The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Emily Brontë · a novel in thirty-four chapters, in two volumes · December 1847 · published by Thomas Cautley Newby under the name Ellis Bell, as the first two volumes of a set whose third was Agnes Grey · scored on the 1847 text, read from knowledge; no text in hand, and English quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
Novel of passion and revenge in a two-generation family chronicle; Gothic romance moved into a working farmhouse, carried by a legal plot of property and inheritance
Mythos
The foundling from outside who displaces the son; the exile returned rich and unexplained; the demon lover who will not let the beloved rest in death; the ghost at the window who asks to come in; storm and calm in two houses that must be joined
Phase
From a visitor’s first calls at the Heights in 1801, through a servant’s telling of some thirty years, to his return in 1802 after Heathcliff’s death, with a marriage set for New Year’s Day 1803
Presentation
Fiction; thirty-four chapters in two volumes; Lockwood’s diary as the frame, Nelly Dean’s account within it, and within hers Isabella’s letter, Isabella’s spoken account and Zillah’s account
Register
From Lockwood’s arch, overwritten diary and Nelly’s plain, quick, partisan telling to Joseph’s Yorkshire dialect, Isabella’s horror, Heathcliff’s savage eloquence and Catherine’s delirium
Scale
Two families in two houses and four miles of moor; two generations joined by three marriages; the law of property and inheritance
Governing Proposition
A foundling brought into a farmhouse on the moor is degraded by the son of the house, loses the daughter of the house to the son of the Grange, and returns rich to take both houses by law, through mortgage, wardship and marriage, until his revenge fails in the second generation. The wager of the novel is that a love can be a claim of identity rather than a feeling, indifferent to morality, happiness and marriage; that cruelty is handed down, and that the pattern can repeat and then break; and that such a passion can be shown truly only from outside, by narrators who cannot understand it.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The book opens in a diary dated 1801, kept by a visitor to the Heights named Lockwood. Over the door of the house he finds a date, 1500, and a name, “Hareton Earnshaw” (ch. 1), and the name of the house, he notes, is a “significant provincial adjective”. Inside, he misreads everything. In the first two chapters he takes the dead rabbits for cats and the young woman of the house, Cathy, for Heathcliff’s wife; he records the dogs, the snow and a tea table he misreads. The reader enters through a man who cannot understand what he sees, and that is the book’s first instrument: this world cannot be entered by sympathy, and it will be shown from outside.
The novel was published in December 1847 by Thomas Cautley Newby, in London, under the name Ellis Bell, as the first two volumes of a three-volume set whose third was Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey. It has thirty-four chapters: the first volume holds chapters 1 to 14, the second chapters 15 to 34. Emily Brontë died in December 1848, and the book is complete as she saw it through the press. Lockwood keeps the frame. Inside it Nelly Dean, a servant, tells most of the book to him, and inside her telling are Isabella’s letter (ch. 13), Isabella’s spoken account (ch. 17) and Zillah’s account (ch. 30).
The structure is almost diagrammatic in its symmetry. Two houses, the Heights of the Earnshaws and Thrushcross Grange of the Lintons; two families, each with a son and a daughter in the first generation; three marriages that join the houses; and a last marriage, set for New Year’s Day 1803, that returns both names and both houses to their line. The chronology is wholly consistent and datable to the month, as C. P. Sanger showed in 1926, and the law of property and inheritance is used correctly. Catherine dies in chapter 16, a little short of the halfway mark; the second half belongs to the second generation, to Heathcliff’s revenge and to its failure. The name over the door is the name of the heir at the end.
Movement II
Lockwood spends a night at the Heights in an oak-panelled bed, and on its ledge he finds names scratched: Catherine Earnshaw, Heathcliff, Linton (ch. 3). He dreams of Branderham’s sermon. Then a child is at the window, asking to be let in, and he rubs its wrist on the broken glass: “Terror made me cruel” (ch. 3). The ghost at the window, asking to come in, is the book’s first figure of the dead who will not stay outside, and the man who meets it is the least fitted to understand it.
From here the story passes to Nelly, and back some thirty years. A child is brought into the Heights under a greatcoat, a foundling from the Liverpool streets, of no known origin and no surname, and is given a dead child’s name: Heathcliff. He comes into the house as both gift and threat. He displaces the son of the house, Hindley, and is cast down for it: Hindley degrades him and denies him his education. The daughter of the house is Catherine.
The book asks what he is and does not answer. He has no past the book will give, and his origin is a blank on which others write. The Grange, across the moor, is calm where the Heights is storm, and its children are Edgar and Isabella Linton. The novel’s law is that the two orders must meet, and that what is kept apart returns. The form keeps the reader outside both: Nelly is plain, quick and partisan, with her own stake and her own grudges, and there is no voice above her to judge.
Movement III
In chapter 9 Catherine confesses to Nelly why she will marry Edgar Linton. She tells a dream of heaven, from which angry angels flung her out “into the middle of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights”, and she woke sobbing for joy. And she says, “It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now.” Heathcliff overhears that much, and not what follows; Nelly lets him hear half. The book’s judge has let half a confession be heard, and the reader learns to judge her.
What follows is the book’s disclosure. “Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same,” Catherine says, and Linton’s soul is “as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire”. Against the foliage, which is her love for Linton, she sets her love for Heathcliff, “the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary”. Then: “I am Heathcliff!” The love is not a feeling but a claim of identity, and it is indifferent to morality, happiness and marriage. She marries Edgar for standing.
Heathcliff returns rich, and the book never says how. He is changed and unexplained: he counts money and reads law. He marries Isabella Linton, and her letter (ch. 13) tells the marriage from inside the Heights, in horror: “Is Mr. Heathcliff a man? If so, is he mad? And if not, is he a devil?” The book does not answer her. His revenge begins, and it is legal throughout: by mortgage, by wardship and by marriage he will take both houses without breaking the law.
Movement IV
Catherine falls ill. In her delirium (ch. 12) she pulls the feathers from her pillow and names the birds. Nelly withholds the illness from Edgar. The scene is given through the servant who disapproves of both lovers, and the delirium comes through whole: consciousness at its extremity, reported by the one person in the room least willing to credit it.
Heathcliff and Catherine meet a last time (ch. 15). She gives birth to a daughter, Cathy, and dies; it is chapter 16, a little short of the middle of the book. At dawn Heathcliff is in the garden, at a tree, and his cry is the book’s most naked: “I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!” (ch. 16). Isabella gives her own spoken account (ch. 17). The first generation is ended at the centre, and the book has half its length to run.
The heroine of the novel dies before its middle, and the hero is never redeemed. That is the swerve from the Gothic, from Byron and from the domestic novel of the 1840s: the terror is moved from castle and abbey into a working farmhouse, the Byronic hero is given no narrator’s sympathy, and the regional romance is told by its servant. No moral frame is set over any of it. The English novel of its decade was built on one.
Movement V
The second half replays the first in altered terms. Heathcliff degrades Hareton, Hindley’s son, as he was degraded himself, deliberately, as a copy. Isabella’s son, Linton Heathcliff, courts Cathy by letter, and Cathy is held at the Heights and forced into marriage with him (ch. 21 to 28); a will and a lawyer see to the rest. Edgar and Linton die within weeks, and Heathcliff holds both houses. These chapters are the book’s weakest: the machinery takes more pages than the knowledge needs, and Linton is drawn in one peevish note. Catherine’s coffin is opened (ch. 29). Zillah gives her account (ch. 30).
Then the copy fails. Hareton, whom Heathcliff made in the image of his own childhood, loves him anyway, and Cathy teaches him to read (ch. 32). Heathcliff watches and finds his purpose gone: “It is a poor conclusion, is it not?” he says, and “I have lost the faculty of enjoying their destruction” (ch. 33). In chapter 34 he is dead at the open lattice, his eyes that will not close. Hareton grieves at his grave. Lockwood, returned in 1802, comes to the three headstones on the slope by the moor, and the last sentence closes among moths and harebells on “unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth”.
The reviews of 1847 and 1848 were puzzled and in part repelled. In 1850 Charlotte Brontë issued the novel again with a “Biographical Notice” and an “Editor’s Preface”, normalised its punctuation and softened the spelling of Joseph’s speech, and wrote of her sister’s hero: “Whether it is right or advisable to create beings like Heathcliff, I do not know: I scarcely think it is.” The novel has been in print since without a break. It has been filmed by William Wyler, Luis Buñuel and Andrea Arnold, set as an opera by Bernard Herrmann and by Carlisle Floyd, and sung by Kate Bush, and Heathcliff has become the type of the dark lover in fiction and film. What he is, the book still does not say.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test finds little to take. Remove Lockwood and the book loses its first instrument: the outsider who misreads every relation at the Heights, taking the dead rabbits for cats and Cathy for Heathcliff’s wife (ch. 1 and 2), is how the reader enters a world that cannot be entered by sympathy. Remove the second generation and the revenge never meets its own failure; the book’s knowledge is that the pattern repeats and then, in Hareton and Cathy, breaks. Remove Isabella’s letter (ch. 13) and the marriage is told only from outside. What holds the axis lowest of the high figures is chapters 21 to 28, where the machinery of the revenge, the forced marriage, the will and the lawyer, takes more pages than its knowledge needs, and Linton Heathcliff is drawn in one peevish note for longer than one note sustains.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds. A love can be a claim of identity rather than a feeling: “I am Heathcliff!” (ch. 9). Such a love is indifferent to morality, happiness and marriage: “Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same” (ch. 9). Cruelty is handed down: Hindley degrades Heathcliff, Heathcliff degrades Hareton in turn, deliberately, as a copy, and Hareton loves him anyway and grieves at his grave. Passion works through property: the revenge is legal, by mortgage, wardship and marriage. And revenge exhausts itself: “I have lost the faculty of enjoying their destruction” (ch. 33). Held off the top because the central love is disclosed more as a force than as an understood condition; the book gives its terms without analysing them, and that is a choice with a price.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Height is reached often, in terror and in grandeur, and in the cold register more than the warm. The ghost at the window, where Lockwood rubs the child’s wrist on the broken glass: “Terror made me cruel” (ch. 3). Catherine’s dream of being flung out of heaven by angry angels “into the middle of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights” (ch. 9), where she wakes sobbing for joy. Her delirium, pulling the feathers from the pillow and naming the birds (ch. 12). The last meeting (ch. 15). Heathcliff at dawn: “I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!” (ch. 16). The opened coffin (ch. 29), the open lattice and the dead man’s face (ch. 34), and the quiet height of the last sentence. Held below the summit only because the Linton chapters fall flat for a stretch.
Score: 9.4 / 10
Myth built, and load-bearing. A foundling from the Liverpool streets, of no known origin and no surname, given a dead child’s name and brought in under a greatcoat as both gift and threat: the child from outside who displaces the son and is cast down, the exile who returns rich and unexplained, the demon lover who will not let the beloved rest in death, the ghost at the window who asks to come in. Two houses stand for two orders, storm and calm, and the novel’s law is that they must be joined. The archetypes stay particular: Heathcliff counts money and reads law, and Catherine marries for standing. Isabella asks, “Is Mr. Heathcliff a man? If so, is he mad? And if not, is he a devil?” (ch. 13), and the book never answers. Held a step from the top because the second generation’s myth is gentler and less built than the first.
Score: 9.3 / 10
The inheritance is the Gothic novel, Scott’s regional romance, Byron’s hero and the domestic novel of the 1840s. The swerve: Gothic terror moved from castle and abbey into a working farmhouse and its kitchen; a story told by two narrators who are neither the author nor reliable, a fashionable fool and a servant with her own stake and her own grudges, with no voice above them to judge; a hero never redeemed and a heroine who dies at the centre; and the refusal of a moral frame, when the English novel was built on one. The stake was paid: the reviews of 1847 and 1848 were puzzled and in part repelled, and in 1850 the author’s sister wrote, “Whether it is right or advisable to create beings like Heathcliff, I do not know: I scarcely think it is.” Held off the top by its debts: Byron and the Gothic were the materials, and the turn is in what was done with them.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Change the form and the book stops knowing what it knows. Told by an omniscient narrator, Heathcliff and Catherine would be judged or explained; told by Lockwood and Nelly, they are seen only from outside, by a man who cannot understand them and a woman who disapproves, and the passion stays out of reach, which is the knowledge. Nelly’s account is coloured: she withholds Catherine’s illness from Edgar, and she lets Heathcliff overhear half of chapter 9 and not the rest, so the reader judges the judge. The two generations are the argument: the second half replays the first in altered terms, so that the repetition can fail. The chronology, laid to the month across some thirty years, is the form’s spine. Held a step down because the frame thins in the second volume, where Lockwood is a listener and little more.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Evidence rather than promise: a hundred and seventy-nine years of reading that has not settled it. Virginia Woolf’s essay on the two Brontë novels (1916); C. P. Sanger’s The Structure of Wuthering Heights (1926), on its chronology and its law; Georges Bataille’s La Littérature et le mal (1957), which opens with Emily Brontë; Q. D. Leavis’s “A Fresh Approach to Wuthering Heights” (1969); Terry Eagleton’s Myths of Power (1975) and Heathcliff and the Great Hunger (1995); Frank Kermode’s The Classic (1975), which takes it as the type of the text that sustains plural readings; Gilbert and Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic (1979). The questions stay open: what Heathcliff is, whether Nelly is a villain, whether the ending is a restoration or a taming, whether the ghosts walk. Held a step down because the field of its interpretation is wide rather than deep.
Score: 9.3 / 10
The field is the English novel of the 1840s, and the European novel beyond it. The intrinsic force is very high: the novel showed that a story could be told with no authorial moral centre at all, that the Gothic could be made realist and the realist Gothic, and that a passion could be the subject of a novel without being punished or redeemed. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in 1847 it moved nobody, and the reach, delayed and so discounted, came after 1850, rose through the late century and became wide in the twentieth. It redirected the novel’s myth more than its form: Heathcliff became the type of the dark lover in fiction and film, in du Maurier’s Rebecca and a great part of the romance tradition, and Maryse Condé’s La Migration des cœurs (1995) rewrites the book in Guadeloupe and Cuba. The nested narration had less direct issue. Force near the top, reach a step below it.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Survival is demonstrated. Form: the text survives whole as published in 1847. Charlotte Brontë’s edition of 1850, which normalised the punctuation and softened the spelling of Joseph’s speech, is known and set aside; the modern critical text restores the first, and no part is lost. The printer’s misprints of 1847 are a small charge on the fabric, and are made good. Presence: in print since 1850 without a break, translated into most written languages, taught across the English-speaking world and beyond, filmed by William Wyler (1939), by Luis Buñuel as Abismos de pasión (1954) and by Andrea Arnold (2011), made an opera by Bernard Herrmann and by Carlisle Floyd, and a song by Kate Bush (1978). The entail and the Yorkshire farm are history, and the book is read for what they carried. Held below the top because a survival of under two centuries does not stand with the works of millennia.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Command of the medium is high and load-bearing. The chronology is exact across some thirty years and the law of property is right, as Sanger proved. The voices are distinct: Lockwood’s arch diary with its “significant provincial adjective” (ch. 1), Nelly’s plain and partisan telling, Joseph’s dialect, Isabella’s horror in her letter, Heathcliff’s savage eloquence, Catherine’s delirium. Scenes are built round the object at their centre: the date 1500 and “Hareton Earnshaw” over the door (ch. 1), the oak-panelled bed and the names scratched on its ledge, the window, the lock of hair in the locket, the primroses in the porridge. Charged: Nelly’s voice is at times too literary for her station, which the book half concedes; Lockwood’s opening manner runs to affectation a chapter longer than it needs; and the Linton chapters’ plot is handled with less tact than the rest.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: Lockwood’s comedy of manners in chapter 2, the dogs, the snow, the misread tea table; and the dead Heathcliff at the open lattice in chapter 34, his eyes that will not close. Or the reading lessons of Hareton and Cathy (ch. 32) and the opened coffin (ch. 29). One law governs them: the wildness of the Heights and the order of the Grange are forces that must meet, and what is kept apart returns. The ghosts obey it, the law of inheritance obeys it, the weather obeys it; the restoration at the end is not a softer world but the same one, with the dead let out to the moor and the living let into the house. The range is wide and held: farce, Gothic terror, legal plot, pastoral close. Charged: the second plot leans on contrivance, the forced marriage and the deaths of Edgar and Linton within weeks, that the first never needed.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Judged on what the book holds, in two houses and four miles of moor. Consciousness, in extremity: Catherine’s delirium, Heathcliff’s last days. The family, across two generations, as the medium of love and of damage. Property and class: the gentry of the Grange and the yeoman house of the Heights, the foundling’s rise by money and law, mortgage and wardship. Education and its denial, in Heathcliff’s degradation and in Hareton’s. Religion, in Joseph’s harsh Calvinism, the sermon in Lockwood’s dream and heaven refused. The natural order: weather, moor, animals, the seasons. The dead, as presences. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the narrowness of the world: the state, history and the wider society are absent, and no war, no politics and no town beyond a name enters the book. The narrowness is chosen, and the figure says what it costs.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
9.1 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier V · Epochal
Strongest Dimensions
The Sublime at 9.4, with The Archetypal Deep, The Swerve and The Bottomless Well at 9.3. A frequency of height, in terror and grandeur, from the ghost at the window and the dream of heaven refused to the open lattice and the last sentence; a myth built from a foundling, a ghost and two houses that must be joined; a Gothic moved into a farmhouse and told with no moral frame, at a cost the first reviews and the author’s sister recorded; and a hundred and seventy-nine years of reading that has not settled what Heathcliff is.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 8.4, held by the narrowness of the world: two houses and four miles of moor, with the state, history and the wider society absent, a narrowness chosen. Among the gated axes, Pressure on Tradition at 8.8, because the reach was delayed and came through the novel’s myth more than its method. Next above them, The Inevitable and The Made at 9.0, charged for chapters 21 to 28, where the machinery of the revenge takes more pages than its knowledge needs and is handled with less tact than the rest.
The Necessity Cap clears at 9.0 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.2, The Inner Law at 9.2, The Made at 9.0, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Archetypal Deep at 9.3, The Swerve at 9.3, The Imperishable at 9.2, The Unconcealment at 9.1 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.8 clear the bar of 8.5, Pressure on Tradition by three tenths. The Universal Minimum is met (the lowest of the eleven axes it covers is Pressure on Tradition at 8.8, against 7.5), and The Encompassed clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.4. Every summit condition is met.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, published by Thomas Cautley Newby, London, in December 1847, under the name Ellis Bell, as the first two volumes of a three-volume set whose third volume was Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey. It is scored as the 1847 text, the novel as Emily Brontë saw it through the press, as the modern critical editions restore it; she died in December 1848, and the book is complete as she published it. Charlotte Brontë’s edition of 1850, with its “Biographical Notice” and “Editor’s Preface”, normalised the punctuation and softened the spelling of Joseph’s Yorkshire speech; those changes are not the work, and are named only as part of its history. Newby’s misprints in 1847 are a printer’s, not the author’s, and are not charged to The Made. Joseph’s dialect is scored as written in 1847. The language is English, and no translation stands between the reader and the work. No text was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. English is quoted only where its words are certain, and cited by chapter, numbered 1 to 34 through both volumes (the volumes of 1847 number afresh, and chapter 15 is the first of the second); everything else is paraphrased. Facts that could not be verified, among them the length in words, the dating of the story’s events month by month, the edition now taken as the standard text, the wording of some of Catherine’s phrases and the dates of some critical readings, are not given.