British Literature Survey
Reference Pages: Brontë Sisters Group

Contemporary Reception of Wuthering Heights
by Anna MacMonegle

As quoted by David Jerold “Wuthering heights is a strange sort of book - baffling all regular criticism, yet it is impossible to lay it aside afterwards and say nothing about it” (140). This article contains more positive criticism than most generated by the “brutal,” “coarse,” and “savage” novel, and even it noted the controversial nature of the plot and characters presented by Emily Brontë. Even though she wrote under a male alias, the novel was still said contain “profane expressions, inconceivably coarse language, and revolting scenes and descriptions by which its pages are disfigured” (Sharps London Magazine 514). The majority of the public and critics at the time agreed with this previous statement. Her sister, Charlotte, recognized the incongruence between the nature of the novel and the attitude of the public at the time. She summed up the publics’ reaction saying “men and women…with feelings moderate in degree, and little marked in kind, have been trained from their cradle to observe the utmost evenness of manner and guardedness of language, will hardly know what to make of the rough, strong utterance, the harshly manifested passions, the unbridled aversions, and headlong partialities of Wuthering Heights” (225). While all of the characters have been labeled as “utterly hateful or thoroughly contemptible” (The Atlas 539), it is the main character, Heathcliff, that epitomizes these qualities of brutality. His outcast nature from the beginning sets the tone for the rest of his actions. Overall, this novel and its characters were not received without scorn in an age where sensibility and dignity reigned as respectable.

Works Cited

Gordon, Lyndall. Charlotte Brontë: A Passionate Life. New York, NY: W.W. Norton and Company, Inc., 1994.

Barker, Juliet. The Brontës. New York, NY: St. Mariner’s Press. 1994.

Smith, Margaret. Letters of Charlotte Brontë. Oxford, NY: Oxford University Press. 1995. “Victorian Morality.” Wikipedia. 19 January 2006. 31 January 2006. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victorian_morality.

Cecil, David. “Emily Brontë and Wuthering Heights.” Critical Essays on Emily Brontë. New York, NY: G.K. Hall and Co. 1997.

Paul Marchbanks
marchban@email.unc.edu