What is Wuthering Heights about? *=applies to Tess, too.

· Childhood and loss (1st generation)*
· Childhood and loss (2nd generation)
· Family and identity
· Reality and illusion (not just ghosts and dreams but also Isabbella's delusion about the romantic hero Heathcliff and Lockwood's self-delusion (*Angel's view of Tess 'Here was I thinking you a new sprung child of nature' ch xxxv)
· Revenge
· Regression * - in Tess, the yearning of Angel for an Eden, complete with his Eve (see pp 324 and 328)
· A rural way of life*
· Rebellion *(Angel's career and marriage)
· Ambition *compare Heathcliff and Durbeyfield - both seek to achieve through their children)
· Nature vs nurture * (Angel sees T's 'fall' as due to her nature from decayed stock: 'decrepit families imply decrepit wills')
· Love/marriage / religion
· A manipulation of the reader as a warning against romanticism/idealism*
· Thought and action
· Nelly as imaginative and flawed narrator warning us against blindness to our role as participant when we become narrators (or our role in constructing meaning when we become readers)
· Psychological study
· Compromise (abandoning the polarities of youth)*(fails in Tess: 'It isn't a question of respectability, but one of principle!' Angel, pg 308,ch xxxvi) NB Angel's is the unbending intellect (pg 313), as fatally immature as C/H 's unbending instincts
· The old and the new * contrast Lintons with Alec, the shine with the substance
· A landscape/culture/way of life
· Class war
· An ancient stock restored*
· A double tragedy * (two authors of their own misfortune)
· The roles expected of men and women (perhaps of a particular class, esp in regard to marriage)
· The raw (unbending in WH) and the cooked (unbending in Tess)

I Curr 2000