A Spiritual Ecological Study Of Wuthering Heights

Wuthering Heights is the English writer Emily Bronte’s only one masterpiece in her life.Its rich themes and peculiar artistic style not only make a great contribution to the author’s position in literary circle but also make it one of the classic English novels in the world. So far, many researchers have studied the novel from different perspectives involving various aspects, but the spiritual ecological awareness has not been adequately studied yet.This paper attempts to study Emily’s Wuthering Heights by applying the theory of spiritual ecology to show spiritual ecological crises embodied in the characters of the novel and ways out of these crises and point out the importance of rebuilding the spiritual ecology.There are five parts included in the paper.Introduction section summarizes Emily’s life and works, literature review on Wuthering Heights and the theory of spiritual ecology and a brief introduction of this thesis.Chapter One analyzes the individual spiritual ecological crises embodied in the novel’s characters based on the theory of spiritual ecology, which mainly focus on alienation and distortion of Heathcliff,spiritual vacuum of Catherine,and incompetence of behavior of Linton.On the basis of the theory of spiritual ecology and intensive textual analysis, Chapter Two discusses the corresponding outlets for those characters’ spiritual ecological crises mentioned in the previous part. Finally, all of them, namely, Heathcliff, Catherine and Linton,make themselves escape from the spiritual crises respectively by means of regression to morality and rationality, recovery of her inner self and rational recognition of inner self.According to the deeper understanding of the theory of spiritual ecology and further textual analysis, this paper puts its importance on illustrating the return of harmonious spiritual ecology from two aspects: the ultimate return of spiritual harmony—recovery of self,the harmonious spiritual ecology embed in the third generation.The last chapter gives a conclusion of summarizing result, and provides somesuggestions for further study as well as points out the limitations of the study in the paper.