Wuthering Heights Objectives

Wuthering Heights Objectives

1. AO1

   • Examples of imagery include landscape imagery, pathetic fallacy, landscape as a symbolic character and the use of animal imagery to suggest savagery in the novel.
   • The dual narration of Lockwood and Nelly can be compared and contrasted in terms of class and gender, reliable and unreliable narration, objectivity and immediacy.
   • Joseph and Nelly's dialect can be seen to represent a closed community while lockwood's style establishes him simultaneously as both vain and educated. Language in wuthering heights is undicative of culture and class.
   • In wuthering heights there is a doubling of names and repition of stories, while family symmetries contrast with turbulent lives.
   • Religious allegory is linked to morality and metaphysics in the novel, and can be connected to the prometheus myth, defying gods for the sake of humanity. Political allegory can be linked to revolution on themes of power and violence and disruption as seen in the character of Heathcliff

2. AO5

   • Feminist reading, The presentation of female 'madness' in the characters of catherine earnshaw and isabella linton. Bronte's account echoes the beliefs of victorian psychiatry of the madness: The reproductive system was the sources of mental illness in women. Suffers rom the moral insanity associated with women's sexual desires.
   • Post Colonial reading, Heathcliff is described throughout the novel as a savage an outsider, perhaps brought in on a slave ship, or could be a famish irish immigrant escaping the irish potato famine.
   • Formalist reading, Significance of the numerous windows and doors in this novel. Such formal boundaries represent the tension between two conflicting realities. Different characters aim to cross these physical boundaries and unite the two kinds of reality.
   • Marxist reading, The story of WH is concerned not with love in the abstract but with the passions of living people.
   • The novel reads about a girl's childhood and the adult womans tragic yearning to return to it. Catherine's impossile love for Heathcliff becoms comprehensive as a pre-adolescent. The gratuitous cruelties of the novel are this justified as realistic attibutes of the nursery world - and as frankly joyous memories of childhood eroticism.

3. AO3

   • It is possible WH was first published under a male name because the strength of passion depicited was thought unsuitable for a lady.
   • Their aunt raised the Bronte children after their mother died, and was deeply religious. The character of Joseph, a caricapture of an evangelical may have inspired by her aunt's religiosity.
   • They were also influenced by their servant Tabitha - who was fond of telling them local stories (Nelly Dean?)
   • The setting high up on the yorkshire dales in a lonely and wild place, typical of romance novels
   • The romantic movement was also a time of strict morals and value, running wild on the moors would not have been acceptable social class was very important
   • Second industrial revolution 1780 - 1850, New opportunites for upwardly mobile gentlemen challanged ideas of breeding and family. Heathcliffs uncertain background and lack of status reflect the changing shape of society.
   • Cholera epidemics widespread death from cholera and typhoid left children orphaned and homeless; link to heathliff's orphan status.
   • Charlotte fell for a married teacher and was heartbroken - 1844, Branwell was also suffering from a broken heart. There was a family crisis with Bramwell over his former love and he became almost insane (Heathcliff) Emily witnessed allot of heartbreak
   • Chartist movement (1838-42) A campaign for industrial reform and equality for workers; conflict between WH and the grange is symbolic of the conflict between the working classes and the bourgeoisie.
   • Lord Byron, respected by the Bronte sisters established the figure of the Byronic hero, this can be compared to Heathcliff