Wuthering Heights is the story of Heathcliff, a psychological study of an elemental man whose soul is torn between love and hate. The Byronic hero is the natural contact with the great heroic tradition in literature. This examination involves the consideration of the Byronic hero's relationship to the Gothic villain, the motivation behind the Byronic fatal revenge, and the phenomenon of Byronic supernatural manifestations.

Denna uppsats handlar om skillnaden som uppstår mellan två filmer som är baserade på en och samma bok samt hur denna skillnad märks vad gäller den postkoloniala teorin. Filmerna och boken som har utgåtts från är Wuthering Heights (1939) av William Wyler, Wuthering Heights (2011) av Andrea Arnold och boken Svindlande höjder (1847) av Emily Brontë. De teorier som är använda som utgångspunkt för analysen är postkolonialism och intermedialitet. Analysen har en hermeneutisk synvinkel. Slutsatsen visar på att det finns många sätt man kan tolka en text. Hur man än väljer att göra det så gäller det att göra det lika ordentligt som Wyler och Arnold har gjort för att på så vis förmedla det syfte man vill få fram med filmen. Postkolonialismen som Arnold har utgått ifrån har satt sin prägel på filmen på ett intressant sätt genom alla dess aspekter. Wyler som har den typiska Hollywood-strukturen visar också detta i filmens struktur och framförande på sitt fascinerande sätt. En förklaring av omvandlingen kan vara som Anthony Burgess uttrycker sig: ”the verbal shadow turned into light, the word made flesh” (McFarlane, 2004:7).

This essay presents a portrayal of Heathcliff, Catherine and Isabella from a psychoanalytical perspective with regard to four defense mechanisms; namely, repression, denial, sublimation and projection in order to see how these defense mechanisms have affected the characters’ decisions and behaviour, and led them to their destinations in life. It will include three major sections: repression in characters, denial in characters, and sublimation and projection in characters. These terms will be more clearly defined and explained in the subsequent sections.

The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the potential influence of Plato's Symposium on Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, by analyzing similarities between the two texts. Such comparisons, I argue, enhance our reading and understanding of Brontë's novel as a specifically philosophical discourse on metaphysical concepts. By examining the infrastructure of Wuthering Heights, I propose that its specific complexity adheres to models of philosophical inquiry as presented in the Symposium. After my introduction, Chapter 2 investigates the resonances of Aristophanes' speech in Plato's work that are manifest in Brontë's conceptualizations of love: Platonic love, the divided self, and unity of being. Chapter 3 details structural similarities between the two texts, the most important being narrative progression and complexity, are closely examined. Chapter 4 explores similarities between Plato's and Brontë's representations of punishment and discipline, including instances of physical, bodily punishment and examples of punishment aimed at individual reform. In approaching Brontë's novel in terms of, and as, philosophical discourse, this thesis highlights the fair amount of homogeneity between it and the Symposium, and illustrates the validity of an approach to Wuthering Heights which seeks both to clarify and to respect its complexity by searching out its constituent ideas.

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Contemporary analysis of Wuthering Heights necessitates a re-appraisal in light of advancements in the study of incest in non-literary fields such as history, anthropology, and especially psychology. A modern reading suggests that an unconscious incest taboo impeded Heathcliff and Cathy's expectation of normal sexual union and led them to seek union after death. John Milton's Paradise Lost provides a paradigm by which to examine the consequences of incest from two perspectives: that of incest as a metaphor for evil, as represented in Heathcliff; that of incest as symbolic of pre-Lapsarian innocence, as represented in Cathy. The tragic consequences of Heathcliff and Cathy's incestuous fixation are resolved by the socially-condoned marriage of Hareton and Catherine, which illuminates Bronte's belief in the Miltonic theme that good inevitably triumphs over evil.

Wuthering Heights is a composite of opposites. Its two houses, its two families, its two generations, its two planes of existence are held in place by Emily Bronte's careful manipulation of repetitive, yet differentiated, symbols associated with each of these pairs. Using symbols to develop her polarities and to unify them along the imaginatively rendered horizontal axis connecting Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange, the vertical axis connecting the novel's several "heavens" and "hells," and the third dimensional axis connecting the spiritual and corporeal worlds, Emily Bronte gives the divided world of Wuthering Heights an almost perfect symmetry. This study divides the more than seven hundred symbols into physical and nonphysical. The physical symbols are subdivided into setting, animal life, plant life, people, celestial objects, and miscellaneous objects. The fewer nonphysical symbols are grouped under movement, light, time, emotions, concepts, and miscellaneous terms. Verticality and thresholds, the two most important symbolic motifs, are drawn from both physical and nonphysical symbols.

Wuthering Heights was significantly shaped by the pre-Darwinian scientific debate in ways that look ahead to Darwin's evolutionary theory more than a decade later. Wuthering Heights represents a cultural response to new and disturbing ideas. Darwin's enterprise was scientific; Emily Brontë's poetic. Both, however, were seeking to find ways to express their vision of the nature of human beings. The language and metaphors of Wuthering Heights suggest that Emily Brontë's vision was, in many ways, similar to Darwin's.

A modern interpretation of Wuthering Heights suggests that an unconscious incest taboo impeded Catherine and her foster brother, Heathcliff, from achieving normal sexual union and led them to seek union after death. Insights from anthropology, psychology, and sociology provide a key to many of the subtleties of the novel by broadening our perspectives on the causes of incest, its manifestations, and its consequences. Anthropology links the incest taboo to primitive systems of totemism and rules of exogamy, under which the two lovers' marriage would have been disallowed because they are members of the same clan. Psychological studies provide insight into Heathcliff and Catherine's abnormal relationship—emotionally passionate but sexually dispassionate—and their even more bizarre behavior—sadistic, necrophilic, and vampiristic—all of which can be linked to incest. The psychological manifestations merge with the moral consequences in Bronte's inverted image of paradise; as in Milton's Paradise, incest is both a metaphor for evil and a symbol of pre-Lapsarian innocence. The psychological and moral consequences of incest in the first generation carry over into the second generation, resulting in a complex doubling of characters, names, situations, narration, and time sequences that is characteristic of the self-enclosed, circular nature of incest. An examination of Emily Bronte's family background demonstrates that she was sociologically and psychologically predisposed to write a story with an underlying incest motif.

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