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Friday, April 2, 2021

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë | A Review Cum Analysis

   

Book Review

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë


Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë | A Brief Book Review | Dhiraj Sindhi | Indian Book Blogger
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

Author: Emily Jane Brontë

ISBN: 8188280062

Genre: Tragedy and Gothic Fiction

Length: 343 Pages

Publication Date: 2002 (Originally: December 1847)

Publisher: Wilco Publishing House (Originally published by Thomas Cautley Newby under the pseudonym – Ellis Bell)

Order your copy right now: https://amzn.to/3mcne5Q


About the author:

The daughters of an Anglican clergyman, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne, lost their mother in early childhood and were brought up in Yorkshire moors. All of them wrote novels and poetry that have since become the Classics of today. Charlotte's Jane Eyre' and Anne's 'Agnes Grey join the immortality status along with Emily's 'Wuthering Heights', and her own great poems.

Emily (Jane) Bronte was perhaps the most prolific writer of the three. It is her lucid verses however, which reveal her real genius.

In a stroke of misfortune for the literary world, the Bronte sisters lived very short lives. Emily and Anne died of tuberculosis at 30 and 29, and Charlotte at 39, during her pregnancy.

Emily's brilliance lives on – with her widely read poems, and of course, with her spellbinding: Wuthering Heights.


Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë | A Brief Book Review | Dhiraj Sindhi | Indian Book Blogger
Emily Bronte

Bronte Parsonage Museum: https://www.bronte.org.uk/


REVIEW

As you, my readers’ fam, may know that I generally do critical and analytical reviews on my blog, divided into sections based on fundamental literary elements like plot, characters, themes, setting, etc. However, I will not be diving deep into these technicalities for this particular review, because I am planning for yet another reading, focusing on a couple of specific themes. So, without further ado, let’s see what I have been able to perceive so far.

Review

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte was part of my British Novel course, for which I took an examination in February 2021. Although I wasn’t able to read the novel, I had to study it for my exams as I had resolved to pick out Wuthering Heights from amongst all the choices provided. That’s why I was equipped with its summary, analysis, critical essays, and the like before I started reading the novel. But thankfully, for the timeless and mysterious proses, impeccable articulation emanating wildest imaginations, and its ability to transport you to different time and space, as the classic texts often do, my prior knowledge of the text did not even slightly affect my reading experience.

Wuthering Heights showed me myriad shades of human emotions and the destructive consequences of our intense reactions to them. Every character from the novel, at some point in time, seemed to me a villain; their villainy characterized by antipathy, revenge, shifting identities, dishonesty, violence, ill-intensions, etc across all plausible age groups. Having said that, at some point in the novel, each character exuded raw, pure, intuitive, and wild feelings of love, passion, and/or commiseration that I couldn’t keep myself from loving the characters. Well, that’s about the primary theme of the novel, you could consider, leading the narrators to comment on characters and their ways based on their own understanding and commitments towards moral theology; drawing a line between good and evil.

Another major concern that Wuthering Heights brings forth is the presence of gothic elements. The reason that these gothic elements are so naturally and conveniently accommodated in the book is the novel’s setting. Wuthering Heights, as the title suggests, is set in the eerie and gloomy Yorkshire moors and those two country houses/dwellings prevalent throughout the novel – Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange – completely isolated from the surrounding villages. The tumultuous, violent, and raging weather that this setting is often subjected to, symbolizes the dark and negative emotions of characters; the emotions probably leading the characters to unconsciously practice grotesque yet passionate yet unconsummated romance, necrophilia, incest, cruelty, jealousy, revenge, and betrayal. Apart from these, the mysterious, dark, and moody character of Heathcliff emerges as a gothic villain. And his lover, the female protagonist, Catherine Earnshaw is a free spirit, selfish and headstrong; her loyalties torn between two men – her soulmate Heathcliff, and her husband Edgar Linton, who becomes to Catherine a tool for preserving her social status.

The desire for power and social structure has a pronounced influence on the characters of Wuthering Heights and become determining factors for the course of action. The novel put greater emphasis on death, attaining higher and spiritual levels of meaning and being. The lead characters defy even present day morals and ethics; breaking the barriers of an average romance story; powerful and supernatural romantic imagination cutting across the boundaries of heaven and hell; a love story beyond comprehension, reason, civilization, and order, this wildly creative novel seeks an alternative to the basic nature of everyday reality.


Happy Reading!

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DisclaimerThis article is intended for review purposes only. The author does not promote or recommend any behavior illustrated here or claim it to be useful.

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