THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

ancestral house of the title is, as the opening sentences suggest, ‘so completely removed from the stir of society’; it is
subject to ‘pure, bracing, ventilation’ and to a wind that slants ‘a few stunted firs’ and stretches ‘a range of gaunt
thorns’. Nature, and phenomena within and beyond nature, remain ‘wuthering’ and turbulent throughout the
narrative. In its last chapter, the parish church may lie peacefully under a ‘benign sky’, but its glass has been broken
by storms, its roof slates hang jaggedly, and there are reports that the ‘phantoms’ of Heathcliff and a woman have
been seen ‘under t’Nab’. Despite ‘the moths fluttering among the heath and hare-bells’ the churchyard provokes
images of ‘unquiet slumbers, for the sleepers in that quiet earth’.
The phrase ‘the quiet earth’ is that of the prime narrator, the often impercipient, would-be misanthrope Lockwood.
There is little ‘quietness’ either in the landscape or the society which he has observed. Both are marked by change,
confusion, violence, and unpredictability. When Nelly Dean interposes as an alternative narrator, she speaks as an
insider both to the family and to their environment, yet Nelly shifts not simply perspectives but loyalties and
emotional alliances (Heathcliff accuses her of ‘prying’ and of ‘idle curiosity’). It is she who conveys to us Catherine’s
stunning admission: ‘My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath — a source of little visible delight,
but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff — he’s always in my mind — not as a pleasure to myself but as my own being.’
But it is Nelly, never an unqualified adherent of Heathcliff’s, who feels constrained to add: ‘I was out of patience with
her folly.’ Where Catherine feels like the unlovely, underlying rocks, Nelly is as sharp, deceptive, and inconsistent as
the northern weather. Throughout the telling of the story, readers have to work to interpret the information and the
impressions that the tellers choose to recount. The seeming randomness of events and associations and the
arbitrariness of what
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and how we learn, fall into their proper place as readers explore the diverse and multilayered narrative through the
very act of reading. If Wuthering Heights adjusts the conventional paraphernalia of the Gothic, its unquiet graves, its
explosive passion, its illicit relationships, its wild landscapes, and its tempestuous climatic conditions, it remoulds
them into an unconventional narrative shape that neither follows nor creates precedents. Despite its utterly assured
mastery of form, it remains the most unconventional and demanding of all English novels.
Heathcliff’s insistent claim that in opening Catherine’s coffin he disturbed no one, but rather ‘gave some ease to
myself ... I was tranquil. I dreamt I was sleeping the last sleep, by that sleeper, with my heart stopped, and my cheek
frozen against hers’, suggests the degree to which Emily Brontë strained to move beyond necrophiliac frissons. Her
novel is an evocation of freedom, a strange, tranquil, and compelling freedom which also haunts her poetry. The
themes of the soul set at liberty by death, or calmed by the contemplation of death within a natural scheme, figure
notably in the song ‘The linnet in the rocky dells’ where the sounds of the moors ‘soothe’ those lying under the turf.
Death may be a troubling severer in ‘Cold in the earth’, but in the lyric ‘Shall earth no more inspire thee’ a voice,
perhaps from beyond the grave, or perhaps (as Charlotte Brontë believed) of ‘the Genius of a solitary region’, insists
on the enduring and inspiring beauty of wild and empty landscape. Her final poem, ‘No coward soul is mine’, speaks
of a God who is both internalized within the human creature and who is evident in the creation which he continues to
foster. This transcendent God animates ‘eternal years’ and ‘Pervades and broods above, | Changes, sustains, dissolves,
creates and rears’. The lyrics, published from surviving manuscripts in the early years of the twentieth century,
powerfully reinforce the mood of ecstatic intensity evident in the finest of the poems in the collaborative volume of
1846. Most of these poems date from the years 1837 and 1838. The landscapes recalled are vibrant both in summer
and winter, in rain and cloud, or when lit by the last beams of ‘the cold, bright sun’. It is a landscape which is both
physical and visionary, both haunted and possessing:
The night is darkening round me,
The wild winds coldly blow;
But a tyrant spell has bound me
And I cannot, cannot go.
The giant trees are bending
Their bare boughs weighed with snow,
And the storm is fast descending
And yet I cannot go.
Clouds beyond clouds above me,
Wastes beyond wastes below;
But nothing drear can move me;
I will not, cannot go.