UC Davis

Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë’s only novel, adapts the tropes of slave narrative to construct a schema of animalized humanity. By reading Wuthering Heights as a novel about slavery, not just as a novel onto which a reading of slavery can be projected, this thesis proposes a Wuthering Heights in which the greatest sin is seeking to deny one’s own beastliness by animalizing others. Brontë’s animalized humans fall on a spectrum. On one end is the classic brute, a culturally dominant figure of the brutish laborer. At the other end of the spectrum is the British brute, a trope from slave narrative, in which humans lose their humanity by denying the humanity of those they wish to dominate. Heathcliff has often been seen as the singular brute figure in Wuthering Heights, but in fact, every character in the novel is multiply animalized, compared to, paired with, and otherwise associated with nonhuman life. By focusing on this spectrum of brutishness, the racialized nature of white characters is made visible, as is their tendency to deny their own animality. The novel makes a distinction between violence and cruelty. While violence can be cruel, cruelty is not always violent, and many of the characters often viewed by readers, including Charlotte Brontë, as the novel’s least harmful, are cruel rather than violent. I examine the Earnshaws’ enslavement of Heathcliff over two generations, the Lintons’ attempts to distance themselves from the sources of their fortune, and the ways that the two estates function as plantation space and British soil. What emerges from this reading is a picture of greater moral complexity and entanglement with the afterlife of British slavery.