17/10/06 - English Literature - Wuthering Heights

Changing perception over years.

Bronte 1818-1847. Thornton, near Bradford which was the centre of literary attention. Years of theological scepticism and unbelief. Deaths of family members during early years. Emily psychologically unstable consequently? Toy soldiers obtained 1826, helped to create narratives. Widely read family: romantic, gothic, contemporary, poetry, Byron.

No Coward's Soul as Mine can be read as an angry unbeliever in God. In 1846 Wuthering Heights completed, coinciding with political unrest, strikes, machines broken and riots. Can be read as a political novel? Emily died a year after writing the novel. Charlotte published the novel posthumously for a pittance; it was originally unpopular.

First reviewers didn't know how to read the novel. The Examiner: "No narrative unity or focus, immoral, disjointed."
Douglas Jerrold's Weekly: "Baffling all regular criticism. Remarkable. Strange."

Charlotte's preface 1850, justifying sister's novel:
-Realism
-Verisimilitude of language
-Characterisation
She agrees it is immoral, but the Muses helped it, author had to write something and this is the result. No concession to conventionality as in Charlotte's own novel, Jane Eyre.

Wuthering Heights a hall of mirrors instead of a mirror held up to reality. Postmodernist novel? The epitomy of Open Text by Umberto Ecco.
Believes texts take a different perception with every reading.

Multivalence - many meanings, e.g. historicism, liberal humanism, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, feminism, Marxism, postcolonialism.

Liberal humanism - Lord David Cecil. World values. Emphasised Emily as a misunderstood outsider, should be read as cosmological drama, universal principles.

Historicism - biographical, social values, periodicity. (Elizabeth Gaskell's The Life of Charlotte Bronte 1857.)

Psychoanalysis - authorial biography (repression), dream imagery (Freud), collective conscious (Jung), mirroring/doubling (Lacan).

Feminism - sexuality, gender politics, female identity, ecriture feminine. Laugh of the Medusa Helene Cixous. Ecriture feminine. Hierarchical language.

Marxism - socio-economic structures, representation of race, revolutionary moment. Everyday life, class and race. Terry Eagleton Myths of Power - Heathcliff class outsider (Irish orphan), generational struggle for capital, etc.

Deconstruction/poststructuralism - problems of meaning, formalism/structure, textuality/word play, epistemological crisis. So knowledge is under criticism. 'Truth' is a Western philosophical construct, no trascendental signifier, all meaning is textual (Derrida: "there is nothing beyond the text.") (Barthes).
Chapter 2 to 3: narrative form is anti-hierarchical. Lockwood's search for meaning, limited readerly perspective, allusions to textuality, signifier/signified. Narrative form complicated 'Mise en abyme.' Event > Heathcliff > Nelly > Lockwood > Reader. Not first or third person, multilayers/dimensional. Characterisation - Nelly "true benevolence" and "homely fidelity." Lockwood "urbane, intelligent, civilised, metropolitan," gentleman of the time. But the text undermines the integrity of its characters.
Narrative ending is false. Implies struggle will continue, no narrative centre, 'open' text. Not about meaning.