Characterization in Wuthering Heights Essay

Wuthering Heights deals with the very nature of controversy and paradox. The novel expresses deep criticisms of social conventions, and Brontë uses her characters in their incongruous surroundings to exemplify her concerns of the strict social code which she herself was expected to abide by, whilst remaining true to the principles she considered most important. Wuthering Heights challenges orthodoxy with heterodoxy, of which destruction and chaos triumph over social pretensions.

The most undeniably constant difference of aesthetics and values that is presented to us is the juxtaposition of Thrushcross Grange and Wuthering Heights, initially personified by Lockwood and Heathcliff, `a dark skinned gypsy', respectively. Lockwood reckoned that he had acted so coldly to the requited affections of the `real goddess' that was his love, she `persuaded her mamma to decamp'. However, he discovers that relative to Heathcliff, he finds himself extremely sociable, where Heathcliff treats his visitor with the minimum of friendliness and warmth. Following his failure at love, Lockwood, a self-described `misanthropist', rented Thrushcross Grange in an effort to separate himself from society. Ironically, Thrushcross Grange is the epitomising symbol of superficial Victorian society. Wuthering Heights is just as foreign and unfriendly as Heathcliff's character, where `Wuthering' is synonymous with `atmospheric tumult' and wild dogs inhibit the bare and old-fashioned rooms. The casual violence and lack of concern for manners or consideration for other people which characterises Heathcliff here, is the central mood of the whole novel, in which unharnessed, natural hostility is contrasted with the genteel and more civilised ways of living. Both Thrushcross Grange and Wuthering Heights inhabit dogs; however the dangerous nature of the wild dogs emphasises the chaotic and natural atmosphere that is Wuthering Heights, whereas the Linton children of Thrushcross Grange own a