Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights : Diving into the Darkness of Human Mind

2014

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte (1818-1848) is a novel which is windswept and weatherbeaten both in the world outside and in the world inside of human emotion. The total book leaves a deep impression of an intense but dreary romantic view of life and of an unusual mystery and conflict. None of the Victorian novelists has been able to create these traits. Some of Emily's characters appear like creatures of their autonomous, unreal world. This paper shows that the novel is an expression of Emily's rare sense of imagination that is absent in many other contemporary novelists. It also shows that Emily paints an unusual love before which the demonic passion melts. So, this novel stands far apart from other Victorian masterpieces. Not only this, Wuthering Heights does not portray Victorian realism which is the focal point of most of the Victorian great novels.

2014

Wuthering Heights is a Victorian novel written by Emily Brontë, who made an excellent use of her narrative skills to make the reader play an active role in the reading and interpretation of the novel. The figure of the villain in this intense and complicated love story has become a polemic topic discussed by many different critics, whose final conclusions are not always the same. The violent, unexpected and sometimes incomprehensible actions carried out by the mysterious Heathcliff have led many readers and critics to consider him to be the villain par excellence of the novel. However, it should be noted that, despite all his evil actions, there is something that on the other hand turns him into the hero and sufferer of the story: his impossible love for Catherine Earnshaw. The narrator, Ellen Dean, has also been regarded by some critics as the devilish villain of the story, due to her capacity to control the other characters and most of the situations that take place over the cours...

2016

My thesis concerns the understanding of the novel Wuthering Heights (1847) by Emily Brontean adolescent girl's journey towards adulthood. It covers the basic background it originates from: 19th century society, class and geographical determinism, the position of women, and the facts about Bronte's life which formed her unique writing style. It includes a part about the features of romantic literature such as its symbolism, the importance of opposition, the idea of nature as a teacher, the qualities of childhood, the supernatural and the Byronic hero. It provides a description of the main motifs in Wuthering Heights which are important for understanding it as Catherine's search for herself. It discusses the frames of mind of individual characters and repeated motifs. It pays special attention to sexual instinct as the origin of all human actions, self-acceptance and self-love, the loss and regain of identity and harmony. It discusses the idea that all characters can be se...

Langlit: An international peer reviewed open access journal (ISSN-2349-5189, Impact factor-5.61) UGC APPROVED, 2022

The passion in life is both delightful and destructive. In passionate love men and women unconsciously desire their own demise but this is the sublime. Here sublime is a vision of infinity which dissolves our identity in an agreeable kind of way. The fiction Wuthering Heights though with the use of Gothic elements evoked terror, it, nonetheless conveyed strong sublime effect with a destructive romance. Destructive passion, reflecting irrational and the grotesque associated with Gothicism. The passion of Heathcliff and Catherine is a kind of sublimation which is destructive, dangerous, and awe-inspiring and at the same time presents death, abuse, vengeance, and self-loathing, embody grotesque. Edmund Bruke's description of sublime as ''delightful horror'' that has the implication of raising up to or beyond the limit. Through self-destructive limitless passion their souls lifted up by sublime. This paper explores the sublime of this fiction; especially the destructive passion between two protagonists Catherine and Heathcliff. Heathcliff's love for Catherine which is a sentiment fierce and inhuman; a passion that tormented Catherine by its quenchless and ceaseless ravaging effect. But they elevate the soul to its highest pitch being oneness with each other. It is the life of Eros which is the painful travelling in its provocation for the bliss of extinction.

NOTES ON WUTHERING HEIGHTS by EMILY BRONTE FOLLOWED BY ESSAYS AND KEY THEMES, 2024

WHAT IS WH ABOUT? A girl but not an immature girl since she can make such a philosophical difference between two kinds of love, the passionate, Plato, nature, primitive anti-hero such as Heathcliff not different and no able to be separated from nature, his forces, his violence is all nature vs. the Victorian gentleman and a kind or honorable one, Linton. She can give a lecture on two kinds of love the one that never changes and the one that changes with like the seasons...but she is caught in these two forces and chooses a material and comfortable life. What is H's vengance? To become a richer and gentleman than Linton, not the Cinderella horror that we all think about her choice, but she could have married Lord Heathcliff...and his vengance is absurd as long as his enemies and beloved Catherine die....leaving him insane and waiting for her and death....so Cathy was not a gullible girl that made a mistake....she chose what she wanted to be but she did not expect Heathcliff to become the man she never ever thought he would be ....

Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights (1847) is considered one of the most enigmatic novels of the Nineteenth century. Despite its centrality to the canon of Victorian literature and women’s writing in the nineteenth century, it paradoxically embodies both an anti-Victorian universe in its refusal to adhere to the moral and sexual codes of the time as well as upholds some of its major traits, especially with regard to the disappearance of the sexual body while violence keeps on reappearing. Despite this dearth of a moral universe was criticized by its earliest commentators, there was a predominantly patriarchal logic at work which led them to simultaneously grudgingly appreciate the male author, since Bronte was using a male pseudonym, who had, 'at once gone fearlessly into the moors and desolate places for his heroes' and discovered the deeper recesses of the mind.

Using various theories of monstrosity, degeneration, and the morphic figure in Gothic studies, this essay explores explicitly the manifestation of Gothic archetypes and tropes in Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights. The essay further explores figures of the werewolf, the vampire, and the revenant in the general sense, deconstructing the romance of Heathcliff and Cathy, and the interplay of masculinity and femininity, along with a 'natural', atavistic horror, at work in the text.

Novel: A Forum on Fiction , 2021

This article scrutinises what generations of readers have perceived to be Wuthering Heights’ “general air of sour hatred” (Gilbert and Gubar 2000: 260) and its disconcerting density of violent and abusive exchanges. Taking up readings of the novel as a story of anti-colonial retaliation (Heathcliff) and feminist portrayal (Catherine; Isabella), I focus on Brontë’s affective politics in (re-)producing and channelling negative feeling in and beyond the text. In so doing, I follow an approach that I call ‘follow the hatred’ which is inspired by Sara Ahmed’s research on the ‘politics of emotion’ (2014; 2004) and, particularly, the ‘fantasy of violation’ (Ahmed 44). Utilising Ahmed’s understanding of emotions as based on processes of attribution that are structured by power relations, I trace Wuthering Heights’s instalment of Heathcliff as a source of hatred—a hatred that gradually infects all relationships and characters in the novel and, not least through occasional hints at romance, seamlessly blends in with mid-nineteenth century boundary panic regarding miscegenation and inverted colonial hierarchies. Illuminating also how the novel sets incentives for readers to feel within these parameters, the analysis shows how Brontë installs Heathcliff as an expansive force of injury and (emotional) infection with a particular effect: consolidating white English, particularly female, identities. Over two main sections—“Heathcliff’s Hatred” and “Catherine’s Liberation”—I thus go beyond popular readings of Heathcliff as either aggressor or underdog, instead offering new insights into how ‘feeling negatively’ is indebted to literary production, tying in with both writing and reading in an age of imperialism.

Academia Letters, 2021

When we speak of Gothic texts, it is tempting to do so with reference to gender, categorising texts as either Male Gothic or Female Gothic. However, the definitions of these categories are somewhat nebulous – classification can depend on the gender of the author, the gender of the protagonist, elements of the narrative, or a combination therein. Moreover, this dichotomy largely ignores the prevalent depiction of queerness, here meaning non-normative experiences of sex, gender and sexuality, within Gothic fiction. In 1996, Jean Kennard published an article titled ‘Lesbianism and the Censoring of “Wuthering Heights”’. She contemplates Emily Brontë’s own identity, reading her “masculine” habits, “peculiarities”, and nickname, “the Major”, in the context of early Victorian discourse around gender and sexuality. She then reads Wuthering Heights as a subliminally lesbian narrative, in which Brontë’s ambivalence towards her own identity is encoded in the tumultuous relationship between Cathy and Heathcliff. Surprisingly, very little further work on Wuthering Heights as a queer text has been undertaken in the following quarter of a century. This paper aims to return to this site of critical enquiry, this time examining the text through the lens of the Queer Gothic, an area of study that has gained substantial interest over the past fifteen years. It begins by exploring the ways in which Heathcliff is coded as a sexual Other, drawing on the associations between race and transgression in nineteenth century England, and the ways in which these associations were articulated in Gothic fiction. It then returns to Kennard’s interest in sameness in the novel, exploring the ways in which Cathy and Heathcliff’s identifications with one another transform them into increasingly androgynous and transgressive characters. Finally, it explores Victorian notions of sexual transgression as a sickness, and the way in which the Gothic gave language and form to such notions, tracing instances of illness in the novel in this context. Ultimately, this paper reads Wuthering Heights as a deeply transgressive text that both influenced and was influenced by contemporary discourse around gender and sexuality, situating it within a history of sexuality that continues to bear heavily upon the present.