1.Themes of Wuthering Heights

Emily Bronte choose a broader theme than her sister does in Jane Eyre which mainly deals with feminism. In Wuthering Heights, she discusses the problem of human nature, a struggle between rationality and irrationality. She takes the example of a woman, Catherine’s choice in love and marriage to express modern human’s contradiction. Under her pen, human beings in modern civilization are miserable because they have lost their true self. The longing for the true self and nature is so earnest that the female writer invents such a place as Wuthering Heights to vent. At the end of the novel, little Cathy taught her tough cousin Hareton to read, who is another Heathcliff indeed. Yet reading is the process of receiving of civilization. The reunion of the couple has brought hope to the story.

2.Why Gothic?

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.

3.Comments on Wuthering Heights

Wuthering Heights demolishes the assumptions of the given world. The church decays in the course of the novel; God is mocked; gender-norms reversed. The novel is not radical but recidivist; uninterested in social protest, it exhibits an extremist’s scepticism. It is one of the great prose poem in English.