Nonetheless, it is the passion of Catherine and Heathcliff that most of the readers relate to. This has made the novel one of the greatest love stories in English literature and European literature. The relationship between Catherine and Heathcliff and not of any other lovers has become a stereotype.
It shows the passionate longing to be complete and to give submit oneself to another partner and gain complete self or the sense of identity back and to be completely immersed in each other so that nobody and nothing in the world matters and to be loved in this manner forever.
This type of passion cum love can be summed up as more and still more as it cannot be fulfilled, satisfied and is not relenting in the demand of both lovers. It is generally accepted that Catherine and Heathcliff are deeply and madly in love with each other but it is very difficult to understand whether they love each other.
The question here is what type of feeling or love is Emily Bronte is trying to depict in this novel. This kind of love might not be happy or fortunate. According to Cecil Day Lewis, Catherine and Heathcliff represent isolation of soul, the pain of two souls or two halves of a single soul that is forever alone and united.
Their relationship shows the impersonal nature of personal living which is known as a life force by Collins. This is the reason due to which Catherine and Heathcliff describe their love impersonally. The ghosts of Catherine and Heathcliff, the stealing of property, the scenes of incest and adultery and an uncontrolled passion expressed in violent and extreme ways are something that has been portrayed for the first time in a novel.
All the characters have become a replacement for God and the living characters plan to unite with their dead partners after death just like Christians want to unite with God after death.
This is because on one hand Catherine wants to unite with Heathcliff even after her death and on the other hand she wishes to go to another world separately. Conventional religion is given a negative treatment in the novel. A church at Gimmerton continues to lie abandoned and decays eventually.
It feels as if love replaces religion and affects Catherine, Heathcliff, Cathy and Hareton in one way or the other. Virginia Woolf who, along with Sylvia Plath, thought it a sacrilege to scribble in her books, broke her rule with Wuthering Heights , sketching out a family tree on a blank page, in a desperate attempt to sort out how all those multiple Catherines, Heathcliffs and Lintons fit together.
Part of the problem, of course, is that they all sound the same, speaking at a hysterical pitch, as if straining to make themselves heard over a permanent gale. This abiding feeling that Wuthering Heights makes too much noise and not enough sense was woven into my first encounter with the book. Long before I was old enough to read it, I watched the Monty Python sketch in which Catherine and Heathcliff exchange passionate declarations of adulterous love across the moor tops using semaphore.
Again, I turn out to be in good company. The reviews, when they appeared following publication in December , comprised the sort of chorus of disapproval that would send most debut authors into a funk. This was also the publication that wondered if the author, at this time still known as Ellis Bell, had simply been eating too much cheese. Just five years later Charlotte was dead too, but her characterisation of Emily as a freak of nature would gust down the decades, gathering sound and fury as it went.
What she was trying to get at was the sense that Emily was both mythic and a shape-changer, unbound by the physical laws of the universe. At that point a new wave of revisionary scholarship suggested that, far from being a remote and primitive hovel as Gaskell suggested, Haworth was a busy cultural centre with a keen curiosity about and attachment to what was going on in the world.
Earnshaw broke all the rules of his culture and his social class. The Romantic authors also used local dialects and color to set a more realistic portrayal of the events depicted.
If Heathcliff had not been helped by Mr. Earnshaw, his speech and manner may have been close to that of Joseph for Joseph is a peasant like what Heathcliff would have become. Another use of dialect and color among the characters is Lockwoods speech and manner. In the novel many characters love the commonplace, the rural, and the rustic.
Catherine and Heathcliff both love the moor, because it is wild and free like themselves. In the Romantic age, writers wanted to depict the reality and commonality of life whether it be rich or poor. Another characteristic of Romanticism is stressing the relatively greater importance over the rational of the imaginative, emotional, intuitive, free, individual, and particular rather than general. When Heathcliff and Catherine were young, Emily Bront depicts them in a positive light because of their wild imagination and fervent emotions which she finds to be good: they both share the disgust towards the selfishness that the established social order had already placed on Edgar and Isabella Linton, as they display it over the want of a puppy.
A Romantic work also contains characters who are introverted and reclusive. In Wuthering Heights, there are many characters having these qualities. After he is hardened by mistreatment by Hindley and Joseph as a child, Heathcliff becomes an introvert; he only cares about himself. He shows this early on by forcing Hindley to switch colts with him after his once handsome colt fell lame As time goes on, he stays selfish, so much so, that he does not care who else he hurts as long as he gets his revenge on Hindley.
And you both come to bewail the deed to me, as if you were the people to be pitied! I shall not pity you, not I. You have killed meand thriven on it, I think. How strong you are. How many years do you mean to live on after I am gone? It is too hot for walking, let us rest here. Joseph is a very reclusive person, because he feels that everyone in Wuthering Heights is wicked. As time passes, many of the characters become more introverted and reclusive except for the newest generationHareton and Cathy.
Heathcliff is a perfect example of the Byronic hero. He has ennui, or melancholy over the inevitable sadness of the world: Heathcliff is saddened with mistreatment and thinks that he can cure the sadness with revenge. Heathcliff is also a very solitary person after Catherine leaves him; he has no friends, he has nothing to love, and he searches for neither. Although he tries to make others, like Hindley and Isabella hate him, he is not a misanthrope. He tries to get along with Edgar until Edgar insults him by comparing Heathcliffs hair to a colts mane Heathcliff has a strong sense of defiance and individuality.
He has an inert spirit of defiance and independence as shown by his boundless energy and ability to rebel against Hindley without worrying about penalties. Heathcliff never gives in to Hindley, but rather vows for revenge, which shows he is slightly affected and offended. Heathcliffs spirit of defiance never desists even after his death: Nelly has trouble forcing his eyes shut As a Byronic hero, Heathcliff must carry a guilt which alienates him from society.
Catherines arrogance and stupidity keep her from solving that problem: if the wicked man in there [Hindley] had not brought Heathcliff so low I shouldnt have thought of it [marrying Edgar]. New York: W.
Damrosch, David. Volume B. Compact Edition. New York: Addison Wesley Longman, Get Access. Better Essays. Read More. Good Essays. Comparing Northanger Abbey and Frankenstein. Satisfactory Essays. Powerful Essays. Gothicism a Sub-genre for Romantic Writer. Popular Fiction Analysis Words 2 Pages. Popular Fiction Analysis. Related Topics.
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