The letters at the end of our edition of Wuthering Heights shed light a little bit as to why Catherine went through the motions of marrying Edgar. I was glad to read these because if you’ve read my comments prior, you know that this was my biggest argument with the novel. I felt like I had experienced unrequited love one times too many in my lifetime already that it is just disturbing to read the tale of someone doing it willingly and supposedly to no fault of their own (or so the reader is lead to believe).
Instead, the letters display a sense of how women’s rights were allotted to sort of force them into marriage if they wanted to be secure and stable in any sense of the word. For example, a woman would be expected to marry the much wealthier man over the poorer man, despite whatever she would feel inside towards the two men because when it came down to it, they needed to put together the ideas of love and stability into a single unit. This must have caused a great number of compromises within a woman in order to just continue to survive in the world.
I believe that the Brontë wrote about the injustice in women’s property rights in hopes of planting the seed of revolution into the minds of the female readers, but it would appear that this is the extent of her efforts to cause anything to happen. Perhaps she passed before she did things to truly revolutionize the world of women or perhaps this was the only effort she felt comfortable pushing forward with.
2 comments:
The fact that Bronte herself never married, and viewed the act with "deep ambivalence" (p 10), shows in the story. Her sisters being victims of failed or unrequited love/passion is also evident in the story. The passion of Heathcliff and Catherine sort of leads to their destruction, since it cannot come to fruition and leads Catherine to leave Heathcliff behind. I think her view of the rights and actions of women in her time is evident in the story and in the characters. The opening passage on biographical and historical contexts helped to understand, a little bit at least, why Bronte wrote her characters the way that she did.
I agree that the letters were extremely insightful and pertinent to understanding characters' motivations. However, I don't think I agree with your belief that Bronte wrote Wuthering Heights specifically to plant "the seed of revolution." I think, like Charlotte insinuated, Emily was somewhat recluse and, even though she obviously understood the culture of the time, she was not immersed in society. I can't pinpoint her motivation for the novel, but I don't think she was expecting to spark revolutionary change (unfortunately).
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