WUTHERING HEIGHTS Wuthering Heights is a romantic horror story which revolves around the sad and horrifying events taking place in a mansion named ‘Wuthering Heights ‘ from Emily Bronte
WUTHERING HEIGHTS
Wuthering Heights is a romantic horror story which revolves around the sad and horrifying events taking place in a mansion named ‘Wuthering Heights ‘ from Emily Bronte. Instead of starting at the beginning of the story, the first scene of Wuthering Heights plunges into a time close to the end. Later, there is a long flashback when we learn what has happened up until then and, finally the last part of the story is told. The writer also used a good number of story tellers.
The first narrator is an outsider, Charles Lockwood, who first visits Wuthering Heights without knowing about its past . He seems very confused about what is going on, which adds to the novel’s sense of mystery.
Just after his visit, there introduced the next narrator, who is the major story teller though appears as a second hand. She tells the whole story to the first narrator with a good skill. And she is Nelly Dean, a housekeeper who grew up with the novel’s two main characters – Cathy and Heathcliff. She describes the events she has seen, but parts of her story are told by the other characters.
At the end there comes our earlier narrator to give the story a finishing touch by visiting the mansion again.
It must be said that the story is full of deliberate contrasts. The bleak farm house of Wuthering Heights, high upon the moors, is contrasted with the comfortable Thrushcross Grange, safe in the valley, while the passionate, dark haired Earnshaws are set against the gentle, fair-haired (blonde) Lintons. The action shifts between Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange as the two families meet and react to each other.
As an additional information, Emily Bronte i.e. The author herself had many bitter experiences of death and illness, but she also was passionately happy on her beloved moors. All these experiences are reflected in her novel.
Just like its author’s life, Wuthering Heights contains some very sad events, and many of its characters die young.
But it is also filled with vivid descriptions of nature and weather, and some of its most dramatic scenes take place at the moors. Cathy and Heathcliff are both closely identified with the moors and nature, and Heathcliff is compared to a rocky crag, a greedy cuckoo and a prowling wolf.
As mentioned earlier, the bleak farmhouse in Wuthering Heights may have been based on a real house that the author Emily knew, or she may have drawn on details of her own family home to create the house that gives her book its name.
And this information sows a seed for the germinating doubt that the character sketch of Cathy could have depicted the author herself which spread branches of doubts including the character Heathcliff whom Cathy loves in the story might be a real person in the author’s life.
Some people find the novel dark and frightening, but its haunting sense of mystery has helped to make the most famous stories of love and revenge.
When it comes to the character sketches of the story, one must read without taking away their eyes from the book to make sure that they aren’t get lost inside the tangled characters,as the story contains the characters have the same surname and rarely the first name too. In a dramatic scene which takes place at the most terrifying place, the ghost or Cathy’s room, narrator tends to find the scribblings on the wall which reads the same name Catherine with different last names.
It throws light on a good number of love stories including the triangle love of Cathy, Heathcliff and Linton and the final teen love brewing between the two unexpected characters, Catherine jr., and Earnshaw.
This book can also be taken into account as a thriller, as it includes a number of plans and plots of the cunning and sly Heathcliff. It beautifully describes how the cuckoo becomes the master of the crow’s nest.
This novel got the honour of being adapted many times to be decorated as musicals, plays, movies and even a ballet and an opera. American, British, Spanish, French and Japanese film directors have all made their own versions of Emily’s classic novel because of its dramatic effect.
Submitted by,
Evangeline. B
171102013.
