Critical Analysis of Wuthering Heights

Reception And Early Reviews

A number of early reviews of the novel praised it for its imaginative potency while criticizing it for being strange and ambiguous. In a biographical notice attached to many modern versions of the novel, Charlotte Brontë (see portrait, right) complains that the novel did not receive sufficient merit at its initial reception. But Wuthering Heights did not go unrecognized by its early readers. Literary critics repeatedly acknowledged its originality, genius and imaginative power - even if they also complained about its moral ambiguity (Brontë, pp. 37).

Following Charlotte Brontë's clarification of the gender of Ellis Bell, Victorian readers began to place Wuthering Heights in the Gothic category, a category of literature peculiarly associated with women. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, in 1854, describes Wuthering Heights as 'a fiend of a book, an incredible monster, combining all the stronger female tendencies from Mrs Browning to Mrs Brownrigg. The action is laid in Hell, - only it seems places and people have no English names there.'

For the Victorians, Wuthering Heights was unarguably an immoral and uncivilized book. It deeply challenged all their ideas about propriety and literature. Equally, by the 1920s it was just as clear that its great value and message was metaphysical. Lord David Cecil, Professor of English Literature at Oxford, helped to integrate Wuthering Heights into the canon of English Literature in his famous chapter in Early Victorian Novelists (1934). He argues that Brontë's motivation in Wuthering Heights was an exploration of the meaning of life: 'Her great characters exist in virtue of the reality of their attitude to the universe; they look before us on the simple epic outline which is all that we see of man when revealed against the huge landscape of the cosmic scene' (p. 151) (Brontë, pp. 37).

Gilbert and Gubar's interest in the ambivalent presentation of gender focuses upon their reading of Heathcliff as 'female'. This is in the sense that second sons, bastards and daughters are feminine. Heathcliff is 'female' because he is dispossessed of social power. He has no status, no social place and no property. He is only Heathcliff, not Mr Heathcliff, or the Master, in contrast to Edgar Linton. Heathcliff's rebellions against the social conventions of class, marriage and inheritance similarly suggest that he can be read as 'female' since endorsing such conventions only serves the interest on patriarchal culture.

'Wuthering Heights is about England in 1847. The people it reveals are not in a never-never land, but in Yorkshire. Heathcliff was not born in the pages of Byron, but in a Liverpool slum. The language of Nelly, Joseph and Hareton is the language of the Yorkshire people. The story of WH is concerned not with love in the abstract but with the passions of living people, with property ownership, the attraction of social comforts, the arrangement of marriages, the importance of education, the validity of religion, the relations of rich and poor.'

Kettle goes on to examine how Heathcliff rebels against the values represented in Wuthering Heights, the values which reflect the specific tyranny of Victorian capitalist society.

SUMMARY Formalist critics, ...