WUTHERING HEIGHTS

For Tuesday, read through the rest of Wuthering Heights. You might also want to get started on the Sandra M. Gilbert essay on page 379 of the Norton Critical Edition of the novel.

Here are some questions to get you started on your blogs. Feel free to use them or develop your own. Remember, you can also write a blog responding to another student's post. There's some pretty "controversial" blogs out there involving Catherine and Heathcliff, and I would like to see what you think.

1) Last Thursday we spent a great deal of time focusing on our two narrators: Lockwood and Nelly. We took note of the way Nelly, because of her constantly shifting loyalties, might be an “unreliable narrator,” and how Lockwood, with his stodgy Victorian values, might not be the ideal listener for this romantic tale of passion and familial tragedy. For this blog, feel free to choose a scene from the novel and rewrite that scene from another character’s point of view. You can write in any style you like, but you might consider writing in the form of a diary or a letter (think Catherine’s diary on pages 16-18 or Isabella’s letter to Nelly), but bear in mind who is telling this story and to whom this story is told. How might this character manipulate the details of an event to place him or herself in a more sympathetic light? Also, what might change about the narrative depending on the character’s particular audience for his or her tale?
2) Last class, students worked in groups to explore the ways various characters changed depending on whether they were at Wuthering Heights or Thrushcross Grange. Draw from the passages you found and develop a blog examining that character’s changes further. You can find other passages for that character to analyze, or you can choose another character all together.
3) Draw some relationships between our discussion of Rousseau and education and Frankenstein’s “Creature” and Heathcliff and Hareton. What is the role of education in this novel? How does social class influence the way various characters’ consciousness and sense of self develop in the novel? Last class we briefly touched on the “performative nature” of Heathcliff’s character. How does Heathcliff “learn” social class? Why does his mimicry of the upper class become so “horrifying” or “uncanny” for these families?
4) We’ve talked a great deal in this class about “the return of the repressed” in terms of the subconscious, but the nineteenth century saw a more “material” version of this in the form of what is often called “the colonial return” of the repressed. 1847—the year Bronte wrote her novel—was also one of the most calamitous years of the Irish famine or what is now more often called “The Great Hunger.” During this time, England saw an incredible wave of Irish immigration in London, Manchester, and most especially Liverpool. These poor Irish people were most likely sick, emaciated, dirty, spoke Irish Gaelic, and probably seemed to most English people as alien invaders from another planet than human beings and citizens in their so-called “United” Kingdom. During the famine, which killed over a million Irish people, the English government turned a blind eye to Ireland, avoiding the problem rather than working towards providing effective relief. In Heathcliff and the Great Hunger by Terry Eagleton, he explains the way in which Ireland figured as England’s “unconscious” (9), and sees Heathcliff as a “fragment of the famine” (11). He writes:
Part of the horror of the Famine is its atavistic nature—the mind-shaking fact that an event with all the premodern character of a medieval pestilence happened in Ireland with frightening recentness. This deathly origin then shatters space as well as time, unmaking the nation and scattering Irish history across the globe. That history will of course continue; but as in Emily Bronte’s novel there is something recalcitrant at its core which defeats articulation, some ‘real’ which stubbornly refuses to be symbolized. In both cases, this ‘real’ is a voracious desire which was beaten back and defeated, which could find no place in the symbolic order of social time and was expunged from it, but which like the shades of Catherine and Heathcliff will return to haunt a history now in the process of regathering its stalled momentum and moving onwards and upwards. Some primordial trauma has taken place, which fixates your development at one level even as you continue to unfold at another, so that time in Irish history and Wuthering Heights would seem to move backwards and forwards simultaneously. Something anyway, for good or ill, has been irrevocably lost; and in both Ireland and the novel it takes up its home on the alternative side of myth. (14-15)
Explain what you think Eagleton means in the passage above. What do you think of Heathcliff as a “fragment” of the Famine, or as a colonial “Other”? How do he and Catherine “haunt” history? What does that mean? Eagleton says that that time in Irish history and Wuthering Heights “would seem to move backwards and forwards simultaneously.” Where do you see evidence of this in the novel? What does Eagleton mean by the very last statement? How do these characters’ lives become the embodiment of myth? Who (or what?) is lost to “myth”?
5) Read through the excerpt below from Sir William Blackstone’s Commentary on the Laws of England:

Book the First : Chapter the Fifteenth : Of Husband and Wife pp 431-432
By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being or legal
existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and
consolidated into that of the husband: under whose wing, protection, and cover, she performs
everything; and is therefore called in our law-french a feme-covert; is said to be covert-baron, or
under the protection and influence of her husband, her baron, or lord; and her condition during
her marriage is called her coverture. Upon this principle, of a union of person in husband and
wife, depend almost all the legal rights, duties, and disabilities that either of them acquire by the
marriage. I speak not at present of the rights of property, but of such as are merely personal. For
this reason, a man cannot grant anything to his wife, or enter into covenant with her: for the grant
would be to suppose her separate existence; and to covenant with her, would be only to covenant
with himself: and therefore it is also generally true, that all compacts made between husband and
wife, when single, are voided by the intermarriage. A woman indeed may be attorney for her
husband; for that implies no separation from, but is rather a representation of, her lord. And a
husband may also bequeath anything to his wife by will; for that cannot take effect till the
coverture is determined by his death. The husband is bound to provide his wife with necessaries
by law, as much as himself; and if she contracts debts for them, he is obliged to pay them: but for
any thing besides necessaries, he is not chargeable. Also if a wife elopes, and lives with another
man, the husband is not chargeable even for necessaries; at last if the person, who furnishes
them, is sufficiently apprized of her elopement. If the wife be indebted before marriage, the
husband is bound afterwards to pay the debt; for he has adopted her and her circumstances
together.
--Blackstone, Sir William. Commentaries on the Laws of England (1st Ed.). Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1765-1769.

With the reality of English marriage laws in the 19th century in mind, return to the novel and find places where the discussion of “land” and “land inheritance” play a large role in the shaping of characters and events. What role might the transmission of wealth and the shifting of land and inheritance play in the development of the novel in general? What role does it seem to play in the gothic genre?
6) Finally, take time to explore the symbolism of the natural world in this novel. Feel free to draw parallels between Frankenstein and Wuthering Heights.