Resumo de Wuthering Heights

Often described simply as a passionate love story, the complexities and the quite frankly outstanding writing within this novel can be overlooked. The central and most popular theme is clearly the love story between Cathy and Heathcliff, highlighted by their determination and aggression, the pathetic fallacy within the Yorkshire setting and extreme pagan-like outbursts about their feelings for one another. Viewing these characters and their contrast to the Linton children through Nelly?s narrative voice makes them seem other-worldly somehow: an important part of what has given the central love story its immortality and deserved rank as one of the greatest in world literature.

However, many other aspects of Emily Bronte?s only novel are worth exploring when considering what it is that makes Wuthering Heights so compelling. Whilst Cathy and Heathcliff clearly have a connection incomprehensible to those around them (surviving even their separate marriages), the fact remains that Heathcliff is a cuckoo in the Earnshaw nest and seems to either destroy or take control of all in his path. His bitterness at being maltreated by both Hindley and Cathy is taken to extremes, and no matter how sympathetic the author or reader is to his character, Heathcliff?s death and the inevitable marriage at the end of the novel resolve the conflicts both within and between the houses of Wuthering Heights and Thrush Grange.

It is also interesting and useful to make a comparison of the two houses themselves. At Wuthering Heights, for instance, the roaring fireplace and kitchen form the focal point of the action. The fire, symbolic of passion and violence (with all the obvious sexual connotations thereof), coupled with the images of the kitchen and hearty food, implying robustness and health, suggests that the residents are above all physical beings. Thrush Grange on the other hand, with its neatly laid out carpets, curtains and library, stands for social status. Unfortunately its residents display weaknesses such as pettiness and spite on a level equivalent to Heathcliff?s greed or Cathy?s anger.

In Part Two of the novel, Linton can be seen to embody the worst traits of the two households combined whereas Catherine Linton and Hareton have inherited the more admirable qualities of each household. Their reading lessons, a mirror of Cathy and Heathcliff?s own disastrous attempts in that area, give rise to an interesting theory. Heathcliff falls into that very select group (think Richard Burton?s Petruccio or Marlon Brando?s Stanley Kowalski) of brutish figures in literature with whom women cannot help but fall in love, despite their behaviour. However, with her underlying message Bronte belies her soft spot for her most intriguing character, by concluding with an indirect attack on Heathcliff. Based on both the action of the novel and the recurring book motif, the final conclusion is that respect, social standing and even love can be achieved not through the accumulation of possessions and territory, but instead through the accumulation of knowledge.

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