Wuthering HeightsStudy Guide

A fir branch taps the boarded window of a chamber Heathcliff keeps shut. Mr. Lockwood has rented Thrushcross Grange in 1801 and ridden over the moors to meet his landlord. The house is stone, carved with 1500 and Hareton Earnshaw. Dogs attack. Joseph curses. Hospitality arrives with closed teeth. Lockwood sleeps where the ledge is cut with Catherine Earnshaw, Catherine Heathcliff, and Catherine Linton. He breaks the glass and catches an ice-cold child's hand. Let me in, the voice sobs. Catherine Linton, lost on the moor twenty years. He grinds the wrist on the broken pane until blood soaks the bedclothes. Emily Brontë published Wuthering Heights in 1847 under the name Ellis Bell. The wound the book will not close is that a guest who wanted a bed is made to hold the dead, and the living have refused to let each other go.

Nelly Dean is the housekeeper who was in every room and now tells Lockwood how it got that way. An old farmer walks to Liverpool one harvest morning and comes back with a dirty, ragged child he names Heathcliff and favours over his own son. Hindley, once the heir, drives the foundling to outdoor labour, strips the lessons, and flogs him when he and Catherine skip church. Catherine Earnshaw runs the moors with Heathcliff, then comes home from Thrushcross Grange refined and laughing at his clothes. Edgar Linton proposes with a gentleness that can be lived in. His sister will later take a marriage for a romance and learn it is open war. A new generation inherits both houses and the contempt stored in them. The pressure among them is not who loves hardest. It is who gets to stay human after love has already named itself as identity, property, and revenge.

One Sunday they spy through the Grange window. A dog bites Catherine. She stays five weeks and comes home a lady. Edgar proposes. Behind the settle she tells Nelly she has accepted, then says it would degrade her to marry Heathcliff now. That sentence is the hinge. Heathcliff is listening. He leaves on it and does not hear what follows: that her love for Edgar is foliage, that her love for Heathcliff is rock, that she is Heathcliff. She waits at the gate through thunder until midnight. Three years later Edgar leads her to Gimmerton Chapel. Heathcliff returns in September, transformed and rich, wins Hindley's money at cards, and lodges at the Heights. He persuades Edgar's sister to elope, then she flees across the snow after a thrown dinner-knife. Catherine fasts behind a barred door, tears the pillow, and calls across the moor. He comes on a Sunday while Edgar is at church. They clutch until his grip leaves four blue marks. About midnight she bears a seven-months daughter and dies two hours later without waking. Heathcliff, drenched among the trees, prays she haunt him, dashes his head against a trunk, and howls. Years later he opens the coffin. He takes the Heights when Hindley drinks himself to death, degrades the next heir as Hindley once degraded him, and forces his own dying son into a marriage that blocks Edgar's will.

Brontë is not writing a courtship that needs a better proposal. She is writing what a class wound and an overheard word do when nobody will grieve them. Reviewers called the book violent and strange. She nested the story inside Lockwood's visit and Nelly's memory so a stranger arrives as a trespasser and has to sit through two generations before the house will explain itself. The ending is earned because the second generation does not inherit the howl. Cathy, who mocked Hareton's ignorance, offers to teach him to read. They study by firelight. Heathcliff stops eating, stares at something invisible, and dies before dawn in the panelled bed, the window open to the rain, his face fixed in an exulting sneer. They bury him without a minister. Lockwood visits the three headstones and wonders how anyone could imagine unquiet slumbers in that quiet earth. Country tales still say a man and a woman walk the moor.

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