The Presentation of Hindley Earnshaw in Wuthering Heights

Abstract

Hindley Earnshaw is quite likely to be adjudged by many readers as the most unpleasant character portrayed in Emily Brontë’s novel Wuthering Heights (1847). Certainly, the number of negative references to him far outbalance those made to any other figure in the narrative. Yet it is interesting to note that, in spite of our perforce reacting unfavourably for the most part to Hindley’s speech and behaviour, we nevertheless find ourselves eventually having quite ambivalent feelings about him, and that principally through his association with people outside his immediate family: Nelly Dean, Joseph, Isabella and, to some extent, Mr Kenneth. It is, moreover, through these relationships that Brontë partly supplements what we think we already know about these characters by revealing unusual or unexpected aspects of them. Indeed, it is a testimony to Emily Brontë’s profound knowledge of human nature that she enables us to understand why we may sometimes feel sympathetic towards someone all too readily dismissed as a mere villain.