Heathcliff's Long Game, or, A 'Wuthering Heights' Revenge Primer

Does he do it all for love? No, he does it for the money. Why Emily Brontë's windswept romance is actually a novel of revenge

First, a cinema newsflash: I have seen “Wuthering Heights”! Stay tuned for thoughts and reactions on Monday, when the embargo lifts.

And an audio note: earlier this week I spoke with Delia Cai, proprietor of the invaluable Deez Links media and culture newsletter, all about Wuthering Heights. Delia was a staff writer at Vanity Fair during my tenure, and it was great to reunite on her podcast (listen here!) and answer her questions about what the deal is with Nelly’s meddling, what scene I’d be most curious to see filmed (hint: it takes place in a graveyard), and how I approach book-club moderating in real life. And we talked about all the ways Wuthering Heights is, in my opinion, everything but a love story.

Here’s me, on the podcast, explaining that WH is actually a novel of revenge, possibly a legal thriller (this is just a picture of me doing it, because embedding audio clips is hard, turns out):

Be warned that Delia and I talk about the ending of the book. If you don’t want to hear it, you can just shriek “I am Heathcliff!” over and over again until we’ve moved on.

Now to the topic at hand

Last week in Brontëland was all about orphans—so sweet and lovable (some of the time), and also so useful to novelists! This week, I want to talk about inheritance, the passing of wealth and status (or lack thereof) from one generation to the next, as another driving force of narrative and plot resolution in the 19th century.

Incidentally, it’s not as if all the working novelists in a given period get together and decide they are going to embrace certain topics en masse. But during the 1800s, as the English novel gained cultural clout (among other reasons, the rise of mass literacy created a much bigger readership), it also absorbed, reflected, and advanced arguments about prevailing ideas of the time. Ideas such as…

• social mobility (as we discussed in the orphan context)

• scientific progress (this is a big one in Middlemarch, which features a doctor as one of its protagonists)

• industrialization (Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South)

• identity and personhood (The Woman in White)

• the rule of law (Bleak House)

• all sorts of other stuff that was in the ether

It’s compelling to me to see these ideas teased out through fiction, where an author can exert control over the story. It’s also a fascinating exercise to apply that mindset to contemporary fiction. Fifty or 100 years from now, what will people say were the prevailing ideas of our time, and how do they show up in literature? I’ll leave it there for now, but I’d love to come back to this at some point.

How Inheritance Works in Fiction

So what does a focus on inheritance offer the novelist, thematically? It demonstrates the preservation of wealth (or other tangible and intangible assets) possessed by the novel’s major characters, and the continuation of that wealth into the next generation. Alternately, if an inheritance is redirected or revoked, it signifies a disruption of that order. Many classic 19th century novels (and quite a few 20th and 21st century ones) march toward a grand accounting, a tally of who has assets, where those assets came from, and where they are going to go next. And that in turn ties into our final accounting of the success or failure of certain characters and what they represent.

Take Pride and Prejudice as an example. At the end of the novel, Darcy and Elizabeth have 10,000 pounds a year (income from his investments and his delightful estate, Pemberley). Bingley and Jane have 5,000. Lydia, who chose poorly from a financial point of view, is with Wickham and perennially in debt. Everybody gets what they deserve. (Elizabeth might argue that she’s not worth twice Jane, but Darcy would beg to differ. My opinion has always been that Lizzy’s wit adds significant value to Darcy Enterprises.) Annoyingly, Mr. Collins will still get the house when Mr. Bennet dies, but we can live with that for the sake of Mrs. Collins, aka Elizabeth’s old friend Charlotte. It’s tidy and satisfying, and it all adds up.

So marriage, which solidifies a merger, is one way to illustrate the final distribution of assets within a novel. And as the inheritors, the children of that marriage—implied if not yet present—will carry those assets forward. When you introduce an orphan of unknown origin into the mix, things get more complicated. Orphans are not always immediately identifiable as part of a direct line of succession, but as their plots unfold, it’s possible for them to discover relatives or be adopted into a family and, as in the case of Oliver Twist or Jane Eyre, become a financial beneficiary.

‘She’s her brother’s heir, is she not?’

Of course, being named a financial beneficiary is not what happens to Heathcliff. (I fault Mr. Earnshaw for leaving him in legal limbo.) He’s got to forge his own path to acquiring wealth and property, from the outside. And boy does he ever. He’s meticulous about it, because for him it crosses over into the territory of revenge.

Here’s a condensed version: Heathcliff disappears after he overhears Cathy say it would degrade her to marry him. (Unfortunately he misses the complimentary stuff she says after that.) He returns several years later, and reintroduces himself to the Linton crew. I’ll let Nelly tell it:

Now fully revealed by the fire and candlelight, I was amazed, more than ever, to behold the transformation of Heathcliff. He had grown a tall, athletic, well-formed man, beside whom my master [Edgar Linton] seemed quite slender and youth-like. His upright carriage suggested the idea of his having been in the army. His countenance was much older in expression and decision of feature than Mr. Linton’s; it looked intelligent, and retained no marks of former degradation.

Brontë reveals no details about Heathcliff’s change in fortune; he refuses to respond to questions about it. Let’s take a moment to note that this is interesting in itself. By the mid-nineteenth century, novelists were beginning to play with the notion that wealth is not neutral; that it might be tainted or toxic because of its source. Perhaps it came from criminal activity, for example, or financial deception, or some otherwise suspect provenance. Dickens explores this idea at length in Great Expectations. Modern postcolonial critics have done incisive work tying the income of fictional families to the British imperial economy (plantation wealth based on slave labor, for example, lurks in the background of both Mansfield Park and Jane Eyre), showing that the cloistered, domestic spaces of classic English fiction are actually far more globally implicated than they appear.

Anyway, somebody ought to write Heathcliff: The Missing Years, because Brontë doesn’t go there. All that matters to her plot is how he interacts with Cathy, Hindley, Edgar, and Isabella. He flatters Cathy, telling her that he wants to stay at Wuthering Heights because it’s walking distance to her house and has fond memories for him of their shared childhood. He tells her that he has even promised to pay rent to Hindley.

These are at most partial truths. In actuality, he stays there to encourage Hindley to gamble with him and fall into his debt. He visits the Lintons and, on learning from Cathy that Isabella has developed what we would call a crush on him, declines any interest in her but then observes, “She’s her brother’s heir, is she not?” (He does this “after a brief silence,” during which you can practically hear the gears moving.) The answer is that she is, but only if Linton has no sons.

‘The guest was now the master’

Heathcliff’s primary goal is not vengeance against Cathy, but against her brother (who was cruel to him) and her husband (who offends him by being her husband). He is bloodless in his pursuit of it. After he elopes with Isabella, the miserable girl says this: “Whatever he may pretend, he wishes to provoke Edgar to desperation: he says he has married me on purpose to obtain power over him.”

Meanwhile, in her last act, Cathy gives birth to a daughter, and Nelly (doing a little legal exposition while mourning) points out that Cathy’s death leaves her bereaved husband without a male heir. Isabella will indeed come into possession of Thrushcross Grange upon Edgar’s death—and what Isabella possesses, her husband possesses, by law. These events take place in the 1780s, nearly a century before the passage of the Married Women’s Property Act in 1870, which would do exactly what its name suggests: allow married women to maintain property in their own name.

Hindley drinks himself to death six months after his sister’s death, whereupon, as Nelly says, “The guest was now the master of Wuthering Heights.” Hindley had mortgaged all the land to Heathcliff, to fund his gambling. His house, and the raising of his son, Hareton, both fall under Heathcliff’s control.

But one house isn’t enough for our hero. Heathcliff wants the other one too. He plays a long game. There’s work to do, involving the next generation, to pave the road to possession of Thrushcross Grange—work that, as we’ll see, Heathcliff is committed to doing.

Heathcliff’s relentlessness about taking possession is all recorded right there in the novel. He declares his intentions. He keeps pursuing them long after Cathy, the object of his affection/obsession, has exited the scene. He may lose his soul and his soulmate, but he keeps his head for accounting. There’s a blow-by-blow legal analysis by Charles Percy Sanger, published in 1926 and available here at thebrontes.net, that explains the distinctive symmetry of the inheritance plotting, and, rightly, credits Emily Bronte’s rigorous imagination with pulling it off so thoroughly.

And that’s why I don’t think of Wuthering Heights primarily as a love story. There’s passion and love in it, yes, but that gets buried midway through, at the funeral of Cathy Linton. Heathcliff doesn’t occupy those two desolate houses in deference to his lost love. He does it to show once and for all his ascent over those who treated him as inferior.

Stop reading here if you’re not ready for the bitter end!

In becoming master of the two estates, Heathcliff disrupts the pattern of inheritance, but it turns out to be only a blip. For all his success in wresting Wuthering Heights from Hindley Earnshaw, and Thrushcross Grange from Edgar Linton, he can’t break the cycle indefinitely. Both homes will presumably revert back to Hindley’s son and Edgar’s daughter (who are also the two grandchildren of Mr. Earnshaw), on the occasion of Heathcliff’s death.

I think the reason Heathcliff triumphs even temporarily is that Brontë feels some sympathy for this character she created, and his ungovernable passions. He who was scorned for so long—on account of his darkness, his poverty, his savage ways—has something redeemable in him. There’s a certain poetic justice in seeing him shake up two complacent families. But his efforts can’t be permitted to outlive him. Heathcliff has, on the merits, behaved very badly. His biological line ends with the death of his son. And when he himself goes to join Cathy and Edgar in the churchyard, he surrenders what was, after all, only a Pyrrhic victory of possession.