1.All the action of Wuthering Heights takes place in or around two neighboring houses on the Yorkshire moors—Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange.
In Wuthering Heights,Brontë constantly plays nature and culture against each other.Nature is represented by the Earnshaw family,and by Catherine and Heathcliff in particular.These characters are governed by their passions,not by reflection or ideals of civility.Correspondingly,the house where they live—Wuthering Heights—comes to symbolize a similar wildness.On the other hand,Thrushcross Grange and the Linton family represent culture,refinement,convention,and cultivation.
3.Yes.
Catherine and Heathcliff’s passion for one another seems to be the center of Wuthering Heights,given that it is stronger and more lasting than any other emotion displayed in the novel,and that it is the source of most of the major conflicts that structure the novel’s plot.
The most important feature of young Catherine and Hareton’s love story is that it involves growth and change.Early in the novel Hareton seems irredeemably brutal,savage,and illiterate,but over time he becomes a loyal friend to young Catherine and learns to read.When young Catherine first meets Hareton he seems completely alien to her world,yet her attitude also evolves from contempt to love.Catherine and Heathcliff’s love,on the other hand,is rooted in their childhood and is marked by the refusal to change.In choosing to marry Edgar,Catherine seeks a more genteel life,but she refuses to adapt to her role as wife,either by sacrificing Heathcliff or embracing Edgar.In Chapter XII she suggests to Nelly that the years since she was twelve years old and her father died have been like a blank to her,and she longs to return to the moors of her childhood.Heathcliff,for his part,possesses a seemingly superhuman ability to maintain the same attitude and to nurse the same grudges over many years.
5.One of the novel's central conflicts is that between Catherine's social ambitions and her love for Heathcliff.
The location of Catherine’s coffin symbolizes the conflict that tears apart her short life.She is not buried in the chapel with the Lintons.Nor is her coffin placed among the tombs of the Earnshaws.Instead,as Nelly describes in Chapter XVI,Catherine is buried “in a corner of the kirkyard,where the wall is so low that heath and bilberry plants have climbed over it from the moor.” Moreover,she is buried with Edgar on one side and Heathcliff on the other,suggesting her conflicted loyalties.Her actions are driven in part by her social ambitions,which initially are awakened during her first stay at the Lintons’,and which eventually compel her to marry Edgar.However,she is also motivated by impulses that prompt her to violate social conventions—to love Heathcliff,throw temper tantrums,and run around on the moor.
