The repetitions in Wuthering Heights are complex and serve multiple purposes. They emphasize key ideas, show the struggle for identity across generations, highlight both similarities and differences between characters, illustrate what has been lost, and reveal that similar situations can have different outcomes depending on human values. Overall, the repetitions reflect the complex and ambiguous nature of the characters, relationships, and themes in this Gothic novel.

1. Is Wuthering Heights a Gothic
Novel?
Exploring oppositions

2. Write down the following main
characters and settings from the novel:
• Earnshaws • Frances Earnshaw
• Lintons • Lockwood
• Isabella Linton • Catherine Linton
• Heathcliff • Joseph
• Catherine Earnshaw • Edgar Linton
• Hareton Earnshaw • Nelly
• Hindley Earnshaw • Thrushcross Grange
• Linton Heathcliff • Wuthering Heights

3. Write down a few adjectives and nouns taken from
these ‘Oppositions’ alongside the appropriate character
name or place.
• high status • social inferiority
• educated • uneducated
• wealthy • poor
• wild • tame or domestic
• loving • hateful
• insider • outsider
• stormy • calm
• hostile • comfortable/friendly
• weak • strong
• secular (non-religious) • religious
• obedient • tyrannical
• civilized • savage
• nature • nurture
• bestial • human
• masculine • feminine

4. What role(s) do oppositions play
within the novel?
• Consider:
• the ways in which the characters change and
develop throughout the novel
• the fact that opposites sometimes attract
• the fact that apparent opposites may have
more in common than they would like at first
to admit.

5. David Daiches’ introduction to the
1965 edition of WH:
Throughout the novel the homely and the familiar and the wild and extravagant go
together, the former providing a setting for the latter ... We have noted a contrast
between the fireless grate at Thrushcross Grange and the roaring fires of Wuthering
Heights; but even more noticeable in the book is the contrast between the luxury and
comfort of Thrushcross Grange, lying in the soft valley below, and the fierce unpadded
existence at the Heights, which lie exposed to the winds on high moorland...
…this vision of a soft luxury at Thrushcross Grange ... provides the starting point for
that view of the novel which sees it essentially as a carefully patterned weaving of
multiple contrasts between storm and calm. This is the view persuasively argued by
Lord David Cecil in Chapter 5 of his Early Victorian Novelists (1948). Lord David
carefully divides the principal characters in the story into children of calm and children
of storm and their offspring, who are various crosses between the two; offspring of
love combine the best qualities of the parents and offspring of hate (eg Linton
Heathcliff) combine the worst. Children of storm mis-mated to children of calm or
frustrated in their desire to mate with fellow children of storm are driven to destructive
madness; but children of such mis-matings if those mismatings were made in love not
in hate (eg Catherine and Edgar, Hindley and Frances) can themselves mate and
restore harmony between opposing elements. Such harmony is restored by the
marriage of the younger Catherine with Hareton at the end of the novel.

6. • We are going to explore the ideas of Andrew
Green, from an essay he wrote entitled Life on
the Edge – Opposition and Fragmentation in
Wuthering Heights, from emagazine 31, 2006.

7. Gothic: a genre of opposition
As has repeatedly been observed by critics, the Gothic is a genre that resides on the borders and
extremes of experience; it thrives on opposition and division and has, at its heart, uncertainty, the
unsettling and the indefi nable. Wuthering Heights is no exception. It deals with questions of
moral, social, religious and personal doubt. To explore these questions, Brontë presents her readers
with a novel of mirror images, doubles and oppositions. Wuthering Heights violently juxtaposes good
and evil; innocence and guilt; freedom and imprisonment; the pursuer and the pursued; the moral and
immoral; the natural and supernatural, and the living and dead. A novel in which such oppositions
remained distinct would present a reassuring, morally certain world. This is not the world of the Gothic
and is not the world of Wuthering Heights: Brontë subjects these oppositions to intense pressure, until
they are revealed to be unstable, each implicated in the other: not only does it become diffi cult to tell
the diff erence between good and evil, moral and immoral but even between living and dead. The
impact of such oppositions and their collapse is profoundly unsettling for the reader. The ambiguities in
the novel lead to an ambivalence in the reader’s attitudes towards the characters and events. This
encapsulates the essentially contradictory and fragmentary nature of the Gothic genre. As David Punter
argues in The Literature of Terror:
‘Gothic writers work – consciously or unconsciously – on the fringe of the acceptable, for it
is on this borderland that fear resides. In the best works, the two sides of the border are grafted onto
each other.’
As a result, he suggests, Gothic works are ‘fragmentary, inconsistent, jagged ...’ If Gothic works ‘do not
come out right’, this is because they ‘deal in psychological areas which themselves do not come out
right.’ That is the form through which the Gothic novel enacts its themes. The growing complexity of the
relationships, motives and actions of the characters is both generated by, and refl ected in, the central
structural methods: the cycles of repetition, the echoes set up across and down the generations and the
collapsing oppositions. The behaviours and characteristics descending through the generations of
Earnshaws and the Lintons, create an inescapable vortex of violence and hatred, exaggerated through
the repetition in naming. In conjunction with the complex time scheme, Brontë’s manipulation of the
names ensures that the reader, like Lockwood, is repeatedly destabilised.

8. The doppelganger and oppositional pairs
A frequent motif in Gothic novels is the ‘double’ or ‘doppelganger’. While the English
term double suggests exact repetition (a twin), the doppelganger is far more sinister,
used to suggest the possibility of the evil side of a character: the monster in
Frankenstein, for example, can be understood as the destructive forces at work within
Victor Frankenstein’s psyche; Mr Hyde, in Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella Dr Jekyll
and Mr Hyde, is the dark uncontrolled force of science within the respectable Dr
Jekyll; in James Hogg’s dark tale of obsession The Private Memoirs and Confessions of
a Justified Sinner, the double is recognisably satanic in provenance.
In Wuthering Heights, Brontë exploits the motif of the double and the doppelganger,
not only in the character but in her presentation of oppositions as inextricably linked.
Lockwood – a narrator we quickly come to recognise as self-absorbed and wholly
unreliable – begins by greeting Heathcliff as his double. He is delighted to meet
another man who is weary of the world:
‘Mr Heathcliff and I are such a suitable pair to divide the desolation between
us.’
However, it is immediately apparent to the reader that this ‘pair’ have little in
common: where Lockwood constructs himself within a literary stereotype – sensitive,
disillusioned, bored with society and misanthropic – Heathcliff is the real thing, fuelled
by a burning hatred of society. The reader, like Lockwood himself, shifts to interpret
the two men as opposites: indeed they might be seen to ‘divide’ the world between
them, an interpretation reinforced by their names (wood v. heath). Lockwood
represents acceptable gentility; Heathcliff , of unknown parentage, is brutal without
the patina of civilisation and polished society.

9. The doppelganger and oppositional pairs (contd.)
The ease with which it is possible to attribute opposite personal characteristics and social values to the
two men, makes the collapse of these oppositions all the more shocking. Throughout the first three
framing chapters this oppositional relationship is questioned and blurred. Through the character of
Lockwood the values of civilised society – the society which sets itself up in opposition to the
raw, uncultivated world of Wuthering Heights – are compromised, revealed as implicated in the violence
it apparently shuns. We see this in Lockwood’s brutal treatment of the dogs; the violence of his
response to his humiliation; the verbs and adverbs used to describe his second visit to the Heights
(‘ejaculated’, ‘grasped’, ‘knocked’, ‘shook’, ‘vehemently’) and most particularly in his rubbing of the
waif’s wrists until they bleed.
‘I pulled its wrist onto the broken pane and rubbed it to and fro till the blood ran down and
soaked the bedclothes’
It is an opposition which is repeatedly established throughout the novel only to be undermined: young
Edgar and Isabella Linton fi ght over the dog, pulling it apart; the dogs protecting the superfi cially
civilised Thrushcross Grange attack and seriously injure Catherine *1+; Linton ‘winks’ at the violent
treatment of Catherine by Heathcliff ; Frances is encouraged to pull the hair of Heathcliff as he passes.
All of these examples of violence are taken from the ‘civilised’ world: domestic violence is seen and
accepted by all the characters, including the ‘gentlemanly’ Lockwood, as a normal part of everyday life.
As David Punter suggests, the Gothic novel explores its themes through its structure and this is seen
particularly clearly in the destabilising of conventional oppositions in Wuthering Heights. So too is the
marginal position that the Gothic occupies both in terms of its place among literary genres and its
exploration of liminal spaces – the places on the edge, at the boundary. In Wuthering Heights Brontë
repeatedly ensures these boundaries are crossed or broken: Catherine [1] declares that Heathcliff is
more herself than she is, destabilising the boundary between the self and other; she continues to exert
infl uence after death; windows are shattered, violating the limits society establishes between the
inside and outside, nature and culture, civilised and natural and so on. In this Gothic novel the rules by
which we expect the world and society to operate are not simply broken, they are shown not to apply;
appropriately for a novel of collapsing oppositions, this is both frightening and liberating.

10. Exploring repetition
Resemblance or Reversal?

11. What repetitions can you identify?
• Heathcliff
• Isabella (Linton) Heathcliff
• Catherine (Earnshaw) Linton
• Edgar Linton
• Hindley Earnshaw
• Frances Earnshaw
• Catherine (Linton) (Heathcliff ) Earnshaw
• Hareton Earnshaw
• Linton Heathcliff
What is the purpose in repeating the names in this way?

12. Mrs Dean raised the candle, and I
discerned a soft-featured face, exceedingly
resembling the young lady at the Heights, but
more pensive and amiable in expression.
(Lockwood narrates, talking about the
portrait of Edgar Linton, p106/p67)

13. • ‘Now that she’s dead, I see her in Hindley;
Hindley has exactly her eyes,’ (Isabella to
Heathcliff , p217/p182)

14. • That capacity for intense attachments
reminded me of her mother; still she did not
resemble her; for she could be soft and mild
as a dove (Nelly’s narration, regarding
Catherine [2], p224/p189)

15. • A pale, delicate, effeminate boy, who might
have been taken for my master’s younger
brother, so strong was the resemblance; but
there was a sickly peevishness in his aspect
that Edgar Linton never had. (Nelly’s
narration, describing Linton Heathcliff
, p235/p200)

16. • ‘He’s very delicate ... and scarcely likely to
reach manhood; but this I can say, he does not
resemble his father ...’ (Nelly to Edgar,
regarding Linton, p288/p256)

17. • ‘I know what he suffers now, for
instance, exactly – it is merely the beginning
of what he shall suffer, though. And he’ll never
be able to emerge from his bathos of
coarseness, and ignorance.’ (Heathcliff to
Nelly, about Hareton, p253/p219)

18. • They lifted their eyes together, to encounter
Mr Heathcliff – perhaps, you have never
remarked that their eyes are precisely similar,
and they are those of Catherine Earnshaw.
(Nelly’s narration, regarding Catherine [2] and
Hareton, p352/p322)

19. • ‘Five minutes ago, Hareton seemed a personifi
cation of my youth, not a human being – ... his
startling likeness to Catherine connected him
fearfully with her –’ (Heathcliff to
Nelly, p353/p323)

20. Which of these readings of repetition
do you find the most persuasive?
1. Repetition is about emphasis. Brontë is pointing up the key ideas
of the novel by repeating character traits across generations.
2. Repetition is about the struggle of these characters to find an
identity for themselves. The constant restrictions put upon them
by other characters and by society is their prison, and only
through the next generation can freedom be attained.
3. The patterns in this novel in relation to the characters’ names and
traits are as much about difference as about similarity. Brontë only
provides the overlap of traits to show how one generation differs
from the other.
4. The repetitions in the novel are often reminders of things that
have been lost, and are therefore about illustrating absence, not
presence.
5. The patterns of repetition reveal the fact that similar characters
and situations can have different outcomes – the final outcomes
for the second generation are more positive and
optimistic, showing a faith in the impact of positive human values.