ROMANTIC ELEMENTS IN WUTHERING HEIGHTS

The major characteristics of Romanticism can be seen in a reading of Wuthering Heights:

 the imagination is unleashed to explore extreme states of being and experiences

 the love of nature is not presented just in its tranquil and smiling aspects but also
appears in its wild, stormy moods
 nature is a living, vitalizing force and offers a refuge from the constraints of
civilization
 the passion driving Catherine and Heathcliff and their obsessive love for each
other are the center of their being and transcend death
 so great a focus is placed on the individual that society is pushed to the periphery
of the action and the reader's consciousness
 the concern with identity and the creation of the self are a primary concern
 childhood and the adult's developing from childhood experiences are presented
realistically
 Heathcliff is the Byronic hero; both are rebellious, passionate, misanthropic,
isolated, and willful, have mysterious origins, lack family ties, reject external
restrictions and control, and seek to resolve their isolation by fusing with a love
object
 Hareton is the noble savage and, depending on your reading of the novel, so is
Heathcliff
 Brontë experiments with the narrative structure (the Chinese-box structure in
which Lockwood narrates what Nelly tells him, who repeats what others told her),
 the taste for local color shows in the portrayal of Yorkshire, its landscape, its
folklore, and its people,
 the supernatural or the possibility of the supernatural appears repeatedly