Essay: Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte / windows and doorways as symbolical vehicles

Doors and doorways have been symbolic across cultures for as long as history has been recorded. A door is both an entrance and an exit, so it has been associated with portals and passageways on many levels throughout history. Doors are closely related to gates and thresholds because the three share some very similar symbolic features and sometimes work together to create passage.A door is first and foremost an entrance. On a literal level a door usually leads to the inside of something, be it a house, building, or other structure. Within a structure itself a door serves as both an entrance and exit to other rooms, a passageway between rooms, and an exit from the structure. On a metaphorical level, a door can become an entrance to nearly anything, but it is most commonly used to symbolize the entrance to another world. In Wuthering Heights, Bronte utilizes windows and doorways as symbolical vehicles for both spiritual entrance and emotional escape from reality and fears that the characters are constantly trying to run from. This is done in order to illustrate the idea that humans cannot handle the reality of their situations or the fears that resurrect from it.
Lockwood is a good example of doorways and windows in that his name does suggest a locked door, a reality he faces several times—both literally and metaphorically. One prominent example of this is Lockwood’s response to Catherine’s persistent ghost at the window during his eerie night in the oak-paneled bed: ”Terror made me cruel; and, finding it useless to attempt shaking the creature off, I pulled its wrist on to the broken pane, and rubbed it to and fro till the blood ran down and soaked the bedclothes…” (Bronte 35) He feels locked out of the family and seeks the knowledge of Nelly dean. Nelly begins to also represent a doorway/guardian figure by protecting Lockwood with vital information and serving as an emotional escape from his fear of the ghost, the house and its inhabitants.
Throughout the novel, characters gaze and spy through windows, open windows, and break them. Not surprisingly, the large drawing room window of Thrushcross Grange appears ample and cheery compared to windows at Wuthering Heights. Rather than being “narrow” and “deeply set,” it provides accessible views out onto the garden and green valley and, conversely, into the home’s interior. When Catherine and Heathcliff venture out to spy on Edgar and Isabella, the drawing room window provides a view onto a different world—one that eventually welcomes Catherine but rejects Heathcliff. Heathcliff is left to make his observations through the glass partition:”I resumed my station as a spy, because, if Catherine had wished to return, I intended shattering their great glass panes to a million fragments unless they let her out.” (Bronte 174)
Linda Gold writes about this similar idea in a psychoanalytical way. “In the collective unconscious, the shadow is absolute evil. In the personal unconscious, the shadow consists of those desires, feelings, etc. which are unacceptable, perhaps for emotional or for moral reasons. The shadow is generally equated with the dark side of human nature. The shadow is emotional, seems autonomous because uncontrollable, and hence becomes obsessive or possessive. Heathcliff, then, can be seen as Catherine’s shadow–he represents the darkest side of her, with his vindictiveness, his sullenness, his wildness, and his detachment from social connections. She rejects this part of herself by marrying Edgar, thereby explaining Heathcliff’s mysterious disappearance. But Heathcliff, the shadow, refuses to be suppressed permanently; Jung explains that even if self-knowledge or insight enables the individual to integrate the shadow, the shadow still resists moral control and can rarely be changed. Cathy’s efforts to integrate Heathcliff into her life with Edgar are doomed; her inability to affect Heathcliff’s behavior can be seen in his ignoring her prohibition about Isabella. The resurfaced Heathcliff obsessively seeks possession of Catherine to insure his own survival” (Gold Freud in wuthering heights). This criticism is important because it gives insight to the characters. When dealt the personalities of each character through a medium such as Gold’s criticism we are able to understand what makes them seek these doorways and Windows and why they flock to such emotional reprieves from my reality and their fears.
A lot of these characters go through what is called escapism or, the tendency to seek distraction and relief from unpleasant realities, especially by seeking entertainment or engaging in fantasy. They become unhappy with past events or fears that have reattributed itself in another situation.  Linda gold writes “Escapist fiction by definition is writing that permits the reader to escape the ennui of the real world and indulge vicariously in an alternate reality. It is fiction that allows the reader to doff the burden of their problems and inhabit a world concocted by the author; a world that makes up for the arbitrariness and unpredictability of the real world by offering structure, rationality and resolution” (Gold Freud in wuthering heights). Linda gold is correct because bronze uses these symbolic vehicles to offer rationality and security to the characters that happen to utilize them. At the beginning of the book Lockwood rationalized the idea of coming to wurthering heights as a way to become isolated and distant from society, thus making wurthering heights an opportune doorway for Lockwood.
To conclude this criticism In Wuthering Heights, Bronte utilizes windows and doorways as symbolical vehicles for both spiritual entrance and emotional escape from reality and fears that the characters are constantly trying to run from. This is done in order to illustrate the idea that humans cannot handle the reality of their situations or the fears that resurrect from it.