Written in 1846, Wuthering Heights tells the tale of wicked lovers Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff and the destructive path their romance leaves behind them. Their story highlights the capacity humans have to love themselves and others as well as their ability to hate. It also depicts how hatred and revenge can cause people to do terrible things. Emily Bronte 's novel illustrates just how selfish and cruel humans can be, even to the ones they love.
Throughout the novel, you see several examples of various forms of love. However, a common theme among the different lovers is that nobody can seem to put their love for someone above themselves. Nearly every character commits at least one entirely selfish act that only has a positive effect on
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She refuses to give up Edgar for Heathcliff because he can offer her much than she believes his opponent ever could and she refuses to give up Heathcliff because she still loves him. She is too selfish to choose one man, instead keeping them both to fulfill all of her needs while hurting both of her lovers in the process. Catherine 's capacity to love herself continuously overpowered her ability to truly love those around her.
Heathcliff is another extremely selfish character in the novel. His selfishness however, isn 't fueled by self-love but rather his ability to passionately hate those who cross him and his strong desire for revenge. Heathcliff has the capacity to love, in fact he loves Catherine more than anything else, but her betrayal and his rough childhood destroyed what little hope he had of becoming a good, honest human. After Catherine and Edgar 's marriage, Heathcliff is hurt and bitter. In order to get back at them, Heathcliff decides to pursue Edgar 's little sister Isabella. He is able to easily convince Isabella to marry him, but he really sees her as nothing more than a tool he can use to upset Catherine and Edgar. Heathcliff has no regards for other people 's feelings because he
The amount of anger and frustration expressed to keep their marriage together is emphasized by the rhetorical device. It also shows that hatred is expressed in a family when one is lost for patience, becoming a problem and resolution. In the metaphor, “He’s not a rough diamond-a pearl-containing oyster of rustic: he’s a fierce, pitiless, wolfish man”(Bronte 101), Heathcliff is described by Nelly Dean to be powerful and potentially hurtful to Isabella. Dean protects Isabella by warning her at the cost of dehumanizing Heathcliff. The metaphor is used to describe and illustrate an image for readers and Isabella.
As the story progresses, love is expressed in the novel. The author uses character perspectives to express the theme of love. Love is a common topic played in society. The many types of love include, love for an object or thing, family love, and the love for the
Love, in its original meaning, is an unconditional action of putting someone else’s welfare before one’s own. As the world has grown older, mankind’s definition of love has been warped and has dwindled down to nothing more than a fickle feeling of affection and romantic attraction– into something conditional and usually very temporary. The idea of love has been reduced to an ideal of reciprocity; “love” has become self-serving instead of self-sacrificing. Unfortunately, love often dies because of one or another person’s selfishness and pride. Pride and love engage in war in every relationship and, unless love is in its true form (unconditional), pride strangles it.
Throughout the novel Isabelle deals with abuse from her husband, being bullied has a child and being imprisoned in Wuthering Heights which leads to her depression. In a article written about abuse the other said “In almost every case of significant adult depression, some form of abuse was experienced, either physical, sexual, emotional or, often, a combination.” (McGrath). Most of Isabella 's abuse was done threw the element of fear, “He snatched an dinner knife from the table, and flung it at my head” (Bronte 174) during this part of Isabella’s life she is “happily” married to Heathcliff, but Heathcliff is only married to Isabella for her wealth and that 's why he abuses her constantly.
Many literary works have love as a theme. By reading different novels, one receives a glimpse of all the different kinds of love and their purposes. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, love is represented as the sea. By reading this novel, the reader comes to the conclusion that our capability to love deviates with every person we come across. Love is in some ways an art, and it transforms as people transform.
Throughout the novels The Awakening by Kate Chopin and Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë being single or married are conditions that shape the lives of the characters. Both novels involve married couples that are dealing with a variety of problems. In Wuthering Heights, Old Cathy only married her husband, Edgar, for social and financial status. Her life is filled with old emotions and chaos once her true love comes back into her life. Mrs. Pontellier in The Awakening seems tired of being married to her husband and finds Robert more interesting.
All these characters face issues as they seek love from a certain person who does not reciprocate mutual feelings and the conflict of fantasy versus reality
While mankind has made substantial progress in ridding the world of diseases, mental illnesses are still prominent, and often overlooked. In the novel Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë highlights illnesses caused by tensions in order to construct a world where mental health problems and internal struggles take on a life of their own. In the case of Catherine Earnshaw Linton and Heathcliff Earnshaw, the body follows the mind 's descent into distress, with mental illness inflating strenuous circumstances. On the surface, the fevers and hallucinations are nothing more than a plot point orchestrated to spawn grief.
Firstly the obsessive love between Catherine and Heathcliff. Catherine claims that her love for Heathcliff “resembles the eternal rocks beneath –a source of little visible delight, but necessary” (73). She tells her housekeeper “Nelly, I am Heathcliff –he’s always, always in my
Throughout the novel, Nelly acts as the voice of reason to many of her mistresses, although sometimes their actions have consequences. For example, Nelly encourages Isabella to renounce her love for Heathcliff. Nelly knows that Edgar would never approve of him as her husband, but Isabella disregards her advice and seals her elopement with Heathcliff anyway. Their marriage provoked the tension that had remained after Catherine 's decision to elope with Edgar rather than Heathcliff. Brontë scholars believe that Nelly is one of the only characters in Wurthering Heights that has the power to "shape the plot" by the fact that she has been a support to a handful of the characters throughout the novel.
Isabella Linton falls in love with Heathcliff, but she is so cruelly abused by him that she has to leave him. This fact presents a social taboo for the period, in which the novel was written and can be seen in this excerpt from her epistolary confession to Ellen Dean “I assure you, a tiger, or a venomous serpent could not rouse terror in me equal to that which he wakens... I do hate him- I am wretched - I have been a fool” (Bronte 233). Heathcliff does not feel any remorse or shame for Isabella’s fate, not even for their son Linton whom he neglects to seek medical care for when he has fulfilled his purpose in taking over the Heathcliff Thrushcross Grange.
Emily Brontë approaches the idea of sickness and death of the characters in her novel Wuthering Heights in a peculiar way. The characters that are ill are usually mentally ill, and their deaths often result from physical ailments derived from mental illness. The drive for revenge and desire for love that reigns among the characters often lands them in stressful situations that cause them to spiral downward into these mental illnesses. Emily Brontë’s emphasis on the motif of sickness and death in Wuthering Height deepens the drama of the plot and constructs more complicated relationships between the characters.
Love. Love is a very fickle emotion that affects an individual drastically. It can cloud a person’s perception of someone and can cause one to act in a way that they would normally never do. Love is what caused Pip, a young character from the novel, Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, to drastically change from an innocent boy to a foolish man. As a child, Pip was always sweet yet dilapidated beyond repair, because he was neglected as a child.
Wuthering Heights is a novel by Emily Brontë, published in 1847. The book's core theme is the destructive effect that jealousy and vengefulness have, both on the jealous or vengeful individuals and on their communities. Although Wuthering Heights is now widely regarded as a classic of English literature, it received mixed reviews when first published, and was considered controversial because its depiction of mental and physical cruelty was unusually stark, and it challenged strict Victorian ideals of the day, including religious hypocrisy, morality, social classes and gender inequality. Wuthering Heights, which has long, been one of the most popular and highly regarded novels in English literature. In my essay I will write about
The intense conflicts which are characteristics of its artistic structure are create in the terms of social conflicts. The roots and causes of these conflicts are in the pressures of the society with which the novel was published. Wuthering Heights was published two times in 1837 and 1848, times of great change due to the Industrial Revolution. Thus, it reflects in some way the class struggle. Heathcliff did create a classless society, he made everyone his servants.