Comparison of Setting between Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre
In two literary works, Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte and Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, setting plays an important role. Setting can be described as the time and place in which an event occurs. It helps the reader to understand the story and where the character is coming from. Both the authors associate setting to the characters in the story. In Wuthering Heights, the setting represents the nature or characteristics of the characters; while in Jane Eyre, the setting has a function to show the character's development throughout the story.
Title page of original edition of Wuthering Height...
English: The Climb to Top Withens. Thought to be t...
English: Emily Brontë's novel Wutherng Heights ca...Throughout the novel Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte effectively uses weather and setting to give the reader the inside of the personal feeling of the characters. The setting used throughout the novel, helps to set the mood to describe the characters. There are two main settings in Wuthering Heights: the houses of Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange. Each house represents its inhabitants. The wild, uncivilized manner of Wuthering Heights and the high cultured, civilized nature of Thrushcross Grange are reflected in the characters who inhabit them.
Wuthering Heights is a house set high upon a hill where is exposed to extreme weather conditions. The name of the place itself is symbolic of its nature, "Wuthering being a significant provincial adjective, descriptive of the atmospheric tumult to which its station is exposed in stormy weather." (page 2). Heights is a bleak, thick-walled farmhouse surrounded by wild, windy moors. The Heights is "strong," "built with narrow windows and jutting cornerstones," and is "fortified to withstand harsh conditions" (page 2). The path that is nearest to the Heights is long and winding, with "many pits, at least, were filled to a level; and entire ranges of mounds, the refuse of the quarries .