Tragic Heroes?

Question

Here's my dilema:
I have to write an essay bout wheter or not Heathcliff is a tragic hero (Wuthering Heights is the book). I have some great points on both sides of the argument, but am having trouble chosing which side to support. I tried a paper proving it and another probing he wasnt but have been having major trouble oranizing my essay. can anyone give me tis as to how i should organize this paper and which side to chose.

please dont just link me places...ive been to them all.
also anyone know why hareton is so loyal to heathcliff?

Answer 1

"Wuthering Heights centers around the story of Heathcliff. The first paragraph of the novel provides a vivid physical picture of him, as Lockwood describes how his “black eyes” withdraw suspiciously under his brows at Lockwood’s approach. Nelly’s story begins with his introduction into the Earnshaw family, his vengeful machinations drive the entire plot, and his death ends the book. The desire to understand him and his motivations has kept countless readers engaged in the novel.

Heathcliff, however, defies being understood, and it is difficult for readers to resist seeing what they want or expect to see in him. The novel teases the reader with the possibility that Heathcliff is something other than what he seems—that his cruelty is merely an expression of his frustrated love for Catherine, or that his sinister behaviors serve to conceal the heart of a romantic hero. We expect Heathcliff’s character to contain such a hidden virtue because he resembles a hero in a romance novel. Traditionally, romance novel heroes appear dangerous, brooding, and cold at first, only later to emerge as fiercely devoted and loving. One hundred years before Emily Brontë wrote Wuthering Heights, the notion that “a reformed rake makes the best husband” was already a cliché of romantic literature, and romance novels center around the same cliché to this day.
However, Heathcliff does not reform, and his malevolence proves so great and long-lasting that it cannot be adequately explained even as a desire for revenge against Hindley, Catherine, Edgar, etc. As he himself points out, his abuse of Isabella is purely sadistic, as he amuses himself by seeing how much abuse she can take and still come cringing back for more. Critic Joyce Carol Oates argues that Emily Brontë does the same thing to the reader that Heathcliff does to Isabella, testing to see how many times the reader can be shocked by Heathcliff’s gratuitous violence and still, masochistically, insist on seeing him as a romantic hero.
It is significant that Heathcliff begins his life as a homeless orphan on the streets of Liverpool. When Brontë composed her book, in the 1840s, the English economy was severely depressed, and the conditions of the factory workers in industrial areas like Liverpool were so appalling that the upper and middle classes feared violent revolt. Thus, many of the more affluent members of society beheld these workers with a mixture of sympathy and fear. In literature, the smoky, threatening, miserable factory-towns were often represented in religious terms, and compared to hell. The poet William Blake, writing near the turn of the nineteenth century, speaks of England’s “dark Satanic Mills.” Heathcliff, of course, is frequently compared to a demon by the other characters in the book.
Considering this historical context, Heathcliff seems to embody the anxieties that the book’s upper- and middle-class audience had about the working classes. The reader may easily sympathize with him when he is powerless, as a child tyrannized by Hindley Earnshaw, but he becomes a villain when he acquires power and returns to Wuthering Heights with money and the trappings of a gentleman. This corresponds with the ambivalence the upper classes felt toward the lower classes—the upper classes had charitable impulses toward lower-class citizens when they were miserable, but feared the prospect of the lower classes trying to escape their miserable circumstances by acqu

"The Tragic Hero

The tragic hero is an individual who sacrifices themselves for the benefit of another, and in the end is left unhappy. Often times, these characters are tortured souls who, in some facet of their personality, are relatable to the audience. These characters (for the simple reason that, at their core, humans do not change much over time) are easy to empathize with. The reader is able to put themselves in the hero’s position and sympathize with the hero as well. In works such as Wuthering Heights, Brave New World, Oedipus Rex, and Hamlet the tragic hero loses in the end while sending a message to those around him.

Wuthering Heights- In Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff is a tragic hero in the sense that he, in the end, did not get what he wanted, yet many of the people around him did. Heathcliff ended up bitter and in search of revenge due to the way he was treated by those around him, and, despite getting his revenge, he still did not end the novel satisfied. What makes Heathcliff relatable is the reality that we all find ourselves in situations where we do not get what we want. Of course, Heathcliff's distress is on a far more magnified scale than most of ours, but so is the way of literature."

"Well you mention Shelley as a possible model for Heathcliff. Heathcliff is though, often described as a Byronic hero.

Patsy Stoneman: Yes, and I think this is equally valid. And Emily and Anne read Byron, and I think they were immediately struck by the character of Childe Harold, who is very close to Byron himself, who is an exiled wanderer: lonely, yearning, communing with wild landscapes, loving mountains and tumultuous skies much more than cities and civilised places. So that’s one aspect of the Byronic hero. But I think another aspect which is perhaps less in people’s minds nowadays, because we don’t read these poems so much, is the kind of hero that appeared in Byron’s dramatic narrative poems like The Corsair and Manfred. And these characters are bold, adventurous, decisive, even sometimes violent, but also harbour a kind of hidden anguish in their souls. Because, in the case of Manfred, he is tormented by the fact that he’s had an incestuous relationship with his sister in the past, and in the case of the Corsair, he has a very loved wife at home who is dying, and in fact he’s prevented from getting home before she dies. So there is all this grief and love, combined with very conventionally masculine, that is outgoing and adventurous, characters. So Heathcliff matches the model of the Byronic hero in that sense as well.

Amanda Smith: Well it seems to me that Heathcliff also does become something of a model for the male hero of later romantic fiction: the dark flashing eyes, the brooding personality, the mysterious past, the intense passion, and cruelty. I’m not sure why this kind of man is such a compelling archetype, though I must say I do feel the attraction. Do you have any thoughts on this?

Patsy Stoneman: Well my opinion actually is that Heathcliff is not particularly a model for later work, and I think this is true of Wuthering Heights as a whole. Despite its hold on readers’ imaginations, it hasn’t actually founded a school of writing in the same way that Jane Eyre has for instance. And if you’re looking for Byronic heroes that have formed a tradition, I think that Mr Rochester is actually a much stronger candidate. He also has the brooding temperament, the dark secret in the past, the kind of craggy looks and so on. But in the case of Rochester, he really is sort of tameable, and all he’s looking for is the right woman and he does become quite domesticated in the end. Whereas in Wuthering Heights I think it’s quite difficult to imagine Heathcliff, under any circumstances, actually just marrying Catherine and settling down to be a husband and father. And you’ll remember that in the novel, when Catherine is mocking Isabella, for having fallen in love with Heathcliff, she says, ‘You know, he’s not a rough diamond, he doesn’t conceal a bleeding heart behind a rough exterior. He’s a rough, pitiless, wolfish man’. And I think that for these reasons, he’s not really a kind of very manageable model for later romantic fiction, and people have been very selective in the bits of him that they’ve chosen to imitate.

Amanda Smith: And on Radio National, this is Great Lovers. I’m Amanda Smith, and I’m speaking with Patsy Stoneman, a Bronte specialist from the University of Hull in Yorkshire, in the United Kingdom, about Emily Bronte’s Great Lovers: Catherine and Heathcliff.

Now Patsy, this is clearly a tragic love story, but it’s not a conventional love story, and it’s not a conventional tragedy. Can you tease out how Wuthering Heights is different from our other great tales of tragic passion?

Patsy Stoneman: In most of the other love stories, like Tristan and Isolde, or Romeo and Juliet, there’s an element of ‘if only’, or ‘when we are married’, or ‘in the future’. Whereas in Wuthering Heights the oneness seems to be already achieved. Catherine says, ‘Nelly, I am Heathcliff’, or even worse than that, it’s not in the present, it’s in the past, it’s something that they had when they were children and they have lost. And I think that this explains the tragic element in Wuthering Heights. It’s not that Catherine marries somebody else, it’s that they can’t re-achieve that oneness without going back to being children, it’s a regressive kind of emotion. And so they either have to go back or else they have to die in order to achieve it."

Answer 2

You really must decide for yourself if Heathcliff is or is not a tragic hero. Try using Aristotle's guidelines to support an argument for or against; it's an easy way to organize a paper.

As for the two essays you are using for reference, which one seems more convincing to you? Why does that one work better for you? You could always compare the two essays in your paper, to show why you decided Heathcliff is/is not a tragic hero. Begin by stating that Heathcliff is/is not. Give a clear thesis to show your intention of using these two essays to prove your belief, and go from there. And try not to stress too much; it's not hard. :)

Answer 3

I don't see Heathcliff as being a tragic hero. He's more of the antithesis of a romantic hero. He is often compared to a demon by the other characters in the book. He has a a desire for revenge against Catherine and Edgar. He is abusive to Isabella.

His actions are not Heroic at all.