Wuthering Heights - 'Throughout most of the novel, Heathcliff's darker nature surfaces as the reaction to a world of social conventions from which he feels alienated from.

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Wuthering Heights

Throughout most of the novel, Heathcliff’s darker nature surfaces as the reaction to a world of social conventions from which he feels alienated from.’ Paying particular attention to the social and historical dimensions underpinning the novel, discuss this view.

     This novel is of extremes predominantly containing a serious study of human problems such as love and hate, or revenge and jealousy.

     Lack of love is what caused his dark exhilaration. This also formed the character of Heathcliff; dark, menacing and brooding. He was unloved from the beginning as his biological parents abandoned him. Love can create a good person and lack of love can corrupt that same person. How Heathcliff emerged as a character depended all on the amount of love he was receiving. If he was to have had a true environment of love instead of a constant rejection he could have become a respectable and civilized gentleman.

     Wickedness, love, and strength marks Heathcliff’s many-faceted existence.  His dark actions are produced by distortions of his natural personality. Although Heathcliff was once subjected to vicious racism due to his dark skin colour and experienced wearisome orphan years in Liverpool, this distortion has already began when Mr. Earnshaw brought him to Wuthering Heights, a ‘dirty, ragged, black-haired child’. Already he was injured to hardship and uncomplainingly accepted suffering.

     

     Heathcliff was not well received and indeed rejected by the household when Mr. Earnshaw brought him home to Wuthering Heights in the summer of 1771. He was the alien element, the bitter gypsy child that Mr. Earnshaw had created on his own even though he showed signs of great courage, resoluteness and love. He grew up suffering abuse from the hands of Hindley.

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     Poor Heathcliff, who had no family and was taken away from the ‘streets of Liverpool’ already ‘half dead with fatigue,’ was rejected from the very start. The small companionship, which he seeks in his life by others, was almost pitiful. Also how he shows strength and steadfastness when he had the measels and when Hindley treated him cruelly.

     

    He was Mr. Earnshaw’s favourite child over his own blood which is why Hindley hated him most especially when he saw how not long after his arrival he became his sister’s ...

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