Wuthering Heights and the Rhetoric of Interpretation

Abstract This chapter provides an analysis of Charlotte Bronte's Wuthering Heights and the opposing schools of thought regarding the novel's interpretation. Traditional readings of the book yield allegories of class conflict, generational tension, or responses to Romantic tradition. Recent literary studies veer away from this attempt to fit the novel into a logical box. According to them, Wuthering Heights is a complex body of work containing multiple—and sometimes conflicting—signifiers, mysteries, and points of view, which makes ascribing a canonical interpretation nearly impossible. The author also asserts that the novel's rhetorical form, with its embedded listeners and witnessed narratives, serves to frame Catherine and Heathcliff's experiences within the context of “sustained audition.” In the remaining sections, the author illustrates how these narrative exposures serve different functions throughout the novel—self-decipherment, interpretive dialogue, and self-creation—through various models such as Bakhtin's paradigm of multiple voices and Coleridge's concept of “outness.”