My edition of Wuthering Heights includes introductions, a family tree, commentary, and a reading group guide. Although I've had this copy for several reads, this go around was the first time I actually looked at it all. It's helpful information, and I'll be borrowing from it to talk a little bit about the novel's structure.

The Setting

In the editor's preface, Charlotte Brontë writes of the setting,

With regard to the rusticity of "Wuthering Heights," I admit the charge, for I feel the quality. It is rustic all through. It is moorish, and wild, and knotty as a root of heath. Nor was it natural that it should be otherwise; the author being herself a native and nursling of the moors. Doubtless, had her lot been cast in a town, her writings, if she had written at all, would have possessed another character (p. xxxii).

Complementing the Yorkshire moors, the very word "wuthering" adds to the novel's rusticity by connoting blustering weather. As children, Heathcliff and Catherine grow up rambling through this wild environment. Nelly describes the former as "a sullen, patient child" (p. 47) and the latter as "a wild, wicked slip" (p. 52). Yet only four miles away is Thrushcross Grange, the home of Edgar and Isabella, who are "petted things" (p. 60) according to Heathcliff.

How important do you think the setting is to the story? Do the moors and their wildness effect what happens? If Heathcliff and Catherine are wild due to the environment, how are Edgar and Isabella insulated from being influenced by it?

The Timeline

At first glance, the novel's story may seem jumbled—beginning in 1801, jumping back nearly 30 years, returning to 1801, etc. Emily Brontë, however, followed a rigid timeline when constructing her story and I have yet to find a flaw. Near the end of the novel, Heathcliff tells Nelly he is tormented by Catherine's ghost and says, "It was a strange way of killing! not by inches, but by fractions of hairbreadths, to beguile me with the spectre of a hope, through eighteen years" (p. 357). After consulting the handy family tree, I figured out that she had been dead 17 years and 5 months by this point in the narrative. That's pretty good continuity for a novel that was written by hand.

Did you find the timeline hard to follow? Was jumping in and out of time a distraction from the story? If you had no problems following the timeline, what helped you keep track of events?

Symmetry

In addition to the well-constructed time line, Brontë also uses symmetry to add structure to her story. There are two houses of two families with two children each. The story is told by two narrators. Even the book itself is in two parts, with the division being at the first Catherine's death and the second Catherine's birth. Amidst all this neat symmetry, though, the author throws in a wild card: Heathcliff. He fits into the story neatly for a while as part of the double couple (Heathcliff and Isabella; Catherine and Edgar) forming a love quadrangle, which later collapses into a love triangle when Isabella departs.

What do you think about Brontë's use of twos? Is Heathcliff the wild card? Or is something else at work disrupting the "neatness" of the two houses?