see that the passions
unleashed that afternoon have made the two more open with each
other--so open that they declare themselves in love. 

  Ellen has let you know many times that she doesn't like
Cathy.  Certainly, Cathy has behaved badly.  Cathy admits that
she can't hide or control her feelings, that her impulsiveness
is part of her "Wuthering Heights" nature.  But can you excuse
her for her behavior, just because she can't control it? 

  NOTE:  Hindley's dreadful mixing of love and cruelty at the
beginning of the chapter is matched by Cathy's behavior later
on.  Love and cruelty--do the two emotions have anything in
common?  The two are so often related in Wuthering Heights that
you have to wonder if they spring from the same source. 

^^^^^^^^^^
WUTHERING HEIGHTS:  CHAPTER 9 

  Heathcliff saves Hareton's life when Hindley drunkenly drops
him over the bannister.  Heathcliff immediately regrets this
missed opportunity for revenge; still, his instinctive reaction
is good, and makes you wonder again why Cathy rejects him for
Edgar.  It doesn't seem to make sense, especially since Cathy is
so articulate about her feelings: 

  My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods:  time 

  will change it, I'm well aware, as winter changes the
trees. 

  My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath- 

  a source of little visible delight, but necessary. 

  Ambition; a desire to help Heathcliff; a fear that Heathcliff
may be beyond the accepted boundaries of love;--Cathy offers
these reasons for accepting Edgar's proposal of marriage. 

  You can't help believing she is making a terrible mistake in
accepting Edgar.  She may need him, but she needs Heathcliff,
too.  Your suspicion that she and Heathcliff can never separate
is confirmed by her reaction to Heathcliff's departure:  she
runs out into the night to find him, refuses to eat, lets the
rain soak her through, and then stays up all night waiting for
him.  The next day, when Hindley says he's going to throw
Heathcliff out of the house, Cathy swears she will go with
him. 

  NOTE:  Why does Heathcliff leave?  In anger and humiliation?
Is it to make himself worthy of her?  To find the weapons for
revenge?  You can only speculate.  In any case, even in his
absence his relationship with Cathy manages to wreak havoc on
Thrushcross Grange.  Cathy gets sick from her walk through the
rain in search of Heathcliff, and the older Lintons catch the
fever and die. 

  Three years later Edgar and Cathy marry, which closes the
first part of the book.  The older generation is dead, and there
is a resolution--however precarious--of the conflict between the
two houses.  The interloper is gone, and characters have
regrouped themselves according to type:  Edgar, Isabella and
Ellen are at Thrushcross Grange; and Hindley, Hareton, and
Joseph are at Wuthering Heights.  Cathy is at Thrushcross
Grange, but where her heart is, you will have to wait to see. 

^^^^^^^^^^
WUTHERING HEIGHTS:  CHAPTER 10 

  Mrs.  Dean broke off her narrative in the last chapter, and
we're still in the present as this one begins.  Lockwood has
learned he'll be confined to bed until spring because of the
fever.  Despite his love of solitude, he misses people
terribly. 

  Heathcliff visits, and surprises everyone with his friendly
and entertaining behavior.  What a difference between his
present state and the savage "ploughboy" that ran off in the
last chapter.  His friendliness reinforces your sympathy for
him.  You're inclined to excuse his "genuine bad nature" the way
Lockwood excuses him for causing his illness.  When Lockwood
asks Ellen Dean to continue her story, he refers to Heathcliff
as the hero, and to Cathy as the heroine.  You may see them in
the same light, but your sympathies for them will soon be
tested. 

  When Ellen Dean describes the Lintons' early married life,
it's clear that she's firmly allied with Edgar, who preserves
peace in the house by humoring Cathy.  At first this doesn't
seem to represent a change in Ellen's point of view, which has
always been basically anti-Cathy, rather than pro-anyone else.
But now that Heathcliff has returned, the Heathcliff-Edgar
conflict will become more explicit, and she
will--understandably--take Edgar's side. 

  When Ellen announces Heathcliff's return to the Lintons, she
enters a scene of perfect domestic tranquility:  from the window
you can't even see Wuthering Heights, that place of storm.  But
as soon as the Lintons learn of Heathcliff's presence, Bronte's
language again becomes violent.  Cathy's embrace of Edgar
tightens to a squeeze, and she seizes Linton's reluctant
fingers, and crushes them into Heathcliff's. 

  When Ellen Dean first sees Heathcliff she doesn't recognize
him--his looks, clothes, posture, and manners have greatly
improved, at least in the eyes of the world.  He puts Edgar to
shame.  You get the strange feeling that Heathcliff had made a
pact with the devil.  (How did he transform himself?  You are
never told.) He does seem not quite of this world anymore, and
he shows a new harshness under his gentility.  He says he
struggled only for Cathy, and he warns her against trying to
drive him away again. 

  In Chapter 9 you saw that Cathy wanted to have both
Heathcliff and Edgar.  She tries to perform the same balancing
act here, too, and manages to keep them on an outwardly friendly
footing for a while.  The truce can't last for long, though,
just as it couldn't that Christmas day years ago when Edgar
ended up with applesauce on his face.  This time the fight is
caused by Isabella's infatuation for the new, gentlemanly
Heathcliff. 

  NOTE:  When Cathy tells Isabella to stay away from
Heathcliff, she calls him "an arid wilderness of furze and
whinstone"; that is, a wilderness with spiny shrubs and hard
rock.  He is not "a pearl-containing oyster," but a "wolfish"
man who would crush Isabella like "a sparrow's egg." 

  Cathy's not the only character who uses plants and animals to
describe the people in this book; everyone does.  On almost
every page someone is being compared to a tree, a honeysuckle, a
dog, a lamb, or some other animal.  Weather-related terms are
used too (Edgar gets upset if a servant grows "cloudy" at one of
Cathy's orders), and so is fire (Heathcliff's eyes are full of
black fire).  Since Emily Bronte lived in the country, it was
only natural for her to find metaphors and symbols in the world
that surrounded her.  Nature and the supernatural (heaven-hell,
angel-devil) are her frames of reference, the things by which
all else is judged.  This seems to place her closer
temperamentally to Wuthering Heights than to Thrushcross
Grange. 

  Cathy tells Heathcliff of Isabella's infatuation in the
girl's presence (a surprising cruelty that will be amply
punished), and Heathcliff is horrified.  "You'd hear odd things
if I lived alone with that mawkish, waxen face," he says; "the
most ordinary would be painting on its white the colours of the
rainbow, and turning the blue eyes black...." It is a chilling
statement that gives you a glimpse of the tortured man behind
the gentlemanly veneer. 

  When Heathcliff asks about Isabella's property, Cathy says
that Edgar will have many male heirs to wipe out his sister's
claim.  The question remains in your mind:  is Cathy right to
accuse him of greed?  If not, why doesn't he deny Cathy's
charges? 

^^^^^^^^^^
WUTHERING HEIGHTS:  CHAPTER 11 

  Compare this opening with the opening of Chapter 9.  In the
earlier chapter Heathcliff saved baby Hareton from a dangerous
fall.  Ellen tells you that now Heathcliff has "saved" Hareton
from acquiring an education and good manners, and has taught him
to curse his father and go his own way.  This is a good measure
of the change in Heathcliff. 

  Keep Chapter 9 in mind as you read the rest of this chapter.
In both, Cathy is asked to make an impossible choice between
Heathcliff and Edgar, and ends up making herself sick. 

  When Ellen tells Cathy she saw Heathcliff embracing Isabella,
Cathy is jealous.  She confronts Heathcliff, who in turn accuses
her of having treated him "infernally," expressing his anger
even more strongly than he did at the first meeting.  Yet when
Edgar comes in and tells Heathcliff to leave, Cathy lashes out
at her husband. 

  Here you have it at last, the showdown.  It has been set up
perfectly.  The two rivals are now equals.  Heathcliff is no
longer a servant boy with all the "adults"--the elder Lintons,
Hindley, and Joseph--against him.  Each man is forced, to some
extent, to fight on the other's terms.  Heathcliff is at
Thrushcross Grange, where Edgar has servants at his command.
Edgar, the weaker of the two, is forced to fight physically,
which is contrary to his nature. 

  NOTE:  Most readers find that their sympathies are divided
between these two rivals.  Heathcliff, you feel, should have won
Cathy, yet he is behaving abominably.  The fight centers on a
lock and key.  Cathy has locked out the servants who are
supposed to come to Edgar's aid, and when he tries to wrench the
key from her, she throws it in the fire.  For the rest of the
book Heathcliff will often be the "keeper of the keys"--with all
the freedom and the mastery over others that this implies.  When
he isn't, as he's not in this scene, he will break down the
door.  (This will be explored more fully in Chapter 27.) 

  There's no real resolution to the fight, of course.  In
trying to have both men, Cathy has ended up pleasing neither.
When Heathcliff leaves, Edgar asks her to chose between them,
and she refuses.  Instead, she throws herself into a fit. 

  NOTE:  Think now of the role Ellen plays in both scenes.
Earlier she didn't tell Cathy that Heathcliff was listening, and
then didn't inform her immediately of his departure.  This time
she's the one who tells Cathy of Heathcliff and Isabella's
embrace, who tells Edgar that Heathcliff and Cathy are fighting,
and who advises Edgar not to take Cathy's fit seriously.  All of
Ellen's intrigues have disastrous consequences; her meddling
annoys everyone.  In her defense you can argue that she was
probably trying to avoid larger conflicts (Cathy and Heathcliff
confronting each other in Chapter 9; Heathcliff insinuating
himself further into Thrushcross Grange now).  Whether events
would have unfolded as they did without her interference is
something you'll have to decide for yourself. 

^^^^^^^^^^
WUTHERING HEIGHTS:  CHAPTER 12 

  Cathy shuts herself in her room and won't eat for two days.
On the third day, Ellen enters the room and is shocked by the
change.  Cathy's face is wasted, and her manner is strange and
exaggerated.  Cathy's revenge on Edgar and Heathcliff is to kill
herself.  (Remember that when his wife died Hindley tormented
others and started to drink himself to death.  You will see more
of this reaction.) 

  NOTE:  Cathy says that Heathcliff set a trap over the nest of
some lapwings; the older birds wouldn't come near it, so the
babies died. 

  In a similar manner, many of the parent-child relationships
in this book are distorted and cruel.  Mr.  Earnshaw detests
Hindley; Hindley nearly kills Hareton; and Hindley as a
substitute father mistreats Cathy and Heathcliff.  Heathcliff,
another substitute father, does everything he can to degrade
Hareton.  Often this is due to some outside agent, like the trap
put over the lapwing nest.  Heathcliff comes between Mr.
Earnshaw and his son, and the death of Hindley's wife makes him
lose any real interest in his son.  In every case, it's the
child who is vulnerable, almost as vulnerable as the baby
lapwings. 

  Though Bronte's characters have painful childhoods, they also
remember their youths as times of freedom and innocent,
animallike joy.  Soon after she speaks of the lapwings, Cathy
says, "I wish I were a girl again, half savage and hardy, and
free...  and laughing at injuries, not maddening under them!" 

  You have contrasted the qualities of Wuthering Heights and
Thrushcross Grange (stormy-calm, etc.).  You should now add
another:  between child and adult.  The Wuthering Heights type
characters--Heathcliff and Cathy, especially--behave in many
ways like children even when they're grown up; they have little
self-control, for instance.  The Thrushcross Grange qualities of
courtesy and self-restraint belong more to the adult world.
Does that explain why the Thrushcross Grange characters, like
Edgar and Isabella, are the good parents?  Emily Bronte's
obvious love for the vulnerable age of childhood softens you
toward many of the sins of those who live at Wuthering
Heights. 

  It is Cathy's reliving of her childhood now that makes you
forget how difficult a person she was in the previous chapter.
She talks distractedly for a while, and when she refers to a
clothes press that is not there, you know she's hallucinating.
The clothes press, you may remember from Lockwood's description
in Chapter 3, is back in her old room at Wuthering Heights. 

  Cathy sees a face in the press (which is in fact a mirror),
and screams that the room is haunted.  The ghostly face she sees
is, of course, her own.  What a chilling reminder of the "ghost"
that Lockwood sees.  Cathy, imagining herself back home, relives
her first separation from Heathcliff (this is the scene that
Lockwood reads in her diary).  Longing to be out in the heather,
she throws open the window, just as she tried to get in through
the window in Lockwood's dream. 

  In her delirium Cathy accuses Ellen several times of being a
witch, trying to harm her.  Considering the harm that Ellen has
caused her, there may be a grain of truth in this. 

  When Edgar comes in, he's horrified.  He asks Cathy again if
she loves Heathcliff, and again she hushes him.  Why?  Cathy's
images of unhappiness in this scene have all revolved around her
separation from Heathcliff. 

  As Ellen goes to get help, she notices Isabella's pet spaniel
hanged with a handkerchief, and hears hooves galloping away.
Emily Bronte tantalizes you by slowly giving you clues to the
other drama of the night:  the elopement of Heathcliff and
Isabella. 

^^^^^^^^^^
WUTHERING HEIGHTS:  CHAPTER 13 

  Cathy survives her fever, but she's convinced she's going to
die soon anyway.  In a lesser novel, the idea of a heroine dying
of a broken heart would seem sentimental or hysterical.  But
here it's completely convincing. 

  NOTE:  There are ghosts, which may or may not be real.  There
are premonitions of the deaths of Cathy, Mrs.  Earnshaw, and
Hindley's wife.  Characters speak of being in heaven or hell in
the same tone of voice you would use to speak of a visit across
town.  In Wuthering Heights the distinctions between life and
death, and between the commonplace and the extraordinary are
broken down, making life more mysterious and precarious. 

  The rest of the chapter consists of a letter from Isabella to
Ellen.  Isabella says she regretted leaving Thrushcross Grange
so suddenly, but that she can no longer go back.  When she
describes her return to Wuthering Heights, it's with a sense of
helplessness.  She had imagined that some member of the Heights
household would be her ally against Heathcliff, but the
others--Hareton, Hindley, and Joseph--are rough or crazy, and
she's all alone.  If only she had Hindley's pistol. 

  Isabella is a prisoner who isn't even allowed a cell.  The
description of her return is virtually a list of rooms she
enters and is forced to leave.  When Heathcliff first drops her
off at the kitchen door, Hareton threatens to set his dog on her
unless she quits the place.  Then Hindley lets her back into the
house through another door, and says she'll have to use
Heathcliff's room.  Hindley, in his madness, tries to force the
lock on Heathcliff's room in order to shoot him, and Isabella is
driven back into the kitchen.  Joseph eventually shows her to a
lumber room, which is even worse, and she ends up sleeping in a
chair.  When Heathcliff returns, Isabella reminds him that he
still has the key to their room.  It's not our room, he screams,
it's mine, and mine alone.  It's never made clear where she
finally does sleep. 

  When Isabella throws her porridge to the floor, Joseph chides
her, calling her "Miss Cathy." Isabella chafes under
Heathcliff's tyranny, just as Cathy did under Hindley's, but
Isabella has no friend to comfort her, as Cathy did. 

  NOTE:  It's important that Isabella is the one who relates
these events.  Remember, you first learned of Hindley's cruelty
through Cathy's diary.  It's the victims with whom you identify,
and Heathcliff here is no longer the tormented, but the
tormentor. 

^^^^^^^^^^
WUTHERING HEIGHTS:  CHAPTER 14 

  Edgar's refusal to communicate with Isabella seems cruel.  He
may have always seemed to lack passion, but does he lack warmth
as well? 

  It's Ellen--the "bridge"--who goes over to Wuthering Heights,
for the first time since Cathy's marriage.  In her letter
Isabella describes in detail the shambles the place has become.
As an outsider, she can also see that Isabella, through neglect,
looks a wreck.  The only thing about the house that seems decent
to her is Heathcliff. 

  The scene that follows offers you new definitions of love.
At the same time it makes Heathcliff look sadistic. 

  When Heathcliff tells Ellen to arrange a meeting between him
and Cathy or he will break into Thrushcross Grange, he draws
distinctions between his love and Edgar's that remind you of the
contrast in Cathy's feelings: 

  If he loved with all the powers of his puny being, he 

  couldn't love as much in eighty years as I could in a 

  day.  And Catherine has a heart as deep as I have; the 

  sea could be as readily contained in that horse trough, 

  as her whole affection monopolized by him. 

  This is one characterization of the difference between the
stormy and calm types of love.  Now add a third type, which is
actually a mixture of the two:  Isabella's infatuation with
Heathcliff.  Her willingness to put up with any brutality, such
as watching him hang her dog, suggests that Isabella's love was
as overwhelming and as all-forgiving as the love between Cathy
and Heathcliff.  Her love, however, was based on even less
understanding than that between Cathy and Edgar.  According to
Heathcliff, Isabella saw him as a storybook hero. 

  In contrast to Heathcliff's avowal of love for Cathy is his
unspeakably cruel treatment of Isabella.  Not only does he speak
to her abusively, but, as he tells Ellen, he "experiments" with
what she will endure.  The fact that he can still feel shame for
his behavior suggests that he has not yet sold his soul
completely to the devil, but his shame doesn't make his behavior
any more pardonable. 

  When Heathcliff sends Isabella off, he tells Ellen he has no
pity.  Then he goes on again about the differences between his
love for Cathy, and Edgar's.  What kind of demented love, you
wonder, is this? 

  In Chapter 10 you were given one possible reason for
Heathcliff's marriage to Isabella:  he wants her property.
Isabella gives you another reason:  he wants to drive Edgar to
some desperate act.  Whatever his motivation, the loveless
marriage seems to be Heathcliff's specialty.  Later he will
force one on Cathy's daughter and Linton.  Is it possible that
because of his own childhood he wants to prove that marriage
(especially Edgar and Cathy's) has nothing to do with love (his
own and Cathy's)? 

^^^^^^^^^^
WUTHERING HEIGHTS:  CHAPTER 15 

  This chapter begins with a reminder of Cathy's deathlike
state, and ends in a final gasp of passion for Heathcliff. 

  Heathcliff steals into her bedroom while Edgar is at church
(unlike Isabella, Heathcliff always gets into places whether
he's wanted or not), and embraces her.  He's in despair because
he realizes that Cathy is going to die.  But this is no tender
love scene.  Cathy accuses him of thriving on her death, a death
he caused.  Her face shows a wild vindictiveness.  When
Heathcliff first lets go of her, his fingers leave blue marks in
her skin. 

  Though Cathy softens a bit, Heathcliff does not.  He accuses
her of destroying them both when she married Edgar.  When Cathy
forgives him for leaving her for three years and begs to be
forgiven, he refuses.  "I forgive what you have done to me," he
says.  "I love my murderer--but yours!  How can I?" This refusal
may be one of the things that haunt him until his final "strange
change" at the end of the book. 

  When they hear Edgar returning, Cathy clutches Heathcliff
with mad resolution, declaring she'll die if he leaves.  She
faints, and Heathcliff puts the apparently lifeless body into
Edgar's arms. 

  NOTE:  In a more conventional novel there would have been a
clearer death-bed resolution.  Cathy would have declared a love
for Heathcliff that her marriage to another could never dim or
she would have said that she was, above all, Edgar's wife, and
that there are greater things in life than love.  But she does
neither.  Her unwillingness to leave Heathcliff may be her final
statement, but she never tells him that she regrets marrying
Edgar. 

  Note, too, that the scene isn't placed in the novel as if it
were a climax.  The story does not revert back to the present
for reflection.  There are two chapters to go before the story
of the first generation ends.  It will take the whole second
half of the book to work out any kind of resolution. 

  Although the focus in this scene is on the lovers, Ellen is
there, too.  When Catherine first loses consciousness, the
housekeeper thinks, "Far better that she should be dead, than
lingering a burden and misery-maker to all about her." This is
the cruelest comment she has made about anyone in the book.
When you consider that Cathy is dying, you have to wonder how
trustworthy any of her judgments of Cathy are. 

^^^^^^^^^^
WUTHERING HEIGHTS:  CHAPTER 16 

  Two hours after Catherine becomes a mother, she dies. 

  In the last chapter Cathy said that she would find no peace
in death, and yet she longs for the next "glorious" world and
will pity those living on earth.  Which is true?  Ellen says
that she likes to watch at a chamber of death because she sees a
repose no earth or hell can break, but she's still sufficiently
uncertain to interrupt her story and ask Lockwood, "Do you
believe such people are happy in the other world, sir?" 

  Perhaps a character's opinion on whether Cathy has found
peace tells you more about that character than about Cathy's
fate.  You see little of Edgar's grief.  Although Ellen speaks
only of his "exhausted anguish," it becomes clear later that
Edgar believes Cathy is happy in heaven. 

  Heathcliff, on the other hand, is inconsolable.  When Ellen
says Cathy's life ended in a gentle dream, Heathcliff cries,
"May she wake in torment!" and calls on her ghost to haunt him,
as her murderer.  He dashes his head against a tree trunk
throughout the night, leaving blood on the bark.  Despite the
cruelty of his words, it's his anguish, not Edgar's, that you
remember.  His torment goes a long way toward blotting out his
sins from your mind. 

  NOTE:  Except for when they imagine a paradise for Mr.
Earnshaw, Heathcliff and Cathy find no comfort in formal
religion.  As for the other characters, Joseph's religious
fervor is grotesque.  Hindley uses religion for punishment
rather than enlightenment, and Ellen's piety is too conventional
to move you in any profound way. 

  Edgar follows the forms of religion, going to church every
Sunday and getting strength from God.  Yet it is Heathcliff and
Cathy who speak in religious terms.  When Heathcliff gets his
first glimpse of Thrushcross Grange, for instance, he compares
it to heaven.  And Cathy considers herself in hell when she is
separated from Heathcliff.  The examples are endless, and
explain why some readers call the love between Cathy and
Heathcliff the strongest spiritual force in the novel. 

  Despite her sympathy for Edgar, Ellen lets Heathcliff in to
view Cathy's body.  He opens her locket to substitute his own
lock of hair for Edgar's, trying to usurp the place next to her
heart.  But Ellen fittingly entwines the two tresses and
encloses them together. 

^^^^^^^^^^
WUTHERING HEIGHTS:  CHAPTER 17 

  On the morning after Cathy's funeral, Isabella bursts into
Thrushcross Grange laughing, and her hysterical good humor
persists, despite the fact that her light silk dress is
streaming with snow and water; despite a deep, bloody cut under
one ear; and despite her sincere sadness over Cathy's death.
What has happened to her? 

  Certainly the first part of her story is no cause for joy.
As she describes it to Ellen the night before, just after the
funeral, Hindley tried without success to kill Heathcliff.
Hindley locked the door in preparation, but Heathcliff managed
to break in through the window and grab Hindley's pistol.  In
the struggle over the weapon, Hindley was wounded.  Isabella's
description of Heathcliff kicking and trampling Hindley, and
knocking his head against the flagstones, is the most violent
passage in the book.  And this occurs at the point when you've
regained your sympathies for Heathcliff. 

  NOTE:  Just before he got out his pistol, Isabella told
Hindley that treachery and violence are double-edged--"they
wound those who resort to them, worse than their enemies."
Certainly you have plenty of evidence of this so far.
Characters who suffer try to find relief by passing the
suffering on to others.  Hindley behaves this way when his wife
dies.  Cathy is so hurt by the quarrel between Edgar and
Heathcliff that she resolves to die in order to break both their
hearts. 

  Isabella thrives on a dream of revenge, too, telling Ellen,
"I'd rather [Heathcliff] suffer less, if I might cause his
sufferings and he might know that I was the cause." Perhaps she
cannot forgive him because she can never make him suffer as much
as she has suffered. 

  She does her best, though, the morning after the funeral.
She tells Heathcliff that Cathy would still be alive if it
weren't for him; that Hindley's eyes--which Heathcliff tried to
gouge out--are Catherine's; and that had Catherine become Mrs.
Heathcliff, she would soon have become as disgusted with him as
Isabella herself is. 

  Heathcliff throws a knife at her, which cuts her beneath her
ear.  While he's raving, she escapes.  It's in this condition
that she bursts into Thrushcross Grange. 

  The rest of the chapter closes the first half of the novel.
Isabella flees to the south.  Hindley dies in a drunken fit.
Joseph says that before he left to fetch the doctor, Hindley was
alone with Heathcliff, and far from death, which leaves you with
an uneasy feeling.  The characters have arranged themselves
again according to their personalities at one of the two houses:
Edgar, the baby Cathy, and Ellen are at Thrushcross Grange;
Heathcliff, Hareton, and Joseph are at Wuthering Heights. 

^^^^^^^^^^
WUTHERING HEIGHTS:  CHAPTER 18 

  Here begins the story of the second generation.  Ellen Dean
introduces the characters by comparing the young Cathy to her
mother.  This sense of continuity, of one generation bearing the
sins of another, will continue through the rest of the novel.
(There are 34 chapters; each generation gets 17.) Although one
generation mirrors another, they are not exactly the same.
Cathy, for instance is saucy and spoiled, but not to the extent
her mother was, and the younger one adds a gentleness to a
capacity for intense attachment. 

  In the last chapter Ellen told you that Edgar had become a
recluse, perhaps the only possible reaction of a Thrushcross
Grange character to the mad passions released in the preceding
scenes.  Edgar has also sheltered his daughter, who knows
nothing of Heathcliff or of Wuthering Heights.  But when Cathy
is thirteen, Edgar learns that Isabella is dying.  Thirteen is
an age when you start to find things out about life.  What Cathy
finds out about is Wuthering Heights. 

  As she rides by, her dogs and Hareton's start to fight.
History seems to be repeating itself, for it was because of a
dog's attack that Lockwood was forced to spend the night at
Wuthering Heights, and that the older Cathy was first brought to
Thrushcross Grange.  Dogs are associated with violence in the
transition between the two worlds. 

  When Ellen finds Cathy, she and Hareton are enjoying
themselves.  But as soon as the subject of their parents'
generation comes up, the youngsters quarrel.  This is
appropriate, since they will act out the problems that plagued
their elders.  Cathy, hearing that the owner of the house is not
Hareton's father, mistakes Hareton for a servant.  She's
horrified to learn that this rough young man is her cousin.
Again the Thrushcross Grange-Wuthering Heights conflict is being
acted out:  Cathy is civilized, educated, and socially proud;
Hareton is foul mouthed, ignorant, and crude. 

^^^^^^^^^^
WUTHERING HEIGHTS:  CHAPTER 19 

  In this chapter, Linton Heathcliff, the third member of the
younger triangle, is introduced.  His mother Isabella is dead,
and Edgar has brought him home to Thrushcross Grange.  The boy
has an uncanny resemblance to Edgar, but his face has a sickly
peevishness that his uncle's never had.  Linton perks up only
when Cathy feeds him tea out of a saucer, as though he were a
baby.  Edgar imagines that Cathy's company will strengthen the
boy, but not a day passes before Joseph comes to take him to
Heathcliff, his father.  Little good can come of thrusting such
a weakling into the harsh world of Wuthering Heights, and you
begin to feel the inexorable power of its master. 

^^^^^^^^^^
WUTHERING HEIGHTS:  CHAPTER 20 

  Linton is delivered to Heathcliff, who refers to the boy as
his "property." He thinks of Linton less as a person than as an
instrument for revenge.  He says he'll treat Linton well so that
he'll live to inherit Thrushcross Grange, and hire Edgar's and
Hindley's descendants as laborers.  So great is his obsession
with revenge that he won't even let his regard for Hareton stand
in his way. 

  NOTE:  Notice how your attitude toward Heathcliff has
changed.  In the first half of the book he didn't get what he
wanted (Cathy), so you felt sorry for him.  Now he gets
everything he wants, and it's difficult for you to feel anything
but anger at him. 

  Ellen has to lie to get Linton out of Thrushcross Grange.
It's wrong, but what else is there to do?  The end of the
chapter is even more chilling, as Linton cries, "Don't leave me!
I'll not stay here!  I'll not stay here!" Then the latch
falls... 

^^^^^^^^^^
WUTHERING HEIGHTS:  CHAPTER 21 

  In this chapter Cathy meets Heathcliff for the first time.
The Thrushcross Grange character (Edgar) can shelter his
daughter from the Wuthering Heights side of life only so long,
especially since Cathy is a curious child who loves to wander
over the moors, much as her mother did. 

  The day that Heathcliff meets Cathy is her birthday, and the
anniversary of her mother's death.  But you don't see Heathcliff
beating his head against a tree or throwing open a window to cry
to his beloved.  It is Edgar, you are told, who stays alone for
hours by his dead wife's grave.  The grief may be quiet, but it
is heart-rending. 

  NOTE:  Heathcliff outlines his scheme to Ellen--that Cathy
and Linton will marry, thus consolidating Heathcliff's claim to
the two estates.  You know from the beginning of the book that
he does in fact take possession of them, but he is not legally
in the right, despite what he says. 

  Thrushcross Grange--a large house, with a park and
tenants--is "entailed." This means that the possessor of the
property has no control over who will inherit it; succession has
already been worked out.  In this case, the order of succession
goes from the male son (Edgar), to the son of the male son
(none), to the daughter (Isabella), to the son of the daughter
(Linton).  Linton won't be able to leave the place to his
father.  Heathcliff will claim it in his wife's name, but she
never took possession, so Cathy, as Edgar's daughter, has a
greater legal claim to the property. 

  Wuthering Heights is only a farmhouse, so inheritance is a
simpler matter.  Hindley may have mortgaged every inch of land
he owned, and Heathcliff may be in possession as mortgagee, but
Hareton, as Hindley's son, is heir to the title. 

  So Heathcliff will be a usurper until the day he dies. 

  The personalities of the younger generation become
increasingly defined.  When Heathcliff brings Cathy back to
Wuthering Heights, you see that Linton has become selfish and
ill-natured.  The only time Linton shows any animation,
according to Ellen, is when he mocks Hareton for not knowing how
to read.  Hareton may have enjoyed hanging puppies as a boy, but
he doesn't seem so bad now.  He may be rude and rough but he is
sensitive, and he is more than willing to show Cathy around the
property. 

  Cathy's reaction, when forbidden to write to Linton, is to
slap Ellen--a reaction that should remind you of her mother.
Remember how the elder Cathy resorted to pinching and slapping
in Chapter 8?  Yet whatever the similarities between the two,
Cathy doesn't have her mother's grasp of character.  She writes
to Linton, and when she's found out, she announces that she's in
love with him.  In love?  When the elder Cathy said she was in
love with Edgar, she at least knew the boy.  Her daughter's
declaration of love reminds you more of Isabella's infatuation
with Heathcliff. 

^^^^^^^^^^
WUTHERING HEIGHTS:  CHAPTER 22 

  Edgar is sick, and so can't accompany Ellen and Cathy on
their walk.  Notice how little he participates in the action in
the second half of the book.  He comments on things, or forbids
them, but he's never around when anything important happens. 

  It's appropriate that when Cathy wants something beyond her
reach she ends up at Wuthering Heights or runs into Heathcliff.
In order to reach some rosehips, for example, she needs to climb
over a wall near a locked door.  Once she's on the other side,
she can't get back over; neither she nor Ellen has the key.
Just then Heathcliff comes along. 

  Heathcliff persuades Cathy that Linton is "dying" of love for
her.  This is a cruel satire on her mother's death.  It's also
untrue. 

  NOTE:  If you think back over everything Heathcliff has said
so far, you'll realize that he may have been hysterical,
vengeful, or simply confused, but that he has never told such an
elaborate, harmful lie.  If you are like most readers, your
estrangement from him is now complete. 

^^^^^^^^^^
WUTHERING HEIGHTS:  CHAPTER 23 

  If Linton is dying, it can't be over love for Cathy.  When
she arrives, he says, "No--don't kiss me.  It takes my
breath--dear me!" and complains that writing all those letters
wore him out.  Still, they get along until the subject of the
older generation comes up.  This was true of Cathy and Hareton,
too, when they first met.  The problems of their elders seem to
haunt these children, even without Heathcliff's help. 

  When Linton accuses Cathy's mother of hating her father and
loving his, Cathy is so infuriated she pushes his chair over and
he has a coughing fit.  She is conciliatory, however (which
Linton will never be).  When Ellen and Cathy leave the room,
they are recalled by a scream.  Linton has slipped--on
purpose?--to the hearthstone.  He lies there writhing and
crying. 

^^^^^^^^^^
WUTHERING HEIGHTS:  CHAPTER 24 

  Cathy, against her father's orders, has been visiting
Wuthering Heights.  Most of this chapter is her story. 

  Showing once more how cruel she can be, Cathy makes fun of
Hareton for priding himself on learning to read his name in the
inscription over the door.  In passing, you learn something new
about Hareton.  Before, he never quite understood why he was
being mocked.  Now he does catch on, even though it takes him a
while.  His pride, you learn, is quite different from Cathy's.
Hers is an exercise in power, as she tries to put herself above
him.  His takes the form of a natural dignity, which has been
affronted.  If you think that Cathy's mother rejected Heathcliff
because he was beneath her, then you will be able to see
parallels in her daughter's behavior. 

  NOTE:  Many readers find the story of the second generation a
letdown after the high drama of the first, and certainly there
is a sense of moderation here.  Take the younger Cathy, for
instance.  Like her mother, she is given a fairly long speech
comparing the stormy-calm sides of life through natural imagery.
The daughter's idea of happiness is rocking in a rustling green
tree, with everything around her in motion.  It's a wonderful
speech, but it's more static than her mother's turbulent
comparison of Edgar and Heathcliff, or her delirious longing for
childhood. 

  Or think of Cathy's feeling for Linton.  She finally shows
some understanding of his character here, and he is given an
endearing speech of his own.  But Cathy's feeling seems closer
to pity than to love.  What a far cry from her mother's
passion. 

  There are many other examples in the younger generation's
behavior of a lessening of passion and a growth of moderation.
This diminishment is built into the story. 

  In chapters 18 through 28 Heathcliff comes dangerously close
to becoming a cardboard villain.  His power is so inexorable
that the younger generation can't stand up against him; they
pale in comparison.  Furthermore, a fight against total evil is
rarely as interesting as a struggle among complex beings.  What
makes the fight between Hareton and Cathy so interesting is the
fact that Heathcliff doesn't cause it. 

  The younger generation seldom use words such as heaven and
hell or angel and devil.  Ellen calls Cathy an "angel," but from
her that's like saying "dear." Even Heathcliff avoids references
to these unyielding forces.  The absence of this mythic
dimension makes you realize that compared to their parents,
members of this generation have their feet on the ground. 

  The story of Cathy and Linton is told as it appears.  Ellen
rarely shifts from the past to the present.  In addition,
Cathy's story is the only one told by someone else.  Think back
on the first part of the book.  You had Cathy's diary,
Heathcliff's description of Thrushcross Grange, Cathy's
delirium, Isabella's letter, Isabella's story.  These accounts
gave the impression that many mysterious things were happening
at once.  The story now has a more plodding rhythm. 

  Some readers think that this counterpoint between the first
and second halves of the novel is an integral part of its theme.
Others just want to get back to Cathy and Heathcliff. 

^^^^^^^^^^
WUTHERING HEIGHTS:  CHAPTER 25 

  In the last chapter Edgar put a stop to Cathy's visits to
Wuthering Heights.  In this one he finally consents to her
meeting Linton on the moors.  Edgar is dying, and he hopes
Linton will console her. 

  How you react to Edgar's wistful speech on death will depend
on how you react to the Thrushcross Grange side of life.  His
tone is gentle.  Compare the soft rhythms to the vigorous often
abrupt, cadences in Heathcliff's speech.  Edgar is magnanimous.
He says he doesn't care whether Heathcliff gets what he wants,
as long as Cathy is happy. 

  Yet there is also something lifeless in Edgar Linton.  He
seems to be as happy lying on his dead wife's grave as he is
walking with his live daughter.  And you may ask yourself why he
can't check things out for himself once in a while.  Why does he
always rely on Ellen? 

  At the end of the chapter you learn that Linton Heathcliff is
dying, too. 

^^^^^^^^^^
WUTHERING HEIGHTS:  CHAPTER 26 

  A new element creeps into the book here:  helpless terror.
In his dream Lockwood was frightened by the ghost, but he was
able to keep it from getting in.  Edgar trembled when confronted
with an angry Heathcliff, but that did not stop Edgar from
striking him. 

  Linton can do nothing.  When Cathy and Ellen meet him on the
moors, he tries to appear well and cheerful, but his eyes wander
fearfully toward Wuthering Heights.  His terror has silenced
even his complaints.  Before he provoked, now he is only
pitiable.  (Note that it is only Linton, the most tedious
character in the book, who shows this abject fear.  Emily Bronte
thinks highly of courage.) 

  As for Heathcliff, his behavior continues to get worse. 

^^^^^^^^^^
WUTHERING HEIGHTS:  CHAPTER 27 

  The sense of doom is inescapable now.  Edgar is closer to
death.  When Cathy and Ellen meet Linton on the moors he is even
more fearful than before.  Clues to the coming disaster come
thick and fast.  Linton cries that he has betrayed his old
friend, so it's no surprise when Heathcliff shows up.  Cathy may
not be afraid to go to Wuthering Heights, but you are afraid for
her.  You've probably had dreams in which you feel this way; you
know something awful is going to happen, even though you don't
know what it is, and there's nothing you can do to stop it. 

  Once in Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff locks the door behind
them, and his evil-scientist side reasserts itself:  "Had I been
born where laws are less strict, and tastes less dainty, I
should treat myself to a slow vivisection of those two, as an
evening's amusement." (Vivisection is surgery performed on live
animals for experimental purposes.) 

  When Cathy grabs for the key, Heathcliff slaps her again and
again on both sides of her face, and soon his plan is revealed:
she will be his prisoner until morning, when he'll make her
marry Linton.  Heathcliff again mocks Edgar's type of love
(remember the way he scorned it as he tormented Isabella).  In
the conversation that follows you get the most depressing
versions of the two (Thrushcross Grange-Wuthering Heights) loves
yet. 

  Cathy has often said that she loves her father more than she
will ever love anybody.  Is this all that Thrushcross Grange
love comes down to?  As much as you may love your parents, you
must eventually love someone else--in a very different way--or
forever remain a child. 

  As for the Wuthering Heights-type love, Heathcliff releases
none of his former torrents of passion, but he makes one
revealing statement about Cathy:  "She's glad to be obliged to
stay, I'm certain." Is this what love is, then, a form of
imprisonment? 

  NOTE:  You have seen at various points how Heathcliff is
associated with imprisonment.  As a youngster he was the one who
was confined.  From Cathy's diary you learn that he was thrown
into the back kitchen.  When he covered Edgar with applesauce,
he was sent to a garret.  Once locks and keys are actually
mentioned, however, things change.  After Heathcliff returns
transformed, he either keeps the keys (shutting Isabella out of
the bedroom, for instance) or breaks the lock (as after his
quarrel with Edgar). 

  During the second half of the book Heathcliff holds the keys.
Remember the latch falling on Linton's cries.  And now you have
the worst case of all:  Ellen is imprisoned for five nights and
four days, with no word of Cathy's fate. 

  This change in Heathcliff's relationship to locks and keys
reflects his growing mastery of the situation.  As his power
grows, your sympathy for him decreases.  Emily Bronte makes you
root for the underdog, whomever he may be. 

^^^^^^^^^^
WUTHERING HEIGHTS:  CHAPTER 28 

  Ellen is released from her room.  While sucking on candy,
Linton tells how Cathy's mouth filled with blood when Heathcliff
hit her.  You've seen before how Emily Bronte juxtaposes the
everyday with the horrifying or the mysterious.  In this case
the candy makes both Linton and his story all the more perverse.
You have additional proof that cruelty has overshadowed love in
Heathcliff's heart when Linton tells you how Heathcliff took
Cathy's locket, which contained a picture of her father, and
crushed it under his foot.  How your feelings toward Heathcliff
have changed since he replaced Edgar's hair with his own in
Cathy's mother's locket! 

  Edgar wants to change his will so that Cathy's personal
property will not automatically become her husband's (and thus
Heathcliff's).  Edgar wants to be certain that the property will
be Cathy's for life, and then belong to her children.  But the
lawyer has become Heathcliff's pawn, and arrives too late to
alter the will. 

  Although Heathcliff turns away the servants Ellen sends to
rescue Cathy, the girl frightens Linton into letting her out,
and she is reunited with her father just before he dies.  His
death is peaceful, even blissful.  He speaks of going to his
wife and seeing his daughter later.  Ellen and Cathy haven't
told him, of course, about Heathcliff's latest trick.  Edgar's
happiness may depend on ignorance, but a peaceful ending seems
only just for a man who led such a calm and caring life. 

^^^^^^^^^^
WUTHERING HEIGHTS:  CHAPTER 29 

  NOTE:  How many people has Heathcliff tormented?  It's hard
to keep track.  Yet his cruelty doesn't bore you, since much of
it--unlike what you see on television--is left to your
imagination.  Heathcliff only hinted, for instance, at what he
was doing to Isabella.  And when he describes his punishment of
Linton for letting Cathy out, he will say only that: 

  I brought him down one evening...  and just set him in a 

  chair, and never touched him afterwards....  In two hours 

  I called Joseph to carry him up again, and since then my 

  presence is as potent on his nerves as a ghost.... 

  What did Heathcliff do?  Did he say anything?  Did he just
look at him?  The description of a simple beating would have
been less horrifying, for at least you would have known what
happened. 

  In chapters 18 through 28 Heathcliff became almost the
personification of evil.  In this chapter he takes Cathy away
from Thrushcross Grange to install her permanently at Wuthering
Heights.  In the next chapter he will watch Linton's death with
complete indifference, perhaps even contributing to it.  Yet
now, to remind you that he is human, Emily Bronte throws in a
scene so you recall Heathcliff's suffering.  It begins when
Cathy tells him with dreary triumph, "Nobody loves you--nobody
will cry for you when you die!  I wouldn't be you!" Knowing that
his misery is greater than hers, she says, is her "revenge." 

  The truth of Heathcliff's suffering becomes more evident when
he tells Ellen that he looked at Cathy's mother's dead face when
Edgar's grave was dug, and that he has bribed the sexton to
slide away the tops of her coffin and his own so that they will
someday be united in death. 

  Heathcliff now gives his own version of events the night
after Cathy's funeral when Hindley was beaten.  The first time
you heard the story, you feel Heathcliff acted with extreme
cruelty and violence.  In Heathcliff's version the Hindley
incident is reduced to:  "[T]hat accursed Earnshaw and my wife
opposed my entrance.  I remember stopping to kick the breath out
of him...." Which story should you believe?  Should Heathcliff's
behavior be excused because of his overwhelming grief?  When
Heathcliff dug open her grave and began to open her coffin, he
felt her very presence.  He hurried back to Wuthering Heights,
talking to her, convinced he would see her upstairs in her room.
Since then he has been searching for her constantly, but has
never found her. 

  Heathcliff's story puts an entirely different light on the
way he treated Hindley and Isabella that night.  You can
emphasize whatever aspect you wish:  his torment over Cathy, or
his indifference to his own violence.  Certainly we have to
sympathize to some extent with his tortured sleepless nights
since Cathy's death. 

^^^^^^^^^^
WUTHERING HEIGHTS:  CHAPTER 30 

  This chapter consists largely of a story told to Ellen by
Zillah, the current housekeeper at Wuthering Heights (and also
the "lusty dame" of the first chapter).  Ellen calls Zillah a
"narrow-minded, selfish woman" for thinking that Cathy is proud
and therefore refusing to wait on her.  Certainly, Zillah comes
off as hard hearted.  She's indifferent to Cathy's suffering and
to Linton's death.  But just as Ellen's scolding tone makes her
story more believable, so Zillah's disapproval of Cathy gives a
realistic edge to the events surrounding Linton's death. 

  Zillah continues to accuse Cathy of pride when the girl
rejects Hareton's attempts to make himself agreeable.  The
rejection is understandable, however, given his indifference to
Cathy's lonely struggle at Linton's bedside.  To some extent the
quarrel between Cathy and Hareton has been forced on them by
circumstances, although the roots of conflict were always
there. 

  NOTE:  Zillah ends her story with a summing up of Cathy's
behavior:  "...the more hurt she gets, the more venomous she
grows." This seems to sum up the behavior of all the major
characters except Edgar.  Isabella, Cathy, and Cathy's mother
all speak of revenge as a way of dealing with their suffering.
Against this backdrop you may not find Heathcliff quite so evil.
And yet his type of vengeance is of a different, more sinister
quality.  Like Hindley, he takes out his suffering on the
innocent, even on children.  As he explains in Chapter 11, the
tyrant grinds down his slaves and they don't turn against him;
they crush those beneath them." 

  Until now you've seen people hurting others, and being hurt
in return.  The only way characters have broken out of this
vicious circle has been to break off the relationship--through
flight (as in Isabella's case) or to have it end through death.
In the last few chapters Hareton and Cathy will manage to create
a new pattern.  Heathcliff may, too. 

^^^^^^^^^^
WUTHERING HEIGHTS:  CHAPTER 31 

  Ellen's story ended with the last chapter.  Now you are back
in the present, with Lockwood, who visits Wuthering Heights once
more to say he's leaving, and to take another look at the lovely
young widow.  He has expressed an interest in her before, at the
end of Chapter 14 ("...let me beware of the fascination that
lurks in Catherine Heathcliff's brilliant eyes"), and at the
beginning of Chapter 25, when Ellen suggested that he marry
Cathy.  Nothing comes of this, however, and he dismisses her now
with great arrogance.  "Living among clowns and misanthropists,"
he had reasoned, "she probably can't appreciate a better class
of people, when she meets them." But it is true that Cathy is as
unpleasant as she was the first time they met.  Lockwood now
defends Hareton, playing the role of peacemaker instead of
lover.  But the question has been raised:  Is it possible that
Cathy will consider remarrying. 

  In your one glimpse of Heathcliff you see the first crack in
his plan of revenge.  "It will be odd, if I thwart myself!" he
says. 

^^^^^^^^^^
WUTHERING HEIGHTS:  CHAPTER 32 

  About a year later Lockwood passes through Yorkshire and
decides to stop at Thrushcross Grange.  He is told that Ellen
has gone to Wuthering Heights, so he heads over there.  The
change in Wuthering Heights is astonishing.  The gate is
unlocked, the fragrance of flowers permeates the air, and a
scene of young love is played out at an open window.  A
sweet-voiced girl is teaching a handsome, respectably dressed
lad how to read.  She kisses him, and slaps him playfully.  The
two, of course, are Cathy and Hareton.  Emily Bronte withholds
their identities at first to emphasize their complete
transformation. 

  The scene is a union of the best of both houses.  Books once
belonged only at Thrushcross Grange.  For the older Cathy and
Heathcliff they were objects of repression; as children, they
threw religious books into the fire in an act of rebellion.  For
Edgar reading was a way to escape from problems; he shut himself
up with his books when Cathy fell into a fit.  Suddenly, books
have become a medium through which love can flow.  At the same
time, physical love--the Wuthering Heights side of love--is also
allowed to find expression.  Lockwood slinks around back,
thinking about what he has missed.  Ellen Dean, who is happy
now, fills you in on what has happened in the past year. 

  When she returns to Wuthering Heights, Ellen finds Cathy and
Hareton still fighting.  Cathy soon begins to make overtures of
friendship, however, as Hareton did before.  It is a slow
process, but finally they come to grips with their feelings and
confess to the pain they have been causing each other.  Each
puts the emphasis on his own suffering rather than on the
wrongdoing of the other.  (Compare this to the wild accusations
the older Cathy and Heathcliff hurl at each other on her
deathbed.) Once Hareton accepts Cathy's present of a book, the
vicious cycle of suffering has been broken.  They have forgiven
each other. 

^^^^^^^^^^
WUTHERING HEIGHTS:  CHAPTER 33 

  Cathy brings Thrushcross Grange--in the form of flowers from
her old house--to Wuthering Heights.  To do so she has Hareton
uproot Joseph's beloved black currant trees.  Later she sticks
primroses in her new friend's porridge.  You may find this
silly, but it's undeniable that the household is changing. 

  Even Heathcliff begins to change.  When he grabs Cathy as if
to tear her to pieces, his fingers suddenly relax as he glares
intently into her face and sees her mother's eyes.  Heathcliff
sees his beloved everywhere, in the flagstones, in the clouds,
in the trees.  In Hareton he sees his lost youth.  These images
paralyze this once violent and domineering man.  Now that
everything is in place, he says, he can't lift a finger to carry
out his revenge.  Why can't he act?  Why does revenge no longer
give him pleasure?  Ellen suggests that his conscience has made
his life into an earthly hell, but Heathcliff shows no more
signs of a guilty conscience now than before.  Maybe there's an
explanation of Heathcliff's behavior in the final chapter. 

^^^^^^^^^^
WUTHERING HEIGHTS:  CHAPTER 34 

  You read just four chapters ago that Heathcliff had complete
control of Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange.  Now he
doesn't have control even over himself.  He can't eat or sleep.
The reasons for both this final illness,--this "strange
change"--and for his death are ambiguous.  Depending on how you
feel about Heathcliff, you can emphasize either of two
interpretations:  he has finally been consumed by his own
infernal passion, or he has been united spiritually with
Catherine.  Either way the love between young Hareton and Cathy
intensifies his sense of loss and is inextricably linked with
his change. 

  You can support the idea of an infernal passion:  his is a
strange joy, accompanied by shivering, and bloodshot eyes; he
focuses on things that aren't there, things that bring him both
rapture and anguish.  His appearance is so strange that one
night Ellen is convinced he's a goblin, a ghoul, or a vampire.
How do we know where he came from?  she asks.  Even when her
common sense is restored in the morning, she is frightened of
him, and won't sit with him.  He seems to commune with Cathy's
ghost, with wild endearment and with suffering.  When speaking
of making a will, he wishes he could destroy all his property so
no one would get it.  He says he has done no injustice to
anybody.  He rejects making peace with God, and instead insists
on the mingling of the coffins.  He dies with a sneer on his
face. 

  Or you can support the idea of spiritual union with
Catherine:  Heathcliff says he has been on the threshold of
hell, and now is in sight of heaven (which he has always equated
with Cathy).  Hareton and young Cathy, who should understand his
love better than Ellen, particularly since they have just found
their own, emphasize Heathcliff's happiness in their
descriptions of him.  Heathcliff doesn't bother the young lovers
now.  In fact, he encourages Hareton, whom he sees as a younger
version of himself.  He begins to view Hareton as a person
instead of an instrument of revenge.  After he brings up the
subject of the will and the lawyer, he dismisses it.  Questions
of inheritance, which once obsessed him, mean nothing to him
now.  He has been trying unsuccessfully to see Cathy's ghost for
years.  Perhaps he sees it now because, in relinquishing his
revenge, he has also forgiven her.  Finding peace in Cathy's
love seems to offer him greater spiritual satisfaction than any
conventional religion.  His face is exultant in death.  Perhaps
the sneer is only Ellen's fancy. 

  Do the ghosts of Heathcliff and Catherine still live and walk
about?  Perhaps, if you think theirs was an infernal passion.
But the final sentence of the book is one of peace.  Musing
beside their graves, Lockwood wonders how "anyone could ever
imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet
earth." 

^^^^^^^^^^
WUTHERING HEIGHTS:  GLOSSARY 

  Joseph's speech may give you some problems at first, since he
uses dialect a lot, and since the words are written phonetically
to give you an idea of his accent.  Read a few sentences out
loud, and you'll catch on.  Words with a long e are usually
given a long a instead.  Hence, clane for "clean," and stale for
"steal." "Ow" is usually ah; "down" becomes dahn; "how," hah;
"doubt," daht.  A long i often becomes a long e.  "Night" and
"sight" are neeght and seeght.  "Die" is dee. 

  Here are some words you'll get used to quickly. 

^^^^^^^^^^
WUTHERING HEIGHTS:  AW I 

  'BAHT Without 

  BUD But 

  FROUGH From 

  HOR Her 

  I' In 

  MUN Must 

  NOBBUT No one else 

  NORTHER Neither 

  NOWT Nothing, a worthless person 

  SHOO She 

  SUD Should 

  'T It 

  T' The 

  TUH To 

  UN One 

  UN' And 

  WAR Worse 

  Other unusual words in Wuthering Heights are the following: 

  BAIRNIES Bairns, children. 

  BASILISK Spell-binding, fatal; a basilisk is a legendary
reptile with fatal breath and glance. 

  BECK Small stream. 

  BOARDS Shutters or doors. 

  BRACH Bitch hound. 

  CANT 1.  Talk with affected piety; 2.  Lively, vigorous,
cheerful. 

  CHUCK Chicken. 

  CLOTHES PRESS Clothes cupboard. 

  COCKATRICE Legendary serpent with a deadly glance, hatched by
a reptile from a cock's egg on a dung hill. 

  COMMINATIONS Denunciations. 

  CRAHNR Coroner (assimilated to crown). 

  DEAVED Broken with violence. 

  DEN Narrow valley or ravine. 

  DUNNOCK Hedge sparrow. 

  EEN Eyes. 

  EFT Pewt. 

  FAIN 1.  Willingly; 2.  rather. 

  FAISHION Have the cheek to. 

  FLAYSOME Frightening. 

  FLIGHTED Scared. 

  FRAME Go. 

  GAIT Manner. 

  GALLOWAY Small horse or pony. 

  GANS Goes. 

  GAUMLESS Without understanding. 

  GIRN Snarl. 

  GIRT Great. 

  GRAT Cried, wept. 

  HAPPEN Perhaps. 

  HARRIED Dragged. 

  HOB Projection at the back or side of a fireplace where
something can be kept warm. 

  JOCKS Jugs. 

  KIRK Church. 

  LACED Beat, whipped. 

  LAITH Barn. 

  LEVERET A hare in its first year. 

  LIG Lie. 

  LING Heather. 

  LINNETS Finches. 

  LUGS Ears. 

  MADLING A mad person, a simpleton. 

  MARRED Peevish. 

  MEANSFUL Becoming, proper, seemly, decent. 

  MEETERLY Moderately. 

  MELLS ON Meddles with, occupies with. 

  MILO Greek athlete who was eaten by wolves after getting
trapped in the tree he was trying to tear apart. 

  MIM Prim, affectedly modest. 

  MITHER Mother. 

  MOOLS Earth. 

  NAB Projecting part of a hill or rock. 

  NAVE Fist. 

  OFFALD Worthless. 

  OUSELS Blackbirds or thrushes. 

  'OWD NICK Old Nick, the devil. 

  PIKED Picked. 

  PINING Torturing, receiving pain. 

  PLISKY Trick. 

  SCROOP Back of the cover of a book. 

  SCUTTLE Metal pail for carrying coal. 

  SETTLE Wooden bench with arms, a high solid back, and an
enclosed foundation that can be a chest. 

  SIDE OUT Move away, clear out. 

  SIZAR Scholarship student. 

  'SIZES Assizes, superior court in English counties for trial
of civil and criminal cases. 

  SKIFT Move away quickly, change places. 

  SOUGH Small bog. 

  STARVED Suffered from the cold. 

  TENT Care. 

  THIBLE Stick or spatula used for stirring. 

  THRANG Busy. 

  THROSTLES Song thrushes. 

  Heathcliff betrays one solitary human feeling, and that is
not his love for Catherine; which is a sentiment fierce and
inhuman:  a passion such as might boil and glow in the bad
essence of some evil genius; a fire that might form the
tormented centre--the ever-suffering soul of a magnate of the
infernal world:  and by its quenchless and ceaseless ravage
effect the execution of the decree which dooms him to carry Hell
with him wherever he wanders.  No; the single link that connects
Heathcliff with humanity is his rudely confessed regard for
Hareton Earnshaw--the young man whom he has ruined; and then his
half-implied esteem for Nelly Dean. 

  -Charlotte Bronte, preface to the 1850 edition of 

  Wuthering Heights 

  Heathcliff and Cathy die without making a fact of the oneness
they both feel is theirs.  To Emily Bronte, their marriage is
unthinkable.  It can happen only as distant parody:  the
marriage of Hareton and Cathy the younger at the end of the
book.  Hareton is a watered-down Heathcliff; Cathy is a pale,
though still vivacious, replica of her mother.  [Wuthering
Heights and Jane Eyre] end similarly:  a relatively mild and
ordinary marriage is made after the spirit of the masculine
universe is controlled or extinguished. 

  -Richard Chase, in Twentieth Century 

  Interpretations, 1947 

  Heathcliff's revenge may involve a pathological condition of
hatred, but it is not at bottom merely neurotic.  It has a moral
force.  For what Heathcliff does is to use against his enemies
with complete ruthlessness their own weapons, to turn on them
(stripped of their romantic veils) their own standards, to beat
them at their own game.  The weapons he uses against the
Earnshaws and Lintons are their own weapons of money and
arranged marriages.  He gets power over them by the classic
methods of the ruling class, expropriation and property deals. 

  -Arnold Kettle, An Introduction to the 

  English Novel, 1951 

  Any choice between "the Heights" and "the Grange," any
writing up and writing down, will be the manufacture of the
critic, not the novelist.  Emily Bronte's places of the heart
are not stages in the development of the highest self, but
totally different ideas of love, speaking different languages.
What we do in reading the book is learn to understand the two
architectures, and begin to measure the full and complex
implications of their opposition, revealed to us with scrupulous
objectivity. 

  -Mark Kinkead-Weekes, in Twentieth Century 

  Interpretations, 1970 

  None of the other Victorians can successfully describe a
death scene.  Awestruck at so tremendous a task, they lose their
creative nerve; their imaginations boggle and fail, and they
fill up the gaps left by its absence with conventional formulas.
A stagey light of false tragic emotion floods the scene; the
figures become puppets, squeaking out appropriately touching or
noble sentiments.  But Emily Bronte's eagle imagination gazed
with as undaunted an eye on death, as on everything else.  The
light she sheds on it is the same light that pervades her whole
scene, and it is the light of day. 

  -David Cecil, Early Victorian Novelists, 1935 

  THE END