Revision Cards - Wuthering Heights: A Level, Themes

Revise the key points

The novel is set in Yorkshire’s West Riding. It ends not long before steam-powered looms brought the industrial revolution to the area.
Thrushcross Grange, a manor house in Parkland in a rich valley, belongs to the lower gentry.
Wuthering Heights seems to be a long-established yeoman farmstead, up on the fells, a compact estate farmed by the family-members themselves.
Nelly is a respected housekeeper, highly educated, on a social level with professionals such as Dr Kenneth and Lawyer Green.

Themes

Wuthering Heights: A Level

There are only three dates given in the novel, 1801, 1802 and ‘the summer of 1778 – that is nearly twenty-three years ago’ (p. 63).
Time passing is represented in several ways in this novel, including references to seasonal change, weather, the church calendar, grouse-shooting, anniversaries.
Emily Brontë deliberately hides her clock so it won’t get in the reader’s way; yet almost any date can be ascertained by means of close reading.
Brontë sets her novel more than seventy years before the time of writing, comparable to the ‘Tis Seventy Years Since’ of Scott’s landmark historical novel, Waverley.

Themes

Wuthering Heights: A Level

Romanticism often privileges the vision of childhood and youth over the insights of more mature years. Wordsworth says growing up is like being inside a darkening prison house.
In Wuthering Heights the mature or elderly people are in supportive roles, such as Joseph and Nelly.
No major character in the novel lives past 40, though there is some chance that Cathy and Hareton may do so.
Catherine is 19 when she dies, Heathcliff around 38, Edgar 39, Isabella about 32, Hindley 27 and Linton 17.

Themes

Wuthering Heights: A Level

Many novels show a lack of interest in the world of work as soulless and mechanical, but Brontë ensures her characters have full portfolios.
‘A person who has not done one half of his day’s work by ten o’clock, runs a chance of leaving the other half undone’ (p. 62). Nelly’s maxim sums up the novel’s work ethic.
Nelly is a workaholic. As a girl she looked for ‘anything that anybody would set me to’ (p. 35). Lockwood’s idleness distresses her.
Joseph – salesman, foreman, undertaker, ‘chaplain’, lay preacher – turns his hand to anything, and still finds plenty of time to moralise on the life of the other characters.

Themes

Wuthering Heights: A Level

Although the novel is about the rise of Heathcliff from the streets of Liverpool to be master of two houses, social mobility seems otherwise unknown.
If an Earnshaw marries a Linton there is a gain in property but none in status.
Neither family seems to mix much with a County Set, and Gimmerton seems to be too small for Assembly Rooms or public balls, so opportunities to meet new people are very limited.
Even Heathcliff, the levelling outsider, has no permanent impact on the social system as at the end of the book the ‘ancient stock were restored to their rights’ (p. 335).