Wuthering heights

WUTHERING HEIGHTS
Doubles and Conflicts

In Wuthering Heights there are many doubles, used by Brönte as a motif to make us understand the major themes, and there are also many conflicts interwoven. Therefore, I will explain some of them and I will focus on the most important.

Brontë organizes her novel by arranging its elements: characters, places, and themes into pairs. Catherine andHeathcliff are closely matched in many ways, and see themselves as identical. Catherine’s character is divided into two sides: the side that wants Edgar and the side that wants Heathcliff. Catherine and young Catherine are both remarkably similar and different. The two houses, Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange, represent opposing worlds and values. The novel has not one but two distinctlydifferent narrators, Nelly and Mr. Lockwood. The relation between such paired elements is usually quite complicated, with the members of each pair being neither exactly alike nor opposed. For instance, the Lintons and the Earnshaws may at first seem to represent opposing sets of values, but, by the end of the novel, so many intermarriages take place that one can no longer distinguish between thetwo families.

Related to the novel's many doubles, Catherine and Heathcliff are the most important. Their love is based on being spiritual twins. Recall Catherine's confession to Nelly Dean that she can't marry Heathcliff because, as she explains, "he's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same, and Linton's is as different as a moonbeam from lightning,or frost from fire" . She concludes with one of the most memorable lines in the novel: "Nelly, I am Heathcliff" .

Heathcliff is not Catherine's only double , there's also her daughter, the other Catherine, better known as Cathy. There are many Lintons and Earnshaws, even several characters with the name Heathcliff, though only one goes exclusively by Heathcliff . There are two HaretonEarnshaws. Heathcliff has another double too: Hareton Earnshaw. Both were placed into a servile position and deprived of an education by the ruthless master of the house. Just how vengeful Heathcliff is comes out with Hareton, because rather than feeling compassion that the young man has no sympathetic father figure, Heathcliff repeats the same terrible treatment on Hareton that he received from Hareton'sfather, Hindley.

Among the many examples of repetition in the plot, the scenes with the two Catherines and their respective suitors, Edgar Linton and Linton Heathcliff, reveal that mother and daughter are both self-indulgent.
In the first, Catherine ,when he tries to leave Wuthering Heights, she becomes a manipulator, shouting, "No . . . not yet, Edgar Linton , sit down; you shall not leaveme in that temper. I should be miserable all night, and I won't be miserable for you!" Moments later, Edgar proposes marriage and Catherine accepts.
Twenty years later, Cathy pushes Linton Heathcliff after a fight about their parents. Though Cathy apologizes, she also blames him, just like her mother blamed Edgar. She does not want to leave Wuthering Heights carrying the blame for the scene:"Don't let me go home thinking I've done you harm!". Daughter, like mother, cannot control her temper and yet does not want to bear any of the responsibility.

On the other hand, there are many conflicts. Heathcliff’s great natural abilities, strength of character, and love for Catherine Earnshaw all enable him to raise himself from humble beginnings to the status of a wealthy gentleman, but hisneed to revenge himself for Hindley’s abuse and Catherine’s betrayal leads him into a twisted life of cruelty ; Catherine is between her love for Heathcliff and her desire to be a gentlewoman, and her decision to marry the genteel Edgar Linton drags almost all of the novel’s characters into conflict with Heathcliff. There is also a conflict between nature and civilization. Brönte constantly...