Wuthering Heights

Brontë structures the novel so that you are always receiving the story secondhand. Nelly tells Lockwood, who tells us. Occasionally Nelly reads aloud from Isabella's letters. Occasionally other characters narrate their own portions. The effect is that the most volcanic emotional moments in the book are always being described by someone standing slightly outside them. You never get direct access to what Heathcliff feels or what Catherine means. You get Nelly's interpretation, which is intelligent but limited, sympathetic but biased. Brontë is asking you to read between the lines of someone who is already reading between the lines.

What the novel is really doing, underneath the revenge plot and the gothic atmosphere, is examining what love becomes when it has no legitimate outlet. Catherine and Heathcliff are not kept apart by a misunderstanding or a villain. They are kept apart by class, by money, by the very real social architecture of the time, and by Catherine's own choice. She loves Heathcliff and marries Edgar because she understands that love alone is not enough to live on. Brontë does not punish her for this exactly. But she does show the cost.

Heathcliff's violence is easier to read as pure villainy if you ignore where it comes from. He is brought in as a child and immediately othered, mocked for his appearance, stripped of the name he was given, reduced to a labourer in the house he briefly called home. When he returns with power, he uses it the way it was used against him. This is not presented as justified. It is presented as logical, which is more uncomfortable. Brontë gives him enough interiority for you to track his reasoning without ever quite letting you off the hook for finding it monstrous.

The moors function as more than a setting. They are the one space in the novel where the social rules don't apply, where Catherine and Heathcliff are equal, where no one has more claim than anyone else. Every tragedy in the book begins with one of them moving indoors, into houses that belong to hierarchies they can't escape. The novel begins and ends outside. That is not an accident.