In a Fishbowl

What seems to make the majority of the characters of Wuthering Heights so "unlikeable" to readers is the fact that each of the many exaggerated mistakes that they make seem clearly avoidable, and their reactions to the situations they put themselves in as over the top but more often just unfitting altogether. Wuthering Heights may not only be a novel that explores human relationships, but also the effect of setting on them. Maybe in addition experimenting with how an effectively entertaining story can be created, she was also experimenting with how human relation and interaction work in general. Maybe there was a purpose to making the characters so clearly and openly flawed; to provide a reflection of the clearly and openly flawed situation she had created them in.

When I read Renigald Rose's screenplay of Twelve Angry Men I imagined the story played out with the nameless characters as similar to props. I thought this was attributed to the stage notes in the first pages, with their descriptions and plan of the room they occupied for the majority of the play. The characterization of the juries was like this: when the name of the character was introduced, for example, jury three, a form was imagined, just the basic outline of a man, and when their description was told, (juror number three is described as "a very strong, very forceful, extremely opinionated man within whom can be detected a streak of sadism. A humorless man who is intolerant of opinions other than his own and accustomed to forcing his wishes and views upon others") that form had been stamped to be molded into a character that follows the description given.



As opposed to Wuthering Heights, where the characters are developed over time, although remain relatively true to the first impressions they create on the reader, just as in Twelve Angry Men, the prose of the landscape around them as well as the fact that the Mrs. Dean inputs her opinion of the characters' actions, create a distinction from the bare characterizations and descriptions of setting that are relatively open to the reader for their interpretation in Twelve Angry Men. After the character descriptions, a bird's eye view of the set of the play (the jury room) is presented, and below is a list of the objects each character has with him, which are for the most part the only major attributes to their physical descriptions. These objects are mostly the only given physical descriptions of the characters, and the rest is up to the reader to decide.

However, both the plots of Twelve Angry Men and Wuthering Heights challenge human emotion and interaction in a small, cramped space. Wuthering Heights takes place for the most part in two estates and the land between them, which may not be small and cramped, but may seem so to their inhabitants because of the isolation and the same few people to interact with day in and day out. In Twelve Angry Men, the space that the characters are in is a small room which is described by the characters as hot and cramped. This description may be more of a reflection of the situation as opposed to a literal description, and the same goes for Wuthering Heights as well. By doing so, both works create the effect that the characters are being viewed as if they were in a fish bowl, even more so than most other works. The events of Twelve Angry Men takes place over the course of a day, and Wuthering Heights years, but still a similar is created among them of an analysis of relationships and interaction that is even more apparent than in other works.