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.
