英美文学Lecture6,EmilyBronte.ppt

Emily Bront? Wuthering Heights Love as destructive Hero or Villain? The novel teases the reader with the possibility that Heathcliff’s cruelty is merely an expression of his frustrated love for Catherine, or that his sinister behaviors serve to conceal the heart of a romantic hero. We expect Heathcliff’s character to contain such a hidden virtue because he resembles a hero in a romance novel. Nature vs. Culture Nature is represented by the Earnshaw family, and by Catherine and Heathcliff in particular. These characters are governed by their passions, not by reflection or ideals of civility. Correspondingly, the house where they live—Wuthering Heights—comes to symbolize wildness. On the other hand, Thrushcross Grange and the Linton family represent culture, refinement, convention, and cultivation. * * Wuthering Heights, which has long been one of the most popular and highly regarded novels in English literature, seemed to hold little promise when it was published in 1847, selling very poorly and receiving only a few mixed reviews. Victorian readers found the book shocking and inappropriate in its depiction of passionate, ungoverned love and cruelty, despite the fact that the novel portrays no sex or bloodshed, and the work was virtually ignored. Emily Bront? lived an eccentric, closely guarded life. She was born in 1818, two years after Charlotte and a year and a half before her sister Anne, who also became an author. The Bront?s lived in Haworth, a Yorkshire village in the midst of the moors. These wild, desolate expanses—later the setting of Wuthering Heights—made up the Bront?s’ daily environment, and Emily lived among them her entire life. She died in 1848, at the age of thirty. Like Charlotte Bront?’s Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights is based partly on the Gothic tradition of the late eighteenth century, a style of literature that featured supernatural encounters, crumbling ruins, moonless nights, and grotesque imagery, seekin