Evaluate Emily Bronte as a novelist with reference to Wuthering Heights.
Of Emily Brontë‘s Wuthering Height, David Cecil has a pregnant observation: “Alone of Victorian novels, Wuthering Heights’ is undimmed, even partially, by the dust of time. Alone it stirs us as freshly today as the day it was written.” Emily Bronte, who, before her death at the tender age of thirty, wrote a number of poems, however, has left this singular novel of note – Wuthering Heights – which, however, alone has ensured her a high place in the history of English literature.
Wuthering Heights, however, is no popular story. It is rather a strange sort of work. Emily Bronte‘s theme is a conspicuous deviation from the conventional Victorian tales. It is this very unconventional character of the novel that has retained so much interest of a modern reader in it.
The story of the novel is not at all simple, but rather queer, somewhat exotic, with a mixture of natural human passions and supernatural suggestiveness. Set against an immediate moorland background. Wuthering Heights is a grave chronicle of the two generations of two families, the Earnshaws and the Lintons their moorland homes. The theme is animated with the intense passion of love and vengeance of one Heathcliff, an abandoned child, brought home and reared by Mr. Earnshaw senior. Frustrated in his love for young Catherine Earnshaw, he disappears for a certain period and returns for vengeance and sets about planning to ruin both the families and to possess both the estates himself. The story exhibits, with much dramatic suspense and excitement, his dangerous contrivances, out of his passions of love and revenge, and the supernatural visitant that haunts him and ultimately brings about his death. The novel has the tale of crime and villainy as well as tragic suffering and death. But its plan and pattern are quite unlike of what is seen in David Copperfield, Pendennis, Jane Eyre, or Silas Marner.
The plot of the story may appear, by conventional standards, wild, but it is no where clumsy or unconvincing. Different facts and incidents are carefully worked out to have a clear, though complex, factual structure. Wuthering Heights, as a matter of fact, is no improbable story. Every incident here is the inevitable outcome of a situation. The general outline of the story is thoroughly logical, structurally balanced. As a result, the final impression, left by the story, despite its exotic character, is complete, harmonious. Emily
Bronte creates in the novel a symbolic pattern that extends to the supernatural, emerging out of the natural and merges the dead with the living. Here Wuthering Heights attains the artistic height of the masterpieces of fiction, like Madame Bovery, Persuasion, The Mayor of Casterbridge, and so on.
What is more, Bronte’s story is not remote from the central issues of human life. It is based on the heart of life, so varied yet so intense. Emily Bronte has explored more the inmost, even inexplicable urge of life, than any other Victorian novelist. She has penetrated beneath the outward shows of experiences, found so much in the popular Victorian classics, like Vanity Fair, to the essence of human life and spirit, which constitutes the subject-matter of the great tragedy or epic. “Like Hamlet and the Divine Comedy, Wuthering Heights is concerned with the primary problems of men and destiny. Like Paradise Lost, it sets out ‘to justify the ways of God to Men’. No novel of the world has a grander theme”. (David Cecil), Wuthering Heights seems to initiate the modern English novel on intrinsic human aspects.
It is, however, not the grandeur of its theme that makes Wuthering Heights a great novel. Emily Bronte‘s imaginative propensity is as high as her subject. Indeed, a very few glish fiction writers have an imagination powerful enough to clothe a story on the scale of Wuthering Heights. Her imagination is, no doubt, different from Dickens’s, Mrs. Gaskell’s or her sister Charlotte’s, in range and depth. It has nothing homely or eccentric, nothing dazzling or trivial. It is confined to the elemental and manifests itself in an elemental way. Emile Bronte exhibits the most extraordinary imagination in the world of English fiction. Here she stands on al much higher plane, with an ardour of imagination, stirred equally by the natural and the supernatural atmosphere around her characters.
It is this imagination that makes the setting of Wuthering Heights so captivating. Emily Bronte‘s presentation of the landscape is the most telling one in English fiction. This may not be very minute or precise, distinguishing between different natural sounds, as seen in Hardy. On the other hand, her sketches of different scenes – the sky, trees and the heath-are brief and general. But there is an intensity in her description, and this makes her natural setting real and full of vitality. Her scenic background is no still picture. This is rather a moving picture of an animate being. Different natural elements the moon, the wind and the flowers are all alive in Emily Bronte‘s pages. In fact, she represents nature as the expression of a living dynamic force.
Emily Bronte‘s common characters are as vivid as her setting. They are not unnatural or extraordinary figures. They are drawn in the usual tradition of the Victorian novel, flat rather than round, with some strongly marked personal features to individualise them. They belong exclusively to her story, and are more, like Hardy’s rural figures, massive, impulsive and humorous. Of course, her protagonists are enlivened with intensely human moods and psychological complexities. They are possessed of certain spontaneous human passions, making them both real and individual. What is more, the course of their psychological development, from childhood to maturity, is subtly brought out. This is a rare feature in Victorian fiction.
Lastly, there is the high quality of Emily Bronte‘s craft. Wuthering Heights is structurally as well constructed as it is intellectually enlivened. It is designed neatly, without any loose thread, and has a form that is more sophisticated than the narrative manner of Dickens or Trollope.
