1. Wuthering Heights
Considering Form

2. Form - Generic Conventions
AO2 Demonstrate detailed critical understanding in
analysing the ways in which structure, form and
language shape meanings in literary texts.
• Wuthering Heights has often been read as a
Gothic novel. However, it is also often read as a
powerful and passionate love story.
• The following activities look at some of the
different ways in which Wuthering Heights has
been read.

3. Generic conventions
Gothic novels Love stories
• Preoccupied with the supernatural and • Relationships lead the novel
the fantastic
• Locations such as gloomy forests and ruins • Focus on a few characters
• Charismatic villain (mysterious, powerful, usually male/female, often
driven by ambition) youthful and attractive
• Gothic protagonist has contempt for • Misunderstandings
conventional forms of authority (eg the
church and law) • Happy endings
• Landscape is charged with the emotions • Characters often stereotypes
of the characters
eg the brooding, arrogant hero
• Brooding atmosphere of gloom and terror
• Dealing with aberrant psychological states, • Obstacles threaten
looking at the realm of the irrational relationships
• Aims to evoke terror by dwelling on • Jealousy
mystery and horror generally
• Superficial sexual encounters

4. ‘Wuthering Heights is a story about ...’
How would you rank these in order of importance?
• Class conflict
• Obsessive revenge
• The soul of a vindictive man
• The relationship between Catherine [1] and
Heathcliff
• The society on the Pennine moors
• Wealth and power
• Obsession
• Death

5. Metanarrative
What is a Metanarrative?
• A metanarrative is either a narrative that talks
about another narrative, or a narrative which
refers to itself and the way in which it is being
narrated. It is a term that is often used with
reference to postmodern fiction, but can also be
applied to any work of fiction that comments
upon its status as a literary text.
• To what extent could WH be considered an
example of metanarrative?

6. Metanarrative?
1. He ... relaxed, a little, in the laconic style of chipping off his pronouns, and auxiliary
verbs;
(Lockwood of Heathcliff , p50/p8)
2. ‘But Mr Lockwood, I forget these tales cannot divert you ... I could have told
Heathcliff ’s history, all that you need hear, in half-a-dozen words.’ (Nelly, p101/pp61-
62)
3. Why not have up Mrs Dean to finish her tale? I can recollect its chief incidents, as far
as she had gone. Yes, I remember her hero had run off , and never been heard of for
three years: and the heroine was married (Lockwood, p130/p91)
4. ‘now continue the history of Mr Heathcliff , from where you left off , to the present
day. Did he finish his education, on the Continent, and come back a gentleman? or did
he get a sizar’s place at college? or escape to America, and earn honours by drawing
blood from his foster country? or make a fortune more promptly, on the English
highways?’ (Lockwood, pp130-131/pp91-92)
5. ‘What a realization of something more romantic than a fairy tale it would have been
for Mrs Linton Heathcliff , had she and I struck up an attachment’
(Lockwood, p335/p304)

7. Metanarrative
Characters are seen in differing relations to books ...
Edgar (at one point to Cathy’s fury) has his library;
Heathcliff gives up book-learning in his adolescence.
Lockwood tries to bar the dream-Cathy’s entry with
books. Catherine and Joseph threaten each other’s library
... That Catherine is able to protect her own literacy at the
Heights, and then resocialise Hareton through
literacy, constitutes a powerful undermining of Heathcliff
’s strategies. This shared literacy becomes the central
motif of the new Wuthering Heights.
(Peter Miles, An Introduction to the Variety of Criticism:
Wuthering Heights)

8. Metanarrative
It is a tale told by the fireside on a winter’s evening by an
elderly woman, the family nurse, sitting and narrating as she
sews. Fleeting echoes of childhood fairy tales are recalled as
she proceeds. Mr Earnshaw’s journey to Liverpool and his
promise to bring back presents for the three children left at
home resemble the journey and promise of the merchant in
‘Beauty and the Beast’ ... What Mr Earnshaw brings home is a
‘dirty, ragged, black-haired child’ (Chapter 4) who wins his
daughter’s heart. In the fairy tale the Beast is transformed into
a handsome prince and this idea is echoed in the novel where
Heathcliff appears to be the Beast’s equivalent.
Fairy-tale transformations are constantly taking place ... (Hilda
D Spear, Macmillan Master Guides: Wuthering Heights)

9. Critical Readings
19th Century Novel, 21st Century Text Types?
• As well as reading Wuthering Heights in the
context of different generic conventions, it is
also possible to read it in relation to ideas
developed during the 20th and 21st centuries.
These ideas can be seen to infuence both
ways of writing and ways of reading texts.

10. Critical readings
Postmodern texts Feminist texts
• Multiple perspectives, plots and • Lack of identity of women under male
narratives power
• Awareness of form
• Self-conscious and metatextual • Questioning of role of women to find
(interested in the process of writing) their natural state or to fulfil roles defined
• Unreliable narrator or narrators for them by men
• Distortions of desire, memory or • Strong presence of female characters
dreams • Polarised gender differences
• Use of mise en abyme (story within a
story) • Examining the empowerment of women
• Intertextuality (implicit or explicit • Raising awareness of male and female
reference to other texts) stereotypes
• Uncertainty: difficulty in finding the/a • Domination of women, controlling the
truth
• Contradictory selection of events
• Use of ‘female’ forms of writing such as
letters and diaries, often marginalised in
traditionally male writing

11. How does it help or hinder our reading of the
novel to read it as:
• a Gothic novel?
• a love story?
• a postmodern text?
• a feminist text?

12. Using literary theory
AO3 Explore connections and comparisons
between different literary texts, informed by
interpretations of other readers.

13. Using literary theory
• Marxist criticism: a way of reading texts, in which the
critic analyses the social, economic and historical
context.
• Feminist criticism: a way of reading texts that focuses
on the roles of female characters, on the female
writers, and on the language of women in a
predominantly male culture.
• Psychoanalytical criticism: a way of reading texts with
reference to the works of psychoanalysts such as
Freud, Jung and Lacan applying their theories to the
text, explaining relationships between characters, their
actions or motives, for instance.

14. Critical extract 1
Catherine’s death drive involves two foundational desires: the desire to merge
with Heathcliff and the desire to return to an innocent state of childhood. In a
now-famous speech, Catherine tells Nelly that she could no more separate from
Heathcliff than she could from herself. ‘Nelly,’ she explains, ‘I am Heathcliff ’. But
while she is alive, this union can only be represented; in the representation, the
union is always failed. ‘My great thought in living is himself,’ she continues, ‘If all
else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and, if all else
remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger. I
should not seem a part of it.’ Her thought, not her self, is Heathcliff. Their union is
only maintained through Catherine’s identity; neither envisioned future makes a
space for her dissolution. As it is, then, their love is tied to the convention which
establishes subjectivity, namely language. Though she conceptualizes their
merger, her attempts at communication always recategorise the union into a
decidedly live – and limited – outcome. When she begins to beg for her
death, celebrates its onset, Catherine seems to be recognizing that an intense and
masochistic dissolution – death – is the only way truly to merge with Heathcliff.
(Robin de Rosa, To Save the Life of the Novel at www.rrmla.wsu.edu/ereview)

15. Critical extract 2
In social terms the Heights can be read as embodying the world of the
gentleman farmer: the petty-bourgeois yeoman, whereas the Grange
epitomises the gentry. Eagleton argues that Heathcliff ’s social relation
to both the Heights and the Grange is one of the most complex issues
in the novel. Heathcliff fiercely highlights the contradictions between
the two worlds in opposing the Grange and undermining the Heights.
He embodies a passionate human protest against the marriage market
values of both the Heights and the Grange, while violently caricaturing
precisely those values in his calculatedly callous marriage to Isabella. In
this, Heathcliff can be seen to be a parody of capitalist activity, yet he is
not simply this, for he is also a product of and participant in that
system. The contradiction of the novel is that Heathcliff both embodies
and antagonises the values which he wishes to contest. (Claire
Jones, York Notes Advanced: Wuthering Heights)

16. Critical extract 3
There is a conflict of the primal nature of woman (which is a state of
freedom) and the socially acceptable woman of discipline and etiquette.
Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange act as symbols; Wuthering
Heights as the natural state where women can be free, and Thrushcross
as society where women are expected to act according to social law.
The dramatic transformation of Catherine after five weeks’ stay at the
Grange reinforces the idea that ladylike attributes are not
natural, rather constructed. Catherine’s illness represents her downfall
as she is unable to be the natural, free woman that she can be at
Wuthering Heights and with Heathcliff. Notably, her original visit to
Thrushcross Grange trapped her there, as opposed to her choosing to
go there ... In the same way, Catherine suffers her illness at Thrushcross
Grange. This idea of being trapped is articulated when Catherine admits
‘I’m tired, tired of being enclosed here’.
(http://hschelp.wordpres.com)