hear is made manifest, we are told that “the air swarmed with Catherines” (p. 20). The why of it is, in the first and last analysis, all that really interests the author, and eventually it becomes all that interests the reader. The why—the abiding dark force that is Heathcliff’s motivation—cannot be satisfactorily answered and leads instead to other whys, as whys usually do: Why can’t he let go of Cathy? Why doesn’t Cathy let go of him? And, most important: Why didn’t they go off together in the first place? Once one starts rooting around for reasons, the reasons never suffice, and one ends up frantically questioning everything. Everything swirls around this why; it is the vortex from which the novel erupts. This remains so in spite of the fact that Heathcliff’s consuming animus is fairly implausible from the start—as is Catherine Earnshaw’s equally consuming allegiance—and isn’t elaborated so much as it is asserted as a precondition that informs everything else.

Virginia Woolf, who was a great admirer of both Charlotte and Emily Brontë and whose first published piece was about a pilgrimage she made to Haworth to see the museum of Brontë relics that had been created not far from the parsonage in which the sisters grew up, wrote a perceptive essay comparing Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. In it she concedes that the latter novel requires more than the usual suspension of disbelief on the reader’s part and indicates the gratification to be had from doing so: “He [Heathcliff] is impossible we say, but nevertheless no boy in literature has a more vivid existence than his. So it is with the two Catherines; never could women feel as they do or act in their manner, we say. All the same, they are the most lovable women in English fiction.” (One doesn’t have to agree with Woolf’s verdicts on these characters—I, for instance, would not think of describing either Catherine as “lovable,” at least not in any recognizable sense of the word—to assent to her basic point that they are all cast from something other than lifelike material.)

Still, if one looks at Wuthering Heights from this perspective—the donnée, that is, of the novel’s own unreal reality (“The truth,” as one critic put it, “but not of this world”; see Muriel Spark’s and Derek Stanford’s Emily Brontë: Her Life and Work, p. 235), the plot begins to appear remarkably simple, even primitive. It is, after all, the age-old one of a soured romance, of childhood sweethearts who are foiled by the adult reality they grow into. Boy meets girl; boy falls in love with girl; boy loses girl. And then, if the boy in question happens to be Heathcliff with his “satanic nimbus,” as one writer described it (Spark, p. 255)—the romantic antihero par excellence, the one who sets the standard for all Demon Lovers to come—all hell breaks lose. Whoever stands in the way of this vengeful fellow gets either brutally thrust aside or broken in two. The two exceptions are the “vinegar-faced” servant, Joseph, and the shrewdly self-preserving housekeeper, Nelly Dean, who serves as a (possibly unreliable) narrator within a narrator and through whose eyes we see the grim and twisted—or as one Victorian critic put it, the “wild, confused, disjointed and improbable”—events of the story inexorably unfold (Frank, p. 237). Very little blood is spilled in the novel, but it is full of violent acts and even more violent feelings. And by contemporary standards, the book is modest to a fault, since everyone remains more or less dressed, though it is colored throughout by a kind of erotic hunger—propelled often as not by fury rather than love—that goes beyond the most relaxed of social conventions and the loosest of sexual proprieties.

It is undoubtedly this subliminal theme of unharnessed libid inal energy that alarmed the book’s readers—especially at the time of its original publication, when the pseudonyms of all three Brontë women only fueled speculation as to whether the writers were male or, as some suspected, female. There were reviewers who were willing to grant Wuthering Heights its “rugged power” in spite of its being “coarse” and “vulgar” and others who were content to find it perplexing without perforce issuing a summary opinion: “It is difficult to pronounce any decisive judgment on a work in which there is so much rude ability displayed yet in which there is so much to blame” (Frank, p. 237). Still others reacted with heated ambivalence in the form of radically conditional praise, as