Wuthering Heights Contains Many Examples

¶ … Wuthering Heights contains many examples of exiles and intruders. Even Catherine dreams she is being flung out of heaven. Discuss this theme of exile and intruders in the novel, concluding your study with some observations on whether this theme works itself out at the end of the novel.

Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights is a novel about alienation as much as it is about romance. Even the 'frame tale' of this Victorian gothic novel involves an individual in an alienated state. Mr. Lockwood comes to the world of Heathcliff as an outsider to the strange world of the remote community. Only after the housekeeper Nelly Dean apprises him of the long and tortured history of the Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff does Lockwood fully understand the familial arrangement of his landlord, and why a sullen, aristocratic girl is keeping house for the domineering, silent Heathcliff.

The image of the outsider looking in also dominates the novel. When the ghost of Catherine makes her presence known to Lockwood, she does so as a child reaching through the window, crying out that she has been wandering the moors for many years. When Catherine and Heathcliff first encounter the Lintons as young people, they do so after they have been wandering on the moors, and stare at the family through the glass of the house when the Lintons are having a ball. Heathcliff, after spying upon Catherine and hearing her apparently dismiss him, when she says that it would lower her to marry him, becomes an exile in America. Then, after making his fortune, Heathcliff pursues Cathy after his return to England. In the first half of the novel Heathcliff is often portrayed as wandering the grounds of the Linton estate or standing at Catherine's window -- always the outsider looking in. Although Heathcliff is no longer a stable boy, and can now enter polite society, his physical location 'on the outside' symbolizes how Heathcliff is still estranged normal morality in his frenzied pursuit of Catherine. He begins the novel as an orphan, of gypsy birth. Gradually, he encroaches into the world of the Lintons and the Earnshaw and accumulates the property of the fines families of the area through marriage, in revenge for his class-based exclusion and being denied marriage to his beloved Catherine. After her death, Catherine too becomes an exile -- an exile from the world of the living as she haunts Heathcliff, stalking the world of the moors.

Although Heathcliff is portrayed as the ultimate Byronic (or satanic) intruder and exile, his emotional kinship with Catherine ensures that he has an inroad into her heart that her legitimate husband Edgar Linton lacks. This is what Catherine means when she says that she is Heathcliff to Nelly Dean, and he is more herself than she is: while Catherine because of her class and gender tries to hem in and civilize her seething inner passions to some degree, fundamentally she is a wild, untamable creature like Heathcliff. After convalescing at the Lintons, Catherine returns appearing like a young lady, delicate and dressed in beautiful clothing that cannot be spoiled by Heathcliff's dirty face and hands. But the fact that Catherine is still drawn to Heathcliff indicates that this apparent veneer of civilization is not 'real' and merely a surface manifestation of finery, not evidence of Cathy's real nature. Catherine lives in a state of internal exile: her soul is at odds with how she is expected to behave, as an upper-class woman and as a wife.

Perhaps the most extreme statement of Catherine's sense of internal exile is her desire to be with Heathcliff rather than in heaven. This statement foreshadows her early death and her haunting of Heathcliff as a tormented spirit. Even though she is 'supposed' to be happy in heaven (and a happy wife and mother when married to a rich man), Catherine is only happy in the presence of a man who satisfies her passion. She feels a sense of alienation, no matter what her location, except when she is with her beloved. Yet she also confesses to Nelly Dean that she wants to marry Edgar because Edgar is wealthy and has a highly esteemed name. Catherine's desire to dominate others leads her to marry a man that will give her social status, but her decision to do so brings her nothing but misery and shame, and nearly destroys the happiness not just of her husband and her lover, but also the subsequent generation.