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4. Emily Brontë (1818-1848)
Life:
Emily Brontë, a poet and novelist, is the younger sister of Charlotte
Brontë. Just like Charlotte, she also spent her childhood in misery and her
life experience was nearly the same with Charlotte. Yet she is much more
passionate and rebellious than her sister. Some poems strongly voice her
innermost feelings and thoughts. In 1847, her only yet valuable novel
Wuthering Heights was published. Now she is remembered mainly as a
novelist rather than a poet. In 1848, Emily died of consumption
Wuthering Heights
This novel is a story of Heathcliff, a gipsy who is picked up and brought up
by Mr.Earnshaw in Wuthering Heights. After Earnshaw dies, his son,
Hindley who is the new master of Wuthering Heights, bullies and humiliates
Heathcliff. Although he passionately loves Catherine, Hindley’s sister, he
finds it impossible to marry her. Thus he leaves. Three years later he
returns with large fortune, only to find Catherine has already married Edgar
Linton. Heathcliff’s intent love for Catherine only causes her death in
grief. Then Heathcliff marries Edgar Linton’s sister Isabella in order to
seek revenge. He controls Hindley and Hindley’s son Hareton tightly and
treats them cruelly. Later he forces Lonton’s daughter Cathy to marry his
sick son in order to hunt Lonton’s estate. After his son dies, Cathy and
Hareton fall in love with each other. Heathcliff, becoming an old man, finds
the fruitlessness of his revenge and dies. Cathy and Hareton are united
happily.
Love and revenge are the themes of this novel. The love
between Heathcliff and Catherine is the fuse of conflicts and then causes a
series of revenge actions by Heathcliff. This novel starts with love and
ends with the failure of revenge. Heathcliff rebels against the bourgeois
matrimonial system, as well as Catherine during her childhood. His love for
Catherine is destroyed by the rigid social status. Their love is a rebellion
to the conventional bourgeois society and involves struggles for freedom and
happiness. During the process of revenge, Heathcliff turns himself from the
oppressed to the oppressor. Though he has revenged his enemies, he does not
gain what he truly wants and lives in missing and misery.
Class hierarchy can be seen in the novel as well. The
residents of Wuthering Heights seem to be of a lower class than the Lintons
at Thrushcross Grange. Even though she loves him, Catherine will not marry
Heathcliff after he has been degraded, but marries into the rich Linton
family, which leads to all of the major conflicts in the novel. Compared to
the residents in the Wuthering Heights, the Lintons are of a higher class
both because they have more money, and because they are better educated.
Catherine and Heathcliff are the two main characters in this novel.
Catherine is beautiful and charming, but she is never as civilized as she
pretends to be. In her heart she is always a wild girl playing on the moors
with Heathcliff. She regards it as her right to be loved by all, and has an
unruly temper. Heathcliff, of unknown descent, seems to represent wild and
natural forces which often seem amoral and dangerous for society. His almost
inhuman devotion to Catherine is the motive of his life, for which he
revenges with vindictive hatred on all those who stand between him and his
beloved. He is cruel but magnificent in his consistency, and the reader can
never forget that at the heart of the grown man lies the abandoned, hungry
child of the streets of Liverpool.
In this novel, Emily resembles the Gothic
romances of the latter part in the 18th century, such as the horrorable,
mysterious and intense atmosphere on the wild, remote moorland and those
supernatural events that last from the very beginning of the novel to the
very end. In chapter three Lockwood is grabbed and pleaded to by Catherine's
ghost through a window, and in the last chapter Ellen talks about people
seeing the ghosts of Heathcliff and Catherine walking on the moors. The
following part is just the horrorable scene that Mr. Lockwood facing
Catherine’s ghost in Chapter three.
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