Contrasting Places Reveal Flaws
An individual’s environment can play a major role in that individuals coming of character. Emily Bronte develops characters for her novel Wuthering Heights based on their individual environments. Wuthering Heights is the residence of the Earnshaws’, an uncultivated, strong, stormy, manor where Hindley and Catherine grew up along side the adapted orphan Heathcliff. Catherine and Heathcliff develop a passionate love for one another. The house was overwhelmed with all forms of passions. Hindley and Heathcliff throughout the novel maintain revengeful passions aimed toward one another. Four miles a way sits the cultivated, beautiful, Thrushcross Grange where the Lintons’ dwell. Edgar and Isabella Linton cross paths with the inhabitants of Wuthering Heights only to provide contrast and raise conflict. Catherine choices wealth over love and marries Edgar while vengeful Heathcliff takes advantage of the infatuated Isabella by marrying her. By this Heathcliff is furthering his plans of revenge over Edgar for marry his Catherine. Emily Bronte uses two contrasting places to reveal the emotional flaws of the characters. Through the individuals of Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange, flaws of passion, revenge, strong willingness, naivety, infatuation, refinement as well as cultivation and un-cultivation are reveled.
Wuthering Heights mirrors the emotion flaws of its inhabitants, who are Passionate, revengeful, strong willed, and uncultivated. Since their childhood days in the Moors surrounding Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff and Catherine had a passionate love for each other. Catherine testified to her companion Nelly Dean, “I am Heathcliff.” In her opinion they were so in love and so intertwined that “Whatever [their] souls are made of, his and [hers] are the same.” However Catherine’s passion was not expressed solely. Heathcliff was so filled with passion that after Catherine’s death he begged her to “be with [him] always,” he wanted Catherine to haunt him so that he could never be “without [his] soul.” Heathcliff is a passionate character on many levels. His passionate love turned to passionate revenge when Catherine chose the road of wealth over love. Heathcliff warned Catherine for a final time, “I know that you have treated me infernally- infernally …if you think I can be consoled by your sweet words, than you’re an idiot, and if you fancy I’ll suffer unrevenged, I’ll convince you the contrary.” Heathcliff spent a lifetime pursuing his revenge and chasing his passionate lover. He sought revenge over the simple man his wild love fell for. He ruined Edgar Linton’s life, truthfully he ruined the lives of anyone who stepped in his “stormy,” “turbulent” path. Hindley was a victim of Heathcliff’s passionate drive for revenge, for it was Hindley who robbed Heathcliff of an education, treated him as a servant and most traumatically suppressed Heathcliff and Catherine’s relationship. Heathcliff swore “I shall pay Hindley back. I don’t care how long I wait, if I can only do it at last. I hope he will not die before I do,” he knew Hindley would eventually pay the price. Hindley was not an innocent victim, his treatment of Heathcliff arouse from his own vengeful passion toward Heathcliff because their father, in Hindley’s eyes loved Heathcliff more. The combination of the burden of Heathcliff’s revenge and the lost of his wife would force Hindley down a grief stricken path. His gambling debts and alcoholism would turn a once strong willed man into an uncultivated pitiful character. As passionately as Catherine felt for Heathcliff she could not marry him, after all, in her own words, “It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now.” Catherine was strong willed. As her house stood strong against the storms, she would stand strong and not allow her passion to override her need for wealth and social status. Catherine was wild, too wild for the Grange, but something changed in her as she spent more time in a cultivated society, suddenly she wasn’t so uncultivated, she lost the wildness and the strong willity that filled her at Wuthering Heights. The Grange changed Catherine, it stiffed her wildness. However no marriage, separation, or revenge could break Catherine’s passion for Heathcliff. It was the reflection of Wuthering Heights and its stormy, uncultivated thorny grounds that were scene in the eyes of its inhabitants.
