Frankenstein and Wuthering Heights

Shelley’s creature and Brontë’s Heathcliff both begin as figures a household will not hold. Victor flees his creation; Hindley degrades Heathcliff into a farm servant. Each novel then asks what follows from that refusal. The creature’s violence arrives after an education in language and hope; Heathcliff’s cruelty arrives as a long property strategy after Cathy’s marriage and his own exile.

The comparison is not “two monsters.” It is two theories of what injury does to a person. Frankenstein still stages a demand for recognition — a companion, a hearing. Wuthering Heights stages the capture of recognition’s instruments: land, marriages, literacy withheld from Hareton. One ending turns a ship home; the other waits until Heathcliff dies so the second generation can soften.

Read through Revenge after injury and Isolation and otherness. Then return to the creature’s narrative chapters and to Cathy’s “I am Heathcliff” — the speeches that make each book more than a revenge thriller.