In Wuthering Heights we see a tragic love story between Heathcliff and Catherine. This is shown through the location of Catherine’s coffin as it symbolizes the conflict that tears apart her short life. She is not buried in the chapel with the Lintons. Nor is her coffin placed among the tombs of the Earnshaws. Instead, as Nelly describes in Chapter XVI, Catherine is buried “in a corner of the kirkyard, where the wall is so low that heath and bilberry plants have climbed over it from the moor.” Moreover, she is buried with Edgar on one side and Heathcliff on the other, suggesting her conflicted loyalties. Although Heathcliff and Catherine are in love with each other their social status prevents them from expressing their true feelings and Catherine chooses to marry the well to do Egdar instead. Heathcliff is treated and seen as a servant in the Earnshaw household and Catherine is the lady of the house. In the Victorian times it would have seen to be wrong to marry a servant and Egdar would serve as a more suitable husband as he is wealthy. It is significant that Heathcliff begins his life as a homeless orphan on the streets of Liverpool. When Brontë composed her book, in the 1840s, the English economy was severely depressed, and the conditions of the factory workers in industrial areas like Liverpool were so appalling that the upper and middle classes feared violent revolt. Thus, many of the more affluent members of society beheld these workers with a mixture of sympathy and fear. In literature, the smoky, threatening, miserable factory-towns were often represented in religious terms, and compared to hell. The poet William Blake, writing near the turn of the nineteenth century, speaks of England’s “dark Satanic Mills.” Heathcliff, of course, is frequently compared to a demon by the other characters in the book. Considering this historical context, Heathcliff seems to embody the anxieties that the book’s upper- and middle-class audience had about the working classes. The reader may easily sympathize with him when he is powerless, as a child tyrannized by Hindley Earnshaw, but he becomes a villain when he acquires power and returns to Wuthering Heights with money and the trappings of a gentleman. This corresponds with the ambivalence the upper classes felt toward the lower classes—the upper classes had charitable impulses toward lower-class citizens when they were miserable, but feared the prospect of the lower classes trying to escape their miserable circumstances by acquiring political, social, cultural, or economic power.
On the other hand it can be said that Heathcliff was prevented from marrying Catherine due to Bronte’s presentation of the two characters. Heathcliff is a cold dark character who doesn’t express his feelings well. We see this in the first paragraph of the novel which provides a vivid physical picture of him, as describes how his “black eyes” withdraw suspiciously under his brows at Lockwood’s approach. This lack of emotion may also be due to the abuse he has received from Hindley. The novel teases the reader with the possibility that Heathcliff is something other than what he seems—that his cruelty is merely an expression of his frustrated love for , or that his sinister behaviors serve to conceal the heart of a romantic hero. We expect Heathcliff’s character to contain such a hidden virtue because he resembles a hero in a romance novel. Traditionally, romance novel heroes appear dangerous, brooding, and cold at first, only later to emerge as fiercely devoted and loving. One hundred years before Emily Brontë wrote Wuthering Heights, the notion that “a reformed rake makes the best husband” was already a cliché of romantic literature, and romance novels centre around the same cliché to this day. Catherine’s choice not to marry Heathcliff may be due to the fact that her actions are driven in part by her social ambitions, which initially are awakened during her first stay at the Lintons’, and which eventually compel her to marry Edgar. However, she is also motivated by impulses that prompt her to violate social conventions—to love Heathcliff, throw temper tantrums, and run around on the moor. Her cruel character also causes her to treat Heathcliff bad in some parts and act as though she is far too superior to marry him. For example when she returns home from the Linton’s and belittles Heathcliff.
In conclusion although social influences do affect the plot of both novels it is at the end of the day the cause of the authors’ presentation of the characters’ personalities and actions. The uptight Victorian society had high standards when it came to social class and the proper way for a lady to act. This may be the cause of Catherine’s choice of marriage or Eustacia not opening the door to Mrs Yeobright when she had another man in the house. However both Hardy and Bronte present Eustacia and Catherine as both strong and ‘wild’ women who often rebel against society but eventually have to conform to fit in with the times. In my opinion both authors use the characters in their novels to represent the constraints of the 19th century.
