Wuthering Heights

When published in 1847, Wuthering Heights was a literary anomaly, blending the passionate intensity of Romanticism with the dark, supernatural elements of the Gothic tradition. These two genres had developed in tandem with one another in the 18th century. Romanticism, more associated with poetry than prose at the time, was a response to the Enlightenment-era emphasis on reason and order; it stressed the primacy of individual emotion and found in the natural world a mirror of humanity’s wild and irrational impulses. The Romantic Era is conventionally divided into two generations: William Blake, Samuel Coleridge, and William Wordsworth established the pattern that John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Byron developed. Simultaneously, novelists like Horace Walpole, Matthew Lewis, and Ann Radcliffe were setting the parameters of Gothic fiction. The Gothic shared with the Romantic an interest in the past and a prioritization of feeling over reason, but it took these concerns in a more consistently dark or transgressive direction, often invoking themes of mental illness, sexual taboos, and the supernatural.

Set against the wild, sublime backdrop of the Yorkshire moors, the novel departs from the social realism popular in the Victorian era. It inherits from Romanticism a focus on primal emotions, individualism, and a deep connection to nature. The characters are not driven by social convention but by fierce, transgressive passions, epitomized in Catherine’s declaration, “He’s [Heathcliff] more myself than I am” (57). Heathcliff himself embodies the Byronic hero: a dark, brooding, and morally ambiguous outcast, defined by his mysterious origins and all-consuming love.

Emily Brontë uses a Gothic framework to explore these Romantic themes. Wuthering Heights is a classic Gothic setting, a decaying manor with “narrow windows […] deeply set in the wall” that becomes a prison for its inhabitants (2). The narrative is saturated with supernatural events, most famously the appearance of Catherine’s ghost, whose frigid hand grabs Lockwood in a nightmare, establishing a tone of psychological horror and unresolved torment. By weaving together the emotional excess of Romanticism and the unsettling atmosphere of the Gothic, Brontë creates a novel that challenges Victorian domesticity, morality, and restraint. This unique fusion is largely why early critics, accustomed to more conventional fiction, often condemned the novel for its perceived savagery and lack of a clear moral center.