Jesse C Blanca Instructor M.

Duckworth English 46B Extra Credit 3-4 Wuthering Heights

What is there to say about Brontes Wuthering Heights that cant be said in a short blurb. Mysterious orphaned brought home, the orphan Heathcliff grows up to be a hunky bad boy, pitted against Edgar the proverbial square gentleman, both vying for one womans love Catherine. Dear me what to do, should I chose comfort over wild passion that sets my bloomer on fire? Since this work was written by Emily Bronte, a woman and not another Victorian man penning down another egocentric farce about women it deserves a more discreet consideration. Namely, how the condition between Heathcliff and Catherins state of love and trust tore through the moors. Indeed for anyone even vaguely familiar with the story knows that Heathcliff was a product of a traumatic childhood. What endears him to us is this stolid resolve under persistent abuse from Hindley Earnshaw and the universal jeering of his caste. The delusion of the social construct imprisons the Earnshaws from the beginning, gripping Catherine and Hindleys fortune into parley. Clashing faith (Catherine stumbles onto the Lintons estate), Heathcliffs passionate revenge that eventually culminated into a pair of ironic dnouement. Heathcliff dies after losing the desire to extend his revenge to Young Catherine and Harenton, whose marriage would close the book on this the mother of all love-triangle! What fueled this picaresque gothic novel is the concept of class, that precarious position of the gentry and the possibility of ignominy. This is nothing unique in English literature, from Chaucer to Dickens, using the social strata, as a backdrop is time honored. What made Brontes work unique is the effect of Catherine had on the

play; it offered an insight into the matrimony game, or the co modification of women as the means to ascend social caste. Yes, Moll Flanders took this theme and ran from England to America and back but Bronte was a story closer to home, a verisimilar analog that tugs on universal emotion. Catherine had the daunting task in whether to let the heart or comfort choose her faith. Realistically she could have terminated her connection with Heathcliff once she considered Edgar, or even earlier, when she became of age, yet she chooses to walk along the precipice of comfort and desire. Bronte could have unknowingly illustrated the typical landscape of womanhood as she bares to faith her condition in the social schema. The men in Wuthering Heights are simple, single minded and predictable, the real turmoil is in Catherine ambivalence. In this sense, all this could only have transpired in Catherines mind alone.