Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights

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Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights

1)

The story takes place in the early XIXth century. There are two

characters in this extract : Mr Lockwood and Catherine Linton. Mr

Lockwood is the first narrator of this novel, he was one of Mr

Heathcliff's tenants. At the beginning of the story , there were three

characters : Heathcliff, a foundling, his sister Catherine and his

brother Hindley. Catherine fell in love with Heathcliff, but was

married with Edgar Linton. So, the second character we meet here is

Catherine Linton, Edgar Linton's daughter. This extract belongs to the

end of the novel. Catherine comes back to the farm Wuthering Heights,

she tries to get in the house trough the window. Mr Lockwood, which

had read Catherine's diary, does not recognize her.

2)

In this text, Mr Lockwood is in his bed room at Wuthering Heights, he

is alone and he had to stay in the farm because of the snow. He is

disturbed by the gusty wind and the incessant move of the fir-bough.

So he tries to stop this teasing noise, opening the window and seizing

the branch. When his fingers grabbed the branch, another cold hand

caught his. Then the context makes the text become an ambiguous

experience and we can say that this extract is set between sanity and

madness to some extents.

First of all, we will see that this text relates an ambiguous

experience. The atmosphere is gloomy : Mr Lockwood is alone in an

isolated farm, everithing is dark around him and there are many

teasing noises. So we can say that the atmosphere is quite

nightmarish. Mr Lockwood had found Catherine Linton's diary, and he

had read it. So he knows the passion between Catherine Linton and Mr

Heathcliff, the owner of Wuthering Heights. The first contact between...

... middle of paper ...

...ieve that what he is living is a hallucination, a

product of his imagination because nothing seems to be real. Maybe

that the excessive feelings mentionned are caused by Mr Lockwood's

imagination ; for the reader, the atmosphere is not very threatening.

As in many pre-Romantic novel, the nightmarish atmosphere, symbolised

by the darkness, the moor, the winter, is the source of imagination

and also of fear : imagination and extreme feelings like fear are

linked together.

We could make a link between this novel from Emily Bront and the

short stories by Edgar Allan Poe, like in The Raven for example.

Indeed, Poe wrote his short stories in the same period as Emily

Bront. In The Raven, the power of imagination, the supranatural and

the unreal have also a great place, and we could note, as in Wuthering

Heights, that the feelings expressed are often excessive.

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