I love the setting of Wuthering Heights, all tangled in prickly gooseberries with those narrow windows that I can picture so well. In the early chapters, the wind seems to forebode events, and the house windows are portals through to what is always on the "other side", which, depending on your perspective, is trying to get inside of the house or outside of the house. Where is the safest place to escape a haunting?
As to whether Catherine's ghost is real? Based on the text, if I ask myself if Catherine's ghost is 'real' objectively, I can't answer that for myself, never mind the characters in a novel. I believe that the characters who report seeing the ghost perceived and experienced a real phenomenon, one that involved an apparation of Catherine. Whether ghostly Catherine is conjured within the haunted mind of the perceiver or by external forces that we don't fully understand, I don't know. The uncertainty is a mystery that I am happy to wait for the answer to when it's time to move on from this life. What's your take, Colin? Is Wuthering Heights haunted?
Oh yes, I was discussing pathetic fallacy with my kids in the context of The Crucible and The Raven in a beautiful crossover of them studying texts that have Gothic elements, while I’m reading WH. 😍. It’s an interesting literary concept because it’s getting harder for me to see “inanimate nature”. 🤷 I have read a little of dark ecology/eco-criticism and I find myself drawn into the deep dark woods of ecogothic ideas.
I think at this point in the novel (certainly if you were reading for the first time) the question of whether the ghost is real is less relevant as to why there might be a ghost in the first place. So it's not something that needs answering right now and more a conclusion to be reached further along.
I love the setting of Wuthering Heights, all tangled in prickly gooseberries with those narrow windows that I can picture so well. In the early chapters, the wind seems to forebode events, and the house windows are portals through to what is always on the "other side", which, depending on your perspective, is trying to get inside of the house or outside of the house. Where is the safest place to escape a haunting?
As to whether Catherine's ghost is real? Based on the text, if I ask myself if Catherine's ghost is 'real' objectively, I can't answer that for myself, never mind the characters in a novel. I believe that the characters who report seeing the ghost perceived and experienced a real phenomenon, one that involved an apparation of Catherine. Whether ghostly Catherine is conjured within the haunted mind of the perceiver or by external forces that we don't fully understand, I don't know. The uncertainty is a mystery that I am happy to wait for the answer to when it's time to move on from this life. What's your take, Colin? Is Wuthering Heights haunted?
Agreed Angela, the wind, the snow, the rain. A definite trigger for pathetic fallacy, something I think the Brontë sisters were masters at wielding.
Oh yes, I was discussing pathetic fallacy with my kids in the context of The Crucible and The Raven in a beautiful crossover of them studying texts that have Gothic elements, while I’m reading WH. 😍. It’s an interesting literary concept because it’s getting harder for me to see “inanimate nature”. 🤷 I have read a little of dark ecology/eco-criticism and I find myself drawn into the deep dark woods of ecogothic ideas.
I think at this point in the novel (certainly if you were reading for the first time) the question of whether the ghost is real is less relevant as to why there might be a ghost in the first place. So it's not something that needs answering right now and more a conclusion to be reached further along.