"Wuthering Heights" by Emily Bronte: How has your understanding of the representation of the younger generation been shaped by different approaches?

Essay by sugarnspice1000High School, 12th grade February 2007

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The younger generations' lives are shaped and influenced greatly by the actions and deeds of the elder generation. Their lives are impacted quite heavily from Catherine and Heathcliff's broken relationship. To understand the younger generation, one must first recognize and realise the full impact that the elder generation really had on the younger one. Education and class play a huge factor in their relationships and by looking at these different approaches, their relationships can be redefined. By looking at their relationships from different approaches, it has highlighted the way in which Bronte is commenting on her society and showing in many cases the inadequacy of the emphasis that is placed on certain features.

The novel "Wuthering Heights" is centred pre-dominantly around Catherine and Heathcliff's love affair. Their relationship is doomed to survive in the society which they live and thus Catherine marries elsewhere. It is because of this broken relationship that Heathcliff is bent on revenge against the Linton family, in the hopes of gaining retribution and settling the score that he feels he has against not only the Linton family but also of members of the Earnshaw family.

Step by step, Heathcliff takes control of the younger generation, in the hopes of avenging his losses. After Hindley's death, he brutalises Hareton in retaliation of the treatment he received as a child from Hindley. Isabella, too, dies, and he seizes their son, Linton, whom Edgar had sought to care for. Finally, he decoys Cathy to Wuthering Heights where he forces her to marry Linton. In this way, he gains control of both houses, and ultimately the control of both families

The ideas and value of class and society plays an important feature in the shaping of the younger generation. Heathcliff, deprived of an education by...