1. Who is Heathcliff?
• Romantic Creation?
– ‘Handsome Prince’
– ‘child of the storm’
• Gothic Monster?
– ‘the dark little thing...?’
– ‘demonic inhuman’
• Some AO4?
– ‘Rage against the Machine’ (Marxist Reading)
-social outcast
-product of circumstance

2. Romantic Creation
• Heathcliff – ‘displays the battle between
traditional moral criteria and the claim that sheer
vitality of being is superior to conventionality of
being’ (Cedric Watts, 1988)
• “Its better to burn out, than fade away” (Neil
Young, 1979)
• “as he had no surname, and we could not tell his
age, we were obliged to content ourselves with
the single word, ‘Heathcliff’” (p330)

3. ‘Handsome Prince’
• “You’re fit for a prince in disguise. Who knows, but
your father was Emperor of China, and your mother an
Indian Queen, each of them able to buy up, with one
weeks income, Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross
Grange together”.
• Fairy Tales are Romantic?
– Concerned with romance and love
– Handsome Princes are physically alluring and ‘charming’
• Fairy Tales are Gothic?
– Disguise and mystery can be subversive
– Fairy Tales are violent and horrific

4. Child of the Storm
• ‘A natural force which has been frustrated of its
natural outlet, so that it inevitably becomes
destructive; like a mountain torrent diverted from
its channel’ (David Cecil, 1934)
• ‘A tendency to charge the landscape with
emotions that echo those of the characters that
populate it ... Is one of the most notable features
of Wuthering Heights’ (Peter Hyland, 1988)

5. • ‘The grim and forbidding Yorkshire moors,
hostile as they are to human activity ...
Provide an ideal setting for a grim story’.

6. A wild nature and being un-reclaimed – is
fundamental to his character.
• Tell her what Heathcliff is – an unreclaimed
creature, without refinement – without
cultivation; an arid wilderness of furze and
whinstone (Catherine warns Isabella)
Bronte draws on the hardest, most
elemental forms of nature to characterise
Heathcliff. The metaphors containing ...
-The thorny hostility of gorse ‘furze’
-The absolute hardness of stone
... does the work of a mass of adjectives

7. What’s in a name...?
Heath Cliff
Get it????

8. Gothic Monster
• ‘In Gothic narratives, a central figure is commonly
the charismatic villain...’ (Cedric Watts)
– Mysterious
– Saturnine (dark and moody)
– Brooding
– Powerful
– Ruthless
– Sexually menacing
– Tyranical

9. ‘This dark little thing....’
‘a night-creature gripped by dark or evil
ambitions’ (Cedric Watts)
‘... children of the night’ (Dracula, Stoker 1890)

10. Biblical Rejection – c.f. Prodigal Son.
- Going against God – Prometheus, Satan, Frankenstein
-A Classic Gothic Archetype.
• “I felt that God had forsaken the stray sheep
there to its own wicked wanderings, and an
evil beast prowled between it and the
fold, waiting his time to spring and destroy”
(Nelly doesn’t like the ‘new’ Heathcliff on his
return, p146)
Wicked, evil, beast – the diction of villainy
Prowl, spring, destroy – the verbs of a lurking menace

11. Demonic Inhuman?
• ‘I have no pity! I have no pity! The more worms
writhe the more I yearn to crush out their
entrails! It is moral teething, and I grind my teeth
with greater energy, in proportion to the increase
of pain’ (p189)
– Focus on Horror (physical suffering) as opposed to
Terror (mental aguish)
– Heathcliff appears almost like the classic ogre from
earlier Gothic texts and Fairy Tale.

12. Nice Guy? –
- Love for Catherine
- ‘rudely confessed regard for Hareton’
- ‘half-implied esteem for Nelly Dean’
- ‘These solitary traits omittted, we should say
he was ... a man’s shape animated by demon
life – a Ghoul’ (Charlotte Bronte 1850)

13. A Ghoul??
• Remind you of anybody??

14. Some AO4?
Yes, plea
se!

15. Social Outcast and Misfit
• Heathcliff
– appears in a rural economy
– mouthing ‘gibberish, that nobody could
understand’
– racially distinct ‘dark little thing’
• Heathcliff
‘proletarian offspring of industrial Liverpool’
(Peter Miles, 1990)
Marxist Reading

16. “Heathcliff ... You may come and wish Miss
Catherine welcome, like the other servants”
Hindley characterises Heathcliff as a ‘class’.
“They entirely refused to have it in bed with them, or
even in their room ... so I put it on the landing of the
stairs, hoping it might be gone on the morrow”
Nelly’s use of the pronoun ‘it’ to describe Heathcliff defines him as ‘the other’,
as removed from the culture of the Earnshaw household.

17. • “He has no social or domestic status, and he is
therefore both a threat to the established
order and an opportunity for it to be
reinvented” (Terry Eagleton, 1975)
More Marxism

18. Now write the essay ...
• Clear Structure (A01)
• Consistent use of quotation (A02)
• A discussion of the form of the novel (AO2)
• Reference to other texts (AO3)
• Use Critical Quotations (AO3 / 4)
• Give alternative readings (AO4)
• Discuss Screen adaptations (AO4)