Our very best writers will produce any essay or term paper you are looking for! We offer reasonable prices and deliver top quality papers on virtually any topic. Our service is available 24/7. Be sure that we are reliable and consistent.
Heathcliff's Obsession
Throughout Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff's personality could be defined as dark, menacing, and brooding. He is a dangerous character, with rapidly changing moods, capable of deep-seeded hatred, and incapable, it seems, of any kind of forgiveness or compromise. In the first 33 chapters, the text clearly establishes Heathcliff as an untamed, volatile, wild man and establishes his great love of Catherine and her usage of him as the source of his ill humour and resentment towards many other characters. However, there are certain tensions, contradictions, and ambiguities present in Chapter 34 that establish the true intensity Heathcliff's feelings towards Catherine; feelings so intense that they border on a jealous obsession.
Chapter 34 begins with a tension in regard to Heathcliff's disposition. Since Heathcliff's countenance has seldom expressed anything but a sullen disposition, certainly nothing even remotely resembling joy, it comes as somewhat of a surprise when in the last chapter, young Cathy, upon seeing Heathcliff, reports that he looks, almost bright and cheerful -- No, almost nothing -- very much excited, and wild and glad (276)! This is entirely unlike the Heathcliff that has been established up until this point. Even Nelly, who is well-accustomed to Heathcliff's personality and dark moods is taken aback by the sudden change, so uncharacteristic of his usual temper --...anxious to ascertain the truth of her statement, for to see the master looking glad would not be an everyday spectacle, I framed an excuse to go in (276). Since Catherine has previously almost always been the cause of such wild mood fluctuations, it stands to reason that she has somehow inspired this wild and frightening joy in him as well.
During the final days of his life, Heathcliff's curious behaviour continues. He refuses to eat, absents himself from the company of Cathy, Hareton, or Nelly, disappears inexplicably for long intervals of time and refuses to explain his absences. Most disturbing, his strange excitement continues, causing discomfort to all those around him, especially Nelly. When Nelly asks him where he was the night before his he began to exhibit this odd elation, he tells her, Last night, I was on the threshold of hell. To-day I am within sight of my heaven -- I have my eyes on it -- hardly three feet to sever me (278)! His statement is ambiguous--it does little to explain his sudden change of humour and little to satisfy Nelly's curiosity and wonder at his state. Joy in most characters in Wuthering Heights is an uplifting state associated with happiness and delighted exhilaration. However in Heathcliff, as Nelly observes, it is a horrible, frightening thing. In Heathcliff, the mood arouses wariness and fear in others and indicates some inner change so dramatic that its cause is almost unthinkable.
Heathcliff offers no coherent explanation for his sudden change of state and the text offers no concrete solution as to what could have caused his dark exhilaration. Thus, the question of his condition is left largely unanswered as Heathcliff continues to exhibit such uncharacteristic behaviour, inspiring all the more uneasiness in Nelly, especially. He frightens her greatly several times with his agitated state. Once, upon encountering him in his room, Nelly tells Mr. Lockwood, I cannot express what a terrible start I got, by the momentary view! Those deep black eyes! That smile, and ghastly paleness! It appeared to me, not Mr. Heathcliff, but a goblin; and, in my terror, I let the candle bend towards the wall, and it left me in darkness (278).
Even Nelly, who has never before, even after many, many years of acquaintance to Heathcliff, shown any intimidation or fear of him despite his blatant displays of brutality, is shaken and haunted by his strange appearance and his agitated condition. So shocking is his countenance that she even asks herself if he is a ghoul or a vampire. Since he is not willing to divulge entirely what it is that is causing him such excitement, Nelly, and all of Bronte's audience, are left to ponder for themselves what could effect such a change.
Of course, the only thing previously that has caused Heathcliff to fluctuate so wildly in his moods and to hover between such dramatically varying temperaments is Catherine. Nelly, having been witness to Heathcliff's fits of passion and rages in regard to Catherine before is shrewd enough to credit his appearance and strange condition to her former mistress, even though she has been dead for many years. Heathcliff has previously professed the misery Catherine's death has caused him and stated his desire to be close to her -- his anticipation to meet her when he dies.
When Nelly attempts to serve Heathcliff food in the last chapter she finds Heathcliff watching some invisible apparition with rapt attention. Though Nelly admonishes him for his refusal to eat and his poor condition, he never moves his eyes from whatever it is he sees -- one may assume it is vision of Catherine, since his expression is a conflicting one of both pleasure and pain, in exquisite extremes...(280). Little else could arouse such extreme emotion in Heathcliff, and nothing else, it seems, could make them apparent on his face. Apparently Heathcliff, seeing himself near death, and despite their present separation, feels himself as near to Catherine as he can possibly be given the fact that he is still alive. And given this relative proximity, his mood has been heightened to a delirious agitation at the prospect of seeing her again.
With this anticipation, the text introduces another contradiction. Heathcliff assumes that he will be united again with Catherine in eternal bliss when he dies. Given this belief, Heathcliff apparently believes that Catherine is in heaven. He has admitted to Nelly numerous times that he is an evil man, merciless, and bent on revenge towards his enemies, even if it means hurting those who have never wronged him--young Edgar Linton, and young Cathy, in particular. Heathcliff realizes that he is filled with hate and vengeance and makes no excuse for his behaviour. Yet, since he imagines himself being reunited with Catherine after his death, he apparently feels that he will go to heaven when he dies. This is a curious contradiction coming from a man who recognizes his evil and makes no attempt to reform himself. Maybe Heathcliff holds no beliefs concerning heaven or hell, but in the last chapter, he tells Nelly how close his soul is to bliss, which seems to indicate that he does believe in something following death.
When Heathcliff does finally die, the cause of his death is never really ascertained. His countenance in death is almost a smile, at the same time a sneer, according to Nelly--a look of life-like exultation. His countenance doesn't suggest which end he met--the sneer he wears in death is close to his normal expression in life. It must be assumed that his obsession with Catherine, his desperate yearning to be with her, and his longing for death was what ultimately killed him.
Our very best writers will produce any essay or term paper you are looking for! We offer reasonable prices and deliver top quality papers on virtually any topic. Our service is available 24/7. Be sure that we are reliable and consistent.
A Farewell to Arms: Style Critics usually describe Hemingway's style as simple, spare, and journalistic. These are all good words; they all apply. Perhaps because of his training as a newspaperman, Hemingway is a master of the declarative, subject-verb-object sentence. His writing has been likened to a boxer's punches--combinations of lefts and rights coming at us without pause. Take the following passage: We were all cooked. The thing was not to recognize it. The last country to realize they were cooked would win the war. We had another drink. Was I on somebody's staff? No. He was. It was all balls. The style gains power because it is so full of sensory detail. There was an inn in the trees at the Bains de l'Allaiz where the woodcutters stopped to drink, and we sat inside warmed by the stove and drank hot red wine with spices and lemon in it. They called it gluhwein and it was a good thing to warm you and to celebrate with. The inn was dark and smoky inside and afterward when you went out the cold air came sharply into your lungs and numbed the edge of your nose as you inhaled. The simplicity and the sensory richness flow directly from Hemingway's and his characters'--beliefs. The punchy, vivid language has the immediacy of a news bulletin: these are facts, Hemingway is telling us, and they can't be ignored. And just as Frederic Henry comes to distrust abstractions like patriotism, so does Hemingway distrust them. Instead he seeks the concrete, the tangible: hot red wine with spices, cold air that numbs your nose. A simple good becomes higher praise than another writer's string of decorative adjectives. Though Hemingway is best known for the tough simplicity of style seen in the first passage cited above, if we take a close look at A Farewell to Arms, we will often find another Hemingway at work--a writer who is aiming for certain complex effects, who is experimenting with language, and who is often self-consciously manipulating words. Some sentences are clause-filled and eighty or more words long. Take for example the description in Chapter 1 that begins, There were mists over the river and clouds on the mountain; it paints an entire dreary wartime autumn and foreshadows the deaths not only of many of the soldiers but of Catherine. Hemingway's style changes, too, when it reflects his characters' changing states of mind. Writing from Frederic Henry's point of view, he sometimes uses a modified stream-of-consciousness technique, a method for spilling out on paper the inner thoughts of a character. Usually Henry's thoughts are choppy, staccato, but when he becomes drunk the language does too, as in the passage in Chapter 3: I had gone to no such place but to the smoke of cafes and nights when the room whirled and you needed to look at the wall to make it stop, nights in bed, drunk, when you knew that that was all there was, and the strange excitement of waking and not knowing who it was with you, and the world all unreal in the dark and so exciting that you must resume again unknowing and not caring in the night, sure that this was all and all and all and not caring. The rhythm, the repetition, have us reeling with Henry. Thus, Hemingway's prose is in fact an instrument finely tuned to reflect his characters and their world. As we read A Farewell to Arms, we must try to understand the thoughts and feelings Hemingway seeks to inspire in us by the way he uses language.
Word Count: 599
Copyright 1999-2004 Wow Essays, All Rights
Reserved
Design by Dream Net Studio
