Wuthering Heights (Emily Brontë, 1847)

Emily Brontë. Wuthering Heights. Pub. 1847. Ed. Pauline Nestor. Penguin Classics, 2003. Print.

• Pub 3 vol by Newby (lower-rent than Smith, Elder who pub. Charlotte: see Sutherland 1976, List of Victorian publishers)
• Good for: 22-4 Lockwood reading Catherine's marginalia then seeing her ghost; 62 Lockwood and nelly dean talking about storytelling methods (Benjamin storytelling/novel); catching reader up at the beginning of Vol 2 brief metafictive framing of Nelly as narrator/storyteller (interesting that Lockwood chooses the former term); 249 partial and inadequate reading of books a dramatization of theme of misunderstanding

General Notes

• 22-4 extraordinary passage with Lockwood reading Catherine's narrative in the book, then dreaming, then the ghost
• 34-5 Mrs Dean gives somewhat convoluted genealogy
• 37 heathcliff industrial surplus from Liverpool
• 62 Lockwood and nelly dean talking about storytelling methods
  • Benjamin storytelling/novel
• that and 63 metafictive
• 70 metaphorizes heathcliff as looking like "bleak, Holly coal country"
• 81 Catherine's dream that she doesn't belong in heaven
• 82 physical bodies separate and delineate but souls (as C's and H's) can unify between them
• 102 heathcliff no longer coal country but "an arid wilderness"
• 120 lots of books in the Thrushcross Grange library never being opened by Edgar et al - very Price 2012
• 122 Cathy's rambling an avian version of Ophelia's flowers - lists and insanity
• 125 Cathy's monologue -- wonderful
• lots of interesting stuff in ch xii of vol 1
• 126 their souls are one
• 136ff Isabella's long letter -- "Any relic of the dead is precious, if they were valued living."
• 158 beginning vol 2 - brief metafictive framing of Nelly as narrator/storyteller (interesting that Lockwood chooses the former term)
  • also just enough to catch a reader up -- "I had heard all of my neighbor's history"
• 161 he's my soul
• 167 the former inhabitantS of cathy's body
• 185 Catherine to L / Cathy to H, young Cathy to L / Catherine else: chiastic naming, intimacy
• 224 letters between Catherine and linton almost a form of perversion
  • 226: "A fine bundle of trash you study in your leisure hours to be sure - Why, it's good enough to be printed!
• 249 Hareton trying to read the sign above the gate - the spectrum of not reading in this novel, or partial/inadequate reading
• 254 linton's "distorted nature" never to be at ease or let others be -- Heathcliff's physical distortion inherited as mental
• 266 now Catherine compared to the landscape more positively than heathcliff
• 288-9 Heathcliff opening Cathy's coffin
• 299 "she's a beauty, true; but not an angel." Lockwood ref toNelly's unreliability , though I trust her more
• 309 nelly says heathcliff has a "queer end"

Theme Tracking

Shakespeare allusions

• 6: Twelfth Night - Lockwood recounting failed courting says he "never told my love"
• 17 Lear - Lockwood when trying to escape WH utrers "several incoherent threats of retaliation that, in their indefinite depth of virulence, smacked of king Lear utters"
• beginning of ch 4 "what vain weathercocks we are" - Love's Labours Lost "what Caine? What weathercock?" I.1.94