Setting Analysis and Symbolism of Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

Setting Analysis and Symbolism of Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

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 manor Wuthering Heights is described as dark and demonic. In the English moors, winter lasted three times as long as summer and the Heights and the land adjacent to it can be compared to winter, while Thrushcross Grange can be described as the summer. Bronte describes the Heights as a "misanthropist's Heaven." Its gate is always chained from the outside and its inhabitants on the inside are as unappealing as the house itself. Wuthering Heights produces Heathcliff, the protagonist of the story, and his "siblings", Catherine and Hindley. These three children, brought together in unusual circumstances, have to survive the obstacles of their environment. This reality is harsh, but it explains their later behavior. Because life at the Heights often demonstrates man's cruelty, the children can not appreciate the utopia that is Thrushcross Grange. When Heathcliff is a boy and returns from the Grange he describes his adventure;

"...We laughed outright at the petted things; we did despise them! ... or find us by ourselves, seeking entertainment in yelling, and sobbing, and rolling on the ground divided by the whole room? I'd not exchange, for a thousand lives, my condition here, for Edgar Linton's at Thrushcross Grange..." (p.52)

Wuthering Heights is a dark manor that expects t...

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...es in the bogs of the moors..." The moors are where, in the end, their ghosts return and are free to roam.

In Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte is able to use the setting of the English moors to show two different aspects of the world and symbolically, the destructive nature of love. At one end there is Wuthering Heights and the evil that results in the cruelty that its inhabitants force upon each other, while the other end is Thrushcross Grange and the naivety and ignorance that results from its "utopia-like" atmosphere . For Heathcliff and Catherine, who will destroy anyone for the other, the only peace that can be reached is in the middle of the two estates where they can live by their own rules. The irony of the story is that Catherine and Heathcliff's obsessive love not only leads to their destruction, but to the destruction of the others who loved them.