Volume 21, Number 5 · April 4, 1974
Female Gothic: Monsters, Goblins, Freaks
By Ellen Moers
The first readers of Wuthering Heights were struck as we are still today by the perverse aspects of the novel. 'A disagreeable story' about 'painful and exceptional subjects,' said The Athenaeum, '…dwelling upon those physical acts of cruelty—the contemplation of which true taste rejects.' Much as that assessment misses—the strength, the solidity, the moral wisdom of the novel—it still sums up a side of Wuthering Heights that cannot be argued away. Emily Brontë's acceptance of the cruel as a normal, almost an invigorating component of human life sets her novel apart, from its opening pages to its close. Her first narrator, Lockwood, the foppish London visitor to Wuthering Heights who establishes our distance from the central Brontë world, falls asleep at the Heights at the start of the novel and dreams that Catherine—the dead Cathy, Heathcliff's love—is a child ghost outside the casement window, begging to be let in. 'Terror made me cruel,' says Lockwood; 'and, finding it useless to attempt shaking the creature off, I pulled its wrist on to the broken pane, and rubbed it to and fro till the blood ran down and soaked the bedclothes….'
Feature, 4613 words
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