Chels

It’s been a week, and the Wuthering Heights discourse persists.

I think something that’s getting a little lost in translation is the difference between a romance and a Romance. Typically, when we hear ‘romance’ these days, we think about love stories – I even wrote in defence of romance novels earlier this month! Capital-R Romance, though, refers to the Romantic movement (and, in fact, Romance is a less common term compared to Romantic or Romanticism, but it’s one that’s becoming more popular as a retrospective term).

The Romantic movement has very little to do with the concept of romance we have today. It was a cultural movement, with quite a large output in literature, that began towards the end of the 18th century, and stayed prominent until the mid 19th century. The Romantic period lines up pretty neatly with the Industrial Revolution, and a lot of the main beliefs of the movement were direct responses to increasing industrialism. The Romantic period is mostly associated with poetry – the Romantic poets are hugely well known and well liked (the Lakes poets were Romantics) – but there were also some really incredible novels and pieces of artwork that came from the period.

There was a big focus on nature and the importance of nature in art and literature. When the world started becoming increasingly grey, when machinery replaced green spaces, nature became a symbol of comfort and familiarity, a nostalgia for a romanticised past. I can imagine the industrial revolution, while hugely impactful for people’s daily lives, must have been a terrifying thing to witness. The great developments in technology happened at a rapid pace, and the world effectively turned upside down. I can understand why so many people longed to return to a time they had experienced not so long before, one where nature was more prominent, and their world was familiar.

Romanticism also focused on sentimentality and nostalgia, there was a real reverence for the past, and a real emphasis on expressing appreciation and awe. Emotions were important, often more important than plot, and many stories took place predominantly inside characters’ heads. The concept of the sublime existed long before the Romantic era, and continues long after, but it was especially prominent in works by the Romantics. The sublime is the feeling and description of just utter awe. It’s often used in connection with nature – the awe one would feel at seeing a big weather event or phenomenon, perhaps a great wave or sunlight after a long winter. There’s also a different kind of sublime, one that is often referred to as the feminine sublime (though it’s a debated term).

The feminine sublime is more domestic and close to home, in a way. Rather than great feats of nature, the feminine sublime celebrates the more mundane aspects of nature. The everyday, the small joys. One of my favourite poets, Mary Bailey, associated the sublime with her children, which I think was lovely. Because of course she would be in awe of the lives that she created, and after all, it is a great feat of nature. She often associated her children with the moon, as a beacon of hope in her otherwise quite unfortunate life.

The Romantics were not only interested in the beauty of nature, there was also a great fascination with the supernatural. I think it makes a lot of sense, psychologically. In a movement where industrialisation, and the changes it brought, was frightening, and nature was revered, of course we were fascinated by things we couldn’t explain. Of course we wrote about ghosts and spirits and unexplained phenomena. The world was changing at a rapid pace, there was so much we didn’t understand, and in a way, channeling these fears into a being, whether malicious or not, was a great way to explore all of the feelings we had.

The Romantic period had a lot of overlap with the peak of Gothic literature, and so many Romantic works are also Gothic. Where Romance brought the supernatural out into nature, the Gothic brought it inside, trapping the reader. A lot of the most iconic stories from the era are both, which is lucky for me, because I love both movements.

Wuthering Heights, in fact, is a Gothic Romance. There are intense emotions, and intense natural phenomena – while the Yorkshire moors are not a great mountain or rare phenomenon, they are beautiful, and powerful enough to be a character in their own right. They’re also a reflection of despair and hopelessness; where so much of Gothic literature emphasises claustrophobia, the Yorkshire moors’ vastness is the source of their eeriness. The Gothic Romance label is why I expected much more haunting from the novel – I had expected Cathy to physically haunt the other characters, rather than haunting the narrative. I think it’s also why many people associate the novel with a dark romance; the increasingly popular genre focusing on romantic relationships with dark or taboo love interests. Which, arguably, Wuthering Heights is, to an extent. I just struggle to associate the story with no-capital romance. Cathy dies at the halfway point of the novel, after all, and there’s a lot more emphasis on the trauma that everyone endures throughout her lifetime and after her death.

I hope my whistlestop tour of the Romantic movement is enough to pique your interest. It’s a really interesting movement that gave life to such beautiful works.