ANAYLYSIS PAPER ("Wuthering Heights" & "Their Eyes Were Watching God")

Lei Dennis-Osuagwu
03-27-03
2A/B

ANALYSIS

In Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte and Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neal Hurston, Catherin and Janie seems to have a lot in common, they both are victims of passion and love. Catherine was never given an opportunity to show her true self, she was never really allowed to love Heathcliff, Janie was also not allowed to love and know love as she wanted to, because grandmother always seemed to stand in her, she was also forced to marry Logan Killicks just as Catherine was forced to marry Linton, but Janie was given an opportunity to find love on her own, after running to Jody, she found out that the love she thought she knew and wanted wasn’t really what she wanted after all; she finally found a place to lay her heart in the arms of Virgible Woods aka “ Tea Cake”, whom she later lost. Wuthering Heights was centered on the passionate love of Catherine and Heathcliff. When all is said and done, Heathcliff and Catherine are the story. Their love started as a youth and Catherine loves Heathcliff but she could never lower her self to his standards. Catherine Earnshaw is the dominant female spirit which prevails the novel. She is a character dominated by obsession and her single greatest obsession is her love for Heathcliff. It is this which controls her life and gives a sense of meaning, purpose and direction to her existence. Catherine and Heathcliff’s misfortunes, recklessness, willpower, and destructive passion are unable to penetrate the eternal love they share. Throughout Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff's personality could be defined as dark, menacing, and brooding. He is a dangerous character, with rapidly changing moods, capable of deep-seeded hatred, and incapable, it seems, of any kind of forgiveness or compromise. Janie is a user of metaphor. As a girl, she figures her life as a “tree in bloom.” Dreaming of a man who will be “bee to her blossom,” Janie rejects bourgeois marriage as an ideal. After Joe Starks's death frees her to dream again, she dreams of journeying to the horizon in search of people. She realizes both dreams through Tea Cake. Janie spent her days looking for love. She thought of love just as she thought of the elements of springtime: Sunny days, bright skies, a bee pollinating pear tree blossoms. She searched far and wide for this kind of perfect love. Janie searched for the special love that she saw between the bee and the bloom for a long time. She finally found it in Tea Cake, but had to kill him. Killing him was probably the biggest act of love made in her whole life.