Nature and Culture in Wuthering Heights

One of the most obvious devices used in the novel Wuthering Heights is that of the coellation between the weather on the moor and the residents of the manor that shares the book’s name.  Specifically, the Earnshaw family seems to have an amazing effect on the elements, as the weather seems to match their personas.  (For example, the gloomy, stormy weather when the protagonist, Lockwood, meets Heathcliff, and the pleasant weather when he later finds love-struck Catherine and Harenton reading together.)

These atmospheric metaphors, as well as other ecospheric ones, were not chosen by coincidence, for if one looks more closely, one can see that one of the themes of Wuthering Heights is Nature versus Culture.  Consider the Earnshaw’s, with whom the famously unpredictable moorland weather always seems to agree; they are a family of passionate and often impulsive people.  Hendly savages Heathcliff’s humanity, and Heathcliff revenges himself cruelly on Harenton, Hendly’s son.  In both cases, the spite and hatred of the men seems to be boundless and untamed.  They’re natures have not been curbed by culture– until, perhaps, the end when Heathcliff relents somewhat.  Similarly, in the latter part of the book when Harenton is socialized by Catherine, the unruly gardens around Wuthering Heights manor are symbolically tamed.  In this way, the gardens act as yet another metaphor for nature, which is later moderated by culture.

The Linton family, by contrast, is almost too cultured.  Edgar, for example, is wealthy, well-educated, kindly, and rather spoiled.  He is very nearly the epitome of an early nineteenth-century gentleman, but he is too delicate and too docile for his own good.  When Heathcliff sweeps back into his life like a force of nature, he is helpless to protect himself and his family.  Like any civilized man faced with a typhoon, he is easily overcome. 

Lockwood, though not a Linton, is another example of this sort of highly-cultured character.  He is financially secure, and very gentlemanly.  He is so preoccupied with propriety that he invites himself back to his landlord’s house, even after he has been given clear indications that he is unwelcomed, because he wants company and, at that time, a gentleman who owned a manor like Wuthering Heights was always supposed to receive a visiting gentleman graciously.  The idea that anyone might do differently never occurs to Lockwood, even when he is faced with obvious evidence to the contrary.  Likewise, he is too cultured to have any practicality.  When he returns to visit Wuthering Heights manor, he becomes completely lost on the moor despite the fact that he lived in the area for a year.  Near the beginning of the book, during his second visit to Heathcliff, he is so frightened and upset by being chased my dogs that he gives himself a nosebleed.  It appears as if overexposure to culture makes characters like Edgar and Lockwood weak.

Emily Brontë almost seems to be arguing for moderation in her novel Wuthering Heights.  She seems to point out problems with both the wild and egocentric ways that are natural to human kind, and the overly-protected, impractical ways of the elite class of her Victorian world.  It is one of the interesting and thought-provoking themes that set Wuthering Heights apart from many other Gothic novels of its time.