Social Norms In Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights

Emily Bronte was born on July 30, 1818 to educated parents in Yorkshire, England. She grew up in the Victorian age in which women were oppressed and seen as objects. The Victorian age was prim and proper and was a patriarchal society. Emily Bronte’s surroundings and her family are heavily influenced in her works especially in Wuthering Heights. Bronte explores the issue of class and creates the character, Catherine who flies in the face of the social norms and Heathcliff who is shunned because of his lower class in her only novel Wuthering Heights. Catherine represents Emily’s hatred of women not having rights in society and could show how she wanted to break free of the norms.
Emily’s family played a huge role in her writing. Losing a mother

at just three years old had a major impact for Emily as well as the other children. In Wuthering Heights, Catherine and Heathcliff are also young when Mrs. Earnshaw dies. Later on in the novel, Catherine dies during child birth, leaving young Cathy to by raised without a mother. This is a complete echo of her actual life events, which Emily most likely drew her inspiration from her own feelings of not having her mother around growing up. Emily’s brother Branwell influenced Catherine’s writing as well, specifically in her creation of Hindley Earnshaw. Branwell was immensely talented and educated, with high hoped to become famous in the arts. Like Branwell, Hindley was destined for greatness but could never live up to his expected greatness. He died without achieving his intended goals for the future. Emily saw what a deep spiral her beloved brother headed down, that Hindley came out of observations and experiences. Her sister Charlotte pushed Emily to publish her work, good thing because if it where up to Emily, the world would never know Wuthering Heights. Because Emily was so introverted, most of what the world knows about her is from the accounts of what her family says.
Tabby Aykroyd was the Bronte servant for about 30 years. She taught Emily all she knows about the supernatural world. Every night before bed, Tabby would tell the kids a spine-tingling tale about the supernatural world. Tabby’s dark, scary stories intrigued the children, especially Emily, and had a lasting effect on her writing. It is here that Emily’s dark, gothic tale of destructive love, cruelty, and death begins. Mr. Lockwood frighteningly says, “...knocking my knuckles through the glass, and stretching an arm out to seize the importunate branch: instead of which, my fingers closed on the fingers of a little, ice-cold hand. The intense horror of nightmare came over me: I tried to draw back my arm, but the hand clung to it, and a most melancholy voice sobbed, "Let me in – let me in!" (Bronte 3) The ghost of Catherine was inspired by the tales Tabby used to tell Emily as a child. Nelly Dean is much inspired by Tabby because Nelly was like a mother to Catherine and taught her right from wrong. Nelly also took care of Cathy after Catherine died, showing that Nelly really cared for Catherine. Tabby was also like a mother for the Brontes especially Emily because she would take care of them and Emily would look up to Tabby.
Emily loved the parsonage and her family house. “Emily Bronte looked out on a landscape that she loved, miles of farmland and untamed moors.”(The Bronte Sisters 291) She drew most of her inspiration for her novel form her home and the nature that surrounded it. Since we could see Emily had depression in her poetry, the nature was able to bring some life into her. The only was she could survive was being able to be in the nature. Growing up in a house with the moors on one side and the rest of the house surrounded by a graveyard, gave Bronte a very gothic style of writing. She drew from the nature in her backyard in order to create the gothic feel in Wuthering Heights.
The nature by which she was surrounded shaped Emily to value the beauty of nature over anything else the world had to offer.

Emily’s surroundings influenced her writing. She wrote, “My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it, I'm well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary.”( Bronte 9) All she knows is the world right outside her window, the only love she has ever felt is towards the house she lives in and the surrounding area. To Emily, the only way to express love is to compare it to nature. When Catherine was getting sicker by being locked up she said, “Oh, I’m burning! I wish I were out of doors. I wish I were a girl again, half savage and hardy, and free, and laughing at injuries, no maddening under them! Why am I so changed? Why does my blood rush into a hell of tumult at a few words?”(Bronte 9) Both Emily and Catherine were not meant to be a “real girl” of that time because they needed to be out in nature however that would be un lady like. In Wuthering Heights Catherine and Heathcliff were most themselves when they were on the moors. This shows Emily’s feeling towards her real life. Heathcliff’s name means a hill and since he was representative of Emily it shows her more savage side. In the Victorian Age women needed to be proper and follow what their husbands said. Heathcliff was Emily’s way of showing how she wanted to break free

and to be on her own.
Emily enjoyed to gossip. In Mrs. Gaskell’s biography on Charlotte, she records an instance when Charlotte talks about her sister Emily:
"My sister's [Emily's] disposition was not naturally gregarious: circumstances favoured and fostered her tendency to seclusion; except to go to church, or take walk in the hills, she rarely crossed the threshold of a home. Thought the feeling for the people around her was benevolent; intercourse with them she never sought, nor, with very few exceptions, ever experienced and yet she knew them, knew their ways, their language, and their family histories; she could hear of them with interest, and talk of them with detail minute, graphic and accurate; but with them she rarely exchanged a word. Hence it ensued, that what her mind has gathered of the real concerning them was too exclusively confined to those tragic and terrible traits, of which in listening to the secret annals of every rude vicinage, the memory is sometimes compelled to receive the impress."(Gaskell 14)
Emily was very observant of others and liked to be left on her own.

It is much like how Catherine and Heathcliff would rather be at the Heights away from society. Charlotte seemed to be telling Mrs. Gaskell that Emily enjoyed gossip, she loved to know about people, but she never wanted to talk to those people. In a sense, all of Wuthering Heights is actually gossip. Mr. Lockwood who narrates the story, has nothing to do with the Lintons or Earnshaws. On certain accounts Mr. Lockwood is proven wrong. He mistakes young Cathy for Heathcliff’s wife, Nelly Dean as a permeant member at Thrushcross Grange, and Heathcliff as a pleasant landlord. Obviously not a very reliable source, Emily drew on her love for gossip to create her novel, the reader doesn’t know what is fake and what isn’t. This is why the reader wants to find out more because of the gossip that fills the entire book. The reader wants to find out who to trust and who not to.
Emily Bronte could arguably be the best writer out of her sisters. She kept to herself and just wanted to be apart of nature. She didn’t want the fame like her sisters did with their novels. Emily’s writing allowed the reader to understand where she was coming from, and also made the reader intrigued with the puzzling gossip. Her family was a major influence in her novel Wuthering Heights and it is very clear to the readers why. By writing Emily was able to pour her emotions into a wonderfully intellectual award winning novel. Battling with depression

Emily died December 19, 1848 of tuberculosis.