“The intense horror of nightmare came over me: I tried to draw back my arm, but the hand clung to it, and a most melancholy voice sobbed, ‘Let me in – let me in!’ ‘Who are you?’ I asked, struggling, meanwhile, to disengage myself. ‘Catherine Linton,’ it replied, shiveringly (why did I think of LINTON? I had read EARNSHAW twenty times for Linton) – ‘I’m come home: I’d lost my way on the moor!’ As it spoke, I discerned, obscurely, a child’s face looking through the window.”
– Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights, Ch. 3
By thinking about my own life,all experienced in the past and being present in the time passing now me by,there has been no difficulties to start writing this review.It is about an idea, that Emily Bronte lived such a life with similar experience in her environment,by thinking where to run away,and finding pleasure and solace in writing this well-known and loved novel.I don’t know much of her personal life and actually don’t want to learn more of it,before i have done with my story;i prefer to be led by my imagination and pure feelings,without any obstacle and prejudices.
I am lucky enough to meet Emily Bronte on the same path with hints of great desires and a sense of the nobility,craving to reach much more than ordinary life gives everyone..Being deprived to step into labeled world of the higher spheres where spiritual souls wandering around,in her reality,she had no other choice than to let her inner beauty of mind to swing into deepest paths of her bright mind,and bring hidden knowledge and fantasy to light,by putting herself over all the improprieties of everyone’s mangled thinking and observations.
The most intriguing in the novel is great deal of cruelty in the behaviors of the main characters.I am willing to accept that in everyone’s nature lies a piece of “wild” instinct,which sometimes impels them to destructive and cruel acts,but there were more than we usually meet in such a form.Human nature may be more intriguing,mysterious and heartless,than all the nature in all its shapes of the phenomenons.
Great example of such a mysterious nature we meet in Heathcliff ,who was an orphan and abused in his youngest days,and it ,by itself might be the foundation of his cruelty in elder age,although i am a stronger believer in the original heritage and pure spring of violance.Anyway,all together arose a torrent of powerful negative emotions which draw Catherine Earnshaw and eventually brought to her death.I almost hear whisperings which Heathcliff so passionately heard for years in own isolation and voluntary torture.Cruelty possesses its reverse in the form of self-destruction and martying.and by the same strength he abused the others,he tortured himself,by voluntary giving his spirit to wander across wilderness and expecting to meet and hear from his beloved woman.Catherine was everything for him in his poor life,which was pictured in growing without a family and matches to make his company in the youth.By finding asylum in Catherine’s soul, looking at her like being a Godlike appearance,all the hopes,being secrets of his soul ,he put into her.And here comes up the greatest feature in his character :he was granted by the power to see the future,and it would have determined his destiny and destructive tracks of his character.Thereby the damn appeared to be inevitable for him,and drew Catherine in,by throwing malediction on her deadly bed:
“––Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest as long as I am living; you said I killed you–haunt me, then! The murdered DO haunt their murderers, I believe. I know that ghosts HAVE wandered on earth. Be with me always–take any form–drive me mad! only DO not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! it is unutterable! I CANNOT live without my life! I CANNOT live without my soul!”/Heathcliff
– Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights, Ch. 16
You loved me—then what right had you to leave me? What right—answer me—for the poor fancy you felt for Linton? Because misery and degradation, and death, and nothing that God or Satan could inflict would have parted us, you, of your own will, did it. I have not broken your heart—you have broken it; and in breaking it, you have broken mine. So much the worse for me that I am strong. Do I want to live? What kind of living will it be when you—oh, God! would you like to live with your soul in the grave?’
In some way he was prepared for the coming events,Catherine marriage,and leaving for Thrushcross Grange.Without a power to withhold the destiny,and having insulted by her saying,he left Wuthering Heights,only to come back after few years.
Regardless of Catherine’s fate was defined by Heathcliff’s prevision or not,it was inevitable for her to confront her true feelings,by making a decision to betray him;by doing that,she could not have had different expectations but suffering,pain and longing for loving heart of Heathcliff for the rest of her life.Her excape led to rising a chain of events with bad outcomes and missed lives of the closest people around her..The weakness of the one moment was milestone to losing of the future,just a glimps of the time to bring so many sorrows,miseries and hates.
“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.“/Catherine
– Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights, Ch. 9
Every time you go against your true nature and feelings,by surrendering yourself to other people’s valuations of social standings ,and betraying personal beliefs,you give yourself away to Devil;it is now his field to play with you by own rules,holding you in hate against yourself and all around you.It is great clash,and the only solution to get out of that is finding strenght and will to win EVIL imposed by the others.It is all the sense of Human exsistence-eternal struggle between Good and Bad,evil and goodness,which springs from people, conceived by their disturbed and in stupidity triggered opinions.
“It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now; so he shall never know how I love him: and that, not because he’s handsome, Nelly, but because he’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same; and Linton’s is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire.”
– Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights, Ch. 9
The credit of all the misfortunes belongs to weakness of ourselves to confront the temptations coming from our fellows.
If this question has not been remarked the other way than being only the fruit of my imagination,yet i put it in here:In what way to regard Love between Heathcliff and Catherine?Will it be followed by approving and smiles in our faces,or it will be seen with fear and doom because of wrong decisions and behaviours of both of them .Will we judge the circumstances that they had been surrounded with,the time they lived in,or atrocious breeding and absence of parent’s Love?Will we reject the obviously passion which brings forth the hate?
Great love happens to be DAMN
Every fluid of events carried by the strength of its nature, which is not possible for you to overcome,is usually marked to be devil’s nature,it is always implied to damn! And in great Love all seems to be like demon’s affairs and miracles.
Or,will we bow before the two in LOVE who had courage to defy the doom of their love and follow their destiny regardless of how much of evil ,hate and deaths it caused them?To bow before the two who got rare privilege to get themselves involved into furious and cruel freak of the nature,in the whirl of passion and the feeling of being powerless to get out of it/As the flood carries lots of unnecessary loads with itself,the madness of great love is not freed from own burden of the native moods,attributing to the fact of common source of the unique moment of the creation.
Our instincts for freedom and free will pursue us toward complete independence,but Love comes to be closely dependant of nature and tends to bent us forever.
The only way of true understanding and accepting of the love between Heathcliff and Catherine in this love story is being personally involved in almost the same killing Love,as experienced by some past souls,with hope that one day the two in the same love, come to approve your own.
“‘I wish I were out of doors! I wish I were a girl again, half savage and hardy and free, and laughing at injuries, not maddening under them! Why am I so changed? Why does my blood rush into a hell of tumult at a few words? I’m sure I should be myself were I once among the heather on those hills.’ /Catherine
CHARACTERS
Heathcliff
Catherine Earnshaw
Edgar Linton
Isabella Linton
Hindley Earnshaw
Frances
Cathy Linton
Hareton Earnshaw
Linton Heathcliff
Ellen Dean
Joseph
Mr Lockwood
RESOURCES
Wuthering Heights is a gothic novel, and the only novel by Emily Brontë. It was first published in 1847 under the pseudonym Ellis Bell, and a posthumous second edition was edited by her sister Charlotte.
The name of the novel comes from the Yorkshire manor on the moors on which the story centres (as an adjective; wuthering is a Yorkshire word referring to turbulent weather). The narrative tells the tale of the all-encompassing and passionate, yet thwarted, love between Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw, and how this unresolved passion eventually destroys them and many around them.
Now considered a classic of English literature, Wuthering Heights met with mixed reviews by critics when it first appeared, mainly because of the narrative’s stark depiction of mental and physical cruelty. Though Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre is generally considered the best of the Brontë sisters’ works, many subsequent critics of Wuthering Heights argued that its originality and achievement made it superior.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuthering_Heights
INSERT from online-literature.com
Emily Bronte (1818-1849), English author and one of the famed Bronte sisters wrote Wuthering Heights (1847);
First published under Emily’s pseudonym Ellis Bell, the combination of its structure and elements of passion, mystery and doomed love as well as social commentary have made Wuthering Heights an enduring masterpiece.
Emily Bronte was born on 30 July 1818 at 74 Market Street in Thornton, Bradford, Yorkshire, England. She was the fourth daughter of Maria Branwell (1783-1821), who died of cancer when Emily was just three years old, and Irish clergyman Patrick Bronte (1777-1861). After her youngest sister Anne (1820-1849) was born the Bronte’s moved to the village of Haworth where Patrick had been appointed rector. Emily had four older siblings; Maria (1814-1825), Elizabeth (1815-1825), Charlotte (1816-1855) and Patrick Branwell “Branwell” (1817-1848). Emily’s “Aunt [Elizabeth] Branwell” (1776-1842) had moved in to the Parsonage after her sister Maria’s death to help nursemaids Nancy and Sarah Gars raise the six young children.
www.online-literature.com/bronte/
QUOTATIONS
www.wuthering-heights.co.uk/quotations.htm
IMAGE
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Balthus (1908 – 2001)
‘Wuthering Heights’ By Emily Brontë
1993
Published by the Limited Editions Club, New York
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