A scandalous novel by a clergyman's daughter
Emily Brontë was a clergyman’s
daughter. She grew up in a remote part of England, in Howarth, a tiny village
in Yorkshire. She didn’t like to travel.
When she left home she became ill. She never married and she died at the age of
30 having published her only novel and some poetry.
Wuthering Heights was one
of the most shocking novel in English literature. When it was first published
in 1847, it created a firestorm of protest. It was called “one of the most repellent book ever published”. One critic said it
should be burnt. The protest only settle down when the second edition came out
and the author was revealed to be the daughter of a parson from west-Yorkshire.
How had a parson’s daughter created such a threat to civilized society as Heathcliff, a hero driven by
sexual passion and vengeance and, instead of a proper Victorian heroine, she gave the world a married woman who runs
around on the moor in her nightgown with her lover. The reading public was
shocked. Shocked. But the novel has never been out of print and has had many
film adaptations.
VIDEO 1 - I AM HEATHCLIFF
VIDEO 2 - I CANNOT LIVE WITHOUT MY SOUL
Heathcliff
The male protagonist, Heathcliff, is described as a sort of Byronic hero, moved by irresistible passion, doomed to the despair of a solitary life and finally tending to a total identification with his love, Catherine ("I cannot live without my life, I cannot live without my soul"). Yet Heathcliff aso resembles the villain of some Gothic novel in his inhuman treatent of his wife and even his son.
Gothic elements
There are several Gothic features in the novel, such as the sinister atmosphere of Wuthering Heights, surrounded by wilderness, Catherine's ghost, the dreams and superstitions, the macabre and the gloomy scenes connected to death. However, they are used by the author not to frightened the reader, but to convey the struggle between the two opposing principles of love and hate, of order and chaos.
The structure of the novel
Wuthering Heights has a complex narrative structure which employs two narrators. Mr Lockwood, the polite visitor from the city, is the outsider; apart from a few occasions when he narrates what he sees, he simply writes down, in the form of a journal, what Nelly Dean tells him. Nelly is the second narrator, closely involved in the story, and entirely reliable. Other characters occasionally narrate to Nelly.
The narration does not follow a chronological order, it starts almost at the end of the story and develops a narrative within the narrative, including the use of flashbacks. This complex structure create a sense of verisimilitude and a feeling of suspense and a mythical atmosphere.
Poetry and tragedy
The continuous flowing of human life into the natural world creates moments of intense poetry and mysticism that are balanced by the concreteness and common sense of Nelly's language.
As a whole Wuthering Heights represents a unique achievement in Victorian literature. Often compared to a Shakespearian tragedy for its rendering of turbulent passions, unnatural crimes and cruelty, the novel marked a departure from the observation of society towards the descriptio of the individual personality and anticipated the novelists of the early 20th century in narrative technique.
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