Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights

     Questions about which characters are “likable” are sometimes difficult to answer because I sense that the characters we like in a book we wouldn’t like in real life. I think, though, that likability issues have some relevancy here because the book seems so often to lack a figure with whom the reader can identify. Jane Eyre, by contrast, made the reader-stand-in its narrator. Here, though, there are a few narrators, and none have quite the charisma of Jane. I think the book’s central accomplishment, especially in the early chapters is in getting readers invested in such a troubled romance as Healthcliff’s and Catherine’s. Nelly states that “the two, to a cool spectator, made a strange and fearful picture” (189), but I think, on the contrary, that there are many who will identify with the frenzied passion of these characters, even if these moments of recognition are not ones to be proud of.

     Heathcliff makes an engaging centerpiece for the novel. There's something intriguing about his ambiguous background and how that might affect how the others respond to him, including Bronte. Is he a gypsy? If so, I am specifically interested in the question of whether or not Bronte meant to depict racism in her characters’ reactions against Heathcliff, or if his ethnicity were only a small part of his role as an outsider as she imagined it—an element she added subconsciously. Early in the book, Healthcliff laments his status when he cries, “I wish I had light hair and a fair skin, and was dressed and behaved as well, and had a chance of being as rich as he will be!” (66) Nelly counsels him against understanding himself purely as a victim, but she later remarks that, in his moments of jealousy and guardedness, he seems almost monstrous. “I did not feel as if I were in the company of a creature of my own species” (191). Does Nelly recognize that prejudiced perceptions like these have made Heathcliff such a subversive figure? Does Bronte? ­