The tale is a complicated tangle involving Catherine, her brother Hindley and the orphan Heathcliff, who is being raised in their home. Heathcliff and Catherine love each other, but when Catherine grows up she marries a neighboring gentleman, Edgar Linton. Heathcliff is consumed with bitterness; he has been tortured by Hindley, rejected by Catherine, and in despair goes away to seek his fortune. When he returns he gets his revenge by hounding Hindley to death, inheriting the mansion and tormenting the next generation. Catherine’s daughter, also named Catherine, is held prisoner in his home until she marries his invalid son, giving him title to both estates. Heathcliff has gone mad, however, and eventually dies, leaving Catherine (now also widowed) to learn to love and eventually marry Hindley’s son, Hareton.
Bronte’s convoluted narrative style has been much commented upon, along with the very complex plot line and a challenging time line. Bronte handles the intertwining narrative strains with alacrity to bring us a fascinating story of a strange group of people who are hopelessly intertwined in love, envy and malice.
What’s in a Name?
It is surely no coincidence that so many people in this novel share the same names. There are two incarnations of nearly every name, and Catherine herself possesses, at one time or another, the surnames of all three families that form the center of the action. As Mr. Lockwood finds himself imprisoned in the oaken closet that was Catherine’s bed, he finds her various names scratched over and over on the wood and in the margins of her books: Catherine Earnshaw, Catherine Heathcliff, and Catherine Linton.
Did You Know?
During the first few years after the publication of Wuthering Heights, critics did not believe that Emily Bronte was its author. Instead, they chose to think that both Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (by youngest sister Anne) were earlier, less polished works by the creator of Jane Eyre, older sister Charlotte. Since the women lived in almost total seclusion and Emily and Anne died within a few months of each other, it was difficult to persuade the public that there were, in fact, three authors instead of one. Their creative lives were intertwined in a remarkable way, however, as Charlotte described:
“We were wholly dependent on ourselves and each other, on books and study, for the enjoyments and occupations of life. The highest stimulus, as well as the liveliest pleasure we had known from childhood upwards, lay in attempts at literary composition.” (Wuthering Heights, Penguin Classics Edition, Introduction.)
There seems to be a deliberate intent to confuse us with the names of the characters, as if their setting, both emotional and physical, causes them to melt into one great bundle of painful emotion. We don’t know who they really are.
One of the first reviewers of the novel, Sidney Dobell, saw this repetition of names and histories as a kind of philosophical statement about human nature. He remarks, “There are minds whose crimes and sorrows are not so much the result of intrinsic evil as of a false position in the scheme of things, which clashes their energies with the arrangements of surrounding life. It is difficult to cure such a soul from within. The point of view . . . is in fault.” I think this is an important insight about the troubled characters of Wuthering Heights. Like many people we know, they are not evil, just out of step somehow with the proper rhythm of happy existence. Their abnormal surroundings make it impossible for them to function in a normal manner.
Again, the moors themselves seem to exert an influence on the personalities of the inhabitants; they are more intense in their passions, more concentrated and fixed in their obsessions. Mr. Lockwood comments:
“I perceive that people in these regions acquire over people in towns the value that a spider in a dungeon does over a spider in a cottage, to their various occupants; and yet the deepened attraction is not entirely owing to the situation of the looker-on. They do live more in earnest, more in themselves, and less in surface, change, and frivolous external things. I could fancy a love for life here almost possible; and I was a fixed unbeliever in any love of a year’s standing. One state resembles setting a hungry man down to a single dish, on which he may concentrate his entire appetite and do it justice; the other, introducing him to a table laid out by French cooks: he can perhaps extract as much enjoyment from the whole; but each part is a mere atom in his regard and remembrance.” (209)
Love Story, or Horror Story?
When Emily Bronte read the (often harsh) criticism of her wild, violent characters, she was amazed, and could not see why the novel was considered so frightening. She never encountered any of her critics directly, however, since she lived in complete seclusion with her sisters, and died before most people even realized that her novel was not, as many believed, penned by her more famous sister. Later editions of the novel contained a defense of its origin by Charlotte herself, and eventually Emily’s genius was duly recognized. Its style is definitely unique to its author. The following passage is just one example of the way Emily gathers in the natural surroundings, the gate, the road, the stones and the “withered turf,” to portray the emotional lives of her characters:
“One time I passed the old gate, going out of my way, on a journey to Gimmerton. It was about the period that my narrative has reached: a bright frosty afternoon; the ground bare, and the road hard and dry. I came to a stone where the highway branches off on to the moor at your left hand; a rough sand-pillar, with the letters W. H. cut on its north side, on the east, G., and on the south-west, T. G. It serves as a guidepost to the Grange, the Heights, and village. The sun shone yellow on its grey head, reminding me of summer; and I cannot say why, but all at once a gush of child’s sensations flowed into my heart. Hindley and I held it a favourite spot twenty years before. I gazed long at the weather-worn block; and, stooping down, perceived a hole near the bottom still full of snail-shells and pebbles, which we were fond of storing there with more perishable things; and, as fresh as reality, it appeared that I beheld my early playmate seated on the withered turf: his dark, square head bent forward, and his little hand scooping out the earth with a piece of slate. ‘Poor Hindley!’ I exclaimed, involuntarily. I started: my bodily eye was cheated into a momentary belief that the child lifted its face and stared straight into mine! It vanished in a twinkling; but immediately I felt an irresistible yearning to be at the Heights.” (310)
In response to Emily’s critics, Charlotte acknowledged the faults of the work while staunchly defending its honesty and courage. Though she affirmed that over much of the story “there broods a horror of great darkness,” Charlotte believed that this was a result of Emily’s lonely, melancholy existence, and that “had she lived, her mind would of itself have grown like a strong tree, loftier, straighter, wider-spreading, and its matured fruits would have attained a mellower ripeness and sunnier bloom . . .”
Emily Bronte was a poet as well as a novelist and many of her poems attempt to describe the love she has for her native countryside, and its impact on her psyche. Consider these lines:
Few hearts to mortals given
On Earth so wildly pine;
Yet few would ask a Heaven
More like this Earth than thine.
Then let my winds caress thee;
Thy comrade let me be—
Since nought beside can bless thee,
Return and dwell with me.
Wuthering Heights, Charlotte Bronte concluded, “was hewn in a wild workshop, with simple tools, out of homely materials . . . with a rude chisel, and from no model but the vision of his meditations.” It is a compelling tale of love gone wrong, and a faithful representation of a wild land, beautiful and dangerous, that shapes the lives and souls of its inhabitants.
Quotations taken from Wuthering Heights. Penguin Classics Edition, London. 1995.
Talk About It
Wuthering Heights brings up the discussion of nature versus nurture. Is Heathcliff bad by nature, or was his upbringing as an orphan, tormented by his peers, responsible for the way he behaves as an adult? To what extent are we truly responsible for
our own actions?
About the Author: Emily Brontë
Born in 1818, Emily was the middle girl of the three famous Brontë sisters, all novelists. She had four older siblings (Maria, Elizabeth, Charlotte, and Patrick) and one younger sister (Anne). Emily wrote only one novel, Wuthering Heights. The family lived in the small, isolated town of Haworth, Yorkshire. A poor Irishman, their father was somewhat eccentric and strict; he became a parish clergyman. Their mother died in 1821 and an aunt brought up the sisters conscientiously but with little understanding and affection.
First published under Emily’s pseudonym Ellis Bell and set in eighteenth-century England, her novel is a portrait of the moors. It creates a world of patriarchal values juxtaposed with the natural elements. Brontë explores themes of revenge, religion, class, and prejudice while plumbing the depths of the metaphysical and human psyche.
Both Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights were published in 1847. Emily died in 1848 at the age of 30. In the 1850 edition of Wuthering Heights, Charlotte wrote an editor’s preface and paid tribute to the unique gifts of its creator. “Stronger than a man, simpler than a child, her nature stood alone,” she said of Emily.
Source: Glen, Heather, ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Brontës. Cambridge, 2002.
A Beautiful Vein of Genius:
Vanity Fair, by
William Makepeace Thackeray
Vanity Fair, by William Makepeace Thackeray, was published in installments in 1847-48: the same year that saw the publication of Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte, and the year before David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens. All three authors were keenly aware of each other. Dickens was the undisputed master of English novelists; for a decade his novels had appeared in quick succession and had been wildly popular. Bronte idolized Thackeray, to whom she dedicated the second edition of Jane Eyre. Thackeray, trained as a critic and essayist, wrote in the serial form popularized by Dickens but in a very different style. Where Dickens was sentimental and even pedantic, Thackeray maintained a cool, ironic stance that both infuriated and delighted readers.
Vanity Fair represented a new kind of novel in English. It was a book that portrayed human nature with all its weaknesses, yet did so against the backdrop of a high moral idealism. Subtitled, “A Novel Without a Hero,” the book’s title comes from John Bunyan’s allegorical story The Pilgrim’s Progress, first published in 1678 and still widely read at the time of Thackeray’s novel. Vanity fair refers to a stop along the pilgrim’s progress: a never-ending fair held in a town called Vanity, which is meant to represent man’s sinful attachment to worldly things. From the moment that Becky Sharp flings Johnson’s dictionary out the window as she leaves boarding school, we know we are in for a wild ride, as she rejects “civilized” society and its restrictions while at the same time longing for its status and advantages.
Synopsis
Becky Sharp, the aptly named “anti-heroine” of Vanity Fair, is a surprising, entertaining, and rather unsettling character. Of lowly birth, she is brought up at Miss Pinkerton’s fashionable boarding school where her father was once the drawing master. She hates the place, and particularly the snobbish Miss Pinkerton, and the narrative opens with her gleeful, bitter escape.
Becky Sharp has only one friend at Pinkerton’s, Amelia Sedley, a sweet, timid, and demure girl that Becky both loves and envies. Amelia falls in love with George Osbourne, a self-centered young soldier, and marries him against his father’s wishes. George dies in the Battle of Waterloo and Amelia returns home to her parents to raise their son, George Jr. Meanwhile Betsy marries Rawdon Crawley, a soldier and heir to a fortune, until his aunt disowns him after his marriage to Becky. Rawdon’s only talent is cheating at cards, and Becky charms various society figures in order to advance his interests. Osbourne’s friend Dobbin adores Amelia, and does everything in his power to help her while she treats him badly and idolizes her late husband. By the end of the novel Becky is impoverished and disgraced. Amelia finally realizes Dobbin’s true worth and they marry. Eventually Becky’s son by Rawdon inherits the family title and fortune and supports her, though she was an indifferent mother to him.
What Makes it Great?
Thackeray is a master at capturing the subtle gradations in moral character that make life so confusing. There are paradoxes everywhere we look. Sweet, gentle Amelia is Becky’s polar opposite, and should, by rights, be the true heroine of the novel, but it doesn’t exactly work that way. It is the genius of Thackeray to bring these two girls into all sorts of trying situations where the reader may see their true characters revealed, without ever taking the side of either. Becky is nearly always bad, though she has many endearing qualities. Amelia is nearly always perfect, and rather irritating! Rather than offering us the standard fare of good souls in conflict with evil ones, Thackeray offers us a cast of complex, realistic characters that struggle to make right choices in a confusing world.
To further anchor his characters in the real world, Thackeray places them against the backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars. However, his version of the historical novel is different from Tolstoy’s War and Peace, or Hugo’s Les Miserables. In those books the battles are gritty and realistically drawn, and the people are idealized as either good or evil. In Thackeray, the battles are largely ignored, history is merely touched upon, but the everyday struggles in the drawing room, the nursery, the schoolroom, or at the dinner table are shown to be where the real victories and defeats of life take place. Thus, though his story is placed in a historical setting, it would perhaps be more accurate to call Thackeray a moral realist, since ethical behavior is his chief concern.
One quickly gets the impression that it matters very little to Thackeray who wins the battle of Waterloo: what is important is whether George, the young soldier destined to fight and die there, will be faithful to his young wife on the eve of that battle. And the disastrous losses suffered by businessmen who speculated on that war are less important than whether George’s father, who profited thereby, will be merciful to those less fortunate than himself. Sometimes his characters succeed, and sometimes they fail, but Thackeray never blinks; we see the whole heart revealed in his masterful prose.
A fine example of this moral realism is the character of George Osbourne, the dashing soldier beloved by Amelia since girlhood. George is handsome but weak, charming but spoiled, and nearly abandons Amelia when her family’s financial ruin causes George’s father to turn against the match. The one, great, honorable character in the novel, George’s friend Dobbin, persuades him that he must go ahead with the marriage. George is constantly disappointing us, yet by viewing him through the adoring Amelia’s eyes and the worshipful eyes of the other soldiers, we come to love George in spite of his weakness and mourn his loss. Only Becky sees him without sentimentality, as she sees everyone; just as they are and in terms of how they might benefit her schemes.
We all know a George Osbourne. We know an Amelia, a Becky, and if we are lucky, we may meet one or two people of Dobbin’s caliber in the course of our lives. Each character represents a type of person, and yet each character has an endearing individuality that renders them unforgettable. Thackeray has the knack of identifying his characters by certain material objects that surround them, such as Dobbin’s cloak, Amelia’s miniatures, and Becky’s special little box that hides her treasures and will contain the resolution of the novel’s plot. These physical clues to inner character abound in Thackeray and are part of the pleasure of his style. For Thackeray, actions often speak louder than words: in a moment of crisis he may say little about how a character feels and instead shows what they do.
Did You Know?
Like many novels of the time, Vanity Fair was published as a serial before being sold in book form; it was printed in 20 monthly parts between January 1847 and July 1848. Its canary-yellow cover was Thackeray’s signature color (Dickens’s was blue-green) and allowed passers-by to notice a new Thackeray number in a bookstall from a distance. It was also the first work that Thackeray published
under his own name, and was a bestseller. The original monthly numbers and later bound version featured Thackeray’s own illustrations, which at times provided plot hints or symbolically freighted images (a major character shown as a man-eating mermaid, for instance) to which the text does not explicitly refer.
Here, for example, is the scene where George’s father reacts to the news of his son’s marriage, a union he once promoted but now opposes for purely selfish reasons:
“He opened the book-case, and took down the great red Bible we have spoken of—a pompous book, seldom looked at, and shining all over with gold. There was a frontispiece to the volume, representing Abraham sacrificing Isaac. Here, according to custom, Osborne had recorded on the fly-leaf, and in his large clerk-like hand, the dates of his marriage and his wife’s death, and the births and Christian names of his children . . . . Taking a pen, he carefully obliterated George’s names from the page; and when the leaf was quite dry, restored the volume to the place from which he had moved it.” (p. 272)
Every phrase here is full of emotional information: from the Bible, encrusted in gold but seldom read, to the reference to Abraham and Isaac (George is sacrificed, not on the altar of God through obedience, but on the altar of the world through his father’s pride) to his “clerk-like” hand, which reminds us that Osbourne Senior is not a gentleman, but only a small man with a large amount of money. The crowning irony, of course, is that in his most evil moment this father takes his son’s name out of the Bible, and by so doing ensures that his own name is struck from the Lamb’s Book of Life. Though Thackeray did not espouse religion, he was committed to the idea that the true mark of a “gentleman” was not birth or wealth, but integrity and morality. This notion of the true gentleman looms large in Vanity Fair. When young George Junior comes to know his godfather, Major Dobbin, he realizes that Dobbin is in a different class from the fashionable, shallow people that surround him:
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