W4 Flashcards
Poet Laureate Robert Southey’s response to Charlotte Bronte, March 1837
‘Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life, and it ought not to be’
When published WH received criticism of its…
perceived violence, and the brutal and savage character of Heathcliff
Millions of interpretative words measure the…
incapacity of C & H to speak for themselves; ferocious privacy
failure to express nature of relationship quote; distributed conception of selfhood stuns potency of language; words cannot break into imagined space
‘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?’
Best quote in the whole fucking world; separation and ‘talk’ impracticable bc there is no term for the relationship
‘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.’
other unspeakable quote…. by Heathcliff
‘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’
quote for CH indistinguishably locked together in embrace when they reunite on eve of C’s passing; configuration of interlockedness
‘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’
best quotes on young Linton
- ‘Thou art my mother’s child, entirely! Where is my (i) share in thee, puling chicken?’
- whey-faced whining wretch!’
- ‘more of a lass than a lad’
- ‘the invalid’
- ‘the worst tempered bit of a sickly slip that ever struggled not its teens’
on Linton’s love letters
‘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.’
Heathcliff to Nelly on double dealings
‘Worthy Mrs Dean, I like you, but I don’t like your double dealings’
quote on birth of Cathy
‘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’
quote Hareton no education
‘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’
Kate Flint in ‘The Victorians and the Visual Imagination’ (2000)
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
Imperceptibilities Kate Flint picks up on
- blindness
- dust
- hallucinations
- social and psychological depths
Kate Flint: our sense of the Victorians as self-consciously upright people…
reflecting their own complacent equilibrium is misguided; they were acc aware of the subjectivity and fallibility of vision
Flint details a Victorian visual imagination permeated by horizons…
“slippery, intriguing borderline[s]” between the seen and the unseen, objective and subjective
Kate Flint portrays a ——- visual culture
variegated and contradictory
Wildfell Hall is a powerful…
and disputatious sister-novel to Wuthering Heights
Human beings have abandoned Wildfell as too Wuthering
’ - ‘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’
Emily’s utilitarian Romanticism is answered by…
Anne’s picturesque rationalism
Religion in Wildfell Hall
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
Unreliable narrators
- Gilbert Markham first cousin to Lockwood; cad/oaf
- chapters destabilising and confusing
Charlotte Bronte writing to Miss Wooler on men
‘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’
J. Hillis Miller on WH
talks about its system of ‘Chinese Box’ encapsulations 1982
instability in Wildfell
- vitalizes link between inner/major plot told by Helen’s diary and outer domesticated reality
- males of WH are unstable
unstable males of Wildfell
ironically what men have conventionally called women;
1 Markham ‘spoiled’
2 Huntibngdon can’t grow up - infantile basis of conditioned male psyche
Lucy as unreliable narrator in Villette
- reticence about personal circumstances and history
2. withholds info from readers e.g. over identity of Dr John
What do we hear about Lucy’s immediate family in Villette?
nothing except supposed death in cryptic comment ‘the ship was lost, the crew perished’
- presages end of novel
- hides specifics of family
foreshadowing Villette
- family death in ship
2. Miss Marchmont’s 30 year grief for dead love Frank presages Lucy’s grief over M Paul
Physiognomy Villette
Nicholas Dames; character’s act on what they see on other’s faces and what that predicts about their future
Lucy quote withholding her identity from Dr John
‘I liked entering his presence covered with a cloud he had not seen through’
Dante Gabriel Rosetti on WH
“A fiend of a book – an incredible monster […] The action is laid in hell, – only it seems places and people have English names there.”
Bronte and gothic fiction
Ellen Moers, in Literary Women, developed a feminist theory that connects women writers, including Emily Brontë, with gothic fiction.
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]
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
James Harley
Nelly as bystander
Joseph’s speech and dialect, changed by Charlotte
Irene Wiltshire on dialect and speech in the novel examines some of the changes Charlotte made.
The Atlas review of WH
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.”
G&G on being like a woman (Cathy)
‘Catherine has learned, correctly, that if it is degrading to be a woman it is even more degrading to be like a woman’.
G&G. on the marriage
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’.
Emily Baldys on adult hareton (Animal + education)
‘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.’
Hareton animal description / education
“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’
Speech / Music critics / the not-said
- Lord David Cecil (Bronte’s prose)
2. Pierre Macherey (the not-said)
Lord David Cecil on rhythm of Bronte’s prose
‘unfailingly beautiful; a varied, natural haunting cadence, now buoyantly lifting, now surging like the sea’
Critic Pierre Macherey
‘the not-said’ ; construction of narrators provides for reader a means of reading what the post-structuralist critic has called the ‘not-said’
Catherine Belsey
‘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’
Q.D Leavis
sees WH as ‘a Romantic incest-story: Heathcliff as brother-lover’
Robert Kiely
‘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’
Mary F. Robinson
painstakingly traced aspects of Heathcliff’s behaviour to aspects of Branwell Bronte, Emily’s brother
Nancy Armstrong
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’
Margaret Homans
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.
Terry Eagleton, Arnold Kettle and Nancy Armstrong
economic and social conditions which inform the novel; novel as both product and participant in social context
Elizabeth Gaskell’s biography of CB (1857)
clear that Bronte sisters struggled with conflict between being a woman and being a writer
G&G’s reading of Heathcliff
as female; second sons, bastards and daughters; disposed of social power. Unpropertied and disposed; goes against grain of heroic masculinity.
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 were I entirely contained here?
Unspeakability details WH
‘I cannot express it; but surely…’
‘do not speak it is impracticable’
‘it is unutterable’
Key ideas psychoanalysis
- preoccupation with Boundaries
- Imaginary vs Symbolic (Semiotic vs Symbolic(
- Mirror stage: Lacanian childhood (‘I’ I am Heathcliff)) (Is that Catherine Linton?’
- Polymorphous Perversity of Infant
- Castration
Narrative framing quotes
‘I’ll continue it… only a little condensed’
It is a truism of the novel’s critical edifice that…
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.
Love and punishment quote
‘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.’
oppositional: Edgar and Heathcliff
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.
