wuthering heights essay

Wuthering Heights Emily Bronte

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Wuthering Heights Essays

Halberstam among the victorians: applying 'female masculinity' to 'wuthering heights' and 'vanity fair' molly mcatee college, wuthering heights.

Can masculinity be applied to genders other than male? This is a question posed and answered in Judith Jack Halberstam’s Female Masculinity , published in 1998. In this book, Halberstam discusses the appearance and characteristics that are applied...

Wuthering Hareton Jessica Fatzinger 12th Grade

In Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, the characters around Hareton treat him like a background character, even though he is a main character in the book. From his family to people he just met, everyone pushes Hareton around, making him mold to...

Wuthering Heights: The Complexity of Existence and the Limitation of Human Perception Sid Ali Kercenna College

Published in 1847 under the pseudonym of Ellis Bell, Emily Bronte’s only finished novel is a unique work when it comes to the way, in which, it deals with the complexity of the human soul and treats the mysteries of its psychology. This book...

Captivity: Societal vs. Physical for Cathy (Wuthering Heights) and for Mary Rowlandson Molly McAtee College

How does one define captivity? Is it the physical restraint of a person through threats and violence? Could one be captive of their society due to the roles and expectations assigned to them? Both of these questions pose possibilities when it...

Dream World and Real World in Wuthering Heights Emma Kirkwood College

In her novel Wuthering Heights , Emily Brontë interconnects the real world with the dream world, in a sense merging allegory with realism. This essay will explore how the dreams that Brontë’s characters experience give more meaning to the real...

The Conflict in Wuthering Heights Anonymous College

Bringing great controversy with it when it was published in 1847, Wuthering Heights achieved considerable success by rendering many masked, unresolved issues of the time novel was written apparent. The storyline revolves around the narration of...

Heathcliff's Obsessions Olivia L.H. Garnett

Throughout Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff's personality could be defined as dark, menacing, and brooding. He is a dangerous character, with rapidly changing moods, capable of deep-seeded hatred, and incapable, it seems, of any kind of forgiveness...

The Setting in Wuthering Heights Ryan Frishberg

Wuthering Heights is a timeless classic in which Emily Brontë presents two opposite settings. Wuthering Heights and its occupants are wild, passionate, and strong while Thrushcross Grange and its inhabitants are calm and refined, and these two...

Mirrors, Windows, and Glass in Wuthering Heights Robert Klein

Various glass objects, usually mirrors and windows, play a seemingly ubiquitous role in the construction of Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights; rarely does a chapter go by where the reader is not given some description of a character passing by a...

The Problem of Split Personalities in Wuthering Heights Emily Flynn

Note: Oxford University Press Version of Wuthering Heights used for this paper

In Bronte's novel, Wuthering Heights, a person has the capacity to attain happiness only if his external state of being is a true and accurate manifestation of his...

The Main Characters in Wuthering Heights and Their Resemblance To Children Garrison Cross Woodfield

Life would be strangely different if no person matured past the state of childhood: if one possessed the physical qualities of an adult, but the faculties of only a juvenile. The environment would most definitely be a harsher, more difficult one....

A Clash between Nature and Culture Melissa Bradley

Wuthering Heights is essentially a romantic novel in which the author, Emily Bronte, brings two groups of people with different backgrounds into contact with each other. Close analysis of the novel reveals a key theme. When the reader examines the...

Heathcliff as a Reflection of the Age in Bronte's Wuthering Heights Shira Traison

Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights is a perfect parallel to the time in which it was composed. Heathcliff, her protagonist turned antagonist, was brought into a world in which he did not belong, in both a social and economic sense. As he joined the...

The Three Faces of Wuthering Heights Anonymous

In Wuthering Heights, Bronte depicts the turbulence of the psyche through her characters. Heathcliff, Edgar and Catherine are portrayed not as three distinct personas, but instead as three parts of a single psyche. Heathcliff, Edgar and Catherine...

Reconceptualizing the Plight of Isabella Chloe Mead

Readers of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights and Maryse Conde's Windward Heights can easily become overwhelmed by the deluge of voices that permeate each of the respective novels. After sorting through the complicated filtering of narratives in...

Wuthering Heights: A Tale of Two Loves Bryce Goodman

In Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, Catherine redeems her mother's inability to love another tenderly with her love towards Linton. Catherine's lovingness is not one of intense self-consuming passion where the object of love is over-looked and...

Lovengeance Spencer James

Emily Bronte, in her novel Wuthering Heights, characterizes the protagonist Heathcliff as both a recipient and a perpetrator of the continually domineering forces of both love and revenge existing within the novel. Through complex...

Charlotte's Error: Isolationism in Wuthering Heights Jordan Reid Berkow

Charlotte Bronte's greatest error in her preface to Wuthering Heights is her striking underestimation of Emily Bronte's understanding of the world and human nature. Charlotte writes that her sister had little knowledge of the practicalities of the...

Bronte's Influence on Readers' Attitudes Towards Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights Stephanie Nicole Bonham

In Emily Bronte's famous novel Wuthering Heights , Heathcliff is indisputably an evil character. He commits innumerable atrocious acts, yet Bronte ensures that one cannot help but feel sympathy towards him. One reason that the book is considered a...

The New Gnosticism: Reading Romantics in Wuthering Heights Anonymous

The New Gnosticism:

Reading Romantics in Wuthering Heights

Like the romantic poets who so influenced her, Emily Bronte explores the redefining of religious categories in her most famous novel, Wuthering Heights. Through the relations between her...

A Victim of His Environment Liz Zak

In Wuthering Heights, author Emily Bronte depicts Heathcliff, one of the main characters, as an incarnation of evil. Heathcliff is first introduced in the novel as the unpleasant, unwelcoming landowner of Wuthering Heights, and from this first...

The Beggarly Interloper and The Bright, Graceful Damsel Meghann E. Stubel

"Heathcliff was hard to discover, at first . . . that naughty swearing boy" (Wuthering Heights pp.51-3).

From his arrival, nearly all the inhabitants of Wuthering Heights treat young Heathcliff disdainfully and as "the other" who has intruded into...

Allusions: Parallels to the Garden of Eden in Wuthering Heights Scott Christopher Graham

“Out of the ground the Lord God made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food, the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil,” Genesis reads (Gen 2.9). In the Genesis story...

Breaking Down the Wall: Catherine and Hareton’s Discovery of Love Britani Hollis

In Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë develops a conflict between Catherine Linton and Hareton Earnshaw and uses the resolution of their conflict to resolve that between Catherine and Heathcliff. Though their social classes and upbringings differ,...

Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Literature › Analysis of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights

Analysis of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on March 25, 2019 • ( 3 )

Wuthering Heights is constructed around a series of dialectic motifs that interconnect and unify the elements of setting, character, and plot. An examination of these motifs will give the reader the clearest insight into the central meaning of the novel. Although Wuthering Heights is a “classic,” as Frank Kermode has noted, precisely because it is open to many different critical methods and conducive to many levels of interpretation, the novel grows from a coherent imaginative vision that underlies all the motifs. That vision demonstrates that all human perception is limited and failed. The fullest approach to Emily Brontë’s novel is through the basic patterns that support this vision.

Wuthering Heights concerns the interactions of two families, the Earnshaws and Lintons, over three generations. The novel is set in the desolate moors of Yorkshire and covers the years from 1771 to 1803. The Earnshaws and Lintons are in harmony with their environment, but their lives are disrupted by an outsider and catalyst of change, the orphan Heathcliff. Heathcliff is, first of all, an emblem of the social problems of a nation entering the age of industrial expansion and urban growth. Although Brontë sets the action of the novel entirely within the locale familiar to her, she reminds the reader continually of the contrast between that world and the larger world outside.

Aside from Heathcliff’s background as a child of the streets and the description of urban Liverpool, from which he is brought, the novel contains other reminders that Yorkshire, long insulated from change and susceptible only to the forces of nature, is no longer as remote as it once was. The servant Joseph’s religious cant, the class distinctions obvious in the treatment of Nelly Dean as well as of Heathcliff, and Lockwood’s pseudosophisticated urban values are all reminders that Wuthering Heights cannot remain as it has been, that religious, social, and economic change is rampant. Brontë clearly signifies in the courtship and marriage of young Cathy and Hareton that progress and enlightenment will come and the wilderness will be tamed. Heathcliff is both an embodiment of the force of this change and its victim. He brings about a change but cannot change himself. What he leaves behind, as Lockwood attests and the relationship of Cathy and Hareton verifies, is a new society, at peace with itself and its environment.

It is not necessary, however, to examine in depth the Victorian context of Wuthering Height s to sense the dialectic contrast of environments. Within the limited setting that the novel itself describes, society is divided between two opposing worlds: Wuthering Heights, ancestral home of the Earnshaws, and Thrushcross Grange, the Linton estate. Wuthering Heights is rustic and wild; it is open to the elements of nature and takes its name from “atmospheric tumult.” The house is strong, built with narrow windows and jutting cornerstones, fortified to withstand the battering of external forces. It is identified with the outdoors and nature and with strong, “masculine” values. Its appearance, both inside and out, is wild, untamed, disordered, and hard. The Grange expresses a more civilized, controlled atmosphere. The house is neat and orderly, and there is always an abundance of light—to Brontë’s mind, “feminine” values. It is not surprising that Lockwood is more comfortable at the Grange, since he takes pleasure in “feminine” behavior (gossip, vanity of appearance, adherence to social decorum, romantic self-delusion), while Heathcliff, entirely “masculine,” is always out of place there.

Even Cathy’s passionate cry for Heathcliff, “Nelly, I am Heathcliff,” is less love for him as an individual than the deepest form of self-love. Cathy cannot exist without him, but a meaningful relationship is not possible because Cathy sees Heathcliff only as a reflection of herself. Heathcliff, too, has denied an important aspect of his personality. Archetypally masculine, Heathcliff acts out only the aggressive, violent parts of himself.

The settings and the characters are patterned against each other, and explosions are the only possible results. Only Hareton and young Cathy, each of whom embodies the psychological characteristics of both Heights and Grange, can successfully sustain a mutual relationship.

This dialectic structure extends into the roles of the narrators as well. The story is reflected through the words of Nelly Dean—an inmate of both houses, a participant in the events of the narrative, and a confidant of the major characters—and Lockwood, an outsider who witnesses only the results of the characters’ interactions. Nelly is a companion and servant in the Earnshaw and Linton households, and she shares many of the values and perceptions of the families. Lockwood, an urban sophisticate on retreat, misunderstands his own character as well as the characters of others. His brief romantic “adventure” in Bath and his awkwardness when he arrives at the Heights (he thinks Cathy will fall in love with him; he mistakes the dead rabbits for puppies) exemplify his obtuseness. His perceptions are always to be questioned. Occasionally, however, even a denizen of the conventional world may gain a glimpse of the forces at work beneath the surface of reality. Lockwood’s dream of the dead Cathy, which sets off his curiosity and Heathcliff’s final plans, is a reminder that even the placid, normal world may be disrupted by the psychic violence of a willful personality.

The presentation of two family units and parallel brother-sister, husband-wife relationships in each also emphasizes the dialectic. That two such opposing modes of behavior could arise in the same environment prevents the reader from easy condemnation of either pair. The use of flashback for the major part of the narration—it begins in medias res—reminds the reader that he or she is seeing events out of their natural order, recounted by two individuals whose reliability must be questioned. The working out of the plot over three generations further suggests that no one group, much less one individual, can perceive the complexity of the human personality.

Taken together, the setting, plot, characters, and structure combine into a whole when they are seen as parts of the dialectic nature of existence. In a world where opposing forces are continually arrayed against each other in the environment, in society, in families, and in relationships, as well as within the individual, there can be no easy route to perception of another human soul. Wuthering Heights convincingly demonstrates the complexity of this dialectic and portrays the limitations of human perception.

Bibliography Barnard, Robert. Emily Brontë. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Benvenuto, Richard. Emily Brontë. Boston: Twayne, 1982. Berg, Maggie. “Wuthering Heights”: The Writing in the Margin. New York: Twayne, 1996. Davies, Stevie. Emily Brontë: Heretic. London: Women’s Press, 1994. Frank, Katherine. A Chainless Soul: A Life of Emily Brontë. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990. Glen, Heather, ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Brontës. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Liddell, Robert. Twin Spirits: The Novels of Emily and Anne Brontë. London: Peter Owen, 1990. Miller, Lucasta. The Brontë Myth. London: Jonathan Cape, 2001. Pykett, Lyn. Emily Brontë. Savage, Md.: Barnes & Noble, 1989. Rollyson, Carl, and Lisa Paddock. The Brontës A to Z: The Essential Reference to Their Lives and Work. New York: Facts On File, 2003. Vine, Steve. Emily Brontë. New York: Twayne, 1998. Winnifrith, Tom, ed. Critical Essays on Emily Brontë. NewYork: G. K. Hall, 1997.

Major works Poetry: Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, 1846 (with Charlotte Brontë and Anne Brontë); The Complete Poems of Emily Jane Brontë, 1941 (C. W. Hatfield, editor); Gondal’s Queen: A Novel in Verse by Emily Jane Brontë, 1955 (Fannie E. Ratchford, editor). Nonfiction : Five Essays Written in French, 1948 (Lorine White Nagel, translator); The Brontë Letters, 1954 (Muriel Spark, editor).

Analysis of The Novel "Wuthering Heights" Written by Emily Bronte

Categories: Book Review Wuthering Heights

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11 min read

Published: Jun 5, 2019

Words: 2170 | Pages: 5 | 11 min read

Works Cited

Brontë, E. (1847). Wuthering Heights. London, England: Thomas Cautley Newby.
Connolly, T. (1986). The Romanticism of Wuthering Heights. Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 40(1), 1-24.
Dunn, R. (2009). Reading Wuthering Heights : Outsiders and Insiders. New York, NY: Twayne Publishers.
Eagleton, T. (2011). Heathcliff and the Great Hunger. London, England: Verso Books.
Gilbert, S. M., & Gubar, S. (2000). The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
John, J. (2017). Brontë’s Wuthering Heights: A Reader’s Guide. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Publishing.
Knoepflmacher, U. C. (1976). Repression and Revenge in Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights. PMLA, 91(1), 22-33.
Magill, F. N. (1998). Masterplots II: Women’s Literature Series, Volume 2. Pasadena, CA: Salem Press.
Morrison, J. (1988). The Name and Nature of Heathcliff. Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 43(1), 1-29.
Todorov, T. (1973). The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Cleveland, OH: Press of Case Western Reserve University.

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