Heathcliff and Snape Two Sides for the Same Coin: A Study of the Manipulation of Child Abuse in Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights and J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter Series

Abstract

In common with other Victorian novelists, such as Charles Dickens, Emily Bronte uses her fiction to highlight and attack the social injustice of this period. She feeds her reader's growing concern for the ills of their society especially child abuse. Wuthering Heights gives readers a good idea of what it must have been like to be an orphan in Victorian society represented by Heathcliff's character. However, in contemporary fiction, the Harry Potter series are no exception. Since the first book of the series, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (1997), until the seventh book Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (2007) J.K. Rowling manipulated the theme of child abuse through her depiction of Severus Snape by using different types of abuse such as the physical abuse, emotional abuse, verbal abuse, bullying, mobbing and neglect. The current research will try to explore to what extent Emily Bronte and Rowling have depicted these two characters as victimized antiheroes, the similarities and differences between the two, the different types of abuse throughout the novel and examine the effects of abuse on the abused characters. The study will apply the BMACAL Theory (Blending Method for Analyzing Child Abuse in Literature) which is based on adapting the archetypal psychology represented by Jung (1953) and Hillman (1997) entangled with the sociological and psychological classifications of abuse and its types and effects represented by Briere (1992), Tower (2002) and Elliot (2003) will be used to analyze the characters' personality and in both texts.