Wuthering Heights: Repetition

In this novel, many situations that take place seem to repeat. Because of this, the novel is difficult to follow unless the reader pays extreme attention. Character's names are repeated, such as Catherine, because the original Catherine has a daughter named Catherine. Not only are their names the same, but they have extremely similar personalities. "Catherine Earnshaw, Heathcliff, Linton, the air swarmed with Catherines;..." (Bronte 23). This is one example of how the twisted events that take place in this novel are duplicated. It is only appropriate that the young Catherine was to envelop her mother's personality and not the more tamed and controlled personality of her father. Another duplicated instance in the novel is in the way the young men are treated in Wuthering Heights. When Heathcliff was young he was treated extremely poorly by Hindley. He was treated like a servant even though Hindley's father had treated him as another son. When Heathcliff returns to Wuthering Heights and acquires a great deal of power over Hindley, he treats Hareton equally as poorly as Hindley had treated him. Although their names are not the same like the Catherines, perhaps the fact that all their names begin with H is a significant instance to support the way they act. The way that the story seems to repeat itself is that since both families were significantly different, and thus their marriages to one another proved disastrous, the more they married into each others families (Catherine into the Linton family and Isabella marrying Heathcliff), the more it becomes impossible to tell the difference between the two families, and it foreshadows to the reader that over time the cycle will have repeated so many times that there will no longer be a line dividing the personalities of the families, they will have blended into one dysfunctional self destructive family. This cyclic situation could also indicate that eventually the family will become so intertwined and the cycle will have repeated so many times that it will destroy both families. Both families could be seen as equally destructive to one another due to the fact that they are completely opposite, and so they destroy what is most individualistic about each other, no matter how twisted.