2. The Eternal Rocks beneath (Chapters 4–9)

Wuthering Heights, like Greek tragedy, is ruled by a sense of fatal inevitability, with every development in the pattern of relationships accountable ultimately to an inheritance or ‘gift of God’ (as Earnshaw labels Heathcliff), left by an ancestor to subsequent generations. This accounts for the amoral quality of the novel, which makes irrelevant both the Victorian search for ‘instances of humanity’, and the modern social benevolence which weighs up the mitigating circumstances of aberrant behaviour. The reader's sympathy is caught at a much deeper level than that of a rationalising praise or blame; the novel's structure is essentially poetic, in that circumstances are subservient to an underlying emotional problem with which the characters are bound up outside the exercise of their will. The pattern of their actions is determined by the necessity to expose and catharsize the emotional knot. Like Lockwood, the reader approaches the book with conventional expectations, prepared to indulge in a form of romantic literary gossip, and finds that he is sucked into the penetralium of the Heights and the dream-chamber at the heart of its network of ‘narrow lobbies’. Here, the observant ‘stranger’ is confronted with the ghosts that wail in the caverns of his own neglected unconscious — the ‘eternal rocks beneath’ (as Catherine expresses her idea of Heathcliff's function). Continuing to read the book, he may trace Emily Brontë's own artistic resolution of the tension between the ‘Lockwood’ and the ‘Heathcliff’ aspects of the mind confronted and expressed in the opening chapters.

The story, with its simultaneous present and historical action, is — as Nelly says — ‘Mr Heathcliff's’. It begins with his arrival at the Heights, and his death, though not quite the last event chronologically, shapes the ending of the tale, and is the last event narrated. The first part of the story concerns his relationship with Catherine, and the second part his relationship with her ghost. This ce