In the following essay, Federico maintains that Wuthering Heights is a bildungsroman-a novel which outlines the initiation of a young character into adulthood-focusing on the development of young Cathy Linton rather than that of her mother.

In their study of nineteenth-century women writers, The Madwoman in the Attic, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar argue persuasively that because the story of Wuthering Heights is built around a central fall-generally understood to be Catherine and Heathcliff's anti-Miltonic fall from hell to heaven-"a description of the novel as in part a Bildungsroman about a girl's passage from 'innocence' to 'experience' (leaving aside the precise meaning of these terms) would probably be widely accepted."

This is an interesting interpretation, and brilliantly demonstrated. But like other views of Wuthering Heights as a feminine Bildungsroman, the focus of development is Catherine, and by association her male doppelganger Heathcliff. The emphasis upon...