Abstract ▼ AI-Helper

This study tried to analyze the passionate love between Catherine and Heathcliff focussed on Heathcliff’s obscure racial identity in Wuthering Heights. In this work two lovers’s love is represented to transcend all social boundaries such as class and race, and even the boundary of life and death. If...

This study tried to analyze the passionate love between Catherine and Heathcliff focussed on Heathcliff’s obscure racial identity in Wuthering Heights. In this work two lovers’s love is represented to transcend all social boundaries such as class and race, and even the boundary of life and death. If we consider that race was everything in a Victorian society, we can see how their love might be rebellious and subversive to the established order. However in Catherine’s love for Heathcliff, there found an ambiguity which is related with Heathcliff’s racial otherness. Even though Catherine’s love to Heathcliff is sincere and intense, she unconsciously realizes his racial otherness as a main obstacle to fulfill their love. That’s why she cannot imagine their marriage and their love is only contained in dream, delirium and other world. This fact that their love could not be realized in this world reflects the force of social reality which denied their love. But this impossibility of their love seems make two lovers express their love more desperately and more intensely. Actually their evocation of their love is so intensely expressed that it gives us the impression that their love can transcend their reality and leads us insensitive to the social contradiction. In this sense, their passionate love serves to obscure the problem of racial otherness of Heathcliff. In the love plot of second generation, the process of Cathy growing to love Hareton who is a kind of personification of Heathcliff is shown to be a process of overcoming her class prejudice of him. Here the writer suggests love means the sympathy for other person’s suffering and the acceptance of other’s otherness. In this meaning of otherness, the racial otherness is shown unable to be contained.

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