Forbidden passion in The Lover and Wuthering Heights

Abstract

The key to understanding the romance between Catherine and Heathcliff is its obsessive and all consuming nature, a ferocity of desire that exceeds even the realm of the sexual, it is a profoundly metaphysical longing in which Catherine cannot conceive of herself without her metaphysical Other Heathcliff, they are two parts of a whole as Catherine declares that “I am Heathcliff”. Life without him is futile and meaningless because she is only completed as a human being in and through her existence with Heathcliff.While Heathcliff is dark, destructive and brutal, one is brought to admire the intensity of his desire for Catherine as an all consuming passion that will haunt him throughout his life and bring him to long to be reunited with Catherine in death. The Lover is a book about a teenage girl who was physically and emotionally abused by her mother and elder brother. She felt unable to control her predicament.She sought solace and control through her passionate affair with a wealthy Chinese man from Cholon.The affair is tragic from the beginning because of the cross-cultural battle experienced by the two lovers.On one hand, there was the French social restrictions about relationships with the "inferior" race of Vietnamese and the Chinese. On the other hand, it was about the Chinese tradition of arranged marriages.