Motifs In Wuthering Heights

The Destructiveness of a Love That Never Changes

The passion that Catherine and Heathcliff feel for one another is depicted as the core of Wuthering Heights, because it is the strongest andmore lasting emotion in the novel, and that it is the cradle of most of the major conflicts that structure the novel’s plot.
It is not an easy task to decide whether Emily Brontë intends thereader to condemn these lovers as blameworthy or to venerate them as romantic heroes whose love surpasses social conventions and morality. The book is actually structured around two parallel lovestories, the first half of the novel centering on the love between Catherine and Heathcliff, while the less dramatic second half features the developing love between young Catherine and Hareton. In contrastto the first, the latter tale ends happily, restoring peace and order to Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange. The differences between the two love stories contribute to the reader’sunderstanding of why each ends the way it does.

The most important feature of young Catherine and Hareton’s love story is that it involves growth and change. Early in the novel Hareton seems irredeemablybrutal, savage, and illiterate, but over time he becomes a loyal friend to young Catherine and learns to read. When young Catherine first meets Hareton he seems completely alien to her world, yet herattitude also evolves from contempt to love. Catherine and Heathcliff’s love, on the other hand, is rooted in their childhood and is marked by the refusal to change. In choosing to marry Edgar, Catherineseeks a more genteel life, but she refuses to adapt to her role as wife, either by sacrificing Heathcliff or embracing Edgar. In Chapter XII she suggests to Nelly that the years since she was twelveyears old and her father died have been like a blank to her, and she longs to return to the moors of her childhood. Heathcliff, for his part, possesses a seemingly superhuman ability to maintain the...