The presentation of childhood is a theme that runs through two generations with the novel beginning to reveal the childhood of Catherine and Hindley Earnshaw, and with the arrival of the young Liverpudlian orphan, Heathcliff. In chapter four, Brontë presents Heathcliff’s bulling and abuse at the hands of Hindley as he grows increasingly jealous of Heathcliff for Mr. Earnshaw, his father, has favoured Heathcliff over his own son, “my arm, which is black to the shoulder” the pejorative modifier ‘black’ portrays dark and gothic associations but also shows the extent of the abuse that Heathcliff as a child suffered from his adopted brother. It is this abuse in childhood that shapes Heathcliff’s attitudes towards Hindley and his sadistic nature, as seen in chapter 17, “in rousing his rage a pitch above his malignity” there is hyperbole and melodrama as the cruelty that stemmed from his abuse in childhood has been passed onto Isabella in adulthood.
In chapter three, Lockwood opens a window to Catherine Earnshaws childhood through perusing through her books “Catherine’s library was select…scarcely one chapter had escaped a pen-and-ink commentary…scrawled in an unformed childish hand” we can see that her collection of books was limited but nevertheless well used. Two voices also come to the fore one being Lockwood’s and the other the autobiographical elements of Emily Brontë’s voice, ‘pen-and-ink commentary’ and ‘unformed childish’ the pre-modifiers reveal that the Brontë sisters also wrote in the margins of the novels they owned as paper was a scarce material.
However, Heathcliff as a child was a complete opposite to Cathy “Rough as a saw-edge…hard as whinstone” these similes show a hardened Heathcliff through a lifetime of abuse...
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...he power to depart, as much as a cat possesses the power to leave a mouse half killed, or a bird half eaten” a window motif can be seen here, as Edgar has been pushed on the outside of Wuthering Heights while Cathy remains inside her home. A change is signalled in that Edgar is likely to ask Cathy to marry him, for her cannot take his eyes off her or leave her side for one second. The plosives ‘possessed…power’ emphasise the choice that Edgar has to go back to the Grange or stay with the girl he loves, and the simile ‘as much as a cat possesses the power to leave a mouse half killed’ shows Brontë making a comparison to emphasise that Edgar would rather stay with Cathy even though she has just hit him moments early in a flurry of passion, this also shows that Edgar is easily swayed to make decisions without much persistence or effort from anyone.
. 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.
The presentation of Cathy and Heathcliff as physically divided is not only literally seen through the differing households but also through Cathy's own actions and attire.
A parallel description is given to Heathcliff when he is called, in one instance of the Brontean text «dark almost as if [he] came from the devil” (Emily Bronte: 36)
Heathcliff is a character defined by his sympathetic past. Growing up as an orphan from a tender age, deprived of a structured family and family support system, exposed to the negative influences life offered, it is almost a certainty that his behaviour will not be that of an ideal gentleman.
The initial downward spiral of Heathcliff’s life was predominantly caused by harsh influences in the environment in which he was raised. Heathcliff, an adopted child, grew up in Wuthering Heights, a desolate and dystopian estate when compared to the beauty of the neighboring Thrushcross Grange. In childhood, Heathcliff displayed evidence of a sympathetic personality through his emotional attachment to Catherine and kind attitude towards Nelly. At the time of Mr. Earnshaw’s death, Nelly describes a scene where, “Miss Cathy had been sick, and that made her still; she
Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights is a novel about lives that cross paths and are intertwined with one another. Healthcliff, an orphan, is taken in by Mr. Earnshaw, the owner of Wuthering Heights. Mr. Earnshaw has two children named Catherine and Hindley. Jealousy between Hindley and Healthcliff was always a problem. Catherine loves Healthcliff, but Hindley hates the stranger for stealing his fathers affection away. Catherine meets Edgar Linton, a young gentleman who lives at Thrushcross Grange. Despite being in love with Healthcliff she marries Edgar elevating her social standing. The characters in this novel are commingled in their relationships with Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange.
Heathcliff is a character who was abused in his childhood by Catherine’s brother, Hindley, because of his heritage as a “gypsy”, and Hindley was jealous of the love that Heathcliff got from Mr. Earnshaw, Hindley’s father. This is also selfishness upon Hindley’s part since he only wanted his father’s love for his sister and himself. So to reprimand Heathcl...
Heathcliff never finds peace through his revenge. In fact, the only time he truly finds happiness is when he gives up his plan for retaliation. Austin O’Malley states “Revenge is like biting a dog that bit you” (O’malley 1). O’Malley’s quote reflects Heathcliff’s immature need to propagate agony in those who have offended him. Heathcliff’s plan for revenge on Edgar and Catherine is to marry Isabella, who is ignorant of love and of men because she has never experienced either. He wants to hurt Edgar because of his marriage to Catherine, and he wants to get revenge on Catherine by making her jealous. Catherine’s death proves that this flawed plan of repayment helps nothing. Heathcliff, haunted by the ghost of Catherine because he is her “murderer,” still is motivated by the need for revenge and tries to get young Cathy away from Edgar by having her marry his son, Linton. Heathcliff never finds peace until he gives up his plan for revenge just before he dies. When Heathcliff gives up his plan for revenge, he meets Catherine in death and truly becomes happy once more.
On the face of it, it would seem that the relationship between Catherine and Heathcliff is self-destructive to an extreme. Due to the lovers’ precarious circumstances, passionate personalities and class divisions, it seems that fate transpires to keep them apart and therefore the hopelessness of their situation drives them to self destruction. However, although the relationship is undeniably self-destructive, there are elements within it that suggest the pain Heathcliff and Catherine put each other through is atoned for to an extent when they share their brief moments of harmony.
From the beginning of the novel and most likely from the beginning of Heathcliff's life, he has suffered pain and rejection. When Mr. Earnshaw brings him to Wuthering Heights, he is viewed as a thing rather than a child. Mrs. Earnshaw was ready to fling it out the doors, while Nelly put it on the landing of the stairs hoping that it would be gone the next day. Without having done anything to deserve rejection, Heathcliff is made to feel like an outsider. Following the death of Mr. Earnshaw, Heathcliff suffers cruel mistreatment at the hands of Hindley. In these tender years, he is deprived of love, friendship, and education, while the treatment from jealous Hindley is barbaric and disrupts his mental balance. He is separated from the family, reduced to the status of a servant, undergoes regular beatings and forcibly separated from his soul mate, Catherine. The personality that Heathcliff develops in his adulthood has been formed in response to these hardships of his childhood.
Gerard Genette focuses on the narration of the novel by analysing focalisation, the narrative mode, the use of intrusive authors and the way time is handled in a text. Each of these contributes to a readers understanding and appreciation of a text. Focalisation is one of the key features in Narratology effectively facilitates readers to comprehend the text. Bronte adopts the literary technique dual narration in Wuthering Heights; this is when two characters narrate. The two characters that narrate, via internal focalisation in the novel, are Lockwood and Nelly. Internal focalisation is when a narrator has ‘witnessed...learned about, or even participated in the events they tell.’ (Barry, 2009, pp. 225-226) This is imperative to understanding literature; an example of this in the novel is when Nelly says ‘a ...
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...
A multitude of feelings and sentiments can move a man to action, but in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, love and revenge are the only two passions powerful enough to compel the primary actors. There is consensus, in the academic community,1 that the primary antagonist in the novel, Heathcliff is largely motivated by a wanton lust for vengeance, and it is obvious from even a cursory reading that Edgar Linton, one of the protagonists, is mostly compelled by a his seemingly endless love for his wife, and it even seems as if this is reflected in the very nature of the characters themselves. For example, Heathcliff is described as “Black-eye[d]” [Brontë,1], “Dark skinned” [Brontë, 3] and a “dirty boy” [Brontë, 32]; obviously, black has sinister connotations, and darkness or uncleanliness in relation to the soul is a common metaphor for evil. On the converse, Edgar Linton is described as blue eyed with a perfect forehead [Brontë, 34] and “soft featured… [with] a figure almost too graceful” [Brontë, 40], which has almost angelic connotations. When these features and the actions of their possessors are taken into account, it becomes clear that Edgar and Heathcliff are not merely motivated by love and revenge as most academics suggest, but rather these two men were intended by Brontë to be love and hate incarnate.
At first, the children of Wuthering Heights (Hindley, Cathy, Nelly) all rejected him for his appearance as a gypsy- they thought of him as knavish, grimy, and uneducated. Despite this, Mr. Earnshaw treated with a certain respect by letting him live as with the Earnshaws while still being an outsider to the family. Yet the spectrum of hostility didn’t end with the children. Mrs. Earnshaw questions her husband’s insight, “asking how [Mr. Earnshaw] could fashion to bring that gipsy brat into the house” when he added another mouth for her to feed at the dinner table. (Chapter 4). Mr. Earnshaw’s attempt to integrate Heathcliff fails once Hindley takes over Wuthering Heights. Despite basically being middle class under Mr. Earnshaw, Hindley takes it on his own to oppress and torture him. Before this, Heathcliff was on a level playing field class wise compared to the Earnshaws. Heathcliff now finds himself as a servant, a laborer working the fields. By subjugating Heathcliff, Hindley drew the line in the sand. Hindley has effectively forced Heathcliff into a lower class, Hindley has colonized
Charlotte Bronte assumed the role of intermediary between her late sister and the perplexed and hostile readers of Wuthering Heights (Sale and Dunn, WH p. 267). Charlotte attempted to provide Emily’s readers with a more complete perspective of her sister and her works. She selectively included biographical information and critical commentary into the revised 1850 edition of Wuthering Heights, which gave the reader a fuller appreciation of the works of Emily Bronte. Charlotte championed the efforts of her younger sister and believed that Emily’s inexperience and unpracticed hand were her only shortcomings. Charlotte explains much of Emily’s character to the readers through the disclosure of biographical information.