Download Contextual Information Wuthering Heights

WUTHERING HEIGHTS: CONTEXTUAL INFORMATION
The author of Wuthering Heights was Emily Jane Brontë, the middle of the worldfamous Brontë sisters. An isolated, painfully shy woman, she produced one of the
most distinctive novels in literature and some of the greatest poetry. Her character
and life are as singular as her book.
Emily had an unusual character, extremely unsocial and reserved, with few friends
outside her family. She preferred the company of animals to people and rarely
traveled, forever yearning for the freedom of Haworth and the moors. She had a will
of iron – a well known story about her is that she was bitten by a (possibly) rabid
dog which resulted in her walking calmly into the kitchen and cauterizing the
wound herself with a hot iron. She had unconventional religious beliefs, rarely
attending church services and, unlike the other children, never teaching in the
Sunday school.
In appearance, she was lithesome and graceful, the tallest of the Brontë children
(her coffin measured five feet seven inches – 1.7 meters) but ate sparingly and
would starve herself when unhappy or unable to get her own way. As her literary
works suggest, she was highly intelligent, teaching herself German while working in
the kitchen (her favorite place outside of the moors) and playing the piano well
enough to teach it in Brussels. Her stubbornness lasted to the end where she refused
to see a doctor or rest while she was dying of tuberculosis.
(In 1871, Ellen Nussey, a lifelong friend of the Brontës, wrote of her first
impressions of the fifteen-year-old Emily in Reminiscences of Charlotte Brontë ) Emily
Brontë had by this time acquired a lithesome, graceful figure. She was the tallest
person in the house, except her father. Her hair, which was naturally as beautiful as
Charlotte's, was in the same unbecoming tight curl and frizz, and there was the same
want of complexion. She had very beautiful eyes – kind, kindling, liquid eyes; but she
did not often look at you; she was too reserved. Their color might be said to be dark
grey, at other times dark blue, they varied so. She talked very little. She and Anne
were like twins – inseparable companions, and in the very closest sympathy, which
never had any interruption.
Charlotte famously said of her sister: “Stronger than a man, simpler than a child, her
nature stood alone.”
HISTORICAL AND LITERARY CONTEXT-WHEN PUBLISHED: 1847- LITERARY
PERIOD: VICTORIAN
RELATED LITERARY WORKS: Like Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights
contains elements of Gothic literature as well as Romanticism, which focuses on
people's natural goodness and imagination and favors "the sublime" of nature and
spirituality over urbanity and technology. Yet Brontë's novel also has much in
common with George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871), which realistically examines life
in a provincial village.
RELATED HISTORICAL EVENTS: The American Revolution, which often symbolizes
the ability of the common man to prevail over old, established power, coincides with
some of the action in Wuthering Heights. Heathcliff, the book's little guy (who may
have actually come from America), stages a revolution of his own by trying to bring
down two old, powerful families.
THE BRONTE FAMILY: Two of Emily Brontë's sisters are also respected writers.
Charlotte Brontë wrote Jane Eyre, Shirley, Villette, and The Professor, and Anne
Brontë wrote Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Because the Brontës
collaborated, critics love to analyze the whole family, not just the individual authors.
The family also appeals to readers because it experienced so much tragedy: five of
the six children died young (four daughters died of tuberculosis, or "consumption,"
as it was known at the time, and Branwell, the only son, turned to drugs and alcohol
when his career as an artist failed).
THE ENGLISH GOTHIC NOVEL: A BRIEF OVERVIEW
The English Gothic novel began with Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1765),
which was enormously popular and quickly imitated by other novelists and soon
became a recognizable genre. To most modern readers, however, The Castle of
Otranto is dull reading; except for the villain Manfred, the characters are insipid and
flat; the action moves at a fast clip with no emphasis or suspense, despite the
supernatural manifestations and a young maiden's flight through dark vaults. But
contemporary readers found the novel electrifyingly original and thrillingly
suspenseful, with its remote setting, its use of the supernatural, and its medieval
trappings, all of which have been so frequently imitated and so poorly imitated that
they have become stereotypes. The genre takes its name from Otranto's medieval–
or Gothic–setting; early Gothic novelists tended to set their novels in remote times
like the Middle Ages and in remote places like Italy (Matthew Lewis's The Monk,
1796) or the Middle East (William Beckford's Vathek, 1786).
What makes a work Gothic is a combination of at least some of these elements:
* a castle, ruined or intact, haunted or not (the castle plays such a key role that it
has been called the main character of the Gothic novel),
* ruined buildings which are sinister or which arouse a pleasing melancholy,
* dungeons, underground passages, crypts, and catacombs which, in modern
houses, become spooky basements or attics,
* labyrinths, dark corridors, and winding stairs,
* shadows, a beam of moonlight in the blackness, a flickering candle, or the only
source of light failing (a candle blown out or, today, an electric failure),
* extreme landscapes, like rugged mountains, thick forests, or icy wastes, and
extreme weather,
* omens and ancestral curses,
* magic, supernatural manifestations, or the suggestion of the supernatural,
* a passion-driven, wilful villain-hero or villain,
* a curious heroine with a tendency to faint and a need to be rescued–frequently,
* a hero whose true identity is revealed by the end of the novel,
* horrifying (or terrifying) events or the threat of such happenings.
The Gothic creates feelings of gloom, mystery, and suspense and tends to the
dramatic and the sensational, like incest, diabolism, necrophilia, and nameless
terrors. It crosses boundaries, daylight and the dark, life and death, consciousness
and unconsciousness. Sometimes covertly, sometimes explicitly, it presents
transgression, taboos, and fears–fears of violation, of imprisonment, of social chaos,
and of emotional collapse. Most of us immediately recognize the Gothic (even if we
don't know the name) when we encounter it in novels, poetry, plays, movies, and TV
series. For some of us, safely experiencing dread or horror is thrilling and enjoyable.
Elements of the Gothic have made their way into mainstream writing. They are
found in Sir Walter Scott's novels, Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre , and Emily Brontë's
Wuthering Heights and in Romantic poetry like Samuel Coleridge's "Christabel,"
Lord Byron's "The Giaour," and John Keats's "The Eve of St. Agnes." A tendency to
the macabre and bizarre which appears in writers like William Faulkner, Truman
Capote, and Flannery O'Connor has been called Southern Gothic.
THE GOTHIC AND WUTHERING HEIGHTS
Whether or not Wuthering Heights should be classified as a Gothic novel (certainly it
is not merely a 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 weatherbuffeted Wuthering Heights is the traditional castle, and Catherine resembles Ann
Radcliffe's heroines in her appreciation of nature. Like the conventional Gothic herovillain, 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, 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. (1850)
Those women who overcame the limitations of their social roles and did
write found it more difficult to challenge or reject society's assumptions and
expectations than their male counterparts. Ellen Moers identifies heroinism, a form
of literary feminism, as one way women circumvented this difficulty. (Literary
feminism and feminism may overlap but they are not the same, and a woman writer
who adopts heroinism is not necessarily a feminist.) Heroinism takes many forms,
such as the intellectual or thinking heroine, the passionate or woman-in-love
heroine, and the traveling heroine. Clearly all the Brontë sisters utilize the
passionate heroine, whether knowingly or not, to express subversive values and
taboo experiences covertly.
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 Athenaeum
reviewer 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 middleclass women who never matured sexually was the brother-sister relationship. In
childhood, sisters were the equal of their brothers, played just as hard, and felt the
same pleasures and pains; girls clung to this early freedom and equality, which their
brothers outgrew, and displaced them into their writing:
Women writers of Gothic fantasies appear to testify that the physical teasing they
received from their brothers–the pinching, mauling, and scratching we dismiss as
the unimportant of children's games–took on outsize proportions and powerful
erotic overtones in their adult imaginations. (Again, the poverty of their physical
experience may have caused these disproportions, for it was not only sexual play
but any kind of physical play for middle-class women that fell under the Victorian
ban.)
Moers applies this principle to the Brontës' chronicles of Angria and Gondal,
which the sisters collaborated on with their brother. Their turbulent sagas are filled
with unbridled passions, imprisonment, adultery, incest, murder, revenge, and
warfare. Thus the uncensored fantasies of Angria and Gondal, whose imaginative
hold Emily never outgrew, may have provided an outlet for the sisters' imaginations,
passions, and aspirations; fostered their intellectual and artistic equality with their
brother; and provided the model for Emily's impassioned Heathcliff and Catherine
as well as for Charlotte's Rochester.
Characteristics of the Byronic Hero
The Byronic hero--so named because it evolved primarily due to Lord Byron’s writing in the
nineteenth century—is, according to Peter Thorslev, one of the most prominent literary
character types of the Romantic period:
Romantic heroes represent an important tradition in our literature . . . . In England we have
a reinterpreted Paradise Lost, a number of Gothic novels and dramas . . . the heroic
romances of the younger Scott, some of the poetry of Shelley, and the works of Byron. In all
of these works the Byronic Hero is the one protagonist who in stature and in temperament
best represents the [heroic] tradition in England. (Thorslev 189)
A Byronic hero exhibits several characteristic traits, and in many ways he can be considered
a rebel. The Byronic hero does not possess "heroic virtue" in the usual sense; instead, he has
many dark qualities. With regard to his intellectual capacity, self-respect, and
hypersensitivity, the Byronic hero is "larger than life," and "with the loss of his titanic
passions, his pride, and his certainty of self-identity, he loses also his status as [a traditional]
hero" (Thorslev 187).
He is usually isolated from society as a wanderer or is in exile of some kind. It does not
matter whether this social separation is imposed upon him by some external force or is selfimposed. Byron's Manfred, a character who wandered desolate mountaintops, was
physically isolated from society, whereas Childe Harold chose to "exile" himself and wander
throughout Europe. Although Harold remained physically present in society and among
people, he was not by any means "social."
Often the Byronic hero is moody by nature or passionate about a particular issue. He also
has emotional and intellectual capacities, which are superior to the average man. These
heightened abilities force the Byronic hero to be arrogant, confident, abnormally sensitive,
and extremely conscious of himself. Sometimes, this is to the point of nihilism resulting in
his rebellion against life itself (Thorslev 197). In one form or another, he rejects the values
and moral codes of society and because of this he is often unrepentant by society's
standards. Often the Byronic hero is characterized by a guilty memory of some unnamed
sexual crime. Due to these characteristics, the Byronic hero is often a figure of repulsion, as
well as fascination.
Harold Bloom notes that "between them, the Brontes can be said to have invented a
relatively new genre, a kind of northern romance, deeply influenced both by Byron's poetry
and by his myth and personality, but going back also . . . to the Gothic novel and to the
Elizabethan drama" (1). When Byron died at the age of thirty-six in 1824, Bronte was but
eight years old. Bronte's youthful age, however, did not preclude Byron and his works from
having a profound effect on her and her writing; indeed, the "cult" of Lord Byron flourished
shortly after his death "dominating [the Brontes'] girlhood and their young womanhood"
(Bloom 2). Of the Bronte sisters' background, Tom Winnifrith comments that a "study of the
Brontes' juvenilia provides confirmatory evidence of the sisters' preoccupation with the
aristocracy, their emancipation from Victorian prudery, and the attraction of the Byronic
hero, beautiful but damned" (4).
Bronte was deeply affected by the movement that took place during what is now called the
Romantic period. She makes repeated references to Romantic works, and there is some
evidence that suggests Jane Eyre was set in the Romantic period. For example, Blanche
Ingram asks Rochester to "now sing, and I will play for you." When Rochester replies that he
will indeed sing for them, she says, "Here then is a Corsair-song. Know that I dote on
Corsairs; and for that reason, sing it 'con spirito'" (181; ch.17). Bronte's allusion to Byron's
immensely popular work "The Corsair," which was published in 1814, suggests that Jane
Eyre was set sometime after this date (Pirie 508). Since Jane and Blanche are technically
rivals for Rochester and Jane politely dislikes Blanche, Bronte's placement of this allusion
into Blanche's reply implies that on one level Bronte may not have thought highly of certain
works by Byron or "Byronic" characters.
Works Cited
“Charlotte's Web:A Hypertext on Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre .”
University of Michigan-Dearborn: Winter Term 1997, 2001, 2003, and 2005..
Web. Nov. 2012.
<http://www.umd.umich.edu/casl/hum/eng/classes/434/charweb/CHARACTE.htm>