Heathcliff's Demonization And Emily Bront(?)'s Utopian Aspiration

The nineteenth-century England witnesses the emergence of a great many women writers, among whom Emily Bronte is no wonder an outstanding one. She is famous for her novel Wuthering Heights which is generally regarded as a riddle in the history of English literature. Various mysterious and gothic images pervade in the novel, where Emily's talent in wild imagination has been brought into full play. For about 160 years Wuthering Heights has been interpreted from different perspectives. This thesis is attempted to explore some association between Emily Bronte and the protagonist Heathcliff in terms of Freudian psycho-analysis and feminist criticism. In other words, it aims at finding the answer to the question why Emily Bronte creates such a merciless and malicious demon as Heathcliff in her novel.The paper can be divided into four parts.Part one begins with an introduction to Emily Bronte's two worlds, namely, her real world and her fictional world, and an analysis of these two worlds will be made from Freud's psycho-analytical perspective. In her short span of life, Emily Bronte suffered a lot from social constraints and psychological trauma. On the one hand, she was only a woman born into a poor middle-class family in the Victorian Age. On the other, she longs for a life of freedom and equality as men have. Therefore, her natural desire is repressed and she has to find some way to satisfy its needs. In light of Freud's Interpretation of Dreams, human beings' instinctive drive is in most cases repressed and latent, and it is often represented by some manifest images in our dreams. In the case of Emily Bronte, she uses some manifest images in Wuthering Heights to express her repression in reality. Among all these manifest images, the demonized protagonist Heathcliff should be the most significant one. To some extent, Emily communicates her hidden repression from real life through Heathcliff's demonization in the novel.Part two deals with Heathcliff's demonization from three aspects: the root and inspiration of demonization as well as Heathcliff's aspiration after a life of eternal bliss. In line with psychology, when their instinctive drive encounters repression, human beings will easily go mad or become abnormal. Heathcliff suffers a lot of repressions from various aspects, such as society, culture, family and even himself. These repressions are the roots of his demonization. At the bottom of his heart, he wants to release his repressed feelings, so he has to rebel against the unjust world. This rebellious spirit inspires his demonization. He ruthlessly revenges his maltreatment like a demon, but at the same time, like an angel, he rebels thoroughly against the authority to realize his dream of freedom and happiness. In this sense, he is Satan, a Byronic hero, a rebellious angel as well as a demon. He intends to destroy everybody and everything by whatever means to win his freedom and happiness. Unfortunately, all the revenge and rebellion are useless. No matter how maliciously he revenges or how thoroughly he rebels, he still can't get satisfied. Life without Catherine, his soul mate, is like death to him. Only through death can he reunite with his beloved Catherine and pursue a life of eternal bliss. That's why he finally starves himself to death just before he almost destroys everything.Part three associates Emily Bronte the author with the protagonist Heathcliff and further elaborates on the links between the two. As a woman living in the Victorian Age, Emily Bronte suffers more repressions than Heathcliff in the novel. In the patriarchal society of the 19^th century, women are deprived of the rights to discourse. They are silenced and repressed by their society, their culture, their family, and even by themselves. They want to hear their own voice. Many middle-class women writers manage to express their repression by creating mad images or devils in their works, which can be taken as the distorted images of the writers themselves. Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights is Emily Bronte's alter ego. Like Heathcliff, she feels repressed in the patriarchal society. Her natural drive for the pursuit of a life of freedom and equality is repressed by patriarchy, so she creates the image of Heathcliff to show her rebellion against the patriarchal culture. However, at the end of the novel, after Heathcliff's death, the harmony reestablished between Thrushcross Grange and Wuthering Heights shows Emily's Utopian aspiration. On the one hand, she is rebellious against the injustice, while on the other, she longs for a perfect harmonious society of freedom and equality through rebellion.Part four serves as more an inspiration from Emily as well as her novel than simply a summary of the first three parts. In our daily life, all the human beings dream of a heaven of freedom and equality; therefore, Emily's rebellion and aspiration are demonstrations of her nature, hence meaningful and inspiring in her days. However, in the patriarchal culture where only male discourse exists, this rebellion is far from enough and the aspiration is only Utopian, because a total absence of sexual discrimination and the establishment of a free and equal society are impossible. In order to subvert the patriarchal system, repressed women should break down the stereotyped binary opposition of men and women, and struggle for their own rights to discourse.