How the setting helps develop the story in Wuthering Heights?

Answer 1

The novel's narrator tells the story in the winter months of 1801 in a moor country in England. The actual tale and events contained in Wuthering Heights, however, spans across the time period of approximately 1778 through 1801 and is set in the same aforementioned moor country near a village called Gimmerton.

The setting is important to the plot, characters, and conflicts of the novel as it is set in the Georgian era of British history and society differed greatly when held in comparison to the moral codes and laws of today. Marrying one's cousin was not considered 'wrong,' and this is critical in that Catherine Linton marries two of her cousins in the novel. Analyzing the book from an even more modern perspective, Heathcliff and Catherine are technically brother and sister, yet they love as lovers do. This too, is deemed as unnatural in today's age, however, it was not so for the time period in which Wuthering Heights is set.

The setting is crucial, for as many things that are deemed unacceptable in today's world were extremely commonplace in that era. One must remember that as times change, literature changes as well; in reading a book such as Wuthering Heights, one must think as a reader from those times would.