In the notes to “Snow White,” the Grimms recorded a second ver- sion of the story that gave a more prominent role to the father of the child: A count and countess travel on a sled and see three mounds of snow, whereupon the count wishes for a child as white as snow. The couple then passes three pools filled with blood, and the count wishes for a child with cheeks as red as blood. After seeing three black ravens flying overhead, he wishes for a child with hair as black as ravens. As if on cue, a girl with those exact attributes appears by the side of the road, and the count invites her to ride in the carriage with them. He “likes” the girl, and the countess, “not pleased,” drops a glove, tells the girl to retrieve it, and orders the carriage to move on without her.

Finally, that such a psychodramatic enactment is going on in both Wuthering Heights and Frankenstein suggests a similarity between the two novels which brings us back to the tension between dramatic surfaces and metaphysical depths with which we began this discussion. For just as one of Frankenstein’s most puzzling traits is the symbolic ambiguity or fluidity its characters display when they are studied closely, so one of Wuthering Heights’s key elements is what Leo Bersani calls its “ontological slipperiness.” In fact, because it is a metaphysical romance (just as Frankenstein is a metaphysical thriller) Wuthering Heights seems at times to be about forces or beings rather than people, which is no doubt one reason why some critics have thought it generically problematical, maybe not a novel at all but instead an extended exemplum, or a “prosified” verse drama. And just as all the characters in Frankenstein are in a sense the same two characters, so “everyone [in Wuthering Heights] is finally related to everyone else and, in a sense, repeated in everyone else,” as if the novel, like an illustration of Freud’s “Das Unheimlische,” were about “the danger of being haunted by alien versions of the self.”

When bodies spill out of their boundaries, or when parts are severed from the whole, they become something unsettlingly other. That forces viewers to renegotiate the borderlands between inside and outside, between themselves and the source of their disquiet.

“The subliminal mind has many dark, unhappy corners, after all. Imagine something loosening itself from one of those corners. Let’s call it a—a germ. And let’s say conditions prove right for that germ to develop—to grow, like a child in the womb. What would this little stranger grow into? A sort of shadow-self, perhaps: a Caliban, a Mr Hyde. A creature motivated by all the nasty impulses and hungers the conscious mind had hoped to keep hidden away: things like envy and malice and frustration…”

I saw the image of my dream lover before my eyes, clearer than life—much more clearly than I could see my own hand. I talked to it, cried before it, cursed it; I called it [...] Beloved and foresaw its ripe, all-fulfilling kiss, called it devil and whore, vampire and murderer. It lured me into the most tender and beautiful dreams, and into vile shamelessness; nothing was too good and precious for it, nothing too low and bad.