All Mrs Dalloway and Wuthering Heights comparison essay plans for A-Level
English Literature
(blue = Wuthering Heights quotes/AO1, purple = Mrs Dalloway quotes/AO1, green =
context/AO3, red = comparison/AO4)
Comparison of Wuthering Heights and Mrs Dalloway on alienation
Intro: main context + main idea
Para 1: alienation from one’s own character/identity/property
- MARRIAGE C loses her identity becomes ‘not even Clarissa any more; this being Mrs. Richard Dalloway’ sacrifices identity
for security
- ‘Like a nun withdrawing’ forced to a purely domestic figure, loses fluidity to instead become ‘like iron, like flint, rigid up the
backbone’ she is alienated from herself
- Pattern of exogamy in WH, Cathy is ‘an exile, an outcast’ LOSES HER IDENTITY AS A CHILD WHEN SHE HAS TO GIVE
BIRTH ‘I wish I were a girl again, half savage and hardy, and free’ civilisation softens her ability to resist
- P recognises ‘there’s nothing in the world so bad for some women as marriage’
- Isabella can’t leave her marriage with H because the Matrimonial Causes Act came into force in 1857, Clarissa can’t leave hers
because it offers security in modernising London with the new Labour government about to come in in 1923
- VALUE Loss of value for H and P ‘little Lascar, or an American or Spanish castaway’ ‘they entirely refused to have it in bed
with them’ lack of identity, alienated from the family ‘from the very beginning he bred bad feeling into the house’
- Peter is lost as he clings to a time that is slipping away ‘as dear to him as a personal possession; moments of pride in England’
‘men of business’ it is a time of change, the British Empire is sinking, Queen Victoria dies in 1901, even God is being
questioned as Einstein publishes ‘The Origin of Species’ therefore he is alienated from himself
- PROPERTY the Earnshaws are alienated from their own property line as Heathcliff usurps Wuthering Heights and Hareton
Para 2: alienation due to non-conformity
- PLACELESS PEOPLE Street singer ‘voice of an ancient spring sprouting from the earth’ is able to manipulate time
ANALEPSIS, in some ways Lockwood is a placeness figure alienated from the story of the novel and is also able to
manipulate the tale ‘she probably cannot appreciate a better class of people, when she meets them’ unreliable narration MORE
QUOTES
- CONTEXT: SOCIAL COMMENTARY ON HOMELESSNESS - in the 1920s there was a social norm to dehumanise the
homeless populous, they were seen as lesser and we see Clarissa conforming
- PASSION Vagrant ‘impudent, loose-lipped, humorous’ ‘still there was time for a spark between them’ is able to gain romance
which breaks through civilisation ‘I am Heathcliff’
- C and H’s passion breaks through civilisation and leads them to their transcendent end with ‘moths fluttering’ ‘soft wind
breathing through the grass’, similarly Septimus’ heightened emotional senses cannot be contained as he ‘flung himself
vigorously, violently down on to Mrs. Filmer’s area railings’
Para 3: alienation from the physical world (transcendence)
- DEATH we see how Septimus is so overwhelmed by the world ‘where would it descend?’ ‘the world wavered and quivered
and threatened to burst into flames’ that he must fling himself ‘vigorously, violently’ to escape
- Also how Catherine cannot have a baby and cannot subject herself to civilisation, she dies ‘like a child reviving and sinking
again to sleep’ as she reaches her wish ‘I wish I were a girl again’ CYCLICAL
- CONTEXT: MODERNISM VS GOTHIC STYLE - treat these events of death very differently, the gothic tends towards the
explained supernatural as used by Ann Radcliffe in ‘The Mysteries of Udolpho’ where the the mystic is simply explained
away as Lockwood does at the very end, but in modernist literature the narrative does not attempt to discover a truth or
explain the event, just make sense of individual events as Clarissa understands why Septimus has died
- PRESERVATION C+H wish to be together for eternity by transcending the realms of the physical and resisting earthly
constraint by becoming nature ‘bleak, hilly coal country’ ‘tore the pillow with her teeth’ so much that we see nature mourn
Cathy’s death ‘larks were silent’ ‘early trees smitten and blackened’
- Just as C wishes for her transcendental theory of self ‘the unseen part of us, which spreads wide, the unseen might survive’ as
she builds up her image ‘as he had often seen her, in a doorway’ and connections between people ‘being laid out, like a mist
between the people she knew best’
, - They all reach their transcendent ends as C+H lie together in the earth ‘moths fluttering among the heath’ ‘soft wind breathing
through the grass’ ‘wondered how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth’ and C
becomes a part of the landscape forever ‘for there she was’
Conclusion: (WOW FACTOR)
- Alienation is a very positive thing
- Being alienated from somewhere one does not belong, leads to greater comfort and inclusion in a world of transcendence
Comparison of Wuthering Heights and Mrs Dalloway on the relationship between the past and the present
Intro: main context + main idea
Para 1: the past is intertwined with the present
- ‘For so it had always seemed to her when, with a little squeak of the hinges she had burt open the French windows and
plunged at Bourton into the open air’ Clarissa reminisces about childhood at Bourton
- ‘There was Regent’s Park. Yes. As a child he had walked in Regent’s Park - odd, he thought, how the thought of childhood
keeps coming back to me’ Peter thinks of childhood frequently
- ‘Somehow in the stress of London, on the ebb and flow of things, here, there, she survived, Peter survived, lived in each other’
sense of transcendence and Platonic continuity
- HENRI BERGSON’S IDEAS OF TIME saw him believe that there was an objective time but there is also a subjective fluid
verison of time that allows us to experience time more deeply and purely, Woolf conforms with this idea so deliberately
collapses the past, present and future in her novel
- ‘A fly-leaf bore the inscription ‘Catherine Earnshaw, her book’ and a date some quarter of a century back’ Wuthering Heights
is immersed in the past
- ‘It’s twenty years! Mourned the voice, twenty years, I’ve been awake for twenty years’ Cathay’s ghost appears
- WORLD WAR ONE happened 5 years before the events of Mrs Dalloway and appears to still hang over the novel, as one of
the deadliest military conflicts of the time it’s influence is great due to the huge number of people killed as well as the effects
of shell shock on the returned soldiers
- The ghost of Evans too comes back ‘A man in grey was actually walking towards them. It was Evans!’ sees the war ingrained
in the present
- The ‘violent explosion’ provides a sharp reminder of the sounds of the war, repetition of ‘it was over, thank Heaven - over’
Para 2: the past is eternal, allowing present character to lament on it
- ‘Sally, remembering the past no doubt, was laughing’ Sally reminisces on the past with laughter
- ‘They would discuss the past. With the two of them … she shared her past ….A part of this Sally must always be; Peter must
always be’ the present moment is ephemeral but memories can ensure the past
- TUNNELING PROCESSES sees Woolf form tunnels between character and dive deeply into their interior lives, for Clarissa,
Sally and Peter they are all joined in one cave by the experiences of Bourton, when Woolf wrote ‘Jacob’s Room’ it was
criticised for seeing no true interiority, however this novel connects characters through time
- Memories of Bourton return as Heathcliff asks ‘be with me always - take any form - drive me mad’ as he wishes that the past
will be with him always
- ‘I’m trying to settle how I shall pay Hindley back … I hope he will not die before I do’ Hindley’s past mistreatment of
Heathcliff affects the present
- ‘Now my bonny lad, you are mine! And we’ll see if one tree won’t grow as crooked as another, with the same wind to twist it!’
Heathcliff’s revenge on Hareton sees the past informing the present
- Clarissa laments ‘pity of the loss of roses’ as she grows older and begins to miss her previous fertility ‘had that not after all
been love’ ‘like a match burning in a crocus’
- MOMENT OF BEING for Clarissa this moment in one in which the cotton wool is removed and she is able to experience a
wordless connection to the universe, she accesses the passion she felt as Bourton with no bounds and in a pure and real
sensation as the barriers she puts up in society come down
- ‘Did it matter then, she asked herself, walking towards Bond Street, did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely’
present feeling is fleeting and will not exist forever
Para 3: allows passion to exist through time
- ‘I am alone; I am alone!’
- ‘When all boundaries are lost, the country reverts to its ancient shape, as the Romans saw it, lying cloudy’
, - ‘She said how she was his wife, married years ago in Milan, his wife and would never, never tell that he was mad!’ sees
Lucrezia haunted by the passion of her lost marriage and her past comes back to her in a moment of analepsis
- ‘I got the sexton, who was digging Linton’s grave, to remove the earth off her coffin lid, and I opened it’
- ‘You know, I was wild after she died, and eternally, from dawn to dawn, praying her return to me’ shows how the passion of
Cathy’s ghost has always haunted him
- ‘The word ‘time’ split its husk poured riches over him; and from his lips fell like shells, like shavings from a plane’ indicates
trauma of the war and enduring the past that Septimus feels
- ‘Like an ancient spring sprouting from the earth’ the street singer allows for passion ‘still there was time for a spark between
them’
- SOCIAL COMMENTARY ON HOMELESSNESS
- ‘Wondered how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth’
- CULT OF SENSIBILITY sees that Lockwood is concerned with Romantic ideals and books such as Henry Mackenzie’s ‘Man of
Feeling’, due to this preoccupation he is unable to understand the huge passion and tumult that lives on though time even as
Cathy and Heathcliff die
- ‘Never, never had he suffered so internally’ ‘closing his knife with a snap’ as Cathy and Heatlhcliff live on, the pain of
Clarissa’s rejection haunts Peter which causes him to develop his masculinity and put up a wall against feeling
- However, society echos his desires for passion and love ‘petticoats tumbling on the floor’ ‘to array herself in blue and pearls’
sees the passion of his youth return to him
Comparison of Wuthering Heights and Mrs Dalloway on characters who wish to escape
Intro: main context + main idea
Para 1: characters who wish to escape marriage
- Clarissa is forced to become ‘not even Clarissa anymore; this being Mrs Richard Dalloway’ as she must bind herself in
marriage to protect herself against modernity and London
- She loses her ‘divine vitality’ and is insead forced to become ‘physically hard’ ‘like iron, like flint, rigid up the backbone’ as
Peter Walsh observes the emotional austerity she is now overcome by in marriage
- Similarly, Cathy is forced to leave behind her primitive engagement in nature and become ‘an exile, an outcast’ in her
marriage to Linton, she wishes ‘I wish I were a girl again, half savage and hardy, and free’ as she becomes tied down in
marriage
- Both become alienated from themselves in marriage
- Isabella also struggles in her marriage ‘the single pleasure I can image is to die, or to see him dead’ after Heathcliff says ‘the
first thing she saw me do, on coming out of the Grange, was to hang up her little dog’
- She is forced to physically escape her marriage ‘I bounded, leaped and flew down the steep road’ as she would ‘far rather be
condemned to a perpetual dwelling in the infernal regions, than ever for one night abide beneath the roof of Wuthering
Heights again’
- CONTEXT: MATRIMONIAL CAUSES ACT 1857 gave women the ability to divorce their husbands, but at the time that
Wuthering Heights is set this had not come into effect meaning that the women in Wuthering Heights are legally trapped in
their marriages (Heathcliff knows as he states ‘I, being your legal protector, must retain you in my custody’) and they cannot
escape
- This is similar to Lucrezia’s marriage to Septimus which declines throughout the novel as she realises ‘I am alone; I am alone’
and mourns for the time ‘he had a beautiful fresh colour’ and their marriage proposed, she is found decidedly alone by the
end of the novel as he ‘flung himself vigorously, violentry down on to Mrs Filmer’s area railings’
Para 2: characters who wish to escape back to a time of great passion
- Loss of passion sees Cathy completely alienated from herself as she cannot even recognise her own face as she is about to give
birth ‘Do you see that face?’ and once she realises states ‘It’s true, then; that’s dreadful’, she can no longer experience passion
as she once did ‘I am Heathcliff’
- Similarly Clarissa is alienated from the best passionate experience of her life ‘like a match burning in a crocus’ she cannot
come back to her experience with Sally Seton at Burton ‘had that not, after all, been love?’
- CONTEXT: MOMENT OF BEING is seen by Woolf as the moment where the ‘cotton wool’ that limits perception and dulls
strong emotion is removed, in these moments of being characters are able to experience a wordless connection to the universe
as Clarissa could, but now in adulthood she is seeped in a senseless marriage
English Literature
(blue = Wuthering Heights quotes/AO1, purple = Mrs Dalloway quotes/AO1, green =
context/AO3, red = comparison/AO4)
Comparison of Wuthering Heights and Mrs Dalloway on alienation
Intro: main context + main idea
Para 1: alienation from one’s own character/identity/property
- MARRIAGE C loses her identity becomes ‘not even Clarissa any more; this being Mrs. Richard Dalloway’ sacrifices identity
for security
- ‘Like a nun withdrawing’ forced to a purely domestic figure, loses fluidity to instead become ‘like iron, like flint, rigid up the
backbone’ she is alienated from herself
- Pattern of exogamy in WH, Cathy is ‘an exile, an outcast’ LOSES HER IDENTITY AS A CHILD WHEN SHE HAS TO GIVE
BIRTH ‘I wish I were a girl again, half savage and hardy, and free’ civilisation softens her ability to resist
- P recognises ‘there’s nothing in the world so bad for some women as marriage’
- Isabella can’t leave her marriage with H because the Matrimonial Causes Act came into force in 1857, Clarissa can’t leave hers
because it offers security in modernising London with the new Labour government about to come in in 1923
- VALUE Loss of value for H and P ‘little Lascar, or an American or Spanish castaway’ ‘they entirely refused to have it in bed
with them’ lack of identity, alienated from the family ‘from the very beginning he bred bad feeling into the house’
- Peter is lost as he clings to a time that is slipping away ‘as dear to him as a personal possession; moments of pride in England’
‘men of business’ it is a time of change, the British Empire is sinking, Queen Victoria dies in 1901, even God is being
questioned as Einstein publishes ‘The Origin of Species’ therefore he is alienated from himself
- PROPERTY the Earnshaws are alienated from their own property line as Heathcliff usurps Wuthering Heights and Hareton
Para 2: alienation due to non-conformity
- PLACELESS PEOPLE Street singer ‘voice of an ancient spring sprouting from the earth’ is able to manipulate time
ANALEPSIS, in some ways Lockwood is a placeness figure alienated from the story of the novel and is also able to
manipulate the tale ‘she probably cannot appreciate a better class of people, when she meets them’ unreliable narration MORE
QUOTES
- CONTEXT: SOCIAL COMMENTARY ON HOMELESSNESS - in the 1920s there was a social norm to dehumanise the
homeless populous, they were seen as lesser and we see Clarissa conforming
- PASSION Vagrant ‘impudent, loose-lipped, humorous’ ‘still there was time for a spark between them’ is able to gain romance
which breaks through civilisation ‘I am Heathcliff’
- C and H’s passion breaks through civilisation and leads them to their transcendent end with ‘moths fluttering’ ‘soft wind
breathing through the grass’, similarly Septimus’ heightened emotional senses cannot be contained as he ‘flung himself
vigorously, violently down on to Mrs. Filmer’s area railings’
Para 3: alienation from the physical world (transcendence)
- DEATH we see how Septimus is so overwhelmed by the world ‘where would it descend?’ ‘the world wavered and quivered
and threatened to burst into flames’ that he must fling himself ‘vigorously, violently’ to escape
- Also how Catherine cannot have a baby and cannot subject herself to civilisation, she dies ‘like a child reviving and sinking
again to sleep’ as she reaches her wish ‘I wish I were a girl again’ CYCLICAL
- CONTEXT: MODERNISM VS GOTHIC STYLE - treat these events of death very differently, the gothic tends towards the
explained supernatural as used by Ann Radcliffe in ‘The Mysteries of Udolpho’ where the the mystic is simply explained
away as Lockwood does at the very end, but in modernist literature the narrative does not attempt to discover a truth or
explain the event, just make sense of individual events as Clarissa understands why Septimus has died
- PRESERVATION C+H wish to be together for eternity by transcending the realms of the physical and resisting earthly
constraint by becoming nature ‘bleak, hilly coal country’ ‘tore the pillow with her teeth’ so much that we see nature mourn
Cathy’s death ‘larks were silent’ ‘early trees smitten and blackened’
- Just as C wishes for her transcendental theory of self ‘the unseen part of us, which spreads wide, the unseen might survive’ as
she builds up her image ‘as he had often seen her, in a doorway’ and connections between people ‘being laid out, like a mist
between the people she knew best’
, - They all reach their transcendent ends as C+H lie together in the earth ‘moths fluttering among the heath’ ‘soft wind breathing
through the grass’ ‘wondered how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth’ and C
becomes a part of the landscape forever ‘for there she was’
Conclusion: (WOW FACTOR)
- Alienation is a very positive thing
- Being alienated from somewhere one does not belong, leads to greater comfort and inclusion in a world of transcendence
Comparison of Wuthering Heights and Mrs Dalloway on the relationship between the past and the present
Intro: main context + main idea
Para 1: the past is intertwined with the present
- ‘For so it had always seemed to her when, with a little squeak of the hinges she had burt open the French windows and
plunged at Bourton into the open air’ Clarissa reminisces about childhood at Bourton
- ‘There was Regent’s Park. Yes. As a child he had walked in Regent’s Park - odd, he thought, how the thought of childhood
keeps coming back to me’ Peter thinks of childhood frequently
- ‘Somehow in the stress of London, on the ebb and flow of things, here, there, she survived, Peter survived, lived in each other’
sense of transcendence and Platonic continuity
- HENRI BERGSON’S IDEAS OF TIME saw him believe that there was an objective time but there is also a subjective fluid
verison of time that allows us to experience time more deeply and purely, Woolf conforms with this idea so deliberately
collapses the past, present and future in her novel
- ‘A fly-leaf bore the inscription ‘Catherine Earnshaw, her book’ and a date some quarter of a century back’ Wuthering Heights
is immersed in the past
- ‘It’s twenty years! Mourned the voice, twenty years, I’ve been awake for twenty years’ Cathay’s ghost appears
- WORLD WAR ONE happened 5 years before the events of Mrs Dalloway and appears to still hang over the novel, as one of
the deadliest military conflicts of the time it’s influence is great due to the huge number of people killed as well as the effects
of shell shock on the returned soldiers
- The ghost of Evans too comes back ‘A man in grey was actually walking towards them. It was Evans!’ sees the war ingrained
in the present
- The ‘violent explosion’ provides a sharp reminder of the sounds of the war, repetition of ‘it was over, thank Heaven - over’
Para 2: the past is eternal, allowing present character to lament on it
- ‘Sally, remembering the past no doubt, was laughing’ Sally reminisces on the past with laughter
- ‘They would discuss the past. With the two of them … she shared her past ….A part of this Sally must always be; Peter must
always be’ the present moment is ephemeral but memories can ensure the past
- TUNNELING PROCESSES sees Woolf form tunnels between character and dive deeply into their interior lives, for Clarissa,
Sally and Peter they are all joined in one cave by the experiences of Bourton, when Woolf wrote ‘Jacob’s Room’ it was
criticised for seeing no true interiority, however this novel connects characters through time
- Memories of Bourton return as Heathcliff asks ‘be with me always - take any form - drive me mad’ as he wishes that the past
will be with him always
- ‘I’m trying to settle how I shall pay Hindley back … I hope he will not die before I do’ Hindley’s past mistreatment of
Heathcliff affects the present
- ‘Now my bonny lad, you are mine! And we’ll see if one tree won’t grow as crooked as another, with the same wind to twist it!’
Heathcliff’s revenge on Hareton sees the past informing the present
- Clarissa laments ‘pity of the loss of roses’ as she grows older and begins to miss her previous fertility ‘had that not after all
been love’ ‘like a match burning in a crocus’
- MOMENT OF BEING for Clarissa this moment in one in which the cotton wool is removed and she is able to experience a
wordless connection to the universe, she accesses the passion she felt as Bourton with no bounds and in a pure and real
sensation as the barriers she puts up in society come down
- ‘Did it matter then, she asked herself, walking towards Bond Street, did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely’
present feeling is fleeting and will not exist forever
Para 3: allows passion to exist through time
- ‘I am alone; I am alone!’
- ‘When all boundaries are lost, the country reverts to its ancient shape, as the Romans saw it, lying cloudy’
, - ‘She said how she was his wife, married years ago in Milan, his wife and would never, never tell that he was mad!’ sees
Lucrezia haunted by the passion of her lost marriage and her past comes back to her in a moment of analepsis
- ‘I got the sexton, who was digging Linton’s grave, to remove the earth off her coffin lid, and I opened it’
- ‘You know, I was wild after she died, and eternally, from dawn to dawn, praying her return to me’ shows how the passion of
Cathy’s ghost has always haunted him
- ‘The word ‘time’ split its husk poured riches over him; and from his lips fell like shells, like shavings from a plane’ indicates
trauma of the war and enduring the past that Septimus feels
- ‘Like an ancient spring sprouting from the earth’ the street singer allows for passion ‘still there was time for a spark between
them’
- SOCIAL COMMENTARY ON HOMELESSNESS
- ‘Wondered how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth’
- CULT OF SENSIBILITY sees that Lockwood is concerned with Romantic ideals and books such as Henry Mackenzie’s ‘Man of
Feeling’, due to this preoccupation he is unable to understand the huge passion and tumult that lives on though time even as
Cathy and Heathcliff die
- ‘Never, never had he suffered so internally’ ‘closing his knife with a snap’ as Cathy and Heatlhcliff live on, the pain of
Clarissa’s rejection haunts Peter which causes him to develop his masculinity and put up a wall against feeling
- However, society echos his desires for passion and love ‘petticoats tumbling on the floor’ ‘to array herself in blue and pearls’
sees the passion of his youth return to him
Comparison of Wuthering Heights and Mrs Dalloway on characters who wish to escape
Intro: main context + main idea
Para 1: characters who wish to escape marriage
- Clarissa is forced to become ‘not even Clarissa anymore; this being Mrs Richard Dalloway’ as she must bind herself in
marriage to protect herself against modernity and London
- She loses her ‘divine vitality’ and is insead forced to become ‘physically hard’ ‘like iron, like flint, rigid up the backbone’ as
Peter Walsh observes the emotional austerity she is now overcome by in marriage
- Similarly, Cathy is forced to leave behind her primitive engagement in nature and become ‘an exile, an outcast’ in her
marriage to Linton, she wishes ‘I wish I were a girl again, half savage and hardy, and free’ as she becomes tied down in
marriage
- Both become alienated from themselves in marriage
- Isabella also struggles in her marriage ‘the single pleasure I can image is to die, or to see him dead’ after Heathcliff says ‘the
first thing she saw me do, on coming out of the Grange, was to hang up her little dog’
- She is forced to physically escape her marriage ‘I bounded, leaped and flew down the steep road’ as she would ‘far rather be
condemned to a perpetual dwelling in the infernal regions, than ever for one night abide beneath the roof of Wuthering
Heights again’
- CONTEXT: MATRIMONIAL CAUSES ACT 1857 gave women the ability to divorce their husbands, but at the time that
Wuthering Heights is set this had not come into effect meaning that the women in Wuthering Heights are legally trapped in
their marriages (Heathcliff knows as he states ‘I, being your legal protector, must retain you in my custody’) and they cannot
escape
- This is similar to Lucrezia’s marriage to Septimus which declines throughout the novel as she realises ‘I am alone; I am alone’
and mourns for the time ‘he had a beautiful fresh colour’ and their marriage proposed, she is found decidedly alone by the
end of the novel as he ‘flung himself vigorously, violentry down on to Mrs Filmer’s area railings’
Para 2: characters who wish to escape back to a time of great passion
- Loss of passion sees Cathy completely alienated from herself as she cannot even recognise her own face as she is about to give
birth ‘Do you see that face?’ and once she realises states ‘It’s true, then; that’s dreadful’, she can no longer experience passion
as she once did ‘I am Heathcliff’
- Similarly Clarissa is alienated from the best passionate experience of her life ‘like a match burning in a crocus’ she cannot
come back to her experience with Sally Seton at Burton ‘had that not, after all, been love?’
- CONTEXT: MOMENT OF BEING is seen by Woolf as the moment where the ‘cotton wool’ that limits perception and dulls
strong emotion is removed, in these moments of being characters are able to experience a wordless connection to the universe
as Clarissa could, but now in adulthood she is seeped in a senseless marriage
