Emily%20Bront

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Emily Brontë
Wuthering Heights

• NOTES

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• published in 1848 under the pseudonym Ellis
  Bell (the same initials as hers)
• two years before the Brontë sisters had published
  a volume called Poems by Currer, Acton and Ellis
  Bell
• her sister Charlotte describes the composition of
  the book as if it was involuntary, produced by
  creative gifts Emily was not completely aware of

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• She wrote
• It is rustic all through. It is moorish and
  wild, and knotty as the root of heath.
• feelings, passions, narrative complexity,
  shifts of time and perceptions

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• Wuthering Heights
• the main setting
• solitary, gloomy, strong building facing the
  winds and storms of the moor
• a place of the mind, where Catherine and
  Heathcliff belong

• Thrushcross Grange
• its counterpart
• light building placed on the plain
• the place of order and normality, where people
  are happy or unhappy for very ordinary reasons

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• Wuthering Heights
• a metaphor of childhood and adolescence, a world
  peopled with creatures of the imagination
• the children of storm/nature live here

• Thrushcross Grange
• a symbol of adulthood, to which those who belong
  to reality must emigrate
• the children of calm/culture live here

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Gothic elements

• general suspended atmosphere
• supernatural elements, unquiet graves, wild
  landscapes, illicit passions, queer dreams
• contact between the living and the dead
• the mysterious male character coming from nowhere
  who becomes the villain of the story

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• but Heathcliff is much more than that
• We crowded round, and I had a peep at a dirty,
  ragged, black-haired child
• He seemed a sullen, patient child hardened,
  perhaps, to ill-treatment
• handsome, savage, irresistible, cruel, devilish,
  self-destructive, a genuine bad nature, INSTINCT

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• the features Freud ascribed to the id apply to
  him perfectly
• the source of psychic energy
• the seat of the instincts
• the essence of dreams
• the archaic foundation of personality selfish,
  asocial, impulsive

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• Freud civilization is built on repression
• People learn to live with one another by
  internalizing social rules which define certain
  forms of behaviour and speech as unacceptable
• The uncanny is the return of the repressed we
  are frightened by uncanny occurrences not because
  they are totally outside and unknown to us but
  because they are part of our nature that we
  cannot afford to acknowledge as our own if we
  want to be civilized

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• Victorian readers found the book strange they
  couldnt work out its moral standpoint. Some
  thought it was violent, morbid, immoral
• (Should social conventions be trampled on by the
  force of passions?)
• It illustrates a pre-moral vision of life

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• Friedrich Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Böse,
  1886
• Was man aus Liebe macht, ist immer jenseits von
  Gut und Böse.

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Narrative technique

• made complex by the presence of two internal
  narrators /points of view
• several other narratives interspersed in the
  book
• action presented as eyewitness narrations of
  people involved
• not parallel narrations, but a multi-layered
  narration, each springing from another

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• Lockwood the outer framework of the story
• then becomes the recipient of Nellys narrative,
  and she in turn the recipient of other narratives
• Nellys narrative highly dramatised
• often records conversations of other characters
• direct participation of the reader theatrical
  effect

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Passage from Chapter 9

• Nelly reports a conversation she had with
  Catherine before her wedding to Edgar Linton
• Catherine tells Nelly about the reasons why shes
  going to marry Edgar Linton

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• similes describing her love for Edgar and her
  love for Heathcliff
• the foliage in the woods
• the eternal rocks beneath
• complete identification between her and
  Heathcliff