Wuthering Heights, the only book Emily Bronte published, became an unanticipated classic, and with its powerful and complex love story, it has drawn multitudes of critics to approach certain concepts from many different angles. The concepts of childhood and innocence permeated throughout the novel and were analyzed in Marielle Sechepine’s essay “Childhood and Innocence in Wuthering Heights” and Joyce Carol Oates’ essay “The Magnanimity of Wuthering Heights”. Childhood and innocence are considered central themes of the novel and are most adequately analyzed when focusing on Catherine and her daughter Cathy. Emily Bronte’s rendition of childhood was peculiar compared to that of the other writers of her time. Marielle Seichepine, a french essayist, …show more content…
Because of the abuse she suffered as a child, Catherine’s growth was stunted. It was late during her pregnancy that she began to acquire a more adult perspective of the world, but she did not gracefully ascend onto maturity. When she looked in the mirror, she did recognize herself, and she began to pluck, from her pillow, “feather[s] picked up from the heath...[where] Heathcliff set a trap over” (Bronte 121). Catherine’s growth from childhood into maturity was so inhibited that she could not even recognize her own reflection and sought to divert her attention away from the idea of childhood by surrounding herself with death, specifically the premature death of the dead birds whose feathers she pulled out from her pillows. In her essay, Oates explained that Catherine's inability to mature was due to her “identification with the frozen and peopleless void of an irrecoverable past” (Oates). Catherine cannot escape the memories of her childhood, so as she grew older, she continued to dwell and live within those memories. She made the connection between the deceased birds and her relationship to Heathcliff because Catherine felt that Heathcliff was a part of her identity as well, but her identification with him is cold and “peopleless”. Their relationship only existed in childhood. Now that they are adults, their feelings towards each other are merely recollections of emotions once felt between children desperate for love. What Heathcliff and Catherine have was not love. It was obsession with an object of the past. Unlike her mother, Cathy Linton demonstrated a transition between child and adult. She endured Heathcliff’s abuse and nursed her ill husband, left “so long to struggle against death alone, that [she] felt and saw only death” (Bronte 283). After being cared for and treated as a child all her lifeCathy demonstrated a shift from