SOURCE: “Genealogy and Incest in Wuthering Heights,” in Studies in the Novel, Vol. XIV, No. 4, Winter, 1982, pp. 359-76.

In the following essay, Goetz examines two interpretation problems in Wuthering Heights: first he examines Catherine's choice to marry Edgar Linton instead of Heathcliff, and then he discusses the second half of the novel's complex kinship relationships.

In arguing for the basic equivalence between language and systems of kinship, Claude Lévi-Strauss has pointed out that the situations of the two, in one important respect, are symmetrical but inverse. In the case of language, we know what the function or meaning of the phenomenon is, but we do not (or did not until recently) know how it functions as a system. In the case of kinship, the structure of the system itself is more or less apparent, but the meaning or function the system serves remains obscure.¹ It is this...