The erotic is not separated from the economic, or from the passage of power and land across generations.
14) until she learns the truth of his brutality – but those fantasies take their place within a carefully plotted story about inheritance, intermarriage and theft. It is fascinated by the power of fantasy, particularly erotic fantasy, in people’s lives – Isabella thinks of Heathcliff as ‘“a hero of romance”’ (ch. It sets its extraordinary actions in a vividly realised family history and landscape. Wuthering Heights is also a highly organised and rationally planned novel, with a complex time scheme and several interlocking narrators. The book is full of animals, spirits and ghosts, and those, like Heathcliff, about whom we can never be sure. The book is fascinated by what lies at the limits of the human and is haunted by the forces of death and the diabolical, by compulsive modes of behaviour, by infantile and sublimely powerful emotions, by the force of irresistible will, and by the terrible consequences done to human beings by radical evil. 12) or when Heathcliff breaks through the side of Catherine’s coffin or hangs his wife Isabella’s dog from a hook in the garden.
The book plays with death, courts death, stages death, even jokes with death, as we see when the dying Catherine is haunted by the face in the ‘black press’ (ch. Terror stalks the book and defines so many of its central relationships, concerned as it is with the ecstatic, eerie and mad. Wuthering Heights creates a world of passionate intensities, in which particular events are burned on the characters’ and readers’ memories, beyond reason, measure or reserve.
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