Shmoop - Wuthering Heights

Wuthering Heights is a house, and with this novel, Emily Bront takes the whole Gothic haunted house thing several steps further than her predecessors. While the book has all of the Gothic elements made popular the century before by authors such as Ann Radcliffe and Horace Walpole - and even mocked by Jane Austen in Northanger Abby - Wuthering Heights has a lot more psychological complexity than your average pulp Gothic job. Throughout the story Bront plays on a whole set of genre conventions - Gothic, romantic, pseudo-psychological - and by naming the novel after the house, she sort of announces those influences to her readers. While the house is the main setting for most of the action, its role is so important that it almost seems like a living, breathing, ticked-off character, reflecting the bad attitude of its inhabitants.
Windows and doors are a big deal in the novel, as people and ghosts are always trying to climb in or out, people are always getting locked in and out, doors are slammed, keys hidden, and so forth. Heathcliff often stands in the doorway of Wuthering Heights controlling who crosses the threshold. At the center of the house, symbolically if not literally, is Catherine's oak-paneled bed, which provides the setting for the more uncanny and chilling events: Catherine's ghost fighting to get in against Lockwood's brutal refusal, and the death and discovery of Heathcliff's rain-soaked corpse.
To Heathcliff, whoever controls the house has the power, so even though he seeks revenge for all of his mistreatment, he does so by acquiring real estate. Being accepted into houses means a lot - Hindley never welcomes Heathcliff into Wuthering Heights, but the Lintons open their doors to Catherine (but not Heathcliff). The house has different meanings for each character - prison and punishment, social class, horror, and nostalgia.
The house is loaded with symbolic importance. It's up on the stormy hillside above Thrushcross Grange, which, by comparison, seems like a sort of Eden with its brightly lit salon and expansive garden. Lockwood notices some of the house's strange details from the very beginning - for example, the inscription over the doorway:
Before passing the threshold, I paused to admire a quantity of grotesque carving lavished over the front, and especially about the principal door, above which, among a wilderness of crumbling griffins and shameless little boys, I detected the date "1500," and the name "Hareton Earnshaw." (1.13)
This inscription serves as the house's nametag and informs us that the Earnshaws have been there for a long time (the novel is set in 1801). What Lockwood means by "shameless" we can't really know, but the implication is that the image is Gothic and a little sinister. Emily Bront grew up on the Yorkshire moors, so a lot of critics speculate about the influence the houses in her village of Haworth had on her description of Wuthering Heights.

The book is a real page-turner, making you really want to know how it ends. Death? Marriage? Both. With Catherine dying halfway through the novel, finding out what happens to Heathcliff becomes all the more important. The last page of the book has Lockwood leaving Wuthering Heights for Thrushcross Grange, stopping to take one last look at the soon-to-be-married Hareton Earnshaw and Catherine Heathcliff.
Wuthering Heights really shows the difference between "ending" and "closure." Sure the book ends, as does Nelly's narration, and certain threads of the story are neatly tied together: domestic harmony returns to the home, Hareton is able to read his name above the threshold, and his ownership of the house suggests that all is right with property and inheritance. When Nelly picks up the narration one last time, she seeks to provide closure to Heathcliff's story and to the reunification of this generation of Earnshaws. Like a Shakespearean comedy, the story ends with a marriage, as Nelly explains in almost maternal tones: "The crown of all my wishes will be the union of these two; I shall envy no one on their wedding day. There won't be a happier woman than myself in England!" (32.111).