COMPARATIVE ESSAY

        Comparing PRIDE AND PREJUDICE and WUTHERING HEIGHTS:

    

    Wuthering Heights tells about the love between the heroine,Catherine Earnshaw and her father’s adopted son,Heathcliff and how this love destroys their lives and the lives of those around them.

          Pride and prejudice centers on Benet family,consisting of the bookish Mr Benit,his wife and their five daughter,the love story between Darcy and Elizabeth started the wrong way but ends a happy ending.

        There are a number of differences in both novels. the narrative structure is very different. Pride and Prejudice use a chronological method, told by a limited 3rd person narrator. Wuthering Heights begins at present (for them) and then is told as a series of flashbacks, sometimes through letters, but with two different first-person narrators.  Pride and Prejudice reads chronologically, with someone telling about the characters. Wuthering Heights skips around (making it a bit confusing and mysterious), and you hear the story through the eyes of the characters.

         The mood of the novels is very different too. Pride and Prejudice is a more typical normal love story (boy meets a girl, complications arise, boy gets the girl), while Wuthering Heights deals with the deeply passionate but tragic love between Catherine and Heathcliff . BOTH novels deal with social/economic class separating the lovers, but Heathcliff and Catherine never overcome this separation and are kept apart (until they die). 

         Unlike Pride, Wuthering contains Gothic elements. There is a strong suggestion of supernatural occurrences, ghosts, etc. all through Wuthering Heights. The primary effect of these elements is the dark and gloomy mood of the story. In addition, the novel also suggests that the ghosts of Heathcliff and Catherine are together after they died, there is a pretty disturbing scene of Heathcliff digging up Catherine's grave to see her body, and there are several mentions of seeing unnatural things, and the ghost of Catherine walking the moors in search of Heathcliff and her home. Pride and prejudice has none of these elements.

          Lastly, both works, are not biographical, were influenced by the authors' lives. Emily Bronte wrote about the area where she lived - in Yorkshire, England - and the moors and landscapes play a huge role in which she lived, work. However, Jane Austen wrote Pride and Prejudice to poke fun at the rules and customs of the society in which she lived. It is lighthearted and satirical, in contrast to the darker mood of Heights.