W4

Question 1

Poet Laureate Robert Southey’s response to Charlotte Bronte, March 1837

Answer 1

‘Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life, and it ought not to be’

Question 2

When published WH received criticism of its…

Answer 2

perceived violence, and the brutal and savage character of Heathcliff

Question 3

Millions of interpretative words measure the…

Answer 3

incapacity of C & H to speak for themselves; ferocious privacy

Question 4

failure to express nature of relationship quote; distributed conception of selfhood stuns potency of language; words cannot break into imagined space

Answer 4

‘I cannot express it; but surely you and everybody have a notion that there is, or should be an existence of yours beyond you. What were the use of creation if I were entirely contained here?’

Question 5

Best quote in the whole fucking world; separation and ‘talk’ impracticable bc there is no term for the relationship

Answer 5

‘My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it, I’m well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff! He’s always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being. So don’t talk of our separation again: it is impracticable.’

Question 6

other unspeakable quote…. by Heathcliff

Answer 6

‘You said I killed you-haunt me then!… Be with me always- take any form - drive me mad! Only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! It is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul’

Question 7

quote for CH indistinguishably locked together in embrace when they reunite on eve of C’s passing; configuration of interlockedness

Answer 7

‘how they met I hardly saw, but Catherine made a spring, and he caught her, and they were locked in an embrace from which I thought my mistress would never be released alive’

Question 8

best quotes on young Linton

Answer 8

1. ‘Thou art my mother’s child, entirely! Where is my (i) share in thee, puling chicken?’
2. whey-faced whining wretch!’
3. ‘more of a lass than a lad’
4. ‘the invalid’
5. ‘the worst tempered bit of a sickly slip that ever struggled not its teens’

Question 9

on Linton’s love letters

Answer 9

‘copious love letters, foolish as the age of the writer rendered natural, yet with touches, here and there, which I thought, were borrowed from a more experienced source.’

Question 10

Heathcliff to Nelly on double dealings

Answer 10

‘Worthy Mrs Dean, I like you, but I don’t like your double dealings’

Question 11

quote on birth of Cathy

Answer 11

‘On the anniversary of her birth we never manifested any signs of rejoicing, because it was, also, the anniversary of my late mistress’s death’

Question 12

quote Hareton no education

Answer 12

‘The lattice was open, and as he stepped out, I heard Cathy inquiring of her unsociable attendant, what was that inscription over the door?… It’s some damnable writing: he answered,” I cannot read it’

Question 13

Kate Flint in ‘The Victorians and the Visual Imagination’ (2000)

Answer 13

Flint advances provocative claim that V’s were as much interested in invisibility as the vaunted visibility for which that “scopic” culture is well known

Question 14

Imperceptibilities Kate Flint picks up on

Answer 14

• blindness
• dust
• hallucinations
• social and psychological depths

Question 15

Kate Flint: our sense of the Victorians as self-consciously upright people…

Answer 15

reflecting their own complacent equilibrium is misguided; they were acc aware of the subjectivity and fallibility of vision

Question 16

Flint details a Victorian visual imagination permeated by horizons…

Answer 16

“slippery, intriguing borderline[s]” between the seen and the unseen, objective and subjective

Question 17

Kate Flint portrays a ——- visual culture

Answer 17

variegated and contradictory

Question 18

Wildfell Hall is a powerful…

Answer 18

and disputatious sister-novel to Wuthering Heights

Question 19

Human beings have abandoned Wildfell as too Wuthering

Answer 19

’ - ‘only shielded from the war of wind and weather by a group of Scotch firs, themselves half blighted with storms’ - echoes WH ‘the excessive slant of a few, stunted firs at the end of the house’

Question 20

Emily’s utilitarian Romanticism is answered by…

Answer 20

Anne’s picturesque rationalism

Question 21

Religion in Wildfell Hall

Answer 21

Voice of Helen’s diary rich and deep with biblical allusion;
Anne’s Protestant vision encompassed awareness of depravity with refusal of doctrine of hell as incompatible with the God of love

Question 22

Unreliable narrators

Answer 22

• Gilbert Markham first cousin to Lockwood; cad/oaf

- chapters destabilising and confusing

Question 23

Charlotte Bronte writing to Miss Wooler on men

Answer 23

‘You ask if I do not think men are strange beings. I do indeed - and I think too that the mode of bringing them up is strange’

Question 24

J. Hillis Miller on WH

Answer 24

talks about its system of ‘Chinese Box’ encapsulations 1982

Question 25

instability in Wildfell

Answer 25

1. vitalizes link between inner/major plot told by Helen’s diary and outer domesticated reality
2. males of WH are unstable

Question 26

unstable males of Wildfell

Answer 26

ironically what men have conventionally called women;
1 Markham ‘spoiled’
2 Huntibngdon can’t grow up - infantile basis of conditioned male psyche

Question 27

Lucy as unreliable narrator in Villette

Answer 27

1. reticence about personal circumstances and history

2. withholds info from readers e.g. over identity of Dr John

Question 28

What do we hear about Lucy’s immediate family in Villette?

Answer 28

nothing except supposed death in cryptic comment ‘the ship was lost, the crew perished’

• presages end of novel
• hides specifics of family

Question 29

foreshadowing Villette

Answer 29

1. family death in ship

2. Miss Marchmont’s 30 year grief for dead love Frank presages Lucy’s grief over M Paul

Question 30

Physiognomy Villette

Answer 30

Nicholas Dames; character’s act on what they see on other’s faces and what that predicts about their future

Question 31

Lucy quote withholding her identity from Dr John

Answer 31

‘I liked entering his presence covered with a cloud he had not seen through’

Question 32

Dante Gabriel Rosetti on WH

Answer 32

“A fiend of a book – an incredible monster […] The action is laid in hell, – only it seems places and people have English names there.”

Question 33

Bronte and gothic fiction

Answer 33

Ellen Moers, in Literary Women, developed a feminist theory that connects women writers, including Emily Brontë, with gothic fiction.

Question 34

Heathcliff is described as a vampire, and it has been suggested that both he and Catherine are in fact meant to be seen as vampire-like personalities.[17][18]

Answer 34

it has been suggested that both he and Catherine are in fact meant to be seen as vampire-like personalities; Toni Reed and Carol A Senf

Question 35

James Harley

Answer 35

Nelly as bystander

Question 36

Joseph’s speech and dialect, changed by Charlotte

Answer 36

Irene Wiltshire on dialect and speech in the novel examines some of the changes Charlotte made.

Question 37

The Atlas review of WH

Answer 37

called it a “strange, inartistic story,” but commented that every chapter seems to contain a “sort of rugged power.”; / “We know nothing in the whole range of our fictitious literature which presents such shocking pictures of the worst forms of humanity.”

Question 38

G&G on being like a woman (Cathy)

Answer 38

‘Catherine has learned, correctly, that if it is degrading to be a woman it is even more degrading to be like a woman’.

Question 39

G&G. on the marriage

Answer 39

The marriage ‘inexorably locks her into a social system which denies her autonomy’ so Heathcliff’s return, the ‘return of the repressed’ ‘represents the return of her true self’s desires without the rebirth of her former powers’ – hence the inevitable descend into self-rejection, self-starvation, madness, and death – ‘a complex of psychoneurotic symptoms that is almost classically associated with female feelings of powerlessness and range’.

Question 40

Emily Baldys on adult hareton (Animal + education)

Answer 40

‘The adult Hareton has suddenly grown from an ‘infernal calf’ to a ‘young man’, a trajectory that revokes not only his infantilisation but his animalisation as well.’

Question 41

Hareton animal description / education

Answer 41

“infernal calf”, Lockwood describes him as ‘that bear’; at the end he is ‘respectably dressed, and seated at a table, having a book before him’

Question 42

Speech / Music critics / the not-said

Answer 42

1. Lord David Cecil (Bronte’s prose)

2. Pierre Macherey (the not-said)

Question 43

Lord David Cecil on rhythm of Bronte’s prose

Answer 43

‘unfailingly beautiful; a varied, natural haunting cadence, now buoyantly lifting, now surging like the sea’

Question 44

Critic Pierre Macherey

Answer 44

‘the not-said’ ; construction of narrators provides for reader a means of reading what the post-structuralist critic has called the ‘not-said’

Question 45

Catherine Belsey

Answer 45

‘In Wuthering Heights the inadequacies of the perceptions of Lockwood or Nellie Dean do not prevent the reader from seeming to apprehend the real nature of the relationship between Catherine and Heathcliff’

Question 46

Q.D Leavis

Answer 46

sees WH as ‘a Romantic incest-story: Heathcliff as brother-lover’

Question 47

Robert Kiely

Answer 47

‘Wuthering Heights is liked ream and like life and like history and like other works of literature precisely because Bronte rejects the exclusiveness of these categories. They continually inform and define one another’

Question 48

Mary F. Robinson

Answer 48

painstakingly traced aspects of Heathcliff’s behaviour to aspects of Branwell Bronte, Emily’s brother

Question 49

Nancy Armstrong

Answer 49

argues that the ‘enigmatic figure of Heathcliff is the result of his crossing between literary genres - the Romantic genres of the early nineteenth century, and early Victorian domestic realism’

Question 50

Margaret Homans

Answer 50

takes up point first made by Leo Bersani about destructiveness of nature: points out that nature is hardly ever directly represented in the novel which appears to be about nature; Emily chooses indirect metaphor/anecdote as a mode of repressing nature’s more threatening aspects.

Question 51

Terry Eagleton, Arnold Kettle and Nancy Armstrong

Answer 51

economic and social conditions which inform the novel; novel as both product and participant in social context

Question 52

Elizabeth Gaskell’s biography of CB (1857)

Answer 52

clear that Bronte sisters struggled with conflict between being a woman and being a writer

Question 53

G&G’s reading of Heathcliff

Answer 53

as female; second sons, bastards and daughters; disposed of social power. Unpropertied and disposed; goes against grain of heroic masculinity.

Question 54

I cannot express it;

Answer 54

but surely you and everybody have a notion that there is or should be an existence of yours beyond you. What were the use of creation were I entirely contained here?

Question 55

Unspeakability details WH

Answer 55

‘I cannot express it; but surely…’
‘do not speak it is impracticable’
‘it is unutterable’

Question 56

Key ideas psychoanalysis

Answer 56

1. preoccupation with Boundaries
2. Imaginary vs Symbolic (Semiotic vs Symbolic(
3. Mirror stage: Lacanian childhood (‘I’ I am Heathcliff)) (Is that Catherine Linton?’
4. Polymorphous Perversity of Infant
5. Castration

Question 57

Narrative framing quotes

Answer 57

‘I’ll continue it… only a little condensed’

Question 58

It is a truism of the novel’s critical edifice that…

Answer 58

C&H’s exile stems from their pre-conscious union, however, their unity only has meaning through the need for their escape; depends on exile. Linton (cypher) needed for Heathchliff’s triumph in grave scene.

Question 59

Love and punishment quote

Answer 59

‘She was much too fond of Heathcliff. The greatest punishment we could invent for her was to keep her separate from him: yet she got chided more than any of us on his account.’

Question 60

oppositional: Edgar and Heathcliff

Answer 60

Doubtless Catherine marked the difference between her friends, as one came in and the other went out. The contrast resembled what you see in exchanging a bleak, hilly, coal country for a beautiful fertile valley; and his voice and greeting were as opposite as his aspect.