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Chapter 1: Wuthering Heights: Introduction: This chapter examines the two contrasting homes presented in the novel, their inhabitants and external landscapes with its domestic settings and provincial location.The supernatural occurrences in Wuthering Heights arguably align it more closely with the Gothic novel than the Romantic novel, since Bronte's use of grotesque imagery to describe how Lockwood pulled the wrist of Catherine's ghost 'on to the broken pane, and rubbed it to and fro till the blood ran down' generates an atmosphere of horror.Lockwood's account of the interior known as 'the house' at Wuthering Heights:

Lockwood's first impressions are of heat and light reflecting 'splendidly from ranks of immense pewter dishes, interspersed with silver jugs and tankards, towering row after row, in a vast oak dresser'.On Lockwood's second visit, as the snowstorm sets in, the 'bleak hill top ... hard with a black frost' and the locked gate over which he has to climb before 'running up the flagged causeway bordered with straggling gooseberry bushes' and knocking 'vainly for admittance' on the farmhouse door, is very obviously a reminder of the chilly reception he previously enjoyed and a premonition of turbulence to come.The Romantic poet Lord Byron is credited as having invented the Byronic hero in his poem Childe Harold's Pilgrimage who has parallels with Heathcliff's dark, obsessive mentality, his strange mixture of attractive and repulsive qualities, and his capacity to inspire fear and wreak devastation on his enemies."With its 'Chinese boxes' effect of narratives within narratives, its constant regressions of perspectives and instabilities of viewpoint, it is a strangely 'decentred' fiction which subverts the dominance of the conventional authorial 'voice' as markedly as aspects of its subject-matter threaten to undermine the received forms of bourgeois society."?Isabella and the young Catherine's incarceration at Wuthering Heights is reminiscent of this aspect of the Gothic, and feminist criticism has firmly established modes of reading the genre as expressive of the physical and psychological oppression of women within patriarchal society.By the time Lockwood finds himself pinned down by Heathcliff's dogs in the snow outside, comedy has transmuted into something more brutal; this physical onslaught at the conclusion of Chapter II is followed in Chapter III by Lockwood's introduction to the more truly gloomy part of the Wuthering Heights' interior where he spends the night.Bronte's incorporation of the features of a variety of literary genres into her novel also contributes to the oppositional formal unity of the work, while simultaneously having decidedly disorientating effects on the reader.These responses are the Spectator's view of the novel is too 'extreme' and marred by detailed and protracted depictions of violence, but praise of the novel's originality and imaginative power often ran alongside criticism of the writer's evident inexperience.Our introduction to 'sinewy' old Joseph and his savage master Heathcliff has already prepared us to find a connection between the inhabitants of the Heights and 'the excessive slant of a few, stunted firs at the end of the house'; and the 'range of gaunt thorns all stretching their limbs one way.Home at Thrushcross Grange: "ah! it was beautiful - a splendid place carpeted with crimson, and crimson-covered chairs and tables, and a pure white ceiling bordered by gold, a shower of glass-drops hanging in silver chains from the centre, and shimmering with little soft tapers. Old Mr. and Mrs. Linton were not there. Edgar and his sister had it entirely to themselves; shouldn't they have been happy? We should have thought ourselves in heaven!"Charlotte Bronte identifies in her preface to the novel, where she stresses the 'alien and unfamiliar' nature of the inhabitants, customs and landscape of Yorkshire to those 'unacquainted with the locality where the scenes of the story are laid'.Bronte's introduction to her novel via Lockwood's encounter with Heathcliff and the second-generation characters has plunged us straight into a bewildering conjunction of everyday domesticity with ghosts and strange emotional excess.Also, the earliest reviewers of the novel tended to discuss the 'home' setting of Wuthering Heights more than the landscapes it evoked, such as a review for the Athenaeum by the critic Henry Chorley, describes the home at Wuthering Heights as 'a prison which might be pictured from life.Lockwood has just described the figure that we might normally expect to find seated in the comfortable kitchen at Wuthering Heights, 'a homely, northern farmer, with a stubborn countenance, and stalwart limbs set out to advantage in knee-breeches and gaiters'.In Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff is portrayed as proud, physically courageous, oppressive, revengeful, brooding, defiant of laws and conventions, given to violent utterance and action, with flashing 'basilisk eyes'.The Romantic literary hero and fairy-tale changeling, Heathcliff, whose foreignness also has historical origins within the contemporary context of the novel, providing an example of the interaction of romance and realism in the text.Nelly observes that after saving Hareton's life when Hindley dropped him over the bannister, Heathcliff's face betrayed his desire 'to remedy the mistake by smashing Hareton's skull onthe steps' - a violent image that highlights his brutality and makes us more likely to see him as a Gothic villain than a Romantic hero.The structure of Wuthering Heights in relation to the idea of 'home', the narrators and narrative frames through which the novel's story is told, the patterns of repetition and variation between events and characters, and the novel's carefully presented chronology.The mid-twentieth-century critic Queenie Leavis saw Wuthering Heights as home to a 'wholesome', 'primitive' and 'natural' society pitted against the overdeveloped, artificial culture of the Grange.Heathcliff as a recognisable Byronic or Gothic hero-villain might be manageable was the way in which the novel represented all the occupants of his house in their 'wild state'.Heathcliff's origin a mystery in a novel where genealogy is vital.Bronte uses a tree metaphor to indicate Heathcliff's determination to reduce Hareton to the same lowly state to which Hindley reduced him: 'we'll see if one tree won't grow as crooked as another, with the same wind to twist it!'.This untempered mixing of the prosaic and the fantastic is particularly a feature of Bronte's fiction, a sense that ordinary domesticity is a fit subject for the novel is something that Wuthering Heights shares with a great number of Victorian novels.However, after her death, a cutting was found in her desk of a perceptive which identifies the contrast between the two houses as fundamental to the novel: 'An antiquated farm-house, a neighbouring residence of somewhat more pretending description with their respective inmates'.The multiple narrative viewpoints in Wuthering Heights mean that readers tend to experience a lack of authoritative stance about the events and, most notably, the violence depicted in the novel.Alongside its tight chronological organisation, the opposing locations and voices in the novel help to structure the narrative, as do the genealogical ties that are of such thematic importance to the story.Lockwood's eye is drawn to the tea canisters on the mantelpiece (tea being a relatively expensive commodity at the time of the novel's setting, and an implicit sign of connections between the domestic world of the novel and the world of imperial trade 'abroad').Such contrasts are fundamental to the opposing thematic and metaphorical patterns, the careful balance of locations (and characters), that help to structure the novel, even if some of these oppositions break down on closer inspection.Nelly's description of the exterior of the Thrushcross Grange:

Nelly's account here includes one of many lyrical descriptions of the seasons, weather and landscape that appear throughout the novel.Nelly's account combines precise topographical features of the Grange's valley setting with a poetic evocation of its green softness, wrapped in a protective silver mist above which Wuthering Heights stands exposed.Heathcliff is marginalized on the basis of his orphan status, and he is only able to achieve ownership of Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange by acts of cunning and manipulation.Feminist readings of the second-generation plot view it as either a retelling or a revision of the first- generation story, depending on whether they read the novel as voicing protest against the triumph of patriarchal power or as depicting its reform.Therefore early reviews offer a complex range of insights into Bronte's text and the contexts in which it was read, such as the now quaint vocabulary of 'coarseness' and 'moral taint' in The Spectator review.Lockwood reflects that 'the apartment and furniture would have been nothing extraordinary as belonging to a homely, northern farmer ... But Mr. Heathcliff forms a singular contrast to his abode and style of living'.The comedy plays over several pages where Lockwood's social platitudes come up against Catherine's overt hostility, Hareton's boorishness and Heathcliff's increasing savagery.The contrasting worlds of Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange might represent a conflict between northern rural values and the more urban cultures of the south of England.The novel's ending cements the union between the Lintons and the Earnshaws and Heathcliff's role has been predominantly as an external catalyst for relationships, both harmonious and conflicted, between others.The notion of 'romance' came, during the Romantic period, to describe works of introspection and imagination generally denotes a mode of writing that engages with the desires and imaginative lives of its characters and readers.This accommodation of the domestic alongside the Romantic elements in the novel seems more akin to Bronte's aesthetic practice of mixing romance and realism.The themes of home and abroad have helped to frame an exploration of the novel's ideological and generic complexity from which readers can venture further abroad for themselves.The novel itself is structured along highly organised lines with a clearly indicated span of dates both for Lockwood's narrative and for the events that Nelly Dean narrates.Catherine's daughter goes to Wuthering Heights, echoing her mother's move to the Grange, Hareton's deprivations repeat those inflicted on Heathcliff, Catherine feels trapped at the Grange, and Isabella and the second Catherine are both incarcerated at Wuthering Heights.In the quotation below literary critic Eaglenton comments on the lack of a single authorial stance in Wuthering Heights.It can be tempting to dismiss early responses as narrowly moralistic 'Victorian' reactions to a challenging text.Thus the consumption of print within the home was linked explicitly to the consumption of food, and unwholesome reading considered as likely to have deleterious effects on its inhabitants as a surfeit of sweetmeats.As previously, there is an extreme - and comic - discrepancy between the expectations inspired by this interior and his rude reception by its inhabitants and most unconventional tea party that follows.Early reviews dwelt on the joint significance of Wuthering Heights as both a wild, abandoned landscape and a house, noting connections between events taking place inside and the exterior weather and landscape.Heathcliff, by contrast, with his 'gypsy'-like appearance, suggests a mysterious wealth of possible origins which, for Lockwood, would contradict a gentlemanly status.Additional support for viewing Heathcliff as a Gothic villain is provided by Bronte's use of a violent animal metaphor to convey his lack of compassion: 'I have no pity!In Wuthering Heights Bronte brings together the romance elements of genres such as the Gothic with realistic depictions of character, dialogue and behaviour.The brutal truths which Wuthering Heights presents include the realities of domestic life, social exclusion and economic dispossession.The prejudice to which orphans were subjected is reflected in Mrs Earnshaw's use of the derogatory term 'gipsy brat' to refer to Heathcliff.The Gothic is used from the start to show the shadow side of the Victorian domestic ideal, which can leave women the unequal partners under domestic tyranny, and it persists in the power of the ghosts of Cathy and Heathcliff to disturb us until the end.Wuthering Heights never allows us to arrive at the kind of harmonious and unexamined idea of the domestic encouraged by Ruskin, Patmore and others.The structure of Wuthering Heights: The family at Wuthering Heights that were at odds with the domestic ideals which contributed to the way in which the novel puts pressure on familiar literary classifications.Wuthering Heights demonstrates both Gothic and realist qualities, and can be classified as a 'hybrid'.She tells Lockwood that she was always predisposed to take Linton's side in any dispute, and does not readily accept Catherine's account of the severity of her collapse following the physical conflict between Heathcliff and Linton.She tells Lockwood that she was always predisposed to take Linton's side in any dispute, and does not readily accept Catherine's account of the severity of her collapse following the physical conflict between Heathcliff and Linton.Eagleton draws attention to the decentring effects created by the different narrative voices in this 'elusive, enigmatic text' and by the bizarre events it narrates.These bright, un-dismal objects suggest a life of prosperity and plenty, confirmed by the 'frame of wood laden with oatcakes, and clusters of legs of beef, mutton and ham'.The novelist Henry James conceived of 'the house of fiction' in order to represent the formal structures that writers build to frame their characters, a house whose many windows represent the multitudinous perspectives the novelist can evoke.It is also followed by his own physical cruelty to the waif-like would-be-inhabitant of the house 'looking through the window', whose grasp he escapes only by rubbing 'its wrist' across 'the broken pane'.Lockwood's description of the exterior setting for the house at Wuthering Heights:

In Wuthering Heights, the landscapes work as a spatial expression of the themes and emotions portrayed.The interior of this house is intensifying the contrast between the wild, exuberant race, in Catherine's case barefoot, and the glories and constraints of its domestic space.Heathcliff's account begins with the obvious contrast with the miseries of the house at Wuthering Heights, where he and Catherine spend their Sunday evenings 'standing shivering in corners'.This viewpoint from the Grange is paralleled by the way in which readers at home viewed the world of the novel from the comfort of their own domestic interiors.Lockwood's narrative shows him as entirely disconcerted by the inhabitants of the house - a feeling shared by many readers confronted by such wild behaviour while reading in the apparent safety of their own homes.Lockwood's initial stance as a man appreciative of isolated and unrefinedsociety is soon diminished by the rough reception accorded him.The Mysterious character 'Heathcliff':

"He is a dark-skinned gypsy in aspect, in dress and manners a gentleman - that is, as much a gentleman as many a country squire ... he has an erect and handsome figure - and rather morose - possibly some people might suspect him of a degree of under- bred pride."Heathcliff is 'morose', suggest that he might share the characteristics of a hero, or indeed villain, from a genre which is in contrast to the polite domestic novel of manners.Nevertheless, the relentless patterns of repetition-withvariation constantly invite frustrating interpretation.she demanded'.

Chapter 1: Wuthering Heights: Introduction: This chapter examines the two contrasting homes presented in the novel, their inhabitants and external landscapes with its domestic settings and provincial location. Wuthering Heights is most immediately connected with ‘home’. The themes of home and abroad have helped to frame an exploration of the novel’s ideological and generic complexity from which readers can venture further abroad for themselves. There are two houses in Wuthering Heights. The central importance of the house at the Heights has tended to dominate the reading experience or at least memories of Brontë’s commentators. However, after her death, a cutting was found in her desk of a perceptive which identifies the contrast between the two houses as fundamental to the novel: ‘An antiquated farm-house, a neighbouring residence of somewhat more pretending description with their respective inmates’.

The structure of Wuthering Heights: The family at Wuthering Heights that were at odds with the domestic ideals which contributed to the way in which the novel puts pressure on familiar literary classifications. The novel increases the sense of uncanny disturbance that is produced in the reader by the strange–familiar events it depicts. A sense of disturbed familiarity is also produced by the way in which the novel is structured. The structure of Wuthering Heights in relation to the idea of ‘home’, the narrators and narrative frames through which the novel’s story is told, the patterns of repetition and variation between events and characters, and the novel’s carefully presented chronology. Wuthering Heights was a three-volume novel like any other that Victorians were accustomed to read in the comfort of their homes. Within its covers, however, they encountered a confusing disregard of social and literary codes. The novel itself is structured along highly organised lines with a clearly indicated span of dates both for Lockwood’s narrative and for the events that Nelly Dean narrates. In addition, there is a constant symmetrical patterning of contrast and repetition between characters. Characters are related not just through naming and genealogy, but through their similar-yet-different experiences. Catherine’s daughter goes to Wuthering Heights, echoing her mother’s move to the Grange, Hareton’s deprivations repeat those inflicted on Heathcliff, Catherine feels trapped at the Grange, and Isabella and the second Catherine are both incarcerated at Wuthering Heights. So they all contribute to a sense of a tightly organised literary structure. Nevertheless, the relentless patterns of repetition-withvariation constantly invite frustrating interpretation. Wuthering Heights can be read as a romance. Its form is often described as a hybrid genre drawing on numerous literary genres. Wuthering Heights demonstrates both Gothic and realist qualities, and can be classified as a ‘hybrid’.

Narrators and narrative frames: There are two main narrators in Wuthering Heights, both of whom have a role in shaping our experience of the text. Lockwood, the tenant at the Grange, introduces the novel. His narrative forms an outer frame for the whole, reporting the central narrative as related by Nelly. The central narrative is carried forward instead by Nelly Dean, the housekeeper who takes the story back twenty years. Brontë’s introduction to her novel via Lockwood’s encounter with Heathcliff and the second-generation characters has plunged us straight into a bewildering conjunction of everyday domesticity with ghosts and strange emotional excess. This prepares us for the more traumatic events that will take place in Nelly Dean’s narrative after she has provided an account of Catherine and Heathcliff’s childhood years. Also, the novel calls to mind the form of earlier epistolary novels (novels told in the form of letters), such as via Isabella’s letter in Volume I, Chapter XIII. Another voice has intervened when Lockwood reads Catherine’s diaries in the form of her annotations in the books in the chamber. Lockwood’s reading of her diary provokes the apparition of the waif-like child Catherine trying to get back into the house. The rest of the novel, Catherine’s voice is heard only in Nelly’s reported dialogue, although we tend to forget this under the spell of her most compelling speeches.

Why Nelly is not a reliable narrator?

Nelly is at home at Wuthering Heights, and later also at the Grange. She can move readily between these two worlds. Yet she, naturally, has her own opinions of the tale she tells, and readers who look askance at Lockwood’s inadequacies might also be prudent not to depend too securely on her as their guide through this house of fiction. Like so many first-person narrators, she is less than entirely reliable. Nelly’s sympathies are certainly not to be identified with the novel’s romantic protagonists, Catherine and Heathcliff. She tells Lockwood that she was always predisposed to take Linton’s side in any dispute, and does not readily accept Catherine’s account of the severity of her collapse following the physical conflict between Heathcliff and Linton. Critics have often read Nelly as the voice of convention and narrow-minded prejudice. She speaks on behalf of our own scepticism as readers as we consider how to interpret Catherine and Heathcliff’s exorbitant declarations of romantic union and Heathcliff’s repellent behaviour.

In the quotation below literary critic Eaglenton comments on the lack of a single authorial stance in Wuthering Heights. Discuss this view in relation to the multiple narrative voices in the novel. "With its ‘Chinese boxes’ effect of narratives within narratives, its constant regressions of perspectives and instabilities of viewpoint, it is a strangely ‘decentred’ fiction which subverts the dominance of the conventional authorial ‘voice’ as markedly as aspects of its subject-matter threaten to undermine the received forms of bourgeois society."?

The multiple narrative viewpoints in Wuthering Heights mean that readers tend to experience a lack of authoritative stance about the events and, most notably, the violence depicted in the novel. There are two main narrators in Wuthering Heights, both of whom have a role in shaping our experience of the text. Lockwood, the tenant at the Grange, introduces the novel. His narrative forms an outer frame for the whole, reporting the central narrative as related by Nelly. Nelly is at home at Wuthering Heights, and later also at the Grange. She can move readily between these two worlds. Yet she, naturally, has her own opinions of the tale she tells, and readers who look askance at Lockwood’s inadequacies might also be prudent not to depend too securely on her as their guide through this house of fiction. Like so many first-person narrators, she is less than entirely reliable. She tells Lockwood that she was always predisposed to take Linton’s side in any dispute, and does not readily accept Catherine’s account of the severity of her collapse following the physical conflict between Heathcliff and Linton. Perhaps this sense of narrative uncertainty explains why the novel has frequently been considered confused, despite its highly symmetrical structure and chronological scheme. The events narrated retrospectively by Nelly cover a much longer period, the first twenty years of which are occupied by the story of Catherine and Heathcliff. The second half of the novel is given to the second-generation plot. The more exciting events portrayed in the first-generation story are one reason for this disparity, as is the way in which this half of the novel seems to have a formal coherence independent of the remaining narrative. Wuthering Heights in the form we have it has a highly organised coherence. Alongside its tight chronological organisation, the opposing locations and voices in the novel help to structure the narrative, as do the genealogical ties that are of such thematic importance to the story. The formal unity of Wuthering Heights has long been admired by critics. Terry Eagleton described it as offering ‘a unified vision of brilliant clarity’. Yet readers are often confused and surprised to realise that this is not the result of a lack of formal organisation, but despite the novel’s structural coherence. Eagleton draws attention to the decentring effects created by the different narrative voices in this ‘elusive, enigmatic text’ and by the bizarre events it narrates. Brontë’s incorporation of the features of a variety of literary genres into her novel also contributes to the oppositional formal unity of the work, while simultaneously having decidedly disorientating effects on the reader.

Reviews about the book:

Discuss three reasons why wuthering Heights was underappreciated by critics at the time of its publication.?

Wuthering Heights was an under-appreciated and misunderstood work at the time of its publication. The discussion of Wuthering Heights has begun with some of the early responses to the novel. These responses are the Spectator’s view of the novel is too ‘extreme’ and marred by detailed and protracted depictions of violence, but praise of the novel’s originality and imaginative power often ran alongside criticism of the writer’s evident inexperience. Also, the earliest reviewers of the novel tended to discuss the ‘home’ setting of Wuthering Heights more than the landscapes it evoked, such as a review for the Athenaeum by the critic Henry Chorley, describes the home at Wuthering Heights as ‘a prison which might be pictured from life. It can be tempting to dismiss early responses as narrowly moralistic ‘Victorian’ reactions to a challenging text. We notice that Brontë’s first readers were uniformly less perceptive and intelligent than readers now. The first reviewers were working within a context where it was common to speak about the healthfulness or otherwise of reading material. John Ruskin, for example, constantly discussed reading in terms of a wholesome or unwholesome diet. Thus the consumption of print within the home was linked explicitly to the consumption of food, and unwholesome reading considered as likely to have deleterious effects on its inhabitants as a surfeit of sweetmeats. Therefore early reviews offer a complex range of insights into Brontë’s text and the contexts in which it was read, such as the now quaint vocabulary of ‘coarseness’ and ‘moral taint’ in The Spectator review.

Lockwood's account of the interior known as ‘the house’ at Wuthering Heights:

Lockwood’s first impressions are of heat and light reflecting ‘splendidly from ranks of immense pewter dishes, interspersed with silver jugs and tankards, towering row after row, in a vast oak dresser’. These bright, un-dismal objects suggest a life of prosperity and plenty, confirmed by the ‘frame of wood laden with oatcakes, and clusters of legs of beef, mutton and ham’. Lockwood’s eye is drawn to the tea canisters on the mantelpiece (tea being a relatively expensive commodity at the time of the novel’s setting, and an implicit sign of connections between the domestic world of the novel and the world of imperial trade ‘abroad’). Wuthering Heights clearly has the appearance of a well-ordered home; arguably it is a well-ordered home within which is revealed the full domestic chaos of a disordered family. Lockwood reflects that ‘the apartment and furniture would have been nothing extraordinary as belonging to a homely, northern farmer … But Mr. Heathcliff forms a singular contrast to his abode and style of living’. The idea of ‘home’ and the house at Wuthering Heights can provide a reference-point for the formal composition of this novel. Critics have often discussed the novel form in general by analogy with the rooms of a house through which the reader progresses. The novelist Henry James conceived of ‘the house of fiction’ in order to represent the formal structures that writers build to frame their characters, a house whose many windows represent the multitudinous perspectives the novelist can evoke. On Lockwood’s next visit, he is pleased to find himself, after his frozen walk, once again ‘in the large, warm, cheerful’ sitting room at Wuthering Heights. As previously, there is an extreme – and comic – discrepancy between the expectations inspired by this interior and his rude reception by its inhabitants and most unconventional tea party that follows. The exchange between Lockwood and Catherine as he attempts to help her reach a tea canister during the preparations ‘“I don’t want your help,” she snapped, “I can get them for myself.” … “Were you asked to tea?” she demanded’. The comedy plays over several pages where Lockwood’s social platitudes come up against Catherine’s overt hostility, Hareton’s boorishness and Heathcliff’s increasing savagery. By the time Lockwood finds himself pinned down by Heathcliff’s dogs in the snow outside, comedy has transmuted into something more brutal; this physical onslaught at the conclusion of Chapter II is followed in Chapter III by Lockwood’s introduction to the more truly gloomy part of the Wuthering Heights’ interior where he spends the night. It is also followed by his own physical cruelty to the waif-like would-be-inhabitant of the house ‘looking through the window’, whose grasp he escapes only by rubbing ‘its wrist’ across ‘the broken pane’.

Lockwood’s description of the exterior setting for the house at Wuthering Heights:

In Wuthering Heights, the landscapes work as a spatial expression of the themes and emotions portrayed. Discuss briefly.

Early reviews dwelt on the joint significance of Wuthering Heights as both a wild, abandoned landscape and a house, noting connections between events taking place inside and the exterior weather and landscape. It is significant to consider the natural setting of Wuthering Heights and has meanings to readers. This wild external landscape has a pervasive presence in the text. In the novel itself, exterior landscapes tend to be symbolic of events in the story rather than the immediate location for its action. The landscapes in Wuthering Heights certainly work in this way on the reader as a spatial expression of the themes and emotions portrayed. Given Lockwood’s definition of ‘wuthering’ as ‘descriptive of the atmospheric tumult to which the house’s station is exposed in stormy weather’. Our introduction to ‘sinewy’ old Joseph and his savage master Heathcliff has already prepared us to find a connection between the inhabitants of the Heights and ‘the excessive slant of a few, stunted firs at the end of the house’; and the ‘range of gaunt thorns all stretching their limbs one way. On Lockwood’s second visit, as the snowstorm sets in, the ‘bleak hill top … hard with a black frost’ and the locked gate over which he has to climb before ‘running up the flagged causeway bordered with straggling gooseberry bushes’ and knocking ‘vainly for admittance’ on the farmhouse door, is very obviously a reminder of the chilly reception he previously enjoyed and a premonition of turbulence to come.

Home at Thrushcross Grange: "ah! it was beautiful – a splendid place carpeted with crimson, and crimson-covered chairs and tables, and a pure white ceiling bordered by gold, a shower of glass-drops hanging in silver chains from the centre, and shimmering with little soft tapers. Old Mr. and Mrs. Linton were not there. Edgar and his sister had it entirely to themselves; shouldn’t they have been happy? We should have thought ourselves in heaven!" The first description of the Grange is Heathcliff’s narration retold by Nelly. He and Catherine have run all the way ‘from the top of the Heights … and planted’ themselves ‘under the drawing-room window’. The interior of this house is intensifying the contrast between the wild, exuberant race, in Catherine’s case barefoot, and the glories and constraints of its domestic space. Heathcliff’s account begins with the obvious contrast with the miseries of the house at Wuthering Heights, where he and Catherine spend their Sunday evenings ‘standing shivering in corners’. Heaven’ is how Heathcliff describes it. His comment conveys his child’s eye view of the gilded and brightly lit interior. Heathcliff himself would not swap their heaven for even the hell of his oppression by Hindley Earnshaw. The inhabitants of the Grange seem only marginally less badly behaved than those of Wuthering Heights. However, the contrasts with the life at the Heights are clear. Such contrasts are fundamental to the opposing thematic and metaphorical patterns, the careful balance of locations (and characters), that help to structure the novel, even if some of these oppositions break down on closer inspection. The focus of attention on its interior means that the reader seems to learn about this house from indoors.

Nelly's description of the exterior of the Thrushcross Grange:

Nelly’s account here includes one of many lyrical descriptions of the seasons, weather and landscape that appear throughout the novel. It is ‘a mellow evening in September’ and she is returning from the orchard at dusk with a basket of apples, having enjoyed breathing ‘the soft, sweet air’. Nelly’s description is of the exterior landscape of the Grange contrasts with the situations of Wuthering Heights. This viewpoint from the Grange is paralleled by the way in which readers at home viewed the world of the novel from the comfort of their own domestic interiors. Nelly’s account combines precise topographical features of the Grange’s valley setting with a poetic evocation of its green softness, wrapped in a protective silver mist above which Wuthering Heights stands exposed. This lyricism takes some of its poignancy that Nelly is the messenger of a paradise already disturbed by a revenant from Wuthering Heights.

The Mysterious inhabitants in Wuthering Heights: Wuthering Heights begins with accounts by the cultivated southerner Lockwood of his first experiences of his new home in the north of England. We find Lockwood as a representative of ourselves as readers of the novel. Lockwood’s narrative shows him as entirely disconcerted by the inhabitants of the house – a feeling shared by many readers confronted by such wild behaviour while reading in the apparent safety of their own homes. Lockwood's initial stance as a man appreciative of isolated and unrefinedsociety is soon diminished by the rough reception accorded him. The people whom Lockwood encounters are foreign as to their mode of living, manners and speech, which in Joseph’s case is a Yorkshire dialect impenetrable to outsiders. Charlotte Brontë identifies in her preface to the novel, where she stresses the ‘alien and unfamiliar’ nature of the inhabitants, customs and landscape of Yorkshire to those ‘unacquainted with the locality where the scenes of the story are laid’. He cannot understand the behaviour of the Wuthering Heights family, or even work out what their relationships are one to the other. They are strange and mysterious enough in themselves, even before the addition of the terrifying apparition at his window. Strangest of all is Heathcliff. His origins remain unexplained, as does the source of the wealth and education he acquires when he temporarily disappears. The contrasting worlds of Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange might represent a conflict between northern rural values and the more urban cultures of the south of England. To Lockwood, the north is strikingly ‘other’, a foreign place. To the inhabitants of the north, London and the south are equally foreign. The mid-twentieth-century critic Queenie Leavis saw Wuthering Heights as home to a ‘wholesome’, ‘primitive’ and ‘natural’ society pitted against the overdeveloped, artificial culture of the Grange.

The Mysterious character 'Heathcliff':

"He is a dark-skinned gypsy in aspect, in dress and manners a gentleman – that is, as much a gentleman as many a country squire … he has an erect and handsome figure – and rather morose – possibly some people might suspect him of a degree of under- bred pride." Lockwood has informed the reader the first physical description of Mr Heathcliff when he gives him a tough welcome. Lockwood has just described the figure that we might normally expect to find seated in the comfortable kitchen at Wuthering Heights, ‘a homely, northern farmer, with a stubborn countenance, and stalwart limbs set out to advantage in knee-breeches and gaiters’. Heathcliff, by contrast, with his ‘gypsy’-like appearance, suggests a mysterious wealth of possible origins which, for Lockwood, would contradict a gentlemanly status. Dark, gypsy-like, Heathcliff is a foreign thing. Heathcliff is ‘morose’, suggest that he might share the characteristics of a hero, or indeed villain, from a genre which is in contrast to the polite domestic novel of manners. The Romantic poet Lord Byron is credited as having invented the Byronic hero in his poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage who has parallels with Heathcliff’s dark, obsessive mentality, his strange mixture of attractive and repulsive qualities, and his capacity to inspire fear and wreak devastation on his enemies. Like Heathcliff, he sets himself outside social and moral boundaries. In Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff is portrayed as proud, physically courageous, oppressive, revengeful, brooding, defiant of laws and conventions, given to violent utterance and action, with flashing ‘basilisk eyes’. Such qualities, typical of Byron’s heroes, also figure prominently in the hero-villains of popular Gothic romances. In some respects Heathcliff is mysterious, in others he can be identified with character types familiar to Victorian readers. It was the pervasiveness of emotional and physical violence which seemed most to have disturbed early readers of the novel. Heathcliff as a recognisable Byronic or Gothic hero-villain might be manageable was the way in which the novel represented all the occupants of his house in their ‘wild state’.Heathcliff's origin a mystery in a novel where genealogy is vital. Heathcliff owns but one name. Despite his marriage to Isabella Linton and the younger Catherine’s to his son, Heathcliff is never properly knitted into the genealogical pattern. The novel’s ending cements the union between the Lintons and the Earnshaws and Heathcliff’s role has been predominantly as an external catalyst for relationships, both harmonious and conflicted, between others.

Wuthering Heights as Gothic romance and realism:

Discuss the Gothic Romance features in Bronte's Wuthering Heights. Comment on at least three elements of the Gothic/Gothic Romance that appear in the novel.? Discuss the Gothic and the Gothic Romance features in Bronte's Wuthering Heights. Comment on at least three elements of the Gothic/Gothic Romance that appear in the novel while grounding your answer with specific examples.?

The notion of ‘romance’ came, during the Romantic period, to describe works of introspection and imagination generally denotes a mode of writing that engages with the desires and imaginative lives of its characters and readers. Wuthering Heights also has strong connections with Gothic romances over and beyond the Gothic characteristics of Heathcliff. Gothic novels share the Romantic novel’s emphasis on strong emotion and the imagination, but they are specifically concerned with cultivating an atmosphere of fear, suspense and horror. They typically feature a villain who is merciless and intent on seeking revenge and they tend to depict violent and supernatural events. The Romantic literary hero and fairy-tale changeling, Heathcliff, whose foreignness also has historical origins within the contemporary context of the novel, providing an example of the interaction of romance and realism in the text. Isabella and the young Catherine’s incarceration at Wuthering Heights is reminiscent of this aspect of the Gothic, and feminist criticism has firmly established modes of reading the genre as expressive of the physical and psychological oppression of women within patriarchal society. The supernatural occurrences in Wuthering Heights arguably align it more closely with the Gothic novel than the Romantic novel, since Brontë’s use of grotesque imagery to describe how Lockwood pulled the wrist of Catherine’s ghost ‘on to the broken pane, and rubbed it to and fro till the blood ran down’ generates an atmosphere of horror. The shocking extent of Heathcliff’s malice and vengefulness also encourages us to view him as a Gothic villain. Heathcliff’s obsession with getting revenge is reflected in the novel’s structure. While the first volume charts the love story between him and Catherine Earnshaw, Volume II focuses on the implementation of his revenge plot against Hindley and Edgar. Heathcliff’s vengefulness is also revealed through the way he punishes Hindley by depriving his son, Hareton, of education and forcing him to ‘live in his own house as a servant’. Brontë uses a tree metaphor to indicate Heathcliff’s determination to reduce Hareton to the same lowly state to which Hindley reduced him: ‘we’ll see if one tree won’t grow as crooked as another, with the same wind to twist it!’. Additional support for viewing Heathcliff as a Gothic villain is provided by Brontë’s use of a violent animal metaphor to convey his lack of compassion: ‘I have no pity! The more the worms writhe, the more I yearn to crush out their entrails!’ Brontë also uses Nelly’s recollections of events to emphasize Heathcliff’s evilness. Nelly observes that after saving Hareton’s life when Hindley dropped him over the bannister, Heathcliff’s face betrayed his desire ‘to remedy the mistake by smashing Hareton’s skull onthe steps’ – a violent image that highlights his brutality and makes us more likely to see him as a Gothic villain than a Romantic hero. In Wuthering Heights Brontë brings together the romance elements of genres such as the Gothic with realistic depictions of character, dialogue and behaviour. Emily Brontë made startling transpositions of a variety of different modes of writing to represent what she saw as reality. The critic George Henry Lewes found in Wuthering Heights a combination of heightened description and a telling engagement with real issues and emotions, which for him was the basis for the realist novel’s claim to ‘truth’. The brutal truths which Wuthering Heights presents include the realities of domestic life, social exclusion and economic dispossession. Heathcliff is marginalized on the basis of his orphan status, and he is only able to achieve ownership of Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange by acts of cunning and manipulation. The prejudice to which orphans were subjected is reflected in Mrs Earnshaw’s use of the derogatory term ‘gipsy brat’ to refer to Heathcliff. In this respect, Wuthering Heights can be linked with what was termed ‘the condition of England’, particularly those dealing with the plight of homeless, displaced children. Brontë’s depiction of nineteenth-century social conditions in the novel might lead us to view it in some regards as a realist novel as well as a Romantic novel. The idea of the domestic, in its full horror and glory, is being important within the novel, rather than something to be dismissed in favour of Romantic ideal. This accommodation of the domestic alongside the Romantic elements in the novel seems more akin to Brontë’s aesthetic practice of mixing romance and realism. The categories of romance and realism, home and abroad, coexist as much as they compete within the novel. This coexistence is crucial to the characteristic way in which Brontë can be seen to flout literary decorum in this novel. This untempered mixing of the prosaic and the fantastic is particularly a feature of Brontë’s fiction, a sense that ordinary domesticity is a fit subject for the novel is something that Wuthering Heights shares with a great number of Victorian novels. Feminist readings of the second-generation plot view it as either a retelling or a revision of the first- generation story, depending on whether they read the novel as voicing protest against the triumph of patriarchal power or as depicting its reform. The constant overlapping of the Gothic and the domestic is one of the distinctive features of this novel. The Gothic is used from the start to show the shadow side of the Victorian domestic ideal, which can leave women the unequal partners under domestic tyranny, and it persists in the power of the ghosts of Cathy and Heathcliff to disturb us until the end. Wuthering Heights never allows us to arrive at the kind of harmonious and unexamined idea of the domestic encouraged by Ruskin, Patmore and others. However, ‘home’ remains centre stage in this novel.