A Presentation of the Personalities of Heathcliff and

Murray Kempton once admitted, ‘No great scoundrel is ever uninteresting.’ The human race continually focuses on characters who intentionally harm others and create damaging situations for their own benefit. Despite popular morals, characters who display an utter disregard for the natural order of human life are characters who are often deemed iconic and are thoroughly scrutinized. If only the characters of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights were as simple as that. Set on the mysterious and gloomy Yorkshire moors in the nineteenth century, Wuthering Heights gives the illusion of lonesome isolation as a stranger, Mr. Lockwood, attempts to narrate a tale he is very far removed from. Emily Bronte’s in-depth novel can be considered a Gothic romance or an essay on the human relationship. The reader may regard the novel as a serious study of human problems such as love and hate, or revenge and jealousy. One may even consider the novel Bronte’s personal interpretation of the universe. However, when all is said and done, Heathcliff and Catherine are the story. Their powerf

ul presence permeates throughout the novel, as well as their complex personalities. Their climatic feelings towards each other and often selfish behavior often exaggerates or possibly encapsulates certain universal psychological truths humans are too afraid to express. Heathcliff and Catherine’s stark backgrounds evolve respectively into dark personalities and mistaken life paths, but in the end their actions determine the course of their own relationships and lives. Their misfortunes, recklessness, willpower, and destructive passion are unable to penetrate the eternal love they share.

Catherine and Heathcliff’s misfortunes, recklessness, willpower, and destructive passion are unable to penetrate the eternal love they share. However, love is hardly the main theme of the book. It is difficult and possibly wrong to consider Emily Bronte’s classic, Wuthering Heights, as a worldly book. As Romantic authors tend to look into man’s inner nature, so did Bronte glimpse into the mind of Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw. What she came up with however, is hardly a social commentary on the human mind. These are two unique characters that must exist only in a certain mysticism not found in Liverpool. The sincerely private relationship of Heathcliff and Catherine make no reference to any social convention or situation. In fact, it is doomed only when Cathy begins to be attracted to the mannerly ways and the social graces of Thrushcross Grange and is led to abandon her true nature. If not social classes, is the privacy of the human experience the theme of the novel? Or is revenge the central and recurring idea? Is Bronte proposing that as humans we have the right to meddle with the cosmic, dark and questioning universe just as Catherine and Heathcliff manipulated with their own lovers and family? Perhaps it is simply a book about characters, each to his own, meandering through puddles, with cloudy morals and mistaken ideals. With a darkness within and beauty without, stumbling back and forth a two-mile stretch of land searching for something they’ve had all along. Maybe it’s a book about reality.

Catherine Earnshaw’s iron will, immaturity, and quest for high-profile acceptance cause her character to star in the tragedy of a lost generation. She is both loving and violent, gentle and passionate, affectionate and willful. Her turbulent and aggressive personality rivals only that of Heathcliff. Like Heathcliff, certain traumas experienced feed the

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Approximate Word count = 1681
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page double spaced)