94 pages • 3 hours read
Emily BrontëWuthering Heights
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1847A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Symbols & Motifs
The Ghost of Catherine
The ghost of Catherine Earnshaw is a symbol of the past and the futility of any attempt to change the past. Catherine ghost’s presence outside her bedroom window during the snowstorm that forces Lockwood to stay overnight is evidence of the lingering nature of the past. Even an outsider like Lockwood must somehow experience the chaos and pain that dominates Wuthering Heights, which stands as a large monument to the abuses suffered by all who lived there.
The ghost, in its disembodied form, also represents the futility of anyone’s effort to alter the past, especially as memory becomes less reliable as the years pass by. Heathcliff desperately wants Catherine to appear to him in ghost form, but she appears only to others, as Lockwood reports the night of the snowstorm. This phenomenon is a painful reminder to Heathcliff that, even in death and despite their passionate attachment to each other, Catherine was never really his at any point. Interestingly, however, the ghost of Catherine might be a figment of Lockwood’s active imagination rather than an unambiguous supernatural sighting, so Heathcliff’s disappointment may be pointless.
The Wildness of the Landscape
Brontë’s native Haworth Romantic influence nature is overwhelming, like passion and rage. The wildness and the potential danger of the moors as a setting parallels the wild, unchecked emotions of the inhabitants of Wuthering Heights. The rocky expanses of land are not suitable for agriculture, and worse, the land can become marshy and wet, causing unfortunate souls who lose their way to drown in the confusing landscape. Even though the moors are dangerous and mysterious in one way, they are also comforting and magical in others. For example, when Heathcliff and Catherine are young, they escape the anger and meanness of Hindley by spending most of their days exploring the moors. In this landscape, they find their connection, and so the land cannot be as infertile as the desolate look of it suggests. Catherine is buried in the moors, a final resting place she herself has chosen, so the wildness of the landscape means something more to her than a polished family tomb.
The weather is often as extreme as this unhospitable terrain of northern England, and in this setting, young children repeatedly defy adult members of their household, generation after generation, just as crops defy cultivation in the infertile ground. Often, the wind kicks up in a severe way when emotions begin to run high, as if external storms in nature are in tune with the internal tempests that characterize the interactions between most of the characters of the novel. Just as Catherine’s spirit cannot be contained by others’ demands on her, her soul cannot be housed in a locked building; her grave must be out in the elements, where she can spend eternity as free as the wind and the snow.
