Wuthering Heights Flashcards
“You teach me now how cruel you’ve been - cruel and false. Why did you despise me? Why did you betray your own heart, Cathy? I have not one word of comfort. You deserve this. You have killed yourself. Yes, you may kiss me, and cry; and wring out my kisses and tears: they’ll blight you - they’ll damn you. You loved me - what right had you to leave me? What right - answer me - for the poor fancy you felt for Linton? Because misery, and degradation, and death, and nothing that God or Satan could inflict would have parted us, you, of your own will did it. I have no broken your heart - you have broken it; and in breaking it, you have broken mine.”
-Use of hyphens convey suppressed emotions, breaking down from anger- disjointed language.
-repetition of cruel ironic as H.C is portrayed as cruel. The repetition being twice reflecting on the pair of them. love as a destructive force theme.
-false character she portrays as and upper-class, she attempted to deceive Linton when she pinched nelly.
condemns her to hell ‘You deserve this’
-ghosts haunt when they cant rest, condemns her to eternal suffering.
poor fancy no pity or real love between them. No riches came from that marriages she had expected.
short sentences declarative sentences, presents himself as judicial- litigious language?
Kisses and tears futile She is unable to have him any longer, Romanticism, almost an internal disease.
Semantic field of suffering cruel, despise ect.
-Root of each others suffering
betray your own heart the rejection of her true nature by conforming to social marital views, in turn his heart hurts,
Blames Cathy plays victim, shows the corrupt side neither of them acknowledge. spiteful.
synthetic listing use of and- ‘misery and degradation and death’ hints at the fact he would embrace poverty to be with her.
Heathcliff defies the idea of a higher being presenting himself as secular. Otherworldly.
What right? rhetoric. women’s rights being very limited during the Victorian era a husband having entire control over his wife, allowance or abuse and rape, dominance amplified through the command ‘answer me’.
interrogatives desperation and denial.
His one weakness not God nor Satan
Repetition of you To sprout guilt- love as a destructive force
“Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest as long as I am living. You said I killed you–haunt me then. The murdered do haunt their murderers. I believe–I know that ghosts have wandered the earth. Be with me always–take any form–drive me mad. Only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! It is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!”
The place of Catherine’s interment, to the surprise of the villagers, was neither in the chapel under the carved monument of the Lintons, nor yet by the tombs of her own relations, outside. It was dug on a green slope in a corner of the kirk-yard, where the wall is so low that heath and bilberry-plants have climbed over it from the moor; and peat-mould almost buries it. Her husband lies in the same spot now;
Kirk Yard church yard
Conflict Portrays the conflict between Cathines body neither being buried with the Linton’s not the Earnshaw’s but having Heathcliff and Edgar buried on each side instead.
Symbolism The heath plants symbolising H.C tenacity to chase Cathy even in the dead he is rooted close by her, climbing over any walls that they try to make.
Edgars Love Not beside his family in the chapel.
Key Context Historical setting
-Not set in Victorian Era but written in it (deals with different issues)
-Roughly set between the abolition of slavery (1772) and the lull in French war (1802)
-Influence of rebellion from those events
Context Evangelical revival
-There was a great spiritual movement of the eighteenth centaury.
-Lockwood’s dream of the famous preacher and the opening of a new nonconformist chapel at Gimmerton, seems to reflect this energetic new puritanism
Context Liverpool
-Earnshaw visits Liverpool (1771) when it was a major slave, sugar and tobacco port
-Liverpool was filled with poor, migrant and homeless people
‘you must e’en take [Heathcliff] as a gift of God; though it’s as dark almost as if it came from the devil’
-Heathcliff automatically associated with a battle between heaven and hell
-Semi- colon keep the sentence joint but separate
-juxtaposition of ‘gift from god’ and ‘from the devil’ creates a gothic sense of mystery and confusion.
-modal verb ‘must’ is almost a warning as it foreshadows his nature. (fallen angel)
- Alliteration -gift god- dark devil.
-Association of ‘Dark’ and his skin and stoic behaviour.
- Sent down as a punishment for possible adultery one of the 10 commandments.
-God brings light, light was shone upon Earnshaw’s possible cheating.
-Affairs were common in higher class family’s as men would often go on business trips and women would marry to gain.
-illicit act of conception
-‘its’ dehumanising, other worldly and outcasted
-‘must take’ commandment from god
-Possibly their son coming back as another race, takes Hindley’s inheritance as rightful owner being H.C
-Its almost portrays how H.C is doomed as lucifer was.
-Fight against British ideals, race, legitimacy, ‘otherness’ and class
Heathcliff as a threatening figure
‘Rough as a saw edge, and as hard as a whinstone! The less you meddle with him the better’
‘Its a cuckoo’s sir’ ‘Hearton has been cast out like an unfledged dunnock’
‘dirty, ragged, black-haired child’
-‘Heathcliff is an usurper’
-I thought him not vindictive; I was deceived completely’
-‘I was frightened’
‘Poor fatherless child, as he called him’
‘As he called him’ could be sarcastic, latent mockery.
‘A wild, wicked slip she was–but she had the bonniest eye, the sweetest smile, and lightest foot in the parish: and, after all, I believe she meant no harm’
-wild unlike nobility
-lightest foot could mean gentle could refer to her stealing the hearts of men
-triplet
-juxtaposition -wicked but meant no harm?
-attention seeking as a child, has ill humour
-social standards for women are against it
-uncontrollable
-eye being the widow to the soul, her true nature within her eyes
-‘sweetest smile.’ sibilance, manipulative with devil connotations.
“I was only going to say that heaven did not seem to be my home; and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; and the angels were so angry that they flung my out into the middle of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights; where I woke sobbing for joy.”
Nelly is trying to help the 2 of them grow through acceptance of Edgar and Cathy as H.C and Catharine are forbidden.
-Oxymoronic- ‘sobbing for job’ and in ‘angles so angry’ highlights confusion but also that it is not of their nature.
-Edgar depicted as Heaven and Heathcliff as earth, worldly desires
-A place of innocence and morality no longer correlates with her
-Flung from the heavens- fallen angel
-Middle of the Heath- between both like purgatory
“I’ve no more business to marry Edgar Linton than I have to be in heaven and if the wicked man in there had not brought Heathcliff so low I shouldn’t have thought of it. It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now so he shall never know how I love him and that not because he’s handsome Nelly but because 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.”
-Like a devil in hell, undeserving of Edgar
-Degrading herself
-unworthy
-undesirable to her
-emphasises the lack of stainability
-Union of the souls- he’s more myself than I am
-Frost from fire, laid back and cold(Edgar) violent vengeful and passionate (Heathcliff)
-‘His and mine are the same’- soul mates, both being made of fire.
-moonbeam and lightning, Harsh, empowered, feared, commanding, bright and fire starting (H.C)
Moonbeam, gentile, illuminating, beautiful, warm, comforting, elegant however unmoving a path to take but will do no more than illuminate.
-‘no business’ a transaction of marriage, cant afford to fight for her love as it would degrade her.
“My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it, I’m well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Healthcliff!”
-Use of natural imagery, ever changing but not ever present- ‘like the foliage in the woods’ it dies in the winter, a cycle of conditional love
-Heathcliff survives all seasons been there from the beginning, however it can slowly erode and break down, it also symbolises their love as a rock it is unmoving they will always be grounded with no progress.
“They are dove’s eyes - angel’s”
-Heavenly imagery
-‘They’ otherworldly
-eyes a window to the soul, a window of innocence
-Doves are often caged, freedom only once out of marriage
-symbol of love and peace
-doves often used in funerals- key to his heaven
“fierce, pitiless, wolfish man”
-hell hound
-no remorse
-loyal to only one
-wolves often are shown to imitate in children’s books (little red riding hood, wolf in sheep’s clothing) he imitates the man Isabella would like
-predatory
-territorial
