4.

The Shakespearean comedy: characters,

plot, humour, language
A comedy, like the drama in general, may be of two typesClassical and Romantic.
The classical comedy follows the rules of dramatic composition as laid down by the ancient
Greek and Roman masters. Its models are the classical dramatists like Plautus, Terence and
Aristophanes. The more important of these rules are:

1. The observance of the three unities of time, place and action.

2. The strict separation of the comic and the tragic, or the light and serious elements.
3. Realism. It deals with the everyday familiar life of ordinary people
4. Its aim is corrective and satiric. Some human folly, weakness, or social vice is
exposed and ridiculed. It laughs at the people and not with them. The most noted
exponent of the Classical Comedy in England was a younger contemporary of
Shakespeare, Ben Johnson.

William Shakespeare's plays come in many forms. There are the histories, tragedies,
comedies, and tragicomedies. Among the most popular are the comedies, which are full of
laughter, irony, satire, and wordplay. Following are the salient features his comedies.

1. A greater emphasis on situations than characters (this numbs the audience's

connection to the characters, so that when characters experience misfortune, the
audience still finds it laughable)

2. A struggle of young lovers to overcome difficulty, often presented by elders

3. Separation and re-unification
4. Deception among characters (especially mistaken identity)
5. A clever servant
6. Disputes between characters, often within a family
7. Multiple, intertwining plots
8. Use of all styles of comedy (slapstick, puns, dry humour, earthy humour, witty
banter, practical jokes)

9. Pastoral element (courtly people living an idealized, rural life), originally an element
of Pastoral Romance, exploited by Shakespeare for his comic plots and often
parodied therein for humorous effects

10. Happy Ending

The Romantic Comedy Of Shakespeare

The Shakespearean comedy, on the other hand, is a Romantic Comedy. The

dramatist does not care for any rules of literary creation but writes according to the dictates
of his fancy. The three unities are not given any importance. There is a free mingling of the
comic and the tragic, the serious and the gay. Its aim is not corrective or satiric, but
innocent, good natured laughter. We laugh with the people, not at them. In the words of
Charlton The Shakespearean comedy is not satiric, it is poetic. It is not conservative, it is
creative. The way of it is of imagination rather than that of pure reason. It is an artists
vision, not a critics exposition.

The Romantic Setting

The Shakespearean comedy is romantic not only in the sense that it does not
observe the classical rules, but also in the sense that it provides an escape from the sordid
realities of life.

Its characters are also different from us as they are denizens of not our humdrum
world but the imaginary, colourful world of their own. Venice is not the real historical Venice
but an ancient town of enchanting beauty in which loans could be obtained by offering the
flesh of ones heart as security. What is true of setting is also true of the characters. They
too are romantic and remote from the ordinary people of flesh and blood. They are
somewhat unearthly. They go about making love, dancing, feasting, engaging themselves in
battles of wit with one another, singing and making merry. Life for them is one long spring.
Let us quote Thorndike here

There are only three industries in this land, making love, making songs, and making jests.
And they make them all to perfection. It is well to interrupt the love-making with a little
joking and the joking with a little music and perchance some cakes and ale, and then back
to love again.

Theme Of Love In All Its Variety

A Shakespearean comedy is a story of love, ending with the ringing of marriage

bells. Not only are the hero and the heroine in love, but many are in love, and so in the end
there is not one marriage but a number of marriages. However, to use Shakespeares own
words, the course of true love did never run smooth. Difficulties come in the way of the
lovers before the final union takes place.

Music And Spirit Of Mirth

Since music is the food of love, the Shakespearean comedy is intensely musical.
Music and dance are its very life and soul. Twelfth Night opens with music. Several songs
are scattered all over As You Like It, and The Merchant of Venice, too, abounds in music.

Women In Shakespearean Comedy

Women in Shakespearean comedy constitute its very soul. George Gordon observes:
All lectures on Shakespeares comedies tend to become lectures on Shakespeares women
for in the comedies, they have the front of the stage.

Ruskin remarks, Shakespeare has only heroines and no heroes.

Shakespeares comic heroines are much more sparkling and interesting than their
male counterparts. We have the vivacious and intelligent Portia, the witty Beatrice, and the
charming Rosalind. Bassanio does not come to the level of Portia, Benedick pales in wit
beside Beatrice, and Orlando has no comparison with Rosalind.

Though all these heroines differ in their characters pattern, yet they have in common
one important characteristictheir typical womanhood. The quality makes them surprisingly
modern. These are dateless.

Mistaken Identities

The plot is often driven by mistaken identity. Sometimes this is an intentional part of
a villains plot, as in Much Ado About Nothing when Don John tricks Claudio into believing
that his fiance has been unfaithful through mistaken identity. Characters also play scenes in

disguise and it is not uncommon for female characters to disguise themselves as male
characters. The trial scene in The Merchant of Venice is one of the finest scenes of English
drama in which Portia disguises as a lawyer to save her lovers friend Antonio from the
intolerant Jew, Shylock.

Humour, Use Of Puns

A very attractive feature of Shakespeares comedies is their humour. It is as it

should be. Ben Johnsons humour is sarcastic, satirical, but Shakespeares attitude towards
his fellow being is acceptive and genial. He does not laugh at others, but with others.

Shakespeares comedy plays are peppered with clever word play, metaphors and
insults. He was a master of wordplay, and his comedies are filled with puns and witty
language games.

Sometimes silly, sometimes bawdy, yet always clever, his plays on words are a
distinguishing feature of all his works. You'll need to brush up on your Elizabethan English if
you want to catch all of his jokes.

Plot Construction

The plotline of a Shakespeare comedy contains more twists and turns than his
tragedies and histories. Coleridge is of the view that The heart of Shakespearean play lies
in its characterization and not in plot.

There is much that is superfluous, ridiculous, shapeless, grotesque and artificial. Too
much depends on chance or fortune, deceits, disguises, mistaken identities are the stock
devices used by the dramatist to maintain suspense or interest. How strange it seems that
Portia in the disguise of a man is not recognized by any one in the trial scene in The
Merchant of Venice. Further, all the ships of Antonio returns home safe just at the right
moment. But these absurdities of the plot are concealed by heightening the character
interest.

Shakespearean comedies also contain a wide variety of characters. Shakespeare

often introduces a character and then discards him, never to be seen again in the balance of

the play. Songs often sung by a jester or a fool parallel the events of the plot. Also, foil and
stock characters are often inserted into the plot. All Shakespearean comedies end happily.
Most often, this happy ending involves marriage or pending marriage. Love always wins out
in the end.

Shakespeares comedy plays have stood the test of time. Today his plays like The
Tempest, The Merchant of Venice and Much Ado About Nothing continue to enthrall and
entertain audiences worldwide but these plays are not comedies in the modern sense of
the word. His 17 comedies are the most difficult to classify because they overlap in style
with other genres. Critics often describe some plays as tragi-comedies because they mix
equal measures of tragedy and comedy. For example, Much Ado About Nothing starts as a
Shakespeare comedy, but takes on the characteristics of a tragedy when Hero is disgraced
and fakes her own death. At this point, the play has more in common with Romeo and
Juliet, one of Shakespeares key tragedies.

Novelists of the 1840sThe Bronts

Scope: Appearing in 1847, the same year as Thackerays Vanity Fair, Charlotte Bronts Jane Eyre and Emily
Bronts Wuthering Heights take the English novel in new directions. The Bronts works are often
passionate and angry, echoing the revolutionary sentiments of the 1840s. The Bronts also challenge the
limitations of earlier love stories, endowing their fiction with the intensity of Romantic poetry and
modeling their male characters on the heroes of Lord Byron. Yet if the Bronts have much in common,
they are also sharply distinct. Where Charlotte is fundamentally conservative, creating secure social
positions for such characters as Jane Eyre, Emily is truly daring. In Wuthering Heights, she confounds the
usual novelistic distinctions between love and hate, birth and death, creation and destruction, creating one
of the few 19th-century English novels with the scope and shape of a tragedy.

Outline
I. Appearing in 1847, the same year as Thackerays Vanity Fair, Charlotte Bronts Jane Eyre and Emily
Bronts Wuthering Heights take the English novel in new directions.
A. The Bronts works are often passionate and angry, echoing the revolutionary sentiments of the 1840s.
B. Their writing also borrows heavily from the works of the Romantic poets, and their male characters
strongly resemble the heroes of Lord Byron.
C. Though the sisters were devoted to each other, their works are ultimately quite distinct. In this lecture, we
will focus on their differences as well as their similarities.
II. The Bronts grew up in Haworth, a small town in Yorkshire.
A. There were six children in the family, two of whom died in childhood after contracting tuberculosis at
school.
B. Four children survived to adulthood: Charlotte, the eldest (18161855); Branwell, the only brother (1817
1848); Emily (18181848); and Anne (18201849).
C. The children lost their mother at an early age, and they became exceptionally close, reading and writing
stories for one another and exploring the moors together.
III. From childhood, the Bronts dreamed of literary fame but also feared the consequences of public
exposure.
A. Their first publication was a collection of poems. They chose to publish under ambiguous pseudonyms
Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bellhoping to divert attention from themselves.
B. In 1847, when Charlottes Jane Eyre became a literary sensation, readers and reviewers were eager to
know the authors true identity.
C. The Bronts soon revealed their identities to their publisher, though Charlotte insisted that she be forever
known to the public as Currer Bell.
D. Even more reclusive than Charlotte, Emily had few friends outside her immediate family. Of the sisters,
she was the one most attached to the pseudonyms.
1. Emily died a year or so after publishing Wuthering Heights. Branwell had preceded her in death, and Anne
would follow her soonall dying within a span of just nine months.
2. Charlotte continued to write, publishing two more novels before her own death in 1855.
IV. As one might expect, Charlotte and Emily share many concerns.
A. Their novels respond to the social upheavals of the day, echoing the revolutionary sentiments of the late
1840s.
1. Jane Eyre not only protests against the class system but also insists on the equality of men and women.
2. Heathcliff, the central figure of Wuthering Heights, rejects all social values. What matters to him is not
wealth or status but his intense attachment to Catherine Earnshaw.

B. Both Charlotte and Emily challenge the limitations of earlier love stories, endowing their fiction with
the intensity of Romantic poetry.
1. Their male characters are descendents of the Byronic hero, difficult and dangerous yet powerfully
attractive.
2. Janes master and future husband, Mr. Rochester, can be violent and domineering. Because he has married
for money rather than for love, he feels himself undeserving of happiness.
3. Heathcliff is even more complex. He can be cruel as well as loving, and the other characters often describe
him as a monster or a ghoul.
V. Despite their many similarities, the sisters are fundamentally different from each other.
A. Although Charlotte is capable of expressing anger, she is cautious and conservative by nature.
1. At the beginning of the story, Jane Eyre is an orphan. She has no money and no home of her ownand she
is keenly aware of her dependence on others.
2. As governess to the children of Mr. Rochester, Jane is in a complicated positionneither a member of the
family nor really one of the servants.
3. After falling in love with Rochester, Jane discovers that he is married to another woman. Although he
offers to live with her in a kind of marriage, she rejects this offer.
4. By the end of the novel, Jane and Rochester have been reunited. Whats more, Jane has gained a fortune of
her owninheriting a large sum of money from her uncle.
5. Thus, Charlotte upholds the comedic conventions of the English novel: By the end of the story, her angry,
outcast heroine has been promoted into the ruling class.
B. By contrast, Emily Bront is much more daring.
1. Her vision is broader, taking in two families and two generations. The action of the novel spans a period of
decades, starting in the early 1770s and ending around 1802.
2. The central action of Wuthering Heights is Catherine Earnshaws decision to marry Edgar Linton instead of
Heathcliff.
3. Unable to accept this decision, Heathcliff runs away. When he returns after three years, having gained a
fortune of his own, he devotes his life to revenge.
4. Later, after most of his own contemporaries are gone, he continues to seek power over their children,
eventually tricking Catherines daughter into marrying his own son.
5. At the end of the novel, however, Heathcliff and Catherine seem to be reunited in death. Significantly, there
is no suggestion of poetic justice in Heathcliffs death.
VI. Though both works are impressive, Wuthering Heights is ultimately the more distinctive of the two.
A. Wuthering Heights confounds the usual novelistic distinctions between love and hate, birth and death,
creation and destruction.
B. Emily Bronts major characters transcend conventional notions of good and evil, and the death of those
characters is a precondition for the survival of the rest.
C. A century earlier, Richardson had produced a great tragic novel in Clarissa, and about a half century
later, Hardy would produce tragic novels, including Tess of the DUrbervilles. Between Richardson and
Hardy, Wuthering Heights stands as one of the few Victorian novels with the shape and scope of a
tragedy.

BrontWuthering Heights, Part 2

Scope: Heathcliff, spurned, leaves; he returns later, to wreak his revenge. Things turn very dark: Catherine is
dying of her feelings, and Heathcliff displays a (lifelong) mix of brutality and cruelty that stun us. These
characters seem positively driven by ungovernable fury, by pathological forces. We realize that
Wuthering Heights is a place of utter violence, uncontainable. Softness and kindness have no place here.
Conventional values are cashiered. Bront dives very deep.
Criticism has focused on Heathcliff as the marginalized, mad, dark, Byronic male and on Catherine as an equally
mad, self-assertive female; even death does not stop them. Their love is at once paradisal and demonic.
The novel depicts both childhoods lost bliss and childhoods despotic feelings, including sadomasochism
and outright torture. The books second half valiantly attempts to remedy the disorder by telling the story
of the next generation, also injured and injuring but moving toward reconciliation and love. How to make
sense of this war between dark and light?
Outline
I. Most people regard Wuthering Heights as romantic, but in this lecture, well see its dark, almost
pathological side. The text seems to focus on the poisonous consequences of both cruelty and love; such
consequences live on, suggesting something of the cycles of revenge we find in The Oresteia.
II. Catherines grand and unforgettable pronouncement, I am Heathcliff, strikes us initially as the epitome
of romantic desire; it comes early in the novel, and few readers expect things to go as badly as they do.
We increasingly understand what it means to be another, as well as oneself.
A. With Heathcliff gone, Catherine marries the likable Edgar Linton, who is smitten with her. She moves into
Thrushcross Grange.
B. A few years later, Heathcliff, utterly altered, returns. Handsome, rich, exuding a sense of power, he
pronounces an implacable judgment on the events that have taken place.
1. He indicts Edgar as an impossible love-object for someone of Catherines vital and generous nature.
2. His most withering and tragic indictment, however, is of Catherine. In betraying him, she has betrayed
herself. This is not mere rhetoric: Catherine, faced with the return of Heathcliff and his insistence on the
wreckage her marriage has wrought, becomes ill.
C. The novel is merciless in its almost clinical account of Heathcliff bearing down on Catherine to remind her
of the criminality of her actions. This isnt a simple argument in which one person tells another that he
thinks she has done something wrong; here, everything Catherine has done, she has done to Heathcliff, as
well.
1. With Catherine on her deathbed, we might expect that Heathcliff would treat her kindly, but instead, he
explodes: Why did you betray your own heart, Cathy? I have not one word of comfort. You deserve this.
You have killed yourself.
2. Here, we see the boomerang logic of this book. Catherine and Heathcliff experience themselves as one,
with no boundary between them. They are horribly vulnerable and interdependent; each of their gestures
ricochets endlessly. When Catherine asks for Heathcliffs forgiveness, he says that he can forgive his
murderer, but not her murderer.
3. After her death, Heathcliff curses Catherines body, imploring her to haunt him. His desire for her to
torment him after her death is proof for Heathcliff that their love is still alive.
III. Wuthering Heights installs a view of human behavior that borders on the pathological. We realize that
such notions as self-control and boundaries simply have no purchase here. Catherine and Heathcliff are
among the most extreme creations in literature.
A. The book treats us to a number of scenes in which we realize just how uncontrollable its characters are.
Once we see this dimension of the novel, we know that it will not end well.
B. Heathcliffs return pushes Catherine over the edge. In one remarkable scene, she tries to set up a
primitive mano a mano contest between Heathcliff and Edgar. The feeling is virtually Darwinian.

1. Catherine also tries to warn Edgars sister, Isabella, away from Heathcliff, telling her, Hes a fierce,
pitiless, wolfish man.
2. Catherine sees clearly here. There is nothing soft about the romantic interactions in this novel; they are
death-dealing.
3. Ultimately, the stress of Heathcliffs presence is too much. We watch Catherine being invaded by tumult,
coming apart, and moving toward collapse and death.
C. If Catherine is mercurial, however, Heathcliff is volcanic.
1. He is possessed of and by a mix of fury, venom, violence, and cruelty that one does not easily forget. His
haunting by Catherine will serve to nourish his rage.
2. Heathcliff marries Isabella and treats her with utmost brutality.
3. This behavior stamps him throughout his long life. After Catherines death, the plot moves to the next
generation coming under Heathcliffs tyrannical reign.
D. The lack of gentleness or kindness in this book is frighteningly evident in the treatment of children.
Heathcliff, for example, will beat Catherines daughter, also called Catherine.
1. Recall Lockwoods dream about a tortured child at the beginning of the novel. Wuthering Heights is about
torturing children. It is also about childhood as loss that cannot be redeemed.
2. It does not seem unreasonable to view the general spectrum of behavior in this novel as strangely infantile:
the tortured antics and tantrums of creatures who cannot grow up or forget.
E. But Catherine and Heathcliff are only the most visible mad people of the text. All the denizens of this book
are capable of fury and violence. It seems to be a trademark.
1. When Heathcliff talks about hanging Isabellas dog, he notes, But no brutality disgusted her. I suppose she
had an innate admiration for it.
2. The line seems to suggest that cruelty is contagious, and killing animals and treating children with brutality
certainly appear to be signature behaviors in this book.
IV. With this in mind, we understand the generational imperative of Bronts novel. She is desperately trying
to clean up the story she tells in the first half of the book.
A. Catherines daughter is first married to Linton, the sickly but vicious son of Heathcliff and Isabella. After
his death, she will probably marry Hareton, the wild child of Hindley. Young Catherine teaches
Hareton to read, a classic example of turning the raw into the cooked.
B. The novel seems sugared over by the end, with the second generation cleaning up most of the mess made
by the first generation. Yet the last words of Nelly suggest that even in death, Catherine and Heathcliff
find unquiet slumbers.
Essential Reading:
Emily Bront and Richard J. Dunn, Wuthering Heights: The 1847 Text, Backgrounds and Contexts,
Criticism.
Supplementary Reading:
Maggie Berg, Wuthering Heights: The Writing in the Margin.
Emily Bront, The Poems of Emily Bront.
Edward Chitham, The Birth of Wuthering Heights: Emily Bront at Work.
Thomas John Winnifrith, ed., Critical Essays on Emily Bront.
Questions to Consider:
1. Wuthering Heights is stamped by emotional violence of a rare stripe. Do you find its characters sadistic?
Pathological? Infantile? Is maturation possible in such a scheme?
2. Given the generational structure and logic of the novel, it would seem that Bront wanted to write a
fable about the possibility of civilized behavior. Has she succeeded? What kind of future do you
imagine for the denizens of Wuthering Heights after the last page of the novel?

1.4. The Bront Sisters Contribution to the Victorian Novel

Drawing their inspiration from the bleak moors near their home, Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bront left a
remarkable literary legacy of powerful novels, poems and short stories.

1.4.1. Charlotte Bronts Novel Jane Eyre, A Feminine Version of

the Story of Initiation and Development
Jane Eyre was first published under the pen name of Currer Bell in October 1847. The mid-nineteenth
century Victorians did not expect women to manifest their artistic potential outside of the domestic sphere
and therefore did not encourage women to fulfill their talents. When the twenty-year old Charlotte wrote
to Robert Southey, the poet laureate, for his opinion about writing, his response was that literature
cannot be the business of a womans life, and it ought not to be. Given this view of women, it is not
surprising that the three sisters adopted pseudonyms to hide their sex when they published their poems
and novels.
Published under pseudonym, Jane Eyre enjoyed success when it came out. Like Dickenss Great
Expectations, Jane Eyre is a story whose protagonist is an orphan. Like Great Expectations, Charlottes
novel traces the development of her heroine from childhood to maturity.
The novel opens with ten-year old Jane Eyre, who lives unhappily with her wealthy, cruel cousins and
aunt at Gateshead. Jane finds comfort in books, but she is bullied by her cousin John,who interrupts her
reading and says that, since she is orphaned and thus dependent on his family, she has no right to read
their books. John strikes her with the book and they fight, but because Jane scares him off, she is
punished by being locked in the red room, a chill, silent, solemn room, the room where her
aunts husband died. The red room gives Jane the shivers because she sees in it both a tomb and a
jail.
Locked in the red room, Jane feels like nobody. She feels unloved and useless. Then Jane grows by
degrees cold as a stone. Her courage sinks. She starts to think of death, all the deaths in her family and
her own. The red-room becomes a hallucinatory place, projecting horrible visions from its dimly
gleaming mirror. Tormented by these visions, Jane falls unconscious.
Jane is spared further mistreatment from her aunts family when she is sent off to school at Lowood, but
there she suffers further privations in the austere environment. Despite that, Jane excels as a student for
six years and as a teacher for two.
Advertising for a job, Jane finds employment as a governess at the estate of Thornfield for a little girl,
Adle. After much waiting, she finally meets her employer Edward Rochester, who seems to be a rather
moody and strange man.
Mister Rochester is far from being the only oddity at Thornfield. Jane occasionally hears demonic piles of
laughter coming from the third-story attic. This mystery remains unresolved while Jane and Mister
Rochester feel more and more attracted to each other. Eventually, Jane accepts his proposal, and they are
engaged to be married. On their wedding day, a visitor who proves to be Rochesters brother-in-law,
interrupts the ceremony by revealing that Rochester already has a wife: Bertha Mason, a lunatic who is
kept in the attic in Thornfield.
This event brings Rochester to confess all his past misdeeds to Jane: in his youth his family had him
marry Bertha for money, but he was unaware of her familys history of madness. Over time, his wife
became a dangerous part of his life which only imprisonment could solve. Despite his protests that he
loves Jane, she cannot accept to marry him because of his previous marriage and leaves Thornfield.
Wandering without food and money and having nowhere to go, Jane arrives at the desolate crossroads of
Whitcross. Fortunately, the Rivers siblings (St. John, Diana and Mary), who turn out to be her cousins,
take her into their home at Moor House. Jane grows very attached to Diana and Mary and learns a lot
from St. John. Eventually, she is happy to be a teacher at his school. Inheriting a vast fortune from her
uncle, Jane divides it among her new family.

St. John prepares to do missionary work in India and repeatedly proposes to Jane. Each time he does it,
Jane refuses. She is increasingly drawn to thoughts of Rochester and, one day, after she hears him calling
from a distance, she seeks him out at Thornfield. She finds out that the estate was burned down by Bertha.
Rochester, who was blinded by the incident, lives nearby. He is overwhelmed with joy to see her again
and tells her that he did call her one night.
The epilogue is a happy ending of deep love triumphing. Both Jane and Rochester are now ready for
each other, having been purified by suffering. They marry and enjoy their life together, love working
wonders on Rochester, who regains sight in one eye.

1.4.2 Point of View in Jane Eyre

Jane Eyre is a first person narrative told from Janes point of view. This is another aspect that associates
Charlotte Bronts novel with Dickenss Great Expectations. First person point of view gives authenticity
and also urgency to these two novels of formation. Both Jane and Pip communicate with the reader, but
Jane seems more inclined than Pip to analyze herself and justify her reactions to both herself and her
readers.
Jane Eyre is also an autobiography based on Charlotte Bronts own life. However, it is the
fictionalized autobiography of a woman endowed with a very keen sense of observation. In the
opening lines of Chapter 10, Jane makes it explicit when she says that this is not to be a regular
autobiography but an account based on selective memory, which recalls only those moments, periods
and scenes that will possess some degree of interest to the fiction she writes.
The novel abounds in side speeches marked by I thought and in frequent and long passages in which
Jane communicates to the reader her own feelings, moods and motivations, analyzing them, or her
observations of situations and characters. In the opening lines of chapter 11, for instance, she confesses,
directly addressing the reader.
The novel is about a womans search for her kindred spirits, for a sense of belonging and love. Her search
is constantly urged by her need for independence and equality with men. This need is communicated to
the reader through the development of plot, but also frequently reinforced, explained and analyzed.

1.5. Emily Bronts Gothic in Wuthering Heights

The Gothic in literature refers to a genre characterized by gloom and darkness, often with a supernatural
plot unfolding in a strange location such as a ruined castle, mansion or house. Wuthering Heights is
Emily Bronts only novel, considered to be the fullest expression of her deeply individual poetic vision.
It obviously contains many romantic elements that can be summarized as the passionate consuming love
of two characters who are deeply attached to the natural world.
At the same time, the novel expresses deep criticisms of social conventions, particularly those
surrounding gender issues, in the sense that the author distributes feminine and masculine characteristics
without regard to sex.

1.5.1. Wuthering Heights: A Shocking Novel

Almost any reader of Wuthering Heights, even today, feels Emilys writing profoundly unconventional,
disturbing and shocking. To the conventional Victorian reader, Wuthering Heights must have come as an
unprecedented shock. The Victorian reader surely saw in Wuthering Heights a novel that no gently-bred
Victorian writer (male or female) could even dream of writing! Although Emily sent it to publishers under
the masculine name of Ellis Bell, it took many tries before it was finally accepted in 1847.
The reviews of the book were almost entirely negative: reviewers implied that the author of such a novel
must be insane, obsessed with cruelty and barbaric!

Emily died soon after the novels publication, and Charlotte, her sister, had to disclose the identity of its
author, which had been so far a mystery. Charlotte also wrote a preface for the novel,defending her
sisters character. The problem is that Charlotte herself was uncomfortable with the more disturbing
aspects of her sisters masterpiece.

1.5.2. Wuthering Heights: A Novel of Multiple Points of View

Wuthering Heights is a novel told in a series of narratives, which are themselves told to the narrator, a
gentleman named Lockwood.
Lockwood rents a fine house and park called Thrushcross Grange in Yorkshire and gradually learns more
and more about the histories of two local families from Ellen (Nelly) Dean, who has been with one of the
two families, the Earnshaws, for all her life. However, the destinies of the two families are intertwined.
Lockwoods role as a narrator is only to frame the story told by Nelly Dean. Being a civilized man with
little intuition and even less experience of the strange world he is about to encounter, Lockwood is
unprepared and unequipped to understand strangeness. However, he finds strangeness on his first night in
the form of a nightmare.

1.5.3. Plot in Wuthering Heights

The story begins with the gentleman-farmer Earnshaw going on a trip to Liverpool and bringing with him
a child, whose name is Heathcliff. Earnshaws daughter Catherine falls in love with Heathcliff, although
he is a strange and silent boy, who seems not to mind the blows he receives from Hindley, Catherines
brother.
Catherine and Heathcliff enjoy taking long trips in the surroundings. Both are deeply attached to nature,
and one day they run down to Thrushcross Grange, a more civilized house where the Lintons live with
their children Edgar and Isabella.
Because Catherine is caught by a bulldog and injured, she is brought inside and stays for five weeks at the
Grange to recover. When she comes back to Wuthering Heights, she is visibly changed in the sense that
she is dressed and acts as a lady, to the delight of Hindley and his wife, but to Heathcliffs sorrow. In the
next few years, Catherine struggles to strike a balance between maintaining her relationship with
Heathcliff and socializing with the elegant and civilized Linton children.
Hindleys wife Frances gives birth to a son, Hareton but dies soon after of tuberculosis. Hindley gives
into wild despair and alcoholism, and the household falls into chaos. Heathcliff is very harshly treated and
grows to hate Hindley more and more. In the meantime, Edgar Linton falls in love with Catherine, who
is attracted by the civilization he stands for, although she loves Heathcliff much more deeply. She
explains this to Nelly and as she does so, she refers to Heathcliffs coarseness. Heathcliff overhears their
discussion and runs away. However, he runs before hearing Catherines confession I am Heathcliff,
which expresses her sense of identification with him.
Catherine falls ill after looking for Heathcliff all night in a storm, the storm outside echoing her inner
storm. She goes to the Grange to get better, and she marries Edgar. Catherine and Edgar live
harmoniously together for almost a year, when Heathcliff returns. He has mysteriously acquired
gentlemanly manners, education and some money. Catherine is overjoyed to see him, while Edgar
somehow feels the danger he
represents. Finally there is a violent quarrel, and Heathcliff leaves the Grange to avoid being thrown out
by Edgars servants. Catherine is angry with both men and shuts herself in her room for several days.
Meanwhile, Heathcliff seduces Edgars sister Isabella and elopes with her. Edgar cannot forgive his
sisters betrayal of him but does not try to stop the marriage. Catherine becomes extremely ill,
feverish, delirious and nearly dies, although she is carefully looked after by Edgar.

A few months later, Catherine is still feeble and besides, she is pregnant. Heathcliff and Isabella have
returned to Wuthering Heights, and Isabella writes to Nelly Dean about how cruel her savage husband
Heathcliff is to her and how much she regrets the marriage. Nelly goes to Wuthering Heights to visit them
and to see if she could improve Isabellas situation. She also tells them about Cathys condition.
A few days later, Heathcliff goes to the Grange while Edgar is at church. He has a passionate reunion
with Catherine, in which they forgive each other for their mutual betrayals. Catherine faints under the
weight of this intensely felt reunion. Edgar comes back and Heathcliff leaves. Catherine dies that night
after giving birth to a daughter. Edgar is terribly grieved, while Heathcliff goes wild, begging Catherines
ghost to haunt him.
Isabella manages to escape from Wuthering Heights and goes to live close to London, where she gives
birth to a son, Linton. Hindley dies a few months after his sister Catherine. Catherine and Edgars
daughter, Catherine, grows to be a beloved and charming child. She lives a peaceful life at the Grange,
completely unaware of the existence of Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff, or her cousin Hareton, whom
Heathcliff treats brutally.
Once, she finds the farmhouse while exploring the moors, and is upset to think that an ignorant rustic
such as Hareton could be related to her. Nelly tells her that she cannot return there. Isabella dies when
Linton is about 12 years old, and Edgar goes to fetch him at the Grange. That day, however,
Heathcliffarranges for his son to be fetched to Wuthering Heights. On her sixteenth birthday, Catherine
and Nelly stray onto
Heathcliffs land, and he invites them into Wuthering Heights to see Linton. Heathcliff is eager to
encourage a romance between the two cousins so as to ensure himself of Edgars land when Edgar dies.
Since Edgar forbids Catherine to ever visit Wuthering Heights again, Catherine begins an exchange of
love letters with her cousin Linton. Nelly finds out and puts an end to it. Edgar falls ill, and Heathcliff
asks Catherine to come back to Wuthering Heights because Linton is breaking his heart for her.
Catherine agrees and finds Linton a malicious invalid, but not without charm. Since Nelly is ill as well,
she cannot prevent Catherine from visiting Linton whenever she likes. Catherine feels obliged to help
Linton and despises Hareton for being clumsy and illiterate. Edgar dies, and after his funeral, Heathcliff
fetches Catherine to Wuthering Heights to take care of Linton, who is dying, and to free up the Grange so
he can rent it out (to Lockwood, in fact). He tells Nelly that he is still obsessed with his beloved Catherine
and that he went to gaze at her long-dead body when her coffin was uncovered by the digging of Edgars
grave.
Catherine has to take care of Linton alone, and after he dies, she maintains an unfriendly attitude toward
the household. As time passes by, however, she becomes lonely enough to seek Haretons company and
begins teaching him to read. This is around Lockwoods time at the Grange. Lockwood leaves the area for
several months, and when he returns, he finds out that while he was gone Heathcliff began to act more
and more strangely and became incapable of concentrating on the world around him, as though
Catherines ghost would not let him. He stopped eating and sleeping, and Nelly finds him dead one
morning,
with a queer and savage smile on his face. Heathcliff is buried next to Catherine, as he wished, and so
they are reunited in death.
Hareton mourns him, but he is too happy with the younger Catherine to be inconsolable. When the novel
ends, they plan to marry and move to the Grange.
`