Wuthering Heights and Its Defiance of Universal Pragmatics

Research Project
Candidate 316773
Module Title 12,000 word Research Project
Module Tutor Essaka Joshua
Abstract An investigation of plurality and subjectivity in Wuthering

Heights, which in turn provides a critique of the communicative
and social theories of Jürgen Habermas
Title Wuthering Heights and its Defiance of Universal Pragmatics
MHRA Citation
1342 Words
Candidate 316773 Research Project: ‘Wuthering Heights and its Defiance of Universal Pragmatics’
Wuthering Heights and its Defiance Of Universal

Pragmatics
introduction
For the last hundred and fifty years, critics have repeatedly admitted a grudging
stalemate with Wuthering Heights. This most unorthodox of novels has consistently
defied the identification of any coherent ‘meaning’1, ‘message’ or even a reason why
it works. Simultaneously, the novel has established a strong position at the centre of
Western culture, on the basis of its canonisation as ‘one of the world’s greatest love
stories’, translations into film and music and, most straightforwardly, enormous
popularity (Thompson 1998, 30-31). This combination of academic intrigue and
popular adulation has led to an exceptional deluge of criticism. An integral property of
Wuthering Heights is its open-endedness to interpretation, an open-endedness that has
proved conducive to readings from an almost unprecedented breadth of theoretical
schools2. It has inspired shelves of Marxist, psychoanalytic, formalist,
(post)structuralist, cultural materialist and reception-historical readings.
The most striking example of this saturation comes in a miscellaneous section
of Brontë Society Transactions. Here Humphrey Gawthrop took what is often seen as
Wuthering Heights’ vital pivot, the list of surnames inscribed on the windowsill of
Lockwood’s unfortunate chamber in Chapter III, ‘Catherine Earnshaw – Heathcliff –
Linton’ (Nestor ed 1995, 20) and rearranged them to form an anagram that
summarises the plot: ‘How the infernal half-caste can inherit’ (2001, 85-6). Analysis
has stretched beyond select passages, beyond select sentences, beyond even
morphemes and phonemes to bleed interpretation from the smallest possible (non-
meaningful) unit, the letter, the individual block of black on the printed page. In this
context, how can yet another reading of Wuthering Heights be justified?
The answer lies in critics’ aforementioned ‘grudging stalemate’. In order to
produce stable readings of Wuthering Heights, they have been unable to account for
the novel in its entirety, for its unexplainable dreams, unresolved puzzles and
contradictory genres3. Sensing the inadequacy of such readings, and capitalising on
Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Gaskell’s myth-construction of Emily as a ‘Mystic On
The Moors’4, it became rapidly acknowledged that Wuthering Heights is in some way
2
transcendental. This tendency may have begun in the month following its publication,
in a review in Douglas Jerrold’s Weekly Newspaper:
Wuthering Heights is a strange sort of book – baffling all regular criticism . . .

What may be the moral which the author wishes the reader to deduce from his
work, it is difficult to say; and we refrain from assigning any, because to speak
honestly, we have discovered none but mere glimpses of hidden morals or
secondary meanings . . . We strongly recommend all our readers who love
novelty to get this story, for we can promise them that they never have read
anything like it before. (Anon 1847, cited in Allot 1947, 228)
Establishing the prevailing trend of the following century and a half, the reviewer is
not prepared to identify these ‘hidden morals or secondary meanings’. In the 1950s,
Walter Allen simply reproduces the motif of ‘baffling all regular criticism’. He claims
that when discussing Wuthering Heights “the usual compass bearings of criticism do
not apply” (1954, 194). His reason for admitting defeat recourses directly to the image
of the Mystic on the Moor: “The central fact about Emily Brontë is that she is a
mystic” (194). He legitimates this sentiment on the basis of F.R. Leavis’ refusal to
include the novel in his Great Tradition: Leavis excludes it on the grounds that this
‘astonishing work seems to me a kind of sport’ (cited in Stoneman ed 1993, 2). This
critical orthodoxy of shrouding Wuthering Heights in mystery should not be
perpetuated; nevertheless it cannot be dismissed, as it is clearly central to the novel’s
appeal. Whether this mysteriousness is a property of the text itself or a product of its
reception-history, it weighs heavily upon any contemporary reading.
This essay addresses two issues: the weight of contradictory criticism on
Wuthering Heights, and the critical myth that the novel is transcendental. It will
present a reading of Wuthering Heights’ plurality, but also debunk ideas that the novel
is in any way beyond interpretation, by demonstrating how this plurality is built
within the language of the text. To paraphrase Belsey’s formation of textuality, but in
relation to Wuthering Heights, the novel is not finally anchored in anything outside
the differences, without positive terms, which constitute the language that enables us
to think (2002, 116). Or, as Derrida more succinctly put it ‘there is nothing outside of
the text’ (cited in Appignanesi and Garratt 1995, 79). The central tenet of my
argument is this: Wuthering Heights defies the application of any universal value
system by persuading the reader to accept several irreconcilably subjective discourses
simultaneously, as a result of its narrative frames. This essay will explicate plurality,
difference and irreconcilable subjectivities in Wuthering Heights. It is not so much a
3
complete reading of the novel as a demonstration of the ways in which conflicting

readings can coexist5. By doing so it provides a critique of the work of the Twentieth
Century socio-historical philosopher Jürgen Habermas.
This essay explores two separate areas of Habermas’ research. Firstly it will
take issue with the concept of ‘universal pragmatics’ which forms the basis for his
attack upon the dominant hermeneutic and post-structuralist ideas of the Twentieth
Century. Habermas posits four ‘sociological concepts of action’: teleological,
normatively regulated, dramaturgical and communicative. Pragmatic universals occur
in the final category and are ‘general presuppositions of communicative action’ that
aim to ‘identify and reconstruct universal conditions of possible understanding’
(Habermas 1976, 1). These centre on the idea that all communicative action6 is based
on implicit ‘truth claims’ that are universal across certain interpretative communities7.
Habermas aims to re-establish an objective rationality as the basis for communication,
rather than the Subject of earlier philosophy (ibid, 15). Let us take the opening lines
of Wuthering Heights as an example:
I have just returned from a visit to my landlord – the solitary neighbour that I
shall be troubled with. This is certainly a beautiful country! In all England, I do
not believe that I could have fixed on a situation so completely removed from
the stir of society (3)
Communication is achieved as Lockwood, the speaker, shares certain universal

presuppositions with the reader: that Lockwood, the reader and Heathcliff are separate
subjects and that they are all distinct from the world, this ‘beautiful country’ that is a
meronymic of ‘all England’. The reader also implicitly shares with Lockwood a
presupposition of the validity of the symbolic structures he is using, that what he says
is grammatically correct and intentionally truthful8. Intersubjective recognition of
what Lockwood is saying can be brought about – different readers would understand
this statement on the basis of the same pragmatic universals.
However, this essay concludes that the concept of ‘pragmatic universals’ is
hopelessly utopian. The near-impossibility of ‘ideal speech situations’ means that
communication invariably exists only in a grey area conceded by Habermas himself:
Naturally [the existence of pragmatic universals] does not mean that

interpretation must lead in every case to a stable and unambiguously
differentiated assignment. Stability and absence of ambiguity are rather the
exception in the communicative practice of everyday life. A more realistic
4
picture is that drawn by ethnomethodologists – of a diffuse, fragile continuously

revised and only momentarily successful communication in which participants
rely on problematic and unclarified presuppositions and feel their way from one
occasional commonality to the next
(in Habermas 1976, 148)
Habermas’s model therefore has little practical application, especially in the case of a
text as polyphonic as Wuthering Heights. This decision is reached on the basis of an
investigation of textual plurality that examines Wuthering Heights on the grounds of
Habermas’ ideas about communication and ideology. It destabilises the idea that
implicit ‘truth claims’ must be shared by participants for any valuable communication
to take place. Wuthering Heights’ super-ordinate narration, Nelly Dean speaking to
Lockwood, is extremely effective but resounds in their differences. Here subjective
impression is not distinguished from objective reality; there is no determinate ‘truth’.
The first section of this essay will investigate the way in which Wuthering
Heights’ ‘Chinese box ingenuity of construction’ (Leavis 1966, 25) deliberately
renders objective interpretation impossible. The novel is strongly emblematic of what
Belsey describes as the ‘Romantic Construction of the Unconscious’, claiming that:
‘the distinguishing feature of these texts is that they are composed of irreconcilable
discourses, constructed of signifying nonsense which intrudes substantially on sense
and remains unmastered by it’ (1986, 64). Wuthering Heights defies Habermas’s
discourse ethics – character discussion does not result in an agreement that establishes
a set of moral guidelines but the precise opposite. Discussion is destructive and
disruptive, taking apart the social order and any presuppositions it contains.
Habermas initially intended to use his linguistic system for a rather
structuralist purpose, to establish the system of rules behind communication and thus
uncover the symbolic reality of society itself. However, this project was abandoned,
Habermas deducing that ‘social theory must stand on its own’ (Outhwaite 1996, 11).
He therefore developed, separately, the highly influential concept of the ‘bourgeois
public sphere’ (1989, 14-26). My essay, however, defies any assertion that theories
about the foundations of knowledge, such as Habermas’ social formation, can stand
apart from linguistic systems, such as his ‘universal pragmatics’, since knowledge is
first and foremost linguistic. For a literate bourgeois public sphere to exist, in which
ideology is put to one side and in which communication can be achieved, pragmatic
universals must be present to ground conversation.
5
My investigation of textual plurality therefore examines not only

communication and ideology, but also the way in which Wuthering Heights’ plurality
problematises Habermas’ notion of a homogenous bourgeois public sphere. The
second section of this essay examines the novel’s social stance. It demonstrates how it
challenges ideas of the existence a powerfully rational public which operates mainly
according to reason, especially in its depiction of women’s public and private roles.
The novel presents no ungendered sphere in which rational debate is possible, but
instead depicts a complex set of relations in the domestic sphere, which is savage and
corrupt. It challenges the rational discourse of the Public Sphere, by offering
appealingly chaotic alternatives that are rooted in pantheism, catharsis and anarchy.
However, issues about the social formation will, initially, be put to one side in order to
examine Wuthering Heights in terms of Habermas’s communicative theory.
(post)structural plurality
The concept of universal pragmatics is a definite turn in Twentieth Century

communicative theory. It shifts attention from Gadamer’s infinite subjectivity to
locate a new, objectivising stance based on inter-subjective relationships. Wuthering
Heights can be seen as emblematic of a similar landmark in Nineteenth Century
communicative theory, but one that demonstrates a turn in the opposite direction. For
Patricia Parker it is:
one of those nineteenth-century texts which call into question – long before
contemporary interest in this problem . . . precisely the identity, or self-identity,
of the text, by the simultaneous demonstration and undoing of the
epistemological claims and ordering structures of the novel form” (1982, 178)
It therefore opposes the Enlightenment idea of textual linearity which arises, in a

much revised form, in Habermas’s idea of ‘implicit truth claims’. This section
contends that Wuthering Heights is structured in a deliberately plural fashion, in terms
of narrative frames, chronology and genre. In this way, it necessitates plurality of
interpretation, rendering interpretation based upon ‘pragmatic universals’ impossible.
Most importantly, it destabilises the concept of the autonomous ‘self’ or ‘subject’
upon which pragmatic universals are based. This section investigates the possibility of
communication across class-barriers in Wuthering Heights, the idea that its plot is
driven not so much by people as by the transgression of personality traits and the way
6
in which the framed narration problematises interpretation. It will also investigate the
way in which the use of disrupted chronology and contradictory genres necessitate
plurality of interpretation.
Before exploring the wide implications of universal pragmatics in the text-to-
reader relationship, it is worthwhile to demonstrate that relations between characters
in Wuthering Heights also disprove Habermas’s theory: true communication (i.e. that
intended to achieve mutual understanding) is impossible across class barriers.
Lockwood’s implicit truth claims, those of the aristocratic sphere, are often different
from those held by the inhabitants of the Heights, which are based on a
rural/agricultural public sphere. No amount of ‘conversation’ presents the possibility
of reconciling them. The central narrative of Wuthering Heights is a colossal speech-
act between two characters who could hardly play more polarised social roles: a
middle-aged, female and rural working-class servant (Nelly Dean) and a young, male
and fashionable aristocrat (Lockwood)9.
Both participants are utterly tied to their respective ideologies. Lockwood
cannot appreciate that he must alter his southern lifestyle to accommodate rural
convention: ‘I dine between twelve and one o’clock; the housekeeper, a matronly lady
. . . could not, or would not, comprehend my request that I might be served at five’
(9). This exchange demonstrates the absence of an ‘implicit truth claim’. Conversation
is not thwarted by an argument but because the participants speak, to some extent,
different languages. Lockwood is asking the impossible in Nelly’s discourse – she
does not defy his request to change dinnertime, she cannot conceive the possibility of
changing mealtimes against the implicit, eternal backdrop of agricultural necessity.
Similarly, when Lockwood encounters another servant he fails to interpret her
behaviour correctly: “I saw a servant-girl on her knees surrounded by brushes and
coal-scuttles, and raising an infernal dust as she extinguished the flames with heaps of
cinders. This spectacle drove me back immediately” (9). He fails to appreciate that
‘this spectacle’ is a necessary action performed entirely for his benefit; the word
‘cleaning’ does not occur to him. Instead, he regards it solely as an irritation. The
world of practical necessity is beyond his conception. On Habermas’s sociological
level of ‘normatively regulated action’ Lockwood and Nelly are not members of a
homogonous ‘social group who orient their action to common values’ (in Outhwaite
1996, 134).
7
This communicative impossibility is mutual. Nelly can only interpret the

world in terms of practical action, rather than living along the poetic lines that
Lockwood sets for himself. He asks her a rhetorical question in his typically
ridiculous over-affected manner:
‘Are you acquainted with the mood of mind in which, if you were seated alone,
and the cat licking its kitten on the rug before you, you would watch the
operation so intently that puss’s neglect of one ear would put you seriously out
of temper?’ (61)
Nelly’s response demonstrates her disregard for abstract philosophy and storytelling:
‘A terribly lazy mood, I should say’ (61). This conversation is itself only taking place
due to Lockwood’s insensitivity to Nelly Dean’s working environment. Though ‘the
clock is on the stroke of eleven’ (61) he bids her to continue her story because ‘One or
two is early enough for a person who lies ‘til ten’ (61). Her response is, again,
indicative of a psychology that revolves around a necessity for practical action: ‘You
shouldn’t lie ‘til ten. There’s the very prime of the morning gone long before that
time. A person who has not done one half of his day’s work by ten o’ clock, runs a
chance of leaving the other half undone’ (61). Early in the novel Lockwood says that
Nelly Dean was ‘taken as a fixture along with the house’ (9). Their conversation
therefore fails one of Habermas’s central tenets of communication – Lockwood is not
entirely aware of Nelly Dean as a subject that is separate from the world around him.
Nelly and Lockwood’s relationship throws Habermas’s intersubjective
definition of communication into debate. Habermas replaces ‘the ontological concept
of ‘world’ with one derived from the phenomenological tradition . . . the pair of
concepts ‘world’10 and ‘lifeworld’ (Outhwaite 1996, 133). For him, ‘this
intersubjectively shared lifeworld forms the background for communicative action’
(ibid). Inside the lifeworld two separate roles for cultural tradition are identified. The
first, where it ‘functions from behind as a cultural stock of knowledge from which the
participants in interaction draw their interpretations’ (Outhwaite 1996, 133) is
disproved by Wuthering Heights’ central speech-act. The incompatibility of Nelly and
Lockwood’s discourses disproves the idea of a homogonous ‘cultural stock of
knowledge’ that exists across gender and social-class: ‘the cultural tradition shared by
a community . . . constitutive of the lifeworld which the individual member finds
already interpreted’ (ibid). Indeed, when cultural differences disrupt communication
in this way, the concept of a universal lifeworld is itself threatened. Habermas’s
8
appropriation of the lifeworld is thus indicative of his tendency to universalise, to

unify contradictory discourses whenever they interact and thus arrive at a ‘universal’
social formation.
Habermas’s second role of cultural tradition can also be located in Nelly and
Lockwood’s conversation. In this role:
individual elements of the cultural tradition are themselves made thematic [so
that] the participants must . . . adopt a reflective attitude towards cultural
patterns of interpretation that ordinarily make possible their interpretative
accomplishments. This change in attitude means that the validity of the
thematized interpretive pattern is suspended and the corresponding knowledge
rendered problematic: at the same time, the problematic element of the cultural
tradition is brought under the category of a state of affairs to which one can refer
in an objectivating manner (ibid)
Lockwood presupposes that, since Nelly is of a lower class, she will be poorly read 11.
He stereotypes the nature of the rural working class (‘the manner that I am habituated
to consider as peculiar to your class’, 62), in his literary-romanticising speech:
‘I perceive that people in these regions acquire over people in towns the value
that a spider in a dungeon does over a spider in a cottage, to their various
occupants; and yet the deepened attraction is not entirely owing to the situation
of the looker-on. They do live more in earnest, more in themselves, and less in
surface, change, and frivolous external things. I could fancy a love for life here
almost possible’ (61)
As though the actual events of Wuthering Heights were not gothic enough, Lockwood
decorates them with his references to spiders and dungeons. His view of the rural
working class is derived from a form of stereotyping that is characteristic of the Lake
Poets: the stereotype of rural rustics at one with nature12. Nelly strongly opposes the
idea that the working class ‘had no thought’ of their lives, but Lockwood regards her
as an exception:
‘Excepting a few provincialisms of slight consequence, you have no marks of

the manner that I am habituated to consider as peculiar to your class. I am sure
you have thought a great deal more than the generality of servants think. You
have been compelled to cultivate your reflective faculties, for want of occasions
for frittering your life away in silly trifles’ (62).
Nelly contests this idea even more strongly, locating Lockwood’s misunderstanding at
the level of class-stereotype rather than the individual: ‘“Oh! Here we are the same as
anywhere else, when you get to know us,” observed Mrs Dean, somewhat perplexed
9
at my speech’ (62). She turns education, an element of cultural tradition, into a

‘theme’ of speech in order to challenge Lockwood’s presuppositions. She
deconstructs the binary between town and country which underlies his understanding:
‘I certainly esteem myself a steady, reasonable kind of body,’ she said; ‘not
exactly from living among the hills and seeing one set of faces, and one series of
actions, from year’s end to year’s end; but I have undergone sharp discipline,
which has taught me wisdom; and then, I have read more than you would fancy,
Mr. Lockwood. You could not open a book in this library that I have not looked
into, and got something out of also: unless it be that range of Greek and Latin,
and that of French; and those I know one from another: it is as much as you can
expect of a poor man’s daughter’ (62).
Nelly is not content to fulfil Lockwood’s perceived role, of engaging only with nature
and the annual cycle of rural tradition: ‘living among the hills and seeing one set of
faces, and one series of actions, from year’s end to year’s end’. She has gained
literary-academic knowledge through the ‘sharp discipline’ of a programme of auto-
didacticism. The only limit to her education is a financial one, and the constraint
imposed by playing a female role in a patriarchal order, of being ‘a poor man’s
daughter’. So Habermas’s second form of lifeworld communicative action, in which
intersubjective communication can re-examine cultural presuppositions, is valid here.
Lockwood does not comment directly upon Nelly’s assertion, so it is impossible to
determine whether this has been successful communication on a character to character
level. That he now differentiates the working class from himself on the basis of their
lack of ‘occasions for frittering your life away in silly trifles’ does however indicate a
new degree of self-knowledge. More importantly, however, on the level of text-to-
reader, Lockwood’s ‘cultural pattern of interpretation’ is devalued. His town/country
binary is broken down as a form of prejudice. There is, rarely, potential for a shift in
shared presuppositions between Lockwood and the reader.
On this level of character-to-character communication, then, Wuthering
Heights certainly demonstrates a situation in which ‘consensus is shaken, and the
presupposition that certain validity-claims are satisfied (or could be vindicated) is
suspended, [so] the task of mutual interpretation is to achieve a new definition of the
situation which all participants can share’ (Outhwaite 1996, 120). Nelly Dean and
Lockwood never reach Habermas’s utopian communicative state: ‘coming to an
understanding . . . bringing about an agreement on the presupposed basis of validity-
claims that can be mutually recognised’ (Outhwaite 1996, 120). If, as Habermas
10
claims, ‘communicative action can continue undisturbed only as long as participants

suppose that the validity claims they reciprocate are justified’ (Outhwaite 1996, 119)
then this is at best a form of flawed communication, at worst no communication at all.
This failed communication serves a deliberate function, however, on the level of text-
to-reader. In its satirical portrait of Lockwood the bourgeois/aristocrat and relative
sympathy towards Nelly, Wuthering Heights is certainly a ‘claim’ against the shared
conditions considered as truth claims by Lockwood’s class, a class that probably
constituted the majority of the contemporary readership of the novel. As Kermode
observes, ‘novels, even this one, were read in houses more like the Grange than the
Heights’ (1975, 44).
Wuthering Heights’s text-to-reader relationship throws up even greater
problems for Habermas’s model of communicative action. The central purpose of this
model was to displace ‘the subject’ at the centre of Western rationality with a
rationality built inside intersubjective relationships. However, in order to build this
intersubjective rationality, it is absolutely necessary for the participants to have a
complete and unshakable (and presumably false) understanding of themselves as
volitional subjects (defined in 1976, 66). Though Habermas’s third ‘sociological
concept of action’, dramaturgical action, leans towards the idea that the subject is
socio-linguistically constructed, as it posits that everyone is ‘acting’ their own subject
position (defined in Outhwaite 1996, 136), it does not actually analyse the way in
which subject-construction occurs as, for instance, Lacan does in his description of
entry into the Imaginary and Symbolic orders. So Habermas’s model fails to explain
the nature of communication in relationships, such as that between text and reader in
Wuthering Heights, where the subject is decentred. The subject is decentred in
Wuthering Heights as its plot does not involve characters so much as the
transgression of personality traits.
As mentioned earlier, Wuthering Heights summarises the journey of the two
Catherines itself, in the inscription that Lockwood discovers on the window ledge,
13
read left to right for Catherine1 and right to left for Catherine2: ‘Earnshaw –
Heathcliff – Linton’ (20). This is demonstrated by Frank Kermode’s famous diagram:
11
(Wuthering Heights) (Thrushcross Grange)
EARNSHAW HEATHCLIFF LINTON
Catherine1 (loves Heathcliff) Heathcliff (marries Edgar Linton)
(marries Hareton Eanrshaw) Linton Heathcliff (marries Linton Heathcliff)

Catherine2
(from Kermode 1974, 45)

This is by far the most accurate way of demonstrating Wuthering Heights’s plot in a
simple manner. The Earnshaw name is threatened and transgressed, but eventually
wins out, annihilating the genealogy of the ‘beggarly interloper’ (39) Heathcliff. ‘The
lawful master and the ancient stock were restored to their rights’ (332) when
Catherine2 marries Hareton.
So the plot is about the transgression of certain characteristics across
characters and generations. The best way to demonstrate this situation would perhaps
be to accept Roland Barthes’s definition of ‘character’ as a ‘semic code’ comprising of
different traits (1978, 115)14. Wuthering Heights defies Habermas’s model of
communicative action as these traits regularly transcend the Subject, going across not
only generations but also thematic links. Their movement is perhaps best explained in
a table of ‘distinctive feature characterology’ (defined in Toolan 2001, 96) such as
Appendix 1.
This table relates characters to, on its x axis, the novel’s major themes. It
supports the idea raised by critics such as Helen Moglen that the relationship between
the two Catherines is not a mother-daughter one, but the ‘evolution’ of a certain
character type, the continuous linear development of a female mind (cited in
Stoneman ed 1998, 90)15. For once, mother does not equal (m)other. Ironically, on the
hinge between volumes one and two, the respective domains for each Catherine’s life-
story, Lockwood comments ‘let me beware of the fascination that lurks in Catherine
Heathcliff’s brilliant eyes. I should be in a curious taking if I surrendered my heart to
that young person, and the daughter turned out to be a second edition of the mother!’
(152). They share nine of these fourteen ‘traits’ an unparalleled commonality in the
novel.
12
The lives of the two Catherines barely overlap16, as Nelly explains ‘about
twelve o’clock, that night, was born the Catherine you saw at Wuthering Heights, a
puny, seven months’ child; and two hours after the mother died’ (164). The death of
one central protagonist is thus immediately replaced with another one, who bears the
same name. Following the description of her birth, she is described entirely in relation
to her mother: ‘after the first six months, she grew like a larch; and could walk and
talk too, in her own way, before the heath blossomed a second time over Mrs Linton’s
[Catherine1’s] dust’ (187). Nelly describes her exactly as her genealogy ascribes (see
Appendix 2), as a cross between the two families: ‘the Earnshaws handsome dark
eyes, but the Lintons’ fair skin, and small features, and yellow curling hair’ (187). Her
continued description places Catherine2 as more of a Linton than an Earnshaw, but
this is an instance where we are expected to ‘read against’ Nelly’s explicit
characterisation. She describes Catherine2 almost entirely positively:
Her spirit was high, though not rough, and qualified by a heart sensitive and
lively to excess in its affections. That capacity for intense attachments reminded
me of her mother: still she did not resemble her: for she could be soft and mild
as a dove, and she had a gentle voice and pensive expression: her anger was
never furious; her love never fierce: it was deep and tender. (187)
This elevated praise hardly seems apt for the adolescent who will throw herself with
wilful abandon into an utterly destructive relationship with Linton Heathcliff. It
becomes increasingly clear that her ‘self’ is fundamentally an extension of her
mother’s:
However, it must be acknowledged, she had faults to foil her gifts. A propensity
to be saucy was one; and a perverse will, that indulged children invariably
acquire, whether they be good tempered or cross. If a servant chanced to vex
her, it was always - ‘I shall tell papa!’ And if he reproved her, even by a look,
you would have thought it a heart-breaking business: I don’t believe he ever did
speak a harsh word to her. (187)
Despite the earlier claim that ‘she did not resemble’ her mother, this description is
very similar to Catherine1’s behaviour as a child:
[Mr Earnshaw’s] peevish reproofs wakened in her a naughty delight to provoke

him: she was never so happy as when we were all scolding her at once, and she
defying us with her bold, saucy look, and her ready words; turning Joseph’s
religious curses into ridicule, baiting me, and doing just what her father hated
most (43)
13
Both ‘saucy’ children persistently defy adults with a ‘perverse will’, answering
everybody back. The difference is that Catherine2 has Linton sensitivity, so cannot
bear to be scolded. It is important to note, then, that she is half Linton, and as such she
internalises the struggle between these two families in the preceding generation17.
Yet Catherine2 seems almost biologically compelled to follow in her mother’s
footsteps. One of the first descriptions of her character describes a fixation upon
Pennistone Craggs: ‘The abrupt descent of Penistone Crags particularly attracted her
notice . . .”Now am I old enough to go to Pennistone Craggs” was the constant
question in her mouth” (188-9). When her mother lay on her deathbed, rapidly
oscillating between ‘reality’ and gothic fantasy, she uses the Craggs as the basis for a
peculiar fantasy: ‘this bed is the fairy cave under Penistone crags, and you [Nelly] are
gathering elf-bolts to hurt our heifers; pretending, while I am near, that they are only
locks of wool’ (122). Though critics’ psychoanalytic readings of Wuthering Heights
are persistently anachronistic, there is potential here for straightforward Freudian
analysis. The same repetition-compulsion18 that has caused Catherine1’s illness
(seemingly a combination of hysteria and anorexia) has been projected onto the
Craggs: her desire to return to a protective ‘cave’ symbolises a return to the womb so
as to never have been born19.
Catherine2 shares this compulsion, but now ‘the Fairy Cave’ is revealed as a
piece of folk tradition, mentioned to her by ‘one of the maids’ (189). Though she
appears to suffer no repetition-compulsion, upon leaping over the wall of the Grange
on her Pony and following her desire for the Craggs, she immediately re-enters the
cycle that destroyed her mother, getting caught up once more in the world of the
Heights. Brontë deliberate ironises these mother-daughter parallels. The fusion of
Catherine1 as dead adult, Catherine1 as haunting ghost-child and Catherine2 is most
powerfully expressed in the image of Nelly finally discovering the lost Catherine 2,
inside Wuthering Heights: ‘I entered, and beheld my stray lamb, seated on the hearth,
rocking herself in a little chair that had been her mother’s, when a child. Her hat was
hung against the wall, and she seemed perfectly at home, laughing, and cattering, in
the best spirits imaginable’ (191).
Crucially, Catherine2 eventually transcends all of the traits that lead to her
mother’s premature death. Though both generations are victims of domestic violence,
at the hands of Hindley and Heathcliff respectively, Catherine2 does not become an
aggressor in turn, as her mother becomes towards those less powerful than her such as
14
Nelly. Ultimately Catherine2 does demonstrate the ‘deep and tender’ love that Nelly
locates in her as a child. Her closing relationship with Hareton is passionate, unlike
her mother’s with Edgar Linton, but is also based upon reason/rationality as the
transmission of literacy is one of its central elements. This is expressed in the utopian
vignette of the reading-lesson in Volume Two Chapter XVIII. Catherine2 therefore
transgresses the ‘passion’ category which led her mother to self-destruction.
Moreover, in teaching Hareton to read she transgresses the selfishness that is a crucial
part of her mother’s personality.
Character traits also pass along thematic lines. These thematic links often
override genealogical ones. Linton Heathcliff has none of his father’s characteristics,
he is a ‘pale, delicate, effeminate boy’ (198) and is as such entirely aligned with the
Lintons. Nelly observes that he ‘might have been taken for my master’s younger
brother, so strong was the resemblance, but there was a sickly peevishness in his
aspect, that Edgar Linton never had’ (198). Heathcliff addresses him as such: ‘Thou
art thy mother’s child, entirely! Where is my share in thee, puling chicken?’ (205).
Instead, Heathcliff’s movement across the generations is symbolised best by Hareton
Earnshaw. Where Hindley is oppressed by old Mr Earnshaw and cast out of the house
(‘the young master had learnt to regard his father as an oppressor rather than a friend,
and Heathcliff as a usurper of his parent’s affections, and his privileges, and he grew
bitter with brooding over these injuries’, 38), Hindley in turn casts out Heathcliff (‘He
drove him from their company to the servants, deprived him of the instructions of the
curate, and insisted that he should labour out of doors instead, compelling him to do
so, as hard as any lad on the farm’, 46). Heathcliff does the same to Hareton,
Hindley’s son: ‘Heathcliff . . . appeared to have bent his malevolence on making him
a brute; he was never taught to read or write; never rebuked for any bad habit which
did not annoy his keeper, never led a single step towards virtue, or guarded by a single
precept against vice’ (194-5). Heathcliff openly admits this procedure to Nelly: ‘if I
try to describe the thousand forms of past associations, and ideas [Hareton] awakens;
or embodies . . . Five minutes ago, [he] seemed a personification of my youth, not a
human being’ (320).
The decentring of these ‘oppressed’ subjects is presented by an illusion, in a
similar manner to the merging of the Catherines through the chronologically
disruptive appearance of Catherine1’s ghost,. At the crossroads between the Heights
and the Grange the adult Nelly discovers an ‘apparition’ of Hindley: ‘it appeared that I
15
beheld my early playmate seated on the withered turf; his dark, square head bent
forward, and his little hand scooping out the earth with a piece of slate’ (107). She
follows this creature back to the Heights to make a startling discovery:
The apparition had outstripped me: it stood looking through the gate. That was
my first idea on observing an elf-locked, brown-eyed boy setting his ruddy
countenance against the bars. Further reflection suggested this must be Hareton,
my Hareton, not altered greatly since I left him, ten months since (108).
To be wildly anachronistic, the scene reads almost as a deliberate trope for the
fundamental Lacanian precept that ‘any recognition is also a misrecognition’ (cited in
Belsey 2002, 56). The Hindley-Hareton hybrid demonstrates that any unitary and
autonomous self is constructed in the alien system of language20, for this creature is in
a sense both Hindley and Hareton. Both constitute a motif of the oppressed child, and
are separable only by the dislocation of time. Most importantly, this creature is also
the infant Heathcliff, as demonstrated by his subsequent behaviour:
then ensued, from the stammering lips of the little fellow, a string of curses,
which, whether he comprehended them or not, were delivered with practised
emphasis, and distorted his baby features into a shocking expression of
malignity.
He is strongly reminiscent of the infant Heathcliff, the goblin-child who ‘repeated

over and over again some gibberish that nobody could understand’ (37). The
‘practiced emphasis’ demonstrates that this behaviour has been taught, and Nelly
Dean’s suspicions are confirmed in one of Brontë’s most powerful vignettes,
juxtaposing innocence and evil:
following with Hareton, [Heathcliff] lifted the unfortunate child on to the table
and muttered, with peculiar gusto, ‘Now, my bonny lad, you are mine! And we’ll
see if one tree won’t grow as crooked as another, with the same wind to twist it!’
The unsuspecting thing was pleased at this speech: he played with Heathcliff’s
whiskers, and stroked his cheek; but I divined its meaning
Heathcliff confirms, then, that characters (trees) are not so important as their context
(the ‘wind to twist it’). Several echoes indicate that Hareton is following Heathcliff’s
path. Most memorably, and extremely subtly, when Isabella makes a dash for freedom
from the Heights in Volume II she ‘knocked over Hareton, who was hanging a litter of
puppies from a chair-back in the doorway’ (181). This is a junior echo of Heathcliff
16
hanging her own dog when he and Isabella eloped from the Heights. Heathcliff sums
up all of Hareton’s connections to his own life: ‘Hareton’s aspect was the ghost of my
immortal love, of my wild endeavours to hold my right, my degradation, my pride,
my happiness, and my anguish’ (321).
However, as in the relationship between the two Catherines, Hareton
transcends his predecessor’s faults by possessing superior character-traits. He does not
continue the cycle of domestic violence, despite Catherine2’s goading, and even loves
his abuser. Indeed, the corrupted genealogy of the novel results in Hareton treating
Heathcliff as his paternal function21, to whom he must be loyal. It was Heathcliff, after
all, who caught him when his biological father (‘devil daddy’) threw him from a
balcony. This bond is explained in a passage that is ambiguous between Hareton’s free
indirect speech and Nelly’s pure narration: ‘Earnshaw took the master’s reputation
home to himself; and was attached by ties stronger than reason could break - chains,
forged by habit, which it would be cruel to attempt to loosen’ (318). Catherine 2 cannot
understand this behaviour. In a Habermasian sense, these trans-subject bonds
destabilise the implicit truth claims of ‘reason’ that characters (especially those from
the Grange, who are more educated) use as the basis for intersubjective speech.
Habermas’s view of communication, which is orientated towards reaching
understanding, is rendered inadequate in this context. Nelly implies that the nobility
of Hareton’s ‘generous heart’ lies in his being ‘the last of the ancient Earnshaw stock’
(63).
Catherine1 and Heathcliff’s love is the most famous example of the decentring
of the subject in Wuthering Heights. Their relationship exists in conflict with what
Lacan termed the imaginary order22. Entry into this order is characterised by the
famous ‘mirror phase’ and, almost too appropriately, both of these characters
demonstrate the artificial construction of the subject when they are placed in front of a
mirror. When Heathcliff implores Nelly Dean to ‘make me decent’ (55) she begins to
speculate:
Come to the glass, and I’ll let you see what you should wish . . . now that we’ve
done washing, and combing, and sulking - tell me whether you don’t think
yourself rather handsome? I’ll tell you, I do. You’re fit for a prince in disguise.
Who knows but your father was Emperor of China, and your mother an Indian
queen, each of them able to buy up, with one week’s income, Wuthering Heights
and Thrushcross Grange together? And you were kidnapped by wicked sailors
17
and brought to England. Were I in your place, I would frame high notions of my
birth (56-57)
Nelly’s conjecture presents the possibility that the reified image can be ‘what you
should wish’. The scene also addresses the symbolic register, insinuating that one’s
background and cultural status are simply ‘framed’. The past is a discourse, which can
be constructed along any generic parameters, such as the mini-adventure story that
Nelly sets down here. The same day, Heathcliff disappears to return three-and-a-half
years later having constructed an entirely new gentlemanly self, who ‘retained no
marks of former degradation’ (95).
Catherine1, especially in her madness, makes an eloquent argument against the
centrality of the subject and the false, linguistic construction of ‘reason’. On her
deathbed, she stares ‘at her reflection in a mirror hanging against the opposite wall’
(120) and asks a vital question - ‘Is that Catherine Linton?’ (120). The question
summarises the struggle between her previous status as a ‘wild’ Earnshaw and the
moniker of the ‘civilised’ Lintons that she must now adopt. It questions the extent to
which the contained image of a sick lady represents the full extent of her passionate
soul and, of course, it destabilises her identity in relation to that of her forthcoming
and identically-named daughter. This idea is expanded almost as a thesis in her
explanation of her love for Heathcliff compared to her love for Edgar: ‘surely you and
everybody have a notion that there is or should be an existence of yours beyond you.
What were the use of my creation, if I were entirely contained here?’ (81). She
explicitly draws attention to the disparity between the ‘I’ of the utterance and the ‘I’
who speaks. She will not be contained in the image.
Having destabilised the boundaries of the subject, breaking the outer
membrane of Lacan’s homlette, Catherine1 and Heathcliff are able to describe their
love in terms of the lack of a boundary, of their selves flowing into one. Heathcliff
describes his vision for them sharing a grave, ‘dissolving with her’ (286). This love
can be classified under Barthes’s union figure: ‘Dream of total union with the loved
being’ (1977, 227). As such, it pushes outside the imaginary and symbolic registers to
something in the Real23, the pre-linguistic unconscious. Catherine1 attempts to
describe her love for Edgar Linton in the same, subject-transcending terms that
transgress the physical limitations of the body: ‘I love the ground under his feet, and
the air over his head, and everything he touches, and every word he says’ (78).
However, she betrays this sentiment by locating a large degree of her affection on the
18
surface level of the Symbolic, in the possessions and cultural values that language
ascribes: ‘he will be rich, and I shall like to be the greatest woman of the
neighbourhood, and I shall be proud of having such a husband’ (78). On this level, ‘it
would degrade me to marry Heathcliff, now’ (80). Her feeling for Edgar are not based
on the transgression of boundaries, but one focussed entirely upon an Other, on a
subject that has been reified into a detached unity by the entry into the imaginary: ‘I
love him entirely, and altogether’ (78). Catherine1’s glib superlatives about him are
thus rendered hollow. It is a conventional ego-based relationship, ‘as everyone loves’,
unlike her declarations about Heathcliff.
These declarations are often regarded as the philosophical heart of the novel.
Catherine1 implores Nelly to ‘speak rationally’ (78), as her love for Edgar can be
explained in terms of conventional language. Her love for Heathcliff, however, defies
simple explanation in the symbolic: ‘I can’t [explain] it directly, but I’ll give you a
feeling of how I feel’ (78). It is based on dreams, the Lacanian route to the
unconscious: ‘I’ve dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and
changed my ideas, they’ve gone through and through me, like wine through water,
and altered the colour of my mind’ (79). She launches her first unification statement in
a flurry of poetic language:
he’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are
the same; and Linton’s is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost
from fire (80)
Using the contemporary dualism of her era, Catherine1 decentres the subject in the
guise of a union of souls. Alongside her famous declaration, ‘I am Heathcliff, ‘ it
makes explicit the idea that
Consciousness of self is possible only on the basis of differentiation: ‘I’ cannot

be signified or conceived without the conception ‘non-I’, ‘you’, and dialogue,
the fundamental condition of language, implies a reversible polarity between ‘I’
and ‘you’’ (Belsey 2002, 54).
If she is Heathcliff then there can be no separate ‘I’ from ‘you’ and thus no subject.
Their love exists behind the ego, in the realm of the Real, and its self-destructive
power/pain is strongly reminiscent of Lacan’s jouissance24: ‘my soul’s bliss kills my
body, but does not satisfy itself’ (330). Philip Wion has described the Catherine-
Heathcliff relationship as a replication of the ‘pre-linguistic relationship between
19
mother and child, where there is no sense of separate existence and language is
therefore unnecessary’ (cited in Stoneman 1998, 94). To extend this idea, Catherine1’s
marriage to Edgar demonstrates the imposition of the imaginary division, a
‘separation’ as Nelly describes it (81). It leaves Heathcliff ‘quite deserted in the world’
like the baby that suddenly finds itself detached from its mother.
So communication in Wuthering Heights, rather than establishing universal
‘truth claims’, interpellates the reader to follow a Lacanian view of the subject
constructed in language, a view in which consciousness in decentred so that it can no
longer be seen as the origin of meaning, knowledge and action (as defined in Belsey
2002, 56). Catherine1 and Heathcliff’s love stems from childhood, the point at which
they should have become inculcated into the symbolic order. Instead their love,
persisting through life and beyond, is a mode of defiance – it resists the signifying
systems of culture, and especially the supreme system of language. It is therefore
unsurprising that the most radical writing in the book, the most destabilising, derives
from their discourse. The power of Catherine1’s speech is seemingly beyond language;
Nelly calls it ‘nonsense’ (82). Obviously, here, we return to the problematic idea that
Wuthering Heights is transcendental, and this will be addressed in due course.
To return to the issue of textual plurality, Wuthering Heights’ framed narrative
establishes much of the aforementioned ‘irreconcilable subjectivity’. There are
various disparities between the narrative frames of Lockwood-Nelly and the central
story; the reader must accept contradictory viewpoints simultaneously as a result of
the frame. John T. Matthews claims that ‘the frame portion of Wuthering Heights
sinks into the background of the monumental passion which it discloses’ (1985, 55)
but, as his own argument proceeds to demonstrate, the superordinate frame actually
persists beyond the novel’s beginning, end and the interjections that remind us of its
existence. Lockwood explains that he is reporting Nelly’s story, ‘in her own words,
only a little condensed’ (155) indicating that the entire narrative is shaped
(‘condensed’) through his consciousness. Accordingly, the second volume begins by
reporting Nelly’s words as free indirect speech in Lockwood’s pure narration25: ‘In the
evening, she said, the evening of my visits to the Heights, I knew as well as if I saw
him, that Mr Heathcliff was about the place’ (155). This construction is confusing -
without quotation marks the reader can only infer from context that the ‘she’ of the
beginning of the sentence is the ‘I’ of an embedded layer towards the end.
Lockwood’s frame therefore dissolves to present Nelly’s free direct speech as pure
20
narration in its own right, but his presence is still felt. As such, he and Nelly serve as
the grounds for ‘normatively regulated action’ against which the excesses of the main
story are measured.
Lockwood’s voice is rapidly discredited. The central story increasingly
destabilises his form of reason, to the point at which the reader feels strangely remote
from his closing rationalisation, looking at Catherine1 and Heathcliff’s grave: ‘I . . .
wondered how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers, for the sleepers in that
quiet earth’. We are more inclined to trust the superstitious ‘little boy with a sheep and
two lambs before him’ who swears on their haunting. We have become alienated from
the voice that initially accompanied us into the alien world. Lockwood does not
appreciate the grand romance he is told, judging it ‘Dree, and dreary! . . . and not
exactly of the kind which I should have chosen to amuse me’ (151). This statement
comes at a pivotal point, at the end of the first volume, and throws a gauntlet down to
a Victorian reader. If he or she has ‘chosen’ a tale that ‘amuses’ them they are
impelled to purchase the second volume or to seek it from a lending library. To refuse
to do so is to boldly defy Emily Jane herself, and to align oneself with Lockwood’s
complete idiocy.
It is Nelly’s form of rationality that survives, in bold contradiction with the
heightened emotions of Catherine1 and Heathcliff. Nelly cannot comprehend the
nature of the unification love-ideal, telling Catherine1 ‘That is very strange! I cannot
make it out’ (79). She has no pity for her excesses: ‘she was so proud, it became really
impossible to pity her distresses, till she should be chastened into more humility’
(67)26.
Yet, if Nelly misreads Catherine1’s momentous sentiment, her negative
characterisation cannot be faulted. Catherine1 is certainly ‘selfish’, capable of
‘shameful conflict’ (76) while Heathcliff is a ‘mad dog’ (160). Both, aside from their
feelings for one another, are unredeemably dislikeable. We join Nelly’s sympathy for
the second generation, in which Catherine2 and Hareton’s relationship closes off the
subversive portrait of wild pantheistic love in Volume One. We share her feeling that
‘there won’t be a happier woman than myself in England’ when the ‘proper’ order of
things is regained by their marriage. She makes an observation that, utilising a classic
feature of closure, realigns an image from the beginning of the novel to symbolise this
return to order, when Hareton ‘moved off to open the door, and, as he raised the latch,
he looked up to the inscription above’ (68). But, unlike Nelly, we have previously
21
sympathised with Catherine1 and Heathcliff’s love. Wuthering Heights, then, inspires
equal satisfaction in terms of formal composition and unbridled chaos. The reader
must utilise the ‘truth claims’ of a relationship in Catherine 1 and Heathcliff’s world
whilst also accepting the contradictory claims of the intersubjective relationship
between ourselves and Nelly.
Once again, Belsey’s reading of The Monk demonstrates a key feature of
Wuthering Heights, this time regarding its dual narration:
the text is the product of two distinct discourses which are never reconciled.
Since neither masters the other, the reader is unable to take up a position of
extra-discursive knowingness shared with the author, but is constantly offered
the opportunity to see meaning as an effect of discourse itself” (1986, 66).
This threatens Habermas’s communicative theory, as accepting one set of narrators

whilst trusting a contradictory incorporated narrative is to accept conflicting levels of
‘normatively regulated action’ simultaneously. Moreover, by foregrounding the idea
that meaning is ‘an effect of discourse itself’ Wuthering Heights foregrounds another
problem, regarding Habermas’s binaries of ‘perceptible reality versus symbolically
prestructured reality and observation versus understanding’ (Outhwaite 1996, 123).
Habermas regards ‘meaning’ as an intersubjective linguistic construct, but this is
separate from ‘perception’, hence the distinction that ‘observation is directed to
perceptible things and events (or states); understanding is directed to the meaning of
utterances’ (Outhwaite 1996, 122). This is based upon a simplistic distinction: ‘the
difference in level between perceptible and symbolically prestructured reality is
reflected in the gap between direct access through observation of reality and
communicatively mediated access through understanding an utterance referring to
events’ (Outhwaite 1996, 123). Wuthering Heights emphasises that there can be no
‘direct access’ to perception. The ‘meaning’ of the novel derives from Lockwood’s
perception which in turn derives from the telling to him of the perceptions of others.
Habermas has ignored the strong possibility that observations are themselves an
interpretive act, in which the cognitive process of perception takes place on a
linguistic level (the visual is processed in language units, objects are defined by
difference, and are self-contained linguistically). There is, therefore, a fundamental
problem to his diagram of the idea that ‘sensory experience is related to sectors of
reality immediately, communicative experience only mediately’. Thus his diagram
needs to be altered from:
22
Level 1 Observable events Observation (Observer)
Level 2 Observation sentence Understanding (interpreter)
Level 3 Interpretation
(in Outhwaite 1996, 122)

to:
Level 1 {Observable events Observation-Construction in language (Observer)

which do not straightforwardly exist}
Level 2 Observation-construction verbally translated Understanding (interpreter)
Level 3 Interpretation
Rather than linking ‘observable events’ to an ‘observation sentence’, perception is

based upon a verbal translation of what is fundamentally, in some form, a linguistic
construct. There is no direct link between the articulated sentence and the far more
problematic sphere of an external ‘event’. Consciousness exists precisely because
there is a symbolic formation. The symbolic formation does not straightforwardly
comment upon an external and objective ‘reality’.
Critics all too often only examine the subjectivity resultant of the Lockwood-
Nelly Dean frame, but the novel actually contains another embedded layer, of
extended character discourse: Catherine1’s palimpsestic book, the young Heathcliff’s
long report to Nelly in Chapter VI and Isabella’s epistles and extended report to Nelly.
These heighten sympathy for characters in a fashion that often contradicts the ‘main’
narrator’s descriptions. Heathcliff’s analeptic report to Nelly in Chapter VII gives him
1,567 words in which to establish a tangible voice, elevating him above the ‘beggarly
interloper’ that has disrupted a pre-existent family group to a character in his own
right. He explains his admiration for Catherine1 in terms that Nelly could never
conceive, in the heightened language she persistently eschews: ‘She did not yell out –
no! she would have scorned to do it, if she had been spitted on the horns of a mad
cow’ (49). We are given an insight into his curious faith in her, for upholding their
shared ideals of defiance and passion: ‘she was sick; not from fear, I’m certain, but
from pain’ (49). Moreover, the scene most strongly demonstrates Heathcliff’s
23
complete defiance towards social hierarchies, accounting for his subsequent ability to
slide between the brutish and the civilised with absolute ease: ‘if Catherine had
wished to return, I intended shattering their great glass panes to a million fragments’
(50). He sneeringly mocks the young Lintons’ idiolect, ‘Oh, mamma, mamma! Oh
papa! Oh, mamma, come here. Oh, papa, oh!’ presenting the possibility that his
immorality results from the lack of the moral and social anchorage that parenthood
provides. Understanding his modus operandi allows us to establish a new kind of
sympathy for him, beyond that established solely from his being a victim of Hindley’s
abuse. Similarly, Isabella, a character noted previously only for her peevishness,
demonstrates in her own narrative a defiance and potential for self possession,
refusing to allow Heathcliff to ‘crush [her] like a sparrow’s egg’ (102).
Wuthering Heights’ complex chronology also increases the capacity for
plurality of interpretation27. Characters’ lives are chronicled with a notable precision;
the novel’s ‘six hundred temporal allusions’ prove so coherent that C.P. Sanger has
drawn up a chronology that has been barely contested over nearly eighty years (cited
in Daley 2003, 357). This contrasts the level of debate around the chronology of
similar frame-structured novels such as Frankenstein (in for instance, Joshua 2001),
and demonstrates the importance that Brontë places on time, even though it is heavily
obscured by the complex pattern of narration. The pervading feature of the
chronological telling of these events, however, lies in what Genette calls lacunae
(1980, 47); narrative gaps. These relate in the most part to Heathcliff, as expressed by
Nelly: ‘I know all about it, except where he was born, and who were his parents, and
where he got his money, at first’ (35). It is left to the reader to fill in these gaps. Some
have done so in the most deterministic manner possible, by producing paratexts and
hypertexts28 such as Jeffrey Caine’s Heathcliff, an adventure novel that ‘fills in’ the
gap created by Heathcliff’s three-year absence (cited in Stoneman 1996, 241). But the
original indeterminacies serve a vital function. Our attention is drawn to them –
Heathcliff’s mysterious origins are no different to those of Frances (‘What she was,
and where she was born, he never informed us’ 45) yet no momentous sense of
mystery surrounds her. Instead, the central lacunae provide a crucial explanation for
readings that describe the novel as transcendental.
Catherine1 and Heathcliff’s love, occurring as Wordsworthian children on the
Yorkshire moors, is not only the novel’s central theme but also its most potent silence.
The relationship is depicted in only two distinct glimpses: in the vignette of their
24
‘comforting each other with better thoughts than I could have hit on’ after Mr
Earnshaw has died (note that their conversation is only reported in the absolutely
distancing form of Nelly’s narrative report of a discoursal act rather than direct or
indirect discourse) and in their rebellious ramble on the moor under a maid’s cloak
(which begins at the breaking off of Catherine1’s diary, and ends at the
commencement of Heathcliff’s narrative in Chapter VI, so as to exist only in a brief
analeptic trace). Instead, their relationship is defined by negative traces, especially in
the proceeding turmoil of their separation. The first time Nelly sees Heathcliff after
Catherine1 has been incarcerated/refined at the Grange, she reports ‘There was
Heathcliff, by himself; it gave me a start to see him alone’ (47). Heathcliff sums up
the absent nature of their love: ‘I guess, by her silence as much as
anything, what she feels’ (151).
As Matthews puts it, ‘perhaps the millions of interpretive words which have
come to encase this love story measure the incapacity of Catherine and Heathcliff to
speak for themselves’ (1985, 57). Readers regard Catherine1 and Heathcliff’s
relationship as being incomprehensibly powerful, beyond language, because its site as
a negative trace defies the imposition of the mundane, pragmatic and disappointingly
linguistic world. Wuthering Heights’ preponderance of holes may explain its aptitude
to the whole range of ‘postmodern’ theories to which it has been subject. As Bannet
notes: ‘different as they are from one another, Lacan, Barthes, Derrida and Foucault
all developed structures of language and thought characterised by gaps, discontinuities
and suspensions of dictated meanings in which difference, plurality, multiplicity and
the coexistence of opposites are allowed free play’ (1974, 5)29.
Finally, regarding Wuthering Heights’ structural plurality, it is important to note
the co-existence of various contradictory genres. As Nestor observes, ‘the novel not
only incorporates elements from a number of genres, but interrogates these different
elements by creating a tension between them. So, for example, the pleasure of familiar
detail provided by the text’s realism is challenged by the transgressive power of the
genres of fantasy and horror’ (ix). For Q.D. Leavis: “candour obliges us to admit
ultimately that some things in the novel are incompatible with the rest, so much so
that one seems at times to find oneself in really different novels” (1966, 25). The
critical deluge leaves little to be said on this topic, so to summarise: Wuthering
Heights utilises a huge array of different genres, from the fairytale of the arrival of the
‘goblin’ Heathcliff, melodrama (Hindley’s madness), gothic violence (Hindley’s
25
attacking Heathcliff with his knife-gun device) and social realism (the cross-Brontë
motif of high culture’s failure to understand farming culture), and various romance
motifs. Characters simultaneously embody different archetypes - Heathcliff as
romance hero, deceptive gypsy, cruel trickster and a Jungian Shadow.
Ultimately then, to reheat the central tenet of poststructuralism, while critics can
produce an infinite variety of rich and worthwhile readings of Wuthering Heights, any
pursuit of a ‘true’ reading is essentially inauthentic. The novel’s lacunae are not gaps
in need of permanent filling in, but hermeneutic black holes. To some extent, it does
not matter where Heathcliff came from, or where he disappeared to in his
adolescence, or the unreported elements of his childhood relationship with Catherine1.
These issues cannot (and should not) ever be resolved. Like the Lacanian variable
session, the novel is deliberately open-ended in order to spark a broader range of
associations from the reader. Wuthering Heights naturally assumes Gadamer’s overall
position, that it will mean whatever the reader wants it to mean, and therefore
increases the opportunities for reader-interpretations, rather than creating a tightly-
prescribed universe30. Bearing this plurality in mind, it will now be useful to examine
the novel’s construction of ‘society’ and social-relations.
social hierarchies and Brontë’s other way
As Newman notes, ‘it has become a critical commonplace to read Wuthering Heights
as being representative of mid nineteenth century England’ (2001, 17). In fact,
however, the novel is a historical one. Composed between 1844 and 1847 31, it reports
events that occurred seventy years previously between 1771 (when Mr Earnshaw
delivers Heathcliff to his household) and 1803 (when Catherine2 and Hareton marry).
The world it depicts bears few of the features defined by Habermas in The Structural
Transformation of the Bourgeois Public Sphere, of either a Bourgeois Public Sphere
or of the Feudal/Aristocratic Spheres that preceded it.
Supposedly, during the period in which Wuthering Heights is set there should
be a shift from divisions between the private realm (of commerce and the conjugal
family) and a Sphere of Public Authority (the state) to the median order of the
Bourgeois Public Sphere. Habermas points out that the Oxford English Dictionary
dates the first documentation of the phrase ‘public opinion’ to 1781 (1989, 95), a year
which is coincidentally near the mid-point of Wuthering Heights. The members of
26
Habermas’s bourgeois public sphere believed that they could put ideology to one side
to allow for the rational discussion of public affairs. However, Habermas argues, this
stance masked an economic basis for their decisions: ‘interested private people,
assembled to constitute a public, in their capacity as citizens, behaved outwardly as if
they were inwardly free persons'’ (1989, 14-18). He claims that the sphere was
governed by the dual identity of ‘the selfish bourgeois in the guise of the unselfish
homme’ (1989, 111).
By contrast Wuthering Heights depicts a complex matrix of relations between
the public and private based not only upon class but also upon gender. Here
‘rationality’ never attempts to transcend the explicit power of property. ‘Public’
power-systems repeatedly effect the ‘private’ domestic realm. Wuthering Heights
demonstrates the impossibility of establishing any form of truly ‘rational discourse’,
as all discourses are inevitably influenced by the power-based relations of a particular
ideology. This section will investigate whether Wuthering Heights can be examined as
a ‘social’ novel, the way in which its extremities are orientated from implicit
conventionalities and the way in which Brontë destabilises the ‘rational’ morality of
the bourgeois public sphere.
Aside from an array of Marxist readings, critics have described Wuthering
Heights as alienating itself from a sense of social context in favour of depicting
isolation and otherness. Allen describes all of the Brontë novels as “products of
immense solitude, of the imagination turned inwards upon itself, and of ignorance of
the world outside Haworth and literature” (1954, 187)32. This assertion does not lack
textual support, from Lockwood’s opening declaration that ‘in all England I do not
believe that I could have fixed on a situation so completely removed from the stir of
society’ (3), to his observation that those he meets live ‘a life of such complete exile
from the world’ (13) onwards. Set in 1801, no mention is made of the Napoleonic War
or any other contemporary event33. Even so, and despite the intimations of countless
critics, Wuthering Heights is not set in a dreamscape derived from Gondal but in
historical Yorkshire. As such, it has a perfectly valid social agenda. The inhabitants of
both houses are remote from Gimmerton, the nearest town. For Habermas towns were
‘the life centre of civil society not only economically; in cultural-political contrast to
the court, it designated especially an early public sphere in the world of letters whose
institutions were the coffee houses, the salons, and the Tischgesellschaften’ (1989,
30). Had Habermas ever visited a Yorkshire industrial town at the turn of the
27
Nineteenth Century, he may have been surprised at the lack of continental style
debating societies and men of letters. His statement is again indicative of a tendency
to generalise towards a ‘universal’ social formation.
The novel certainly depicts the ‘social’ in the form defined by Hannah Arendt
and quoted by Habermas: “Society is the form in which the fact of mutual dependence
for the sake of life and nothing else assumes public significance, and where the
activities connected with sheer survival are permitted to appear in public” (1989, 19).
As such, Wuthering Heights depicts an element of society in which Habermas has
shown little interest – the rural, marginal and overwhelmingly domestic. His central
tenets of the rise of the bourgeois public sphere are ‘the traffic in commodities and
news’ (1989, 17). The protagonists of Wuthering Heights are certainly isolated from
the press, but trade – the exchange of agricultural livestock (commodities) at markets
– is at the very heart of their existence: ‘On Easter Monday, Joseph went to
Gimmerton fair with some cattle’ (282). The impression of character’s isolation may
not be due to the absence of society so much as a very particular form of emotional
focalisation by the author. The principle characters are surrounded by hordes of
servants who simply exist in the background of the novel, mentioned only when they
intersect with the central characters: “The Housekeeper (9), “a servant girl on her
knees” (9), “the unhappy plough boy” (20) etc. As Newman observes, ‘at Wuthering
Heights the servants have no identity beyond that which accrues by virtue of their
being kept on as retainers’ (2001, 16)34. External ‘society’ is relegated to mere
glimpses due to the novel’s intense focus upon the central protagonists’ loves and
hatreds, with which they are so obsessed that the background world fades away35.
In order to demonstrate the novel’s social stance it is first necessary to identify
the classes to which the central protagonists belong. To do so is surprisingly
complicated36. Heathcliff proves most contentious. For Eagleton, he ‘represents the
victory of capitalist property-dealing over the traditional yeoman economy of the
Earnshaws’ (1975, 112). Yet his brutality echoes the Earnshaw’s dispositions, and aids
his capitalist quest. As such, Eagleton claims that ‘Heathcliff is subjectively a Heights
figure opposing the Grange, and objectively a Grange figure undermining the Heights;
he focuses acutely the contradictions between the two worlds. His rise to power
symbolises at one the triumph of the oppressed over capitalism and the triumph of
capitalism over the oppressed’ (Eagleton 1975, 112). Newman, with some
28
justification, sees these stances as anachronistic. Instead, he claims that Heathcliff

‘symbolises land ownership which is the prerequisite of a feudal society’ (2001, 15).
The only definite claim it is possible to make about Heathcliff is that he is
overdetermined. There is a sound basis to many Eagleton’s claims, yet it is
simultaneously impossible to deny Newman’s observation that Heathcliff’s ‘strategy
is a far cry from that of the capitalist, whose aim is to amass capital – money or the
means of production or more money – by the successful employment of capital itself’
(2001, 15). Moreover, Heathcliff also appears to symbolise Victorian fears and
demarcations of the ‘other’ of their society – of the ethnic, of the gypsy and possibly
even of the increasingly empowered working class. We have returned to the realm of
irreconcilable subjectivities. No thesis is ultimately provable as they rest upon the
novel’s previously mentioned lacunae, the gaps surrounding Heathcliff’s origins and
the way in which he came by his fortune.
The Earnshaws, more straightforwardly, are of yeoman stock, a class whose
small scale land ownership prevents the novel simply being read as a binary
opposition between the agricultural lower class and aristocratic higher class. Indeed,
the Heights is hardly a poor farm but ‘a respectable house, the next best in the
neighbourhood’ (203). This small land owning class, in the opinion of several critics,
combined with the mercantile class to emerge as the bourgeois. Yet the Earnshaws
show few facets of the ‘bourgeois public sphere’. The aristocracy, for Habermas, live
publicly in front of servants (1989, 105). So, however, do the inhabitants of the
Heights, though they could hardly be described as aristocratic. The entire story is
derived from the observations of Nelly Dean, a servant.
The Lintons are correspondingly difficult to define. For Eagleton they are
‘agrarian capitalists’ (1975, 113). Their public displays of wealth (extensive grounds,
chandeliers and pets) and public insignia (heightened manners, delicate dress) mark
them out as aristocratic. They are characteristically detached from manual labour and
their treatment of literature is certainly aristocratic. Private reading culture is a symbol
of isolation and incommunication, rather than a medium of public expression: ‘Mr.
Linton, on his part, spent his time in the library, and did not inquire concerning his
wife’s occupations’ (117) ; ‘Her father invariably spent that day alone in the library’
(182) ; ‘Catherine and Isabella were sitting in the library, on hostile terms, but silent’
(176). They exemplify the ideology of writing as patronage. Nelly Dean is employed
to read to Catherine2, so as to prevent her from engaging with the world outside her
29
household: ‘The first day or two my charge sat in a corner of the library, too sad for
either reading or playing’ (232). However, the Lintons also embody several
characteristics of the bourgeois public sphere. Old Mr Linton is a ‘magistrate’ and as
such has much in common with the lawyers who were supposedly at the vanguard of
the rise of the bourgeois37. There are also bourgeois elements to the Lintons’ style of
living. Thrushcross Grange is not an Austenesque estate; when Heathcliff looks in he
sees a ‘drawing room’ (48) rather than a hall.
Old Mr Linton, as a magistrate, certainly has legal power, but it is difficult to
identify whether this lies in the aristocratic Sphere of Public Authority or as one of the
‘new state authorities’ that Habermas identifies which are more orientated towards
bourgeois concerns. He certainly has a greater ‘public’ consciousness than his fellow
protagonists; he is the only character other than Lockwood to mention ‘the nation’ and
he does so with the supposed moral authority of bourgeois decision-making: ‘would it
not be a kindness to the country to hang [the young Heathcliff] at once, before he
shows his nature in acts, as well as features?’ (50). As such, he provides a brief (and
only) trace of what Althusser terms Repressive State Apparatus. Throughout the rest
of the novel morality is enforced more strongly by the implicit force of Ideological
State Apparatuses: Joseph’s orthodox Christian doctrine and, most importantly, the
legal right of property38.
This essay has described Wuthering Heights’ plot as transgression down a
genealogical line, but it is important to note that this line is not so much ‘biological’ as
the result of the implicit conventional orientations of property and inheritance. The
transference of property, of the proper places that are tied to proper names (the
Heights and the Grange), is due to primogeniture legislation rather than ‘nature’.
Wuthering Heights follows Godwin’s maxim in Political Justice, that ‘marriage is an
affair of property, and the worst of all properties’ (in Wu 2000, 49)39. Accepting that,
in some respects at least, the yeoman Earnshaws are emblematic of the rising
bourgeois, their property-centred behaviour does not demonstrate the vital tenet of the
bourgeois public sphere that Habermas identifies, the pretence of ‘rationality’. As
countless feminist critics have noted, property exchange remains an important and
explicit part of marriage after the rise of the bourgeois. Children are still defined as
inheritors, while the (male) head of the family is defined by the dependence of a
female and of children upon him.
30
This is certainly the case in Wuthering Heights. Nelly Dean’s declaration

‘There’s law in the land, thank God there is! though we be in an out-of-the-way place’
(271) serves as a typical isolation statement that smoothes over the fact that, in
actuality, the letter of the law is felt throughout every relationship in the novel.
Heathcliff even hires a lawyer, the odious Mr Green. Property and inheritance are
central. The novel certainly represents Habermas’s newly emergent ‘civil society’ in
demonstrating that “the old forms that harnessed the whole person into systems of
supraindividual purpose had died and . . . each family’s individual economy had
become the centre of its existence [so that] a private sphere was born as a
distinguishable entity in contrast to the public” (1989, 19). Hindley and Heathcliff’s
first dispute is over a colt, a piece of property. Hindley despairs about Hareton’s future
as he realises that his son’s inheritance is slipping away, declaring ‘is Hareton to be a
beggar? Oh, damnation! I will have it back; and I’ll have [Heathcliff’s] gold too’
(138-9). Similarly Catherine1 regards the potential union of herself and Heathcliff in
terms of the loss of property, as the union of the disenfranchised, woman and beggar:
‘did it never strike you that if Heathcliff and I married, we should be beggars?
whereas, if I marry Linton I can aid Heathcliff to rise, and place him out of my
brother’s power’ (81). Nelly judges this her ‘worst motive’ (81) but there is some truth
in it, and it demonstrates the way in which marriage and the conjugal family serve as
manoeuvres for power relations40.
Women in Wuthering Heights are entirely dependent upon the head of the
family. Keane, criticising Habermas’s ‘universalist rhetoric’ points out that obviously,
‘women were more often belongings than proprietors’ (2000, 2). Lockwood assumes
that Catherine2’s dogs are pets, but her bitter response demonstrates the way in which
women cannot own property: ‘They are not mine’ (10). Isabella is entirely dependent
upon Heathcliff once she has married him. He is careful to ‘keep strictly within the
limits of the law’ (149) so that she has not got ‘the slightest right to claim a
separation’ (149). He uses the law to justify his brutal behaviour, abusing Isabella to a
point at which ‘you’re not fit to be your own guardian, Isabella, now; and I, being
your legal protector, must retain you in my custody’ (150). Echoing Wollstonecraft’s
The Wrongs of Woman, this demonstrates that the law allows a husband to incarcerate
his wife by deeming her insane. Without a husband to depend on, Catherine2 is unable
to challenge Heathcliff once he has illegally possessed her lands:
31
Heathcliff went up to show her Linton’s will. He had bequeathed the whole of
his, and what had been her moveable property to his father . . . The lands, being
a minor, he could not meddle with. However, Mr Heathcliff has claimed, and
kept them in his wife’s right, and his also – I suppose legally, at any rate
Catherine, destitute of cash and friends, cannot disturb his possession’ (291)
Despite Catherine2’s defiant spirit, her position is restricted by the inscriptions of the
law. Ironically, the contrastingly feeble Linton Heathcliff is empowered by the same
law:
uncle is dying, truly, at last. I’m glad, for I shall be master of the Grange after
him. Catherine always spoke of it as her house. It isn’t hers! It’s mine: papa
says everything she has is mine. All her nice books are mine; she offered to give
me them, and her pretty birds, and her pony Minny, if I would get the key of our
room, and let her out; but I told her she had nothing to give, they were all, all
mine (277)
Any ‘humanity’ towards the one person who has helped him in life is destroyed by the
centrality of market forces. Linton lacks spirit but owns property. Despite family ties,
and Catherine2’s ownership of all of this property throughout her life, she must now
yield it by law.
Children in Wuthering Heights are regularly seen as inheritors, the route to
certain properties, rather than human beings in their own right. The importance of
Linton Heathcliff’s legal status saves him from Heathcliff’s domestic abuse: ‘my son
is prospective owner of your place [the Grange], and I should not wish him to die till I
was certain of being his successor’ (206). He continues ‘Besides, he’s mine, and I
want the triumph of seeing my descendent fairly lord of their estates; my child hiring
their children, to till their father’s land for wages’ (206). This contrasts an earlier
world view that he, disgusted, proclaims: ‘the tyrant grinds down his slaves and they
don’t turn against him, they crush those beneath them’ (111). Heathcliff has
consequently decided to rail against the downwards spiral of the class-based power
structure and ‘turn against’ his social superiors, reversing the power-structure through
his aggressive capitalism41.
As such, the yeoman Earnshaw stock do not hold the ‘fictious identity’ that
Habermas identifies as the basis for the bourgeois public sphere, an identity based
upon the dual roles of ‘property owners’ and ‘the role of human beings pure and
simple’ (1989, 56). The Earnshaws do not differentiate between the ‘private sphere’ of
the market and the ‘intimate sphere’ of the conjugal family. Instead, as Eagleton notes,
32
‘for farming families like the Earnshaws, work and human relations are roughly
coterminous: work is socialised, personal relations mediated through a context of
labour’ (1975, 106). So each household member has a prescribed labour role. As
Zillah tells Catherine2: ‘we each had our tasks’ (290). Habermas claims that
In the intimate sphere of the conjugal family privatised individuals viewed

themselves as independent even from the private sphere of their economic
activity – as persons capable of entering into ‘purely human’ relations with one
another (1989, 48)
However, critics such as Carole Pateman challenge this prevailing rhetoric, pointing
out that
‘the social contract that organises the relationships of the eighteenth-century

civil society is a sexual contract; the public sphere not only mediates between
civil society, the family and the state but reproduces one in the image of the
other’ (cited in Keane 2000, 4).
The Earnshaws never attempt ‘purely human’ relations between one another. They
openly and unashamedly follow Pateman’s view of the social formation, rather than
existing under the prevailing ideology cited by Habermas. For Nelly, Mr Earnshaw’s
preparations for his trip to Liverpool indicate kindness: ‘he did not forget me . . . he
promised to bring me a pocketful of apples and pears’ (36). Mr Earnshaw’s gift
promise, however, serves to rigidly enforce the social hierarchy – real property (a
whip and a violin) for the children to whom he will ultimately leave property, and a
far smaller gift for one who can only grow up to inherit her mother’s role as servant.
Heathcliff’s very presence at the Heights is, presumably, the result of a business trip
and as such he constitutes a possession of old Mr Earnshaw’s. When he first finds him
in Liverpool he is without ‘an owner’ (37). Hindley indicates very early on that the
interruption of the ‘cuckoo’ Heathcliff is not only a threat to his paternal bond, but
also an attack upon his property: ‘wheedle my father out of all he has: only,
afterwards, show him what you are, imp of Satan’ (39).
It is the Lintons, a family whose public displays of wealth align them to the
aristocracy rather than the bourgeois, who are motivated by ‘purely human’ factors.
Detached from the physicality of the mode of production, both Edgar and Isabella
marry on the basis of questionable impulses that will lead to them both witnessing the
loss of their property, the Grange. They fall in love in a non-materialistic fashion, in
33
direct opposition to Catherine1 whose love for Edgar is described in purely in terms of
property (‘he is scarcely a degree dearer to her than her dog, or her horse’, 147), or by
Heathcliff’s ‘deliberate designing’ (100) in accepting Isabella (‘she is her brother’s
heir, is she not?’, 104). Catherine1 tells Heathcliff, when he is contemplating this
political manoeuvre, that ‘you are too prone to covert your neighbour’s goods:
remember this neighbour’s goods are mine’ (105). So while the Earnshaws challenge
the supremacy of the Lintons, they do not appear coterminous with Habermas’s
bourgeois.
The centrality of property and inheritance in Wuthering Heights locates the
rise of the bourgeois (the Earnshaws being non-aristocrats who achieve wealth) as an
aggressive economic act derived from the property-centred aggression of the lower
castes, not as a result of the supremacy of Enlightenment intellectualism that
Habermas identifies in the bourgeois public sphere. As Keane puts it, prior to
developing her own argument, ‘to privilege the ‘scribbling’ classes as the makers of
national identity in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries might be seen at best
as a gesture of post-structuralist solipsism, or at worst a naive representation of print
as somehow more powerful than property’ (2000, 11).
This property-centred aggression causes an act of genealogical annihilation,
and not merely of Heathcliff’s ‘interloper’ line. As Eagleton notes ‘it will not do to
read the novel’s conclusion as some neatly reciprocal symbolic alliance between the
two universes, a symmetrical symbiosis of bourgeois realism and upper-class
cultivation’ (1974, 114). He continues by arguing that ‘whatever unity the book finally
establishes, it is certainly not symmetrical: in a victory for the progressive forces of
agrarian capitalism, Hareton, last survivor of the traditional order, is smoothly
incorporated into the Grange’ (1975, 114). However, it could equally be argued that
this is a victory for the progressive values of the bourgeois. Rather than becoming
incorporated Hareton takes over the Grange. He has gained superior property by
appropriating the Linton’s educated qualities whilst defying their weaker
constitutions.
As Appendix 2 demonstrates, though Catherine2’s blood is 50% Earnshaw and
50% Linton, her offspring with Hareton will consist of 50% Earnshaw to only 25%
Linton. The higher class line has been diluted and, more importantly, in terms of
inheritance and property their name has been annihilated at the same time as the
Grange is lost. This can be seen as the culmination of a process. Heathcliff is not the
34
only ‘cuckoo’ that enters another family to cause enormous disruption. Catherine 1
visits the Grange for a second time when she is ill, and as Nelly claims ‘the poor dame
had reason to repent her kindness; she and her husband both took the fever, and died
within a few days of each other’ (87). So Catherine1 is literally a disease in the Linton
line. As Nelly describes her relationship to the Linton children, ‘it was not the thorn
bending to the honeysuckles, but the honeysuckles embracing the thorn. There were
no mutual concessions: one stood erect, and the others yielded’ (91). Lockwood
enforces the impression that the Lintons have been wiped out: ‘my predecessor’s
name was Linton’ (35). So in terms of the dual quality of property-acquisition and
genealogical succession, the Earnshaws are clearly victorious.
Brontë blames the domestic tyranny encountered throughout the novel upon
the ideology of patriarchal power-structures. Domestic abuse is only inflicted once a
character has become the possessor of property, especially as one ‘master’ of the
Heights becomes another. Heathcliff’s most extreme act of domestic abuse,
imprisoning Catherine2, is necessary not to fulfil his cruel desires but to ensure that he
will inherit the Grange as her legal guardian once Linton dies. Brontë is quick to
demonstrate that to become ‘civilised’ is to subscribe to a particular form of
authoritarian power. Thus when the Lintons are first encountered, their language is
inscribed with as much violence and repressive potential as the ‘absolute heathenism’
(50) of the inhabitants of the Heights: ‘fasten the chain . . . hang him at once . . . put
him in the cellar’ (50). They are willing to let their guard dog injure two young
children, ‘his pendant lips streaming with bloody slaver’ (49). As Eagleton notes, ‘the
more property you have, the more ruthlessly you need to defend it’ (1974, 107).
From this perspective, it is possible to address another reason for the constant
identification of the ‘transcendental’ in Wuthering Heights. Paul Keen observes that
Habermas’s account of [the] historical shift in the meaning of the word

‘publicity’ from aristocratic aura to communicative process is analogous to
Michael Foucault’s sense of a shift from an earlier epoch in which power
functioned by displaying itself in rituals such as public executions to a
disciplinary form of power – symbolised by Jeremy Bentham’s plans for a
panopticon – which reversed this dynamic by emphasising the visibility of the
subjects rather than the rulers. Whereas Foucault’s sense of this historical shift is
pessimistic (modern life as a prison), Habermas emphasises the liberating
aspects of this version of publicity
(1999, 31-32)
35
Wuthering Heights certainly follows the impression of ‘disciplinary’ rather than

‘ritual’ power, which focuses upon the subject rather than the ideology-propagating
state. It follows Foucault’s negative stance rather than Habermas’s ‘liberation’, by
often depicting subjects as being literally imprisoned due to the power-structure
inscribed in law. Despite the relative absence of Repressive State Apparatus,
disciplinary power is felt across the novel. As Appendix 1 demonstrates, whenever a
character suffers domestic abuse they later perpetuate it, establishing a cycle of
revenge. After the young Hindley throws a weight at Heathcliff’s chest, he launches
his scheme of ‘flinging Joseph off the highest gable, and painting the house-front with
Hindley’s blood!’ (48).
To grow up in the Heights is to endure a microcosmic panopticon: ‘this
enclosed, segmented space, observed at every point, in which individuals are inserted
in a fixed place, in which the slightest movements are supervised, in which all events
are recorded’ (1975, 197). Countless critics have located significance in Wuthering
Heights’ constant references to boundaries, to the classification of space through
mentions of doors, thresholds, locks and lattices. Zillah’s point about every member
having their own ‘task’ takes on new significance in this light. As for supervision,
Catherine1 observes that ‘a mere titter is sufficient to send us into corners’ (21). It is
inside this regimented space that Joseph repeatedly impresses the doctrine of the
prevailing social order upon his young charges.
Both the Grange and the Heights are highly regimented spaces – Edgar Linton
identifies Catherine2’s place as the library, and will not allow her to move beyond the
grounds. When Hindley becomes master of the Heights he realigns the inhabitants
‘fixed place’: ‘he told Joseph and me we must henceforth quarter ourselves in the
back-kitchen, and leave the house for him’ (46). Hindley fulfils what Foucault defines
as the ‘control function according to a double mode’ (1975, 199) that all authorities
exercise: ‘that of binary division and branding’ (199). His mode of ‘binary division’ is
to separate Heathcliff from the conjugal family by redefining him as a servant, a ‘dirty
boy’ who heavily contrasts his former companion Catherine1, ‘a bright, graceful
damsel’ (53). He repeatedly brands Heathcliff as Other using terms of abuse that mark
him out as ethnic and of a class of moral deviancy. This branding sticks, for when
Edgar is told that Heathcliff has returned years later he declares ‘What! the gipsy - the
ploughboy?’ (94).
36
Brontë locates (an)other way to exist beyond the panopticon. She uses a
similar strategy to that by which she sidesteps the inadequacy of communication, by
locating a solution in Catherine1 and Heathcliff’s primordial love. When these two
escape onto the moors as children, they enter a space that is not analytical and
classified but is without boundaries42. There is no property, no people, no hierarchies.
The moor demonstrates the same fluidity towards setting as their love does towards
the demarcated subject. Significantly they enter it in one of the most powerful images
of the union figure: ‘we should appropriate the diary woman’s cloak, and have a
scamper on the moors, under its setting’ (22). Catherine1 makes this remark
immediately preceding her actual undertaking of this ‘pleasant suggestion’ (22) and as
such must stop writing. Brontë locates her solution to the problems of social
hierarchies, as she has done to solve the inadequacies of communication, in a lacunae.
Definitive interpretation is hindered, and plurality given full reign, by the sheer
breadth of the gap.
conclusion
Wuthering Heights is a powerfully plural text: its self-reflexive framing, disruptive
chronology and subject-positions all prevent the establishment of ‘definitive’
readings. Humanistic values are made to engage with their binary oppositions:
Catherine1 and Heathcliff are in love, but this is an alien type of love that is as
disorientating as it is familiar. The conjugal family connotates economically-
motivated brutality rather than protection, and even the boundaries of life and death
are debased (and how many other novels allow the reader to sympathise with
necrophilia?)
The irreconcilable subjectivities inscribed in Wuthering Heights defy the
application of Habermas’ communicative and social theories. His determination to
assert the existence of shared ‘truth claims’ is an attempt to fulfil the human desire for
a transcendental signified, an objective force that guarantees meaning and truth, but
which ultimately does not exist. Equally however, and in a similar vein, the inherent
problem in producing a reading that incorporates a text’s entire plurality and
subjectivity is that it is at odds with the reductivist nature of literary criticism itself.
Most criticism is empirical: it identifies a coherent ‘theme’ and demonstrates it using
examples. Of course, texts are dialogic, so another critic can identify an opposing
37
‘theme’, and thus criticism becomes an extension of the dialogue of the text, self-
generating ad nauseum. A true reading of Wuthering Heights’ plurality would demand
an utterly miniaturist rather than reductivist approach, and would produce an analysis
(perhaps infinitely) longer than the novel itself. Pragmatically, the production of such
a reading is impossible.
38
39
40
KEY
appendix 2: character-trait inventory for Wuthering Heights '/' denotes a change of state
Mr Mrs Catherine1 Catherine2 Hindley Heathcliff Hareton Linton Edgar Isabell France Nelly Lock- Joseph
Earnshaw Earnshaw Earnshaw Earnshaw Heathcliff Linton a s Dean wood
Linton
Domestic ? ? + + + + + +/? - + - - - -
Victim
Domestic + ? + - + + - - + + ? - +
Aggressor
Passionate ? (+) ? + -/+/- + + - + - - - - - -

Cruel + ? + +/- + + - + - - + - - +
Social + + + - - + -/+ - - - - - - -
Ascension
Literacy/ ? ? + + ? -/+ -/+ + + + ? + + +

Education
Manipulative ? ? + + ? + - + - -/+ ? - - +
Desire for ? ? - - + + - - - -/+ ? - - -

Revenge
Rationality + ? - - - - - - + +/- ? + - -
Chaotic + ? + + + + ? - - -/+ ? - - -
Propertied + - - - +/- -/+ +/-/+ - + - - - + -
Infatuation + ? ? ?+ + + ? ? + + ? - ? -
Pantheist ? ? + + ? + ? - - - - - - -
Selfish ? ? + +/- + +/- - + +/- + ? - + ?

41
appendix 2: modified genealogical table for Wuthering Heights

Key
Earnshaw
Mr. Earnshaw Mrs. Earnshaw Mr Linton Mrs. Linton
d.Spring or d.Autumn 1780
d.October 1777 Summer 1773 d.Autumn 1780 Linton
m. m. Francis-line
Heathcliff line
Heathcliff
Hindley Frances Catherine1 Edgar Isabella m.
b.Summer 1757
m. d.late 1778 b. Summer 1765
m. b. 1762 b..late 1765 January 1784
b. Summer 1765
d. 20 March 1784
d. September 1784 d. 20 March 1784 March 1783
d. September 1801 d. July 1797
m. Linton
Hareton m. Catherine2 b.September 1784
b.June 1778 b. 20 March 1784 September 1801
d. September 1801
1 January 1803
(dies young)
42
sources cited
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45
1
notes
See Barnard, Robert 1998 ‘What Does Wuthering Heights Mean?’
2
The extent to which any text is open-ended is, obviously, a hugely complex theoretical issue. For
reception-historians all texts are open-ended as they simply constitute potential from which readers
‘concretise’ their own meaning, (Makaryk 1993, 15-16). In Gadamerian hermeneutics even this
objectivity is eroded; texts are infinitely open-ended as all meaning derives entirely from the reader’s
subjectivity (Makaryk 1993, 327). Nevertheless, an extremely select group of texts written in the
Nineteenth Century have received as varied a selection of readings as Wuthering Heights – Jane Eyre,
Frankenstein and perhaps a few others. This variety may simply be accounted for on the twin grounds
of popularity and canonisation. Equally, however, these texts may deliberately incorporate wide-scale
structural ambiguities. In my discussion of subjectivity and more specifically lacunae, I will argue the
latter in the case of Wuthering Heights.
3
All of which are defined as key features of Wuthering Heights in Claire Jones’ York Notes Advanced,
probably the most-read piece of criticism on the novel in the UK, encountered by thousands of A-Level
students each year.
4
A phrase coined by Lucasta Miller to sum up the speculative reconstruction of Emily Brontë, a key
part of Wuthering Heights’ reception-history: ‘Recent biographers have tended to dismiss or underplay
the idea that her writings were the result of personally experienced trance-states or moments of ecstatic
oneness with the divine. Yet this view – presented in a resolutely unhistorical framework – remained a
common assumption into the 1970s’ (2001, 24).
5
As Keane has noted ‘contributions by cultural historians, postcolonialists and feminists have ensured
that to study ‘English’ anywhere in the world in the 1990s is to be confronted with difference and
contestation, not unity and coherence’ (2000, 1).
6
Communication is distinct from the other three categories of sociological action, as it is the only one
orientated to the pursuit of understanding. For Habermas communicative action is defined as
conversation, political debate or a decision-making process (Outhwaite 1996, 115). On several grounds,
Wuthering Heights does not appear to be a form of communicative action at all, but ‘instrumental or
strategic action only concerned to produce effects desired by the actor’ (ibid, 116). Brontë does not
intend to come to an agreement with the reader, but to produce an effect on them through the use of this
text. If this were the case, Wuthering Heights would be a distorted form of communication that was
never intended to adhere to the definite, objective meanings required of universal pragmatics. However,
most contemporary branches of criticism are interested in text as dialogue, and in this context
Wuthering Heights is certainly ‘communication’ by Habermas's terms. It is a dialogue between the
reader’s presuppositions (horizons of expectations and impression of the social formation) and those
presuppositions in the text, in a search for mutual understanding. However, this is a rather one-sided
form of communication. One side of the dialogue is fixed, the text cannot respond to our arguments as
they are formulated. The text can make an impression upon us (and we act upon it by coming to our
own interpretations), but we cannot make an impression upon the text. This is good enough for
Habermas who claims that ‘the interpreter who understands meaning is experiencing fundamentally as
a participant in communication, on the basis of a symbolically established intersubjective relationship
with other individuals, even if he is actually alone with a book, a document or a work of art’
(Outhwaite 1996, 122).
7
The term ‘universal pragmatics’ has been taken literally by many of Habermas's foremost critics, as
representing a set of assumptions that are universal across social groups and gender. This is not strictly
true. Pragmatic universals exist only intersubjectively between two or more participants, as the basis
for their rationality. Habermas never really explores the nature, type and interrelation of these
interpretative groups. The word ‘universal’ is used, according to Habermas, simply as a contrast to the
general use of empirical pragmatics. He claims that ‘I am no longer happy with this terminology; the
term ‘formal pragmatics’ – as an extension of ‘formal semantics’ would serve better’ (in Outhwaite
1996, 129).
8
This example is based upon Habermas’ list of the factors required for the establishment of ‘pragmatic
universals’. These are that the speaker must demark himself from: 1) an environment he objectifies in
the third-person attitude of an observer, 2) an environment that he conforms to or deviates from in the
ego-alter attitude of a participant 3) from his own subjectivity that he expresses or conceals in a first-
person attitude and finally (4) from the medium of language itself’ (Habermas 1976, 66).
9
Establishing the age of either narrator is only possible by comparison to the main protagonists, whose
ages are strongly spelt out by necessity, as Wuthering Heights is based strongly around ideas of
inheritance and general genealogical succession. Using Stuart Daley’s revised chronology, based upon
the famous version by C.P. Sanger, Nelly Dean would appear to be in her mid-forties in 1801, the time
of her major narrative-report to Lockwood, as this would have been the age of her deceased playmate
Hindley Earnshaw (b.1784). Lockwood’s age can only be derived from the fact that he has spent the
preceding summer courting, and that he is of the same generation as Hareton (b.1778) and the
seventeen year old Catherine2 (b.1784), putting him somewhere in his twenties (see Daley 2003, 357-
61).
10
In this sense world is (extremely) roughly analogous to Lacan’s concept of ‘the real’, the non-
verbalised and even non-verbalisable, which the subject can never directly address (Fink 1997, 49).
The idea of just such an overwhelmingly powerful but intangible force lies at the very centre of
Wuthering Heights’ power - especially in relation to Catherine1 and Heathcliff’s love - and will be
discussed later.
11
As Habermas notes, ‘women and dependents were factually and legally excluded from the political
public sphere, whereas female readers as well as apprentices and servants often took a more active part
in the literary public sphere than the owners of private property and family heads themselves. Yet in the
educated the one form of public sphere was considered to be identical with the other’ (1989, 56). Nelly
Dean demonstrates the existence of this separate ‘literary public sphere’ while Lockwood’s prejudice
demonstrates the assertion that the ‘educated’ did not consider that it existed separately from the
political public sphere.
12
Take, for instance, one portrait by Wordsworth:
He lay, his pack of rustic merchandise

Pillowing his head. I guess he had no thought
Of his way-wandering life. His eyes were shut,
The shadows of the breezy elms above
Dappled his face. With thirsty heat oppressed
At length I hailed him, glad to see his hat
Bedewed with water-drops, as if the brim
Had newly scooped a running stream
(‘The Ruined Cottage’, ll.44-51 in Wu 2000, 278)
13
As this essay will argue, the plot of Wuthering Heights is driven not so much by character as by the
perpetuation and transgression of certain Barthesian ‘traits’. Identity is fluid. This trait-perpetuation is
an essential factor in character motivations when the plot crosses generations. I have therefore
eschewed the critical orthodoxy of describing the older Catherine (Earnshaw to Linton, who is the
second Catherine encountered in the chronology of the novel) as ‘Catherine’ and her daughter (Linton
to Heathcliff to Earnshaw, the first Catherine encountered) as ‘Cathy’. Both women are described using
both names in the novel in order to heighten confusion between them, to elevate the opening
hermeneutic puzzle in which Lockwood meets a Catherine who is specifically not married to Heathcliff
(he is forced to correct Lockwood’s confusion by asserting that ‘Mrs Heathcliff is my daughter in law’,
13) only to immediately encounter the diary of another Catherine whom Heathcliff certainly does love
but is the ghost of a child, when ‘the air swarmed with Catherines’ (20). So the older, mother-Catherine
will be described here as ‘Catherine1’ while her daughter will be described as ‘Catherine2’. This system,
in turn, is deliberately evocative of the Lacanian construction of the ego, in which different identities of
the subject – S – are developed: S1, S2, S3 etc (see Fink 1997, 133).
14
Barthes: ‘Character’ is a product of combinations: the combination is relatively stable (denoted by the
recurrence of the seme) and more or less complex (involving more or less congruent, more or less
contradictory figures); this complexity determines the character’s ‘personality’ which is just as much a
combination as the order of a dish or the bouquet of a wine’ (in Chatman 1978, 115-16).
15
The relationship between the Catherines is not, of course, the only example of the decentring of the
subject across genealogical links. For instance, it is constantly asserted that Hareton bears the closest
resemblance to his aunt, Catherine1, rather than her daughter. When Isabella first encounters him she
describes ‘a look of Catherine in his eyes, and about his mouth’ (135). The relationship between
Catherine2 and Hareton is introduced and expanded in terms of a pre-existing unification caused by
biological similarity, Hareton 'could not stand a steady gaze from her eyes, though they were just his
own' (192). This idea is expanded at the end of the novel:
They lifted their eyes together, to encounter Mr. Heathcliff: perhaps you have never remarked that
their eyes are precisely similar, and they are those of Catherine Earnshaw. The present Catherine
has no other likeness to her, except a breadth of forehead, and a certain arch of the nostril that
makes her appear rather haughty, whether she will or not. With Hareton the resemblance is
carried farther: it is singular at all times (319)
Ironically, then, when Heathcliff chooses Hareton as the principle subject for his revenge against
Hindley, making him re-enact Heathcliff's own degradation, he is actually attacking the one who most
resembles Catherine1, the separation from whom caused his desire for revenge in the first place.
Brontë draws strange parallels by presenting identical character traits in different family
members, who find themselves in different contexts. Almost no critical attention has been directed to
Hindley and Catherine1 as gender-reversed versions of essentially the same character set (perhaps in
which Catherine1, the recipient of a riding whip plays the male role to Hindley’s female, as the
‘blubbering’ recipient of a violin). Isabella makes an observation to Heathcliff that draws the three
Earnshaws (Hindley, Catherine1, Hareton) together: ‘Now she's dead, I see her in Hindley; Hindley has
exactly her eyes, if you had not tried to gouge them out’ (180). The Earnshaw siblings are both
passionate, prone to madness and ultimately self-destructive. They share ‘the Earnshaw’s violent
dispositions’ in which ‘Mrs Linton caps them all’ (128). As with his sister, Hindley would be
extremely miserable' in heaven (80). When Frances dies he does not show
conventional grief; ‘he neither wept nor prayed’ (65). Talking about his soul he
feels that ‘I shall have great pleasure in sending it to perdition, to punish its maker
. . . Here's to its hearty damnation’ (75). When both characters cannot have their
own way their reaction is to try to destroy themselves, both - eventually -
successfully. Interestingly, where Catherine1's heightened emotions mark her out as a romance
heroine, in Hindley they result in a pathetic wretch who ‘does nothing but play and drink’ (102). This
disproves N.M Jacobs’ assertion that ‘Emily and Anne [Brontë] seem to have moved beyond any faith
in categories of gender as formulated by their culture. To them, gender is a ragged and somewhat
ridiculous masquerade concealing the essential sameness of men and women’ (1986, 75).
16
Except, of course, in the presence of Catherine1 as the child-ghost of Chapter 3 or as the ethereal
woman who perpetually walks the moors with Heathcliff at the end of the novel, both during the
lifetime of Catherine2. Patricia Parker describes the significance of the hauntings in terms of a
transgressions of boundaries. Catherine1 ‘haunts Heathcliff after her death, overrunning all boundaries
by being at once everywhere (‘I am surrounded with her image! . . . The entire world is a dreadful
collection of memoranda that she did exist, and that I have lost her!’) and in no single, definable place
‘Where is she? Not there – not in heaven – not perished – where?’)’ (1982, 180). This idea can be
extended to demonstrate that Catherine1 as ghost transcends the boundaries of the Subject who is tied to
the binary of life (existence) and death (non-existence) and whose life runs in a chronological order
from child to adult. In her dying madness, Catherine1 tells Nelly that ‘most strangely, the whole last
seven years of my life grew a blank! I did not recall that they had been at all. I was a child; my father
was just buried, and my misery arose from the separation Hindley had ordered between me and
Heathcliff’ (124). She thus describes the state in which she haunted Lockwood, back in Chapter III, and
the events described inside Nelly’s narration in Chapter VI. Her presence therefore evades the linear
chronology of her lifetime. Even when she is gone, she exerts a powerful influence as the motivation
for all of Heathcliff's actions. Indeed, she decentres the subject to the extent that she becomes free of
physical place, as expressed in one of Heathcliff's desperate closing statements:
what is not connected with her to me? and what does not recall her? I cannot look down to this
floor, but her features are shaped in the flags! In every cloud, in every tree - filling the air at
night, and caught by glimpses in every object by day - I am surrounded with her image! The
most ordinary faces of men and women - my own features - mock me with a resemblance. The
entire world is a dreadful collection of memoranda that she did exist, and that I have lost her!
(320-1).
Oddly, Catherine2 rarely mentions her mother. Brontë does not even present her reaction to
Catherine1's hauntings. In Volume One Chapter Two she does, however, serve as a proleptic trace of her
mother's supernatural advent in the following chapter, telling Heathcliff that if he lets Lockwood go out
into the snow, ‘I hope his ghost will haunt you’ (17). Linton Heathcliff's brief narrative, however,
reveals that she wears a hinged chain around her neck, with a picture of her mother in one pane, and her
father in the other. This demonstrates a preference for the non-destructive, non-Heathlciff based
relationship that constituted one of her mother's options. Highly symbolically, Catherine2 separates the
images and gives the portrait of her mother to Heathcliff's son. Upon discovering this, Heathcliff
wrenches the image of Edgar Linton from Catherine2 and smashes it underfoot. This is a vital part in
the realisation process by which she rejects the destructive Heathcliff-element and thus transcends the
central element of her mother’s downfall.
17
This is demonstrated, again in Volume 2 Chapter IV. At the Heights a servant tells her that ‘Mr Hareton
[Earnshaw], there, be not the master’s son, he’s your cousin’ (193). Her response demonstrates the
onset of internal conflict:
‘He my cousin!’ cried Cathy, with a scornful laugh.

‘Yes, indeed,’ responded her reprover.
‘Oh, Ellen! don't let them say such things,’ she pursued in great trouble. ‘Papa is gone to fetch
my cousin from London: my cousin is a gentleman’s son. That my - ’ she stopped, and wept
outright; upset at the bare notion of relationship with such a clown.
‘Hush, hush!’ I whispered; ‘people can have many cousins and of all sorts, Miss Cathy, without
being any the worse for it; only they needn’t keep their company, if they be disagreeable and bad.’
(193-4)
Nelly sums up the breadth of this divide: ‘people can have many cousins and of all sorts’. Catherine 2
cannot reconcile the 'gentleman' side of her family with an Earnshaw ‘clown’, yet it is the hardy spirit
of this side of the family that caused her to run away to the moors and get caught up in this situation in
the first place. Nelly's remark that she ‘needn’t keep [her cousin’s] company if they be disagreeable and
bad’ provides yet another demonstration of the narrator's misinterpretation of the situation. One of her
cousins does turn out to be ‘disagreeable and bad’, but it is not Hareton but the ‘whey-faced whining
wretch’ (207) Linton Heathcliff.
18
Freud: ‘patients regularly repeat traumatic situations’. The repetition compulsion is the drive towards
Thanatos (1915-17, 315).
19
Simply regard the wounding, phallic ‘elf-bolts’ in the same light as the plethora of psychoanalytic
readings of Rosetti's ‘Goblin Market’. However, in this instance psychoanalytic techniques are hardly
necessary to demonstrate that Catherine1 has a particularly distorted relationship to male sexuality.
20
As Belsey notes:
Subjects are subject to particular forms of knowledge, which may construct mutually
incompatible subject positions. ‘Identity’, subjectivity, is thus a matrix of subject-positions, which
may be inconsistent, or even in contradiction with one another. The subject, then, is linguistically
and discursively constructed and displaced across the range of knowledges’ (2002, 57).
Countless critics have noticed the importance of naming in Wuthering Heights. As Parker has noted, 'if
this novel observes the carefully articulated system of naming in which the form of address reflects
distinctions of position, it also calls attention, even after chapter III, to the multiple names a single
character can be called and conversely to the potential for ambiguity’ (1982, 191). The master of
Wuthering Heights changes identity to become 'Mr Earnshaw' or simply 'Earnshaw' whether it is the
first (unnamed) patriarch - Hindley's father, Hindley during his tyrannical reign (52) or Hareton (314).
The novel appears to focus on what Lacan regards as the artificial creation and reification of
the subject which is caused by entry into the Symbolic order; linguistic pronominalisation creates a
false division between the 'I' of the utterance and the 'I' that actually speaks (defined in Belsey 2002,
56). Consequently proper name and proper place melt into one another; the Earnshaws become
identified entirely with the Heights, the Lintons with Thrushcross Grange. Most notably, when
Lockwood first enters Wuthering Heights he 'detected the name 'Hareton Earnshaw' and the date '1500''
carved into the doorframe. This establishes the hermeneutic puzzle over why the lowest member of the
household has his name inscribed on a property he does not own, alongside an ancient date. It also
validates Lacan's idea that the Self, the alienating product of language, is created before a subject's
biological birth, in the discourse of his/her ancestors (Fink 1995, 50). So Hareton plays a predetermined
role that is independent of his position as a biological subject. He is necessary to return the Heights to
the correct hands after Heathcliff's usurpation, to restore the 'natural' order of things.
In a similar vein, Heathcliff is given his name as 'it was the name of a son who had died in
childhood' (38), so he has also existed as a legitimate subject position prior to his biological birth. His
role as a 'cuckoo' in the subject-position of a legitimate son, possibly even the first son to whom
primogeniture would dictate all of Mr Earnshaw's property (adding yet another layer to the problem of
'legitimate' ownership of the Heights), may explain Mr Earnshaw's bizarre choice of Heathcliff as 'his
favourite' (41). The most subtle, and powerful, demonstration of the power of the name, however, lies
in Heathcliff's relationship to Catherine2. He barely ever refers to her by name, the name of the mother
with whom he was infatuated. As it is, her 'appearance causes me pain, amounting to agony' (320).
Instead he can only refer to her through the metonymies of 'witch' or 'slut'.
21
Wuthering Heights is full of these bizarre and often overdetermined surrogate relationships.
Referring to Catherine2 and Hareton, Nelly comments that 'they both appeared in a measure, my
children' (318).
22
The imaginary order is the level at which a subject is created through recognition and separation from
an other: 'the ego is essentially seen by 'oneself' (as in a mirror reflection) – that is, viewed as if by
another person, or seen from the outside by someone else – a running commentary may well be
provided in a form of self-consciousness, or consciousness of one's self doing things in the world' (Fink
1997, 86).
23
'The real is that which has not yet been symbolised, not yet put into words; it is what, at a certain
moment, is unspeakable' (Fink 1997, 158).
24
Jouissance: 'it qualifies the kind of 'kick' someone may get out of punishment, self-punishment, doing
something that is so pleasurable it hurts (sexual climax, for example), or doing something that is so
painful it becomes pleasurable' (Fink 1997, 8-9)
25
Terms defined in Toolan 1998 Language In Literature: An Introduction to Stylistics, 82-104
26
Indeed, the reader and the pattern of the narrative defy her attempt to tie Catherine 1's death into an
orthodox Christian frame which utilises 'happily-ever-after' style closure:
no angel in heaven could be more beautiful than she appeared. And I partook of the infinite calm
in which she lay: my mind was never in a holier frame than while I gazed on that untroubled
image of Divine rest . . . Whether still on earth or now in heaven, her spirit is at home with God!'
(164)
27
Occasionally, however, the use of anachronies (defined in Toolan 2001, 43) deliberately constrains
our sympathies. The chronological presentation of Hindley serves to mark him out as 'a detestable
substitute' (20) to old Mr Earnshaw, the heart of the genealogical line. The reader
encounters him first in the external intradiegetic analepsis of Catherine1's diary
snippet in Chapter III. Here he is the "new master", desperate to assert his power
through declarations of "sobriety and silence". He is instantly abusive towards
Heathcliff, commanding: "Frances, darling, pull his hair as you go by". Whilst the
narrative jump of Catherine's diary is a useful device to prepare for the ghostly
encounter, Hindley's presence is peripheral on this level; it provides a different
function. Wuthering Heights is a novel of fractured knowledge, in which the
reader has to fit information together as events unfold to establish its meaning.
So by introducing Hindley at the pinnacle of his position as a hated authoritarian
figure, Brontë shrewdly provides the reader with an in-built negative response to
him, which we carry throughout the novel. All knowledge that explains and to
some extent justifies his conduct is withheld. In fact, later chapters present
motivations for his actions that are hardly divergent from the characters we
'support'. He is unloved by an abusive father who declares that 'Hindley was
naught, and would never thrive as where he wandered' (41). The death of Francis,
his wife, is one of the extremely rare moments of physical tenderness in the entire
novel. He 'raised her in his arms' and 'she put her two hands about her neck' as
she slips away, the combination of irony and tragedy increased by her
proclamation that 'she should be able to get up tomorrow' (for more on our
inability to sympathise with Hindley see footnote 15).
28
Genette defines a paratext as a text whose “being depends upon its site” (1987, xii). A hypertext is
“the superimposition of a later text on an earlier one that includes all forms of imitation, pastiche, and
parody as well as less obvious superimpositions . . . A new text written over an old one, inviting a kind
of double reading” (1987, xv).
29
The open-endedness of the novel's structure can be demonstrated with reference to the anti-closure
mechanism that Lacan describes as the 'variable session' (defined in Fink 1997, 17-19). The (dubious)
cultural barometers of Kate Bush's 'Wuthering Heights' and last year's BBC TWO 'reinterpretation'
Sparkhouse both focus on Volume I of the original novel, indicating a general neglect of the second
book in terms of public attention. Volume II is mostly involved with the 'closure' provided by the
second generation - Catherine2 and Hareton's conventional love, with the end of the disruption to the
Earnshaw line caused by the 'interloper' Heathcliff. It is important to note, however, that each volume
was a separate book when Wuthering Heights was originally published, of which a reader may have not
(if it was acquired from a circulating library, probably did not) read one after the other or in the correct
order. By re-ordering Wuthering Heights as one book of continuous chapters as part of her revisions of
1850, Charlotte Brontë appears to be determined to enforce the closure of Lockwood’s Enlightenment
discourse over the variable session implications of ceasing reading at the end of Book I would infer.
This ending, after all, is one in which Catherine1’s delusions and Heathcliff’s extremity easily run
roughshod of the five paragraphs of the super-ordinate, Lockwood-Nelly narration, like the ‘oak in a
flowerpot’ (151) with which Heathcliff describes Catherine1’s passion in a civilised realm. The first
volume, notably, does not represent the complete story of the first generation but ends on a cliff-hanger,
leaving a terminally-ill Catherine1 hovering between Edgar and Heathcliff. The subversive, pantheistic
elements of their relationship are left open ended, for a reader to close off in his or her way until he or
she encounters the second volume. The broken cycle allows for a far more open-ended reading than the
completed one.
30
That is not to say, however, that every interpretation is equally valid. Perhaps the (artificial but useful)
hermeneutic constructs of one of Gadamer's opponents, E.D. Hirsch, will prove useful here:
Meaning is that which is represented by a text; it is what the author meant by his use of a
particular sign sequence; it is what the signs represent. Significance, on the other hand, names a
relationship between that meaning and a person, or a conception, or a situation, or indeed
anything imaginable. (Hirsch, 8.)
Wuthering Heights has a limited 'meaning' but deliberately extends the spectrum for possible
'significance' from reader to reader.
31
As calculated in Chitham, Edward 1998 'Sculpting the Statue: A Chronology of the Process of Writing
Wuthering Heights'
32
This impression of the ‘isolated’ Brontës was constructed and perpetuated, in no small part, by
themselves. Writing to Wordsworth, Branwell claims that he has ‘lived among secluded hills, where I
could neither know what I was or what I could do. I read for the same reason that I ate or drank,
because it was a real craving of nature. I wrote on the same principle as I spoke – out of the impulse
and feelings of the mind; nor could I help it, for what came, came out, and there was the end of it’ (in
Orel ed. 1997, 35)
33
There is certainly something unique about the 'dismal spiritual atmosphere' at the Heights which
Lockwood first encounters. By orientating the reader from a 'conventional' character such as Lockwood
or servants, this oddness is heightened. Zillah tells him that 'they had so many queer goings on, she
could not begin to be curious' (19). Heathcliff embodies this otherness, as an enigmatic being outside
class and most recognisable character-type. He is 'a singular contrast to his abode and style of living'
(5). He professes his own isolation: 'Guests are so exceedingly rare in this house that I and my dogs, I
am willing to own, hardly know how to receive them' (8). This isolation is emphasised by Catherine 2's
catalogue of her co-inhabitants: “There is [Heathcliff], Earnshaw, Zillah, Joseph and I” (16).
Lockwood’s subsequent question only enforces matters: “Are there no boys at the farm?” (16). As a
'perfect recluse' (188) Catherine2 is forbidden to leave the grounds of the Grange by her father, and
when she does so she initiates a process marked by Heathcliff imprisoning her in the Heights: 'They
wouldn't let me go to the end of the garden wall' (16). Appendix 2 demonstrates that the three main
characters who have no biological connection to the central protagonists – Nelly, Lockwood and Joseph
(as depicted on the right, separated by a vertical line) lack almost all of the traits that lie at the centre of
the other's troubled existence.
34
Equally, and quite surprisingly as it breaks the novel's 'isolated' style, during the Christmas of 1777,
'our pleasure was increased by the arrival of the Gimmerton band, mustering fifteen strong: a trumpet,
a trombone, clarionets, bassoons, French horns, and a bass viol, besides singers' (59). This
demonstrates a brief interface between the Heights and the 'normal' social world, before Hindley's
regime crumbles, as the band 'go the rounds of all the respectable houses, and receive contributions
every Christmas' (59). Another glimpse of the social world occurs when Joseph mentions a world
outside his experience, of external society on the margins, when he is enraged at the end of the novel
declaring 'Aw'd rather arn my bite, an' my sup, wi' a hammer in th' road' (316).
35
So the margins of Wuthering Heights are not the taboo elements of Nineteenth Century society but the
complete opposite, the mass conventions, structures and cultural context of the novel's contemporary
readership. These exist in the ever-peripheral Gimmerton and its folk. Brontë uses the prevailing social
order as a mirror image for her creation; she pushes against it. By using Derrida's differance, and
identifying the 'invasion of the other in the selfsame' (Belsey 2002, 116) Wuthering Heights’ rural-
agricultural and overwhelmingly domestic microcosm transpires to be a negative trace of the same
Victorian preoccupations of snowballing capitalism and industry that form the subject matter of the
‘social-problem’ novels of Dickens, Disraeli and Gaskell. It deconstructs the binary of the 'corrupted'
industrial town against the rural idyll where, as Dickens describes it in Hard Times, 'everything was at
peace'. Wuthering Heights does not present a rural milieu that “speaks of other times and other
occupations” in an Edenic fashion, but instead demonstrates that ideological power-structures extend
beyond the industrial and beyond the feudal to work in microcosm on a domestic level. However, as
Eagleton warns, we must be careful ‘to illustrate how a certain deconstruction need not simply abandon
all historical or political responsibility, euphorically dissolving complex contradiction into sheer
indeterminabilitiy or some myth of pure difference’ (1988, xiv). Wuthering Heights also engages with
its contemporary society in a more straightforward and fundamental manner.
36
Except in the case of Lockwood, who is clearly aristocratic. By framing all events through this type of
character, Brontë satirises both the late Eighteenth Century ‘man of sentiment’ and also the ‘rational
discourse’ that usurps this archetype with the development of social-realist texts. Lockwood has many
of the key features of sensibility. He is as self centred as the Marianne of Sense and Sensibility. Miller
notes that Brontë had probably never read Austen, as she was not in the parsonage’s library (2001,
172), but she must surely have been familiar with this type of mannered discourse. After all, her branch
of agricultural rural realism proves a strong critique of Lockwood’s mannered discourse.
To use Lacanian terms, Lockwood has constructed a very particular ideal ego for himself (a self
image orientated by an impression of being watched by Others, defined in Leader and Groves 1995,
48). By Habermas’s system of sociological action, his focus upon the dramaturgical undermines any
attempt at communicative or teleological action. This overbearingly constructed self-image is at the
very centre of Lockwood’s consciousness, so much so that after describing Heathcliff (ridiculously) as
one who will ‘love and hate, equally under cover’ he realises that ‘I bestow my own attributes over-
liberally on him’ (5). In the opening chapters, where Lockwood has his greatest influence upon the
novel, he takes an affected version of the man of sentiment’s love of landscape: ‘This is certainly a
beautiful country!’ (3). His self-characterisation is contradicted within a chapter, when he decides to
remain at the refined Grange ‘instead of wading through heath and mud to Wuthering Heights’ (9).
Lockwood casts himself as a romantic hero with a ‘susceptible heart’ (11), who has chosen to cast aside
the afflictions of polite society and enter ‘a perfect misanthropist’s Heaven’ in a rural Yorkshire. His
misunderstanding of this society is, as mentioned earlier in this essay, relayed to comic effect.
Lockwood self-consciously presents his life as a drama, through indulgent literary allusions,
quoting ‘I never told my love’ from Twelfth Night and enjoying the gothic elements of his milieu by
referring to the Heights’ cat as ‘Grimalkin’ (26), an allusion to Macbeth’s witches. He uses a Biblical
reference, ‘the herd of possessed swine’ (7) in a tiny domestic incident, overreacting to being disturbed
by some dogs. In a bizarre piece of extradiegetic external analepsis Lockwood explains the events of
‘last summer’ in a form that reads like a summary of a novel of sensibility:
While enjoying a month of fine weather at the sea-coast, I was thrown into the company of a most
fascinating creature: a real goddess in my eyes, as long as she took no notice of me. I ‘never told
my love’ vocally; still, if looks have language, the merest idiot might have guessed I was over
head and ears: she understood me at last, and looked a return - the sweetest of all imaginable
looks. And what did I do? I confess it with shame - shrunk icily into myself, like a snail; at every
glance retired colder and farther; till finally the poor innocent was led to doubt her own senses,
and, overwhelmed with confusion at her supposed mistake, persuaded her mamma to decamp. By
this curious turn of disposition I have gained the reputation of deliberate heartlessness; how
undeserved, I alone can appreciate. (1995, 6)
Lockwood deliberately casts himself as a cad, as the archetypal handsome figure who goes about
breaking hearts in the same way as Willoughby in Sense and Sensibility, the milieu appearing similar to
that in Persuasion of the infamous Cobb scene at Lyme Regis. Lockwood’s constant superlatives –
‘goddess’, ‘sweetest of all imaginable’ serve the opposite purpose to his intention, demonstrating his
melodramatic nature as one who is constantly ‘over head and ears’, rather than heightening the drama
of the situation.
This entire Austenesque pattern of romance, based on insinuation behind layers of etiquette, is
satirised by the events of Wuthering Heights. From Nelly Dean’s narrative Lockwood is to encounter a
romance that stretches beyond a small disruption to aristocratic plans (a girl ‘persuaded her mamma to
decamp’) to violence, revenge, self-mutilation and necrophilia. Wuthering Heights is the perfect
antidote to a romance of manners. In Heathcliff Lockwood is to encounter a true misanthrope who
negates his attempt at isolation to the most superficial realms of the dramaturgical. From the outset
Heathcliff provides the genuine version of a social role that Lockwood has constructed for himself
from the discourse of polite society, and is drawn to comment on its deficiencies himself: ‘I felt
increasingly interested in a man who seemed more exaggeratedly reserved than myself’ (3). Heathcliff
is instantly amused by Lockwood’s naïve declaration of his violent capabilities: “I would have set my
signet ring on the biter” (7). Lockwood’s ridiculous notion of his own capacity for violence is
continued when he suggests that he “might be tempted to box [Hareton’s] ideas”, a “rustic youth” (12)
who has no need for an outdoor coat in the snow. His failure to interpret his situation in a practical
manner serves as the source of much of Brontë’s black comedy. He is unable to reconcile his
presuppositions of female roles against the practicalities of a farming lifestyle. Assuming that
Catherine2 loves pets, he enquires if ‘an obscure cushion full of something like cats’ contains her
‘favourites’ (10). He discovers, using typically over-polite language, that ‘unluckily, it was a heap of
dead rabbits’ (11).
Yet upon actually encountering a supernatural event, in his dream of Catherine’s ghost,
Lockwood abandons the romantic principles upon which he has hitherto based his actions, and falls
instead on an almost utilitarian form of cold reason. His initial impression that Wuthering Heights is
‘swarming with ghosts and goblins’ (1995, 27) soon gives way to the conviction that he had simply had
a ‘ridiculous nightmare’ (29). He rationalises the experience by intimating that the spilt candle wick,
‘perfuming the place with an odour of roasted calf-skin’, (20) is responsible, in the style of Scrooge
declaring ‘You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an
underdone potato. There’s more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!’ (1843, 24).
Lockwood extends this rationalisation: ‘Alas, for the effects of bad tea and bad temper! What else
could it be that made me pass such a terrible night?’ (23). He plays the traditional role of the sceptic in
supernatural fiction. Though he swaps poles, Lockwood is persistently the voice of the incorrect side of
an argument: first he is a voice that cannot appreciate the nature of rural reality, and then a voice that
cannot appreciate the supernatural, non-realistic, elements of his experiences.
37
A group who eight years after his death would kick-start the French Revolution on the basis of
principles of 'rationality', by rioting at Grenoble in the infamous Day of Tiles.
38
Perhaps this indeterminacy can be attributed too Wuthering Heights adhering only to the earliest stages
of the disintegration of the representative public of the aristocracy in the face of the bourgeois. As such
it would represent “that initial assimilation of bourgeois humanism to a noble courtly culture . . . Early
capitalism was conservative not only as it regards the economic mentality . . . but also as regards
politics. As long as it lived from the fruits of the old mode of production (the feudal organisanization of
agricultural production involving an enserfed peasantry and the petty commodity production of the
corporatively organized urban craftsmen) without transforming it, it retained its ambivalent
characteristics. On the one hand this capitalism stabilized the power structure of a society organized in
estates, and on the other hand it unleashed the very elements within which this power structure would
one day dissolve” (Habermas 1989, 15).
39
Emily Brontë’s portrait of the family as a rigid economic hierarchy constitutes one of the most
‘subversive’ elements of the novel in comparison with her immediate peers. Her sister Anne’s Agnes
Grey proves a particularly striking comparison. Here the family is truly isolated from the ‘evils’ of the
outside world, into which Agnes must venture. It maintains a womb-like innocence, artificially
illuminated as she leaves it for the first time: ‘I looked back again: there was the village spire, and the
old grey parsonage beyond it, basking in a slanting beam of sunshine – it was but a sickly ray, but the
village and surrounding hills were al in a sombre shade, and I hailed the wandering beam as a
propitious omen to my home’ (1988, 12). Here the seclusion-trope proves far more persuasive: ‘so long
and so entire had been my parent’s seclusion from the world’ (1988, 10). Agnes declares that ‘for the
first time in my life, I must stand alone’ (12), strongly contrasting the inhabitants of Wuthering Heights
who are born into competition with one another by the very nature of their productive labour. Most
significantly, Agnes stands alone against a strictly defined ‘other’ – the cruel and corrupt middle classes
who hire her to become embroiled in their domestic disharmony. Agnes Grey is straightforwardly anti-
middle class satire. In Wuthering Heights moral behaviour is rarely ascribed by class positions.
40
Heathcliff's first speech in the novel is a possessive relational process relating to property: 'Thrushcross
Grange is my own' (3). The centrality of property laws first allow Heathcliff to ensare Catherine 2,
eventually forcing her to marry Linton and therefore forfeit the Grange, because she encroaches upon
his property: 'the Heights were Heathcliff's land, and he was reproving the poacher' (212). This focus
upon property is indicated by Catherine2's eventual defiance and triumph over Heathcliff: 'You
shouldn't grudge a few yards of earth, for me to ornament, when you have taken all my land! . . . And
my money . . . And Hareton's land, and his money' (316-7).
41
Nelly Dean tells Heathcliff, after Hindley's death, that as far as his plan to keep Hareton is concerned
'There is nothing in the world less yours than he is!' (186). However, as their lawyer tells her 'Hareton
would be found little else than a beggar' (184) since his father mortgaged all of his property to
Heathcliff. As such, Hareton is entirely under Heathcliff's control: 'the sole chance for the natural heir is
to allow him an opportunity of creating some interest in the creditor's heart, that he may be inclined to
deal leniently towards him' (184-5). Where Heathcliff has gained all of Hindley's lands, it follows
logically that he should also gain control of Hindley's ultimate possession, his son. Property laws also
mean that, after Isabella has died, Heathcliff has every right to claim back 'his lad' (Linton Heathcliff)
with Edgar conceding that 'there was nothing left but to resign him' (201).
42
Catherine1 cannot re-enter this extra-panopticon state with Heathcliff when she is tied to the social
order by her marriage to Edgar. Her response is to re-align herself using the most common binary
division/branding technique to separate herself from the corrupted sphere of 'normal' behaviour: she
goes mad.
Belsey points out that:
The incompatibilities and contradictions within what is taken for granted also exert a pressure on
concrete individuals to seek new, non-contradictory subject-positions, even if, in the event, no
wholly non-contradictory place is available.
To take a familiar instance, women in our society are at once produced and inhibited by
contradictory imperatives. Very broadly, women have access both to the liberal-humanist promise
of freedom, self-determination and rationality, and at the same time to a specifically feminine
ideal of submission, relative inadequacy and irrational intuition. The attempt to locate a single
and coherent subject-position within these conflicting models, and in consequence to find a non-
contradictory pattern of behaviour, can create intolerable pressures. One way of responding to this
situation is to retreat from the contradictions, and from the language that defines the conflicting
ideals, to become ‘sick’. More women than men are treated for mental illness
(2002, 61).
This is obviously an enormous oversimplification of mental illness, but does describe what happens to
Catherine1 rather well.

Wuthering Heights and Its Defiance of Universal Pragmatics

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Research Project

Module Title 12,000 word Research Project

Module Tutor Essaka Joshua

Abstract An investigation of plurality and subjectivity in Wuthering

Title Wuthering Heights and its Defiance of Universal Pragmatics

Wuthering Heights and its Defiance Of Universal

Wuthering Heights is a strange sort of book – baffling all regular criticism . . .

complete reading of the novel as a demonstration of the ways in which conflicting

Communication is achieved as Lockwood, the speaker, shares certain universal

Naturally [the existence of pragmatic universals] does not mean that

picture is that drawn by ethnomethodologists – of a diffuse, fragile continuously

My investigation of textual plurality therefore examines not only

The concept of universal pragmatics is a definite turn in Twentieth Century

It therefore opposes the Enlightenment idea of textual linearity which arises, in a

This communicative impossibility is mutual. Nelly can only interpret the

appropriation of the lifeworld is thus indicative of his tendency to universalise, to

‘Excepting a few provincialisms of slight consequence, you have no marks of

at my speech’ (62). She turns education, an element of cultural tradition, into a

claims, ‘communicative action can continue undisturbed only as long as participants

(Wuthering Heights) (Thrushcross Grange)

EARNSHAW HEATHCLIFF LINTON

Catherine1 (loves Heathcliff) Heathcliff (marries Edgar Linton)

(marries Hareton Eanrshaw) Linton Heathcliff (marries Linton Heathcliff)

(from Kermode 1974, 45)

[Mr Earnshaw’s] peevish reproofs wakened in her a naughty delight to provoke

He is strongly reminiscent of the infant Heathcliff, the goblin-child who ‘repeated

Consciousness of self is possible only on the basis of differentiation: ‘I’ cannot

This threatens Habermas’s communicative theory, as accepting one set of narrators

Level 1 Observable events Observation (Observer)

Level 2 Observation sentence Understanding (interpreter)

(in Outhwaite 1996, 122)

Level 1 {Observable events Observation-Construction in language (Observer)

Level 2 Observation-construction verbally translated Understanding (interpreter)

Rather than linking ‘observable events’ to an ‘observation sentence’, perception is

social hierarchies and Brontë’s other way

justification, sees these stances as anachronistic. Instead, he claims that Heathcliff

This is certainly the case in Wuthering Heights. Nelly Dean’s declaration

In the intimate sphere of the conjugal family privatised individuals viewed

‘the social contract that organises the relationships of the eighteenth-century

Habermas’s account of [the] historical shift in the meaning of the word

Wuthering Heights certainly follows the impression of ‘disciplinary’ rather than

Passionate ? (+) ? + -/+/- + + - + - - - - - -

Literacy/ ? ? + + ? -/+ -/+ + + + ? + + +

Desire for ? ? - - + + - - - -/+ ? - - -

Selfish ? ? + +/- + +/- - + +/- + ? - + ?

appendix 2: modified genealogical table for Wuthering Heights

Appignanesi, Richard and Garratt, Chris 1995 Introducing Postmodernism USA:

Belsey, Catherine 1986 ‘The Romantic Construction of the Unconscious’ in Barker,

Belsey, Catherine 2002 Critical Practice (2nd ed) Cornwall: Routledge

Fink, Bruce 1997 A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Theory and

Gawthrop, Humphrey 2001 ‘Wuthering Heights – an Oddity’ Brontë Society

Genette, Gerard 1987 trans. Lewin, Jane E. 1997 Paratexts: Thresholds of

Habermas, Jürgen trans. Burger,Thomas assist. Lawrence, Frederick 1989. The

Jacobs, N.M. 1986 ‘Gender and Layered Narrative in Wuthering Heights’ in

Makaryk, Irena R. ed. 1993 Encyclopaedia of Contemporary Literary Theory Canada:

Miller, Lucasta 2001 The Brontë Myth London: Jonathan Cape

Newman, Neville F. ‘Workers, Gentlemen and Landowners: Identifying Social Class

Stoneman, Patsy ed. 1996 Brontë Transformations: The Cultural Dissemination of

Toolan, Michael 1998 Language In Literature: An Introduction to Stylistics London:

Toolan, M R 2001 Narrative: A Critical Linguistic Introduction (2nd ed) London:

Take, for instance, one portrait by Wordsworth:

He lay, his pack of rustic merchandise

‘He my cousin!’ cried Cathy, with a scornful laugh.

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