Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights - A Great Romantic Novel

Wuthering Heights: A Great Romantic Novel

The Romantic Period was a very imaginative and creative period of thinking. The literature produced during this period reflected this wild and free-spirited imagination. The works dismissed the Enlightenment thinkers in their claims of "Reason, progress, and universal truths" (Damrosch, 1317). Instead, these writers explored superstitions and had a renewed sense of passion for the wild, the unfamiliar, the irregular, and the irrational (Damrosch, 1317). Other common elements of the writing during this period were the returned interest of gothic romance elements, a fascination of exploring the inner world of the mind and the unconscious into its dark side, an interest in emotional adventures in exotic and remote times and places, an interest in the outcast people in society (outlaws, rebels, nonconformists, exiles, etc.), and an interest in characters performing dangerous self-explorations that take them to hell, and not always back (Agatucci, 1&3).

Wuthering Heights, by Emily Bronte, is an excellent example of a great Romantic novel, especially of the kind of romanticism known as Dark Romanticism. There are many different Romantic elements found in this novel, making it a masterpiece of the period. These elements include that fact that it is most definitely one strange story that is very original, emotionally charged, and imaginative and innovative (Agatucci, 4); its characters are very intense, passionate, go to emotional excesses, and even become violent; and it deals with the element of the supernatural and the antirational also (Agatucci, 4). Other Romantic elements contained within its pages include its Gothic setting that is sensual but remote, the dark roma...

... middle of paper ...

...d Heathcliff.

Thus, as you can see, this is indeed a very powerful, emotionally charged story that delves into the darkness of the human unconscious, the supernatural forces that surround reality, and the romantic charges that initiate and cause all sorts of different human actions and thought. The story is very strange, but full of adventure, creating a very engrossing reading. This novel by Emily Bronte is definitely a piece of classic Romantic literature, and will continue to be read for years to come.

Works Cited

Agatucci, Cora. Lecture Notes. Romanticism & Realism. Literary-Historical Contexts for Wuthering Heights. 2001.

Bronte, Emily. Wuthering Heights. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1990.

Damrosch, David . The Longman Anthology Of British Literature. Volume B. Compact Edition. New York: Addison Wesley Longman, 2000.