Wuthering Heights

Themes · Wuthering Heights

The ideas it keeps circling back to.

1. 01

   Love as possession

   Heathcliff doesn't want to be with Catherine in any ordinary sense. He wants to be her, to keep her from belonging to anyone else, to outlast her even in death. The novel keeps asking whether what he feels is love or something that only resembles it from a distance.

2. 02

   Class and its cruelties

   Heathcliff is degraded because he has no name, no origin, no money. When he returns with all three, he wields them with the same coldness they were wielded against him. Brontë doesn't excuse it. She makes you understand it, which is harder.

3. 03

   Nature against society

   The moors are wild, indifferent, and equal. The houses are hierarchical and suffocating. Every character who tries to live entirely within one or the other comes undone.

4. 04

   Cycles and inheritance

   The second generation inherits the wounds of the first without inheriting the context. Hareton and young Cathy pay for sins that were never theirs. The novel asks whether any of it can be broken, and answers cautiously, quietly, yes.