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The Opposing Forces of Wuthering Heights

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The opposing forces of Wuthering Heights.

Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights can be seen as one of the most influential works of fiction produced during the Victorian age. In Brontë’s novel, the reader will encounter many oppositions across several elements of the story. These oppositions play a vital role in the development of both the characters and the plot and have been discussed by many critics. According to Melvin R. Watson, as he describes in his article “Tempest in the Soul: The Theme and Structure of “Wuthering Heights,”” a most influential theory is that of the opposing forces of calm and storm developed by Lord David Cecil (Watson, 88). This theory, however, does not completely encompass the multitude of opposites found in the novel. The oppositions found in Wuthering Heights all serve specific roles in the development of the characters and the plot of the novel.
The universe of the opposing forces of the calm and the storm that can be found within Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is one that encompasses many elements of the story. At the very start of the novel, the narrator, in the form of Mr. Lockwood, gives the reader a detailed description of the house he is about to enter:
Wuthering Heights is the name of Mr. Heathcliff’s dwelling. ‘Wuthering’ being a significant provincial adjective, descriptive of the atmospheric tumult to which its station is exposed in stormy weather. Pure, bracing ventilation they must have up there at all times, indeed: one may guess the power of the north wind blowing over the edge, by the excessive slant of a few stunted firs at the end of the house; and by a range of gaunt thorns all stretching their limbs one way, as if craving alms of the sun. (Brontë, 2)
On that bleak hilltop, the earth was hard with a black frost, and the air made me shiver through every limb. (Brontë, 5)
Entirely in the tradition of the Gothic

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