Prose Flashcards
Withering Heights - Emily Bronte 1845-46
Misery and degradation and nothing that god or satan could inflict would have parted us, but you of your own will did it’
He will be rich and I shall like to be the greatest woman in the neighbourhood’
My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods, time will change it, I’m well aware, as winter changes trees. My love for health cliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath, a source of minimal delight bout necessary. Nelly I am Heathcliff.
They both promised fair to grow up as savages
It’s a cuckoos sir
I’d make a pet of him if he were mine
Papa says everything she has is mine
I wish you were a mile or two up those hills vs
Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest as long as I am living.
He sat by the corpse all night, weeping in butter earnest.
If Catherine wished to return I intended shattering the big glass panes to a million pieces top get her out.
The picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde 1891
Love
An illusion
They spoil every romance by trying to make it last forever
Gazing at the shadow of his own loveliness
On sibyl Vane’s death ‘ a wonderful ending to a wonderful play. A tragedy in which I took a great part, but by which I have not been wounded.
If he ever does you any wrong, I shall kill him.
The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath 1963
In spite of all the roses and kisses and restaurant dinners a man showered on a woman before he married her, what he secretly wanted when the wedding service ended was for her to flatten out underneath his feet like Mrs Willard’s kitchen Matt.
Woman haters were like gods; invulnerable and chock full of power.
My virginity weighed like a millstone around my neck.
Climbing to freedom, freedom from fear, freedom from marrying the wrong person like Buddy Willard just because of sex, freedom from the Florence critterden homes where all the poor girls go.
Mother in her ‘sweet martyrs voice’ pretend it’s all a bad dream.
The Great Gatsby- Fitzgerald.
There was dancing now…. And men pushing young girls backwards in eternal graceless circles, superior couples holding each other tortuously, fashionably and keeping to the corners.
He re evalued everything in his house according to the measure of response it drew from her
Daisy stumbled short of his dreams, through no fault of her own, but from the colossal vitality of his illusions
It excited him too that many men already had loved daisy- it increased her value in his eyes
What realism- knew when to stop too, didn’t cut the pages.
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. But that’s no matter- tomorrow we will run faster, stretch our arms out further…
The edible woman 1965
Atwood
Children - “Limpets clinging to a rock’
society flaunted these slender laughing rubberised women before his eyes, urging, practically forcing on him their flexible blandishments and then refused to supply him with any.
now that she had been ringed he took pride in displaying her. He said he wanted her to really get to know some of his friends.
Ainsley behaved properly, why couldn’t you? The trouble with you is, he said savagely, you’re just rejecting your femininity’
now that I was thinking of myself in the first person singular again, i found my own situation much more interesting than his.’
You’ve been trying to destroy me haven’t you, trying to assimilate me.
You’re rejecting your femininity
The woman lay there, smiling glassily, her legs gone.
Nonsense she said, its only cake
she plunged the fork into the carcass neatly severing the body from the head.
Tiny two dimensional figure in a red dress, posed like a paper woman in a mail order catalogue, turning and smiling, fluttering in the white empty space… this couldn’t be it there had to be something more.
Oscar Wilde Context. - 1891
Social Context:
Industrial Revolution – social change
Strict moral codes of behaviour.
Literature Context:
Gothic Horror Links - Supernatural, corruption of soul, murder. Dorian’s Faustian Bargin
Contrast Literature’s movement in the Victorian Era to combat social ills.
Inspired by Plato’s Republic, King of Oyges
Aestheticism- Art for arts sake. reflected in detailed description of fabrics etc.
Wilde
Hedonist akin to the characters - celebrity, flamboyant dress
Homosexual (but previously married)
Reaction to the Novel:
- Censored 500 words cut, some say should be proecuted for violating laws of public morality. Have to remove homosexual hints between Basil and Dorian.
Jeanette Winterston - 1985
Adopted and raised in the Elm Pentecoastal church.
-16 identified as a lesbian and left home.
Literature
- Bible used as a framing device
-intersperse mythology
Postmodern tendancies - Taboo -Experimentation and surrealist.
Emily Bronte - 1846
Emily:
Wrote under ‘Ellis Bell’
Reclusive but loved nature. Less opportunities for women in period.
Reception:
Mixed, some condemn for amoral passions and depiction of cruelty.
Very original and new.
Literature:
Gothic- Madness, violence, paranormal, revenge, mysterious atmosphere.
Moers- conforms to gothic romance, she falls victim to demonic instincts of lover, suffers from violence of his feeling and is entangled by his thwarted passion.
Realism
- Psychologically complicated characters
- Nature vs nurture
- Frame Narrative
- Focus on less fortunate.
Sylvia Plath- 1963 set 1950s
Semi biographical account of her attempted suicide and teen years. During her life no effective treatment for depression.
Confessional poetry
Society:
Still huge restrictions on women, college numbers dropped in the 1950s. Mills College courses to prepare women for running a family. Time of huge prosperity but also huge conformity - Mccarthy etc.
Modernism:
Reflective, focus on the inner conscious
society impersonal
Rise of Freud.
Reaction:
Heavily influenced by her death, brutal honesty.
Many have identified a feminist tone.
Fitzgerald- 1925 novel.
Social
WW1
Roaring Twenties.
Prohibition- blurred norms and law.
Fitzgerald
Upper Middle class, Catholic
Fell for debaunte Zelda, tried to make money to convince her to marry him, only did so after success of his first novel. Written during critical point in their relationship. He was an alcoholic and she neurotic.
Literature:
LOST GENERATION- see a lack of meaning and purpose in life after cultural shock of World War One. Turn inwards.
Modernism- Experimentation, conscious artistic craft.
Margret Atwood - 1965, published 1969
Society
- Women’s role still mainly the home, marriage restrict but freedom uncertain. Only earn half of men’s wages, Atwood stayed in Uni of Toronto’s female accommodation, the first in Canada called Annsely hall.
Atwood:
Canadian
Humanist
PROTOFEMINIST NOVEL
Postmodernism
Experimentation
Reality as a social construct.
Oranges are not the only fruit- Jeanette Winterston
Love is as strong as death
I want someone who will be destroy and be destroyed by me
She’s no daughter of mine snapped my mother
We hugged and it felt like drowning
When I married I laughed for a week, cried for a month and then settled down for life’
As walked down the aisle the crown got heavier and heavier and the dress more and more difficult to walk in
The church was my family too
He told her she’d married down. Promptly ended all communication.
I thought he was nice, though he didn’t say much
Unnatural passions
