Various glass objects, usually mirrors and windows, play a seemingly omnipresent role in the construction of Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights; Rarely does a chapter pass without the reader receiving a description of a character walking past a window, looking in a mirror, or some other similar activity. Yet we should not find this persistent imagery too strange; the natural properties of glass “impermeability, lucidity, fragility” make it an excellent symbolic correlative for several characters in the novel. Specifically, Catherine and Heathcliff are fully reflected (literally and figuratively), and thus magnified as characters, in the various glass images that abound in Wuthering Heights. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay. Catherine, like all great tragic characters, ultimately fails (at least in life) because of her tragic flaw, namely her erroneous and persistent goal. with which she makes important decisions. Her decision to marry Edgar Linton, for example, is based on her desire to help Heathcliff by becoming rich, and while this feeling is sincere, it is equally misplaced; we know that it is her marriage to Linton that ultimately leads to Catherine's death and Heathcliff's lifelong torment. Catherine's self-destructive nature is symbolically anchored in the hurtful glass images that continually surround her. This system of glass images manifests itself in the early chapters of the book, as when Catherine's ghost infiltrates Mr. Lockwood's dream and attempts to enter through his window: "Who are you?" I asked, meanwhile struggling to free myself. “Catherine Linton,” she replied, shuddering (why did I think of Linton? I had read Earnshaw twenty times for Linton), “I'm coming home, I had lost my way. on the moor! » While he spoke, I obscurely saw the face of a child looking out of the window: terror made me cruel; and, finding it useless to try to shake the creature, I pulled his wrist to the broken window and rubbed it back and forth until the blood flowed and soaked the sheets: he was still moaning: “Let me in!” and maintained his stubborn anger, almost exasperating me with fear. (III, 18) This passage, one of the most vivid and horrible in all of Bronte, presents itself as a proleptic scene of violence and carnage. Because it takes place within the framework of Lockwood's dream, Brontë is able to introduce her symbolic imagery without hindrance; the limitless possibilities of dreams allow the narrator to introduce her harsh themes of broken glass (anticipating Catherine's own fragility) and blood (representing the anemic descent of Catherine's life) without having to maintain any sort of faithful realism . The destruction, introduced so hyperbolically in this first passage, reasserts its force in chapter XII at a crucial moment in Catherine's life. Having already made the fateful choice to marry Linton, and now barely holding on to her own sanity, Catherine looks in the mirror and is confused, mistaking her own form for a more insidious creature: "It's back there again!" she continued anxiously. “And it moved. Who is it ? I hope this doesn't come out when you're gone! Oh! Nelly, the room is haunted! I'm afraid of being alone! I took his hand in mine and told him to calm down; for a succession of shivers shook her, and she kept looking out of the window. “There’s no one here!” I insisted. "It was yourself, Mrs. Linton: you knew it fora long time. (XII, 91) Once again, the glass was revealed to be a symbol of Catherine's demise, as the earlier devastation of slit wrists and bloody glass is here transformed into a destruction of identity, of reason and of oneself. Catherine's inability to recognize her own figure reveals the extent of her self-destructive impulse, her penchant for viewing herself as something monstrous, something deserving of pain and ruin. When Nelly pushes Catherine away for her stupidity, stating "Why, what's the matter?" » “Who's a coward now? " Wake up ! It's the glass – the mirror, Mrs. Linton; and you see yourself in it, and I too am at your side" (XII, 91), the reader recognizes that it is precisely the "coward [ice]" that Nelly cites which allows Catherine to be so easily represented and repressed by the imagery of glass. Just as Catherine was too cowardly to marry Heathcliff over Edgar, her cowardice now prevents her from literally considering herself or the seriousness of her actions. The glass is therefore a bodily realization and a reflection of Catherine's repressed guilt; by denying the reality of her actions to the point that she can no longer recognize herself, Catherine allows herself to be hurt, forcing herself to be hurt, on the very fragments of her own fractured consciousness. Bronte employs a curious linguistic ploy in the above. section repeatedly using the word "mirror", a word that does not appear in any other section of the novel. For all the other characters in the work, such as Heathcliff, the mirrors are called "the glass": Oh, Heathcliff, you show an evil spirit! Come to the glass and I'll let you see what you should want. Do you mark these two lines between your eyes? and those thick eyebrows which, instead of rising and curving, lower in the middle; and this pair of black demons, so deeply buried, who never boldly open their windows, but hide beneath, brilliant, like the devil's spies” (VII, 41). This scene is rather revealing of Heathcliff's character, and perhaps helps to explain precisely why only Catherine looks into the "mirrors", while Heathcliff looks into the "glass"; Aside from the obvious implications of the Latin and Anglo-Saxon connotations of the two words, this bifurcation in naming highlights the important fact that mirrored glass represents different traits in different characters. While for Catherine the glass reflects internal currents of self-destructive behavior, Heathcliff's relationship appears to be one of imprisonment and domination. The passage above, for example, lists a series of Heathcliff's flaws, inherent physical characteristics that eternally prevent Heathcliff from assuming a position equal to that of Edgar Linton. This failure to live up to society, to fail in its outward appearance, is found again towards the end of the book, shortly before Heathcliff's death, when Nelly tells Heathcliff that he "just has to looking into a glass to see.” how [he] needs both [food and sleep]” (XXXIV, 244). For Heathcliff, then, the imagery of the glass represents something rather opposite to what it represents for Catherine; while the glass presents Catherine with a reality that she cannot accept, it presents Heathcliff with a vision of self-limitation that he must accept, a vision that is all too real. The glass reconstructs for Heathcliff his own socially constructed impotence; indeed, even when he is not looking at it, the glass still represents Heathcliff's exclusion from society, as is the case in Chapter VI when Heathcliff looks at Catherine and the Lintons from the opposite side of a window. This exclusionary property of glass resurfaces in the Hauts de,.