Jurnalul Cristinei: ***

WUTHERING HEIGHTS BY Emily Brontë

WUTHERING HIEIGHTS & ROMANTICISM

CRITICAL EVALUATION:

Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë's only novel, was published in 1847 under the pseudonym "Ellis Bell". It was written between October 1845 and June 1846. Wuthering Heights and Anne Brontë's Agnes Grey were accepted by publisher Thomas Newby before the success of their sister Charlotte's novel Jane Eyre. Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë's only novel, was published in 1847 under the pseudonym "Ellis Bell". It was written between October 1845 and June 1846. Wuthering Heights and Anne Brontë's Agnes Grey were accepted by publisher Thomas Newby before the success of their sister Charlotte's novel Jane Eyre.

ROMANTICISM AND THE BRONTËS

Romanticism, the literary movement traditionally dated 1798 to 1832 in England, affected all the arts through the nineteenth century. The Brontës were familiar with the writings of the major romantic poets and the novels of Sir Walter Scott. When Charlotte Brontë, for instance, wanted an evaluation of her writing, she sent a sample to the romantic poet Southey. The romantic elements in the Brontës' writings are obvious. Walter Pater saw in Wuthering Heights the characteristic spirit of romanticism, particularly in "the figures of Hareton Earnshaw, of Catherine Linton, and of Heathcliff–tearing open Catherine's grave, removing one side of her coffin, that he may really lie beside her in death–figures so passionate, yet woven on a background of delicately beautiful, moorland scenery, being typical examples of that spirit."

As the details of their lives became generally known and as Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights received increasingly favorable critical attention, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne were cast in the role of Romantic Rebels. Contributing to the Romantic Rebels Myth was the association of Romanticism and early death; Shelley having died at 29, Byron at 36, and Keats at 24. Branwell died at the age of 31, Emily at 30, and Anne at 29; to add to the emotional impact, Branwell, Emily, and Anne died in the space of nine months. The Romantic predilection for early death appears in Wuthering Heights; Linton is 17 when he dies; Catherine, 18; Hindley, 27; Isabella, 31; Edgar, 39; Heathcliff, perhaps 37 or 38.

ROMANTIC ELEMENTS IN WUTHERING HEIGHTS

The major characteristics of Romanticism could be extrapolated from a reading of Wuthering Heights:

the imagination is unleashed to explore extreme states of being and experiences.

the love of nature is not presented just in its tranquil and smiling aspects but also appears in its wild, stormy moods, nature is a living, vitalizing force and offers a refuge from the constraints of civilization, the passion driving Catherine and Heathcliff and their obsessive love for each other are the center of their being and transcend death, so great a focus is placed on the individual that society is pushed to the periphery of the action and the reader's consciousness, the concern with identity and the creation of the self are a primary concern, childhood and the adult's developing from childhood experiences are presented realistically, Heathcliff is the Byronic hero; both are rebellious, passionate, misanthropic, isolated, and willful, have mysterious origins, lack family ties, reject external restrictions and control, and seek to resolve their isolation by fusing with a love object, Hareton is the noble savage and, depending on your reading of the novel, so is Heathcliff, Brontë experiments with the narrative structure (the Chinese-box structure in which Lockwood narrates what Nelly tells him, who repeats what others told her), the taste for local color shows in the portrayal of Yorkshire, its landscape, its folklore, and its people, the supernatural or the possibility of the supernatural appears repeatedly.

ROMANTIC LOVE IN WUTHERING HEIGHTS

Romantic love takes many forms in Wuthering Heights: the grand passion of Heathcliff and Catherine, the insipid sentimental languishing of Lockwood, the coupleism of Hindley and Frances, the tame indulgence of Edgar, the romantic infatuation of Isabella, the puppy love of Cathy and Linton, and the flirtatious sexual attraction of Cathy and Hareton. These lovers, with the possible exception of Hareton and Cathy, are ultimately self-centered and ignore the needs, feelings, and claims of others; what matters is the lovers' own feelings and needs.

Nevertheless, it is the passion of Heathcliff and Catherine that most readers respond to and remember and that has made this novel one of the great love stories not merely of English literature but of European literature as well. Simone de Beauvois cites Catherine's cry, "I am Heathcliff," in her discussion of romantic love, and movie adaptations of the novel include a Mexican and a French version. In addition, their love has passed into popular culture; Kate Bush and Pat Benetar both recorded "Wuthering Heights," a song which Bush wrote, and MTV showcased the lovers in a musical version.

The love-relationship of Heathcliff and Catherine, but not that of the other lovers, has become an archetype; it expresses the passionate longing to be whole, to give oneself unreservedly to another and gain a whole self or sense of identity back, to be all-in-all for each other, so that nothing else in the world matters, and to be loved in this way forever. This type of passion-love can be summed up in the phrase more--and still more , for it is insatiable, unfulfillable, and unrelenting in its demands upon both lovers.

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CRITICAL GLANCE AT WUTHERING HEIGHTS

Initially Jane Eyre was regarded as the best of the Brontë sisters' novels, a judgment which continued nearly to the end of the century. By the 1880s critics began to place Emily's achievement above Charlotte's; a major factor in this shift was Mary Robinson's book-length biography of Emily (1883). In 1926, Charles Percy Sanger worked out the chronology of Wuthering Heights by closely examining the text; though other critics have since worked out alternate chronologies, his work affirmed Emily's literary craft and meticulous planning of the novel and disproved Charlotte's presentation of her sister as an unconscious artist who "did not know what she had done." Critics are still arguing about the structure of Wuthering Heights: for Mark Schorer it is one of the most carefully constructed novels in English, but for Albert J. Guerard it is a splendid, imperfect novel which Brontë loses control over occasionally.

Despite the increasing critical admiration for Wuthering Heights, Lord David Cecil could write, in 1935, that Emily Brontë was not properly appreciated; even her admirers saw her as an "unequal genius." He countered this view by identifying the operation of cosmic forces as the central impetus and controlling force in the novel. He was not the first critic to perceive cosmic forces in the novel; Virginia Woolf, for one, had earlier written of Emily Brontë and her novel that

She looked out upon a world cleft into gigantic disorder and felt within her the power to unite it in a book. That gigantic ambition is to be felt throughout the novel–a struggle, half thwarted but of superb conviction, to say something through the mouths of her characters which is not merely "I love" or "I hate," but "we, the whole human race" and "you, the eternal powers..." the sentence remains unfinished.

Nevertheless, Cecil's theory that a principle of calm and storm informed the novel was a critical milestone because it provided a comprehensive interpretation which presented the novel as a unified whole. He introduced a reading which later critics have generally responded to, whether to build on or to reject. Cecil premised that, because Emily was concerned with what life means, she focused on her characters' place in the cosmos, in which everything–alive or not, intellectual or physical–was animated by one of two spiritual principles: the principle of the storm, which was harsh, ruthless, wild, dynamic and wild, and the principle of calm , which was gentle, merciful, passive, and tame. The usual distinction between human being and nature did not exist for her; rather, for her, they were alive in the same way, an angry man and an angry sky both literally manifesting the same spiritual principle of storm. Cecil cautioned that in spite of their apparent opposition these principles are not conflicting. Either–Emily Brontë does not make clear which she thinks–each is the expression of a different aspect of a single pervading spirit; or they are the component parts of a harmony. They may not seem so to us. The world of our experience is, on the face of it, full of discord. But that is only because in the cramped condition of their earthly incarnation these principles are diverted from following the course that their nature dictates, and get in each other's way. They are changed from positive into negative forces; the calm becomes a source of weakness, not of harmony, in the natural scheme, the storm a source not of fruitful vigour, but of disturbance. But when they are free from fleshly bonds they flow unimpeded and unconflicting; and even in this world their discords are transitory. The single principle that ultimately directs them sooner or later imposes an equilibrium....

Because these principles were neither good nor evil but just were, the novel was not concerned with moral issues and judgments; rather, it presented, in Cecil's view, a pre-moral world.

Just as Brontë resolved the usual conflict between the principles of storm and calm into equilibrium, so she resolved the traditional opposition between life and death by allowing for the immorality of the soul in life as well as in the afterlife. Cecil extrapolated, "The spiritual principle of which the soul is a manifestation is active in this life: therefore, the disembodied soul continues to be active in this life. Its ruling preoccupations remain the same after death as before." In other words, the individual's nature and passions did not end with death; rather, death allowed their free expression and fulfillment and so held the promise of peace. This was why Catherine's spirit haunted Wutheirng Heights after her death.

Cecil's theory is one of the twentieth century outpourings of interpretations trying to prove the novel had a unified structure. Surveying these myriad efforts, J. Hillis Miller challenged the assumption that the novel presents a unified, coherent, single meaning: "The secret truth about Wuthering Heights, rather, is that there is no secret truth which criticism might formulate in this way... It leaves something important still unaccounted for... The text is over-rich." He suggests that readers and critics should push their reading of or theory about the novel as far as they can, until they can face the fact that their interpretation fails to account for all the elements in the novel, that the novel is not amenable to logical interpretation or to one interpretation which accounts for the entire novel.

Perhaps F.R. Leavis penned the most quoted (most infamous?) modern interpretation of Wuthering Heights when he excluded it from the great tradition of the English novel because it was a "sport," i.e., had no meaningful connection to fiction which preceded it or influence on fiction which followed it.

THE GOTHIC AND WUTHERING HEIGHTS

Whether or not Wuthering Heights should be classified as a Gothic novel (certainly it is not merleya Gothic novel), it undeniably contains Gothic elements.

In true Gothic fashion, boundaries are trespassed, specifically love crossing the boundary between life and death and Heathcliff's transgressing social class and family ties. Brontë follows Walpole and Radcliffe in portraying the tyrannies of the father and the cruelties of the patriarchal family and in reconstituting the family on non-patriarchal lines, even though no counterbalancing matriarch or matriarchal family is presented. Brontë has incorporated the Gothic trappings of imprisonment and escape, flight, the persecuted heroine, the heroine wooed by a dangerous and a good suitor, ghosts, necrophilia, a mysterious foundling, and revenge. The weather-buffeted Wuthering Heights is the traditional castle, and Catherine resembles Ann Radcliffe's heroines in her appreciation of nature. Like the conventional Gothic hero-villain, Heathcliff is a mysterious figure who destroys the beautiful woman he pursues and who usurps inheritances, and with typical Gothic excess he batters his head against a tree. There is the hint of necrophilia in Heathcliff's viewings of Catherine's corpse and his plans to be buried next to her and a hint of incest in their being raised as brother and sister or, as a few critics have suggested, in Heathcliff's being Catherine's illegitimate half-brother.

A FEMINIST THEORY OF THE GOTHIC AND WUTHERING HEIGHTS

Ellen Moers has propounded a feminist theory that relates women writers in general and Emily Brontë in particular to the Gothic. Middle-class women who wanted to write were hampered by the conventional image of ladies as submissive, pious, gentle, loving, serene, domestic angels; they had to overcome the conventional patronizing, smug, unempowering, contemptuous sentimentalizing of women by reviewers like George Henry Lewes, who looked down on women writers: Women's proper sphere of activity is elsewhere [than writing]. Are there no husbands, lovers, brothers, friends to coddle and console? Are there no stockings to darn, no purses to make, no braces to embroider? My idea of a perfect woman is one who can write but won't.

What subversive values and taboo experiences does Emily Brontë express with her passionate heroine Catherine? Moers sees subversion in Brontë's acceptance of the cruel as a normal, almost an energizing part of life and in her portrayal of the erotic in childhood. The cruelty connects this novel to the Gothic tradition, which has been associated with women writers since Anne Radcliffe . The connection was, in fact, recognized by Brontë's contemporaries; the Athenaeumreviewer labeled the Gothic elements in Wuthering Heights "the eccentricities of ‘woman's fantasy'" (1847). Moers thinks a more accurate word than eccentricities would be perversities. These perversities may have originated in "fantasies derived from the night side of the Victorian nursery–a world where childish cruelty and childish sexuality come to the fore." Of particular importance for intellectual middle-class women who never matured sexually was the brother-sister relationship.

WUTHERING HEIGHTS AS SOCIO-ECONOMIC NOVEL

The novel opens in 1801, a date Q.D. Leavis believes Brontë chose in order "to fix its happenings at a time when the old rough farming culture, based on a naturally patriarchal family life, was to be challenged, tamed and routed by social and cultural changes; these changes produced Victorian class consciousness and ‘unnatural' ideal of gentility." In 1801 the Industrial Revolution was under way in England; when Emily Brontë was writing in 1847, it was a dominant force in English economy and society, and the traditional relationship of social classes was being disrupted by mushroom-new fortunes and an upwardly-aspiring middle class. The criterion for defining a gentleman was shifting to money, from character, breeding, or family. This social-economic reality provides the context for socio-economic readings of the novel.