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Explore the Different Types of Love Shown in Wuthering Heights

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Explore the Different Types of Love Shown in Wuthering Heights
Explore the different types of love shown in Wuthering Heights
Pages 70 -75
The love shown in Wuthering Heights on pages 70-75 is not only those of morality love, but also love that aches, and both types are each, for a different man. The simpler of the two is that of which Catherine feels for Edgar.
Having chosen to marry Edgar, through no other reason than it is moral option; Catherine feels no true love towards him. When conversing with Nelly, and questioned on just what it is that Catherine loves about him, it is apparent, that she struggles to find an emotionally invested response. The responses that she does return to Nellys question, consisting of the adjectives, ‘handsome’, ‘pleasant’ and ‘rich’ all show that Catherine feels for Edgar’s appearance, which is also evidential later in the passage; ‘He is young and rich now, and I have only to do with the present.’ This further shows the reader that Catherine’s love for Edgar is far from reliable, nor worth losing Heathcliff over.
Catherine’s fight between both her heart and her head causes her to feel that Nelly is taunting her and doesn’t understand the dilemma of her situation; ‘but if you will not mock at me, I’ll explain it..’ and further mentions that she can only give a small insight of how it is she feels; ‘I can’t do it distinctively.’ The fact that Catherine feels quite apprehensive towards letting Nelly in on her ‘secret’, a secret in which she and she alone feels ownership over, which fails to include Heathcliff’s feelings toward her, shows that this love, the love for Heathcliff, is much harder to explain, hence she can find no words to describe it, compared to that of her love with Edgar. She later goes on to explain how in a dream, she visions herself in heaven and how she ‘broke her heart with weeping to come back to earth...’ This could be considered a vision into the future, in which due her decision, the decision to marry Edgar, she would eventually be in heaven, but without Heathcliff.

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