Visionary Experience in Wuthering Heights

The strangeness in Wuthering Heights which sets it apart from other nineteenth-century novels lies in “the perfect simplicity with which it presents its elemental figures almost naked of the web of civilized habits [and] ways of thinking” which form the background of most fictional works.1 During the years immediately following its publication, all but a few of the critics assailed this strangeness in condemning its harshness of tone, the violence of theme, and the illogical construction of Wuthering Heights. Modern critics have reversed the decision of Emily Brontë's contemporaries; today the novel is widely praised for its power and intensity, and its general structure has been called “as logical as that of a fugue.”2 Much recent criticism has been directed toward its structural technique and to a search for the possible sources of the plot3 as well as to a consideration of fairytale and religious elements in the narrative which serve as a means of characterizing the experience of Catherine Earnshaw.4 But the source of the novel's power has not been elucidated, and its strangeness remains.

It is in the novel itself rather than in its somewhat tenuous connections with possible sources that I think we must look for the answers to the problems which Wuthering Heights presents. The novel's obscurities and its emotional resonance have suggested to me that the reading of this work in the light of some of the concepts of Jungian psychology might serve to clarify its apparent anomalies. My procedure has been first to study the text of the novel, and secondly to attempt to show a relationship between what the novel reveals and the conclusions established by C. G. Jung's empirical method. This approach, admittedly limited in scope, is justified only