Emily Bronte - The conflict between nature and civilization in Wuthering Heights

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The conflict between nature and civilization in Wuthering

Heights

As Charlotte Bronte mentioned on sister Emily’s Wuthering Heights: ”…She did

not know what she had done;” creative artists “work passively under dictates
[they] neither delivered nor could question.”

I can say that Emily Bronte knew what she was doing when approaching the
issues of the Wuthering Heights. The antagonic play between nature and culture
in Bronte’s vision were of great impact at the time and I could say that this is a
reason why Wuthering Heights is a literary masterpiece.

The Romantic elements come together and offer us beautiful and intense images.
First, the “strange” story: non-normative, original, powerful, imaginative. Then
the characters, intense, passionate, violent – we can easily notice the emotional
excess. Then another romantic element, the super-natural brought to light by
the anti-rational and by the primitive folk legends. We also must note the
internal and external conflicts: nature vs. civilization, wild vs. tame, natural
impulses vs. artificial restraint.

In order to understand the conflict between nature and civilization in Wuthering

Heights, we must first analyze the main characters, representing in their own
way the nature and the civilized world. The Earnshaw family comes together with
nature when the Lintons are a symbol for the culture.
A representative member of the Earnshaw family is Catherine. She is beautiful
and charming, but she is never as civilized as she pretends to be. In her heart
she is always a wild girl playing on the moors with Heathcliff. She regards it as
her right to be loved by all, and has an unruly temper. Heathcliff usually calls her STUDENT ONLY - FUN ZONE:
Cathy and, very interesting, Edgar usually calls her Catherine.
Heathcliff is another distinct member of the Earnshaw family. He is of unknown
descent, and he seems to represent the wild and natural forces which often
seem amoral and dangerous for society. His devotion, almost inhuman, to
Catherine is the moving force in his life. He is cruel but magnificent in his
consistency, and we, as readers, can never forget the fact that at the heart of
the grown man lies the abandoned, child of the streets in Liverpool.
On the other hand we have the Lintons. Edgar Linton, in contrast to Heathcliff, is

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Emily Bronte - The conflict between nature and civilization in Wuthering Heights

a gently bred, a refined man, a patient husband and a loving father. Charlotte
Bront�, in her preface to the 1850 edition of Wuthering Heights, refers to Edgar
as "an example of constancy and tenderness," and goes on to suggest that her DISTRACTIE SI SUPER FUN:
sister Emily was using Edgar to point out that such characteristics constitute true
virtues in all human beings, and not just in women, as society tended to believe.
However, Charlotte's reading seems influenced by her own feminist agenda.
Edgar's inability to counter Heathcliff's vengeance, and his naïve belief on his
deathbed in his daughter's safety and happiness, make him a weak, if
sympathetic, character.
As members of the gentry, the Earnshaws and the Lintons occupy a precarious
place within the hierarchy of late eighteenth - and early nineteenth-century PENTRU CARIERA TA:
British society. At the top of British society was the royalty, followed by the
aristocracy, then by the gentry, and then by the lower classes, who made up the
vast majority of the population. Although the gentry, or upper middle class,
possessed servants and often large estates, they held a fragile social position.
The social status of aristocrats was a formal and settled matter, because
aristocrats had official titles. Members of the gentry, however, held no titles, and
their status was thus subject to change. A man might see himself as a
gentleman but find, to his embarrassment, that his neighbors did not share this
view. A discussion of whether or not a man was really a gentleman would
consider such questions as how much land he owned, how many tenants and
Tips & tricks:
>
servants he had, how he spoke, whether he kept horses and a carriage, and eScoala este un proiect
national la care poate
whether his money came from land or "trade"—gentlemen scorned banking and participa oricine. Omul cat
commercial activities. traieste invata sau poate
invata si pe altii :)
Considerations of class status often crucially inform the characters' motivations in
Wuthering Heights. Catherine's decision to marry Edgar so that she will be "the
greatest woman of the neighborhood" is only the most obvious example. The
Lintons are relatively firm in their gentry status but nonetheless take great pains
to prove this status through their behaviors. The Earnshaws, on the other hand,
rest on much shakier ground socially. They do not have a carriage, they have
less land, and their house, as Lockwood remarks, resembles that of a "homely,
northern farmer" and not that of a gentleman. The shifting nature of social status
is demonstrated most strikingly in Heathcliff's trajectory from homeless waif to
young gentleman-by-adoption to common laborer to gentleman again (although
the status-conscious Lockwood remarks that Heathcliff is only a gentleman in
"dress and manners").

The environment the characters live in is another way to understand the conflict
between the nature and the civilization in the writing. First, we must note that
Wuthering Heights is a place of wildness, passion and life while the Thrushcross
Grange is a place of convention and culture and stands up for a refined way of
life. The constant emphasis on landscape within the text of Wuthering Heights
endows the setting with symbolic importance. This landscape is comprised
primarily of moors: wide, wild expanses, high, and thus infertile. Moorland
cannot be cultivated, and its uniformity makes navigation difficult. It features
particularly waterlogged patches in which people could potentially drown. Thus,
the moors serve very well as symbols of the wild threat posed by nature. As the
setting for the beginnings of Catherine and Heathcliff's bond (the two play on the
moors during childhood), the moorland transfers its symbolic associations onto
the love affair.

Bront� constantly plays nature and culture against each other. The characters
are governed by their passions, not by reflection or ideals of civility.
Correspondingly, the house where they live in.
When, in Chapter VI, Catherine is bitten by the Lintons' dog and brought into
Thrushcross Grange, the two sides are brought onto the collision course that
structures the majority of the novel's plot. At the time of that first meeting
between the Linton and Earnshaw households, chaos has already begun to erupt
at Wuthering Heights, where Hindley's cruelty and injustice reign, whereas all
seems to be fine and peaceful at Thrushcross Grange. In this chapter we first
hear Heathcliff speak for a long time, and it is worth noting how his language
differs from the narrators we have heard so far. He is more expressive and
emotional than the other two, and his speech is more literary than Ellen's and
less artificial than Lockwood's. He tends to speak in extreme and vibrant terms:
expressing his scorn for Edgar Linton's cowardice and whiny gentility, he says:
"I'd not exchange, for a thousand lives, my condition here, for Edgar Linton's at
Thrushcross Grange not if I might have the privilege of flinging Joseph off the
highest gable, and painting the housefront with Hindley's blood!" He admires the
comparative luxury of the Grange and recognizes its beauty, but he remains
entirely devoted to the freedom of his life with Cathy, and cannot understand
the selfishness of the spoiled children: "When would you catch me wishing to
have what Catherine wanted?" His devotion to Cathy is clear, and appears to

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Emily Bronte - The conflict between nature and civilization in Wuthering Heights

him to be completely natural and inescapable: "she is so immeasurably superior

to them to everyone one earth; is she not, Nelly?" He admires her for her
bravery, and he possesses that same kind of bravery.

The image of the two civilized children inside the beautiful room, and the two
wild children outside both boy and girl of similar ages makes the glass of the
window take on the role of a kind of mirror. However, the "mirror" shows the
complete opposite rather than the true images of those who look into it.
However, the influence of Wuthering Heights soon proves overpowering, and the
inhabitants of Thrushcross Grange are drawn into Catherine, Hindley, and
Heathcliff's drama. Thus the reader almost may interpret Wuthering Heights's
impact on the Linton family as an allegory for the corruption of culture by
nature, creating a curious reversal of the more traditional story of the corruption
of nature by culture.

Bront� tells her story in such a way as to prevent our interest and sympathy
from straying too far from the wilder characters, and often portrays the more
civilized characters as despicably weak and silly. This method of characterization
prevents the novel from flattening out into a simple privileging of culture over
nature, or vice versa. Thus in the end the reader must acknowledge that the
novel is no mere allegory.

Bibliography:
Armstrong, Nancy. "Emily Bront�: In and Out of Her Time." In Bront�,
Emily,Wuthering Heights, ed. William M. Sale, Jr., Norton Critical Edition (New
York: W. W. Norton, 1990), 365–377. First published in Genre XV (Fall 1982):
243–264.
Eagleton, Terry. "Wuthering Heights." In Myths of Power: A Marxist Study of the
Bront�s, 97–121. London: Macmillan, 1975.
Jones, Judy and William Wilson. "A Bedside Companion to the Nineteenth-
Century English Novel." In An Incomplete Education, 216–240. New York:
Ballantine, 1987.
Kermode, Frank. "A Modern Way with the Classic." New Literary History 5
(1974): 415–34.
Kiely, Robert. "Wuthering Heights: Emily Bront�." In The Romantic Novel in
England, 233–51. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1972.
Miller, J. Hillis. "Emily Bront�." In The Disappearance of God: Five Nineteenth-
Century Writers, 157–211. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963.
Pool, Daniel. What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew: From Fox Hunting
toWhist—The Facts of Daily Life in Nineteenth-Century England. New York: Simon
& Schuster, 1994

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