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...
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...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.
He is very unprepared because he doesn’t have enough equipment to finish his trip because it’s too cold. The traveler does not have proper clothing to keep him warm in the cold weather. ”The frozen moisture of its breathing had settled on its fur in a fine powder of frost, and especially were its jowls, muzzle, and eyelashes whitened
He fig-ured that the normal half hour walk home might take as long as two hours in snow this deep. And then there was the wind and the cold to contend with. The wind was blowing across the river and up over the embankment making the snow it carried colder and wetter than the snow blanketing the ground. He would have to use every skill he’d learned, living in these hills, to complete the journey without getting lost, freezing to death, or at the very least ending up with a severe case of frostbite be-fore he made it back to Ruby.
was dying so Hindley went to visit her. While he was there, she did passed
with his mother. This occurs when his mother asks him to remain at home rather
Heathcliff cried vehemently, "I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!" Emily Brontë distorts many common elements in Wuthering Heights to enhance the quality of her book. One of the distortions is Heathcliff's undying love for Catherine Earnshaw. Also, Brontë perverts the vindictive hatred that fills and runs Heathcliff's life after he loses Catherine. Finally, she prolongs death, making it even more distressing and insufferable.
with Edgar. He shows love of the past by pointing out to her how little
now we realise that he has no parents and that he is alone in the
Wuthering Heights is not just a love story, it is a window into the human soul, where one sees the loss, suffering, self discovery, and triumph of the characters in this novel. Both the Image of the Book by Robert McKibben, and Control of Sympathy in Wuthering Heights by John Hagan, strive to prove that neither Catherine nor Heathcliff are to blame for their wrong doings. Catherine and Heathcliff’s passionate nature, intolerable frustration, and overwhelming loss have ruined them, and thus stripped them of their humanities.
Definitive criteria for judging the success or failure of a work of fiction are not easily agreed upon; individuals almost necessarily introduce bias into any such attempt. Only those who affect an exorbitantly refined artistic taste, however, would deny the importance of poignancy in literary pieces. To be sure, writings of dubious and fleeting merit frequently enchant the public, but there is too the occasional author who garners widespread acclaim and whose works remain deeply affecting despite the passage of time. The continued eminence of the fiction of Emily Bronte attests to her placement into such a category of authors: it is a recognition of her propensity to create poignant and, indeed, successful literature.
The famous saying that from a true love to a great hatred is only a
“Wuthering Heights is a strange, inartistic story”(Atlas, WH p. 299). “Wuthering Heights is a strange sort of book” (Douglas, WH p.301). “This is a strange book” (Examiner, WH p.302). “His work [Wuthering Heights] is strangely original” (Britannia, WH p.305). These brief quotes show that early critics of Emily Bronte’s first edition of Wuthering Heights, found the novel baffling in its meaning - they each agreed separately, that no moral existed within the story therefore it was deemed to have no real literary value. The original critical reviews had very little in the way of praise for the unknown author or the novel. The critics begrudgingly acknowledged elements of Wuthering Heights that could be considered strengths – such as, “rugged power” and “unconscious strength” (Atlas, WH p.299), “purposeless power” (Douglas, WH p.301), “evidences of considerable power” (Examiner), “power and originality” (Britannia, WH p.305). Strange and Powerful are two recurring critical interpretations of the novel. The critics did not attempt to provide in depth analysis of the work, simply because they felt that the meaning or moral of the story was either entirely absent or seriously confused.
Wuthering Heights, written by Emily Bronte, has 323 pages. The genre of Wuthering Heights is realistic fiction, and it is a romantic novel. The book is available in the school library, but it was bought at Barnes and Nobles. The author’s purpose of writing Wuthering Heights is to describe a twisted and dark romance story. Thus, the author conveys the theme of one of life’s absolute truths: love is pain. In addition, the mood of the book is melancholy and tumultuous. Lastly, the single most important incident of the book is when Heathcliff arrives to Edgar Linton’s residence in the Granges unannounced to see Catherine’s state of health. Heathcliff’s single visit overwhelmed Catherine to the point of death.
The setting is the backbone for a novel it sets the tone and gives the reader a mental image of the time and places the story takes place. The Wuthering Heights Estate in Emily Bronte’s novel “Wuthering Heights” is one of the most important settings in the story. Wuthering Heights sets mood for the scenes taken place in the house, and reflects the life of Heathcliff through its description, furniture, windows, gates, and the vegetation.
It has been proven evident throughout the history of literature that authors will tend to incorporate their own lives into their works. This is the case in Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë. Although the novel is in itself fictional, Brontë invites readers into her private life by the way in which she writes her novel. Literary elements are often taken into consideration when determining the value of a literary work. However, they offer more than just layers of complexity to a work. Brontë uses countless metaphors to portray relevance to her own life. The ongoing comparison between the characters in Wuthering Heights and Brontë’s own life only exemplifies how often authors use their works to reflect their lives.
Bronte's Use of Language and Setting in Wuthering Heights Between pages 15 and 18 there are identifiable ways in which 'Bronte' uses 'language and setting' to establish the characters and create a distinguishable atmosphere. In this essay, themes, genres and styles will be discussed to show how 'Bronte' establishes the characters; there will also be a discussion of the 'gothic' elements which Wuthering Heights contains. Many people would argue that the style of 'Wuthering Heights' is peculiar and complex, the power of Wuthering Heights owes much to its complex narrative structure and to the device of having two conventional people relate a very unconventional tale. Bronte importantly introduces the element of 'the supernatural' into chapter 3 which is an important technique as it grips the reader. Lockwood has come into contact with the ghost of Cathy, who died 18 years before, Some might argue that she is a product of Lockwood's imagination, and it is clear that Bronte has presented these facts in this way so that the reader can make up their own mind on the subject.