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If you need to read up on the movements this work belongs to you can click the following links: Romanticism / Gothic Literature

Book beginning: page 19

Gothic elements

• Nightmares.
• Cold, dark weather; eeriness.
• Ghosts on the moors and at Wuthering Heights.
• Dogs like vicious monsters.
• Sneaking around at night.
• Ladders coming down from traps.
• A lonely house in the middle of the wilderness.
• Paths that prevent getting back to safety.
• An air of solemnity about the characters.
• Madness.
• Talk of the devil and dark magic.
• Heathcliff’s descriptions (said by Nelly):
1. “[Heathcliff] foamed like a mad dog […] I did not feel as if I were in the company of a creature of my own species” (p143).
2. “Those deep black eyes! That smile, and ghastly paleness! It appeared to me, not Mr. Heathcliff, but a goblin. […] Is he a ghoul or a vampire? I had read of such hideous incarnate demons” (p273).

Characters

• The snowy weather described outside in chapter II, reflects the iciness between the characters inside.
• Everyone came and went but Ellen was the only constant, she was even ill at one point but managed to survive.
• Cathy and Hareton had the same initials as Catherine and Heathcliff.
• Cathy and Hareton mirror Catherine and Heathcliff:
1. The two ladies shared lively and confident natures; they both should have married advantageously without any problems but fell in love with inferior men (although both went on to be gentlemen); both women also teased the men about their appearances and lower intellect.
2. The two men shared brutish ways; fell in love with superior women, although in Hareton’s case (not known in Heathcliff’s) this was not due to a lack of birth right; and unusual for the time, they depended a lot on their female counterparts to elevate them in the world: Heathcliff improved his economy and became a gentleman so Catherine wouldn’t think him beneath her; and Hareton only became interested in learning how to read when Cathy appeared in his life.
3. The four as couples: Their time spent together seems as if the elder two’s boisterous activities out of doors made them as well suited as the hours Cathy and Hareton spent reading; Both ladies taught the boys the lessons they learnt: Catherine until her father’s death (p52) and Cathy after Linton’s death and loneliness set in (p261).
• Mr Lockwood is the unsuspecting and innocent man that reflects the reader, and by his means, we have intruded in on the characters’ lives.
• Nelly: “I noticed on that occasion how much selfishness there is even in a love like Mr. Linton’s, when he so regretted Catherine’s blessed release!” (p147)
  
  Even the most compassionate male characters in the book show many flaws due to love, not only did Mr Linton regret that his wife now lay in peace but he also abandoned his daughter in the first hours of her existence.

• With everything going on in the house between Catherine and Heathcliff, it seems odd that Mr Linton would be enjoying the weather as he walked home (p144), it shows how oblivious his character really is.
• When Nelly first talks about Cathy she says: “Its beginning was as friendless as its end is likely to be” (p146), but this is not true as Cathy went on to marry Hareton and be extremely happy.
• Heathcliff as a character demonstrates many types of strength: physical, health, inner/mental (against both physical and emotional abuse), and a will to carry out the impossible (his revenge).

Illness

• Practically everyone suffered from nerves at one point.
• Whenever Heathcliff had been out in the coldish, wet weather he was fine afterwards, however, when this happened to everyone else, they were laid up in bed for at least three months or ended up dying. This not only indicates the harsh circumstances of his childhood work and activities, but also how hardened he’d really become in life.

Catherine and Heathcliff’s relationship

• There is something almost savage about the way Heathcliff and Catherine grew up on the moors, with as much indifference to hours spent in the rain as the punishment received because of them (p52). One has to wonder if to achieve a love as everlasting as theirs, if it is not compulsory to be so completely primitive to society’s ways, and so raw in character that you can make a proclamation such as “Catherine has a heart as deep as I have” (p134), and still come off so traditionally masculine. This is one of the many lines Heathcliff says without the slightest worry of showing weakness or vulnerability, and if anything, gives a sense of ever growing strength.
• Catherine wished to never be parted from Heathcliff (p142), and Heathcliff wished to be haunted by Catherine for the remainder of his days (p148). It would seem they were granted this, as she haunted him to his dying day (chapter III & XXXIV) and was then, after his death, seen with him running on the moors (p278).  
• Mr Lockwood believes them at peace in the finishing lines, not as roaming spirits on the moors (p279).

Heathcliff’s revenge

• Heathcliff married Isabella for revenge, but had been fooled by the situation as to how annoying she really was: “The nuisance of her presence outweighs the gratification to be derived from tormenting her!” (p136).
• He got revenge on Hindley in two ways, the first, by giving him money to mortgage Wuthering Heights bit by bit, for Hindley’s gaming problems, and upon Hindley’s death actually owned the entire property (p164). And the second, starting during his lifetime, turning his son Hareton against him into a swearing brute (p103), much like Hindley had taken Heathcliff’s education away and made him a servant (p52). This meant that Hareton was then left a servant in his own home (p164), degrading the only Earnshaw left, and converting Heathcliff into the first gentleman of the neighbourhood.
• When Heathcliff compares Hindley’s son to his own (Hareton and Linton): “One is gold put to the use of paving-stones, and the other is tin polished to ape a service of silver” (p188). Although Heathcliff degrading Hareton is the return of a poor favour to Hindley, Heathcliff did actually value the son rather a lot, and as we can see here, valued him above his own.
• Heathcliff got his revenge on the Linton family, not only for being the ones to take Catherine away from him but also due to his reproach of Mr Linton being the type of respectable man she could marry in the first place. Heathcliff put his plan in motion by marrying Isabella, making her brother part ways her at first (p134), and then having their son: Linton. His plan continued that he should marry off their son to Cathy, the daughter of Edgar and Catherine, and force Linton to sign over all of his and Cathy’s property to him when deceased (chapter XXVIII). Therefore upon Linton’s death, Heathcliff was the sole owner of both Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange (p245/6).
• To a certain extent Heathcliff even got revenge on Catherine, although he does say it isn’t part of the plan (p105). However, she points out that he can “quarrel with Edgar […] and deceive his sister: [he]’ll hit on exactly the most efficient method of revenging [him]self on [her]” (p106).
• In part, Heathcliff does not have a foolproof plan as seen when Cathy says: “However miserable you make us, we shall still have the revenge of thinking that your cruelty arises from your greater misery” (p240). Not to mention, that in the end, the lineage is restored as property ownership falls back to both the Earnshaw and Linton families.

Religion and sin

• Once her father had passed, Catherine fell under the care of her elder brother Hindley, and the only area he took an interest in was hers and Heathcliff’s religious practise. And, this was only due to the curate and Joseph reprimanding his negligence (p52).
• God was what made Linton the better man (p162), not only in the way he lived his life but also upon his wife’s death when he had faith in God and found peace again (p161), as opposed to Heathcliff who complicated his life by asking to be haunted by Catherine (p148).
• Joseph’s character was always present, much to the irritation of other characters, to give the input of religious teaching (p48/9), it shows the contrasts between what the characters actually did, and what they should have done according to the Bible.

Pride

• There is a lot of mention about pride as the motive for characters’ actions:
1. Heathcliff talking to Catherine and Hindley: “Shame and pride threw double gloom over his countenance […] I shall not [shake hands], I shall not stand to be laughed at” (p58).
2. Heathcliff had a “proud heart and an empty stomach” one night before going to bed (p60).
3. Catherine “was so proud, it became really impossible to pity her distresses” (p69)
4. [Hindley] was rather too indulgent in humouring [Catherine’s] caprices; not from affection, but from pride” (p87).
5. Isabella had to smother her pride and choke her wrath (p131) following her marriage to Heathcliff.
6. Heathcliff about Hareton: “I’ve got him faster than his scoundrel of a father secured me, and lower; for he takes a pride in his brutishness” (p188).
7. “[Cathy] presently saw fit to retreat to her solitude: but the frost had set in, and, in spite of her pride, she was forced to condescend to our company, more and more (p248).
8. Hareton to Cathy: “I shall have naught to do wi’ you and your mucky pride” (p260).
• Nelly about Heathcliff when the father still lived: “That humouring was rich nourishment to the child’s pride and black tempers” (p48).
• “Joseph had instilled into [Hareton] a pride of name, and of his lineage; he would, had he dared, have fostered hate between him and the present owner of the Heights; but his dread of that owner amounted to superstition” (p171).

Brontë, Emily. Wuthering Heights. Penguin Popular Classics, 1994.