‘I was in the condition of mind to be shocked at nothing’: Losing the Plot in Wuthering Heights

Abstract

In Emily Brontë’s critique of the Earnshaw and Linton families in Wuthering Heights, books and reading are used to register cultural participation or exclusion in unexpected ways. While for the privileged Cathy Linton reading itself is a mark of status and innate superiority, her attitude is undermined both by Nelly Dean’s admission that she has read most of the books in the library at Thrushcross Grange and by Cathy’s own use of books as a bribe to her father’s groom. Throughout the novel, books complicate hierarchies of gender and class as they are variously defaced, overwritten with palimpsestic texts, and used as weapons in the literal and figurative power plays in which female characters participate as energetically as their male counterparts. This challenge to the status of reading is refracted through the generic instabilities of the novel itself, as it perpetually invites readers to question the stories they are told.