Frankenstein is one of the most popular novels of the past two centuries, and graphic, stage, cinematic, television, and digital adaptations have proliferated seemingly exponentially since it first appeared in 1818. Less obviously, other creative works have roots in Frankenstein as well. This essay explores important connections between Shelley’s novel and Emily Brontë’s 1848 Wuthering Heights that go beyond their apparent unconventionality. Unlike works complying with the feminine domestic tradition (consider, for example, Jane Austen’s or Charlotte Brontë’s works), Frankenstein and Wuthering Heights do not follow one young woman’s path to marriage. Although both Shelley and Emily Brontë base their stories in domestic drama and family life, their most memorable characters are men traumatized and haunted by abuse. An abusive “childhood” results in their thoughtlessly steamrolling nearly everyone unfortunate enough to find themselves in their path. This essay follows Edward Mendelson’s observation that Frankenstein is “an extended restatement of a single sentence by Mary Wollstonecraft, in . . . A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792): ‘A Great proportion of the misery that wanders, in hideous forms, around the world, is allowed to rise from the negligence of parents’” (8) and shows how Emily Brontë covers similar terrain. At a profound level, both Shelley’s creature and Brontë’s Heathcliff suffer rejection from those who ought to care for them. At a subterranean level, the books that follow their journeys are domestic dramas about the effects of family on individuals disfigured and disastrously affected by their early experiences. This essay traces the crimes committed against the creature and Heathcliff by their ostensible family members, the punishment both individuals suffer, and the way they subsequently turn to violence—both literal and metaphorical—because of their early experiences with abuse.

Shelley’s maladjusted men sired numerous literary offspring. For example, in the perennial favorite Dracula, Jonathan Harker chases his nemesis across Europe in a fatal pursuit evocative of Victor and his creation. The recent best-selling book and movie series, Twilight, is clearly in debt to Frankenstein, as Edward Cullen despairs over his own monstrosity and chafes at his desires. Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2005 Never Let Me Go follows the travails of clones seeking to find their own place in the world, just as Shelley’s creature tries to. These popular works highlight the fertility of Shelley’s original novel, yet the most evocative direct descendent of the creature is, arguably, Heathcliff; indeed, Dracula, Edward, and Tommy are all heirs of Heathcliff as well as of Shelley’s creature. Elements of the prototype include their individual character formations, their disastrous home lives, and the effects of those early experiences on others. Each novel provided a unique and powerful template that continues to inspire writers and to haunt readers nearly two hundred years after they first appeared.

Frankenstein and Wuthering Heights have been canonized for much of the last century and are nearly permanent fixtures in traditional British literature course syllabi. Connections between the novels abound. Both include frame narratives, the stumbling, bumbling first-person narrators, Robert Walton and Lockwood; the stark, nearly mythic landscapes; the enigmatic endings that might presage death or the failure of the narrators’ imaginations; and the absence of mothers in both novels. Anne Williams holds that the lack of maternal love may catalyze the creature and Heathcliff’s turn to violence, as “the child is mother of the man.” Thus, the greatest similarities in the novels may be found in their protagonists. The hulking, articulate, unnamed creature and Heathcliff, the troubled Byronic hero of the Heights, are two of the great loners of literature. Paradoxically, both are also inextricably, indubitably bound to their famous counterparts, Victor Frankenstein and Catherine Earnshaw, whether in filial, fraternal, or romantic relationships (and perhaps all three). Even as the creature and Heathcliff strive for human connection in misguided, disastrous attempts (their yearning for companionship clearly comes from their early experiences of rejection and abuse), both men are also undoubtedly orphans; they enter the novels, homes, and the world’s stage, unwanted and unloved. H.W. Gallagher observes that “Frankenstein . . . did not become a demon monster until all with whom he made contact or helped had rejected him. Heathcliff, dehumanized like Frankenstein by having an incomplete name, only becomes a demon monster after his assumed rejection by Cathy. The resemblances are striking” (164). In some ways, both novels are about the characters’ individual attempts to find acceptance in a hostile world. And just as both novels focus on loneliness, solitude, and suffering, they also speak to the importance of childhood experiences and the lingering consequences of trauma.

While this essay focuses on the arguable centers of Frankenstein and Wuthering Heights in the creature and Heathcliff, worth mentioning is that its critical approach also applies to the abuse, marginalization, and neglect inherent to characters haunting the novels’ margins, particularly Justine Moritz and Nelly Dean. Justine is the servant of the Frankenstein family who claims she is responsible for William’s death. Though her confession is a lie, she is executed for the crime. Relayed in a letter early in the novel from Elizabeth Lavenza to Victor is Justine’s backstory, how her mother hated her and how she found a working sanctuary in the Frankenstein home. Nelly’s family life is not discussed in the novel, but she is routinely punished through exclusion during her time with the Earnshaws and Lintons for no apparent crime. Justine’s death at the hands of an unjust social system makes her a martyr. Nelly is a more complex character; her cruelty towards Heathcliff (and perhaps towards Cathy Earnshaw and Catherine Linton) could show in a more realistic way the lingering effects of abuse and neglect. Perhaps ironically, the labor of these women sustains the families, despite their own marginalization and trauma.

Considering the effects of trauma, David Punter asks, what does Wuthering Heights “tell us about the process of demonisation which constitutes a large part of its narrative structure, the demonisation of the orphan, the passage of the ‘unhoused’ beyond the laws, represented in the figure of Heathcliff?” (133). The same question could be asked of Shelley’s novel. The answer, as Shelley and Brontë realized, is that in denying children respect, humanity, and love, in committing crimes against the most vulnerable, humanity runs the risk of creating “monsters” who grow up to traumatize others. But their depictions of abuse, trauma, and their effects differ, and in this difference, we can see Brontë distinguishing herself from Shelley, indicating both perhaps the later writer’s debt to the former, but also her cultural distance, which might speak to the social changes brought about in the thirty years between the two works’ publication.

Both the creature and Heathcliff are rejected routinely when young, are ostracized from family circles, and in turn abuse others when afforded the chance. Punter observes that the idea of “loss structures Frankenstein on many levels. It is loss of a sense of home, family, community, imaged in the scientist’s rejection of domestic ties, in the monster’s transcendental homelessness” (60). But whereas the creature turns to acts of physical violence, Heathcliff employs a more subtle revenge. If the former kills in spates of rage, the latter psychologically torments his victims. Nevertheless, Brontë shows her readers that emotional abuse is just as devastating as bodily harm. Cruelty, the writers show us, is timeless, even as its manifestations change.

We see the creature’s “birth” from the perspective of his creator, Victor Frankenstein, who spends hours explaining to Walton his own familial history and his obsessive desire to, in his words, “bestow animation upon lifeless matter [and. . . . ] renew life where death had apparently devoured the body to corruption” (Shelley 36). Yet even as Victor imagines that “a new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me [and no] father could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I should deserve theirs” (36), when his creation finally breathes life, the scientist turns away, appalled. In an instant, Frankenstein relates that “the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart. Unable to endure the aspect of the being I had created, I rushed out of the room” (39). To the bewilderment of generations of readers, Victor’s immediate response at the creature’s first breath is to flee in horror and then to fall asleep. Marilyn Butler notes in her introduction to Frankenstein that Victor “is himself a monster” and that he does not “acknowledge his only child,” except to label him “Monster, Fiend, and Demon, though no human father ever played so thorough-going a role in any birth” (xliv). The creature’s birth is not a welcome to the world, but an entrance to a cold and lonely place. This is the first crime committed against the creature, and he soon becomes aware that through no fault of his own, he suffers this punishment at the hands of his “father.”

Almost immediately, though, Victor has a chance to set things right, for he awakens in his curtained bed to see the creature standing over him, parting the drapes. Victor tells Walton:

The creator assumes the worst; he interprets the creature’s reaching out to him as an aggressive gesture, when the creature may have only been looking for the warmth of human contact. It’s important that the reader never sees this scene from the creature’s perspective. When the creature relays his own recollection of his early life to Victor, it’s clear he’s repressed this moment of rebuff—it’s erased from his memory even as its effect is not. Although the creature does not consciously remember Victor’s reaction, in Shelley’s depiction, he stores this painful rejection, which comes back to haunt him when other humans repeat the scenario. Victor rationalizes his neglect, yet he’s clearly acting as many abusive men throughout history have towards unwanted children, shunning them or outright deserting them. Foundling hospitals, workhouses, and orphanages dotted the landscape of nineteenth-century England as institutions that ostensibly cared for abandoned children. The Enclosure Acts, the industrial and agrarian revolutions, and impressment led to the destruction of traditional familial structures; Shelley presciently and gloomily anticipates the effects of disruptions that would happen on a larger scale throughout Brontë’s lifetime.

Like Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights is told in a series of flashbacks that highlight instances of abuse and neglect, crimes against the vulnerable. The reader first meets the adult Heathcliff through the eyes of Lockwood, the myopic narrator, who considers his “growling” landlord, “a dark-skinned gypsy in aspect, in dress and manners a gentleman” (Brontë 3). But it’s Nelly Dean, the voluble housekeeper who recounts to both reader and Lockwood how the imposing gentleman came as a young boy to the Heights. The story has a fairytale quality to it, evoking particularly “Beauty and the Beast,” or La Belle et la Bête, translated from the original French into English in 1757, and another story that alludes to parental neglect and abuse. Nelly emphasizes the fairytale resemblance as she explains how the senior Mr. Earnshaw left the family home promising toys for his children on his return, but coming back instead with a young boy, whom his family must accept “‘as a gift of God, though it’s as dark almost as if it came from the devil’” (34). But what follows takes a drastic turn away from the satisfying conclusion of most children’s stories. Like Shelley’s creature, Heathcliff is objectified even at his most innocent and vulnerable. But unlike Victor, who overtly rejects and in other instances assaults his creature, the Earnshaw family (and their attendants) rejects Heathcliff more subtly—not through acts of physical abuse but by ignoring and belittling him. Even Nelly, herself a servant and therefore also somewhat of an outsider to the Earnshaw family circle, lacks empathy for the child, aligning herself with her master’s children in her contempt for the strange boy:

Mother, children, and servants all show fear and horror at the vulnerable young child. A site of domesticity, what is popularly characterized as the seat of love, becomes not a sanctuary but a place of rejection. Brontë follows Shelley in crafting a novel of domestic abuse.

Heathcliff’s rejection is only compounded in the hours to come. Nelly continues to refer to him as “it,” explaining that “Mr. Earnshaw told me to wash it, and give it clean things, and let it sleep with the children” (Brontë 35). In this very litany of tasks, complex, hierarchical power relations unfold as psychological abuse is heaped on the young child. Even as Mr. Earnshaw attempts to act benevolently (if given the benefit of the doubt), his commands underscore his authority over his servant, his children, and the boy he has brought home (whom critics have speculated could be his illegitimate child). Nelly, Hindley, and Catherine, however, are quick to distinguish themselves from this infiltrator, Cathy “spitting at the stupid little thing, earning for her pains a sound blow from her father to teach her cleaner manners” (35). In such a household one might ask what chance does anyone have? Perhaps Nelly’s description of bedtime is not surprising, as she relates that Hindley and Cathy “refused to have it in bed with them, or even in their room, and I had no more sense, so . . . put it on the landing of the stairs, hoping it might be gone on the morrow” (35). When Mr. Earnshaw realizes how the children have treated the boy he’s named Heathcliff, he sends the servant girl out of the house. This reinforces the principle here that banishment from the group or ostracism serves as punishment.

The cruelty of Victor, Mr. Earnshaw, and the children is depicted as generally unconscious; that is, these characters do not seem to have any awareness of how dehumanizing, brutalizing, or isolating their acts are. They don’t realize the effects of their actions (or their mindset) towards the creature and Heathcliff. While the social perception of appropriate treatment of children certainly differed from what is acceptable today, quotes like Wollstonecraft’s at the beginning of this essay indicate that although a certain level of strictness may have been tolerated, some individuals realized that aggression or indifference would have profound effects on children. The characters’ thoughtless violence may perhaps be more disastrous for their recipients because it’s simply not seen or recognized socially in their circles as such. But these actions and these reactions to people who seem “different” set the stage for how both victims are treated throughout the rest of their lives and lead to their own eventual abuse of others.

After Victor awakes, he is cared for by his dear friend Henry Clerval, who gives him “precisely the maternal nurture that Victor refuses to give his creature” (Mendelson 11). The creature, abandoned by Victor, meanwhile fends for himself, the difference between their situations stark and apparent. The reader does not learn how the creature survives until the shunned creature later finds Victor and explains how he has been living. The first incident he relays is with an old man who, “‘perceiving me, shrieked loudly, and quitting the hut, ran across the fields with a speed of which his debilitated form hardly appeared capable. . . . But I was enchanted by the appearance of the hut. . . . [and] greedily devoured the remnants of the shepherd’s breakfast’” (Shelley 83). This encounter evokes the two original trauma scenes with Victor that the creature cannot consciously remember; an individual is so horrified by the creature’s appearance that he runs away in fear. That same day, a similar scene is repeated when the creature comes to a village and has hardly entered a house before “‘the children shrieked, and one of the women fainted. The whole village was roused; some fled, some attacked me, until, grievously bruised by stones and many other kids of missile weapons, I escaped to the open country’” (83). In one day, the reactions to the creature escalate, changing from flight to attack. Soon, the creature comes across the De Laceys, but the creature has learned from these prior moments of abuse not to reveal himself, and so he hides from the poor family although unbeknownst to them he helps with manual chores around the house. He works for the De Laceys at night, helping them eke out a miserable existence and leaving his provender as anonymous gifts.

After a young, beautiful, and mysterious stranger appears, the creature determines that if he can “gain the good-will and mediation of the old [and blind patriarch] De Lacey, I might, by his means, be tolerated by my younger protectors” (Shelley 107). He is mistaken. Although the younger De Laceys welcome the lovely Safie into their midst, they are horrified at their first sight of the creature; Agatha faints, Safie runs away, and Felix “with supernatural force tore me from his father, to whose knees I clung: in a transport of fury, he dashed me to the ground, and struck me violently with a stick” (110). The creature understands the attack as an emotional betrayal. People whom he had helped turned against him (though in the chaos and confusion of the encounter, they were unaware they were attacking their benefactor), but the psychological betrayal is more basic, like the unspoken utterance of any abused child: “How can you do this to me when I love you?”

More confusion colors the creature’s next encounters with humans. Hiding in the woods, almost accepting the implications of his appearance, the creature sees a young girl fall into a stream:

Even when the creature acts selflessly, he is met with violence. His sufferings—emotional and physical—consume him and are augmented, he tells Victor, “‘by the oppressive sense of the injustice and ingratitude of their infliction. My daily vows rose for revenge—a deep and deadly revenge, such as would alone compensate for the outrages and anguish I had endured’” (116). Shelley allows the creature another chance at redemption, when he imagines a pastoral union with a young child, but at William’s fear, scorn, and naming of Victor, the creature’s anger is rekindled. Victor’s young brother becomes the creature’s first victim.

Abuse within Wuthering Heights is generally more subtly portrayed. Heathcliff, perhaps because he is a child, or because he is the favorite of the Earnshaw patriarch, is not abused in the same way that the creature is. Nevertheless both Hindley and Nelly are fiercely jealous of him, and it is at their hands that he is injured physically and psychologically, though he outwardly appears to withstand their attacks. Heathcliff, Nelly explains, “would stand Hindley’s blows without winking or shedding a tear, and my pinches moved him only to draw in a breath and open his eyes, as if he had hurt himself by accident and nobody was to blame” (Brontë 36). When Heathcliff’s benefactor finds out his son is hurting his protégée, whom he refers to as “the poor, fatherless child” (36), he is furious. The Earnshaw children and Nelly are bewildered by Mr. Earnshaw’s protection of his young charge, and so, Nelly states, “from the very beginning, he bred bad feelings in the house” (36). Hindley sees Heathcliff “as a usurper of his parent’s affections and his privileges, and he grew bitter with brooding over these injuries” (36). The presumptive heir plots how he can hurt this stranger who has bewitched his father. This turn inward distinguishes the abuse that Heathcliff endures from that which the creature endures. For just as Hindley internalizes his jealousy of Heathcliff, once they are grown, both men turn to psychologically wounding others rather than to physical abuse.

Heathcliff, perhaps because he lives in the house, sees that to survive, he must play by “civilization’s” rules, and so he finds subtle ways to enact his own revenge. This kind of revenge may be available to him because he is socially accepted in a way that the creature is not. That is, though ostracized by the heir apparent, Heathcliff aligns himself with Cathy Earnshaw and Nelly Dean. He finds a community of outsiders that Shelley’s creature does not. At the same time, he is still a boy apart; Nelly explains, “He was as uncomplaining as a lamb; though hardness, not gentleness, made him give little trouble. . . . [perhaps he] was simply insensible, though knowing perfectly the hold he had on [Mr. Earnshaw’s] heart, and conscious he had only to speak and all the house would be obliged to bend to his wishes” (Brontë 37; emphasis added). When Mr. Earnshaw gives both boys colts and Heathcliff’s falls lame, he tells Hindley, “‘You must change horses with me; I don’t like mine, and if you won’t I shall tell your father of the three thrashings you’ve given me this week, and show him my arm, which is black to the shoulder’” (37). This threat of childish blackmail shows an intelligence that belies Heathcliff’s apparent lack of social skills. The strange boy knows how to manipulate his way into getting what he wants. Heathcliff realizes the limitations of physical violence that Hindley (and the creature) resort to. Because Heathcliff “complained so seldom, indeed of such stirs as these, [Nelly] really thought him not vindictive—I was deceived completely, as you will hear” (38). The cautious reader, however, might question Nelly’s judgment of both child and the man he grows up to be.

The creature does not appear to be as vindictive as Nelly Dean claims Heathcliff is. For when the creature considers adopting a child, he reflects on his own rehabilitation, imagining an impossible utopian life with the child. The moment passes once William calls him an “ogre” and threatens him with “punishment” by his father. Again, this crime may be unconscious, but it is no less hateful for the creature. His rage at this ultimate rejection (because it is a seemingly innocent child who scorns him and who bears the name of his own “father”) manifests itself in an attack: “I grasped his throat to silence him, and in a moment he lay dead at my feet” (Shelley 117). The attack satisfies the creature, who notes that “my heart swelled with exculpation and hellish triumph. . . . I exclaimed, ‘I, too, can create devastation; my enemy is not impregnable; this death will carry despair to him, and a thousand other miseries shall torment and destroy him’” (117). The creature’s despair and anger translates to physical violence. He has learned from neglect and abuse to hurt others, which gives him not only physical but also emotional satisfaction. The creature’s pleasure comes not just from killing William, but from realizing his emotional power over Victor. The creature yearns to affect Victor, to matter to his creator, and he longs to be in a relationship with Victor, even one that is destructive. Though Victor occasionally sympathizes with the creature, going so far as to begin building a female companion (the creature’s bid for a “proper” object of mature affection), Victor later turns from the process in disgust and fear, just as he did after creating his first model.

But this last rejection is more painful than those initially suffered in the laboratory by the creature because he has now met his “father” and has begun to build a relationship with him, however tenuous. Victor destroys the second creature in a moment of impulsive reactivity—brutally, violently, and savagely. He does not simply walk away from his experiment, but emotionally caught up in the need to destroy his project, “trembling with passion, [I] tore to pieces the thing on which I was engaged” (Shelley 139). He destroys, before the eyes of his “child,” that upon which the “child’s” heart was set; this is in itself a brutal act of abuse, and once again, the distraught creature, who is watching, learns from his tutor.

Though the reader does not witness the creature’s later acts of violence, he or she learns that he is responsible for killing Henry Clerval and Elizabeth Lavenza, the two people closest to Victor. In strangling these innocents (guilty only by their association with Victor), the creature again shows his power not only over his victims, but also over his creator. His acts of revenge are physical, lethal, and emotional. Not only does he want to destroy those closest to Victor (paralleling Victor’s destruction of the creature’s potential mate), he wants to see Victor suffer and to know these acts are linked. Whether the creature is “real” or merely the metaphorical phantasm of Victor’s evil side, Shelley certainly anticipates the repetitious compulsions characteristic of the abused in their desperate psychological efforts to master and control early scenes of trauma by projecting their actions onto others as a way of “getting back” to original scenes of abuse, though this time as the ones with power.

Things go awry at the Heights as well. Hindley returns from school on the death of his father, bringing a wife and instantly assuming the position of pater familias. His domination of the family circle is immediate, and though no longer turning to blows and kicks, he exerts his control over Heathcliff by “driving him from [the family] company to the servants, depriv[ing] him of the instructions of the curate, and insist[ing] that he should labour out of doors instead” (Brontë 44). While Hindley was away, Heathcliff was treated as a member of the family. On Hindley’s return, Heathcliff is banished, though he still clings to his friendship with Cathy, which flourished while her brother was absent. Soon Heathcliff and Cathy make their ill-fated run to Thrushcross Grange, where she is bitten by the family dog, and he is berated by the Linton family as “‘a villain,’ ‘a frightful thing,’ and ‘a little Lascar, or an American or Spanish castaway’” (48). Again, the abuse is not physical but verbal. While Cathy recovers (or falls into femininity) at the Grange, Heathcliff is further isolated at the Heights. As the Earnshaw circle grows more insulated with the death of Hindley’s wife, they become increasingly self-centered and troubled. Hindley continues to ostracize Heathcliff; once Cathy decides to marry Linton, Heathcliff’s isolation is complete. He leaves, only to return years later. Punter contends that in Heathcliff’s absence lies the heart of Wuthering Heights, for Heathcliff “returns darkened . . . he goes through a process of maturation, but this is coloured, perhaps fatally, by his lack of an accepted male mentor and by his lack of female nurturing” (132).

When Heathcliff returns to the Heights, he is grown and more clearly governed by a kind of schadenfreude. But unlike the creature who turns to physical acts of abuse to show his power, Heathcliff turns to psychological torture. Nelly observes of him when he returns that “a half-civilized ferocity lurked yet in the depressed brows and eyes full of black fire, but it was subdued; and his manner was even dignified, quite divested of roughness though too stern for grace” (Brontë 95). (The creature does not have the luxury of these dark good looks). Meanwhile, all is not well for the troubled Earnshaw/Linton clan: Hindley is in a state of alcoholic self-destruction, and Cathy is married to Edgar. Rather than physically overpowering the family who rejected him, Heathcliff turns to psychological manipulation to dominate Hindley, Cathy, and Edgar, gambling with Hindley until he wins the Heights and vengefully seducing Edgar’s younger sister.

It’s notable and important that Heathcliff looks on his future wife Isabella with disgust. When Cathy reveals that Isabella is in love with him, Heathcliff “stares at the object of discourse, as one might do at a strange repulsive animal, a centipede from the Indies, for instance, which curiosity leads one to examine in spite of the aversion it raises” (Brontë 105). He has no tenderness for her. Isabella acts more childlike than womanly: “the poor thing . . . grew white and red in rapid succession,” and she cannot bear his scrutiny (105). But because Heathcliff perceives that in his power over her, he also has power over her brother, he takes an interest in her and is particularly sadistic towards her; she is too unaware to realize the danger of their relationship. Before they elope, Heathcliff hangs her dog (129), though Nelly saves it. Again, this act is one of psychological as much as physical cruelty, and Heathcliff continues to psychically torture Isabella during their short marriage. The pregnant Isabella claims of her husband, “‘He’s not a human being . . . and he had no claim on my charity—I gave him my heart, and he took and pinched it to death; and flung it back to me—people feel with their hearts, Ellen, and since he has destroyed mine, I have not power to feel for him’” (172). Her husband shames and damages her until she no longer feels sympathy. Isabella’s lack of compassion and maternal love are lingering manifestations of Heathcliff’s revenge. Their son will not survive. That the people in both novels who live to tell the stories are not direct progenitors, but interlocutors who learn to admonish others about thoughtless cruelty suggests that in both cases the authors are underscoring the effects of abuse, not siding with their rationalizing characters or an indifferent society.

What does one make of these parallels and connections between the novels’ powerful centers? Shelley and Brontë suggest that the creature and Heathcliff’s cruelty and inhumanity is matched only by their original desire for acceptance. Through no fault of their own, they are rejected, repeatedly throughout their lives, and they in turn act out on guiltless victims. The creature kills innocents and tortures Victor psychologically; Heathcliff tortures small animals and psychologically abuses the powerless. Although they mirror one another, Brontë offers a surprising comment to Shelley and a way for us to understand both authors better, not only as presciently addressing social issues in their respective times, but also as suggesting why they are still so powerful to today’s audiences: the cruelest crimes may be elusive acts of psychical violence that take place at home.

Works Cited