Transcending Wuthering Heights

Perhaps its abiding fascination stems from the fact that the novel not only incorporates elements from a number of genres, but interrogates these different elements by creating a tension between them. So, for example, the pleasure of familiar detail provided by the text's realism is challenged by the transgressive power of the genres of fantasy and horror, gratifying both what Henry James has called 'the taste of emotions of recognition' and that 'for emotions of …

… its lock and window imagery, or by explaining it as being concerned with children of calm and children of storm, or by putting forward such bright ideas as that 'Wuthering Heights might be viewed at long range as a variant of the demon-lover motif' or that 'Nelly Dean is Evil' - these are the products of an age which conceives literary criticism as either a game or an industry, not as a humane study.