How Does Bronte Use Violence In Wuthering Heights

Bronte’s use of violence forces the reader to understand the strength of feeling in her characters’. Using Wuthering Heights page 118 as your starting point, from ‘She rung the bell till it broke with a twang:’ to the end of the chapter, explore the use and portrayal of violence.

Violence is an essential theme in this novel and is vital to the character’s personalities, that they use it to express their feelings. From reading this section it is evident that Bronte particularly focuses on punctuation, imagery and tenses to create a certain mood. The use of imagery is very apparent from the beginning. Cathy is first introduced as “dashing her head” and “grinding her teeth”. The two present participles, give the reader a sense of immediacy
Lockwood gets a bad introduction to Wuthering Heights when Gnasher –Heathcliff’s dog- attacks him. Heathcliff himself doesn’t get a great introduction to Wuthering Heights, firstly Cathy spat in his face and Hindley constantly hit him and insulted him calling him a “vagabond” and a “gypsy” on several occasions. A prime example of violence upon Heathcliff is in chapter four Heathcliff threatens to tell on Hindley for hitting him -“if I speak of these blows, you will get them again with interest”-so Hindley hits him again. It almost seems as if Heathcliff wants Hindley to hit him so that he has something to hold over him. This is a great example of rising action as this harassment leads to his craving for revenge for the rest of the novel. As with relationships in Wuthering Heights violence and desire go hand in hand. Cathy hits Edgar in chapter eight but he is so besotted with her that he ignores the incident thus refusing to heed the warnings of her troubled behaviour and instead he proposes to her. His desire makes him similar to Heathcliff who has a masochistic attraction to drama – which is the reason he married Isabella to cause friction between the two Lintons and to make Cathy jealous of