Love, Family, and the Pursuit of Happiness - An Essay on Wuthering Heights

Love, Family, and the Pursuit of Happiness - An Essay on Wuthering Heights

In Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte creates struggles between numerous people; brothers and sisters, lovers, husbands and wives, and even parents and children. These relationships can all be encountered in a familial or romantic setting, both of which are used throughout. Bronte introduces to us the many issues that go on below the surface of a relationship and how adversely both the involved and outside people can be affected. Instead of the usually cheerful atmosphere created by the ideas of love and family, Bronte takes us into a world where both of these terms usually allow the reader to foresee misery, angst, confusion, or death. The relationship that brings us into the completely corrupt world of the Heights is that of Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff. Not only do they cause each other serious emotional damage, their relationship is the catalyst for Catherine Earnshaw’s death, the later unfortunate experiences of the next generation, Edgar Linton’s depression, and Heathcliff’s slowly deteriorating sanity. In Wuthering Heights, love and hatred are no longer opposites; they are the same.
Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff grow from being the best of friends to the most passionate of lovers. In a place other than the Heights, this sort of progressing relationship could have led to happiness and celebration. However, the initial combination of Catherine’s obsession with status and Heathcliff’s rough and unpolished demeanor cause the two nothing but depression and suffering. Catherine ends up marrying Edgar Linton, a well-established and kind but boring sort of man, and Heathcliff nearly goes mad with jealousy. The pinnacle of all their pent-up and secret emotions is an almost animalistic scene at Thrushcross Grange. “He neither spoke, no loosed his hold, for some five minutes, during which period he bestowed more kisses than ever he gave in his life before, I dare say; but then my mistress had kissed him first, and I plainly saw that he could hardly...