1.What kind of world exists in Wuthering Heights?

It concerns the nature of the world of Wuthering Heights. Here is painted a veritable portrait of an amoral universe. It is a world of man, not of God. It is the scramble and squabble between human beings that take the center stage of the narrative. Money, class, and love, all these otherwise very Victorian virtues, are presented in a non-Victorian, highly idiosyncratic way. It is not about who is right and who is wrong that the author conceived her novel.

2.Why did Wuthering Heights fail at the time of its publication?

Wuthering Heights exposed violence, moral corruption, deceit, rapacity were reproaches amplified by social and ideological needs of the late 1840s. Emily Bronte’s cast of mind works differently from the Victorian temper. She speaks ahead of her time.

3.Do you find anything strange in the names of Heights characters?

Hindley, Hareton, Heathcliff, these “H” words forms a beguiling pattern, each seeming like a shadow or reflection of the others, beckoning, mirroring, as if every name, person, event or thing were a ghost of every other.

4.How many narrators are there in the novel?

There are two narrators in the story. Mr. Lockwood, the visitor, and Mrs. Nelly Dean, the housekeeper.

5.Is Nelly a reliable narrator?

Nelly can be called an unreliable narrator, because she is certainly superstitious, as we can know in paragraph 60 and other parts of the novel. We can also find that Nelly is a manipulative creature who will go to considerable lengths to maintain the status quo of male authority from her manners.

6.What roles do these two narrators play in the novel?

Lockwood as a visitor comes to stay in Wuthering Heights and meets Heathcliff. In the first four chapters, he operates as a third-person-narrator and gives the readers some kind of objective description of country “completely removed” from the stir of society, thus paving way for the later narrative focus on the presentation of the inner world of man. Then, Nelly Dean continues the story with her recollections.

Lockwood cuts in once in a while and distracts and diverts her a little, offering some Victorian common-sense comments or asking some questions, but Nelly loses no time to move back to the original thread of the narrative.

7.How to evaluate this kind of narrative strategy?

This kind of narrative strategy proves to be immensely intriguing because of the advantages it offers. For the readers there is the double perspectives of Nelly’s and Lockwood’s, mutually complimenting, and providing and additional avenue of reading and looking at the story. It also proffers a good deal of leeway for the author to maneuver and manipulate so as to achieve the superb effect of juxtaposing the past with the present and footnoting the behaviors which might have been difficult to understand.

8.What are the symbolic meanings of Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange?

Thrushcross is very near to Wuthering Heights. But the weather seems to be quite different. Wuthering Height is always gloomy, full of storms and heavy rains. While Thrushcross Grange is always mild and sunny. Moreover, people in Wuthering Heights are bad-tempered but people in Thrushcross Grange are hospitable and civilized. To some degree, Wutheing Heights represents the irrational side of human nature like Heathcliff while Thrushcross Grange represents the rational side like Linton.

Wuthering Heights is the symbol of nature. The residents in it are rough, rude, unruly but energetic. On the contrary, Thrushcross Grange is the symbol of civilization. The residents in it are gentle, fragile, rich and snobbish. Catherine destroys the balance of nature and civilization then uplift the story.

9.Why some people classify Wuthering Heights under Gothic novel?

The novel shows us Emily Bronte’s gothic complex in plot. First, we can find gothic descriptions of natural circumstance and settings. Everything described in Wuthering Heights is depressing and gloomy. Second, main characters shows us gothic complex. Heathcliff, a crazy, cruel and ferocious man is the typical hero in gothic novel. Catherine who conceals a wild spirit under her beautiful face has similar characters with Heathcliff. Third, the deep love between Catherine and Heathcliff is completely scary and supernatural.

10.Can you discern any Romantic elements from the text?

Various elements of the Romantic might be discerned in paragraph 75, particularly the notion of an organic connection between humankind and nature, the rejection of society in favour of individual striving, freedom from social and familial oppression.

11.In what ways does the Wuthering Heights inspect and resist the stereotypes of the Victorian age?

The novel has a set of psychological and behavioural enigmas that unsettle values and readers in Victorian age. It takes shibboleths of Victorian ideological custom and exposes them: the family is revealed as an unstable and in some respects vicious unit; catefories of consistent behaviour and secure moral codes crumble; acts of moral benevolence are shown to have enormously disruptive consequences; violence overrides charity and tolerance; the apparently clear psychological opposites of pleasure and pain, love and hate, aggression and affection, are hopelessly tangled; boundary experiences between living and dying, health and illness, consciousness and unconsciousness, dream and waking, are perturbed; even biological species, in this strange, volatile world, seem uncertain.

12.From Catherine’s words, especially the words in paragraph 73, what can you see deeply in her heart psychologically?

Catherine and Heathcliff show a refreshing love of liberty and nature, but that love translates itself into a passionate refusal to grow up. They lack the steadying influence of a mother, and hence grow up without moral restraints and in an atmosphere of patriarchal brutality. They have not been socialized and continue, into adulthood, to assume a direct correlation between their desires and the fulfillment of those desires without usual filters of convention and compromise.

13.Is Wuthering Heights a novel about history?

The novel is about history, and British society. The historical chronology of the novel is extremely detailed and accurate but it tells the reader more about the world of the Early Victorians than last quarter of the eighteenth century. Early Victorian England was a place and time of great change and the novel reflects that, principally in the character of Heathcliff.

14.What themes can be penetrated in this chapter?

Catherine’s choice in love and marriage expresses human’s contradiction, to be specific, the struggle between rationality and irrationality. Catherine’s longing for true self and nature exposes the problem of human nature. Feminism can be indirectly discovered in Nelly’s feedback to Catherine’s intention of marrying Edgar.