Theme and Plot Analysis on
Wuthering Heights

        The whole action of Wuthering Heights is presented in the form of narrations by Lockwood and Nelly Dean. Lockwood's narrative is the outer framework of the story, whereas Nelly acts as the first eyewitness of the complete events in the Wuthering Heights. The reader thuus moves through Lockwood's narrations and the through Nelly's to be able to reach the story of the novel. Below is the diagram of it:

        Lockwood is an outsider (just like the reader) who comes into a world in which he finds bewildering and hostile. He arrives at the end of November 1901 as a tenant of Thrushcross Grange. After his meeting with his landlord, Mr. Heathcliff, he stays there for a couple of months. It is during that time his interest with Wuthering Heights leads to the beginning of Nelly's narrative. His first description about the place is one point where instability emerges.

        A perfect misanthropist's Heaven: and Mr. Heathcliff and I are such a suitable pair to divide the desolation between us (paragraph 1).

        This statement is quite questionable: how can be a place called heaven have the attribute of misanthropy? And why does Lockwood can immediately identify himself to Heathcliff as a suitable pair? This argument of instability is then developed more as the story switch to Nelly.

        The main conflict of the story is between them suddenly shatters by the coming of Edgar Linton. Her passionate love with Heathcliff is confronted her desire for nobility and high class life which exists in her relationship with Edgar. Even though later on h\she marries Edgar, it's recognizable that she doesn't love Edgar; she is only searching for his social status. This is obvious from her words about Heathcliff:

        "Nelly, I am Heathcliff! He's always, always in my mind; not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself,  but as my own being."

        And when three years later Heathcliff asks her to run from Edgar, her answer that she was legally bond to Linton reveals that the marriage is just a way of blowing up her dignity pleasure.

        Selfishness is one of the idea that Bronte wants to communicate in her novel. The first selfish mood that appears is when Catherine ells her objections of marrying Heathcliff which is accidentally heard by Heathcliff. Catherine's selfish character is the followed by Heathcliff by disappearing for three years thus making the life of Catherine also ruined. His act of selfishness then slowly transforms into vengeful behavior. Cruelly, he marries Isabella only to annoy Edgar and then force Young Catherine to marry Linton which later on died of neglection. With this fact, revenge (as the effect of selfishness) is the most dominant idea of the second half of the novel, although in the last chapter Heathcliff abandons his plan of revenge. So the suitable theme for the story is "the act of selfishness would eventually lead to vengeful behavior."

        Wuthering Heights is an anticlimax novel where the main figures are heading toward lower moral attitudes in the end of the story. Although rhe story itself ends with bright resolutions (Cathy and Hareton are the ones who finally destroy the evil between their families in the next generation), ,but the death of Heathcliff provide a proof of love that to him it would continues in the next world, whereas to the reader may promote the feeling of catastrophe.

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