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CHAPRTER 5 Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights: at home

Introduction:

***** The theme of 'home and abroad' in Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte.

With its domestic settings and provincial location, Wuthering Heights is most immediately connected with 'home'.

The first reviews of Bronte's work:

This chapter examines the two contrasting homes presented in the novel, their inhabitants and external landscapes.

[Home]: Wuthering Heights is a story of undying elemental passion, of raw untamed human nature set in wild moorland. (CH5)

[Abroad]: its remote rural setting as quite to exclude the rest of the world. (CH6)

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Home at Wuthering Heights

Wuthering Heights begins with accounts by the southerner Lockwood of his first experiences of his new home in the north of England.

His initial stance as a man appreciative of isolated and unrefined society is soon diminished by the rough reception accorded him.

Lockwood's increasing perplexity and horror were shared by some of the novel's first reviewers who encountered these scenes:

[the incidents are too coarse and disagreeable to be attractive, the very best being improbable, with a moral taint about them, and the villainy not leading to results sufficient to justify the elaborate pains in depicting it.]

**** It is often assumed that Wuthering Heights was an under - appreciated and misunderstood work at the time of its publication.

There was certainly a wide range of responses, some of which were positive: (contemporary critical reception)

- The novel viewed as 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

The first reviewers were working within a context where it was common to speak about the healthfulness or otherwise of reading material.

*** John Ruskin discussed reading in terms of a wholesome or unwholesome diet.

- 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.

***The earliest reviewers of the novel tended to discuss the 'home' setting of Wuthering Heights more than the landscapes it evoked.

The critic Henry Chorley: describes the home at Wuthering Heights as 'a prison which might be pictured from life ... let us hope [the author] will

spare us further interiors so gloomy as the one here elaborated with such dismal minuteness'

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ACTIVITY 1 READ in the book & UNDERSTAND

Is this the prison ... elaborated with such dismal minuteness' that the reviewer recalls?

- ((tea being a relatively expensive commodity in 1801, at the time of the novel's setting, and an implicit sign, too. 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.

- Indeed the reviewer noted that the gloomy and prison-like atmosphere of Wuthering Heights was largely determined by the pervasive presence of 'the brutal master of the lonely house'

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Activity 2 read in the book

How are Lockwood's and the reader's expectations of 'home' played upon in these chapters?

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, which 'glowed delightfully in the radiance of an immense fire, compounded of coal, peat, and wood' with 'the table, laid for a plentiful evening meal' (p. 7).

There is an extreme - and comic - discrepancy between the expectations inspired by this interior and his rude reception by its inhabitants and the most unconventional tea party that follows.

E.G: The exchange between Lockwood and Catherine as he attempts to help her reach a tea canister during the preparations for this is worthy of Alice in Wonderland: '"I don't want your help," she snapped, "I can get them for myself." ... "Were you asked to tea?" she demanded' (p. 8).

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 (pp. 13-14); this physical onslaught is followed 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' (p. 21).

***The 'extreme' events in the novel were among the features that led critics to describe Wuthering Heights as the setting of a 'drama' :

- 'a rude old-fashioned house, at the top of one of the high moors or fells in the north of England' becomes the central stage-set; 'the whole drama takes place in the house'.

For this reviewer and others, the force of the drama taking place in that 'rude' (that is, rough and rustic) setting was apparently such as to erase any recollection of the moors themselves, or of the novel's other domestic location, Thrushcross Grange.

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Outside the home

****A few of the 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 . ======= important idea!!!

Echoing Lockwood's definition of the term 'wuthering' (p. 2), the reviewer notes that 'Wuthering Heights' is expressive 'in provincial phraseology' of 'the frequency of atmospheric tumults out of doors', tumults which are far 'surpassed in frequency and violence by the disturbances that occur in doors'

Activity 3 Read in the book

Significance of the natural setting of Wuthering Heights:

This wild external landscape has a pervasive presence in the text. - Nelly Dean subsequently tells us that Catherine and

Heathcliff loved to 'run away to the moors' as children (p. 40), but there are very few scenes in the novel featuring Catherine and Heathcliff on the moors.

In the novel itself, exterior landscapes tend to be symbolic of events in the story rather than die immediate location for its action.

- The modernist writer Virginia Woolf noticed how the landscapes in the Brontes' novels, their 'storms, moors, lovely spaces of summer weather ... carry the emotion and light up the meaning' of their books

The landscapes in Wuthering Heights certainly work as a spatial expression of the themes and emotions portrayed — regardless of the fact that most of the atmospheric tumult after the opening storm takes place indoors.

- Charlotte Bronte emphasised a view of her sister's creativity as inherendy attuned to her natural environment.

- In Charlotte's view, Wuthering Heights is a work hewn from the moorland crag, 'terrible and goblin-like', yet planted about with 'blooming bells and balmy fragrance'

**** Wuthering Heights is not the only house, nor the only natural setting which the novel portrays, and Woolfs lovely spaces of summer weather' are there aplenty as well as stormy turbulence.

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Home at Thrushcross Grange

*** There are two houses in Wuthering Heights. The central importance of the house at the Heights has tended to dominate the reading experience.

Activity 4 read in the book

What are the immediate contrasts with Wuthering Heights?

This first description of the Grange is Heathcliff's narration retold by Nelly.

We get an account at this stage only of the interior of this house, 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.

- 'Heaven' is how Heathcliff describes it. His comment conveys his child's-eye view of the gilded and brightly lit interior.

- But if contemporary readers were inclined to view the Grange in terms of some of the ideals of home this was likely to be unsettled by the fact that the inhabitants of the Grange seem only marginally less badly behaved than those of Wuthering Heights.

- Readers might reasonably wonder whether the inhabitants of this home are really more civilised than those at 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.

- Thrushcross Grange enjoys a lower, less exposed situation, but having rushed straight from the top of the Heights to the drawing room, after the marriage of Catherine to Edgar Linton, before we get much detail as to its exterior and setting.

- Although Heathcliff and Catherine first view die house as excluded outsiders, the focus of attention on its interior means that the reader seems to learn about this house from indoors, rather than being introduced to Wuthering Heights from its exterior to its internal spaces.

Activity 5

Nelly's account of the situation of the Grange: (the contrasts with Wuthering Heights)

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' (p. 81) and she is returning from the orchard at dusk with a basket of apples, having enjoyed breathing 'the soft, sweet air' (p. 82).

Although Nelly's description is of the exterior landscape and the contrasting situations of Wuthering Heights and the Grange, the house is simultaneously imagined as viewed by Catherine and Edgar. They sit indoors, at an unlatticed window through which is : displayed, beyond the garden trees and the wild green park, the valley of Gimmerton, with a long line of mist winding nearly to its top ... Wuthering Heights rose above this silvery vapour; but our old house was invisible.(p. 83)

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 - '(for very soon after you pass the chapel, as you may have noticed, the sough that runs from the marshes joins a beck which follows the bend of the glen)' (p. 83) - 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 from the fact that Nelly is the messenger of a paradise already disturbed by a revenant from Wuthering Heights.

Just previously, a Gothic moment has intruded, as moonlight causes 'undefined shadows to lurk' (p. 81) in the porch from which Heathcliffs voice, both 'foreign' and 'familiar', suddenly issues (p. 82).

'Mysterious inhabitants'

'the comfortable cheerfulness of one abode, and the cheerless discomfort of the other'; however, it regards the atmosphere of Wuthering Heights as less the result of a cold and bleak situation ... than of the strange and mysterious character of its inhabitants' disconcerted

Activity 6 read in the book

How, from your reading of the novel's opening chapters, do these inhabitants appear 'strange and mysterious'?

- Lockwood's-narrative shows him as entirely disconcerted by the inhabitants of the house.

- Lockwood 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. He has a powerful effect on everybody else, and, apart from Catherine and her father, who feel affection towards him, the main emotion he inspires is fear.

Activity 7 read in the book ======= important idea!!!

The descriptions of Heathcliff's appearance, speech and behaviour?

Within the ordinary domestic setting, Heathcliff's strangeness stands out, despite a degree of familiarity as to his 'dress and manners'.

Heathcliff 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: his origin a mystery in a novel where genealogy is vital.

The centrality of genealogy is reinforced by the incessant repetition and interchange of first names as well as family names: Hareton, Catherine, Linton.

- The elder Catherine inscribes her book with her various possible names: 'Catherine Earnshaw\ 'Catherine Heathcliff, 'Catherine Linton' (p. 15). Heathcliff owns but one name. 'Catherine Earnshaw' becomes 'Linton' but never 'Heathcliff, thus her passionate declaration that 'I am Heathcliff (p. 73) is in defiance of the genealogy that triumphs within the novel's plot.

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.

****However, while foreign in numerous ways in this novel, in other respects Heathcliff is at home in literature - a recognisable descendant of figures that inhabit previous prose fiction and poetry.

His 'erect and handsome figure', and even the fact that Heathcliff is 'morose' (p. 3), 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 or manners that Lockwood seems designed for, but would have been well known to Bronte's readers.

****Compared Heathcliff with the hero of The Corsair by the Romantic poet Lord Byron:

- 'Like the Corsair, and other such melodramatic heroes, he is "Linked to one virtue and a thousand crimes'". Heathcliff shares the foreignness that is highlighted in The Corsair. Byron's poem also contain 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, the Corsair sets himself outside social and moral boundaries

***In Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff is portrayed as proud, courageous, brooding, defiant of laws and conventions, given to violent utterance and action, with flashing 'basilisk eyes' (pp. 158, 160).

- Such qualities typical of Byron's heroes also figure prominently in the hero-villains of popular Gothic romances.

- Gothic villains , is bent on revenge, physically courageous and possessed of a 'wild and terrific' countenance; a character in whom potential virtue has been replaced by viciousness of action: like Heathcliff, he has usurped the property rights of the hereditary owners of his house.

- Thus, while in some respects Heathcliff is mysterious, in others he can be identified with character types familiar to Victorian readers, and from whom extreme behaviour was to be expected.

- 'Wuthering Heights would have been better romance if Heathcliff alone had been a being of stormy passions, instead of all the other characters being nearly as violent and destructive as himself

- The heroines of Gothic novels are demure, accomplished, passive and so exceptionally modest as never to betray their passions except by downcast looks, blushes and the occasional overheard lyric as they console themselves at their lutes.

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The structure of Wuthering Heights

- Things were going on in the family at Wuthering Heights that were at odds with the domestic ideals and which also contributed to the way in which the novel puts pressure on familiar literary classifications.

- The novel's treatment of familiar genres increases the sense of uncanny disturbance that is produced in the reader by the strange—familiar events it depicts, and this recurs throughout the novel's generic make-up.

- A sense of disturbed familiarity is also produced by the way in which the novel is structured.

This section considers 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, - The novel's carefully presented chronology.

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Home and structure***The very 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 analog, 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.

For readers of Wuthering Heights, their progression through its domestic spaces feels anything but orderly or decorous.

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.

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.)

- These examples contribute to a sense of a tightly organised literary structure. Nevertheless, the relentless patterns of repetition-with-variation are also disconcerting, constantly inviting and frustrating interpretation

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Narrators and narrative frames

****Wuthering Heights tends to survive as a direct and unmediated expression of passionate emotion and dramatic incident.

- Its events are mediated by the narrative structure that Bronte employs

Activity 8 read in the book

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

How would you characterize Lockwood as a narrator? Lockwood, a cultivated southerner relating his first encounters with

the inhabitants of his new northern home, is the initial filter for our own disorientating introduction to Wuthering Heights.

The people whom Lockwood encounters are (to his perspective) foreign as to their mode of living, manners and speech, which in Joseph's case is a Yorkshire dialect, impenetrable to outsiders.

- Joseph's language - his constant references to the Bible are less familiar and adding to the difficulties of decoding his Yorkshire dialect.

This produces as a useful parallel with the unfamiliarity of so much in the novel to its readers and the frame-narrator. Lockwood is not at home at Wuthering Heights, and in this he is representative of the geographical and class location of the majority of the novel's readership.

Within Wuthering Heights' covers, however, Victorians encountered a confusing disregard of social and literary codes .

- Charlotte Bronte identifies and 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' (p. 307).

****For such readers the 'wild moors of the north of England can ... have no interest; the' language, the manners, the very dwellings and household customs of the scattered inhabitants of those districts, must be ... in great measure unintelligible, and — where intelligible — repulsive' (p. 307).

These readers 'will hardly know what to make of the rough, strong utterance, the harshly manifested passions, the unbridled aversions, and headlong partialities' of people 'who have grown up untaught and unchecked, except by mentors as harsh as themselves' (p. 307).

Charlotte Bronte is exaggerating, producing a view of Yorkshire society that coheres with stereotypes available to the novel's mainly southern, middle-class readership, stereotypes largely confirmed by the lives her sister portrayed.

Lockwood's initial bewilderment is understandable, but his foppish limitations rapidly make him the subject of satire rather than sympathy, and the central narrative is carried forward instead by his housekeeper, Nelly Dean, who takes the story back twenty years.

Novel's introduction 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.

The narrator of Nelly Dean:

- She is at home at Wuthering Heights , as a servant, knows much more about her masters than they —can ever know of her.

- She 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.

- E.g: 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 (pp. 104—5).

*****Critics have often read Nelly as the voice of convention and narrow-minded prejudice.

- There is an improbable romanticism in Catherine's declarations that she will die, as Nelly suggests (pp. 106—5). But die she does, and the reader can hardly trust the reliability of Nelly's account, let alone her 'true benevolence and homely fidelity'.

Nelly represents the domestic, 'home', but home in Wuthering Heights is something other than merely benevolent.

Activity 9 read in book

How many narrators are you aware of in these chapters?

***There are two chief narrators of the novel. But before we even begin on Nelly's story, another voice has intervened when Lockwood reads Catherine's diaries in the form of her annotations in the books in the chamber where he spends the night.

Lockwood's reading of her diary provokes the apparition of the waif-like child Catherine trying to get back into the house.

However, for 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.

Catherine's diaries give us (and Lockwood) some of the backstory needed to make sense of the novel's present.

- Elsewhere in the novel, events are briefly related in other voices, such as via Isabella's letter in Volume I, Chapter XIII.

- epistolary novels (novels told in the form of letters).

*** The multiple narrative viewpoints in Wuthering Heights mean that readers tend to experience a lack of authoritative stance — about the events and, most notably, die violence depicted in the novel.

e.g.: Isabella's account (reported by Nelly) of Hindley's drunken attempt on Heathcliff's life \ of the savage physical injuries that Headicliff inflicts in retaliation\ or her apparently casual mention of Hareton hanging a litter of puppies from a chair as she passes him when making good her escape from the Heights:

This sense of narrative uncertainty explains why the novel has frequently been considered confused, despite its highly symmetrical structure and chronological scheme.

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Chronology

With Lockwood's initial narrative dated 1801 and his closing section 1802, the time span of the novel is explicitly defined. Within this frame, the events narrated retrospectively by Nelly cover a much longerperiod, the first twenty years of which is occupied by the story of Catherine and Heathcliff.

- The second half of the novel: is given to the second-generation plot, although this tends to occupy a shorter space in the memories of readers. 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' Eagleton draws attention to the decentering effects created as much by the different narrative voices in this 'elusive, enigmatic text' as by the bizarre events it narrates:

- With its 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 contrasting realist and romance modes of fiction at work within Withering Heights.

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Romance and realism

'Wuthering Heights would have been better romance if Heathcliff alone had been a being of stormy passions' This word "'romance' signalled a set of expectations about what a novel should be.

'Romance', 'drama': these terms that feature in the earliest reviews of the novel signal that the generic make-up of Wuthering Heights was at issue from" the start.

The novel form is often described as a hybrid (literally a mongrel-breed). Wuthering Heights draws on numerous literary genres , (THE FOCUS ONLY ON the crucial interaction of realism and romance within the novel)

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Wuthering Heights as romance

Activity 10

How can Wuthering Heights be read as a romance?

IMPORTANT

- Wuthering Heights is a romance because it is a love story; or because it is a work of imagination: or because it has an important relationship to the Romantic period in literature. ((All these associations are valid))

Catherine and Heathciiffs declarations of romantic union have convinced generations of readers that theirs is a love story, despite the fact that the novel contains almost no scenes of physical passion between the protagonists - a 'lack' for which film adaptations have found it necessary to compensate extensively. The connotations of 'romance' with an imagined tale are also relevant to the historical origins of the novel as a genre.

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- The notion of 'romance' came, during the Romantic period, to describe works of introspection and imagination.

- At its most fundamental level, the term 'romance' is used as a synonym for the term 'novel' and generally denotes a mode of writing that engages with the desires and imaginative lives of its characters and readers.

- The reviewer quoted at the beginning of this section on 'Romance and realism' could have been thinking of numerous fictional genres in which the portrayal of the villain is typically offset by other more temperate characters:

Important:- Wuthering Heights also has strong connections with Gothic

romances over and beyond the Gothic characteristics of Heathcliff. Gothic novels cultivated an atmosphere of terror, using remote and rugged settings and a paraphernalia of storms, shadows, apparitions and portents.

- The threat of sexual violence is generally integral to the atmosphere of these novels, in which women are constantly incarcerated in castle vaults and required to escape along labyrinthine underground passages.

- 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.

****There are many contrasts as well as overlaps between Bronte's novel and the Gothic genre:

Gothic heroines are usually virtuous and passive , not major characteristics of Catherine Earnshaw.

Instead of the expected feminine contrast to Heathcliff's savagery, readers encountered a recalcitrant heroine who, like the other residents of Wuthering Heights, is no model of refined behaviour.

'Her heroines scratch, and tear, and bite, and slap", who drew attention to the ways in which the human inhabitants of Wuthering Heights are constantly described in the same animalistic language as Heathcliff's dogs, forever fighting and devouring food.

None of the female characters meets expected standards for a romantic heroine, and more than they serve as ideal domestic role models.

****Bronte is no more decorous in her use of literary genres than her heroines are in their observations of social niceties.

- In Wuthering Heights she brings together the romance elements of genres such as the Gothic with unapologetically realistic depictions of character, dialogue and behaviour .

*****Emily Bronte did not draw on other literary genres as polite models for interpretation, but made startling transpositions of a variety of different modes of writing to represent what she saw as reality.

The critic George Henry Lewes:

- In Wuthering Heights, there is a combination of heightened description and a telling engagement with real issues and emotions, which is the basis for the realist novel's claim to 'truth'.

Important:

('Realism' is the name generally given to novels that aim to provide a faithful rather than idealised portrayal of life. The term can be variously

defined and novels can achieve realist effects using a wide range of literary techniques.)

The brutal truths which Wuthering Heights presents include the realities of domestic life, social exclusion and economic dispossession. A combination of romance and realism is also characteristic of Charlotte Bronte's Jane which also engages with domestic politics (in both the familial and the national meanings of that phrase).

In this respect, Wuthering Heights can be linked with other novels more obviously concerned with what was termed 'the condition of England', particularly those dealing with the plight of homeless, displaced children, like the 'foundling novel'.

***Finally, while the lack of a conventional heroine may have altered the kind of romance that readers found in Bronte's book, romance, in the sense of romantic love, is also an important element in the novel.

- Lewes's appreciation of the 'truth' of Bronte's novel included the conviction with which we accept Heathcliff's 'burning and impassioned love for Catherine, and ... her inextinguishable love for him'

- The final scene between Catherine and Heathcliff in the novel is full of violently eroticized language. However, faced with a novel in which the only scene of physical passion occurs when the heroine is heavily pregnant and on the point of death, most film-versions eroticise the childhood love between Catherine and Heathcliff instead, supplying adolescent trysts on the moors in order to meet our own expectations of what romance should be.

Conclusion

- The portrayal of the theme of home in Wuthering Heights.- The narrative and generic complexities of the novel, such as its

borrowings from a range of genres and its multiple narrators, which work in opposition to the novel's structural coherence and can often create uncertainty and disorientation in the reader.

- The reader: the critical responses to the novel, especially contemporary ones, and on the ways in which the text's formal, narrative and generic qualities engender particular expectations and responses.

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