The Importance of Money, Social Relationships and Marriage - Book Report/Review Example

Oh, never mind, you will read it again. Besides, you were only fifteen when you first read it, anyway. You go through the first few pages and it seems to you the novel has changed, but it is not possible. Your way of thinking is what has changed. You have grown up in the meantime. As you read, your mind inevitably works out every detail and tries to remember everything. A few of your favourite memorized quotations emerge, like R.W. Emerson's "Money often costs too much", Ezra Bowen's "If you marry for money, you will surely earn it" You are amazed to remember a poem you wrote, i.e. you tried to write when you were sixteen and overwhelmed with pain for being rejected by your first love just because you did not belong to the upper class and your family was not wealthy.

You must have realized by now I am talking about my own experience, but what does it have to do with Bronte's extraordinary romantic tragedy. I am not Heathcliff. I have not had my revenge and I have no intention of doing anything that will only bring more pain. Catherine Earnshaw rejected Heathcliff's love and married Linton instead, although she did that out of noble reasons and her true love for Heathcliff. The question is, was the sacrifice worth it QUOTE 1: " I have no more business to marry Edgar Linton than I have to be in heaven; and if the wicked man in there, had not brought Heathcliff so low I should not have thought of it.

It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now; so he shall never know how I love him; and that, not because he is handsome, Nelly, but because he is more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same, and Linton is as different as a moonbeam from lightning or frost from fire". (Bronte, "Wuthering Heights", chapter IX). QUOTE 2: "Nelly, I see now, you think me a selfish wretch, but did it never strike you that if Heathcliff and I married we should be beggars Whereas, if I marry Linton, I can aid Heathcliff to rise, and place him out of my brother's power" (Bronte, "Wuthering Heights", chapter IX, p.87).At this point, I start searching through my mind for similar themes in other novels, and I find there are lots of them.

Using the stream of consciousness technique rather than narrative, Virginia Woolf "attacks the values of bourgeois society in the post-war world" (http://www.bibliomania.com/1/7/1137/15194/). Her heroine Clarissa Dalloway who has once cared for things important to everybody (such as love for example) other than dinner and lunch parties with important people in upper-class England, has become conventional, she loves success, and she chooses