Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte (Symbolism)

Wuthering Heights

by Emily Bronte

(Symbolism)

There is symbolic presentation of the duality of human and non-human existence, of the ‘otherness’ of the natural as opposed to the human. The violent figures of Catherine and Heathcliff portions of the flux of nature, children of rock and heath and tempest, striving to identify themselves as human, but disrupting all around them with their monstrous appetite for an inhuman kind of intercourse, and finally disintegrated from within by the very eagerness out of which they are made. Against the wilderness of inhuman unreality’ she sets the ‘quietly secular, voluntarily limited, safely human concourse of Nelly Dean and Lockwood.’

Wuthering Heights means to be a work of edification: Emily Bronte begins by wishing to instruct her narrator, the dandy Lockwood, in the nature of a grand passion; she ends by instructing herself in the vanity of human wishes. This seems a curiously simple moral to emerge from such a disturbingly complex novel, and while it may well represent in some degree part of Emily Bronte’s conscious intention in writing the book it hardly accounts for all that is actually there.

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