Catherine's dilemma between love and marriage in Wuthering Heights [2]
论文作者:佚名论文属性:短文 essay登出时间:2009-04-03编辑:刘宝玲点击率:9842
论文字数:3000论文编号:org200904031240127929语种:中文 Chinese地区:中国价格:免费论文
关键词:呼啸山庄人物关系人物
be a satisfaction for all: her family, the society and even her practical self. “It would degrade me to many Heathcliff now ... if Heathcliff and I married, we should be beggars?” This is her actual worry for her future. Catherine yields to the pressure from her brother, and alike, in truth, she is yielding to the moral rules of society, without the approval and identification of which, she could not live a better life or even exist i
n it at all.
However, Catherine underestimates what her other more intrinsic self would have effect on her. The most remarkable claim by Catherine herself may be the best convincing evidence to distinguish the different roles of Heathcliff and Edgar—her “id” and her “superego”:
“My great miseries in this world have been Heathcliff's miseries, and I watched and felt each from the beginning: my great thought in living is himself. If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else perished, and he was annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger: I should not seem a part of it. My love for Linton is like foliage in the woods: time will change it. I'm well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I'm Heathcliff! He's always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure and more than I am always a pleasure to me, but as my own being. So don't talk of our separation again: it is impracticable.”
It was a happy thought to make her love the kind, wealthy, weak, elegant Edgar, yet in submission to her superego to oppose against her id, she would fall into a loss of the self. Since the id is the most primitive basis of personality, and the ego is formed out of the id, Catherine's life depends wholly on Heathcliff, as the whole connotation and truth of her life in the cosmic world, for its existence and further more for the significance of her existence. Heathcliff is the most necessary part of her being. She marries Edgar, but Heathcliff still clutches her soul in his passionate embrace. Although she is a bit ashamed of her early playmate, she loves him with a passionate abandonment that sets culture, education, the world at defiance. Catherine's wrong choice for marriage violates her inner desires. The choice is a victory for self-indulgence—a sacrifice of primary to secondary things. And she pays for it.
On one hand, Catherine doesn't find the heavenly happiness she was longing for. Though as a girl “full of ambition”and “to be the greatest woman of the neighborhood” would be her pride, the enviable marriage could only flatter her vanity for a second. After her marriage, the comfortable and peaceful life in the Grange was just a monotonous and lifeless confinement of her soul. She feels chocked by the artificial and unnatural conditions in the closed Thrushcross Grange— a world in which the mind has hardened and become unalterable.“If I were in heaven, Nelly, I should be extremely miserable. ” Catherine eventually knows that the Lintons' heaven is not her ideal heaven. She and Heathcliff really possess their common heaven. Just as Catherine says,“Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same; and Linton's is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire.”
Catherine doesn't want to live in the Lintons' heaven; on the other hand, she has lost her own paradise that she ever had with Heathcliff on the bare hard moor in thei
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