Sublimation and Repression in Wuthering Heights essays

Sublimation and Repression in Wuthering Heights essays Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights is a tale in which "two households, both alike in dignity" have conflicts which cause "civil blood" to make "civil hands unclean." In her one novel she encapsulates both the harshness and the beauty of the Yorkshire moors, using it, not only as a background, but also as a central image of the passions and thwarted longings of the characters in Wuthering Heights. The human patterns, which reoccur in Wuthering Heights, can be likened to the cycles of nature, where the seasons return and time comes about again. It is such a strange, agonizing, and powerful book that every individual who reads it will give it his own interpretation. One where "two households, both alike in dignity" have conflicts which cause "civil blood" to make "civil hands unclean." Such an interpretation is the constant use of the sublimation and repression of nature to express the characters' innermost and most personal thoughts and feelings. This portrayal is extravagantly unique in comparison to the mainstream literature of the time. Throughout the novel, nature is constantly being eluded to and made mention of, merely emphasizing the true story line. Things such as weather, times of day, seasons, clouds, winds, sunlight, gray stones, masses of heather, the wheeling lapwing, imbue a great deal of the novel. For instance, when in Chapter 21, the young Cathy drags Nelly across the moor for an hour's "ramble" on the "twentieth of March[,it] was a beautiful spring day" where Cathy "found plenty of entertainment in listening to the larks singing far and near, and enjoying the sweet, warm sunshine"(Bronte 194-5). The characters such as Heathcliff and Catherine seem bound together by their love for the moors just as much as they are by their love for each other. Catherine and Heathcliff forced apart by their ascribed statuses-as assigned by Hindleyare drawn together by the "freedom, wildness, and purity of the moor...its space ...