Upon his quasi-mythical return as a ‘gentleman’ in the second part of the novel, Heathcliff then turns into a social avenger by wielding the weapons of his oppressors (capital, arranged marriages and property) against them, symbolising thus a form of the rise of the proletariat against their former masters. Opposed to the couple we have not only their oppressor, Hindley, but also the world of gentility, represented by Trushcross Grange and its almost artificially bourgeois inhabitants, the Lintons. This is especially so in the case of Heathcliff. The young Heathcliff, a gipsy child found in Liverpool, and the young Catherine, both wild children and oppressed by the head of their household, Hindley who later forces Heathcliff to work the land, are seen to represent the more natural proletariat and the French Revolution ideals of equality and brotherhood of men.

I will then analyse the way in which such readings are based on defining factors of the text and how these factors, examined against the text itself, generate further meanings of their own.Ī Marxist reading of the text, as befitting this school of thought, focuses on the social aspects of the novel. For a better look at how the text leads its readers into generating their own reading and possibly the reasons behind it, a closer look into three of its more conventional readings, namely, Marxist, feminist and psychoanalyst analysis, will carried out in the first part of this paper. It is one of the more interesting aspects of the novel the means by which its readers and critics are driven to derive their own morals from the book for, while the readings clearly vary, the way in which they are achieved hardly does. The tragic love story of Heathcliff and Catherine, and the former’s consequential ‘moral teething’ of their oppressor’s and agents of her ‘fall’, told in a narration within a narration by ‘common sense’ filled Nelly Dean to her ‘city gentleman’ listener Lockwood, is a surprisingly ambiguous text which paradoxically screams of moral lessons. Wuthering Heights has especially troubled critics for being particularly difficult to grasp in ‘moral’ terms. One could then, questionably, reply that the ‘moral’ of a text is the intended message of its author most literary critics are, however, well acquainted with the impossibility of ascertaining such a message (Barthes, 1977). Therefore, one could say that a moral, as a universal truth which holds true for all that come into contact with the text, is nonexistent. They are all different, but still derived from the same story by different readers. While the moral for the parents’ would be ‘keep close watch of your children’ and for grandmothers’, ‘make sure to check who it is before opening the door’. Such as, the moral a child takes from Little Red Riding Hood could be, ‘don’t talk to strangers’ or ‘obey your mother’ or ‘beware of wolves’.

However, I would argue that every person’s reality is somehow different and, therefore, the morals which they derive are, by a logical progression, also different. This may seem now a preposterous statement due to the fact that it is the very nature of morals that they should be a succinct maxim, a simple universal truth that one derives from a tale or historical fact, and can then happily apply to their reality.

However, this begs the question: is there really an underlying moral to the story? My answer to that would simply be, ‘Yes several of them, in fact.’ This was mostly due to the highly controversial personality of its main character, Heathcliff. This was doubly true to its contemporary critics who saw only “glimpses or secondary meanings” and “refrained from assigning any” moral to the work (Douglas Jerrold’s Weekly Newspaper, 1848). Since its publication in 1847, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights has always caused its critics trouble, for while it is obviously a powerful novel, its ‘meaning’ is hardly easy to grasp.

Heathcliff wordsworth