Radical Wuthering Heights

One of my current courses is the Gothic Novel, where I am currently studying an interesting novel from the Victorian era.

Wuthering Heights, published by Emily Bronte in 1847 (and originally published under a male pseudonym, Ellis Bell), is a very unusual book from its time. Characters in Wuthering Heights fight, manipulate, have affairs, and even drive each other insane. On top of that, one of the novel's main characters, Heathcliff, is a character that resembles Satan from Milton's Paradise Lost. He behaves wickedly throughout: kidnapping a girl and forcing her to marry his son, raising the child of his rival as a lowly house-servant, and abusing his wife, among other faults. But, oddly, he is ruggedly handsome and sympathetic in his quest for revenge against those who have wronged him and his passion to reunite with the woman he truly loves. These behaviors and character types are no surprise to modern audiences, but in its time, it was shocking.

Wuthering Heights was unpopular to contemporary critics of the time, but things got even worse when it was revealed the book was created by a woman, too. Emily Bronte was raised in a proper middle class family and lived a reserved life in the English countryside with her sisters. Yet, she wrote a novel that horrendously offended Victorian sensibilities of the day. Not only did she decline to blank out most of her character's swearing, as was thought proper, but she also wrote about characters and situations that no lady like her should. Many critics became unnerved. "How could a gentlewoman write this?"

In comparison, another Gothic writer, Mary Shelley, had also written the shocking Frankenstein a few decades before. However, both Mary Shelley and her mother were notorious as active writers and feminists. Radical writings from women like them were not entirely unexpected.

In a preface added posthumously to Wuthering Heights, Emily's sister, Charlotte Bronte, almost sounds apologetic as she explains how her sister created the book's scenario and especially the character Heathcliff. She gives the background of her sister's rustic and peaceful life in the countryside, saying, "...the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master -- something that at times strangely wills and works for itself." She adds an analogy of a person carving a statue out of rock, "...Hewn in a wild workshop, with simple tools, out of homely materials...He wrought with a crude chisel, and from no model but the vision of his meditations. With time and labour, the crag took human shape: and there it stands colossal, dark, and frowning, half statue, half rock in the former sense, terrible and goblin-like; in the latter, almost beautiful..."

In other words, Emily Bronte's powerful imagination (not experience) gave rise to the provocative character of Heathcliff. This explanation may or may not have soothed nervous readers of the time. No matter how the inspiration for the novel was obtained, however, it is a striking story considering the conservative circumstances it was written in. I think it’s terrible that Wuthering Heights was Emily Bronte’s only novel. (She died not long after publishing it.) I would have liked to see more of her extraordinary writing!