"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. …show more content…

Linton is scared of his father, he even says: “… my father threatened me, and I dread him - I dread him!” (Brontё 268). However, the readers of Victorian literature are to be barely surprised as victimized children is the common motif in nineteenth-century literature. (Mcknight).
Victorian novel frequently reveals not only the mistreatment of children, but also the abuse women, as it puts emphasis on treatment of women as well as their role in society. In Wuthering Heights Heathcliff marries Isabella for no other reason than he would use his son for - to take the revenge, and become in possession of Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange. There is to say that under common law, all of a woman’s property becomes her husband’s at marriage. “Marriage, then, as Heathcliff seems fully aware, is the quickest way to usurp a woman’s positioning the line of inheritance and thereby claim her inherited property.” (Lamonica 115). However Heathcliff succeeds to make Isabella fall in love with him and want to marry him, he has to coerce young cathy to marry his son Linton, in order to fulfill his own greedy agenda of acquiring Thrushcross Grange. Heathcliff imprisones Cathy and refuses to let her go back to her dying father until she marries his son. Both