In Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë explores the gender identity of both herself and her characters. She published the book under the name of Ellis Bell, which many readers took to be that of a man. As critic Nicola Thompson points out, most...

A complete structural study of a novel demands preoccupation with structure as both organizational and temporal; in the case of Wuthering Heights especially, the two are inextricably linked. The novel is largely predicated on organization and...

The popularity of gothic fiction varied in Victorian England. During the Romantic period Horace Walpole published The Castle of Otranto (1764), which is often considered the first gothic horror story. Many more stories followed but the popularity...

Tony Harrison’s “A Cold Coming,” William Wordsworth’s “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,” Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights and George Orwell’s 1984 each display distinct sensibilities that reflect the time from which they emerged....

Emily Bronte’s classic novel, Wuthering Heights, is not simply the tragic love story it may appear to be on the surface, but is an example of class differences and the role of capital in eighteenth century Victorian England. Using Karl Marx’s...

In the words of Professor Fred Botting, within the Gothic, “transgression is important not only as an interrogation of received rules and values, but in the identification, reconstitution or transformation of limits.” Emily Bronte’s Wuthering...

Many aspects of Heathcliff's personality are apparently “fiendish," complementing his role as the ‘Byronic hero’ of the Wuthering Heights, a character who is dark, rebellious, and antisocial. However, the Byronic hero is also seen to be an...

Both Thomas Hardy's tragic novel Tess of the D'Urbervilles, set in impecunious rural England, and Emily Bronte's gothic novel Wuthering Heights, established at two adjacent houses in the Yorkshire moors, question whether the imperfect male...

From the very first pages of Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff is introduced to readers as a surly and exotic figure. It is ambiguous as to what his unpleasant demeanor and behavior can be attributed. Is it his exoticism, the mistreatment he suffered...

Emily Bronte, author of Wuthering Heights, grew up during a time of very concrete gender expectations. In the mid 1800s, English women and men understood that their genders appropriated distinct behavioral notions that they should inherit. For...

The Byronic Hero is a variant of the Romantic Hero who possesses an “expression which indicates a mixture of contempt and gloom”[1] and whose behaviour is unpredictable, “moodily taciturn and violently explosive.”[2] However, the Byronic Hero has...

The presentation of the Gothic has spanned the centuries, gripping each and every reader with its dastardly plot and unsuspecting victims. The Castle of Otranto, written in 1764 by Horace Walpole, ‘is generally regarded as the first Gothic novel’...

Emily Bronte’s literary dexterity heightens both the inhumanity and passion of her lurid tale, in that she does not tell it herself. Rather, it is the act of storytelling from the words of Lockwood and Nelly that serves as the basis of the...

The natural cycles of the universe promote continuity through repetition. Emily Brontë had a very cyclical outlook on life, and uses these cycles throughout Wuthering Heights to exhibit this. The story itself comes full circle and death is a...

Incest, violence, gambling, and the North of England - just several topics central to Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights that were abhorrent to the polite Victorian elites who originally devised the principle of 'Canon'. The Literary Canon of the...

If the setting of a novel is 19th century Europe, there is a good chance that the women in the novel will be treated as a means to an end rather than as autonomous beings who have intrinsic value in and of themselves. This is the case in Wuthering...

Literature and psychological theories, even if developed in different time periods or one before the other, may parallel because of both an author and psychologist’s ability to understand the human condition. For this reason, it is possible to...

Justice and revenge are two similar terms between which exists a very thin line. Both have the intention of correcting some wrong action, whether physical or intangible. The difference lies within how action is taken against the wrongdoer: revenge...

The characters in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights treat class hierarchy as if it is something natural and immutable, but the author shows that the way characters treat each other is largely based off the class they come to identify with. This...

In Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë employs a complicated narrative structure where characters’ stories are passed down a chain of narrators until they are finally recorded in a diary through an outsider’s perspective. This outsider is Lockwood, a...

The theme of ‘otherness’ is prominent throughout the opening chapters of Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë. Otherness can be interpreted as the exclusion of one party or the act of being dissimilar. This being the case, the opposite to this would...

In her essay "Dispelling the Myth of Strong Female Characters," Megan Leigh deconstructs the phrase “strong female character”, and argues that it is too often a positive attachment given to two-dimensional female characters. The stereotypical...

To ascertain whether or not the ending of a novel is ‘adequate’, one must first isolate components of adequacy. For the purposes of this essay, four general categories of adequacy have been defined: moral adequacy, artistic adequacy, narrative...

Catherine Barkley, who predeceases the retrospective narration of her bereaved lover in A Farewell to Arms, has nevertheless transcended her untimely death to become immortalized as a frequent and much-debated subject of Hemingway criticism. Since...