"I Am Heathcliff!" A Study On The Prototypes Of Heathcliff In Wuthering Heights

Emily Bronte's (1818-1848) only novel, Wuthering Heights, has received voluminous comments and interpretations which has diverged greatly since it was published, and its author, Emily Bronte, is called a "sphinx of literature" for her mysticism. Various mysterious and gothic images pervade in the novel, where Emily's talent in wild imagination has been brought into full play. This thesis attempts to explore some association between Emily Bronte and the protagonist Heathcliff in terms of Emily's unique personality, life experience and her living background and to find out the prototypes of Heathcliff in Emily's world. In other words, it tries at the same time to help the reader get a deeper understanding of Emily Bronte and give her a new interpretation and spirit through the revealing of the process of the creation of Heathcliff.The thesis is divided into three chapters.Chapter One is the introduction to Emily Bronte. It elaborates Emily Bronte's life experience and unique personality in her short life span. Emily Bronte's mother died when Emily was only three years old and her early experience of school days at Cowan Bridge turns out to be a great misery, which would make her physically sick and bring her mental turbulence. At the same time, she is only a woman born into a poor middle-class family in the Victorian Era when women were deprived of the rights to discourse. She longs for a life of freedom and equality as men have. She also suffers a lot from social constraints and psychological trauma. Lonely childhood and long time to struggle with the wild weather and adversity formed her character of introversion; poor communication; self-contain; sullenness; stubbornness; reticence and masculine. The last part of this chapter serves as Emily Bronte's complex of moorland. The Brontes' house was located in a large curacy, nearly half of which was in uncultivated heaths. Since her childhood, she has cherished a love for nature. She could not conform to the rules of the society and her health broke down again by great homesickness, which prompted her to go back to Haworth so that she could seek freedom and happiness on the wild moors. In the novel, Heathcliff's deep love for the moorland is the reflection of Emily's complex of moorland.Chapter Two handles the analysis of Heathcliff and his demonization. It begins with the brief review of Wuthering Heights and an analysis of Emily Bronte from Freud's Psyco-analytical prospective. 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 Wuthering Heights, Emily uses some manifest images to express her repression in reality. 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. This chapter also analyzes the roots and manifestation of Heathcliff's demonization to elaborate further the links between Emily and Heathcliff. In this sense, Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights is Emily Bronte's alter ego.Chapter Three digs out other prototypes of Heathcliff in Emily's world-her father Patrick Bronte. According to some autobiography of The Brontes, her father is a domineering, irritable and unsociable person. So he has a high resemblance to Heathcliff. And besides that, her brother Branwell Bronte is another prototype of Heathcliff. Branwell fell in love with a woman who had married and seventeen years older than him. After the failure of his love affair, he made himself drunk to remove his sorrow that also happened in Heathcliff in the novel after getting successful revenge. And Byronic Heroes, which has much influences on Brontes. Also, some characters in her early creative work-Gondal, can be considered as the original prototype of Heathcliff. Therefore, they are all prototypes of Heathcliff.After the analysis of the prototype, we can dig out some hidden implications in the novel from a new and different perspective to provide the reader with more enlightenment and speculation.