Pride and Prejudice and Wuthering Heights are each concerned with young people confronting choices and decisions about their futures. Why might we consider this significant when critically assessing the novels? Explain your answer, offering detailed reference to one or both of the novels. In the following essay we are going to see that the passage from innocence to experience in Wuthering Heights is more than a tumultuous and an exciting story. Many of the most famous novels, such as Wuthering Heights, fall into the traditional canon of Bildungsroman. However, this novel presents an unusual Bildungsroman: the male-female double Bildungsroman. That is, Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights focuses on the growth of a pair of protagonists to describe the passage from innocence to experience, and what it represents during the development of the story. According to this, we are going to see to what extent the novel conforms to the idea of Bildungsroman. .
As we have seen toward Wuthering Heights, the author dramatizes the separation of Heathcliff and Catherine in adolescence and young adulthood, and concludes with the reunion of both characters at the end of the novel. From the moment that Heathcliff arrived to Wuthering Heights, he and Catherine become inseparable friends. 'She was much too fond of Heathcliff. The greatest punishment we could invent for her was to keep her separate from him: yet she got chided more than any of us on his account' (WH, p35), remarks the house-keeper. The Catherine and Heathcliff love is clearly a tormented love, since for them both, love and punishment, are always mixed up. The situation between both lovers starts to change as soon as Catherine's education for her adult life begins at Thrushcross Grange. We have to take into account that they are divided specially by the gender roles, not only for the distance between Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross.
