Wuthering Heights
In the novel Wuthering Heights, a story about love turned obsession, Emily Bronte manipulates the desolate setting and dynamic characters to examine the self-destructive pain of compulsion. Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights is a novel about lives that cross paths and are intertwined with one another. Healthcliff, a 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. The series of events in Emily Bronte's early life psychologically set the tone for her fictional novel Wuthering Heights. Early in her life while living in Haworth, near the moors, her mother died. At the time she was only three. At the age of nineteen, Emily moved to Halifax to attend Law Hill School. There is confusion as of how long she stayed here, sugg
ily Bronte describes Wuthering Heights having "narrow windows deeply set in the wall, and the corners defended with large jutting stones."8 This description using the characteristics of Wuthering Heights is adjacent to Heathcliff when he is illustrated having, "black eyes withdrawn so suspiciously under their brow."9 Heathcliff lived in a primal identification with nature, from the rocks, stones, trees, the heavy skies and eclipsed sun, which environs him. There is no true separation from the setting of nature for Heathcliff and the lives with which his life is bound. Thrushcross Grange, in contrast to the bleak exposed farmhouse on the heights, is situated in the valley with none of the grim features of Heathcliff's home. Opposite of Wuthering Heights, Thrushcross Grange is filled with light and warmth. "Unlike Wuthering Heights, it is elegant and comfortable-'a splendid place carpeted with crimson, and crimson covered chairs and tables, and a pure white ceiling bordered by gold'."10 Thrushcross Grange is the appropriate home of the children of the calm. The atmosphere of Thrushcross Grange illustrates the link the inhabitants have with the upper-class Victorian lifestyle. Although the Linton's appearance was often shallow, appearances were kept up for their friends and their social standing. While Wuthering Heights was always full of activity, sometimes to the point of chaos, life at the Grange always seemed placid. Linton's existence here at Thrushcross Grange was as "different from Heathcliff's 'as moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire'."11The Linton's often portrayed themselves as shallow, arrogant people, but life here was much more jovial than the inmates of Wuthering Heights lives were. Catherine Earnshaw, also a child of the storm, ties these two worlds of storm and calm together. Despite the fact that she occupies a position midway between the two worlds, Catherine is a product of the moors. She belongs in a sense to both worlds and is constantly drawn first in Heathcliff's direction, then in Linton's. Catherine does not 'like' Heathcliff, but she loves him with all the strength of her being. For he, like her, is a child of the storm; and this makes a bond between them, which interweaves itself with the very nature of their existence. In a sublime passage she tells Nelly Dean that she loves him- "not because he's handsome, Nelly, but because he's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same, and Linton's is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire. . . . My great miseries in this world have been Heathcliff's miseries, and I watched and felt each from the beginning:
Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1790
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page double spaced)
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