Violence in Wuthering Heigh and Jane Eyre

1921 Words8 Pages
“Violence” in Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre ‘Violence: Behaviour involving physical force intended to hurt, damage, or kill someone or something’. This definition of violence is quite classical. Whenever you would ask someone about violence, he would probably give you this answer or something similar but the notion of violence is something huge. This notion is vast and does not implies only physical pain; morality, society, otherness looks… Violence can be everywhere and in many ways. The vast subject that violence is always had a great place in literature: from Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey passing through romance of chivalry during Middle Age to the most recent crime novel, violence is a major topic and all its aspect is developed. We shall study the idea of violence in two novels written by Emily and Charlotte Brontë, two of the greatest authors of the nineteenth century: Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. Both novels deals with the idea of violence. We shall study how this notion is broach in those novels, showing the different types of violence used in Brontë’s sisters work in a quite classical way literary speaking then what violence in the novels shows of society in the nineteenth century. First and foremost, the presence of violence must not surprise the reader as he should know that it is a usual process in Romantic and Gothic literature. The characters will have to face violence of the elements and a hard questioning about themselves. The elements of violence that are in the novels are ‘basics’ of that kind of literature. To emphasize the definition given at the beginning of this study, we might say that physical violence is something almost omnipresent in Wuthering Heights. Right from the start in the firsts chapters, Mr Lockwood has to survive a dog attack, then in his dreams he has to face all his demons… Through the novel, all the
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