The Strangeness of Wuthering Heights

Abstract

O UR EXPERIENCE of Wuthering Heights is now more than a hundred and twenty years old, but there still seems to be only one aspect of that experience about which there is general agreement. From Currer Bell to the present, readers of the book have found it strange, different somehow from other books. Wuthering Heights must indeed seem a rude and strange production to those unfamiliar with the West-Riding of Yorkshire, Charlotte Bronte admitted in her 1850 Editor's Preface; yet, even to her, a native of that place, the book is terrible and goblin-like as well as beautiful. The Examiner for 8 January 1848 began its review with the comment This is a strange while other contemporary reviewers spoke of wildness, violence (the Britannia for 15 January 1848), and power thrown away (the North American Review for October 1848). In our century, Lord David Cecil (1935) starts from the fact that Wuthering Heights is quite unlike other Victorian novels, and compares Emily Bronte to Blake in order to assert that some of the strangeness in her book disappears if we consider that she-like Blake-was a mystic. Dorothy Van Ghent, indeed, finds Wuthering Heights unlike fiction generally, noting (1953) that the content of the book, grotesque and passionate, is more usual as the content of ballads than novels. Some similar perception of what goes on in Wuthering Heights is no doubt also behind F. R. Leavis's famous last word in 1954 that the book is merely a sport. Of course, such sports, unlike many novels perhaps, may be honorable members of a prose tradition of their own. If, to approve of strangeness in fiction, we require a category for it, Richard Chase, with his interesting distinctions