Miss Warren, my English teacher during my junior year, assigned the book. Another dreary story by another dead English author. We had nothing in common, Emily and I. She was a grown woman when she wrote Wuthering Heights , a Victorian recluse, living in a stone parsonage at the edge of the Yorkshire moors. What could she possibly have to say to me? At home that night, I cracked the book open. I had no choice; Miss Warren gave pop quizzes.
A few pages in, I was no longer grumbling, I was gone. Totally blown away. I knew this place, Wuthering Heights. I knew the moors and the towering crags, and the aching sense of isolation they imparted. I knew the gray, melancholy skies. The deep nights. The wind sighing in the fir trees. The strange feeling of homesickness for a place that had never been my home grew.
I was mystified by it. Two families, locked in internecine war and bound together by patrilineal inheritance, stage their abject conflict across the small geographical space that separates their respective households: the luxury and insipidity of the Grange, versus the shabby gentility, decay, and violence of the Heights.
It is a distinctly claustrophobic novel: although we read with a vague sense of the vastness of the moors that is its setting, the action unfolds, with few exceptions, in domestic interiors. Despite countless readings, I can conjure no distinct image of the Grange. But the outline of the Heights, with each room unfolding into yet another set of rooms, labyrinthine and imprisoning, has settled into my mind. The deeper you enter into the space of the Heights - the space of the text - the more bewildering the effect.
The love between Heathcliff and Catherine exists now as a myth operative outside any substantial relationship to the novel from which the lovers spring. It is shorthand in popular culture for doomed passion. The greediness of their feeling for each other resembles nothing in reality.
It is hyperreal, as Catherine and Heathcliff do not aspire so much as to be together, as to be each other. It is a presentation of life, an essay on love, and a glimpse at relationships. This lyrical prose has a distinct structure and style. Significantly, Wuthering Heights is about ordered pairs: two households, two generations, and two pairs of children. Some critics dismiss the plot of the second-generation characters as being a simple retelling of the first story; however, in doing so, they are dismissing the entire second half of the book.
Each of the two main story lines of the two generations comprises 17 chapters. Clearly, in order to appreciate fully Wuthering Heights , attention must be paid to the second half, particularly noting that the second half is not just a retelling but rather a revising — a form of renewal and rebirth.
These ordered pairs more often than not, are pairs of contrast. The most noticeable pair is that of the two houses: Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange. Wuthering Heights has the wild, windy moors and its inhabitants possess the same characteristics.
Opposite this are the calm, orderly parks of Thrushcross Grange and its inhabitants. Each household has a male and female with a counterpart at the other. Readers gain insight into these characters not only by observing what they think, say, and do but also by comparing them to their counterparts, noticing how they do not think, speak, and act.
Wuthering Heights is an important contemporary novel for two reasons: Its honest and accurate portrayal of life during an early era provides a glimpse of history, and the literary merit it possesses in and of itself enables the text to rise above entertainment and rank as quality literature.
Moral reconciliation is when the character comes to terms with the internal or external struggle by coming to a realization. Character information Earnshaw, the father of Hindley and Catherine Earnshaw, and the adoptive father of Heathcliff. He brings the orphan Heathcliff into his home to raise as one of his children, and continues to love and care for him until his death. Hover for more information. Heathcliff carefully explains to Nelly Dean why he is not taking his final revenge.
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