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138 pages

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Facets of Wuthering Heights is a collection of essays by one author concerned to throw critical light on several different facets of Emily Bronte's masterpiece, Wuthering Heights.Although three of the essays deal partly with the historical background to the novel, the collection as a whole seeks to draw attention to Emily Bronts remarkable versatility as a novelist by, for example, implicitly pointing up the skill with which she has constructed the plot, the inventiveness with which she has created an astonishing variety of characters, and the brilliance with which she has made structural use of her central themes.This book is intended to encourage readers to take a fresh look at Wuthering Heights as a work of art which, far from deserving to be read merely for its extraordinary treatment of love, is, in fact, eminently notable for its author's objective and dispassionate portrayal of a particular society and a particular set of individuals in late eighteenth-century England and beyond.

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Publié par	Troubador Publishing Ltd
Date de parution	20 novembre 2018
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781789012903
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	3 Mo

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Facets of
Wuthering
Heights
Selected Essays
Graeme Tytler
Copyright © 2018 Graeme Tytler

All essays copyright © The Brontë Society, reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd, on behalf of The Brontë Society.

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

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For Sachiko
Contents
Acknowledgements

Preface

Wuthering Heights: An Amoral Novel?

The Role of Religion in Wuthering Heights

Heathcliff’s Monomania:
An Anachronism in Wuthering Heights

The Parameters of Reason in Wuthering Heigh ts

The Power of the Spoken Word in Wuthering Height s

‘He’s more myself than I am’:
The Problem of Comparisons in Wuthering Heights

Physiognomy in Wuthering Heights

The Presentation of the Second Catherine in Wuthering Heights

The Presentation of Hareton Ear nshaw in Wuthering Height s

The Presentation of Isabella in Wuthering Heig hts

The Presentation of Edgar Linton in Wuthering Heights

Masters and Servants in Wuthering Heights

Animals in Wuthering Heights

Ea ting and Drinking in Wut hering Heights

House and Home in Wuthering Heights

Author’s Publications
Acknowledgements
Since all these essays originally appeared in Brontë Society Transactions and Brontë Studies , I should like to take this opportunity to thank once again the following editors of both journals for accepting the earliest of them for publication: Mark Seaward, Edward Chitham and Robert Duckett. Special thanks are due to Amber Adams, the current editor of Brontë Studies , for the immense help and encouragement she has invariably given me in respect of various essays I have in recent years had published in her journal on the novels of all three Brontë sisters. I am deeply grateful to the staff of Matador, Hannah Dakin, Fern Bushnell and Emily Castledine in particular, for efficiently shepherding this collection through to its present format. Nor should I forget to convey my warm appreciation of the interest my sister and brother-in-law, Ruth and Michael Kaye, have shown in my research on Emily Brontë’s masterpiece during the past three or four decades. Finally, I must express my infinite gratitude to my wife Sachiko, not only for the superb dexterity with which she has typed my manuscripts, but also for the consummate editorial skills which she has ever brought to bear on each and every one of these essays; to her I gladly dedicate this book.
Preface
These fifteen essays on Wuthering Heights , which have been assembled here partly in honour of this the bicentenary year of the birth of Emily Brontë, are, except for some minor changes here and there, substantially the same as those originally published in Brontë Society Transactions and Brontë Studies . Not the least important function of this collection is to suggest that the love relationship between Catherine and Heathcliff and their presentation as characters need to be viewed rather more dispassionately than has all too often been the case over the years. Further, it is hoped that readers who look upon the second half of the narrative after Catherine’s death as something of a let-down may by dint of these essays be encouraged to acknowledge that it is nevertheless integral to the overall structure of the novel. These and other standpoints of mine have for the most part been gradually arrived at through repeated readings of the text during the past three decades. And though I have spent some of that time studying and writing about other great works of fiction, notably those of Charlotte and Anne Brontë, I have focused my research principally on Wuthering Heights , and in so doing come to realize more and more not only that, owing to the unwonted richness of its content, it is a book that repays constant, not to say endless, perusal and analysis, but that there is surely a good deal more of critical interest still to be said about this wonderful literary masterpiece.
Wuthering Heights: An Amoral Novel?
W uthering Heights has been pronounced an amoral or a non-moral novel, a novel without a moral centre. 1 Of sundry reasons lying behind such designations the most important undoubtedly have to do with the presentation of Catherine and Heathcliff. Thus statements have been made to the effect that both protagonists are above and beyond the confines of ordinary human society and hence not to be judged by its values and principles. 2 Catherine and Heathcliff are, moreover, not seldom esteemed transcendental creatures, whose destiny is to be ultimately reunited in death. In much the same vein are claims that the effusions of these two characters are what alone make the book worth reading, and that the second half of the novel, with its portrayal of Cathy and Hareton, is something of a let-down for the reader. 3 Further support for the idea of the amorality of the novel might even be sought in, say, the apparent indifference to moral questions in those making feminist and psychoanalytical interpretations of the text; in the (formerly common) opinion that the characters have no counterparts in the real world; and in the claim that the two main narrators are not altogether reliable. 4
It is true that a number of scholars have over the years scrupulously exposed the moral defects of some of the main characters. Thus, as well as speaking of violence, cruelty, uncharitableness and the like, they have summarily condemned particular figures. For example, one scholar has declared Hindley to be ‘the villain of Wuthering Heights ’, another scholar has devoted an entire essay to demonstrating that Nelly Dean is ‘The Villain in Wuthering Heights ’, while a third scholar has gone so far as to deem Heathcliff ‘the greatest villain in fiction’. 5 Yet even though Heathcliff’s villainy has been time and again acknowledged, it seems to have detracted from his heroic stature as little as Catherine’s untoward deeds have detracted from hers. This may have been due in part to the influence some critics have exerted through their use of the term ‘moral’ and its cognates in evaluations of the principal hero and heroine. Thus Catherine has been adjudged ‘the real moral centre of the book’ and even labelled ‘absolument morale’; Catherine and Heathcliff’s humanity has been said to be ‘finer and more morally profound than the standards of the Lintons and the Earnshaws’; Lockwood is understood as someone instructed in ‘the moral significance of [Heathcliff and Catherine’s] immoral passion’. 6 Clearly, ‘moral’ and ‘morally’ in such contexts suggest the grandiose metaphysics of the moralist rather than the more humble ethics of the moral philosopher. Yet to overlook what is fundamentally ethical about Wuthering Heights is to miss an important element in the book. My concern here, then, will be to draw attention to an aspect that has hardly figured in criticism on the novel hitherto, namely, the way in which the author, as it were, puts all her main characters, including Lockwood and Nelly Dean, through a rigorous moral test to show how they relate to certain fundamental aspects of truth. By passing judgement on her characters from this standpoint, we are, then, in a better position not only to discern the essence of each of the characters, but to distinguish between them with perhaps greater objectivity.
Let me begin my discussion by considering the role of secretiveness in the plot (or plots) of Wuthering Heights . Secretiveness is, of course, a device used by Heathcliff in his bid to deceive Edgar on two counts: first, in order to arrange his tryst with Catherine at the Grange; secondly, in order to bring about the marriage of his son Linton to Cathy. If, however, Heathcliff’s secretiveness succeeds well enough in the former case, in the latter case his twofold attempts to exhort Cathy, at the time of her first reunion with Linton, not to tell her father about her intended visits to the Heights, prove to be of no avail, thanks to the girl’s frank account to Edgar of her unexpected meeting with Linton. That is why Heathcliff’s secretiveness is ultimately dependent for its success on Nelly’s own practice of secretiveness. In this connection, it is interesting to note the extent to which secretiveness seems to have been a habit with Nelly throughout her career as housekeeper and nanny to sundry masters and mistresses. One early instance is evident when she tells of ‘not daring to speak a syllable’ to Hindley about Catherine and Heathcliff’s reckless behaviour ‘for fear of losing the small power [she] still retained over the unfriended creatures’ ( WH , p. 40). 7 The fact that the ostensible motive for Nelly’s secrecy here is power rather than, say, sympathy for two children maltreated by a vicious master does not, however, blind us to the notion that fear is the real motive for her silence. Indeed, i