Wuthering Heights Theme Essay

Wuthering Heights and Mary Barton have no themes in common but the innovation of their themes is what makes these novels timeless. Wuthering Heights central theme is love, a passionate love that survives all difficulties and which through its strength and vision, and through the overriding value accorded it by their protagonists, transcends time and space to testify to the spiritual potential of humanity. Much of the excitement and terror and tension of Wuthering Heights surely depends on its power of supernatural suggestion. In some texts ghosts do have a dramatic presence, interacting with characters, affecting the development and meaning of events. What can be agreed about Wuthering Heights is that belief in ghosts, as evident in both rural and urban eighteenth century England, has a vital dramatic function. The presence of belief, however, need to imply the phenomena themselves. Heathcliff and Cathy’s childhood bonding is strengthened in Gimmerton kirkyard : Cathy recalls, ‘We’ve braved it’s ghosts often together, and dared each other to stand among the graves and ask them to come’ (p.133). Such memories fuel Cathy’s solution to being separated from

The absence of conventional moral definition and social criticism are not the only differences to be found between Wuthering Heights and Dickens or Thackeray or Gaskell. Wuthering Heights is unusual, though not unique, in its poetic intensity. It is more like Moby Dick or Lady Chatterly’s Lover, in its use of natural symbolism and its powerful lyrical expression. But it is not a purely poetical, it also has a wide rage including not only the hysterical poetry of the two Catherines, and the symbolic landscape of the moors and weather, but the solid realism of Nelly Dean and old