Isabella's Trip To Hades

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In Wuthering Heights by Emile Bronte, Isabella makes a trip to “Hades” during her marriage and elopement with Heathcliff. This trip is significant because it causes Isabella to lose her innocence when she realizes the true nature of Heathcliff, and she is able to find the strength inside of herself to fight back and leave him. This trip also shows the maturation of Isabella from a shallow, vapid girl into a woman who has been abused and disillusioned, but has escaped and been made stronger by her experiences. Heathcliff represents Hades, who figuratively captures Isabella and brings her with him to hell by using his charm like how Hades kidnapped Persephone. He is cruel, merciless, and sadistic, and he is often called names by other characters that connect him to Hades, like “black villain” (105), and a “lying fiend… monster, and not a human being” (Bronte 143). These derogatory names link Heathcliff to Satan and hell, as black is…show more content…
The first thing Heathcliff does when he meets with Isabella to get married is show her how he hanged her favorite dog: “The first thing she saw me do, on coming out of the Grange, was to hang up her little dog… But no brutality disgusted her” (142). Cerberus guards the Underworld from the living and other beings that should not enter the Underworld, and similarly Bronte employs the use of Isabella’s dog to show how Isabella could have canceled the marriage and avoided entering the Underworld. Heathcliff’s cruel nature is shown to her in full so she is disillusioned about whom he really is, but this show of inhumanity is fruitless and unsuccessful in preventing her from descending to the darkness of hell with Heathcliff. Cerberus, too, was unable to prevent the classical heroes Hercules and Orpheus from entering the Underworld, where they met disaster – just like

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