Wuthering Heights (novel)/Headscratchers: Difference between revisions
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* [[Take a Third Option|Or]], it's intended to warn us that if you separate two people whose souls must be united, doom will ensue. |
* [[Take a Third Option|Or]], it's intended to warn us that if you separate two people whose souls must be united, doom will ensue. |
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* It is a romance - it's the story of a boy and a girl growing up, falling in love and being separated, and what the boy does to try to get the girl back, and how he deals with her death. The fact that the boy in question is a dangerous lunatic who brings about the deaths of most of the people who got between him and the girl, generally screws up his relationship with the girl, and goes on to ruin the lives of everyone around him after she's dead, means that it's also a horror story, but doesn't stop it from also being a romance. |
* It is a romance - it's the story of a boy and a girl growing up, falling in love and being separated, and what the boy does to try to get the girl back, and how he deals with her death. The fact that the boy in question is a dangerous lunatic who brings about the deaths of most of the people who got between him and the girl, generally screws up his relationship with the girl, and goes on to ruin the lives of everyone around him after she's dead, means that it's also a horror story, but doesn't stop it from also being a romance. |
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* The Gothic heroine always gets confined somewhere, and a protagonist must have [[Character Development]]. Cathy (II) fits the role of Gothic heroine better than Catherine (I), plus she's one of three strange people Lockwood meets at the beginning, prompting Nelly to tell him simply a very long and detailed [[Backstory]] of [[How We Got Here]]. Based on how Catherine (I) simply reasons that she could never degrade herself by marrying Heathcliff (indicating to Nelly and to me that her professions of unconquerable, passionate love are crap), seeing the Catherine/Heathcliff romance as the main plot of ''[[Wuthering Heights ( |
* The Gothic heroine always gets confined somewhere, and a protagonist must have [[Character Development]]. Cathy (II) fits the role of Gothic heroine better than Catherine (I), plus she's one of three strange people Lockwood meets at the beginning, prompting Nelly to tell him simply a very long and detailed [[Backstory]] of [[How We Got Here]]. Based on how Catherine (I) simply reasons that she could never degrade herself by marrying Heathcliff (indicating to Nelly and to me that her professions of unconquerable, passionate love are crap), seeing the Catherine/Heathcliff romance as the main plot of ''[[Wuthering Heights (novel)|Wuthering Heights]]'' seems to me like seeing Hamlet's romance with Ophelia as the main plot of ''[[Hamlet]]''. |
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** Bear in mind that the novel is set in a time when marrying for love was rare, at least in the upper classes. Whether it would have been socially acceptable or not for Cathy to marry Heathcliff would have been of a lot more importance, so the claim that it shows Cathy doesn't feel unconquerable, passionate love for Heathcliff is sketchy - they don't need a marriage certificate to be in love with each other, and being married would possibly make life more difficult for them. Their love is described in more pagan terms, too - the whole leaves on the trees and the eternal rocks beneath description, the fact that Heathcliff digs up her grave and plans to be buried next to her so they can melt together into corpsey soup - so if marriage is a business deal, and a Christian institution (a belief system that neither of them seem to have all that much respect for), then the fact that Cathy chooses not to marry Heathcliff shouldn't say all that much about whether she truly loves him or not. The fact that she marries Edgar is, of course, a different matter, but hey, Heathcliff could have been dead by the time she said "I do" and she'd have been socially expected to marry someone, so it's a pragmatic but valid choice. |
** Bear in mind that the novel is set in a time when marrying for love was rare, at least in the upper classes. Whether it would have been socially acceptable or not for Cathy to marry Heathcliff would have been of a lot more importance, so the claim that it shows Cathy doesn't feel unconquerable, passionate love for Heathcliff is sketchy - they don't need a marriage certificate to be in love with each other, and being married would possibly make life more difficult for them. Their love is described in more pagan terms, too - the whole leaves on the trees and the eternal rocks beneath description, the fact that Heathcliff digs up her grave and plans to be buried next to her so they can melt together into corpsey soup - so if marriage is a business deal, and a Christian institution (a belief system that neither of them seem to have all that much respect for), then the fact that Cathy chooses not to marry Heathcliff shouldn't say all that much about whether she truly loves him or not. The fact that she marries Edgar is, of course, a different matter, but hey, Heathcliff could have been dead by the time she said "I do" and she'd have been socially expected to marry someone, so it's a pragmatic but valid choice. |
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** Tell that to Heathcliff... |
** Tell that to Heathcliff... |
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