How Wuthering Heights drew on Genesis
A documented line of influence: Emily Brontë demonstrably engaged Moses’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
Genesis
Moses · c. 550 BCE
BibleThe influenced
Wuthering Heights
Emily Brontë · 1847
The Age of the NovelRelevance
5/10
On Wuthering Heights’s page
- The whole shape of Wuthering Heights — childhood innocence, a tempter, expulsion, exile — reworks the Eden story of Genesis
- Brontë was steeped in Scripture from girlhood; the novel carries some 110 biblical references and stages its fall in a garden, apples and all
- Reading Genesis first makes the paradise the lovers lose legible as the original one
On Genesis’s page
- The fall-from-paradise architecture that runs underneath Brontë's moors
- Raised at the parsonage on Scripture, Emily Brontë threads roughly 110 biblical references through Wuthering Heights — and patterns Catherine and Heathcliff's innocence-to-fall arc on Eden
- Watch for the apples and the garden: the Genesis template surfaces in the novel's images of paradise lost