Wuthering Heights

I should not allow any one to inconvenience me, if I could hinder it—walk in! The "walk in" was uttered with closed teeth, and expressed the sentiment, "Go to the Deuce!"

Double-narrative embedded: Lockwood frames, Nelly Dean recounts, within which two generations cycle through the same destructive dyad of obsession and revenge; structure is unusually ambitious but the resolution is partial, so plot scores 84.

My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I _am_ Heathcliff! He's always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being.

Heathcliff is among the most singular creations of the English novel; Catherine Earnshaw's self-recognition ('I am Heathcliff') defines Romantic inwardness; Nelly Dean, Edgar, Isabella, Hindley, Joseph, Hareton, young Cathy — each sharply individuated, so cast scores 94.

My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it, I'm well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary.

First half runs at the speed of gothic melodrama, second-generation half slows to illness and confinement; some episodes are elided rather than dramatized, and the closing reconciliation feels rushed, so pace scores 78.

I lingered round them, under that benign sky: watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass, and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.

Yorkshire dialect for Joseph and the Earnshaws, biblical register for the gothic-dark passages, a Yorkshire-moors lexicon of snow, heather, and slates; the famous closing paragraph fuses landscape and metaphysics, so prose scores 94.

Wuthering Heights is the name of Mr. Heathcliff's dwelling. "Wuthering" being a significant provincial adjective, descriptive of the atmospheric tumult to which its station is exposed in stormy weather.

The two houses — Wuthering Heights as the gnarled, weather-beaten lair of passion, Thrushcross Grange as the gilded but enervated parlor — and the moor between them function as a moral geography, so world scores 88.

I should not allow any one to inconvenience me, if I could hinder it—walk in! The "walk in" was uttered with closed teeth, and expressed the sentiment, "Go to the Deuce!"

Lockwood's first call at the Heights is an ideal gothic hook: the sullen 'walk in', the bare minimum of social response, the snow-bound return, the ghost-bolt scene — by the end of Ch.I the reader is committed and unsettled, so hook scores 90.

Nelly, I _am_ Heathcliff! He's always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being. So don't talk of our separation again: it is impracticable.

The double-frame, the refusal of moral closure, the romantic-hero-as-monster, and the elevation of dialect and landscape to formal principle made Wuthering Heights a one-book revolution, so innov scores 92.

I sought, and soon discovered, the three headstones on the slope next the moor: the middle one grey, and half buried in heath; Edgar Linton's only harmonized by the turf and moss creeping up its foot; Heathcliff's still bare.

Lockwood's gravestone visitation and the closing image of 'quiet earth' is serene and complete in formal terms — but the deaths of Catherine and Heathcliff have already taken place offstage; ending is lyrical, deliberately under-resolved, so ending scores 86.