Have you ever read a book where you have a hard time keeping track of characters and events and the order of the book? Well than you must have come across this gothic novel called “Wuthering Heights” by Emily Bronte. She combines more than one element of a gothic novel and that is craziness, obsession and villain heroes. The novel is formed around the two similar love stories of Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff and the young Catherine Linton and Hareton Earnshaw. The motif of this book is full of doubles and repetitions; it has two protagonists as mentions earlier, Catherine and Heathcliff, two narrators, Mr. Lockwood and Nelly, and two houses, Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange. In spite of all this, Emily Bronte wasn’t just torturing us for no reason but the cycles in violence and the repeating or scrambling the characters names even in intermarriages tells us that it is trapped in something overpowering and unresolved. Assume the chaos of doubling and repetition, their symptoms are increasing on an unresolved issue that drives this entire story around for the sake of Catherin and Heathcliff unresolved passion. Catherine and Heathcliff share a love so deep that the two souls seem to have intertwined into one. In result Bronte deliberately arranges the characters, and the place into pairs. She shows the particular difference on the double to demonstrate both the imaginary ideal and the tragic reality of relationships that are surrounded by the restraints of class, and society.
The craziness, obsessive and the passion love between Heathcliff and Catherine leads to the idea of them being doubles of one another and the idea of them being two parts of a spiritual twin. When Catherine tells Nelly Dean about her dream that she...
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...al code; the here of at the earth and the there of the after-place (death); the inside of love and the outside of hate; the inside of being together and the outside of being apart. And finally it has two generations, the first destroyed in sadness and the second raised up in joy. And toward the end it has two endings; Heathcliff and Cathy walk the moors in death. And Hareton and Cathy return to the Grange to renew the Earnshaw family. To conclude, what one has learnt about doubles and repetition is that if Emily Bronte did not have doubles and repetition than maybe this story would have been a happy ending for many people rather than just Cathy and Harton. If Heathcliff didn’t have the same personality or characteristic from Catherine and was educated and calm than they both would have lived happily where Catherine didn’t need to marry Edgar from the first place.
... images the story of Catherin and Heathcliff’s struggle to find one another and themselves at Wuthering Heights was able to be understood by the reader. The central theme of identity search was clear because of the words chosen by Emily, the passages from the text above and the central line “I am Heathcliff” (82). The social status and sew of the characters is what ultimately lead to the choices they made which in turn determined their final identities, the ones that they were destined to get but did not want. Catherine and Heathcliff both made their decision on who they wanted to be and how they wanted to be defined. Their identities are what they died with and although they were buried beside eachother that’s not how they lived their lives. Identity is a balance between outer and inner perception and once one realizes what they want it’s hard to balance the two.
In the gothic novel Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte, the author hides motifs within the story.The novel contains two major love stories;The wild love of Catherine, and Heathcliff juxtaposing the serene love of Cathy,and Hareton. Catherine’s and Heathcliff's love is the center of Emily Bronte’s novel ,which readers still to this day seem to remember.The characters passion, and obsession for each other seems to not have been enough ,since their love didn't get to thrive. Hareton and Cathy’s love is what got to develop. Hareton’s and Cathy’s love got to workout ,because both characters contained a characteristic that both characters from the first generation lacked: The ability to change .Bronte employs literary devices such as antithesis of ideas, and the motif of repetition to reveal the destructiveness of wild love versus a domestic love.
Heathcliff's love for Catherine transcends the normal physical "true love" into spiritual love. He can withstand anything against him to be with her. After Hindley became the master of Wuthering Heights, he flogged Heathcliff like a slave. Although Heathcliff could have simply run away, his decision to endure the physical pains shows his unrelenting devotion to Catherine. Fortunately, Catherine feels as deeply for Heathcliff as he does for her, explaining to Nelly that "Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same…" Their love for each other is so passionate that they can not possibly live apart. At Catherine's death, Heathcliff hopes that she will not rest, but will haunt him until he dies. This absurdity contradicts the traditional norm that one should pray that the dead rest in peace. Near the end of the novel, we learn that Catherine has haunted Heathcliff, allowing him only fleeting glances of her. This shows that despite their physical separation, nothing can part them spiritually. When Heathcliff dies and unites with Catherine once again, the neighbors see them haunt the moors. We finally see the power of their love; Not only does this love transcend physical barriers, it transcends time as well...
There is two stereotypical types of families, one where the children learn from their parents behavior and do the same as they grow up, and the other where they dislike – and do the opposite. In Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, the characters are quite intricate and engaging. The story takes place in northern England in an isolated, rural area. The main characters of the novel reside in two opposing households: Thrushcross Grange and Wuthering Heights. Wuthering Heights is a story of a dynamic love between two people. This love transcends all boundaries, including that over life and death. The author takes parallelism to great extends. Much of the events that happen in the first half of the story correspond to events in the second half; first generation of characters is comparable to the second generation. Many may argue that the characters are duplicates of each other and that they share many traits. Although Catherine Earnshaw and Cathy Linton are mother and daughter, their personalities and lifestyles are very different. This is a great example where the child is and behaves quite different than her mother.
Her selfishness lies within the reality that she married Linton for the things he could have provided for her. Nothing parted Catherine and Heathcliff. Not God, nor Satan, it was Catherine herself – Catherine was the cause of her broken heart. Along with breaking her heart, she also broke Heathcliff’s, which led him to loathe and yearn for vengeance against what Heathcliff thought was the cause of Catherine’s death – her daughter.
Catherine is free-spirited, wild, impetuous, and arrogant as a child, she grows up getting everything she wants as Nelly describes in chapter 5, ‘A wild, wicked slip she was’. She is given to fits of temper, and she is torn between her wild passion for Heathcliff and her social ambition. She brings misery to both of the men who love her, ultimately; Catherine’s selfishness ends up hurting everyone she loves, including herself.
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.
Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights is a novel about lives that cross paths and are intertwined with one another. Healthcliff, an orphan, is taken in by Mr. Earnshaw, the owner of Wuthering Heights. Mr. Earnshaw has two children named Catherine and Hindley. Jealousy between Hindley and Healthcliff was always a problem. Catherine loves Healthcliff, but Hindley hates the stranger for stealing his fathers affection away. Catherine meets Edgar Linton, a young gentleman who lives at Thrushcross Grange. Despite being in love with Healthcliff she marries Edgar elevating her social standing. The characters in this novel are commingled in their relationships with Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange.
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte In chapter nine, we are introduced to the issues surrounding different. ideas of love through Catherine's dilemma. The author uses a variety of imagery and ideas to separate superficial love from true love. We are shown her love for Edgar, a gentleman residing in the estate of Thrushcross Grange, is indeed superficial.
Catherine is trapped between her love of Heathcliff and her love for Edgar, setting the two men down a path of destruction, a whirlwind of anger and resentment that Catherine gets caught in the middle of. Catherine is drawn to Heathcliff because of his fiery personality, their raw attraction and one certainly gets the sense that they are drawn together on a deeper level, that perhaps they are soulmates. C. Day Lewis thought so, when he declared that Heathcliff and Catherine "represent the essential isolation of the soul...two halves of a single soul–forever sundered and struggling to unite." This certainly seems to be backed up in the novel when Catherine exclaims “Nelly, I am Heathcliff! He's always, always in my mind--not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being...” This shows clearly the struggle Catherine feels as she is drawn spiritually to Heathcliff, but also to Edgar for very different reasons. Edgar attracts Catherine predominantly because he is of the right social class. Catherine finds him "handsome, and pleasant to be with," but her feelings for him seem petty when compared to the ones she harbours...
From the time they were young children, Heathcliff and Catherine formed an almost otherworldly bond. No one else around them could understand such an attraction; even they had trouble comprehending it themselves. Heathcliff was a dark, tortured soul, a mysterious stranger thrust into the lives of the Earnshaws. Catherine was selfish and naïve, aware only of her own emotions and apathetic of how her actions affected others. Through their vast differences both in temperament and in social status, Heathcliff and Catherine grew closer than they could have imagined. Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights is by no means a love story, but a tale of twisted, murderous, obsessive love.
Heathcliff and Catherine have loved each other since their childhood. Initially, Catherine scorned the little gypsy boy; she showed her distaste by “spitting” at him (Brontë 27). However, it was not long before Heathcliff and Catherine became “very think” (Brontë 27). They became very close friends; they were practically brother and sister (Mitchell 122). Heathcliff is intent upon pleasing Catherine. He would “do her bidding in anything” (Brontë 30). He is afraid of “grieving” her (Brontë 40). Heathcliff finds solace and comfort in Catherine’s company. When Catherine is compelled to stay at Thrushcross Grange to recover from her injury, she returns as “a very dignified person” (Brontë 37). Her association with the gente...
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 aim of this paper is to provide an overview of the most prominent Gothic Elements found in Emily Brontë’s novel Wuthering Heights. Due to the fact that the number of these elements and the significance and timelessness of the novel itself by far surmount the limitations of this assignment I shall focus mainly on two major components of Wuthering Heights that could be explored in the light of being Gothic. Those are the novel’s setting (both exterior and interior) and a particular type of love that occurs between the two main characters, Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw. In order to do so, I must first offer a short explanation of the term Gothic and how it applies to this novel; secondly, I shall glimpse into Emily Brontë’s life (her life and her life-work being so closely entwined). Thirdly, I shall pay my full attention to the setting of the novel and love story that takes place in it because, in my humble opinion, the peculiar combination of these two elements along with its upside-down and unconventional concept of morality gives this novel its life-force and timeless appeal. To put it simply, it eternalizes Wuthering Heights and makes it one of the greatest and most baffling English novels of all times.
During the first half of the book, Catherine showed different types of love for two different people. Her love for Heathcliff was her everything, it was her identity to love and live for Heathcliff but as soon as she found out how society views Heathcliff, she sacrificed their love and married Edgar Linton in the hopes of saving Heathcliff from Hindley and protecting him from the eyes of society. In her conversation with Nelly, Cathy who professed her love for Heathcliff quoted “My great miseries in this world have been Heathcliff's miseries, and I watched and felt each from the beginning: my great thought in living is himself.” Catherine proved Nelly Dean that the only person who can make her feel pain and sorrow is Heathcliff. The extent of her love was uncovered when she sang her praise of “I am Heathcliff” because this was the turning point in the book that allowed the readers to truly understand and see the depth of Cathy's love for Heathcliff. On the other hand, Catherine's love for Edgar wasn't natural because it was a love that she taught herself to feel. It might have come unknowingly to Cathy but she did love Edgar as she said “My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it, I'm well aware, as winter changes the trees.” Cathy knew that it was not impossible to love Edgar for he was a sweet and kind gentleman who showed her the world but unlike ...