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The Great Gatsby Character Analysis

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Through her transformation, Catherine’s character can be seen as being ‘double’ in nature. Emma Borg explores the notion of Catherine’s two sidedness and states ‘it occurs when she behaves in different ways surrounded by different people’8. It is particularly evident as Bronte expresses that Catherine had ‘no temptation to show her rough side’ around the Lintons and took care not to act ‘like a vulgar young ruffain’ as Heathcliff was termed9. Catherine ‘was full of ambition- and led her to adopt a double character without exactly intending to deceive anyone’10. Despite Catherine being a rebelious and ‘wild’ character, it is evident that she was still nonetheless greatly influenced by the patriarchal attitudes, gender conventions and expectations …show more content…
Catherine sees her relationship with Edgar Linton as being ‘like the foilage in the woods. Time will change it, I’m well aware, as winter changes the trees’ unlike her love for Heathcliff that ‘resembles the eternal rocks beneath - a source of visible delight, but nececssary’27. Through the use of powerful and descriptive imagery, Bronte highlights the comparison of Catherine’s deep thoughts and feelings for Heathcliff and Edgar. Similarly to Catherine’s thoughts of her relationship with Edgar changing over time, writer and feminist Clementina Black wrote a pamphlet in 1890 about marriage. In the pamphlet she explained ‘why some women were unwilling to get married’. She wrote that marriage ‘like other human institutions, is not permanent and alterable in form, but necessarily changes shape with the changes of social development.. the forms of marriage are transitional, like the societies in which they exist’28. This can be associated with Catherine’s own perspective of marriage, more specifically her commitment to Edgar Linton which she anticipates will change over time. Susan Rubinow Gorsky also explores how Cathereine Earnshaw attempts to ‘accede to society’s definiton of her role’ through marrying Edgar Linton29.Gorsky states that through Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte reveals her own ‘intimate knowledge of the human psyche, of social pressure, emotional pain’ and it allows her to create a novel that depicts ‘the power of love and the effect of its

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