Emily Bronte?s novel ?Wuthering Heights?, is a product of the Victorian era, reflecting a revolutionary, almost iconoclastic contrast with external, ordered, rigid, puritanical, pompous, decadently grand Victorian personal-social fabric, and internal completely personalised free-play of individualism. This laid the ground for the future era of the psychological novel. Wuthering Heights marked the inception of this kind of novel. It is a story of darkened and heightened passions and love.The Victorian era was a singular mixture of the medieval mysterious magical Goth, the romantic notion of the pure countryside and the perverted urban world, and the prudery of the age itself. The interplay of all these are seen in this novel.Wuthering Heights is a place in Yorkshire.The lonely landscape of Yorkshire with its peat and bogs, gorse bush and heather, rough granite hewn topography, rough peasantry, bring out the romantic, the practical, the mysterious with all the gloomy to diabolical shades, and a kind of purity through a process of purgation. The whole story unfolds in this place, hence the name. The name symbolizes too the psychological state of the characters. Passions are strained, they are smothered, withered away and yet they reach great heights.The story is written in the narrative style, infusing the past into present. The present concerns a tenant, Lockwood, living in Thrushcross Grange, owned by Heathcliff, who lives at Wuthering Heights. Lockwood takes shelter at Wuthering Heights, one stormy night, and bizarre incidents there, leave him speechless. Lockwood, when back to his rented place at Thrushcross Grange, asks his housekeeper Nelly or Ellen Dean, about the strange happenings and people of Wuthering Heights. It is through Ellen that the story unfolds, gradually, in the third person narrative.Ellen was a housekeeper at Wuthering Heights originally. The past owners of the Heights were the Earnshaws. This was most clearly felt, when the senior Earnshaw had brought Heathcliff in as a child, an orphan. He was wild, unkempt, prone to violence, but brooding, quiet, keeping to himself. It seemed that he had nobody to support him, and was an orphan, which was probably why he could not respond to affection easily, yet the harshness itself was something he resented, and bred a negative field within him. He was a victim of continual breeding ground of seething resentment, hatred and violence. Why the senior Earnshaw coveted him was a mystery. Hareton hated him from day one. He would continually beat him up, whenever he had the chance, or ask the old servant Joseph to do so. The mistress disliked him, but just avoided him. Nelly also had the usual humane feelings for him.Catherine was Hareton?s sister. She had a wicked, wild, high, animal, playful spirit, and the open countryside, craggy, had bred an uncontrollable violent streak in her, as well as loveable.She loved Heathcliff but married Edward of neighbouring Thrushcross Grange, as per maintaining social norms.This leads Heathcliff to leave, seek his fortune and take revenge in a series of ways. Cathy dies at childbirth, Heathcliff dies many years later as if hearing her call.Both were buried side by side.
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