Bronte: Wuthering Heights Beyond Social

Bronte: Wuthering Heights

Beyond Social Convention: The Nature of the Love that Catherine and Heathcliff share

Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights is one of the most mesmerizing novels in the English Literature. The intensity of the story obviously comes from the extremely powerful and almost unnatural bond between the two main protagonists in the story, Catherine and Heathcliff. This relationship is particularly hard to describe, as Bronte sets the story over a rather long period of time, involving other characters as well, all of which serve as means to enhance the individuality of the two protagonists. The love that Catherine and Heathcliff share is an immeasurable passion, demonic and heavenly at the same time. If described from a strictly moral point-of-view, this love would seem unnatural and destructive. However, a more accurate view would be that the love between Catherine and Heathcliff is an absolute, primordial and uncouth passion that goes beyond social convention and its restrictions.

What is interesting about the story is the fact that it is projected in the past and recounted through the perspective of two unreliable narrators: Mr. Lockwood and Nelly Dean. This device distances the story from the reader at the same time allowing space for the imagination to bring its contribution as well. Nelly Dean especially is dispassionate, prejudiced and narrow-minded, therefore unable to seize the truth about the love she sees growing between Catherine and Heathcliff. Both Heathcliff and Catherine have a wild, uncouth nature and their passions are as strong and indomitable at the savage climate of the place they live in. The title of the book, "Wuthering Heights" is at the same time the name of the house where the two children grow up together and an allusion to the rough winds and tempests that shake this part of the country. It is as if Heathcliff and Catherine borrow their intensity and their tempestuous passions from the very natural environment in which they are raised.

Their love is therefore akin to the rasping and powerful winds that blow from the heights of the sky. Their nature and their passions are clearly misunderstood by the people that surround them and that find them uncivilized and wild. Both Catherine and Heathcliff are anti-social and almost savage in their behavior. While their natures seem wild and violent, it is obvious that this is so because they violate social conventions. They seem to personify the unleashed forces of nature through their instinctual and nonconformist behavior. This is the main reason why they cannot be fully understood by the others. The bond between them is further enhanced by the social environment in which they live. Both Catherine and Heathcliff are neglected as children and, after Earnshaw's death, persecuted by Hinley, and this only solders their bond even more.

It is not by accident that both Catherine and Heathcliff marry into the Linton family. Edgar and Isabel Linton are their opposites in every respect: they seem kinder, are more educated and able to behave exemplary in society. However, despite their mildness, they are selfish and superficial. Under the pressure of the social environment, Catherine marries Edgar knowing at the same time that her love for Heathcliff will always haunt her. Hurt by her choice, Heathcliff leaves mysteriously and returns extremely rich only to marry Edgar's sister. In all this time however, the love they share only grows stronger. Catherine's passionate speech to the listless and ignorant Nelly is a proof of the force of this passion. She realizes that Edgar's kindness and gentleness is unsuitable for her own nature: "I've no more business to marry Edgar Linton than I have to be in heaven: and if the wicked man in there had not brought Heathcliff so low, I shouldn't have thought of it. It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now.... "(Bronte, 95) in her understanding, she could never be at peace in heaven, because her passions are not mild or harmonious. She and Heathcliff belong among the wild forces of nature and their love cannot exist in the middle of society.