The Role Of Women In Wuthering Heights Essay

Of the major themes in Wuthering Heights, the nature of love — both romantic and brotherly but, oddly enough, not erotic — applies to the principal characters as well as the minor ones.Every relationship in the text is strained at one point or another.In fact, it is as if their love is beyond this world, belonging on a spiritual plane that supercedes anything available to everyone else on Earth.

Of the major themes in Wuthering Heights, the nature of love — both romantic and brotherly but, oddly enough, not erotic — applies to the principal characters as well as the minor ones.Every relationship in the text is strained at one point or another.In fact, it is as if their love is beyond this world, belonging on a spiritual plane that supercedes anything available to everyone else on Earth.

Instead of symbolizing a particular emotion, characters symbolize real people with real, oftentimes not-so-nice emotions.

Every character has at least one redeeming trait or action with which the reader can empathize.

Years later, Heathcliff himself validates this assessment by saying that he has no pity for his intended victims or for anyone else.

There are a host of unanswered questions in Wuthering Heights that revolve around "unnatural" attitudes or behaviors. (The entire section is 1,629 words.) In their study of nineteenth-century women writers, The Madwoman in the Attic, Sandra M.

Because of his hate, Heathcliff resorts to what is another major theme in Wuthering Heights — revenge.

Hate and revenge intertwine with selfishness to reveal the conflicting emotions that drive people to do things that are not particularly nice or rationale.The lightning rod of this issue is Heathcliff, an individual who necessarily evokes powerful but somewhat contradictory responses from the other characters in the novel and from the reader as well.Is Heathcliff a devil or just an extraordinarily driven man?Its melodramatic story spans more than three decades, but it is the supranatural passion between Catherine (Cathy) Earnshaw and Heathcliff that dominates the entire book, exerting a controlling influence over the lives of Brontë's characters long after Cathy's physical demise.Brontë appears to deliberately cloud the central question of whether her story is to be read as a supernatural horror story or an emotionally charged romance.They both, however, do not fully understand the nature of their love, for they betray one another: Each of them marry a person whom they know they do not love as much as they love each other.Contrasting the capacity for love is the ability to hate. Heathcliff initially focuses his hate toward Hindley, then to Edgar, and then to a certain extent, to Catherine.Some choices are regretted while others are relished.These emotions make the majority of the characters in Wuthering Heights well rounded and more than just traditional stereotypes.Our response to Heathcliff, to the love he shares with Cathy, and, therefore, to the novel as a whole, is further complicated by the Brontë's use of multiple narrators—Nelly Dean and Mr.Lockwood—each of whom plays a role in the tale, who hold radically different perspectives on the novel's lovers.