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[left]09 مارس, 2010
THEME OF LOVE AND REVENGE


BETWEEN CATHERINE AND HEATHCLIFF






Introduction:


Wuthering Heights is a novel of revenge and romantic love. It tells the stories of two families: the Earnshaws who live at the Heights, at the edge of the moors, and the genteel and refined Lintons who live at Thrushcross Grange. When Mr. Earnshaw brings home a foundling to live in the family, complex feelings of jealousy and rivalry as well as a soulful alliance between Heathcliff and Catherine develop. Believing that he has been rejected by Catherine, Heathcliff leaves to make his fortune. When he returns, Catherine is married to Edgar Linton, but she still feels deeply attached to Heathcliff. Disaster follows for the two families as Heathcliff takes revenge on them all. Only the second generation, young Cathy and Hareton Earnshaw, survive to go beyond this destructive passion in their mutual love.


Structurally the novel is rich and complex. There are two generations of characters, and the themes and relationships of the first generation are reflected in the second but with differences that increase our understanding.


Bront use of point of view leads to many questions about the narrators who control the unraveling of events. It is as if the main characters are seen through a series of mirrors, each causing a certain amount of distortion. Without an omniscient voice controlling sympathies, the reader must get inside the characters’ minds, the one telling the story as well as the one about whom the story is being told. Probing this complex web of relationships and motives leads to intense psychological analysis, and in this way the novel mirrors life itself. Learning occurs in pieces and is always subject to revision.


The themes of Wuthering Heights should appeal to the teenage student. The various power relationships involved with romantic love and vengeance depicted in the novel are also a part of the high school students’ social milieu. Teachers who make relevant connections between the themes and characters of the novel and the students’ own preoccupations will find this novel opens up discussion of many of the students’ concerns. The exercises suggested in this guide are designed to promote such connections. More activities and questions are offered than can be used so that teachers can choose those that help make reading and discussing the novel a meaningful experience for students.


Author life's:


Emily Jane Brontë (July 30, 1818 – December 19, 1848) was a British novelist and poet, best remembered for her only novel Wuthering Heights, which is now an acknowledged classic of English literature, and is considered to be one of the pinnacles of fiction from the age of Romanticism. She was as much a Romantic character as any of those found in her novel; Brontë was silent and shy to the point of being a recluse. Virtually nothing is known of her life, and her sisters—who acknowledged her genius—fiercely protected her from the outside world.


Despite this relative isolation, Emily Brontë possessed a powerful understanding of the society in which she lived, and particularly the Romantic trends in literature and philosophy that had, during her lifetime, become immensely popular. Her one novel, over which she worked like a perfectionist relentlessly, is now considered to be the apotheosis of Romantic literature. It features all the archetypes of her times—unrequited passion; supernatural imagery; and intense melodrama—but raises them above the level of mere romance, crafting these elements together into a work of high art. Wuthering Heights is not only one of the greatest novels of European Romanticism, it also presages much of the narrative complexity and style, developments in fiction which were to come in the following century. With her keen eye for psychology and characterization, Emily Brontë is not just a great Romantic novelist, but one of the greatest novelists of the nineteenth century


Themes and analysis


Wuthering Heights exhibits many of the characteristics of the gothic romances popular in Emily Brontë's time: a dark setting; a doomed passion; revenge and horror; and the presence (however vague) of menacing and supernatural forces. Yet the novel, as is obvious from even the briefest plot summary, is far more complicated than a simple ghost story in the vein of Anne Radcliffe. The very structure of the text places the reader in a bizarre position — we are told the story by a narrator who is having the story largely told to him — all of which brings to the foreground the narrative technique of the novel itself. With respect to these considerations, Brontë's novel is clearly unique not only when it is compared to the novels written by her sisters, but also to virtually all the other fiction produced in the first half of the nineteenth century. The structure of Wuthering Heights, which includes a story within a story within a story, and a narrative that crosses two generations of characters all viewed through the lens of a distant and largely uninvolved narrator—all of these techniques were baffling to Brontë's contemporaries, but have now become some of the most essential commonplaces for modern and postmodern fiction. By creating a story that draws explicit attention to its own fictiveness, Brontë produced a work that acts as a critique of fiction itself, and prefigured the sort of highly vexing and ambiguous literature that would be carried on by such luminaries as Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Even Lockwood, by the novel's end, is unsure of what to make of the story he has just related to his audience, and that in many ways is the lesson of the novel as a whole.


Critics analyze and examine Wuthering Heights to obtain a deeper understanding of the message that Emily Bronte wants to convey. By focusing on the different literary elements of fiction used in the novel, readers are better able to understand how the author successfully uses theme, characters, and setting to create a very controversial novel in which the reader is torn between opposite conditions of love and hate, good and evil, revenge and forgiveness in Thrushcross Grange and Wuthering Heights. There is no doubt that the use of conflictive characters such as Catherine Earnshaw, Heathcliff, and Edgar, with their interactions in the two different settings creates an excellent background for a doomed love story.


The central theme of Wuthering Heights is a love story that challenges the established social rules in which the protagonists, Catherine and Heathcliff have lived; it is a story that survives the unfortunate choices that both lovers make and even mystically survives Catherine’s death. The protagonists fall in love despite the opposition of Hindley Earnshaw. Catherine’s attraction for Heathcliff is so strong that she feels compelled go against her brother’s wishes and the social class conventions existing at that time. However, after courting for a while, Catherine makes the tragic decision of accepting Edgar Linton’s proposal for marriage. This decision brings about a conflictive situation between Heathcliff and both the Earnshaws and the Lintons. One day, Heathcliff overhears Catherine telling Nelly “It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now” (Bronte 59). This comment enrages Heathcliff and he storms out of the house; he comes up with the idea that he needs to gain power in order to be worthy of Catherine’s love. However, in the process, Heathcliff loses sight of his love and degenerates into a heartless and cruel man with an infinite craving for revenge.


Surprisingly, Heathcliff is absent for three years from Wuthering Heights. During that time he mysteriously obtains wealth and returns triumphantly. However, at the time of his return Catherine is already married to Edgar Linton. Heathcliff would spend the rest of his life tortured by his separation from Catherine. He becomes so obsessed that he would roam around Thrushcross Grange for days hoping to take her back or take revenge for what she has done to him. Even the day she dies, he is already so mentally deranged that he tries to unearth her body. At that moment, he feels for the first time a “sigh” that he believes to be Catherine’s spirit, a presence that would haunt him for the rest of his life. Years later, he reveals to Nelly the terrible situation in which he has been living ever since. He says “she has disturbed me, night and day, through eighteen years - incessantly –remorselessly” (Bronte 211). It seems that the spell is set on her deathbed when she tells him that she would haunt him for the rest of his life. At that moment Heathcliff forecasts his fate when he says:


Do you reflect that all those words will be branded in my memory, and eating deeper eternally after you have left me? You know you lie to say I have killed you: and, Catherine, you know that I could as soon forget you as my existence! Is it not sufficient for your infernal selfishness, that while you are at peace I shall writhe in the torments of hell.


A while after Linton dies and the young Catherine, Catherine’s daughter, becomes very close to Hareton, her cousin, Heathcliff gives up his desire for living and wants to finally be reunited with his beloved, the old Catherine, in the afterlife. It is sad that it is Catherine’s wrong choice of Edgar as her husband and Heathcliff’s unforgiving spirit that have led to the double tragedy in the theme of Wuthering Heights.


In addition to an effective central theme, the realistic setting of Wuthering Heights is the moorland on the countryside of England at the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th. Most of the events occur in two houses: Wuthering Heights, the home of the Earnshaws, and Thrushcross Grange, the house of the Linton family. The two houses are not too far away and are separated by the moors. Their inhabitants are the two wealthiest families in the area. However, there are marked differences between both places. Wuthering Height is a rugged house located on top of a hill exposed to windy conditions; it is like a fortress for the inhabitants. Nevertheless, in the inside Hindley, Catherine, and Heathcliff also are described as having tempestuous characters. Thrushcross Grange, on the contrary, is located in a tranquil valley and is depicted as a luxurious and civilized place. The Lintons are refined people accustomed to having servants and to live a comfortable life. The Lintons are gentle and passive people while the Earnshaw are turbulent and passionate. All these conditions perfectly settle the background for the behavior of their inhabitants. An interesting aspect of the Linton family is their vehement rejection and discrimination toward Heathcliff despite their apparent civilized nature. This rejection would fuel Heathcliff’s hate for the family and would give him another argument for carrying out his revenge. Emily Bronte symbolically uses these settings to better describe the nature of the characters in the story.


The characters of a story are another important element of fiction. Characters are the ones who perform the actions. Ann Charters suggests that “characters themselves don’t always have a conscious awareness of why they act the way they do” (1557). Characters have reasons for their actions and “the reader may discover them before the characters do” (1557). In the case of Wuthering Heights, the two main characters are alienated from the feelings that they have for each other. Catherine Earnshaw, one of the main characters of the story, chooses in a bizarre way to marry Edgar Linton despite knowing that her real love is Heathcliff. She is attracted to the social position and economic power of Edgar, but she knows that she is making the wrong decision and that would completely destroy Heathcliff. We understand the nature of her love when she says: “ he’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same” (Bronte 59). She goes further comparing her feeling for the two men as follows:


My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods. Time will change it, I'm well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath - a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff - He's always, always in my mind - not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself - but as my own being.


Her decision of marrying Edgar, combined with the tempestuous nature of Heathcliff, is a definite recipe for this tragic story, which produces a lasting effect on the reader.


Another example of the duality of the characters used in the story is Heathcliff. He is a colored child from meager origins that is saved from the streets and is taken to live at the Earnshaw’s house. In the beginning, the reader is compelled to feel sorry for Heathcliff because of the way he is discriminated by almost everybody. Later on, when it is evident that he is in love with Catherine, Heathcliff is humiliated by the way she treats him, and he is enormously hurt when she decides to marry Edgar Linton. At that point, Heathcliff seems to be a noble man who is able to love somebody despite adversity. However, that noble character capable of enduring adversity becomes an evil man. After his three-year absence, Heathcliff not only returns as a wealthy man but also returns with an obscure hidden agenda. He has a huge craving for revenge that drives most of his subsequent acts. He not only wants revenge, but also wants to become the master of both estates to be able to payback for all the humiliations that he has suffered. He would use any means to reach his goal and is described in the movie version as a “fiend” and a “hellish villain.” The nature of Heathcliff and old Catherine’s characters would greatly influence the tragic outcome of the story that leaves a lasting impression on the reader.


Finally, theme, settings and characters are elements of fiction that Bronte has used to convey her messages. The settings of this tale together with the actions of the characters serve to create the theme, which is the conclusive meaning of the story. In this novel, Bronte uses Catherine, Heathcliff, and the events that happen at both houses to illustrate how humans shape their way to unhappiness by not addressing their true


feelings. However, in the end, young Catherine and Hareton are able to acknowledge their feelings and choose to be happy. They finally obtain the happiness that has eluded the previous generation of these English houses – Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange - as clearly shown in the movie version directed by Peter Kosminsky.


Though the love of Catherine and Heathcliff leaves sensuality in suspension, Wuthering Heights does in fact raise the question of Evil with regard to passion, as if Evil were the most powerful means of exposing passion. If we except the sadistic form of vice, we may say that Evil, as it appears in Emily Brontë ‘s book, has reached its most perfect form.


We cannot consider that actions performed for a material benefit express Evil. This benefit is, no doubt, selfish, but it loses its importance if we expect something from it other than Evil itself – if, for example, we expect some advantage from it. The sadist, on the other hand, obtains pleasure from contemplating destruction, the most complete destruction being the death of another human being. Sadism is Evil. If a man kills for a material advantage his crime only really becomes a purely evil deed if he actually enjoys committing it, independently of the advantage to be obtained from it.






Conclusion


The concept that almost every reader of Wuthering Heights focuses on is the passion-love of Catherine and Heathcliff, often to the exclusion of every other theme–this despite the fact that other kinds of love are presented and that Catherine dies half way through the novel. The loves of the second generation, the love of Frances and Hindley, and the "susceptible heart" of Lockwood receive scant attention from such readers. But is love the central issue in this novel? Is its motive force perhaps economic? The desire for wealth does motivate Catherine's marriage, which results in Heathcliff's flight and causes him to acquire Wuthering Heights, to appropriate Thrushcross Grange, and to dispossess Hareton. Is it possible that one of the other themes constitutes the center of the novel, or are the other themes secondary to the theme of love? Consider the following themes:


The universe is made up of two opposite forces, storm and calm. Wuthering Heights and the Earnshaws express the storm; Thrushcross Grange and the Lintons, the calm. Catherine and Heathcliff are elemental creatures of the storm. This theme is discussed more fully in Later Critical response to Wuthering Heights The clash of economic interests and social classes.


The novel is set at a time when capitalism and industrialization are changing not only the economy but also the traditional social structure and the relationship of the classes. The yeoman or respectable farming class (Hareton) was being destroyed by the economic alliance of the newly-wealthy capitalists (Heathcliff) and the traditional power-holding gentry (the Lintons). This theme is discussed more fully in Wuthering Heights as Socio-Economic Novel.


It is not just love that Catherine and Heathcliff seek but a higher, spiritual existence which is permanent and unchanging, as Catherine makes clear when she compares her love for Linton to the seasons and her love for Heathcliff to the rocks. The dying Catherine looks forward to achieving this state through death. This theme is discussed more fully in Religion, Metaphysics, and Mysticism.


The abusive patriarch and patriarchal family. The male heads of household abuse females and males who are weak or powerless. This can be seen in their use of various kinds of imprisonment or confinement, which takes social, emotional, financial, legal, and physical forms. Mr. Earnshaw expects Catherine to behave properly and hurtfully rejects her "bad-girl" behavior. Edgar's ultimatum that Catherine must make a final choice between him or Heathcliff restricts Catherine's identity by forcing her to reject an essential part of her nature; with loving selfishness Edgar confines his daughter Cathy to the boundaries of Thrushcross Grange. A vindictive Hindley strips Heathcliff of his position in the family, thereby trapping him in a degraded laboring position. Heathcliff literally incarcerates Isabella (as her husband and legal overseer), and later he imprisons both Cathy and Nellie; also, Cathy is isolated from the rest of the household after her marriage to Linton.


Study of childhood and the family. The hostility toward and the abuse of children and family members at Wuthering Heights cut across the generations. The savagery of children finds full expression in Hindley's animosity toward Heathcliff and in Heathcliff's plans of vengeance. Wrapped in the self-centeredness of childhood, Heathcliff claims Hindley's horse and uses Mr. Earnshaw's partiality to his own advantage, making no return of affection. Mr. Earnshaw's disapproval of Catherine hardens her and, like many mistreated children, she becomes rebellious. Despite abuse, Catherine and Heathcliff show the strength of children to survive, and abuse at least partly forms the adult characters and behavior of Catherine and Heathcliff .


The effects of intense suffering. In the passion-driven characters–Catherine, Heathcliff, and Hindley–pain leads them to turn on and to torment others. Inflicting pain provides them some relief; this behavior raises questions about whether they are cruel by nature or are formed by childhood abuse and to what extent they should be held responsible for or blamed for their cruelties. Is all their suffering inflicted by others or by outside forces, like the death of Hindley's wife, or is at least some of their torment self-inflicted, like Heathcliff's holding Catherine responsible for his suffering after her death? Suffering also sears the weak; Isabella and her son Linton become vindictive, and Edgar turns into a self-indulgent, melancholy recluse. The children of love, the degraded Hareton and the imprisoned Cathy, are able to overcome Heathcliff's abuse and to find love and a future with each other. Is John Hagan right that "Wuthering Heights is such a remarkable work partly because it persuades us forcibly to pity victims and victimizers alike"?


Self-imposed or self-generated confinement and escape.Both Catherine and Heathcliff find their bodies prisons which trap their spirits and prevent the fulfillment of their desires: Catherine yearns to be united with Heathcliff, with a lost childhood freedom, with Nature, and with a spiritual realm; Heathcliff wants possession of and union with Catherine. Confinement also defines the course of Catherine's life: in childhood, she alternates between the constraint of Wuthering Heights and the freedom of the moors; in puberty, she is restricted by her injury to a couch at Thrushcross Grange; finally womanhood and her choice of husband confine her to the gentility of Thrushcross Grange, from which she escapes into the freedom of death.


Displacement, dispossession, and exile. Heathcliff enters the novel possessed of nothing, is not even given a last or family name, and loses his privileged status after Mr. Earnshaw's death. Heathcliff displaces Hindley in the family structure. Catherine is thrown out of heaven, where she feels displaced, sees herself an exile at Thrushcross Grange at the end, and wanders the moors for twenty years as a ghost. Hareton is dispossessed of property, education, and social status. Isabella cannot return to her beloved Thrushcross Grange and brother. Linton is displaced twice after his mother's death, being removed first to Thrushcross Grange and then to Wuthering Heights. Cathy is displaced from her home, Thrushcross Grange.


Communication and understanding. The narrative structure of the novel revolves around communication and understanding; Lockwood is unable to communicate with or understand the relationships at Wuthering Heights, and Nelly enlightens him by communicating the history of the Earnshaws and the Lintons. Trying to return to the Grange in a snowstorm, Lockwood cannot see the stone markers. A superstitious Nellie refuses to let Catherine tell her dreams; repeatedly Nellie does not understand what Catherine is talking about or refuses to accept what Catherine is saying, notably after she locks herself in her room. Isabella refuses to heed Catherine's warning and Nellie's advice about Heathcliff. And probably the most serious mis-communication of all is Heathcliff's hearing only that it would degrade Catherine to marry him.


The fall. Recently a number of critics have seen the story of a fall in this novel, though from what state the characters fall from or to is disputed. Does Catherine fall, in yielding to the comforts and security of Thrushcross Grange? Does Heathcliff fall in his "moral teething" of revenge and pursuit of property? Is Wutheirng Heights or Thrushcross Grange the fallen world? Is the fall from heaven to hell or from hell to heaven? Does Catherine really lose the Devil/Heathcliff (this question arises from the assumption that Brontë is a Blakeian subbversive and visionary)? The theme of a fall relies heavily on the references to heaven and hell that run through the novel, beginning with Lockwood's explicit reference to Wuthering Heights as a "misanthrope's heaven" and ending with the implied heaven of the ghosts of Heathcliff and Catherine roaming the moors together. Catherine dreams of being expelled from heaven and deliriously sees herself an exile cast out from the "heaven" of Wuthering Height–a literal as well as a symbolic fall. Heathcliff, like Satan, is relentless in his destructive pursuit of revenge. Inevitably the ideas of expulsion from heaven, exile, and desire for revenge have been connected to Milton's Paradise Lost and parallels drawn between Milton's epic and Brontë's novel; Catherine's pain at her change from free child to imprisoned adult is compared to Satan's speech to Beelzebub, "how chang'd" from an angel of light to exile in a fiery lake."


References


1. Ratchford, Fannie. 1941. The Brontës' Web of Childhood. Reprinted 1964. New York: Russell & Russell. ISBN 0846204878


2. Bronte, Emily. Wuthering Heights. New York: Dover Thrift


3. Editions, 1996.


4. Charters, Ann, ed. The Story and Its Writer. 3rd ed. Boston:


5. St. Martins, 1999.


6. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte. Dir. Peter Kosminsky.


7. Perf. Julliette Binoche, Ralph Fiennes, Sophie Ward,


8. Simon Shepherd and Jeremy Northam. 5 Star Cinema.


9. Bravo Special Presentation. Videocassette. 2002.


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