Essay
How is death presented in Mrs Dalloway and Wuthering Heights?
This essay outlines the way in which death is inevitable and the emotions that occur in response e.g. grief, suffering, and misery.
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In Mrs Dalloway, death is presented as an inevitable part of life that permeates everydayreality. It remains to be something that leaves grief, suffering and misery to the ones left
behind after the loss. In Bronte’s novel Wuthering Heights, ghosts of passion roam the
moors for 18 years whereas Woolf focuses on ghosts of war dead impersonal characters
being the source of grief and the way that British stoicism affected the portrayal of such
emotions. Death is also presented through both novels as a cause of resentment within
relationships whether through tired, agitative and fatigued marriage or a relationship
mourned without ever getting the chance to begin. Lastly, both authors explore the way
that love changes a person through the death of one’s past self-reflecting on whether their
lives have changed for the better or worse.
Both Bronte and Woolf use death to indirectly focus their novels on grief, starting with the
way that ghosts of passion roamed the moors. It is the lingering spirits and forbidden love of
Heathcliff and Catherine locked in eternal brace and the ghostly wanderings of menacing
spirits that inhabit the moors, and Heathcliff seems to go into a descent after the death of
his loved one. ‘Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest, as long as I am living! …. I know that
ghosts have wandered on earth. Be with me always-take any form-drive me mad!’, in this
dark monologue Heathcliff reveals his anguish and rage over Cathy’s passing. His speech
begins with an apostrophe, illustrating his refusal to accept that she’s gone by speaking her
name it is like he is attempting to breathe life back into her. More specifically, he calls for
Catherine Earnshaw, the bold, wild girl he grew up with at Wuthering Heights, not Catherine
Linton, the refined woman who betrayed him by marrying Edgar and moving into
Thrushcross Grange. He does not love and grieve the woman who died, but the girl who
lived. In Mrs Dalloway Woolf focuses on death through ghosts of war dead impersonal
characters being the source of grief and British Stoicism. ‘Mrs Foxcroft at the embassy last
night eating her heart out because that nice boy was killed’, is an example of one way of
grief shown throughout the novel this idiom suggests that Mrs Foxcroft is eating her
emotions and Clarissa is criticising her for doing so in public as she is from a class that seeks
to oppress emotion instead of portraying it and express sadness. Not only does Clarissa use
British stoicism as an excuse to judge Mrs Foxcroft but also to judge the rest of the nation as
she criticised the ‘late age of world’s experiences had bred in them all, all men and women,
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