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Gothic Elements In Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights

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Wuthering Heights comprises all the elements of a Gothic novel. However its characters are not as simple as the average Gothic protagonists. This particular novel deals with an amount of Gothic qualities, like dark settings and extreme landscapes, moonlights and candles, melancholy figures and imprisonment, torture and cruelty, supernatural element, madness, necrophilia as well as a communication between the living and the dead. Jibesh Bhattachayya states out clearly: “That Emily Bronte must have read some of these fictions of the Gothic type is evident from her creation of the mysterious Gondal world in her literary world in her literary attempts. Her passion for the esoteric and the sensational did not seem to have left when she wrote Wuthering …show more content…

Bhattachayya continues by pointing out that the atmosphere of Bronte’s novel is “suggestive of an uncanny Gothic atmosphere” (88). Considering the title, the reader can realize how important the setting is not only for the story itself as well as for the author. The title implies the weather-wracked estate of Wuthering Heights, in which the story takes place, making the story more potent in inciting terror to the readers. In the very first pages, the narrator portrays the sinister and dangerous environment provided around the estate of Wuthering Heights. More specifically the narrator’s impression is depicted in the following …show more content…

Lockwood indoors in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) and the midnight storm and the lightning bolt that shatters the horse chestnut tree at Thornfield, a symbol of family solidarity in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847)” (271). The extreme weather and landscape, two prominent Gothic elements, are portrayed in many pages of the novel. The weather mirrors the passion and wildness of the inhabitants of the Heights. The moorlands that surround Wuthering Heights are interwoven with a sense of danger associated with the property. The estate of Wuthering Heights as well as the wild weather and the dangerous moors create an imagery of a truly Gothic setting: “Pure, bracing ventilation they must have up there, at all times, indeed: one may guess of the power of the north wind, ... by a range of gaunt thorns all stretching their limbs one way, as if craving alms of the sun” (Bronte

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