Internal And External Conflict In Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights

Although Emily Brontë’s first and only novel, Wuthering Heights, was first published in 1847, during the Victorian Period, multiple years after the end of the Romantic Period, her novel is filled with the concerns or “primary obsessions” of the Romantic writer. These obsessions are evident in Wuthering Heights through Brontë’s thematic concerns, motifs and character development. The main internal and external conflicts in Brontë’s Wuthering Height consist of natures, civilisation, deep and elemental between the superficial and impermanent, natural impulses compared to artificial restraint and also the conflict between the wild and tame aspects of the characters ‘personalities.

The gothic style consists in a kind of literature which features supernatural elements encounters, crumbling ruins, moonless nights, and grotesque imagery, seeking to create effects of mystery and fear. Ambiguity, chaos, darkness, irrationality and secrecy are usually present in the gothic novels. They generally show a life of pain, destruction and fear that shadow feelings of love, reason and morality among others.

In the Victorian Era, social class was dependent upon the source of income, birth, and family connection. Significantly, most people accepted their place in the hierarchy. But Brontë offers examples of changing of social class. First of all, as members of the gentry or the upper middle-class, the Earnshaw’s and the Linton’s occupy a somewhat precarious place within the hierarchy of late