"Gold put to use of paving stones": Internal Colonialism in Wuthering Heights

Wuthering Heights is a northern writer's rebuttal of the colonizing tendencies of the south-east's metropolitan elite. Casting Wuthering Heights as the center and Thrushcross Grange the periphery, Emily Brontë presents the North as solid and without artifice, while the South represents imported and suspect values. Lockwood personifies all that is malign in the colonizing nexus, a subject Brontë had explored in her Gondal poems. But she was also a realist: Wuthering Heights both elegizes a way of life that is passing and unites the best of both worlds. Themselves the products of North / South parents, Hareton and Cathy, in their impending union, herald a new and stronger future, where Yorkshire values are invigorated by the influx of southern capital.