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Although banned by many, and put on a shelf for many years, Wuthering Heights still delivers the shock value which is anticipated when reading books written in the 1800’s. Daughter of a clergy man, Emily Bronte the nom de plume of the author Ellis Bell, penned Wuthering Heights and left British society in an uproar due to the content within the pages while having touched upon forbidden love, the supernatural, dark passion, incest, race, and women’s rights. Due to the scandalous nature of Wuthering Heights, it was buried for many years and was not praised for its’ brilliant writing until much later by literary critics. Even today, there are some communities which still have Wuthering Heights banned, but society should ask; why is it that disturbing realities captive the human mind and make them want more, but as distorted as love can be, Wuthering Heights is a giant when it comes to love stories.
When reading Wuthering Heights one is naturally drawn to the love story, as sad and perverse as it may appear on its face, the torrid affairs and events which came about through primarily through the very selfish, self-centered, and sadistic individuals Catherine and Heathcliff, as the two of them destroyed lives of the people that were involved with them. What started out innocently with Mr. Earnshaw loving an orphan boy, whom he named Heathcliff, and taking him into his family as a son, soon turned into jealousy and conflict between his natural born children and Heathcliff. Hindley, natural born son of Earnshaw and the brother of Catherine, hated Heathcliff from the day he arrived the manor at Wuthering Heights. At every opportunity Hindley scoffed at the love his father felt for the “dark skinned” boy and shamed his father at ...
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...pe of love, including the love of their own children and never put their own children’s needs above their own greedy need for the insatiable, unfillable and relentless feelings of obsessive love.
All in all, the love centered relationships of Wuthering Heights may not be what society considers healthy but it does fall within the meaning of love in different aspects throughout the novel. From the innocent love to a distorted view of obsession, Wuthering Heights will open the eyes, appall, enrage, and give a whole new meaning to love with each chapter. It is up to the reader’s own interpretation as to whether or not they believe that the relationships between the parties is true love, hate, obsessive love, or a twisted and distorted view of what society calls love.
Reference(s)
Bronte, Emily. Wuthering Heights. 1847. New York: Penguin Books, 2003.
The complicated nature surrounding Heathcliff’s motives again adds an additional degree of ambiguity to his character. This motivation is primarily driven by Catherine’s marriage to Edgar and past rejection of Heathcliff, since he was a servant whom Hindley disapproved of. Prior to storming out of Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff overhears Catherine say, “It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now…” (Brontë 87). The obstacles that ultimately prevent Heathcliff from marrying Catherine provide insight into Heathcliff’s desire to bring harm to Edgar and Hindley. The two men play prominent roles in the debacle, Edgar as the new husband and Hindley as the head figure who refused Heathcliff access to Catherine. Following this incident, Catherine says, “Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same…” (Brontë 87). Catherine’s sentiment indicates she truly would rather be with Heathcliff, but the actions of others have influenced her monumental decision to marry Edgar. Furthermore, Heathcliff is motivated to not only ruin Edgar’s livelihood, but also gain ownership of his estate, Thrushcross Grange. This becomes clear when Heathcliff attempts to use Isabella
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.
. 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 relation between Hindley and Heathcliff plays a major role in Heathcliff’s social status. Hindley happens to despise Heathcliff because he was adopted by his father and received special treatment which Hindley longed to receive. Perhaps, this triggers Hindley jealousy and hatred towards 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...
...ctive. Catherine is pushed to death and Heathcliff to brutal revenge, bordering on the psychotic. Yet before Cathy’s death, the knowledge that the other loves them is strong enough to make Wuthering Heights such a classic love story, and “that old man by the kitchen fire affirming he has seen two of 'em looking out of his chamber window, on every rainy night since his death,” shows that as they walk together on the moors, their self destruction may have led them to death, but also to what they most desired-being together.
In the gothic novel Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte, the author hides motifs within the story.The novel contains two major love stories;The wild love of Catherine, and Heathcliff juxtaposing the serene love of Cathy,and Hareton. Catherine’s and Heathcliff's love is the center of Emily Bronte’s novel ,which readers still to this day seem to remember.The characters passion, and obsession for each other seems to not have been enough ,since their love didn't get to thrive. Hareton and Cathy’s love is what got to develop. Hareton’s and Cathy’s love got to workout ,because both characters contained a characteristic that both characters from the first generation lacked: The ability to change .Bronte employs literary devices such as antithesis of ideas, and the motif of repetition to reveal the destructiveness of wild love versus a domestic love.
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.
Wuthering Heights is a novel which deviates from the standard of Victorian literature. The novels of the Victorian Era were often works of social criticism. They generally had a moral purpose and promoted ideals of love and brotherhood. Wuthering Heights is more of a Victorian Gothic novel; it contains passion, violence, and supernatural elements (Mitchell 119). The world of Wuthering Heights seems to be a world without morals. In Wuthering Heights, Brontë does not idealize love; she presents it realistically, with all its faults and merits. She shows that love is a powerful force which can be destructive or redemptive. Heathcliff has an all-consuming passion for Catherine. When she chooses to marry Edgar, his spurned love turns into a destructive force, motivating him to enact revenge and wreak misery. The power of Heathcliff’s destructive love is conquered by the influence of another kind of love. Young Cathy’s love for Hareton is a redemptive force. It is her love that brings an end to the reign of Heathcliff.
Wuthering Heights is filled with different examples of the Romantic Movements. Heathcliff is an exceptionally difficult character to analyze because he displays numerous altered personalities. This raises the question: which Romantic Movement was most common in Wuthering Heights? An analysis of Wuthering Heights reveals the most common Romantic Movement in the text: Romanticism. Romanticism is based upon the ideas of subjectivity, inspiration and the primacy of the individual. Various examples of these from the text are when Heathcliff has Catherine’s grave excavated, the repeated possibility of supernatural beings, and the love from the past that is seen from Heathcliff and Catherine.
Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights can be considered a Gothic romance or an essay on the human relationship. The reader may regard the novel as a serious study of human problems such as love and hate, or revenge and jealousy. One may even consider the novel Bronte's personal interpretation of the universe. However, when all is said and done, Heathcliff and Catherine are the story. Their powerful presence permeates throughout the novel, as well as their complex personalities. Their climatic feelings towards each other and often selfish behavior often exaggerates or possibly encapsulates certain universal psychological truths humans are too afraid to express. Heathcliff and Catherine's stark backgrounds evolve respectively into dark personalities and mistaken life paths, but in the end their actions determine the course of their own relationships and lives. Their misfortunes, recklessness, willpower, and destructive passion are unable to penetrate the eternal love they share.
The story of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights has been one of the most influential and powerful piece of literature ever written. After being published, it garnered a lot of interest because of the theme that was deemed misleading and critically unfit for society. The main theme of the book revolves around the evolution of love, passion and cruelty.
It just takes one person to start a cycle of repeated hatred and suffering, but also only one person to break this chain and bring happiness into the world. The relationships at Wuthering Heights are based on envy and revenge and only bring pain. This is ironic as the perpetrator of abuse believes it will bring them relief from their pain. But Bronte points out the futility of carrying out revenge since even when fulfilled, it does not serve its purpose of relieving pain or restoring love. That can only be achieved when people stay true to the path of love and are tenacious enough to overcome their
Everyone knows about romance, whether it comes from films like The Notebook, songs like Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You”, or innocent stories told like those of Disney Princesses. Generally, romance is about two people falling in love and overcoming obstacles to make that love happen for them. Emily Bronte’s “Wuthering Heights” doesn’t exactly follow that for Heathcliff and Catherine. An interesting twist for these two characters is that instead of breaking down obstacles to be with one another, they instead create obstacles for each other because of how much they love and want to be with each other. They recognize and measure the love they share for each other in life with souls and in death with spirits.
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.