Bronte, Emily - Wuthering Heights (4)

Emily Bronte – Wuthering Heights –Notes

It was a very original work, in fact, it was not characterized as a Victorian novel.
The novel is characterized by a focus on two contradictory feelings: love and hate.
One of the main feature of the novel is imagination, expressed through motifs, themes and suggestive settings (a clear example is Yorkshire’s moors)
Characters are in relations with time, eternity, fatality , nature, essence and death.

Emily Bronte’s novel is based on two main philosophical concepts, that can be defined as “pre-moral”:

- Nature and life are expression of some living and spiritual principles

- There is a harmony between every element, although the appearance shows that some elements can be polar opposites of each other: they become contradictory because their true nature is not realized (as the protagonists of the novel become mean because historical events don’t allow them to realize their true nature).

Emily Bronte believes that man and nature are part of a same universal harmony.
We can understand that there isn’t a sexual connotation of the love of the main characters: their bond is special and immortal, it isn’t connected with life or death: they were born to be together.
Emily Bronte believes that soul is immortal because life is the expression of a spiritual principle.
The novel links the psychological analysis to the social criticism against the hypocrisy and the social conventions of Victorian Age.
The atmosphere is dark and suggestive as a Greek tragedy