Morality
Some early Victorian reviewers complained about how Wuthering Heights dealt with violence and immorality. One called it "a compound of vulgar depravity and unnatural horrors".[14]
Brontë was supposedly unaware of "the limits on polite expression" expected of Victorian novelists. Her characters use vulgar language, "cursing and swearing".[74] Though the daughter of a curate, Brontë shows little respect for religion in the novel; the only strongly religious character in Wuthering Heights is Joseph, who is usually seen as satirizing "the joyless version of Methodism that the Brontë children were exposed to through their Aunt Branwell".[75] A major influence on how Brontë depicts amoral characters was the stories her father Patrick Brontë told, about "the doings" of people around Haworth that his parishioners told him, "stories which 'made one shiver and shrink from hearing' (Charlotte's friend Ellen Nussey reported)", which were "full of grim humour" and violence, stories Emily Brontë took "as a truth".[76]
Shortly after Emily Brontë's death G.H. Lewes wrote in Leader Magazine:
Curious enough is to read Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and remember that the writers were two retiring, solitary, consumptive girls! Books, coarse even for men, coarse in language and coarse in conception, the coarseness apparently of violence and uncultivated men – turn out to be the productions of two girls living almost alone, filling their loneliness with quiet studies, and writing their books from a sense of duty, hating the pictures they drew, yet drawing them with austere conscientiousness! There is matter here for the moralist or critic to speculate on.[77]
Religion
Emily Brontë attended church regularly and came from a religious family.[78] Emily "never as far as we know, wrote anything which overtly criticised conventional religion. But she also has the reputation of being a rebel and iconoclast, driven by a spirit more pagan than orthodox Christian."[79] Derek Traversi, for example, sees in Wuthering Heights "a thirst for religious experience, 'which is not Christian'. It is this spirit which moves Catherine to exclaim, 'surely you and everybody have a notion that there is, or should be, an existence of yours beyond you. What were the use of my creation if I were entirely contained here?' " (Ch. IX).[80][81]
Thomas John Winnifrith, author of The Brontes and Their Background: Romance and Reality (Macmillan, 1977), argues that the allusions to Heaven and Hell are more than metaphors, and have a religious significance, because "for Heathcliff, the loss of Catherine is literally Hell ... 'existence after losing her would be Hell' (Ch. xiv, p. 117)." Likewise, in the final scene between them, Heathcliff writhes "in the torments of Hell (XV)".[80]
Daemonic
The eminent German Lutheran theologian and philosopher Rudolph Otto, author of The Idea of the Holy, saw in Wuthering Heights "a supreme example of 'the daemonic' in literature".[82] Otto links the "daemonic" with "a genuine religious experience".[83] Lisa Wang argues that in both Wuthering Heights, and in her poetry, Emily Brontë concentrates on "the non-conceptual, or what Rudolf Otto[84] has called 'the non-rational' aspect of religion ... the primal nature of religious experience over and above its doctrinal formulations".[85] This corresponds with the dictionary meaning: "of or relating to an inner or attendant spirit, esp. as a source of creative inspiration or genius".[86] This meaning was important to the Romantic movement.[87][88]
However, the word daemon can also mean "a demon or devil", and that is equally relevant to Heathcliff,[89] whom Peter McInerney describes as "a Satanic Don Juan".[90] Heathcliff is also "dark-skinned",[91] "as dark almost as if it came from the devil".[92] Likewise Charlotte Brontë described him "'a man's shape animated by demon life – a Ghoul – an Afreet'".[93] In Arabian mythology an "afreet", or ifrit, is a powerful jinn or demon.[94] However, John Bowen believes that "this is too simple a view", because the novel presents an alternative explanation of Heathcliff's cruel and sadistic behaviour; that is, that he has suffered terribly: "is an orphan; ... is brutalised by Hindley; ... relegated to the status of a servant; Catherine marries Edgar".[95]
Love
One 2007 British poll presented Wuthering Heights as the greatest love story of all time.[96] However, "some of the novel's admirers consider it not a love story at all but an exploration of evil and abuse".[48] Helen Small sees Wuthering Heights as being both "one of the greatest love stories in the English language" and at the same time one of the "most brutal revenge narratives".[97] Some critics suggest that reading Wuthering Heights as a love story not only "romanticizes abusive men and toxic relationships but goes against Brontë's clear intent".[48] Moreover, while a "passionate, doomed, death-transcending relationship between Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw Linton forms the core of the novel",[48] Wuthering Heights:
... consistently subverts the romantic narrative. Our first encounter with Heathcliff shows him to be a nasty bully. Later, Brontë puts in Heathcliff's mouth an explicit warning not to turn him into a Byronic hero: After ... Isabella elop[es] with him, he sneers that she did so "under a delusion ... picturing in me a hero of romance".[48]
"I am Heathcliff" is a frequently quoted phrase from the novel, and "the idea of ... perfect unity between the self and the other is age-old", so that Catherine says that she loves Heathcliff "because he's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same" (Chapter IX).[98] Likewise Lord David Cecil suggests that "the deepest attachments are based on characters' similarity or affinity",[99] However Simone de Beauvoir, in her famous feminist work The Second Sex (1949), suggests that when Catherine says "I am Heathcliff": "her own world collapse(s) in contingence, for she really lives in his."[100] Beauvoir sees this as "the fatal mirage of the ideal of romantic love ... transcendence ... in the superior male who is perceived as free".[101]
Despite all the passion between Catherine and Heathcliff, critics have from early on drawn attention to the absence of sex. In 1850 the poet and critic Sydney Dobell suggests that "we dare not doubt [Catherine's] purity",[102] and the Victorian poet Swinburne concurs, referring to their "passionate and ardent chastity".[103][104] More recently Terry Eagleton suggests their relationship is sexless, "because the two, unknown to themselves, are half-siblings, with an unconscious fear of incest".[105]
Childhood
Childhood is a central theme of Wuthering Heights.[106] Emily Brontë "understands that 'The Child is 'Father of the Man' (Wordsworth, 'My heart leaps up', 1. 7)". Wordsworth, following philosophers of education, such as Rousseau, explored ideas about the way childhood shaped personality. One outcome of this was the German bildungsroman, or "novel of education", such as Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847), Eliot's The Mill on the Floss (1860), and Dickens's Great Expectations (1861).[107] Bronte's characters "are heavily influenced by their childhood experiences", though she is less optimistic than her contemporaries that suffering can lead to "change and renewal".[108]
Class and money
Lockwood arrives at Thrushcross Grange in 1801, a time when, according to Q.D. Leavis, "the old rough farming culture, based on a naturally patriarchal family life, was to be challenged, tamed and routed by social and cultural changes".[109] At this date the Industrial Revolution was well under way, and was by 1847 a dominant force in much of England, and especially in West Yorkshire. This caused a disruption in "the traditional relationship of social classes" with an expanding upwardly mobile middle-class, which created "a new standard for defining a gentleman", and challenged the traditional criteria of breeding and family and the more recent criterion of character.[109]
Marxist critic Arnold Kettle sees Wuthering Heights "as a symbolic representation of the class system of 19th-century England", with its concerns "with property-ownership, the attraction of social comforts", marriage, education, religion, and social status.[110] Driven by a pathological hatred Heathcliff uses against his enemies "their own weapons of money and arranged marriages", as well as "the classic methods of the ruling class, expropriation and property deals".[111]
Later, another Marxist, Terry Eagleton, in Myths of Power: A Marxist Study of the Brontës (London: McMillan, 1975), further explores the power relationships between "the landed gentry and aristocracy, the traditional power-holders, and the capitalist, industrial middle classes". Haworth in the West Riding of Yorkshire was especially affected by changes to society and its class structure "because of the concentration of large estates and industrial centers" there.[109]
Race
There has been debate about Heathcliff's race or ethnicity. He is described as a "dark-skinned gypsy" and "a little Lascar", a 19th-century term for Indian sailors;[91] Mr Earnshaw calls him "as dark almost as if it came from the devil",[92] and Nelly Dean speculates fancifully regarding his origins thus: "Who knows but your father was Emperor of China, and your mother an Indian queen?"[112] Caryl Phillips suggests that Heathcliff may have been an escaped slave, noting the similarities between the way Heathcliff is treated and the way slaves were treated at the time: he is referred to as "it", his name "served him" as both his "Christian and surname",[92] and Mr Earnshaw is referred to as "his owner".[113] Maja-Lisa von Sneidern states that "Heathcliff's racial otherness cannot be a matter of dispute; Brontë makes that explicit", further noting that "by 1804 Liverpool merchants were responsible for more than eighty-four percent of the British transatlantic slave trade."[114] Michael Stewart sees Heathcliff's race as "ambiguous" and argues that Emily Brontë "deliberately gives us this missing hole in the narrative".[115]
Storm and calm
Various critics have explored the various contrast between Thrushcross Grange and the Wuthering Heights farmhouse and their inhabitants. Lord David Cecil argued for "cosmic forces as the central impetus and controlling force in the novel" and suggested that there is a unifying structure underlying Wuthering Heights: "two spiritual principles: the principle of the storm, ... and the principle of calm", which he further argued were not, "in spite of their apparent opposition", in conflict.[116] Dorothy van Ghent, however, refers to "a tension between two kinds of reality" in the novel: "civilized manners" and "natural energies".[117]
