Revision Cards - Wuthering Heights: A Level, Key extracts

Snowbound at Wuthering Heights, Zillah tactlessly accommodates Mr Lockwood in Cathy’s old chamber. Read from ‘This time, I remembered’ to ‘lamentable prayer’ (pp. 24–5).
WHY is it important? This is the novel’s most memorable ghost scene, with many Gothic elements: driving snow, rushing wind, and a window that cannot open except with violence.
WHAT themes does it explore? It indicates coming interplay between real and virtual worlds, that past and present intertwine, and that the mildest-mannered man in the novel can be turned into a sadist (slitting the wrist of a child) under the pressure of fear.
HOW does it work within the narrative? This is our introduction to the oak closet, a room-within-a-room, resembling a stage-coach, where Catherine slept as a child. Lockwood’s experience prompts him to ask Nelly for more details of his landlord’s story.
WHAT language techniques does it employ? Despite a few polysyllabic adjectives, such as ‘tenacious’ and ‘importunate’, Lockwood prefers the active voice and abrupt phrasing. This makes it much easier to empathise with his experience here than in other sections of his narrative.

Key extracts

Wuthering Heights: A Level

Soon after Catherine starts to be intimate with the Lintons, Nelly builds up the confidence of her neglected childhood friend, Heathcliff. Read from ‘O, Heathcliff, you are showing a poor spirit!’ to ‘their white faces’ (pp. 57–8).
WHY is it important? This episode, early in Heathcliff’s time at the Heights, shows young Nelly to be his champion, the beginning of what Charlotte Brontë in her 1850 Preface to the novel (p.liii) calls Heathcliff’s ‘half-implied esteem for Nelly Dean’. This helps her obtain extraordinary confessions from him later in the book.
WHAT themes does it explore? The extract shows that mistreatment is already making Heathcliff surly and resentful. Nelly encourages him to take pride in what may be a highly Romantic heritage, beginning his association with Romantic-Gothic heroes.
HOW does it work within the narrative? The uncertainty of Heathcliff’s origins and social status runs throughout the novel; unusually, Heathcliff shows he does not just detest Edgar’s blond good looks; he envies them too.
WHAT language techniques does it employ? Nelly uses Romantic hyperbole to dignify Heathcliff, otherwise reverting to animal imagery to view him as a beaten dog. The Lintons, who arrive hermetically sealed in furs and a carriage, are incuriously described as angels.

Key extracts

Wuthering Heights: A Level

Soon after Heathcliff starts to visit at Thrushcross Grange, Catherine puts temptation in the way of the love-lorn Isabella. Read from ‘I think you belie her’ to ‘you must beware of your eyes’ (p. 106).
WHY is it important? This is an episode of drawing room brutality more or less unmatched in the Victorian novel. The dark side of all three characters is on show in just a few lines.
WHAT themes does it explore? Catherine and Heathcliff like to play dangerous games in Catherine’s well-run country house. Isabella is taunted and tortured into an unexpectedly violent response.
HOW does it work within the narrative? Catherine parades the love-struck girl before Heathcliff, who moves his chair to get a better look. There seems to be no collusion between the old friends; yet they act as one.
WHAT language techniques does it employ? Heathcliff and Catherine choose several animal images for the cornered Isabella: ‘a strange repulsive animal’, a ‘centipede’, a ‘tigress’ and a ‘vixen’. Nelly uses a long sentence to describe the vicious recoil of Isabella’s long fingers.

Key extracts

Wuthering Heights: A Level

When they meet illicitly during Nelly’s illness, Linton and Cathy have different views of moorland beauty. Read from ‘One time, however, we were near quarrelling’ to ‘Linton didn’t like it’ (p. 248).
WHY is it important? This is the only extensive piece of natural description in the novel – otherwise, the moors are conveyed in gusts and glimpses. It suggests a sunlit, contemplative contrast to ‘storm and rushing wind’.
WHAT themes does it explore? It is the best example of Earnshaw vehemence confronting Linton lassitude, bringing out the creative strength of ‘calm’ as well as the vibrancy of ‘storm’. Boy and girl, usually at odds, agree to disagree here.
HOW does it work within the narrative? The shadow of the past breaks in via the initialled toys, reminding us not only that the second generation romances mimic the first, but that the Heights preserves the whole story in its cupboards and closets.
WHAT language techniques does it employ? Cathy uses a long lazy sentence to convey Linton’s somnolent afternoon, with the larks and bees busy enough but going nowhere and his clauses stuffed with adverbs. Cathy’s ‘jubilee’ is made of birdsong and rushing water and numerous active verbs.

Key extracts

Wuthering Heights: A Level

After Edgar Linton’s death, Heathcliff confesses to Nelly his long involvement with Catherine’s ghost. Read from ‘I’ll tell you what I did yesterday!’ to ‘do exist, among us!’ (pp. 288–9).
WHY is it important? A rule of literature is that no character can die in the first person; but Heathcliff gets pretty close here to telling us what death is like. You feel nothing, except (somehow) the exquisite pleasure of the ‘bits that were you’ sliding into the insensate being of another.
WHAT themes does it explore? Is this what Lockwood has in mind in the book’s last lines: ‘unquiet slumbers, for the sleepers in that quiet earth’? ‘I am Heathcliff’ turns out to mean that no-one, not even the sexton, knows which is which.
HOW does it work within the narrative? Brontë is creating for us the icon of the three graves in the churchyard, while Heathcliff is giving his old friend Nelly the key to the Gothic adventure that has consumed him for eighteen years.
WHAT language techniques does it employ? There are many Gothic trappings – sextons, preserved corpses, coffin lids – but Heathcliff’s voice, rapt, rhythmic and serious, dominates the scene. The striking speech ‘I dreamt I was sleeping ...’) suggests that not-being can be about presence as well as absence.

Key extracts

Wuthering Heights: A Level

A Level Study Notes and Revision Guides