Ita Cohen Mrs. Marvin English January 4, 2000 Biography Report of Emily Bronte In every author’s life, there is an event or sequence of childhood/ early adulthood events that have shaped the author’s life and general point of view. These events often color or influence the author’s outlook and filter their way into the author’s work. In Wuthering Heights, by Emily Bronte, this is clearly shown. . The reader sees an extraordinary inwardness in Emily Bronte’s book Wuthering Heights. Emily has a gloomy and isolated childhood. . Says Charlotte Bronte, “ my sister’s disposition was not naturally gregarious; circumstances favored and fostered her tendency to seclusion; except to go to church, or to take a walk on the hills, she rarely crossed the threshold of home.”(Everit,24) That inwardness, that remarkable sense of the privacy of human experience, is clearly the essential vision of Wuthering Heights. Emily Bronte saw the principal human conflict as one between the individual and the dark, questioning universe, a universe symbolized, in her novel, both by man’s threatening and hardly-to-be-controlled inner nature, and by nature in its more impersonal sense, the wild lonesome mystery of the moors. The love of Heathcliff and Catherine, in its purest form, expresses itself absolutely in its own terms. These terms may seem to a typical mind, violent, and even disgusting. But having been generated by that particular love, they are the proper expressions of it. The passionately private relationship of Heathcliff and Catherine makes no reference to any social convention or situation. Only when Cathy begins to be attracted to the well-mannered ways of Thrushcross Grange, she is led, through them, to abandon her true nature. Inwardness is also the key to the structure of the novel. The book begins in the year 1801, on the very rim of the tale, long after the principal incidents of the story have taken place. Mr. Lockwood, our guide, is very far removed from the central experiences of the narrative. Under Lockwood’s sadly unperceptive direction, the reader slowly begins to understand what is happening at Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange. Gradually we move toward the center of the novel. In a few chapters, Nelly Dean, takes over from Lockwood, and the reader is a little closer to the truth. Still Nelly is herself unperceptive and the reader must struggle hard till reaching the center of the novel; the passionate last meeting of Heathcliff and Cathy in Chapter 15.
Society today embellishes the words romance and passion, claiming them to be all good and positive. However, almost no works of media capture the darkness of intense fervor like Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë. Her two protagonists, Heathcliff and Catherine, are one of literature’s most romantic star-crossed lovers, whose only parallel is Romeo and Juliet. Once her father brings the young and wild gypsy home, Catherine forms an unbreakable attachment with him. They embody the term “gothic romance” with tragedy and distress in every chapter threatening the relationship and sanity of the two characters. Catherine and Heathcliff’s amorous affinity and bond towards each other kindles drama that inflicts pain and suffering on those around them, causing the world that encompasses Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange to fall apart.
It would be false to consider Wuthering Heights a story of timeless, undying love. While Heathcliff’s incessant yearning for Catherine may pull on one’s heartstrings as an attempt to showcase the man’s everlasting devotion to one forbidden woman, under more precise scrutinization, it all appears to be a cover-up for Heathcliff’s true desire-- to climb to the top of the social classes for redemption from the trauma in his early life. Emily Brontë hints through Heathcliff’s characterization that his thirst for revenge spawns not from his unrequited love for Catherine, but from an insatiable desire to prove himself as superior to those who have wronged him.
Virginia Woolf and Emily Bronte possess striking similarities in their works. Both works have inanimate objects as pivotal points of the story line. For Bronte, Wuthering Heights itself plays a key role in the story. The feel of the house changes as the characters are introduced to it. Before Heathcliff, the Heights was a place of discipline but also love. The children got on well with each other and though Nelly was not a member of the family she too played and ate with them. When old Mr. Earnshaw traveled to Liverpool he asked the children what they wished for him to bring them as gifts and also promised Nelly a “pocketful of apples and pears” (WH 28). Heathcliff’s presence changed the Heights, “So, from the beginning, he had bred bad feeling in the house” (WH 30). The Heights became a place to dream of for Catherine (1) when she married Linton and moved to the Grange. For her it held the memories of Heathcliff and their love. For her daughter, Cathy, it became a dungeon; trapped in a loveless marriage in a cold stone home far away from the opulence and luxury of the home she was used to. Then, upon the death of Heathcliff, I can almost see, in my minds eye, the Heights itself relax into the warm earth around in it the knowledge that it too is once again safe from the vengeance, bitterness, and hate that has housed itself within its walls for over twenty years.
Throughout the ages, literature and her artists have given anyone the chance to be something they are not: a princess, a pirate, lovers like Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy, anything imaginable, or “call me Ishmael.” Perhaps one of the greatest of these artists is so underrated and misunderstood, but belongs to a category that can only be described as brilliant. Emily Bronte employs powerful characterization and grotesque imagery to manifest the fierce symbolism in the tragic love story that is Catherine and Heathcliff, in her novel Wuthering Heights.
In comparison, Catherine has not only grown up with Heathcliff, allowing her access to a myriad of interactions which Brontë’s audience wasn’t previously privy to, but she has developed her understanding of societal norms alongside him. Thus, the unabashed sympathy Cathy initially feels for her “poor Heathcliff” provides a new narrative altogether—a narrative that focuses on the individual, closely following Heathcliff’s transmogrification from a “starving, and houseless, and as good as dumb [child] in the streets of Liverpool” to a man who Lockwood interprets as filled with cruelty and “savage vehemence” (22, 37, 27). In addition, Catherine’s possible retelling of Wuthering Heights through her diaries eventually allows for Heathcliff’s cruelty to be put into conversation with his upbringing as a non-white subject in a wholly white
This study will examine Emily Bronte's novel Wuthering Heights, focusing on how evil is related to love. The study will explore the main relationship in the book, the relationship between Heathcliff and Catherine. That relationship is full of both love and evil and will show us what happens when evil and love become tied to one another.
...ss in the end. Bronte makes this fictional setting seem plausible because she employed both of these themes in the way that she wrote her novel. By purposefully leaving major questions unanswered in the novel, Bronte deceives many readers into thinking that they have free reign in interpreting these perceived plot wholes. In fact, these are not plot wholes at all; but instead, examples of literary genius employed by Emily Bronte that are only appreciated by careful readers. She used unreliable narrators to recant stories that occurred at the Wuthering Heights and the Grange because the details did not need to be overly in depth in order for the major themes to be understood by the attentive audience. Emily Bronte’s brilliance shined through Wuthering Heights because she was able to create a very personal connection to her work by embodying the novel’s major themes.
Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights has lasted in the literary world for quite some time. The novel has flitted on the edges of the appreciated canon, only read by those avid readers. This book follows the basic story line of some of Jane Austen’s works. Set in 18th century England, the social aspects of this book stand out. These aspects are applicable in the present world, though in much less obvious ways. The meaning and themes of the novel show themselves fairly easily.
Heathcliff and Catherine have loved each other since their childhood. Initially, Catherine scorned the little gypsy boy; she showed her distaste by “spitting” at him (Brontë 27). However, it was not long before Heathcliff and Catherine became “very think” (Brontë 27). They became very close friends; they were practically brother and sister (Mitchell 122). Heathcliff is intent upon pleasing Catherine. He would “do her bidding in anything” (Brontë 30). He is afraid of “grieving” her (Brontë 40). Heathcliff finds solace and comfort in Catherine’s company. When Catherine is compelled to stay at Thrushcross Grange to recover from her injury, she returns as “a very dignified person” (Brontë 37). Her association with the gente...
Set in the wild, rugged country of Yorkshire in northern England during the late eighteenth century, Emily Bronte's masterpiece novel, Wuthering Heights, clearly illustrates the conflict between the 'principles of storm and calm';. The reoccurring theme of this story is captured by the intense, almost inhuman love between Catherine and Heathcliff and the numerous barriers preventing their union.
Emily Bronte recounts the tales of Catherine and Heathcliff’s lives in a cycle. The narrator, Nelly, tells each characters tales from different points in their lives, jumping from one month to that of another a period of time later, instead of having a steady flow of events. Through this, we focus on the most important events of each characters life, events which are significant to the plot line and the development that each character goes through.
Beginning with his mysterious arrival at Wuthering Heights, his subsequent brutal childhood, and his vengeful quest to wreak havoc against the society that wronged him, Emily Brontë’s novel, Wuthering Heights follows the dark and twisted tale of Heathcliff, the Byronic hero of the story. Despite being an instrument of suffering for others, throughout the story, Heathcliff unexpectedly flashes his inherent good nature and Romantic ideals. While in his adulthood, he may act animalistic and even satanic, Heathcliff’s cruelty and uncontrollable desire for revenge is rooted in the mistreatment from Hindley and Catherine Earnshaw. By using the Earnshaw family as a means of corrupting her inherently good Byronic hero, Emily Brontë uses the character
When Wuthering Heights, by Emily Bronte, first appeared in 1847, it was thought to be obscene and crude (Chase 19). To the common person, it was shocking and offensive, and it did not gain popularity until long after it was first published. When the piece of literature became widely read and discussed, however, Bronte was declared as a “romantic rebel against repressive conventions and a writer who made passion part of novelistic tradition” (Chase 19). Unlike earlier writers, Bronte used factors from her own life and passions that she personally held to construct her classic novel. For example, Joseph’s bible-thumper character most likely symbolizes her father, who was a minister. However, Bronte’s book is not only a breakthrough to literature in these ways. The narration of the story is also very unique and divergent because there are multiple narrators. Bronte’s character Lockwood is used to narrate the introductory and concluding sections of the novel whereas Nelly Dean narrates most of the storyline. It’s interesting that Nelly Dean is used because of her biased opinions. In addition, the structure of Wuthering Heights displays a uniqueness. Just as Elizabethan plays have five acts, Wuthering Heights is composed of two “acts,” the times before and after Catherine’s death. However, unlike stereotypical novels, Wuthering Heights has no true heroes or villains. “Although this work was written in the Romantic Period, it is not a romance. There are no true heroes or villain...
According to him, Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights is not only just a romance, but it is about class origins, and how industrialization in Britain had an impact on the culture of the English and found its way to the far reaches of the wild English countryside, that is. Heathcliff was not a Romeo, he was a dark-skinned outsider who reminded the reader of the dramatic social change that happened at that time.
Brontë, Emily. Wuthering Heights. N.p.: Project Gutenberg, 2007. Print. Transcribed from the 1910 John Murray edition by David Price