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Wuthering Heights Review

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Submitted By Softball42
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Emily Bronte’s novel, Wuthering Heights, is a proverbial soap opera stew, filled with love, lies, and deceit intertwining two families that reside only four miles apart across the moors in ever-seemingly dreary northern England. The two main characters, Catherine and Heathcliff are born to be together, but destined to be apart. Although truly happy and hopelessly in love with Catherine during the bright times in his life, Heathcliff couldn’t withstand the cruel, evil grip of jealousy and revenge that consumed him, eventually dragging all of those individuals associated with him, as well as his own being, to a dark demise.

Wuthering Heights is unlike any other story that I’ve come across, and it is difficult to put a specific category label on it. Thrilling, tragic, damp, and dark, filled with villains and heroines, Bronte never clarifies who said villain or heroin is, seemingly purposefully changing the proverbial mind with each turn of the page.

From the moment young adopted Heathcliff becomes friends with Catherine, it’s apparent that he is sincerely happy as he and Catherine’s love grows with each innocent tryst among the moors, ever growing from friendship into love. Catherine gives us a glimpse of that love and adoration when she states, “My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath…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” (Bronte, 1847, p. 64).

The beginning of Heathcliff’s descent was encouraged by his “enslavement” by Hindley and mockery from Edgar that are key in the turning point of change in Heathcliff from light to dark. It is at this point in the novel that Bronte begins paralleling the mood of Heathcliff with the weather, as it’s always raining, or in a dark room, never in the bright light of day when conversations with he and the

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