The aesthetic concept of the beauty in Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights

Abstract

This article examines the application of Edmund Burke's aesthetic concept of the beauty in Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights. Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful is a theoretical work which study the human passions at the most basic level. Furthermore, it distinguishes the difference between the sublime and the beauty. The beauty is a passion which arouses love and pleasure. In the same respect, Wuthering Heights is a story full of human passions and it talks about human sufferings and pleasures. The sources of pleasure are expressed variously in Wuthering Heights, for example through lights, colors, smallness, etc. These different elements which are the sources of pleasure in Wuthering Heights make it an appropriate novel for the application of the aesthetic concept of the beauty. Thus, this study aims at exploring the different ways on which the Burke's theory of beauty is expressed in Wuthering Heights.