As we've got a new Wuthering Heights movie coming to town this weekend I thought I'd publish a post linking to the various posts I've written about that strange, passionate, and perverse story. I first read Wuthering Heights in high school and then again in graduate school, where I wrote a term paper about it. I pretty much forget that paper – though I've probably got it in storage somewhere – but I do remember that I was concerned about tying the two parts of the novel together.
Perhaps I even made a connection with the two-generation plot Shakespeare used in his late Romances, such at The Winter's Tale. In these romances a rift between the members of a male-female pair is opened in the first story and remains until it is resolved by a (successful) romance in the second generation. In The Winter's Tale Paulina is restored to Leontes through the romance of Perdita, their daughter, and Florizel. The restoration is rather grim in Wuthering Heights, as it happens when Heathcliff throws himself into the grave of the dead Catherine once he sees that Cathy Linton, his Catherine's daughter, has become attached to Hareton Earnshaw, who she is teaching to read. I've never written at length about the novel since then, but if I were to do so, that's what I concentrate on, that and the complicated narrative structure.
While I've not given the novel a full treatment, I have featured it in a number of posts. Here they are.
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Toward a Computational Historicism. Part 3: Abstraction at the Time Scale of History, April 23, 2014.
I discuss both The Winter's Tale and Wuthering Heights. I give particular attention to how the novel opens, pointing out how, because he assumes that the people he meets in the house must constitute a "natural" family, Lockwood makes several mistaken guesses about how these people are related. Moreover, both stories are about nature and nurture and the descent of character from one generation to the next.
Godzilla and Wuthering Heights, Kissing Cousins? April 25, 2024. From the post:
Thus both stories have a certain sequence of events that happens relatively late in the overall sequence. As the stories are actually narrated, however, this late sequence is moved to the beginning and the other sequences are adjusted to accommodate. In both cases the sequence that is moved involves a narrator external to the main sequence but known to the characters in it.
Wuthering Heights, Vampires, Handbooks, and Citizen Science, September 15, 2025.
Heathcliff, a vampire? No, but he's in the zone. Also, a link to the best reconstruction of the chronology of events in Wuthering Heights that I've been able to find. It's in The reader;s Guide to Wuthering Heights by Paul Thompson. Here's the link, Timeline.
The King’s Wayward Eye: For Claude Lévi-Strauss, October 25, 2019.
Beyond Lévi-Strauss, this post is mostly about The Winter's Tale in its relation to Pandosto. But it's got two paragraphs about the two-generation plot in Wuthering Heights near. That whole post is a good context in which to read those two paragraphs.
Humans and Dogs in Wuthering Heights, September 1, 2021 (reposted from The Valve, 12.30.2009)
I note: "...violence between dogs and humans takes place at important transition points in the novel. I’ve collected five such passages in this post and italicized the dog references within each passage." At that point I'd only made it through 18 out of 24 chapters. I wonder how dogs will appear in the current movie?
Operationalizing two tasks in Gary Marcus’s AGI challenge, June 9, 2022.
Among other things, Marcus claims that "In 2029, AI will not be able to read a novel and reliably answer questions about plot, character, conflicts, motivations, etc. Key will be going beyond the literal text, as Davis and I explain in Rebooting AI." In the last quarter toa third or so of the post I discuss some of the problems the AI would have with Wuthering Heights.
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