Chapter 9 - Windburn on Planet Brontë

Summary

This chapter on Wuthering Heights (1848) explores the work carried out by the verbs in the novel. Emily Brontë’s style makes evocative use of imperatives, and of active and passive verb forms. A distinction is drawn between the predominant verb forms of the first and second parts of the novel, so that the second half seems more passive and reactive, and therefore to indicate suffering. The imperative often calls an action into being, all the more so when compliance with an imperative is then assumed rather than narrated, as it frequently is in the novel. In this way, the imperative is like fiction itself, bringing into existence an imagined state of affairs; in this analysis, the style of Wuthering Heights starts to seem conversant with the novel’s shifts between its own imagined world and the reality of ours or its first readers to which it appeals.