Heathcliff Quotations She abandoned them [her friends and former home] under a delusion, he answered, picturing in me a hero

o of romance, and expecting unlimited indulgences from my chivalrous devotion. (Heathcliff to Nelly, about his relationship with Isabella) I declare he is that strange acquisition my late neighbour made in his journey to Liverpool a little Lascar, or an American or Spanish castaway. (Edgar Linton, on discovering Heathcliff spying on them at the Grange) I have just returned from a visit to my landlord the solitary neighbour I shall be troubled with ... A capital fellow! (Lockwood introduces us to Heathcliff) She showed herself, as she often was in life, a devil to me! And, since then, sometimes more, and sometimes less, Ive been the sport of that intolerable torture! (Heathcliff reveals to Nelly how he has been haunted by Catherines [1] ghost for 18 years) I have no pity! I have no pity! Th e more worms writhe the more I yearn to crush out their entrails! It is a moral teething, and I grind my teeth with greater energy, in proportion to the increase of pain. (Heathcliff does not regret the way he is persecuting Isabella) About midnight, while we still sat up, the storm came rattling over the Heights in full fury. There was a violent wind, as well as thunder, and either one or the other split a tree off at the corner of the building, (Th e night Heathcliff runs away) A half-civilized ferocity lurked yet in the depressed brows, and eyes full of black fi re, but it was subdued; and his manner was even dignifi ed, quite divested of roughness though too stern for grace. (Nelly describes the new Heathcliff , returned from we know not where) I felt that God had forsaken the stray sheep there to its own wicked wanderings, and an evil beast prowled between it and the fold, waiting his time to spring and destroy. (Nelly reveals her feelings about the renewed presence of Heathcliff ) Heathcliff ... You may come and wish Miss Catherine welcome, like the other servants. (Hindley orders Heathcliff to greet Catherine [1] after her return from six weeks at the Grange)

Name: ______________________________ Heathcliff as a child of the storm Critical position He, too, is a child of the storm; and the anity between him and Catherine Earnshaw makes them fall in love with each other. But since he is an extraneous element, he is a source of discord, inevitably disrupting the natural order ... he is a manifestation of natural forces acting involuntarily under the pressure of his own nature. But he is a natural force which has been frustrated of its natural outlet, so that it inevitably becomes destructive; like a mountain torrent diverted from its channel ... (Lord David Cecil, Early Victorian Novelists, 1934) A tendency to charge the landscape with emotions that echo those of the characters who populate it ... is one of the most notable features of Wuthering Heights. The grim and forbidding Yorkshire moors, hostile as they are to human activity ... provide an ideal setting for a grim story ... (Peter Hyland, Wuthering Heights and the Gothic Myth,1988) Evidence

Further analysis

Post-Presentations: Heathcli is best seen as _________________________ . How far and in what ways do you agree with this view?

Name: ______________________________ Heathcliff as a social outcast and misfit Critical position Heathcli s appearance in a rural economy, mouthing gibberish, that nobody could understand ... as good as dumb, perceived as some rootless, perhaps racially distinct, linguistically separate, proletarian o spring of industrial Liverpool, is a manifold eruption of the outside into the centre. (Peter Miles, The Critics Debate: Wuthering Heights, 1990) Eagleton ... also analyses Heathcli s position in the novel in terms of his place in the family structure, local society and the economic system of rural Yorkshire at the turn of the century. Because Heathcli is spirited out of nowhere into this family, he has no social or domestic status, and he is therefore both a threat to the established order and an opportunity for it to be reinvented. (Terry Eagletons Myths of Power: A Marxist Study of the Bronts, 1975, summarized in Claire Jones, York Notes Advanced: Wuthering Heights, 1988) Evidence

Further analysis

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Name: ______________________________ Heathcliff as 'female' Critical position Gilbert and Gubars seminal feminist work The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and The Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (1975) argues that Heathcli is female because he has no property, place or title. He is simply Heathcli, never master, unlike Edgar Linton. Thus he has the female role in the society of the novel. So, like Cathy, he eventually half-wills his own decline ambiguously. For the traditionally perceived Byronic superman this is a remarkably female solution, to be seen specically as the creation of the woman writer. (Peter Miles, The Critics Debate: Wuthering Heights, 1990) Evidence

Further analysis

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Name: ______________________________ Heathcliff as Romantic or Gothic hero Critical position The Romantic movement, in its essence, aimed at liberating human personality from the fetters of social convention and social morality. (Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy, 1946) The text ... makes the case for Heathcliff as hero as a person whose very intensity of being imposes itself on the imagination and makes the more conventional people of his world seem less vital. The novel thus displays a battle between traditional moral criteria (which commend constructive, law-abiding conduct) and the claim that sheer vitality of being is superior to conventionality of being. (Cedric Watts, Tensions in the Characterisation of Heathcliff , 1988) Heathcliff is, among other things, a member of that large literary family [of Gothic herovillains]. In Gothic narratives, a central fi gure is commonly the charismatic villain: he is mysterious, saturnine, brooding, powerful, ruthless, sexually menacing, tyrannical, a nightcreature gripped by dark or evil ambitions. (Cedric Watts, Tensions in the Characterisation of Heathcliff , 1988) Evidence

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Name: ______________________________ Heathcliff as a demon, an inhuman monster Critical position The single link that connects Heathcliff with humanity is his rudely confessed regard for Hareton Earnshaw the young man whom he has ruined; and then his half implied esteem for Nelly Dean. These solitary traits omitted, we should say he was ... a mans shape animated by demon life a Ghoul ... (Charlotte Bront, in her preface to the 1850 edition of Wuthering Heights)

Evidence

Further analysis

Post-Presentations: Heathcli is best seen as _________________________ . How far and in what ways do you agree with this view?