How do Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë and The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters both warn against abandoning conventional religious practice?

There is a subtle undertone evident in both that warns against abandoning religious practice, highlighted in the contrast between strict orthodoxy and secularization. Although written in the twentieth century, The Little Stranger is set in the post-war 1940’s, a time of great social change. Society, in The Little Stranger, is becoming much more secularized: “When I was a child Sundays meant being dressed in one’s finery… Now Sunday means working like a dustman”. Waters here uses metonymy as “Sundays” represents organized religion and a confessional state. Yet the characters in The Little Stranger appear to be crying out for traditional religion in the place of science and modernity, as shown by Roderick as he begins to break down: “I don’t need a doctor so much as a,” he grasped for a word, “a vicar or something”. Waters masterfully calls into question whether the horrors that follow are a variety of divine retribution or whether the characters could have found salvation had they followed the Christian faith. Religious orthodoxy in Wuthering Heights is prominent and strict; Joseph, Nelly Dean and Edgar Linton constantly reinforcing this with the evocation of religious doctrine throughout the narrative, largely unacknowledged by the other characters. However, as events unfold, religion begins to abandon Wuthering Heights and its characters. Brontë describes how the “grey church looked greyer and the lonely churchyard looked lonelier”, which symbolizes the disintegration of the character’s adherence to the church’s teachings. Religion, especially in Wuthering Heights, is treated as frivolous and idolatrous, such as in the Wuthering Heights characters reaction to Joseph, yet both authors link doom and disaster with a lack of faith and ignoring religion. This aspect of the gothic genre is mirrored in both novels, despite the fact they were written in eras of differing religiosity, as religion acts throughout history a potent source of fear and superstition.