Wuthering Heights Essay - Is Heathcliff truly evil?
I think with the modern understanding of the way childhood affects one's whole perception of life and the world, we would be arrogant to call Heathcliff evil. …show more content…
He becomes attached, if not infatuated by the wild and beautiful Catherine and they form a sort of unworldly passionate relationship on which Heathcliff stakes everything. Imagine then, his deep hurt at Catherine's growing affection for Edgar
Linton and her apparent transformation to a demure society lady. She spurns his affection and blows very hot and cold about her feelings for him. Eventually degraded and abused by Hindley and after having heard Catherine express to her maid that "it would degrade her to marry him", he runs away. We can only imagine how during the following years he must have brooded and obsessed; hating his lowly station ;( he didn't even have a surname, which must have served to reinforce his sense of powerlessness in society). He had shared a wild and passionate love that Catherine had described as resembling …show more content…
We
might suspect that this is a turning point for Heathcliff and every cruel and humiliating deed he does is for the sole purpose of wreaking revenge upon those that thwarted him. He clearly does not love
Isabella, treats her in the most ghastly and brutal way and his complete and bitter despite, he wreaks upon even small wild creatures, such as when he let Catherine's birds die. It is a sad irony that
Catherine never really loved Edgar and though she describes Heathcliff as "mean and jealous - a pitiless wolfish man", it is clear that even on her deathbed that there is a frenzied passion between them. She does not want him to leave even when Edgar comes in. She dies, and there is lost, a curiously innocent but violent love between them.
Heathcliff's behaviour thereafter shows all the traits of the modern psychotic obsessive in many horror/chillers. For instance, in the way he forces his son and Catherine's daughter to re-enact his own destructive love, and how he encourages his son Linton to bully
Hareton.
Heathcliff, a tragic, vulnerable and abused child growing up against
I think with the modern understanding of the way childhood affects one's whole perception of life and the world, we would be arrogant to call Heathcliff evil. …show more content…
He becomes attached, if not infatuated by the wild and beautiful Catherine and they form a sort of unworldly passionate relationship on which Heathcliff stakes everything. Imagine then, his deep hurt at Catherine's growing affection for Edgar
Linton and her apparent transformation to a demure society lady. She spurns his affection and blows very hot and cold about her feelings for him. Eventually degraded and abused by Hindley and after having heard Catherine express to her maid that "it would degrade her to marry him", he runs away. We can only imagine how during the following years he must have brooded and obsessed; hating his lowly station ;( he didn't even have a surname, which must have served to reinforce his sense of powerlessness in society). He had shared a wild and passionate love that Catherine had described as resembling …show more content…
We
might suspect that this is a turning point for Heathcliff and every cruel and humiliating deed he does is for the sole purpose of wreaking revenge upon those that thwarted him. He clearly does not love
Isabella, treats her in the most ghastly and brutal way and his complete and bitter despite, he wreaks upon even small wild creatures, such as when he let Catherine's birds die. It is a sad irony that
Catherine never really loved Edgar and though she describes Heathcliff as "mean and jealous - a pitiless wolfish man", it is clear that even on her deathbed that there is a frenzied passion between them. She does not want him to leave even when Edgar comes in. She dies, and there is lost, a curiously innocent but violent love between them.
Heathcliff's behaviour thereafter shows all the traits of the modern psychotic obsessive in many horror/chillers. For instance, in the way he forces his son and Catherine's daughter to re-enact his own destructive love, and how he encourages his son Linton to bully
Hareton.
Heathcliff, a tragic, vulnerable and abused child growing up against