Wuthering Heights - Setting
Like the world of Transylvania, the Gothic setting in Wuthering Heights suggests a wild and primitive landscape unconstrained by Orthodox norms. The reader is first introduced to Wuthering Heights, the house and its surroundings, as it appears to the middle class, Mr. Lockwood, on a stormy night. Thus, Lockwood serves the same role and Jonathan Harker as he is the bridge between the world of 19th century normal realities and the primeval world of Wuthering Heights. Just as Mr. Harker characterizes his trip to Transylvania as a journey between two atmospheres, entering the "thunderous one", Mr. Lockwood too is introduced to Wuthering Heights on a stormy night, a foreshadowing of the ...
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thus emphasizing the darkness and cruelty in nature. As in Dracula, the storm is a presence of sin and unnatural desires. After ejaculating that his "wretched inmates deserv[ed] perpetual isolation from [their] species of churlish inhospitality," (WH-p.29) for leaving the gate locked during a storm, Mr. Lockwood is let inside, by a woman whom he thinks is Mrs. Heathcliff. His experience here within this Gothic house in quite unpleasant, paralleling Harker's in the Count's dark castle. While waiting for Heathcliff in silence he notices how the women "kept her eyes on [him], in a cool regardless manner, exceedingly embarrassing and disagreeable." (WH-p.30) The arrival of Heathcliff "relieved" (WH-p.32) Mr. Lockwood momentarily, yet soon he became uneased by Heathcliff's "tone in which the words said revealed a genuine bad nature." (WH-p.32) Neither of the hostesses demonstrated much acknowledgment of their guests' presence, so Mr. Lockwood "began to feel unmistakably out of place in ...
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in which the master "never lets anybody lodge," (WH-p.37) a fact which increases the Gothic suspense of the setting. Like Harker, Lockwood experiences a dream emerging and reflecting the dark setting. Harker's dream manifests his Victorian repressions by "revealing the intensity of the emotion he generally denies or represses…but the specific nature of those emotions is also important."28 In this first dream, Lockwood is trying to get home but Joseph, a servant of Wuthering Heights warns him he will not be able to get home without a pilgrim's staff. He realizes that, instead, he and Joseph are going to a chapel to see Reverend Jabes Branderham's sermon, because "either Joseph, the ...
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Wuthering Heights - Setting. (2004, May 7). Retrieved November 23, 2024, from http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Wuthering-Heights-Setting/7422
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"Wuthering Heights - Setting." Essayworld.com. May 7, 2004. Accessed November 23, 2024. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Wuthering-Heights-Setting/7422.
"Wuthering Heights - Setting." Essayworld.com. May 7, 2004. Accessed November 23, 2024. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Wuthering-Heights-Setting/7422.
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