“Yet
each man kills the thing he loves,
By each let this be heard.
Some do it with a bitter look
Some with a flattering word.
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword” - OSCAR WILDE
Some do it with a bitter look
Some with a flattering word.
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword” - OSCAR WILDE
A child
could explain the concept of love, it is something straightforward and simple.
However, as we grow older and things become classified, love becomes something
incredibly complex and incomprehensible but beautiful.
Emily
Bronte (1818-48) was intense in her treatment of love and passion. Wuthering
Heights (1847), her only novel, deals with two generations of the Linton and
Earnshaw families in Yorkshire, and how their lives are affected by the
ferocity of Heathcliff, who was brought into their lives as a boy found in the
streets of Liverpool.
There are two truest types of love in the novel,
that of Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff and that of Catherine Linton and
Hareton Earnshaw. The first is passionate love, the second stable love.
The first, with all its tumult and
chaos, creates a terrible, destructive love shared by Catherine and Heathcliff.
Wuthering Heights is a story of love in its most vicious and repulsive form.
Catherine
Earnshaw’s love for Heathcliff is evident throughout the story. Once she utters
her love for Heathcliff in comparison to
Linton,
“My
love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods. Time will change it, ... but ...
I am Heathcliff - he’s always, always in my mind ...as my own being.”
Yet,
Catherine’s obsession with money is as strong as her love for Heathcliff.
Therefore, she can even think about leaving her childhood love for something
like money which shows how repulsive and vicious her love is. She defends in
order to make Nelly Dean believe that her act of marrying Edgar is really a
selfless act to save Heathcliff, rather than a way to only benefit herself
“...if Heathcliff and I married, we should be beggars? Whereas, if I
marry Linton, I can aid Heathcliff to rise, and place him aout of my brother’s
power,”
In one of the most significant scenes in
their relationship Catherine says, not knowing that Heathcliff is listening,
" It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff, now; so he shall
never know how I love him"
It causes Heathcliff , the one man that
loved her more than anything else in the world, to run away for three years to
seek his fortune. When he returns, Catherine is married to Edgar, dashing all
of Heathcliff's dreams and destroying him. Yet Catherine’s passion is so
intense that she, even before dying, takes the initiative and kisses Heathcliff,
after which for next five minutes he “bestows more kisses on her than ever he had given in his
life before”. Seeing her miserable condition and perceiving that she
is going to die, he cries says,
“Oh Cathy! Oh, my
life! How can I bear it?”
But soon Catherine dies. In a frenzy of grief,
he cries out,
“Oh, God! It is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I can
notlive without my soul!”
Eventually, Heathcliff’s love for
Catherine also takes a vicious and repulsive form. Due to Heathcliff’s
obsession with Catherine he destroys all those around him to make those who “have” Catherine miserable.He wishes to torment those
who were able to spend time with Catherine for all the years of his absence.
In this
novel admittedly there are many of the characteristics of love. Heathcliff’s Passion
turns to violence: to the reader, appears inhuman; his violence is paramount,
and yet so is his love. This is apparently what happens when there is something
that you want, but can never posses.
Catherine Linton
and Hareton, however, have a normal,
healthy love. It is begun with teasing and ends in a quiet passion. They
walk together in the moonlight (unlike Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff, who
walk on the moors in stormy weather, as Ms. Oates noted (Oates 4)) and share
sweet kisses. They even choose to move away from Wuthering Heights--the symbol
of chaos--to Thrushcross Grange, where order prevails. Their love creates the
renewal at the end of the story, washing away all of the pain and sin of past
generations.
Now we will look
into some other characteristics of love in Heathcliff
and Catherine’s relationship:
Heathcliff
and Catherine can be called soul mates having an affinity for each other which
draws them togehter irresistibly. Such a love is not necessarily fortunate or
happy. For C. Day Lewis calls them “two halves of a single soul–forever sundered and struggling
to unite."
Their love is an attempt to break
the boundaries of self and to fuse with another to transcend the inherent
separateness of the human condition; fusion with another will by uniting two
incomplete individuals create a whole and achieve new sense of identity, a
complete and unified identity.
Love has become a religion in Wuthering
Heights, providing a shield against the fear of death and the annihilation
of personal identity or consciousness. Robert M. Polhemus sees Brontë's
religion of love as individualistic and capitalistic. Heathdiff says late in
the book,
"I
have nearly attained my heaven; and that of others is altogether unvalued and
uncoveted by me!"
The love of Catherine and Heathcliff can be called addiction. Catherine
calls her relationship
"a source of little visible delight, but
necessary."
Like an addict,
Heathcliff wants possession of the lover regardless of the consequences to the
loved one. On the other hand, a healthy love is capable of putting the needs of
the beloved first.
Besides the above mentioned features,
some other features of love are mentionable, such as, the insipid sentimental
languishing of Lockwood, the coupleism of Hindley and Frances, the tame
indulgence of Edgar, the romantic infatuation of Isabella, the puppy love of
Cathy and Linton, and the flirtatious sexual attraction of Cathy and Hareton.
Work
Cited
Wilde,
Oscar. The Ballad of Reading Gaol, 1998