Emily Brontë's "Wuthring Heights"

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte is a wild, twisted, passionate, and tragic love story between Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff. The book has many similarities and differences with the elements of fairy tales. These elements also reflects on the way Emily Bronte has been brought up due to her surroundings and family. Most fairy tales usually ends with a happy ending where the prince and princess live happily ever after, however this one has a much more dark and vengeful taste.

Brontë has apposed them in every way, even the names indicate what kind of house we should expect. The beautiful and well-kept Thrushcross Grange can be viewed as a haven when compared to the chaotic Wuthering Heights. Wuthering Heights symbolizes the anger, hatred and deep-felt tension of that house while Thrushcross Grange embodies the superficial feelings and materialistic outlook of its inhabitants. The contrast between the houses is more than physical; rather these two houses represent the people which are living in them. Brontë made Heathcliff and Wuthering Height as one, by making both of them cold, dark, and menacing, similar to the storms which constantly surround both Heathcliff and Wuthering Heights. Thrushcross Grange is parallel with the Linton’s; who are of a welcoming and peaceful manner; who have had virtually perfect lives and who have been hidden by their parents, from the evils of the outside world.

In Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte uses the setting of the English Moors, a setting she is familiar with, to place two manors, Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange. The first symbolizes man's dark side while the latter symbolizes an artificial utopia. This 19th century setting allows the reader to see the destructive nature of love when one loves the wrong person.

The importance this has towards the novel is that it shows that there is more to the Heights and the moors than just a feeling of the paranormal. There really is a ghost haunting the heights, and this entraps the reader by making them believe that there is more to the novel than just the basic story line. The other reason is that Brontë is trying to emphasise just how much Catherine was in love with Heathcliff.

But far from presenting them as innocent children, Emily Bronte uses Nature to depict wild characters trapped into their infancy by savage passions. Thus, the first appearance of a child in the novel, Catherine Earnshaw in the form of a child- ghost who wants to come into the house. (……) is surrounded by a snow storm with a gelid wind. This introduction of the character reveals the connection between her and Nature, the same as Heathcliff, in a similar maner, as Nelly tells, they were only happy in the moors, (….) and both of them are connected with the extreme weather and the wildness of the landscape (…). Furthermore, the lack of adult references, since the premature death of the mother and the distant figure of a father, makes it possible that far from being educated, the children in Wuthering Heights grow up surrounding by wilderness and the wind and as a result their characters are as reflection of those wild elements. Furthermore, in many occasions the characters are described by natural elements such as (….) and on her death bed Catherine asks return to the moors, in a desperately trying to find her lost childhood. As a result, children are presented as savage beings abandoned to their nature and far to be tamed. Only the second generation (Cathy and Hareton) will be tamed and overpass the savage of the childhood by the influence of

In the beginning of the novel, Bronte places the audience in Lockwood’s perspective. After meeting Heathcliff and his residents at Wuthering Heights, Lockwood realizes how late it was and the conditions were too harsh to walk home: “dark night

Heathcliff is an intricate character in the novel Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte. He is a sullen, bad-tempered character, who expresses his own sorrow through the suffering and pain of others. His violent actions towards others, along with his passionate love for Catherine show the qualities of both the villain and the hero, which is what makes Heathcliff such a distinct and complex character. In this novel Wuthering Heights, the readers are witness the turmoil of feelings of betrayal, revenge, and love through Heathcliff’s despondent and violent character. From the beginning of the novel, Heathcliff is an extremely gloomy and vicious character.

Catherine's ghost is a metaphor that symbolizes Heathcliff's lack of closure and his overbearing guilt that was put on him when Catherine died. "Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest as long as I am living. You said I killed you--haunt me then. The murdered do haunt their murderers...". This quote reinforces the idea that the hauntings of Catherine symbolize how Heathcliff has been affected by her death. Emily Bronte added Catherine's ghost into the story as a way to get this idea across to the reader. Authors add symbols like this all the time as an easier way for the reader to understand a certain concept that an author is trying to get across. However, if the ghost of Catherine is just a symbol to display Heathcliff's lack of closure and intense guilt, why did Emily Bronte show Catherine haunting Lockwood as well. This may be Bronte showing how Heathcliff's guilt and lack of closure is affecting other people in a negative way. In the dream that Lockwood had there were a few pieces of disturbing visual imagery depicting pain. Bronte wrote this in to show the immense pain these characters are going through and using Catherine to symbolize this is extremely strategic. An author always has a reason for putting every single minor detail into a story, so it makes sense that Bronte put Catherine in this story as a symbol, not to be an actual

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 novel begins with the first person narration by Lockwood, who is a sophisticated city gentleman, telling of his “inhospitable treatment” at Wuthering Heights (Brontë 7). To distance Lockwood from the novel’s characters, Brontë gives the reader no information about Mr. Lockwood other than he is Heathcliff’s curious tenant at Thrushcross Grange. Through Lockwood, the reader is warned that Heathcliff will “love and hate, equally under cover, and esteem it a species of impertinence to be loved or hated again” (Brontë 6). Lockwood’s objective opinion allows Brontë to show that Heathcliff is a complex man. As an unwelcomed outsider, Heathcliff “wished no repetition of [Lockwood’s] intrusion”

How Emily Bronte Introduces the Reader to the Themes of Enclosure and the Supernatural in Wuthering Heights

Emily Bronte’s two main sources of imagery are nature and the supernatural. Using Wuthering Heights, write a well-developed essay that explores the symbolic associations of storm and calm through the characters.

Throughout the novel Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë effectively utilizes weather and setting as methods of conveying insight to the reader of the personal feeling of the characters. While staying at Thrushcross Grange, Mr. Lockwood made a visit to meet Mr. Heathcliff for a second time, and the horrible snow storm that he encounters is the first piece of evidence that he should have perceived about Heathcliff's personality. The setting of the moors is one that makes them a very special place for Catherine and Heathcliff, and they are thus very symbolic of their friendship and spirts. The weather and setting are very effective tools used throughout the end of the novel as well, for when the weather becomes nice it is not only symbolic of

Although certainly unjust and arguably immoral, assigned gender roles have permeated history and its literature for centuries. Authors have penned the injustice of such gender roles throughout their works, although it was simply a part of life to them at the time. One such author is Emily Brontë, a woman who never married. She and her sisters experienced many familial hardships and began writing at a young age, perhaps as a coping mechanism. With this in mind and assessing trials and events in her life, one cannot help but find uncanny parallels between the characters of her novels and the social turmoil she witnessed. At first glance, Brontë’s Wuthering Heights may seem to be the tragedy of two young lovers. However, the reader cannot truly comprehend or explain Catherine’s decision to marry Edgar, as opposed to Heathcliff, without first understanding the period in which Brontë set her novel. The Victorian era, although positive in a scientific sense, was a brutal period for women, a “world of sadism, violence, and wanton cruelty” (Thompson 71). It perpetuated ideals such as specified gender roles, primogeniture, and the belief that women are property, without a societal voice. As a woman, Brontë experienced this discrimination firsthand as she was forced to initially publish her work under a male pseudonym, Ellis Bell, in order for it to have any societal merit. Her characters in Wuthering Heights were thusly affected by this cloud of sexism. The woman in the

This landscape is comprised primarily of moors: wide, wild expanses, high but somewhat soggy, and thus infertile. Moorland cannot be cultivated, and its uniformity makes navigation difficult. It features particularly waterlogged patches in which people could potentially drown. (This possibility is mentioned several times in Wuthering Heights.) Thus, the moors serve very well as symbols of the wild threat posed by nature. As the setting for the beginnings of Catherine and Heathcliff’s bond (the two play on the moors during childhood), the moorland transfers its symbolic associations onto the love affair. Then the Ghosts appear throughout Wuthering Heights, as they do in most other works of Gothic fiction, yet Brontë always presents them in such a way that whether they really exist remains ambiguous. Thus the world of the novel can always be interpreted as a realistic one. Certain ghosts—such as Catherine’s spirit when it appears to Lockwood in Chapter III—may be explained as nightmares. The villagers’ alleged sightings of Heathcliff’s ghost in Chapter XXXIV could be dismissed as unverified superstition. Whether or not the ghosts are “real,” they symbolize the manifestation of the past within the present, and the way memory stays with people, permeating their day-to-day lives.