Workers, Gentlemen and Landowners: Identifying Social Class in The Professor and Wuthering Heights

Abstract

Abstract This article interrogates class definition in two nineteenth-century novels: Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, and Charlotte Brontë's The Professor. In my analysis of The Professor I draw attention to Charlotte Brontë's preface as a point of departure from which to criticize the novel's ostensible realism. In Wuthering Heights, I argue, certain characters masquerade as members of the working class while signifying something much different. I show that whereas Wuthering Heights conceals within it a nostalgic desirefor an England where the industrial working class as an identifiable, organizable body does not yet exist, in The Professor it is precisely their existence that constitutes that novel's 'not said.' I conclude by arguing that on the one hand Emily Brontë contains her unease by retreating into the past, whereas Charlotte Brontë evidences an unease with a sector of society whose existence can never be disputed. She camouflages it not only by privileging the virtues of capitalism but also by showing that it is members of the capitalist class that will inherit an idealized and sanitized England.