Eminent Victorians
The Conflict in Wuthering Heights College
Bringing great controversy with it when it was published in 1847, Wuthering Heights achieved considerable success by rendering many masked, unresolved issues of the time novel was written apparent. The storyline revolves around the narration of lives of the two main characters of Heathcliff and Catherine as well as the people their tragic love story comes to influence. After his father, the proprietor of Wuthering Heights, brings Heathcliff from one of his travels and adopts him, these main characters grow to fall for each other with the mutual interest for the wilderness. As pure as this love sounds, all evil becomes to unfold when it comes into contact with the class-conscious Victorian era and the norms of the society in which they live. As Catherine expresses her struggle with her identity shifting from Catherine Earnshaw to Catherine Heathcliff or Catherine Linton, which also represents the three phases of her life, the conflict between nourishing her heart by being with Heathcliff and marrying Edgar, as a consequence becoming a respectable Linton herself, begins to expand throughout the whole novel so much so that, when eventually she chooses prestige over love and gives her hand to Edgar Linton, in a way she dooms the...
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