Wuthering Heights - Catherine And Heathcliff
A Presentation of the Personalities of Heathcliff and
Murray Kempton once admitted, ‘No great scoundrel is ever uninteresting.’ The human race continually focuses on characters who intentionally harm others and create damaging situations for their own benefit. Despite popular morals, characters who display an utter disregard for the natural order of human life are characters who are often deemed iconic and are thoroughly scrutinized. If only the characters of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights were as simple as that. Set on the mysterious and gloomy Yorkshire moors in the nineteenth century, Wuthering Heights gives the illusion of lonesome isolation as a stranger, Mr. Lockwood, attempts to ...
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personalities. Their climatic feelings towards each other and often selfish behavior often exaggerates or possibly encapsulates certain universal psychological truths humans are too afraid to express. Heathcliff and Catherine’s stark backgrounds evolve respectively into dark personalities and mistaken life paths, but in the end their actions determine the course of their own relationships and lives. Their misfortunes, recklessness, willpower, and destructive passion are unable to penetrate the eternal love they share.
Heathcliff’s many-faceted existence is marked by wickedness, love, and strength. His dark actions are produced by the distortion of his natural personality. Although Heathcliff was once subjected to vicious racism due to his dark skin color and experienced wearisome orphan years in Liverpool, this distortion had already begun when Mr. Earnshaw brought him into Wuthering Heights, a "dirty, ragged, black-haired child"(45; ch.7). Already he was inured to hardship and ...
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The primal and universal darkness in Heathcliff must not be excused. The vicious manner n which he helps to destroy Hindley, kidnaps Cathy and Nelly, and brutalizes Isabella and Hareton, suggests that he is not born with the same primal and universal structure as everyday man, but some other disturbed quality. For example, Isabella in a letter to Ellen wrote, "Is Mr. Heathcliff a man? And if so, is he mad? And if not, is he a devil?" (121; ch. 13). The antisocial menace now induces pain on his undeserving wife. In just a few chapters the reader identifies with Heathcliff’s dark instincts, awes at his inability to feel compassion in certain instances, and becomes intrigued ...
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"Wuthering Heights - Catherine And Heathcliff." Essayworld.com. January 17, 2006. Accessed April 26, 2024. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Wuthering-Heights-Catherine-And-Heathcliff/39762.
"Wuthering Heights - Catherine And Heathcliff." Essayworld.com. January 17, 2006. Accessed April 26, 2024. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Wuthering-Heights-Catherine-And-Heathcliff/39762.
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