This essay explores the multitude of ways that happiness can be interpreted throughout the two main female characters Nelly and Cathy. Exploring the notion that the male dominated world holds the key that inspires different perspectives on finding happiness and what it really is.
Explore Bronte’s presentation of women’s attempts to find happiness in chapter 9
Bronte explores different interpretations of women’s attempts to find happiness within
Wuthering Heights, especially through 2 main female characters Nelly and Cathy. She uses
both of these strong female voices as mouthpieces used to represent how happiness can be
interpreted differently depending on the class difference and the extent to which
expectations were so unalike. She also explores women’s attempts of finding happiness
within a male dominated world with different perspectives on what love really is which is
very much contrasted between Cathy and Isabella. To do this Bronte represents happiness
through marriage and the destruction of such a thing and whether marriage and happiness
really coincide with each other.
By using two different female characters Nelly and Cathy who both hold completely
different social statuses as mouthpieces throughout the play, Bronte is able to explore how
money, security and social status can hold a power over the amount of happiness somebody
could have. Nelly is a key narrator in Wuthering heights and also the maid for not only
Wuthering Heights but also Thrushcross Grange and so she was almost isolated to these
buildings as she spent all of her time there growing up as she ‘was almost always at
Wuthering Heights’ because her ‘mother had nursed Mr. Hindley Earnshaw’ and so she had
‘got used to playing with the children’ and running errands at a young age suggesting that
Wuthering Heights and her job as a maid was all she had ever known as she provides the
reader with a clear image of her work ethic and her close relationship with the family
through the years. By Bronte telling the readers about Nelly’s background and life growing
up as a lower-class woman in the Victorian era it suggests that Nelly has never really had
chance to feel true happiness herself as she has only witnessed and provided it to and from
others throughout her life and never really had a chance to attempt to find happiness
herself. This is due to constantly being so active and attending to her duties suggested by
Bronte’s use of a powerful adjective ‘incapacitated’ before a noun ‘calamity’ suggesting that
when Nelly was ill and couldn’t work, she had found it difficult to be so inactive and not help
make Mr Heathcliff happy because as at the time a maids job would have been to do what
was told or expected of them and make their boss happy. Therefore, when we witness
Cathy as a mouthpiece throughout the play especially at the beginning, she tends to be a
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