Emily Bronte published Wuthering Heights in 1847, the same year as her sister Charlotte published Jane Eyre, and both novels show the influence of the Gothic tradition. Wuthering Heights has been classified as a love story, but the story of the passionate yet doomed love between Catherine and Heathcliff is far from a traditional Romance and relies heavily on key Gothic conventions.
The Haunted House
Wuthering Heights, the house which gives the novel its name, is old, mysterious, unwelcoming and possibly haunted. Even its location is inhospitable – its nearest neighbour is four miles away, and its position on the moors leaves it exposed to the roughest weather: “one may guess the power of the north wind blowing over the edge, by the excessive slant of a few stunted firs at the end of the house; and by a range of gaunt thorns all stretching their limbs one way, as if craving alms of the sun” (chapter one).
The construction itself is forbidding and unwelcoming: “the narrow windows are deeply set in the wall, and the corners defended with large jutting stones”, and the stonework is covered with “grotesque carving” (chapter one). The house is also very old – the date “1500” appears over the door, suggesting to the reader that it may have a long and dark history.
Lockwood, the first narrator in the novel, also discovers that the house may be haunted when he sleeps in what used to be Catherine’s bed. His sleep is disturbed by a troubling dream in which a child – Catherine – scratches at the window and pleads to be allowed in after roaming the moors for twenty years. Heathcliff’s reaction to this, flinging open the window and begging her to come back again, suggests that the experience was not a dream at all but a visitation from a ghost, although the novel never makes this clear.
The Byronic Hero
Heathcliff, the main male protagonist in the novel, shows aspects of the Byronic hero, a figure that has become familiar to fans of Gothic. His past is shrouded in mystery; his parentage is never discovered, and the reader knows only that old Mr Earnshaw found him wandering the streets of Liverpool as a young boy. He is virtually a savage when he is brought home – “a dirty, ragged, black-haired child” (chapter 4) frequently referred to as a “gypsy” because of his dark colouring. His lack of surname stresses the mystery of his background, and even as he grows older he maintains this air of secrecy – for example, when he returns to Wuthering Heights a wealthy man after a long absence, no-one is ever able to say where he made his money.
As an adult, his personality is dominated by his obsessive love for Catherine, and he shows himself to be cruel, violent, manipulative and vengeful. Despite these flaws, Heathcliff has proved an enduring and much-loved literary character, suggesting his great charisma and magnetism.
Aspects of the Supernatural
WutheringHeights is less reliant on the supernatural that Jane Eyre, but a mysterious and ghostly atmosphere does pervade the novel. Not only does Lockwood experience Catherine’s ghostly presence via his dream, but he also makes other references to spiritual creatures – at the end of the novel, the house is to be shut up “for the use of such ghosts as choose to inhabit it” (chapter 34), and despite the positive nature of the union between young Cathy and Hareton, the novel ends on a more sombre note with a visit to the graves of Catherine, Heathcliff and Edgar: “I lingered round them… and wondered how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.”
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