"wuthering heights" by emily bronte
„Wuthering Heights“ by Emily Brontë
The Author - Her life (1818-1848)
Emily Brontë and her sisters grow up in a quite uninhabited region in Thornton, Yorkshire.
Their father, Patrick Brontë, a preacher educates them very religiously.
He is very influenced by John Wesely, who’s a creator of the Methodist church and stands for a very strict and religious education, which also destroys the will of children.
Brontë teaches his daughters that success through hard work and diligence is a sign of God’s grace.
He sends them to a boarding school, where two of the sisters must die from tuberculosis, until he takes them back home.
After studying in Bruxelles, Emily and Charlotte come back home and set up a school.
The return of their brother, who’s an addict of alcohol and opium pulls the family into great problems
He dies and Emily takes ill at his funerals and dies also.
Perhaps her death is one of the reason too why “Wuthering Heights” became such an immediate popular success.
Book presentation
Genre
Although this novel was written in the Romantic Period, it is not really a romance.
Wuthering Heights was written 1847, the year before E. Brontë’s death.
Story
At the beginning of the book, Mr Lockwood, the narrator is received to Wuthering Heights, which he is the neighbour of.
The people who are living there, are unfriendly to him and also to each other.
Because the night and a storm surprised him, he has no choice but to spend the night in their company.
Fascinated by this hate and inhospitality, he asks Nelly, who worked for them for years, to tell him the story of this place and of the people. The following part of the story is her narrative about the Earnshaws at Wuthering Heights and their neighbours, the Lintons, living at Thrushcross Grange.
One day, the father Earnshaw brings a gypsy boy Heathcliff home, who is going to live with the two children Catherine and Hindley.
Whereas Hindley is jealous and hates him, Catherine falls in love with him and they spend wonderful moments in the Moors.
But when Catherine chooses to marry the rich and cultivate neighbour Edgar Linton, Heathcliff wounded by her decision leaves “Wuthering Heights” for two years.
Then he comes back wealthy, civilized and decides to buy Wuthering Heights from Catherine’s brother Hindley, who has many gambling debts.
He marries the sister of Edgar Linton and takes revenge on Catherine for the pain he felt because of her marriage.
After her death, he forces her daughter, who is also called Catherine, to marry his son Linton, who is dangerously ill and who dies very soon.
Because only the young Catherine and the son of Hindley, Hareton, survive, Heathcliff has now the control of the property over the ancient Linton and Earnshaw family and also over the two survivors.
After his death it can be assumed that Catherine and Hareton will be happy together, and will perhaps marry too.
Themes
Good versus Evil - (also love and hate or bad against good):
Brontë is very interested in the spiritual feelings for her characters, making contact with an existence beyond this life on earth. For instance the love between Heathcliff and Catherine stays very spiritual and it is the one which causes all the pain during the whole story.
Crime, Revenge and Punishment:
All the characters have sinned in one way or another and in the end they are all punished for their crimes. However, Cathy and Hareton are not corrupt in any way and they are the ones who finally destroy the evil between their families in the next generation. Brontë punishes the sin by slow and painful death (Catherine, Heathcliff) and leaves the reader with a sense of satisfaction that the characters deserved what they merit. Heathcliff tries also himself to punish the sins Catherine committed by marrying Edgar, but he does nothing but sinning too, he stays unhappy and sad until his death.
Bronte shows through him that it is not a men’s duty to a human being but God’s matter
Passion versus Rational Love:
Passion is what alienated Catherine from Edgar. Catherine's passion for Heathcliff destroyed the stability of every relationship between the people of Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange. The whole story revolved around the passion that Catherine and Heathcliff felt for each other. Edgar, on the other hand, felt a more reasonable love for Catherine. Catherine was devoted to Edgar, yet was in love with Heathcliff. Heathcliff is the symbol of the dangers of passion, condemned by the Victorian society: TEXT B
Characters
Brontë gives every character a duality within their personalities.
There are no true heroes or villains, only a revealing of what people truly are.
With Catherine, her heart and mind are divided: she loves Heathcliff, but marries the more stable Edgar. (
TEXT D )
At one side she loves the Highlands and at the other she adores to play the lady when the Linton are visiting her. She is torn between two ends, which are symbolized by the persons of Heathcliff and Edgar Linton. She symbolises the innocent women who can’t change her situation and whose life is ruled by Victorian society, its prejudices and its conceptions. But on the other side she is not so innocent, because she doesn’t want to marry Heathcliff because he belongs to a lower social class.
That shows her selfishness.
Heathcliff loves Catherine more than his life (which is shown by his vision of her as a ghost before his death), yet he is a cruel and harsh man. Although Heathcliff could have simply run away, his decision to endure the physical pains shows his unlimited devotion to Catherine. He is a cruel person who nobody likes, but in his black heart there is a small room of love for Catherine. When he realizes that his life is coming to an end, he carries through his will to be buried in the same grave as the woman he loved so fervently. The pain he felt during Catherine’s marriage with Edgar Linton leads him to retaliate: he forces Catherine’s daughter Catherine to his dead-ill son, who was ironically called “Linton”, to obtain Linton’s property, Thrushcross Grange.
He symbolizes freedom without restrictions from society and religion because of his origin as gypsy without home and parents. That’s why the other people, the Victorian society, hate him, who is an allegory of liberty. He’s also the reason why “Wuthering Heights” was treated immoral by the contemporary authors of Brontë.
Edgar is a child born to upper class. He loves Catherine and she marries him despite her love for Heathcliff. He is a good father to Cathy.
His behaving is completely different to Heathcliff’s one: he is cultivated, has no emotions and is also quite boring.
Nelly is an "impartial" storyteller, yet she clearly influences events and their outcomes. She is more a story-telling device than a really developed character.
Hareton is the son of Hindley. He is grew up under the influence of Heathcliff, and that’s the reason why he is a coarse, introverted man. He tries to improve by learning to read and making himself more presentable, but does not know how until Cathy enters his life.
Atmosphere
The setting, the landscape of the Moors and the houses Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange is described as a spooky, rough, dangerous and vast environment.
This atmosphere is very similar to the one conveyed by the people: Emily Brontë shows in an expressive way, how life in the Victorian society can be.
She shows us with this novel all the problems, all the fears and misunderstandings she had to fight against.
She portraits an authoritarian tyrannising father and brother, like she had in her own life.
We can imagine how hard her existence was, by the very dense and oppressing atmosphere, which can be also be deduced by the title of the work “Wuthering Heights”.
I can say that I had some difficulties to “breath” during some passages of this book and at that time it made the reading a little boring and bothering.
At the beginning of the novel, the reader finds a kind of ghost appearance, the appearance of the ghost of Catherine who can’t rest in peace and isn’t able to detach herself from her world. This appearance and the reunion of both souls at the end give the novel a mystic touch.
Narrative technique
The narrative structure
The narrative structure of Wuthering Heights is quite unique.
The narrator, Mr. Lockwood, who is being told this tale by another narrator, Nelly Dean, his housekeeper, is a quite unimportant character in the story,
At certain points in the book, different characters become narrators, who tell their story to Nelly, who then tells Mr. Lockwood.
It’s impossible to find passages in her story that may be untrue, because she’s the only source of information in this novel.
Her language
Emily Brontë wrote Wuthering Heights as a poet constructs a poem.
This work is sometimes considered a great lyric poem.
It is unavoidable to miss something integral to the story, when every line is not read carefully.
Her word choice is impeccable; she paints panoramic images of characters and events which clearly define tone and mood.
Sometimes some of the characters like Heathcliff and Hareton speak in a difficult to understand Southern-English dialect, which is written in a phonetic-like mixture of sounds.
The time and organisation of the novel
Brontë also uses techniques which would now be considered modern-day.
Within the first chapter the reader is pulled into the action and suspense instead of having many pages of introduction.
Added to the complex language, this complex organisation of the Novel makes it a little bit more poetic.
The interaction of Nelly and Mr. Lockwood create suspense between sections of story: When Nelly breaks off of her story one wonders what will happen next.
There are some events which stay obscure and unexplained.
The rhythm is confusing because of the time structure which moves backward, forward and sometimes stays also still.
There are also gaps, highlighted events and evasions in the narrative - you have to piece together the truth!
Concluding
Conclusion:
With so many distortions, the readers at her time frowned upon Brontë's book.
She takes common elements and greatly exaggerates them.
She turns love into obsessive passion, contempt into lifelong vindictive hatred, and peaceful death into the equivalent of burning in hell.
In doing so, she not only loaded the book with emotions, but clearly illustrated the outcome if one were to possess these emotions in such a society.
Heathcliff: "Be with me always - take any form - drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! it is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!" (148).
+: Sehr ausführlich. Intelligente Analyse des Werks, die über den Horizont eines durchschnittlichen Referats hinausgeht.
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