Literary Forms
A Collection of Critical Studies on Some Selected Novels
©2015
Academic Paper
198 Pages
Summary
This book aims at instilling in students of literature a love of literature and involve them actively in the learning experience through a flexible approach, which allows for the building up of modular parts as well as meaningful and clearly defined activities. It is an introduction to the appreciation of literary text through the analysis of the main text of literary genres.
Excerpt
Table Of Contents
2.2 Fitzgerald's Contribution, Reputation & Career ... 103
Chapter Three - F. Scott Fitzgerald's Idea of Symbolism ... 106
3.1 Historical and Critical Background of Symbolism ... 106
3.1.1 Types of Symbols ... 107
3.1.2 Elements of Symbolism ... 108
3.2 Fitzgerald's Idea of Symbolism ... 109
Chapter Four - Symbolism in The Great Gatsby ... 110
4.1 The Story of the Novel ... 110
4.2 Symbolism in the Novel ... 111
Conclusion ... 114
Reference ... 115
William Faulkner's A Rose for Emily and Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis:
A Study of Comparison and Contrast ... 117
Abstract ... 118
Introduction ... 119
1.1 Critical Background ... 119
1.2 William Faulkner's Contribution, Reputation, and Influence ... 120
1.3 Franz Kafka's Contribution, Reputation and Influence ... 123
Chapter One - A Critical Appreciation of Faulkner's A Rose for Emily ... 126
Chapter Two - A Critical Appreciation of Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis ... 133
Conclusion ... 137
4.1 Introduction ... 137
4.2 Findings of the Two Stories ... 138
References ... 140
A Study of Form and Content in T.S. Eliot's Wasteland & Ash Wednesday ... 141
Abstract ... 142
Chapter One - Introduction ... 143
1.1 The Life and Works of T.S. Eliot ... 143
1.1.1 His life ... 143
1.1.2 His works ... 144
1.2 The Twentieth Century Background ... 145
1.3 The Social background ... 146
1.4 The literary Background ... 148
Chapter Two - T.S. Eliot: Formative Influence ... 152
2.1 Parental Influences ... 153
2.2 His Poetic Creed ... 153
2.3 French symbolists ... 157
2.4 Jacobean Dramatists ... 160
2.5 Influence of Dante ... 162
2.6 Objective Correlative ... 164
Chapter Three - The Waste Land: Form and Content ... 166
3.1 Introduction ... 166
3.2 Diction and Versification ... 169
3.3 Rhythm and Versification ... 172
3.4 The Charge of Obscurity ... 174
Chapter Four - Ash Wednesday: Form and Content ... 178
4.1 Introduction ... 178
4.2 The Theme of Warning ... 179
4.3 Symbolism ... 182
4.4 Stress on Silence ... 183
Conclusion ... 187
Bibliography ... 188
1
The Portrayal of Women in Charlotte Bronte's Shirley
Abstract
The present study aims at examining the portrayal of women in Charlotte
Bronte's Shirley. The study is divided into four chapters in addition to a
conclusion.
Chapter One: casts light on Charlotte Bronte as one of the most
prominent female novelists in the nineteenth century. It also traces
Charlotte Bronte as a subjective novelist who is concerned to convey a
subjective impression.
Chapter Two: provides a historical and critical background of her age in
which she matured and originated the main literary tendencies which
affected and swayed her and decided the expression and manner of her
writings.
Chapter Three: traces Charlotte Bronte's Contribution, Reputation and
Influence. Moreover, Charlotte Bronte's writing is a powerful agent in her
effect.
Chapter Four: is devoted to the portrayal of women in Charlotte
Bronte's Shirley, in which Charlotte Bronte sets up moral, spiritual and
social problems such as the position of women, but evades a solution to
the complications by dropping the problem and substituting the
conventional solution of marriage.
2
1. Introduction
Charlotte Bronte is perhaps one of the most prominent female novelists in
the nineteenth century. But she is in some ways even more typical. Of
course, she is not so great a novelist as Dickens; apart from anything else
she had a narrower range. Her range is confined to the inner life, the
private passion. Indeed, Charlotte has stood the test of time and her works
are still fascinating enough to attract readers and scholars of our time
despite of her narrower range. Her imagination is stimulated to create by
certain aspects of man's inner life as that of Dickens or Thackeray by
certain aspects of his external life. As Thackeray was the first English
writer to make the novel the vehicle of a conscious criticism of life, so
Charlotte is the first to make it the vehicle of personal revelation. She is
the first subjective novelist (Patricia, 1992: 45), the ancestor of Proust
and Mr. James Joyce and all the rest of the historians of the private
consciousness. And like her range is limited to those aspects of
experience which stimulate to significance and activity are the private
consciousness of their various heroes and heroines.
According to Gaskell (1990: 133):
The life of Charlotte Bronte is very substance of her novels; three
times she summarized what she had imagined, seen or felt. In Jane
Eyre she depicted her imaginative life; in Villette, her true moral
life; in Shirley, coming out of herself a little- though very little in
fact- and standing as it were at the window of her soul, she
depicted the corner of Yorkshire where she lived and what little she
had seen of human society.
3
Each of her book has therefore a very marked character in the first, Jane
Eyre, Villette, the best parts of Shirley, are not exercises of the mind, but
cries of the heart; not a deliberate self-diagnosis, but an involuntary self-
revelation. Fundamentally, her principal characters are all the same
person; and that is Charlotte Bronte. Her range is confined, not only to a
direct expression of individuals' emotions and impression, but to a direct
expression of Charlotte Bronte's emotions and impressions. In this, her
final limitations, we come indeed to the distinguishing fact of her
character as a novelist. The world she creates is the world of her own
inner life; she is her own subject.
This does not mean, of course, that she never writes about anything about
her own character. She is a story-teller, and a story shows character in
action, character, that is, as it appears in contact with the world of
external event and personality. Only the relation of Charlotte Bronte's
imagination to this world is different from that of most novelists.. In this
context Gaskell (ibid, p132) points out that;
Charlotte Bronte has struck only one cord of the human heart, the
most powerful it is true. In Shirley, the imagination alone speaks
and when imagination is sole master one can be sure that it will
run to strange, fiery passions, difficult of interpretations
Theirs, inspired as it is by some aspect of human life outside their own,
works, as it were objectively. Charlotte Bronte as a subjective novelist is
concerned to convey a subjective impression. Her picture of the external
world is a picture of her own reaction to the external world. But she did
not write novels in order to illustrate a particular moral precept. such an
obvious procedure is deliberately rejected at the end of Shirley:
4
I think I now see then judicious reader putting on his spectacles to
look for the moral. It would be an insult to his sagacity to offer
direction. I only say God speed him in the quest. (p.90).
Every page of Charlotte Bronte's novels burns and breathes with vitality.
Out of her improbabilities and her absurdities, she constructed an original
vision of life; from the scattered, distorted fragments of experience which
managed to penetrate her huge self- absorption, she created a world.
The present study aims at exploring the portrayal of women in Charlotte
Bronte's Shirley. It also tries to give a historical and critical background
of her age in which she matured and originated the main literary
tendencies which affected and swayed her and decided the expression and
manner of her writings which are necessary at the outset.
2. The Traits of Victorian English Society and Charlotte Bronte's
Place in it
2.0 Introduction
In order to put the selected novels of Charlotte Bronte in a social, literary
and historical context, a full understanding of the cultural and social
background which formed the author's instinctual make-up is necessary.
So the traits of Victorian English society and the place of Charlotte
Bronte in it must be examined for a grounded and more informed analysis
the novel in question.
5
2.1 The Social Background
The Victorian age beginning in 187 and lasting until 1901, was a period
of massive changes for England, both socially and economically. The
period was generally a time of peace and prosperity and by the 1840s.
England had emerged as the leading industrial society of the world and
the hub of a vast colonial empire.
To quote Brownstein (2001:143)
The process of industrialization quickened as more factories were
built, particularly in the north of England, heavy engineering,
machine tool production and the highly mechanized cotton and
wool industries powered the economic boom and attracted greater
number to towns and cities
The rising middle class was amassing unprecedented wealth, but for the
working population, the 1840s came to be known as the'' Hungry Forties'',
a time of poverty and economic upheaval. While the sense of national
pride at their country's exalted position on the world stage may have been
gratifying to the British people, what mattered most to them was the
quality of their lives at home. The process of social development and
political reform which had begun earlier in the century continued
throughout the Victorian period.
The Victorian period was an age with new activities. There was a
revolution in commercial enterprise, due to great increase of available
markets, and, as a result of this, an immense advance in this use of
mechanical devices. The new commercial energy was reflected in the
Great Exhibition of 1851.
6
According to Brownstein (ibid, p, 143):
The Great Exhibition, which opened in London in the newly
constructed Crystal Palace on the first of May 1851, was a
highpoint in the history of Victorian Britain,. The industrial and
artistic achievement of the nation were put on display for the world
to admire.
While millions did admire, others pointed out that, despite as seemingly
endless success story. Britain was far from being a paradise on earth,
much criticism focused on the squalor and deprivation that was still to be
found in the cities. While the middle and upper classes gloried in the
prosperity of the times, the far-growing industrial working class began to
question the premise that each such prosperity necessarily involved
demeaning and exploitative working conditions and undemocratic
political representation.
Billington(1988:120) mentions that there was also the question of the
growing number of poor, unmarried surplus'' women, who had limited
means of supporting themselves and who were beginning to pose a real
problem to society. One of the few options for the unmarried surplus
women, who needed to support themselves, was to become a governess.
A governess was one of those people without position in society because
she did not belong to the household or the servant. It was a bitter
experience shared by many women including Charlotte Bronte herself.
The occupation of governess has special appeal for middle-class women
during the Victorian era. At this period, a woman who was not finically
supported by a husband or other male relative had few days to earn a
living. While many women in 1800s did work in mills and factories, the
unmarried daughters of merchants, doctors, lawyers, and clergymen
7
sought more suitable employment that could offer a moderately
respectable lifestyle. A governess lived with the upper-middle class or
upper-class family who hired her to teach their children. In addition to
securing comfortable lodgings, she earned a modest salary.
The subject of work for women was particularly relevant for women
writers, who experienced personal conflicts as a result of their desire to
be viewed both as domestic and womanly and of their needs as artists to
assert themselves in the performance of work. Charlotte Bronte focuses
on their conflict in the partly autobiographical Jane Eyre (1847). After
Jane leaves Mr. Rochester, she is forced to seek work. Because she is a
woman, only a limited number of options are available to her. She tells
St. John Rivers:
I will be a dressmaker; I will be a plain-workwoman; I will be a
servant, a nurse-girl, if I can be no better.( Bronte, Jane
Eyre,p,375)
When she is offered the post of village schoolmistress, she accepts,
realizing that it is the best among several unsatisfactory choices. However
such work- though somewhat socially acceptable since she has no one to
support her- is not fulfilling for the unmarried Jane; after a ''day passed in
honorable exertion'' (J.E. ibid, p, 256.).She experiences strange dream at
night: dreams many-colored, agitated, full of the ideal, the stirring, and
the stormy.'' (J.E, ibid, p, 156). The kind of work that is accessible to Jane
does not give full play to her talents and faculties.
Likewise, in Bronte's Villette (1853),Lucy Snowe, faced with the
necessity of supporting herself, resolves to become a governess, taking
the attitude ''I had to lose( Brone,Villette,p,57). For Lucy,'' work had
neither charm for her( her) taste, nor hold on her interest ''( Villette, ibid,
8
p,.78).Like, Jane she earns for stimulus:'' I did long, achingly,... for
something to fetch me out of my present existence, and lead me upwards
and onwards.''(V, ibid, p 90) in both cases, what the woman desire-scope
for their abilities is not socially acceptable for them to pursue. For
Bronte, womanly and artistic duties were perpetually in conflict. For her
characters, work, in the sense of an activity that earns daily bread, is at
odds with vocation, an inclination or calling that brings intellectual and
emotional gratification. Bronte's novels emphasize the waste of female
potential.
Hunt (1988:12) observes that:
Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth century, along with the
debate on women's position in society, there co-existed unanimity
on what is natural to the female character.
According to the Victorian ideal, woman was the '' angel in the house''
and she was expected to be submissive, chaste, and physically frail, in
addition to being religious, self-denying and capable of tremendous feats
of self- discipline. Armed with these contradicting characteristics, the
Victorian women were seen to represent morality and strength against,
harsh and competitive world of business, in which men could not afford
to possess.
Besides the social tension that existed in the Victorian society, there were
also disagreements about what the core values of society should be. Not
everyone accepted that increased material wealth was the only
worthwhile value. Writers like Mathew Arnold represented the views of
those who felt that over-emphasis on materialism was turning nineteenth-
century Britain into a less caring society, where cultural and artistic
9
pursuits were looked on as distractions from the main objective of
making money.
2.2 The Literal Background
As the Renaissance is identified with drama and Romanticism with
poetry, the Victorian age with the novel. There are several reasons for the
triumph of fiction, but perhaps the most significant is the rapid growth in
the middle classes who, since the eighteenth century, had been avid
consumers of this form of literature. Other factors, such as an improved
education system, which led to grater literacy and a fall in book prices,
due to improved printing techniques and cheaper transport costs, also
contributed to the success of the novel. Circulating libraries became very
popular and allowed people to borrow books for a relatively modest sum.
Women, who had been freed from traditional chores such as candle and
bread making, had more time to dedicate to reading and became avid
consumers of fiction. Indeed, the Victorian age is characterized by the
emergence of women not just readers but also as influential writers.
By the middle of the nineteenth century the novel, as a species of
literature, had thrust itself into the first rank. We shall therefore consider
it first. In the novels of Thackeray and Dickens the various qualities of
the domestic novel are gathered together and carried a stage forward.
Dickens was a social reformer, and yet did much to realize the England of
his day, and to depict the life of the lower and middle classes with
imagination and humor. With the Bronte sisters the romantic impulse was
fully felt in the novel, to which they gave new intensity of passion,
greater depth of intuitive sympathy, and a profound interest in the
struggles of the individual soul. In this they were followed by George
Eliot, who showed a closeness of application to the mental processes of
her characters that was carried further in the work of Meredith, and has
10
led to the ''psychological ' novel of the present day. Most of George
Eliot's novels are set in the Warwickshire countryside of her childhood,
against which underlines the importance of love and family, Eliot hits at
Victorian materialism. The same theme recurs in her novel Middlemarch
(1871- 1882), in which she describes life in a provincial town in 1832.
Readers in the 1870s could see how much progress had been made in
medicine, transport and commerce, while at the same witnessing how
little progress had been made in social concern for the foreshadows later
Victorian writers in her rejection of the prevailing moral and religious
code of the society in which she lived. Her exploration of the
psychological analysis which was to dominate much of twentiethcentury
fiction.
George Eliot also dealt more interestingly with history in her rural idyll
Silas Marner (1861) than in her major historical novel Romola (1862
63).Marner tells how Silas escapes from the harsh industrial world of
Lantern Yard into the Arcadian village of Raveloe. He buries his
treasured guineas, lumber from his urban past, under the floor of his hut.
When they are stolen, they become replaced in the gloom by the
gleaming locks of the baby Eppie, ringlets which Silas' weak eyes firstly
believe to be his returned gold. It is Christmas, and the parable of
redemption through the coming of a child rings clear. But Sally Shuttle
worth has suggested that, beneath the symbolism, the story explores
current views of social development. The innocence of the rural Raveloe
community is undercut by the villagers' inability to see that `they are
pressed hard by primitive wants', and exploited by the feudal squirearchy
of the Red House (ch. 6). Silas' past is both his weakness and his
strength. If his soul has been withered by his life in Lantern Yard, the
hardness of industrial living has created the sturdy independence that
11
leads him to adopt and rear the child Eppie in durance of village advice.
Silas has been physically stunted by labor at the loom, yet in a (literally)
touching scene, when Jane and Godfrey Cass come to reclaim Eppie,
Eppie can comfort and strengthen Silas because she knows the history of
his weaver's hands, and understands that his craft has made them
unusually responsive to her touch. `She held Silas' hand in hers, and
grasped it firmly it was a weaver's hand, with palm and fingertips that
were sensitive to such pressure' (ch. 19). By means of a human touch,
history becomes alive in the domestic present.
The most famous representation of madness in Victorian literature is
Bertha Mason in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. While Bertha in Jane Eyre
is depicted as mad before she is portrayed as an arsonist, she represents a
prototype against which the depiction of mad women in Victorian novels
may be measured. Furthermore, while she is not initially depicted as
criminal, the issues of foreignness, miscegenation, class, and hereditary
taint come into play in her characterization.
In Felix Holt (1866) George Elliot comes closest to making a female
character the center of her novel in her portrait of the daughter of a
dissenting minister, Esther Lyon.( Rogers:1985:92). Eliot is interested in
tracing the spiritual journey of a young woman whose understanding is
deepened when she is exposed to attitudes and values that are very
different from her own. Like many of Caskell's characters, Esther is
intellectually lively, yet unlike Gaskell's characters, at the beginning she
is morally immature. With her refined tastes, she delights most in her own
creature comforts, spending her wages on wax (not tallow) candles, attar
of rose, collections of Byron's poetry. Though her relationship to a young
radical. Felix Holt, Esther becomes aware of the possibility of a nobler
life, one that is not found upon the satisfaction of purely personal desires,
12
but dedicated to an idea, a hope that the condition of the working calls
can be improved.
3. Charlotte Bronte's Contribution, Reputation and Influence
3.1 Charlotte's Life: Family background
Charlotte and family Bronte were born in the small isolated village of
Haworth on the Yorkshire moors where they lived with their father, who
was the local vicar, their mother, three sisters and a brother.
According to Alexander (2001:9)
Charlotte Bronte, born in 1816, grew up in the small mill town of
Haworth on the edge of the rugged of West Yorkshire, in northern
England. The setting was isolated and made lonelier by the fact
that charlotte's mother had when Charlotte was five. Charlotte, her
four sister- Maria, Elizabeth, Emily and Anne and their brother,
Barnwell, turned to each other for companionship.
Due to the harsh conditions in the orphanage two sisters fell ill and
consequently their father brought all five of them back to the family
home. Charlotte Bronte was avid reader of Shakespeare, Milton, Byron,
Scott, the Classics and the Bible. Furthermore, she showed an early gift
for writing, and as a form of amusement she wrote miniature books about
fantasy worlds of her own creation with the help of her sisters as Gordon
(1994:45) points out:
Throughout their childhood and into adulthood, the close-knit
Bronte children entertained themselves by creating fanciful stories.
13
Inspired by a set of twelve wooden soldiers their father brought
home, they invented imaginary worlds that were a blend of myth,
history, current events and society-pages stories from newspapers
and magazines.
Gradually Charlotte Bronte came to focus on romantic passion and
themes of temptation and betrayal in these melodramatic tales. This story-
writing provide an essential outlet for her creativity, an outlet she would
painfully miss once she began her ''wretched bondage''. In 1855, after just
a few months of married life, Charlotte Bronte died due to complications
associated with pregnancy. Her final words to friends in her letter confirm
her deeply bond with her husband:
I find my husband the tenderest nurse, the kindest support - the best
earthly comfort that any women had... as to my husband my heat
is knit to him.
(Gordon 1994: 425).
3.2 Charlotte's Contribution, Reputation Influence
Charlotte Bronte admits the restrictions imposed upon women writers yet
denies her suffering from them, or at least their hindering influence on
her. At the same time, she denies the masculine gender of the pen name
with which she signed her works and insists on its general neutrality. She
can debate the gender of the name, but fails to offer an explanation why
she, if she is such a daring woman, dares not write under her original
name. Charlotte Bronte was more introverts by her nature and in her
writing because of the partly voluntary seclusion of her family and also of
the romantic era, which affected the cultural atmosphere of the time by
emphasizing the exploration of nature and emotion.
14
Charlotte was much more in the world than her other contemporary
writers, and her increasing contact with it on a variety of planets is
revealed in her interest such as charity schools and their abuses, and the
position of governess and teachers, is the work still of an individual not
aware of herself or of these issues as part of a wider society. Hence it is
the individual and isolated passion of Jane that is central; her anger at
injustice, her temptation to forget the world and religion for individual
happiness, her seeking for a fit and independent mode of existence. The
Universe of Jane Eyre approaches that of Wuthering Height in the
exploring of an individual's reaction to its own moral ambience and
emotional universe. But this was not solely Charlotte's sphere for she was
not the isolated spirit family was. The position of women, the fear of
being an old maid, the struggle for independence on the world's terms, not
by retreat to the spiritual, make Shirley and Villette novels based more
firmly in a recognized society. They deal with problems of the individual
seen more and more in relation to society, while still revealing an
individual vision.
Charlotte Bronte's writing is a powerful agent in her effect. The scenes in
her novels, indeed, are the peak of Charlotte Bronte's achievements; for in
them, as in no others, her imagination finds the perfect fields for its
expression. Her pictures of love and character, though they reveal her
powers, and it offers equal scope to her intensity and more on her she
cannot satisfy. No power of psychological penetration or accurate
observation is needed to communicate the impression of the senses in an
abnormal nervous state; while to be dreamlike and unrestrained is
characteristic of such impressions. For once Charlotte Bronte is true not
only to imagination, but also to fact.
15
Charlotte Bronte was a genius. She had, that is, that creative imagination
which is the distinguishing quality of the artist, in the very highest
intensity. In spite of the frustration that the women probably felt as
surplus women, Charlotte had very realistic attitudes towards marriage
for herself and she decided that mere respect without affection was not
enough, although marriage would have made them independent from the
charity of others. In Charlotte's work she relied on the same principle and
married their heroines to men they loved but also sure that happy couples
were well off. However, Charlotte, in later life gave up her principle by
marrying Mr. Nicholls, a man she respected but was not sure if she would
love.
Naturally Charlotte was too much of a Victorian and too much of a
Puritan to do more than hint at its animal side. But her hints are quite
enough to prevent the emotion seeming disembodied and unreal. Even
Caroline Helstone, that blameless dummy, comes to life when alone in
her room she abandons herself to her yearning for Robert Moore. Here is
a frustrated love. And writing as she does of the emotion of her own
unsatisfied heart, Charlotte Bronte is most characteristically concerned to
describe a frustrated love: Jane Eyre's love for Rochester, so hopelessly,
as it would seem, out of her reach; Lucy Snowe's for Dr. John, absorbed
already in Ginevra Fanshawe. But the fact that it is frustrated does not
make the love of Charlotte Bronte's heroines less intense. Indeed it makes
it more of an obsession. Moreover, Charlotte Bronte can describe happy
love equally well, if her story gives her a chance, as a matter of fact love
is the occasion of her few successful flights of humor. Jane Eyre teasing
Rochester, Lucy Snowe sparring with Paul Emanuel, in these she
achieves real comedy. It is a little stiff shy; it is also enchantingly demure
and delicate; a sort of Puritan comedy of the sexes, unlike anything else
16
in English literature. In addition to love' gaieties she can describe love's
ecstasy.
Like most of the other novelist of her school, Charlotte Bronte is a poet;
and her poetry is the pure lyrical poetry of passion. It connects itself with
her sensibility to landscape. The special emotion of her love-scenes
swells to assimilate to itself the emotional quality of the scenery amid
which they take place. In language of stilted compliment Mr. Rochester
converse with Jae Eyre in his garden, and then he says '' listen to the
nightingales,''. ( J.Y.123). And the four simple words, like the note of a
violin, quicken the scene to a lyric rhapsody, in which the scent of the
jasmine flowers, the chestnut in the distant sky, join to convey and
symbolize the passion that animate the two beings who move among
them. In this sort of effect she has no predecessor in English, and no
successors till Meredith
4. The Portrayal of Women in Shirley
4.0 Introduction
At first glance, Shirley appears to have no relationship to Charlotte
Bronte's other novels: it seems to be an attempt at another genre, an
experiment she did not repeat. Although she was to tell Mr. Smith
(2000:68)
I cannot write books handling the topics of the day; it is of no use
trying. Nor can I write a book for its moral. Nor can I take up a
philanthropic scheme.
Shirley is, nevertheless, a departure in this direction, being a historical,
provincial and social novel that focuses on English middle-class women
17
especially single women victimized in contemporary society. In a letter to
W.S William written during the planning of Shirley. Charlotte Bronte
expresses her wish for' the better ordering of the Social System':
I often wish to say something about the' condition of women's
questions- but it is one respecting which so much 'cant' has been
talked, that one feels a sort of repugnance to approach it. It is true
enough that the present a market for female labor is quite
overstocked- but where or how could another be opened?... One
can see where the evil lies- but who can point out the
4.1 The Story of the Novel
The plot is a complicate one, since it consists of a number of parallel
stories. Although the novel takes its title from one of the characters, that
character cannot be said to be the sole protagonist. The novel begins with
a not very flattering picture of the curates of the area, and an attack on the
new machinery for the mill. It ends in the Victorian welter of marriages
and reconciliations. Caroline Helstone's parents separated soon after her
birth and she lives with her uncle, the Reverned Helstone, rector of Briar
-field. She is in love with Robert Moore, who is of Flemish and English
extraction, and whose father was distantly related to Caroline's mother.
Robert's whole concern in life is the success of Hollow's mill and he is
determined to install machinery there to ensure this success. Early in the
story an argument between Helstone and Moore results in Caroline being
forbidden to visit Hollow's cottage, though even before this she has come
to doubt Robert's love for her.
Miss Shirley Keeledar, heiress, landowner in the district and landlord of
the mill, arrive with her governess, Mrs. Pryor, to stay for a while at her
house, Fieldhead, since she has come of age. A strong friendship springs
18
up between the two girls. Together they witness the attempt by the
workers on Hollow's mill, together they take walks, and together they
take part in the annual Sunday-school walk and tea-drinking.
Caroline falls into a decline, and is nursed to health by Mrs. Pryor, who
turns out to be her long-lost mother. Shirley is visited by her uncle, Mr.
Sympson, his family and his son' tutor. Moore who wants to marry her for
her fortune, Shirley at length confess to her love for the tutor, Louis
Moore, brother of Robert, whom she has loved since she lived with the
Sympson family as a girl. Robert Moore, shot by a leader of the
workman, is nursed to health by his friends, The Yorkers, repents his
general harshness, and marries Caroline.
Charlotte Bronte ends the story with the following;
The story is told. I think I now see the judicious reader putting on
his spectacles to look for the moral. It would be an insult to his
sagacity to offer directions. I only say, God speed him in the quest!
( Shirley, 646).
Despite the obvious irony of the above-mentioned passage- in its
reference to a male reader in particular, really, there is a 'moral' in
Charlotte Bronte's Shirley, especially for the woman reader The 'moral'
that comes to the fore in my reading of Shirley would seem to be the
contemporary society depicted in the novel does not yet allow women to
be full liberated and the social equals of men. Shirley is corrected by her
'mirror image', and shown the proper behavioral patens for young women
in the early nineteenth century.
However carefully in Charlotte Bronte limits the area of story in time and
place, she marks political, social and religious influences, the novel is not
of the Victorian social reform kind. There is no reforming zeal at work.
19
The brief picture of the child laborers coming to the mill evokes no
Dickensian indignation; the poverty-off workers no Gaskellian pity:
To quote Argyle (1995:741):
Shirley presents a notable contrast to Miss Bronte's other novels...
The world of toil and suffering lies behind, but ever so far away.
True, it must be again encountered, its problems resolved, its sores
probed; the hard and obstinate war again waged manfully; but in
the mean time the burn foams and sparkles through the glen; there
is sunshine among the purple harebells; and the leaves in the
birken glad dance merrily in the summer wind.
4.2 Shirley and the Idea of Women
Through the novel, Charlotte Bronte shows how the patterns of women's
lives (and those of the workers) are shaped by social attitudes and forces
over which they have no control. That the woman question is one of the
main themes of the novel is recognized by both readers and the critics of
the time.
Although a concern with the position of women in society and the kinds
of lives they lead is implicit in her other novel, it is only in Shirley that it
becomes a predominant theme centering on the lives of the two heroines
Caroline and Shirley. On this context we can quote Bellringer (1993:
122):
In Shirley, Charlotte Bronte is also concerned with the opposition
between the more general behavior of both protagonists, and she
links this with the contrast between the opposite traits of passionate
feeling and excitement, of individual freedom and fulfillment, and
20
those of self-transcending or self-denying duty and moral
responsibility. Rather than presenting this kind of divided
approach in one character, as she does in Jane Eyre, she splits the
behavior into two parts, assigning that the timid and dutiful young
girl to Caroline, and that of the tougher and more independent
women to Shirley.
Caroline's lacks of character, her long, brooding inactivity in the novel,
her seriousness, are as much the result of the weariness of life without
purpose of an unmarried woman as of the sorrowing and decline of the
girl crossed in love. Shirley, of course, is shown to have much to occupy
her, but even so, a comparison of the occupations. Shirley's pursuits are
quite as trivial in some ways as those of Caroline. Fundamentally, it is
Shirley's nature which enables her to find such restrictions of activity not
irksome.
In the novel, Caroline, is portrayed as shy. Her timidity is illustrated by
Yoke's comparison of her pale quietness to one of the marbles of Canova
(Shirely, 539). She is, Shirley tells Moore, quite feminine ''nor of what
they call the spirited order of women'' (Shirely, 363), a girl whose rare
outbursts have no'' manly fire'', but only '' a short, vivid, trembling glow,
that shot up, shone, vanished'' and almost'' left her scared at her own
daring'' (Shirely, 364). Yet, at the same time, as Shirley also points out,
Caroline'' though gentle, tractable, and candid enough, is still perfectly
capable of defying even Mr. Moore's penetration''(Shirely,364).
In the novel also, Shirley is portrayed as an intelligent woman, observes
men' treatment of women and recognizes the perception that underline it.
When Robert Moore does not inform her of the attack on the mill, even
though he owns it, she marks that men tell women nothing and keeping
them completely in the dark about subjects which involve danger. She
21
comes to the conclusion that they perceive women to have as much
capacity for thought as children, and clearly that she think this wrong.
In any case, Charlotte Bronte offers no solution to the feminist problem in
this novel. Shirley, the landowner, farmer, mill owner and heiress,
abdicates wealth, position and power in favor of her husband; Caroline
marries Robert Moore and the problems of unmarried life are removed
from her. But a third attitude to the feminine dilemma is suggested by the
young girl, Rose Yorke, in her determination to use the talents God gave
her and bury them in a life of domesticity.
4.3 Love and Marriage
Love, indeed, is the central theme of Charlotte Bronte's novels: for it was
inevitably the main preoccupation of so passionate a temperament. Her
power to describe it is of course, conditioned by the nature of her genius.
She cannot dissect the workings of passion, nor can she illuminate its
effect on character. What she can do is to convey its actual present throb.
And this she does as it had never been done before in English fiction.
Finding love and getting married seem to be two of the most important
themes in Charlotte Bronte's Shirley. The novel is filled with unhappy
marriages- marriages in which it is the woman who comes off worst- and
this is closely related to the feminine theme, both involving a man's view
of woman.
In Shirley, the men generally are unwilling to accept women as equal and
intelligent partners. A woman like Shirley is looked upon as a good
match because of her money, Helstone prefers women who are light-
headed so he can see them at his inferiors.His wife pined away almost
unnoticed-he believes that people tire of one another in marriage. Mrs.
Pryor comments:
22
... life is an illusion... most of the cheats of existence are strong...
[the] sweetness [of love] is... transitory( Shirely,364).
Shirley gives her opinion as to how one may judge the right mate, by
observing his behavior with others, with those weaker and more helpless
than himself, or by observing his attitude to women. But this a minority
view in face of all the opinions raised against marriage in the novel.
Set against the men are the women, seen as old maids, young girls with
their sights set on marriage, housewives, either married or single. Of
these, the latter are in some ways most content- Mrs. Yorke and Hortense
Moore have their household duties to occupy them. Miss Mann and Miss
Ainley find their satisfaction in good works of a charitable kind, but
under the dominance of male direction Young girls lead idle existences
hoping to marry eventually.
Shirley is an attempt on a woman's part to straddle the two groupings. She
is a woman who, through birth and position, occupies many of the posts
normally filled by men; she refers to herself as Captain Keeldar. But it is
noticeable that she is a figure-head in her position as landowner. She has
more authority, more intimacy with business concerns than Caroline, but
at crucial moments in political events she must retain the passive role of a
woman.
Shirley is intended to have greater insight into what is going on than
everyone else, but since she does not reveal her insights until a situation
has been revealed to her, she is unconvincing. The attempt to portray the
Charlotte- heroine in fortunate circumstances as well as the attempt to
analyze the situation of the unmarried woman is unsuccessful because
both, by their nature, are dogged by lack of appropriate action.
23
Finally, Charlotte Bronte's picture of love and marriage reveal her power.
But solitary obsession, while it offers equal scope to her intensity and
more to her imaginative strangeness, makes no demands on her, she
cannot satisfy. No power of psychological penetration or accurate
observation is needed to communicate the impressions of the senses in an
abnormal nervous state; while to be dreamlike and unrestrained is
characteristic of such impressions.
References
Primary Sources
Bronte, Charlotte. Shirley. London: Penguin, 2003.
Secondary Sources
Alexander, Sally. Women's Work in Nineteenth Century London: A Study
of the Years 1820-1850. London: Journeyman, 2001.
Argyle, Gisela. Gender and Generic Mixing in Charlotte Bronte 's
Shirley''. Studying in English Literature'' 1500-1900.35.4(1995):741-756)
Bellringer, Alan W. Charlotte Bronte's Shirley: Casebook. London:
Macmillan,1993.
Billington, Rosmund. The Life of Charlotte Bronte. London: Macmillan.
1988.
Brownstien, Rachel. Becoming a Heroine: Reading about Women in
Novels. New York. Viking 2001.
Criak, W.A. The life of Charlotte Bronte. London: Nelson and Sons.1999
24
Gaskell, Elizabeth. The life of Charlotte Bronte. London: Macmillan.
1990.
Gordon, Lyndall. Charlotte Bronte: A Passionate Life. London: Chatoo
and Windus.
Hunt, Linda. A woman's Portion: Ideology, Culture and the British
female Novel Tradition. New York: Garland. 1988.
Ingland, Elizabeth. Telling Tales; Gender and Narrative Form in
Victorian Literature and Culture London: Chatoo and Windus.
25
Emily Bronte's
Revenge in
and
Thwarted Love
of
Depiction
The
.
Wuthering Heights
Abstract
The present study aims at examining the depiction of thwarted love and
revenge in Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights. The study is divided into
four chapters in addition to a conclusion.
Chapter One: casts light on Emily Bronte's achievement as of an
intrinsically different kind from that of any of her contemporizes.
Chapter Two: traces Emily Bronte's Contribution, Reputation and
Influence. Emily Bronte illustrates some aspects of human nature more
fully than the other Victorians. Also, she is the most poetical of all
English novelists.
Chapter Three: explores
Thwarted Love in Emily Bronte's Wuthering
Heights
.
Chapter Four: examines
revenge in Emily Bronte's Wuthering
Heights
.
Emily Bronte in her fascinating '' Wuthering Heights, she proves that
man is a creature who differs from all the other creatures. The main
difference lies in the extremeness of the feelings of love, hate and revenge
in every human being. In her metaphysics, love is the primary law of
human nature and paramount principle of her universe. Adhere to, it is at
once the source of joy and harmony; rejected or subverted, it becomes the
fountainhead of enmity and revenge.
26
1. Introduction
The first fact to be realized about Emily Bronte, is that her achievement is
of an intrinsically different kind from that of any of her contemporizes.
Like that of Dickens, indeed, it is specially distinguished by the power of
its imagination. Emily stands outside the main current of nineteenth
century fiction as markedly as Blake stands outside of eighteenth
century poetry.
According to Barker ( 1995:34)
Emily looked at the human life which was their common subject
from a different point of view. She stood outside her age as Blake
stood outside his. It is for the same reason. Like Blake, Emily
Bronte is concern solely with those primary aspects of life which
are unaffected by time and place.
Emily Bronte's great characters exist in virtue of the reality of their
attitude to the universe; they loom before us in the simple epic outline
which is all that we see of man revealed against the huge landscape of the
cosmic scheme. Emily did not see her world in relation to moral or social
concerns of the day. She was not irked by the restrictions placed on
women in society, and presumably viewed Branwell's - destructions as
the action of a free soul going its own way- as did Heathcliff and Hinley
and Cathy. She was able to see such events, she observed the reasons for
certain actions, but she was removed from the influence of everyday
lesson. Her comment on Branwell was that he was 'hopeless being', but
she does not seem to have felt any of the moral disgust for him that
Charlotte felt.
27
Emily Bronte's vision of life does away with the ordinary antithesis
between good and bad. To call some aspects of life good and some evil is
to accept some experiences and to reject others. But it is an essential trait
of Emily Bronte's attitude that it accepts all experience. Not that she is an
optimist who believes that the pleasant parts of life are its only real
aspects. The storm is as much part of her universe as the calm. Indeed,
she is peculiarly aware of the storm : she makes out the harsh elements of
life to be as harsh as they can be. In this context we can quote
Barker(1bid:45):
Emily Bronte's characters set no bridle on their destructive
passions ; nor do they repent of their destructive deeds. But since
these deeds and passions do not spring from essentially destructive
impulses, but impulses only destructive because they are diverted
from pursuing their natural course, they are not bad. Further,
their fierceness and ruthlessness have, when confined to their true
sphere, a necessary part to play in the cosmic scheme, and as such
are to be accepted. Emily Bronte's outlook is not immortal, but
with those conditioning forces of life on which the native erections
of the human mind that we call moral standards are built up.
In consequence that conflict between right and wrong which is the
distinguishing feature in the Victorian view of life does not come into her
view. Human nature, to her, is not a mixture of good and bad elements, as
it to Thackeray. It cannot be grouped into the virtuous and the wicked, as
it is by Charlotte Bronte or Dickens. The conflict in her books is not
between right and wrong, but between like and unlike.
28
According to Wilson (1987: 240)
Substance, intensity, freshness- these then are the three
elements that give its individuality to Emily Bronte'
imagination. They reveal themselves in every aspect of her
world.
This attitude is responsible for lifting the universe of Wuthering Heights
beyond the limitations of the contemporary moral world to a wider belief
in the basic qualities of human nature. Such matters as education or lack
of it, the role of women in society and her relationship with men, the
social reaction to the effects of degradation, are not her concern, In
certain instances, human nature scurvies in its virtues in spite of
degradation; on the other hand, a fierce passion can create unhappiness
for itself and others that strikes across the social and moral codes of
society, but brings misery which is spiritual; and again a weak nature
crossed by unhappiness, and without the stability effect of standards, can
ruin itself.
2. Emily Bronte's Contribution, Reputation and Influence
2.1 Emily's Life: Family Background
Emily Bronte (1818-1848) was a British novelist and poet, best known
for her one novel Wuthering Heights(1847), an acknowledged classic of
English literature.
According to Newman, (1990: 104):
Almost no one has been audacious enough to deny its power and its
unique place in the development of English fiction.
29
Emily Bronte lived in a small town in the rural Yorkshire area of England
during the early to mid-1800s. The fifth of six children, Bronte was no
stranger to hardship and grief. At only one year and nine months old,
Emily moved with her family to the rural town of Haworth. The Bronte
family lived in Haworth for less than a year when Emily mother fell
seriously ill. Within a year, she was dead. Emily Bronte was three years
old. Her youngest sister, Anne, was not yet a year old. Only a few years
later would come the deaths of Emily's two oldest sisters, Maria and
Elizabeth. Significant or not, this would now make Emily Significant or
not, this would now make Emily Bronte the third child of the family.
Emily was perhaps the most persistent in keeping to her path to life where
earning her living by teaching was concerned. Charlotte always suffered
eventually, but Emily could least of the three remain home for very long.
On this context Newman( ibid: 46) pointed out :
Liberty was the breath of Emily's nostrils; without it she perished.
The change from her own home to a school, and from her own very
noiseless, very secluded, but unrestricted and inartificial mode of
life, to one of disciplined routine... was what she failed in
enduring. Her nature proved her to strong for fortitude... in this
struggle her death was quickly broken.
And so, Emily returned to Haworth after only three months as a pupil as
roe head and her place was taken by Anne. To play her part in their plan,
however, Emily made up by taking on the cooking and much of the
housework at Haworth.
In 1842 Emily and Charlotte, accompanied by Mr. Bronte and Mary
Taylor and her brother, went to Brussels and became pupils at the
Pesionnat Heger in the Rued'isbelle, where the school-rooms and
30
dormitories. In school, Mr. Heger took an interest in the two sisters, had
some understanding of their unusual nature and genius, and gave them
private lessons in French. Emily wrote of him:
He is professor of rhetoric, a man of power as to mind, but very
choleric and irritable in temperament; a little back being, with a
face that varies in expression. Sometimes he borrows the
lineaments..( ibid,p56)
It was the cold and cough Emily took at her brother Barnwell's funeral
that was to bring on the second tragedy in so short a time. On 29 October
Charlotte wrote:
Emily' scold and cough are very obstinate. I fear she has pain in
her chest, and I sometimes catch s shortness in her breathing when
she has moved at all quickly. She looks very thin and pale... it is
useless to question her; you get no answers, It is still more useless
to recommend remedies; they are never adopted ( ibid.p.89)
Emily sank rapidly. She refused all help, would not see a doctor. Her
stern independence caused her sisters much heartache. One morning,
having dressed ant taken up her sewing, it was apparent to them that she
was dying. At last she gasped. If you will send for a doctor, I will see
him now.' At two o'clock, she died.
2.2 Emily's Contribution, Reputation Influence
Emily is the most telling landscape of any in English fiction. As might be
expected her observation is not minute or precise. She does not
distinguished between the different sounds made by the wind as it bows
through oak trees or larch, as Hardy does: nor convey with the exact
violence of D.H Lawrence its impact on the physical senses. She sketches
31
in the main features of her scene-sky, trees, heath in general terms; and
briefly.
Indeed, Emily Bronte illustrates some aspects of human nature more
fully than the other Victorians. Its heredity character, for one thing; her
story turns largely on the transmission of hereditary traits. And her
experience, formed as it was in great part on the observation of one
family-her own- taught her to take advantages of it. No other novelist
before Emily Bronte brings out hereditary characteristics in this way.
Jane Austen, impeccable realist as she is, has created children that have
nothing in common with their parents, By what improbable miracle did
Mr. and Mrs. Bennet produce a child like Jane.
According to Kiely (1972:251):
Emily Bronte's intensity gives her the power to describe one aspect
of human nature which never appears in the works of her
contemporaries at all. She can present man at the climax of his
spiritual crises- in spiritual ecstasy, in the turmoil of spiritual
hatred and despair, at the moment of death, None of the other
Victorian can successfully describes a death scene.
This power of expressing intensity of emotion is also connected with the
Emily's poetry. She is the most poetical of all our novelists. She is not the
only poetical one. Also, Emily's genius is more consistently intense: so
that she achieves poetry more continuously and more variously.
According to Dictionary of Literary Biography (1983: 78)
Some poems are--like Wuthering Heights--difficult to interpret
because the context is not known; nor, as the manuscript of such
poems is sometimes missing, is it always known for certain how to
32
punctuate them. The Philosopher is such a poem. Brontë makes
one of the speakers talk about three gods warring within his breast,
and there is a baffling allusion to three rivers, but it is difficult to see
who is speaking to whom, or to what the tripartite division refers.
The imagery may be biblical, and is clearly powerful, but it is hard
to see where it is leading. It would seem that in her later and finer
poems Emily Brontë was slowly working her way to a mystical
vision of a universe compared to which all of life's pains and joys
were meaningless.
Emily Bronte's imagination is the most extraordinary hat ever applied
itself to English fiction. It is also an imagination appropriate to the
material on which she choose to work. The theme of Wuthering Height to
be successfully realized needs just the qualities Emily Bronte is the best
able to supply. Because it conceives nature as informed by a vital spirit, it
needs an imaginative apprehension of landscape. Because it involves an
acute dramatic conflict, it needs the power to express violent. Because it
invests this emotion with a spiritual significance that could not be
conveyed by a mere literal realism, it needs the power of poetic invention.
Finally, because it expresses a view of the world remote from ordinary
experience, it needs an imagination at once intense and substantial.
Wuthering Heights, for all that it illustrates a transcendental philosophy,
is first and foremost a novel. By a prodigious feat of creative imagination,
Emily Bronte has contrived to incarnate an interplay of ultimate
principles in a drama of human beings.
33
3. Thwarted Love in Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights
3.0 The Story of the Novel
Heathcliff, an orphan from the slums of Liverpool, is brought home to
Wuthering Heights by its owner, Mr. Earnshaw, who makes the boy one
of the family. His son, Hindley, develops an undying hatred for
Heathcliff, his daughter, Cathy, an undying love. In his turn, Heathcliff
hates Hindley and loves Cathy.
After the death of Mr. Earnshaw, Hindley degrades Heathcliff to the level
of a farm-worker, and Cathy, though she loves him, realizes that she
cannot marry him. She agrees to marry instead Edgar Linton, son of the
Linton family of Thrushcorss Grangr-Heathcliff, hearing of this, runs
away.
He returns after three years, wealthy and a gentleman, and determined to
avenge himself on the two families. Cathy is now married and living at
the Grange with Edgar and his sister Isabella and Nelly Dean, formerly
the servant at the Heights. Hindley, on the death of his wife Frances, has
turned to drinking and degrading his small son, Hereton.
As a result of Heathcliff's return, Cathy quarrels with Edgar and becomes
ill. Heathcliff elopes with Isabella. Cathy dies after giving birth to the
young Catherine Linton; Isabella escapes from the Heights and leaves the
area, eventually giving birth to a son, Linton Heathcliff; and Hindley
Earnshaw dies, leaving his property and his son Heathcliff's hands.
34
3.1 Emily's Concept of Love
Love is the most obvious and immediate theme of
Emily Bronte's
Wuthering Heights
. It is explored in many aspects, ranging from the
obsessive passion of Heathcliff, through Hindley's joy and desolation,
Lockwood's feeble fancies, Isabella's infatuation, and Edgar's gentle
devotion, to the slowly built, strongly based love of Hareton and
Catherine. Heathcliff and Vathy often speak of each other in semi-
religious terms, as if their love were on some unworldly plane, both
deeper and more spiritual than the love of others; Heathcliff calls for his
'soul', and she feels that he offers a reality far beyond the quieter and
more domestic loves of Edgar, Hareton or Catherine. Although it is more
magnificent in scale, it is also shown to be more destructive and
unforgiving..
Emily Bronte's heroes and heroines do not love each other because they
find each other's personalities pleasant, or because they admire each
other's characters. They may be superficially attracted for such reasons, as
Catherine Earnshaw is attracted to Edgar Linton. But their deeper feelings
are only roused for someone for whom they feel a sense of affinity, that
comes from the fact that they are both expressions of the same spiritual
principle. Catherine does not '' like'' Heathcliff, but she loves him with the
strength of her being. For, he, like her a child of the storm; and this makes
a bond between them, which interweaves itself with the very nature of
their existence.
in the Novel
Love
Thwarted
Idea of
3.2
The love between Heathcliff, and Catherine holds a solid foundation. In
essence, they both belong to one kind of people who abounds in love and
who is full of fiery passion and life energy. They dare love and hate, say
35
and act. They despise the social customs and long for freedom. The
feelings between them do not mingle with benefits, sympathy, and
condolence. ( Kettle, 2000,p.45)Most of all, they both realize they are the
other party of themselves, as Catherine said to Nelly:
If All else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be;
and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe
would turn to a mighty stranger: I should not seem a part of it. My
love for Linton is like the foliage in the wood: time will change it, I
am well aware, as winter changes the threes- My love for
Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath- a source of little
visible, but necessary.
Heathcliff is the disordering cause which creates disaster in two families.
In his wake, he carries passion, hate, jealousy and revenge. Without him
Cathy's marriage would no doubt have proceeded calmly enough, and
nothing would have changed at the Heights or Grange. But as Heathcliff
injects violence, so also he brings energy; the turmoil he causes in both
families is in the end a new source of strength for the second generation.
Emily deliberately demonstrates Heathcliff's brutality, and Cathy's
childish willfulness, yet it is difficult not to feel that her own sympathies
were weighted in favor of the Height. Her imagination is more
passionately engaged by those who belong to the moors than by those in
the valley, or even by those who in the end combine the two. This is not
to say that she rejects the need to harmonize the wild and the tame, the
fierce and the gentle ; but her own personal love for the wild and
untamable led her sympathies in that direction.
36
Heathcliff comes back for his love and hatred. The first time they meet,
Catherine blames him, as she says,'' To be absent and silent for three
years, and never to think of me''( Bronte, 1982, p264). Heathcliff
answers.'' A little more than you have thought of me''.( ibid,p,225). Such
chief answer is sufficient to indicate Catherine has always been in his
mind and his love towards her is the same as before. Catherine uses her
own way to love and try to help Heathcliff. Though her plan is failed.
Catherine does not want Heathcliff to take revenge. Love originally is the
product of human evolution, but if it is inhibited with exterior forces for a
long time, it is prone to cause men some wild behaviors.
To conclude Hareton and Catherine are the children of love, and so
combine the positive'' good'' qualities of their respective parents: the
kindness and constancy of calm, the strength and courage of storm.
Linton, on the other hand, is a child of hate, and combines the negative''
bad'' qualities of his two parents - the cowardice and weakness of calm,
the cruelty and ruthlessness of storm. Heathcliff obtains power over all
three children. Catherine is married to her natural antipathy, Linton; so
that her own nature diverted from its purpose, grows antagonistic to her
natural affinity Hareton.
Necessity of love is human nature. Loving and being loved are human
happiness and also human elemental rights. No one can deprive them at
will and replace with hatred. (Kettle, 2000:67). Where there is human
nature, there is love.
37
4. Revenge in Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights
4.0 The Idea of Revenge in the Novel
Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights is depicted through violence cruelty,
revenge, hatred and love. For example, Heathcliff 's cruelty is projected
towards his enemies, the Earnshaws and the Lintons, in the form of
willed, responsible and controlled by purpose scheme of revenge, and this
controlled scheme distinguishes his attitude from all the other types in the
novel. The best definition of such a scheme is that of Kettle( 2000:67):
For what Heathcliff does is to use against his enemies with
complete ruthlessness their own weapons, to turn on them their
own standards, to beat them at their own games. The weapons he
used against the Earnshaws and the Lintons are their own weapons
of money and arranged marriage.
4.1 Heathcliff 's Revenge
Heathcliff makes no secret to Catharine of his intention to revenge
himself, and he begins his revenge with plans for taking over the property
and wealth of both the Earnshaw and Linton families. When the quarrel
over Isabella begins, we do not hear the whole of it, but we do know that,
to some extent, he and Cathy are quarrelling over the disposition of the
Linton aside.
His revenge will also be in terms of social degradation, as well as in
taking over of property. So Isabella is degraded. When Nelly visits her
after her marriage'... she already partook of the pervading spirit of
neglect which encompassed her. Her pretty face was an and listless: her
hair uncurled... So much had circumstances altered their positions, that
he( Heathcliff) would certainly have struck a stranger as a born and bred
Details
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- Literature English literature Charlotte Bronte Text analysis T. S. Eliot Introduction Thomas Hardy William Faulkner Franz Kafka F. Scott Fitzgerald Joseph Conrad
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