How Does Emily Bronte Use Imagery In Wuthering Heights

In Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, she uses a large amount of imagery in order to bring the setting as well as the characters to life for the audience. She is all over with the types of imagery she uses however she mostly gravitates toward either nature and or the supernatural to bring her story to life. Through associating her characters with the ‘calm’ and the ‘storm’,
Bronte is able to to use imagery to introduce symbols that help the audience better understand the characters.
By associating some of her characters with the ‘calm’ Bronte is able to establish symbolism that characterizes some of her characters as lighter beings in the darker realm that is
Wuthering Heights. Many of the lighter characters in Wuthering Heights do not remain
this way for long and are consumed by the storm. However before they are snuffed out these characters; like Catherine are full of light and seem to represent the better things in nature, the things that bring happiness and light to others.
Catherine is a good example of this as she is full of light and love in the beginning of the novel. Catherine was going to fall in love with the one she wanted and live happily ever after. However this is not how things worked out, the darkness that surrounded her finally caught hold of her and she became part of the storm. She began to only care for herself like so many others that live in Wuthering Heights, and it was not long before she began to feed off those around her. The calm in this story are short lived, for they live in a toxic environment that wears them down until they give. However in the end we did have one come back from the storm, Heathcliff. In the end, after a life of bitterness and selfishness something inside Heathcliff awakens and he becomes cheerful again. It is as if he knew his time was almost up and he used what little positive energy he could to go out of this word a part of the light. It’s in this moment we again see Bronte use these light and cheerful words to describe the person Heathcliff has reverted back into.
By associating the rest of the characters with the ‘storm’ Bronte is able to
establish symbolism that shows how living inside the cancerous belly of Wuthering Heights has managed to corrupt the souls of the good and turn them to shadows of their former self. In this column go people like Nelly. Now this is in fact one of the narrators, however that does not exempt them from the facts, and the facts say that Nelly is definitely a force of darkness. Nelly seems to be on everyone’s side, however this is not the case, it only seems like this because Nelly is in fact against everyone. Nelly flips between people and conflicts stirring up trouble and bringing darkness into Wuthering Heights. It is not merely a coincidence that all of the people around
Nelly started off in the light, but as the novel goes on are sucked into the storm. Heathcliff for example, was not a saint but stayed in the calm with this caring personality and his love for
Catherine, but then one day when he overheard Catherine say she would never marry him, he began to shift, and we see Bronte start to use darker and more sinsiter words to describe
Heathcliff from that point on.
By using both symbolic associations between characters and the ‘storm’ and the ‘calm’,
Bronte creates an image of a place where light fights to survive in a place where darkness thrives. In this place people’s lights dont burn too bright or they risk being snuffed out by a darker, more maleficent force. By creating this contrasting nature these two sides of the good and evil scale, the reader gets to watch each character struggle to remain in the ‘calm’ when the
Diana Shaw: redundant ‘storm’ rages just outside their door threatening to suck them in at the slightest hint of
weakness.