94 pages • 3 hours read
Emily BrontëWuthering Heights
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1847A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Themes
The Dark Side of Enduring Love
In many works of literature past and present, the notion of enduring love is idealized as the hope and dream of many a worthy protagonist. Wuthering Heights, however, is the novel that overturns those romantic visions of passionate and faithful love, presenting the truth of Heathcliff’s obsession with Catherine and Catherine’s love for Heathcliff in all of its violent and sometimes ugly intensity. At the start of the novel, Catherine’s generosity towards Heathcliff and his devotion to her are sweet and admirable. Their childhood companionship grows into a more mature friendship that at first, seems pure and genuine enough, but their personality characteristics eventually get in the way of their genuine attachment to each other. Heathcliff’s uncontrollable bad temper and Catherine’s sense of entitlement merge into a mutual sense of rageful frustration, so unhappiness ensues, for them and for the rest of their immediate society.
The novel is full of chaos, physical and emotional violence, misery,and heartache, which are all consequences of Catherine and Heathcliff’s love for each other. Even innocent young children are punished for the mistakes of the grown-ups, in particular young Linton Heathcliff and young CathyLinton, which only renders the love affair between Heathcliff and Catherine even less reputable. By the end of the novel, it becomes clear that no happy ending exists for Heathcliff nor for Catherine, and the reader finishes the novel with imaginings of the ghosts of both spirits restlessly on the move, searching for something that evades them in life and in death.
Nature’s Resistance to Cultivation
The natural landscape of Yorkshire, in the north of England, in which the events of Wuthering Heights take place, is an inhospitable and infertile space, completely resistant to agricultural development and beautiful in a frightening, rugged sense. It is fitting that Heathcliff and Catherine are themselves linked with nature and that the moors are where they find their connection to each other. Neither individual is particularly likable, but their appeal is apparent to others, as different characters in the novel attest. Although neither character is particularly soft or gentle, they are both attractive in their strength and their fierce independence.
Like the natural world in which they exist, Heathcliff and Catherine are too much their own individuals to be reined in by others, and they resist cultivation in their own right. Catherine may return to Wuthering Heights looking different and more sophisticated after five weeks at Thrushcross Grange, but her true self cannot be altered. In a similar vein, Heathcliff returns to Wuthering Heights after a three-year absence looking more like a gentleman, but as brutal and revenge-seeking as ever.
The Existence of Hope in a Younger Generation
Heathcliff and Catherine appear doomed to be miserable throughout the duration of their lives, but their offspring do bring a bit of hope and optimism to Wuthering Heights after they endure a long and difficult struggle to find grace in each other. The relationship between Catherine and Heathcliff is difficult, yet it did come to something positive in the end, which makes for an undeniably optimistic message.
By the end of Wuthering Heights, Hareton Earnshaw, the son of Frances and Hindley Earnshaw, finds a peaceful stability in his relationship with Cathy Linton, the daughter of Catherine Earnshaw and Edgar Linton. Linton Heathcliff dies, having taken after his mother Isabella, who also died too young. His death comes after having enjoyed some semblance of a loving relationship with Cathy. Although the relationships between these three young descendants of Heathcliff and Catherine are in no way straightforward, thanks to the interference of angry adults like Edgar Linton, Heathcliff, and even Nelly Dean, they do give a sense of hopefulness and positivity to the final chapters of the novel.
