Students Gate: A Sample Character Analysis of Wuthering Heights

A Sample Character Analysis of Wuthering Heights

Main Points

Catherine Earnshaw

Introduction
Wild Nature
Tendency to Own Everything
Status-conscious Social Climber
Conflicted Loyalties
Prejudiced
More of a Ghost

Ellen "Nelly" Dean

Introduction
Personality
Auto Biographer
The Unreliable Housekeeper
Double Agent

Brief Explanation

Catherine Earnshaw

· Introduction

Catherine Earnshaw is the main female protagonist of the novel “Wuthering Heights”. To give a brief introduction to her and the role she played in the novel, she is the daughter of Mr. Earnshaw, sister of Hindley, foster sister and true love of Heathcliff, wife of Edgar, mother of Cathy. There are basically two sides to Catherine: Catherine Earnshaw and Catherine Linton. (She also fantasizes about a third, Catherine Heathcliff—which her daughter later becomes.) Gorgeous and fiery with dark curls and penetrating eyes, Catherine is a woman in conflict— she craves the luxury, security, and serenity of ultra-civilized Edgar, even as she runs wild across the moors with brooding and unkempt Heathcliff. She loves Heathcliff with a huge and overwhelming passion. She is impetuous, proud, and sometimes haughty.

· Wild Nature

Catherine possesses a wild, passionate nature which initially is presented when she spat at Heathcliff on discovering that he was the reason for her father losing the whip she was to get. Further evidence of Catherine's wildness can be seen from the pledge she and Heathcliff made: "promised fair to grow up as rude as savages" in response to the tyranny of Hindley. It was as Nelly said-: "one of their chief amusements, to run away to the moors in the morning and to remain there all day, and the after punishment grew a mere thing to laugh at." Catherine is defiant of authority and seemed to enjoy the wrath of others-: "she was never so happy as when we were all scolding her at once" Catherine's passionate nature, evident throughout her childhood, seemed not to exist in her early months of her marriage to Edgar. Her passion was described as-: "gunpowder which lay as harmless as sand because no fire came near to explode it"

· Tendency to Own Everything

Wild, impetuous, and arrogant as a child, Catherine grows up getting everything she wants. She regards it as her right to be loved by all though she was the love of Heathcliff's life. When two men fall in love with her, she torments both of them. She never refused Heathcliff; rather she said if she could get married to Edgar, she would be able to support Heathcliff with money. Ultimately, Catherine's selfishness ends up hurting everyone she loves, including herself.

Wuthering Heights: Character Analysis

· A Woman with a Double Characteristics

While Catherine is wild, willful and passionate, she also possesses a double character. Her five-week sojourn at the Grange awakens in her an appreciation of the civilized world. When she returns to the Heights, both manner and appearance have changed and is shocked in the appearance of Heathcliff and Edgar. From then on, Catherine adopts a split personality - an amusing lady-like disposition in the company of the Lintons and returning to her wild passionate self when accompanied by Heathcliff. The duality of Catherine's character revealed a crisis point with her marriage to Edgar - the one event in the novel above all others which determine the futures of the central characters. Catherine's marriage to him is a betrayal of her nature. Not only has she broken with her kindred spirit, Heathcliff, but she has physically removed herself from the wildness and freedom from the Heights and the crags. This choice made by Catherine favored wealth, civilization and social position over her natural affinity with the untamed, uncivilized world represented by Heathcliff.

· Status-conscious Social Climber

Catherine is also a status-conscious social climber as She declared her wish to be 'the greatest lady in the neighborhood" as the materialistic side to her personality begins to assert itself. She worries how others see her and she confesses to Nelly it would degrade her to marry Heathcliff. she remarks that marrying to Edgar will bring her solvency and happiness. On the other hand, if she marries Heathcliff, she is going to be a beggar. Later on, her marriage to Edgar destroys Heathcliff.

· Conflicted Loyalties

At the end of Catharine’s role in the novel, it remarks a significant characteristic of Catherine. The location of Catherine’s coffin symbolizes the conflict that tears apart her short life. She is not buried in the chapel with the Lintons. Nor is her coffin placed among the tombs of the Earnshaws. Instead, as Nelly describes in Chapter XVI, Catherine is buried “in a corner of the kirkyard, where the wall is so low that heath and bilberry plants have climbed over it from the moor.” Moreover, she is buried with Edgar on one side and Heathcliff on the other, suggesting her conflicted loyalties.

· Prejudiced

In the beginning of the novel, we find Catherine Earnshaw as a prejudiced character. Her prejudice towards Heathcliff plotted the climax of the whole novel. Subsequently, her prejudice was proved false as Heathcliff became a rich man and Catherine’s life with Edgar was not happy.

· More of a Ghost

In terms of Gothic elements, Catherine is more of a ghost. Even after being haunted, she never forgets Heathcliff, and she wants to fulfill her desires which she couldn’t fulfill in her life time. Catherine’s actions after becoming haunted make us to think that she is trying to repent for her deeds.

Ellen "Nelly" Dean

· Introduction

The main narrator of the novel is referred to as Ellen, her given name, to show respect, and as Nelly among those close to her. The novel is from her point of view; we see every character (aside from Lockwood) through her eyes. Nelly is a servant to three generations of the Earnshaws and two of the Linton family. Humbly born, she regards herself nevertheless as Hindley's foster-sister (they are the same age and her mother is his nurse). She grows up with Hindley, Catherine, and Heathcliff and works at both Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange. Nelly is confidante to many, including both Catherines, Isabella, and even Heathcliff. She cares for Hareton when he is an infant and is a mother-figure to the younger Cathy. Though a servant, she is educated and articulate. Frequently, she does more than observe; she becomes very involved in her employers' lives.

· Personality

Nelly has advanced not only house management and cleaning skills, but also an innate ability for telling a good story. She is also a capable caregiver. Above all else, Nelly is a gossip, not afraid of telling stories and injecting herself into everyone else's business. It is unknown, though, how much of a liar Nelly is. Inconsistencies in her story lead many to believe that she has a higher opinion of herself than others do. Nelly is a decent housekeeper and does have a knack for taking care of children, especially those very young. Despite her meddling, she is not a very good manipulator, as things very rarely go her way.

· Auto Biographer

To analyze the narration made by Nelly, it is apparent that her own life was accumulated with the life of Earnshwas, Lintons and Heathcliff. Thus, her narration is not only a story of the people mentioned there but also her own autobiography. This narration is a pretty much evident of her own life. She has nothing of her own separated in the novel other than the related stories with the characters discussed.

· The Biased Housekeeper

The characteristic which has made “Wuthering Heights” is more interesting is its unreliable narrator. It's the character of Nelly Dean, in fact, that transforms this book from a simple tortured romance and revenge drama into a masterpiece. Sometimes she takes side as in, "Hindley hated him, and to say the truth I did the same" (4.52).

Since the story is not told plainly, as Nelly officially interjects her thoughts into the narrative at times and she also unofficially registers her opinions on all matters of her employers' behavior. While she describes herself as being there for most of the major events, whether or she actually was is open for debate, for the majority of the characters she describes, like Catherine herself, are already dead and her stories can't be confirmed. In fiction, the idea that a character is telling the truth is almost always taken for granted. In life, however, people lie all the time, for reasons that are so complicated that they can never truly be pulled apart. In a way, Bronte is trying to circumvent the narrative form by detailing an aspect of human nature (gossip, lying, inflating one sense of self) that is all too common but truly difficult to capture in story form, since the reader has been trained to trust what the characters and narrators tell them. In general, when we encounter a liar in fiction, they're either heart of gold scoundrels or the villains. But Nelly Dean is either. Instead, she's just a maid trying to sell a story to a passerby. There's no evil, though, just a story around a fire meant to entertain. So who knows what's true and what's not? For Nelly (and in general, the reader), it's more about how the story's told.

· Double Agent

As Lockwood figures out pretty quickly, Nelly Dean has the inside scoop on the Earnshaw-Linton melodrama. She is trusted by the members of both houses, so she is a pretty good source for the story. Nelly has been excommunicated from Wuthering Heights at least two times that we know of. When Heathcliff first arrives as a child, she leaves him on the landing of the stairs and, as she tells Lockwood, "Inquiries were made as to how it got there; I was obliged to confess, and in recompense for my cowardice and inhumanity was sent out of the house" (4.50). She further confesses, "Hindley hated him, and to say the truth I did the same" (4.52). All of this suggests that the very person we rely upon for the facts was a participant in Heathcliff's childhood humiliations. When Heathcliff reaches the climax of his manic behavior, Nelly wonders, "Is he a ghoul, or a vampire?" (24.46)—only to remind herself of the infant he once was and that such musings are absurd. Another issue to consider is Nelly's reliance upon several other narrators to piece together the story—Isabella, Dr. Kenneth, gossipy villagers, and credulous shepherd boys. While she is a much more useful and informed narrator than Lockwood, she is also flawed, biased, and overly identified with the Lintons. When Nelly begins narrating to Lockwood, we don't suddenly get the "real story," but rather another representation of the "truth." It's easy to forget that the novel is Lockwood's journal, which is itself a recording of Nelly's oral narration. Lockwood hopes to find in Nelly a "regular gossip," though she believes herself to be a "steady" and "reasonable" character whose familiarity with books qualifies her as a storyteller. She will indeed provide some clarity to the complicated family tree, but she is no omniscient narrator—not by a long shot. By her own confession, she and the other villagers (several of whom fill in the gaps of her story) don't like outsiders, and they have a tendency toward superstition. Finally, Nelly seems to find the whole conflict between the families pretty entertaining.