Wuthering Heights

Wuthering Heights

Settings

Thrushcross Grange

• 'Pure white', 'gold'-showing the higher class and social status
• Opposite to WH
• 'glass drops'
• 'the idiots'-the Lintons have wealth, status and class yet are still unhappy

Wuthering Heights

• Prison like
• Oddly beautiful
• Graveyard
• 'completely removed from the stare of society'
• 'grotesque' carvings
• Lonely, isolated
• Elemental, with nature.

Characters

Cathy

• Mean and vindictive (Nelly)
• 'at 15 she was queen of the countryside'
• Aware of her responsibilities , marrying Edgar
• 'It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff'

Heathcliff

• Reflects the weather and moors
• Different in appearance and character
• 'Out and outer'
• Nature/nurture
• Passionate
• Mysterious
• Bedraggled
• Out of control
• Animalistic

Lockwood

• Looks on
• Unsure
• Self depricating
• Looknig for friends

Themes

Love

• Heathcliff and Cathy bond through mutual rebellion
• Eternal passion 'I cannot live without my soul'
• 'I am Heathcliff'
• 'If all else remained and he were annihiliated the universe would turn a mighty stranger'
• Edgar/Cathy and Cathy/Linton seperated through death
• Fustration of love?
• Cathy/Hareton are the only succesful couple, overcame social boundaries
• 'It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff'
• Heathcliff hands Cathy back to Edgar, belongs to him

Death and the supernatural

• 'Surely you and everybody else have a notion that there is or should be an existance of yours beyond you'
• 'i know ghosts have wondered on Earth.  Be with me always'
• Death brings Hareton and Cathy together
• Death is the only thing that can truly merge Cathy and Heathcliff
• Supernatural is always dealt with at WH
• Ghosts are a manifestation of the past, the power of memories

Childhood

• Heathcliff's characterised by violence
• Catherine stays immature and child like
• she is spoilt throughout her life
• Cathy is not allowed to WH, Linton aware of how childhood is important and how she should be brought up within society.

Revenge

• Hindley wants revenge on Heathcliff, feels he stole his father from him
• Heathcliff wants to 'pay Hindley back' for his mistreatment
• Heathcliff wants revenge of Edgar so taking Cathy with their material revenge, he marries Isabella for this purpose
• Isabella wishes she could take 'an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth'
• Hareton is degraded as revenge of Hindley
• Although isolated by his obession with revenge he is reuinted with Cathy in death
• WH and TG return to their rightful heirs

Narrative Voice

Nelly

• Colloquial, less educated ' gipsy brat'
• Emotional, dramatic
• Exaggerated

Lockwood

• Well educated, snobby-'Perceiving myself in a blunder'
• Foolish-'a capital fellow' referring to Heathcliff
• Naive-'Unluckily, it was a heap of dead rabbits'
• Complex sentences
• Doesn't understand the lives of the WH inhabitants

Critical reading

Psychoanalytical

• Cathy and Heathcliff's union is only maintained through Cathy's identity
• Their love is tied to the convention of language, which categorises it as having a live and limited outcome
• Cathy realises death is the only way to be truly merged with Heathclliff
• Cathy and Heathcliff dramatise the unknown, repressed and childish part of everyone
• The child is the mother of the man
• Cathy and Heathcliff's love represents the pre-Oedipal stage, a time of absalute identification between the self and someone else(mother)
• …