Monday, October 19, 2009
Love in Wuthering Heights
From the title of my blog, I assume that the reader is thinking "Oh wow, really original" and I don't blame the reader for thinking that. I think that while it is one of the more obvious themes, it is crucial to the development of the novel and it’s characters. The author, considering what I have read about her background, may have been confused herself about what love is and what powers it holds over people’s lives. In most of the marriages in the book, love is not only not discussed, but is barely even touched on. I want to blog about this because considering this novel is a romance, it is not really romantic at all, at least in the normative way. While Catherine is in the throws of passionate emotions after not seeing Heathcliff for a long time, she gushes, “I wish I could hold you until we were both dead! I shouldn’t care what you suffered. I care nothing for your sufferings!” (157). This does not sound like the words of someone who really cares for her lover. I think that they are really the only people that have shared love and it is turned into something that rips apart the lives of all involved, and is not the beautiful, enjoyable emotion it should be. Love means pain and suffering, especially for Heathcliff and Catherine, and it brings them their demise. It makes me wonder why Emily Bronte is so critical of love. It always ends up bad for the characters if they love, even Isabella who convinced herself to run away with Heathcliff turned from any likeness for him into total hatred.
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Bailey, I don't think the topic of this post is silly at all. In fact, I think it's extremely relevant to the novel. While all the Bronte's wrote "love stories" more or less, under sharp scrutiny many of these romances seem ambivalent and troubled. At the end of Charlotte Bronte's Villette, when poor Lucy Snowe has finally got her man, Charlotte Bronte kills him off in a shipwreck! Saying about the ending in a letter to her sister, "drowning and matrimony are the fearful alternatives." In Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte had to blind and maim Mr. Rocheter before Jane would marry him. It seems that both women are troubled by the institution of marriage and find true love impossible in a society that is so based on power, class, and gender division. Nice post.
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