In this essay, I read Wuthering Heights as an answer to the generically pivotal question of the novel genre, i.e. what it is for a child to grow up. The issue of growing up or coming of an age is crucial in the novel as it is seen in the central status of Bildungsroman in the nineteenth-century European novel. Wuthering Heights foregrounds the issue of growing-up with its unequivocal focus on childhood or orphanage but it does not take the retrospective view ofa mature adult in its description of the turbulent childhood as often as it happens in most Bildungsromans. Instead, taking the naked view of children who hardly come out of themselves to understand the adult world, it tries to investigate what wecome to be deprived of as we grow up: something ontological such as solidarity or intimacy between two children or one’s narcissistic identification with the other as her/his double.
Loss as a condition of growing-up is the particular focus of the first and more important generation in Wuthering Heights. Catherine and Heathcliff achieve a mysteriously close and intimate relationship in their childhood. While Hindley’s degradation of Heathcliff and Catherine’s stay and socialization at Thrushcross Grange illuminate the different class positions of them, their realization that they are two separate individual beings with two separate bodies and sexualities plays not a small role in their separate destinies. Catherine’s proclamation of “I am Heathcliff” reveals her bad faith where she believes that she could be in the same relationship with Heathcliff even when they become adults and she is married to Edgar.
While the first generation story of Wuthering Heights implies that growing-up involves an ontological loss, the second generation plot holds quite a normative view that to be an adult means to be mature, to accept a given gender role, or to be reconciled with the symbolic social order. In the second part of Wuthering Heights, Catherine’s daughter voluntarily embraces the female role of care and devotion as it is obvious in her relationship with Linton Heathcliff. On the other hand, Hareton, the liminal figure of Wuthering Heights’s positive imagination, reveals that a child even in a worse condition than Heathcliff’s could hold a desire to be grow up and keep a happy family. While the second generation part unfolds a socially safe and normative view on what it is to grow up, the first generation, whose story presents an idea of growing-up as something of an ontological loss, seems to render Wuthering Heights an everlastingly unforgettable novel. Or, onecompelling feature of Wuthering Heights might lie in its status as an anti-Bildungsroman, which rarely appears in nineteenth-century European realist novels.