The Representation Of Home In Wuthering Heights

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The representation of home in Wuthering Heights According to experts in domestic management, a safe, comfortable and honorable home was very important in British Victorian morality and middle-class respectability. (Towheed, in Watson and Twheed (eds), 2012, p.339).This essay will concentrate on the representation of home in Wuthering Heights by comparing the two houses mentioned in the novel, focusing mostly on Heathcliff’s home and the ideals he adopted compared to Victorian domesticity. The poet Coventry Patmore in his poem The Angel in the House (1863), he created an archetype of Victorian womanhood which was pure, chaste, devoted to her husband, and sympathetic as a part of Victorian ideas about domesticity. (Towheed, in Watson and Twheed (eds), 2012, p.340) Moreover, Ruskin set out his idea of the duties of Victorian men and women inside the home. For Ruskin, the women were homemakers and helpmates to their husbands, who would return from work surrounded by a loving domestic environment. The ‘true nature of home’, Ruskin asserted, was as a ‘place of Peace; the shelter, not only from all injury, but from all terror, doubt and division’. (Towheed, in Watson and Twheed (eds), 2012, p.340). Women should have been devoted to the domestic sphere and act as custodians. Ruskin associated a well-managed and comfortable house with moral correctness. (Towheed, in Watson and Twheed (eds), 2012, p.340) The Victorians had certain beliefs about what home represented. A home was a refuge from the world of work, a heallthy environment for women to bring up children and a place to demonstrate the new goods and values of the middle class. (Towheed, in Watson and Twheed (eds), 2012, p. 465) The major aim of the distribution of space in Victorian residences, is clearly to separate public from private areas, and therefore maintaining the privacy and decency of the

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