The Dysfunctional Family in Brontë’s Wuthering Heights
Creating a haven from the cruel outside world, families ideally provide protection and support for each of their members. In Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, however, bitterness grows between the Earnshaws and the Lintons. Within these two families, siblings rival for power and parents fail to fulfill their roles as caregivers. The intertwining relationships of the Earnshaws and the Lintons are marked by physical abuse, degradation, and emotional negligence. These reduce each of the family members’ life to a lonely and meaningless journey though the cold and misty moors.
Unforgiving as the moors that surround them, the Earnshaws and the Lintons often resort to physical violence when interacting with one another. When Lockwood first visits the protagonist Heathcliff at Wuthering Heights, he tries to caress one of Heathcliff’s dogs but is met with angry snarls. Heathcliff, seeing this, kicks the dog and informs his visitor: “You’d better let the dog alone. She’s not accustomed to be spoiled – not kept for a pet”(12). Like Heathcliff’s dog, no one in the Earnshaw or the Linton family is accustomed to affection. Nelly, the servant who has worked for the Earnshaws and the Lintons for many years, is considered to be a part of these two families. She has grown so accustomed to her master Hindley Earnshaw’s physical violence that she is unfazed when he sticks a knife between her teeth. Hindley tries to use physical violence as a means of re-establishing his power within his household, for he has lost his stranglehold on it when he spiralled into depression over his wife Frances’ death. An alcoholic and a gambler, Hindley is unsuccessful in obtaining his son Hareton’s a...
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...s purposes. When Edgar Linton marries his beloved Catherine, Heathcliff revenges on his adoptive brother-in-law by marrying Isabella so that he may inherit the family fortune. He is only playing a game of emotions though, for he does not love Isabella at all. As Isabella laments to Nelly of her husband Heathcliff: “I gave him my heart, and he took and pinched it to death, and flung it back to me” (168).
Cruel and false, the Earnshaws and the Lintons wreck havoc with each other’s hearts. They abuse each other physically, degrade their children, and withhold affection. The family structure collapses as the spirit is crushed. These two families banish the warmth of love and care from their midst and embrace the coldness of the still, harsh moors between their two houses.
WORK CITED
Brontë, Emily. Wuthering Heights. New York: New American Library, 1959.
The opening events of the play Antigone, written by Sophocles, quickly establish the central conflict between Antigone and Creon. Creon has decreed that the traitor Polynices, who tried to burn down the temple of gods in Thebes, must not be given proper burial. Antigone is the only one who will speak against this decree and insists on the sacredness of family and a symbolic burial for her brother. Whereas Antigone sees no validity in a law that disregards the duty family members owe one another, Creon's point of view is exactly opposite. He has no use for anyone who places private ties above the common good, as he proclaims firmly to the Chorus and the audience as he revels in his victory over Polynices. He sees Polynices as an enemy to the state because he attacked his brother. Creon's first speech, which is dominated by words such as "authority” and "law”, shows the extent to which Creon fixates on government and law as the supreme authority. Between Antigone and Creon there can be no compromise—they both find absolute validity in the respective loyalties they uphold.
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 Brontë’s novel Wuthering Heights, set in the countryside of England’s 1700’s, features a character named Heathcliff, who is brought into the Earnshaw family as a young boy and quickly falls into a passionate, blinding romance with the Earnshaw’s daughter, Catherine. However, Heathcliff is soon crushed by this affection when his beloved chooses the company of another man rather than his own. For the remainder of the novel he exudes a harsh, aversive attitude that remains perduring until his demise that is induced by the loss of his soulmate, and in turn the bereavement of the person to whom the entirety of his being and his very own self were bound.
Isabella is Edgar Linton's sister and although pleasant, well-educated person has the soft and civilised traits of Thrushcross. Grange. Heathcliff marries her as a way of revenge against Cathy and Edgar as part of his overall plan to own both estates. Not Realising Heathcliff's intentions, she is taken in by his magnetism and
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...
Drake, Robert. "The Bleeding Stinking Mad Shadow of Jesus in the Fiction of Flannery O?Connor. Comparative Literature Studies. University of Illinois. 1966. Vol. 3. 183-196.
Throughout Wuthering Heights, I attempted to learn from the characters misery that they had, in most cases, brought upon themselves. Catherine’s difficulty making her decision reiterated to me how important it is to follow your heart when in a relationship, even if there are ‘good reasons’ to do just the opposite. From Heathcliff, I was able to see how seeking revenge will only destroy your happiness as well as the one’s you love. Young Cathy was a perfect example of the power of positivity, and how to indulge in negative thoughts will only add to your burden and isolate you from friends and family. Whether Emily Bronte intentionally wrote the novel with moral lessons in mind or not, her characters are perfect examples of how not to live.
Fee, D. Gordon, and Stuart Douglas. How to read the Bible Book by Book. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2002.
Whitt, Margaret. Understanding Flannery O’Connor. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995. 47-48, 78. Print.
(4) Wuthering Heights’s mood is melancholy and tumultuous. As a result, the book gives off a feeling of sorrow and chaos. For example, Catherine’s marriage with Edgar Linton made Heathcliff jealous and angry. In retaliation, Heathcliff married Edgar’s sister, Isabella, to provoke Catherine and Edgar. Heathcliff and Isabella’s marriage ignited a chaotic uproar with Edgar and Catherine because Linton disapproved of Heathcliff’s character, and Catherine loved Heathcliff in spite of being married to Edgar. Inside, Catherine wanted to selfishly keep Heathcliff to herself. Their relationships all had tragic endings because Catherine died giving birth to Edgar’s child. Isabella also died, leaving behind her young son. Heathcliff and Edgar resented each other because of misery they experienced together. The transition of the mood in the story is from chaotic to somber.
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.
Pamela Gonzalez April 10, 2014 Dr. Yoder English 210A: The Novel. Wuthering Heights Symbols are in which someone chooses to be visualized and the setting within which someone’s portrait is placed can communicate to us about that person’s personality and objectives, how they like to be seen and/or the period in which they lived. Wuthering Heights is a quarantined building on the hills in the West Riding of Yorkshire. “Wuthering Heights is the name of Mr. Heathcliff’s dwelling ‘Wuthering’ being a significant provincial adjective, descriptive of the atmospheric tumult to which its station is exposed in stormy weather" (Emily Bronte pg.2).
Sophocles formulates a believable plot through Antigone’s social conflict. The conflict in Antigone centers in Antigone needing to bury her brother because of her belief that natural law is higher than the governing law, and does not want to have the god’s fury pointed at her. It also revolves around the fact, that family is significantly greater to Antigone than that of the justice system. Polyneices, her brother, was a traitor and died going to war with his own blood brother. Creon, her uncle and king, has made a decree stating: “I here proclaim to the city that this man shall no one honor with a grave and none shall mourn. You shall leave him without burial...” (222). Opposing the king, she neglects the decree. Since she broke the king’s decree, she is sentenced to die for being disobedient; moreover, Antigone proudly states her crime. There is no sign of remorse shown by Creon as he states, “No, though she were my sister’s child, or closer in blood than all that my hearth god acknowledges as mine. Neither she, nor her sister, should escape the utmost sentence-death” (530-33). Bobrick explains that Creon values the love for his land more than he values family, and this becomes a struggle for Antigone as it becomes a fight between obeying the laws of man, and the laws of the god’s. The second struggle that Antigone faces, comes when she realizes she is alone.
Bronte, Emily. Wuthering Heights. Norton Critical ed. 3rd ed. Ed. William M. Sale, Jr., and Richard J. Dunn. New York: W. W. Norton, 1990.
Often in literature, the fictional written word mimics or mirrors the non-fictional actions of the time. These reflections may be social, historical, biographical, or a combination of these. Through setting, characters, and story line, an author can recreate in linear form on paper some of the abstract concepts and ideas from the world s/he is living in. In the case of Emily Bronte, her novel Wuthering Heights very closely mirrors her own life and the lives of her family members. Bronte's own life emerges on the pages of this novel through the setting, characters, and story line of Wuthering Heights.