"The Victorian elements in Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontё"

The Victorian Era, in which Brontё composed Wuthering Heights, receives its name from the reign of Queen Victoria of England. The era was a great age of the English novel, which was the ideal form to descibe contemporary life and to entertain the middle class. Emily, born in 1818, lived in a household in the countryside in Yorkshire, locates her fiction in the worlds she knows personally. In addition, she makes the novel even more personal by reflecting her own life and experiences in both characters and action of Wuthering Heights. In fact, many characters in the novel grow up motherless, reflecting Emily’s own childhood, as her mother died when Emily was three years old. Similarly, the vast majority of the novel takes place in two households, which probably is a reflection of author’s own comfort at home as whenever she was away from home she grew homesick. Emily Brontё’s single novel is a unique masterpiece propelled by a vision of elemental passions but controlled by an uncompromising artistic sense. However, despite the relative invisibility of Victorian influence in the plot and content, the attitudes of the Victorian Era make some impact on the story, and the novel is considered not only a form of entertainment but also a means of analyzing and offering solutions to social and political problems.
Brontё may not highlight the social aspects in the novel, nevertheless the indications of Victorian society’s problems are significant. By provinding characters such as Heathcliff, Lockwood, and Catherine, she communicates various aspects of homelessness. The life of the Ernshaw family changes for good the night an orphan child arrives at Wuthering Heights. The boy is being named Heathcliff, “the name thus signifies his acceptance but also his difference and implied inferiority; in lacking the family