Wuthering Heights: Hidden Monsters

Wuthering Heights: Hidden Monsters

Abstract Models

Book 3

History's Monstrous Possibilties

(fiction responding to life)

British invade India

British take Canada from Arcadians

Catherine II seizes power in Russia, Peter assasinated

stamp act, "liberty or death" speech in US

Abstracts are short overviews of the reasons behind and argument of the paper—in this case 500 words. They are required for conferences and journal submissions. In this case, you should also be setting up enough of your focus and argument that I, and your classmates, can comment usefully on the direction and ideas of your paper. We will look at some models in class before this is due.

Wuthering Heights was published in 1847.

1848 was a sucky year, and not just because Emily Bronte died.

Revolution abounded:

Italy

France

German States

Hapsburg Empire

Hungary

Switzerland

Poland

poor harvests/bread riots in France

Bodies in Love and Bodies on Benches: Romance as Political Theory in Middlemarch

The climactic moment of George Eliot’s Middlemarch, in which Dorothea recognizes her love for Will Ladislaw, is remarkable for its ever growing cast of characters. Having decided to address Rosamond’s misunderstanding of the actions of her husband, she instead finds her in a tete-a-tete with Will. What should be a moment of solidarity, of two hearts becoming one, is instead painted as one that necessitates multiple individuals. If Dorothea’s love for Will “b[i]nd[s]” them “to each other,” it is also one that feels “the largeness of the world.”

In this presentation, I explore the ways in which the mediation between individual and communal in the love plot of Middlemarch closely echoes the text’s political plot. In his exploration of bio-power, Michel Foucault states we must “discover how a multiplicity of individuals and wills can be shaped into a single will or even a single body.” Just as the love plot negotiates between the intensely private and the broadly universal, so too do the political decisions of Will, for instance, when he separates out the “vote” from the “man,” imagining political will as a singularized entity serviced by multiple “votes” (themselves representing parts of the individuals wielding them). This constant negotiation between the individual and the group, I argue, suggests we can read the romantic in the text a “key” to political participation and citizenship in the liberal era being ushered in by the Reform Bill which forms the background of the novel.

Reifictaion of:

Reading Practices

Females as "gift"

Restoring of old order

Enclosed Communities

These revolutions arose from such a wide variety of causes that it is difficult to view them as resulting from a coherent movement or social phenomenon. Numerous changes had been taking place in European society throughout the first half of the 19th century. Both liberal reformers and radical politicians were reshaping national governments. Technological change was revolutionizing the life of the working classes. A popular press extended political awareness, and new values and ideas such as popular liberalism, nationalism and socialism began to spring up. A series of economic downturns and crop failures, particularly those in the year 1846, produced starvation among peasants and the working urban poor.

Large swathes of the nobility were discontented with royal absolutism or near-absolutism. Next the middle classes began to agitate. Both the lower middle classes and the working classes wanted liberal reform. The revolutions of 1848 were an expression of this sentiment. (Wikipedia)

Loss of Female Influence/ Inviolability

Edmund Burke: Reflections on The Revolution in France

So Why the French Revolution?

Fear of Outside Influences

“And at the end of it to be flighted to death!’ he said, opening his great-coat, which he held bundled up in his arms.  ‘See here, wife!  I was never so beaten with anything in my life: but you must e’en take it as a gift of God; though it’s as dark almost as if it came from the devil.’

We crowded round, and over Miss Cathy’s head I had a peep at a dirty, ragged, black-haired child; big enough both to walk and talk: indeed, its face looked older than Catherine’s; yet when it was set on its feet, it only stared round, and repeated over and over again some gibberish that nobody could understand.  I was frightened, and Mrs. Earnshaw was ready to fling it out of doors: she did fly up, asking how he could fashion to bring that gipsy brat into the house, when they had their own bairns to feed and fend for?  What he meant to do with it, and whether he were mad?  The master tried to explain the matter; but he was really half dead with fatigue, and all that I could make out, amongst her scolding, was a tale of his seeing it starving, and houseless, and as good as dumb, in the streets of Liverpool, where he picked it up and inquired for its owner.  Not a soul knew to whom it belonged, he said; and his money and time being both limited, he thought it better to take it home with him at once, than run into vain expenses there: because he was determined he would not leave it as he found it.  Well, the conclusion was, that my mistress grumbled herself calm; and Mr. Earnshaw told me to wash it, and give it clean things, and let it sleep with the children.” (Chapter IV)

It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then the dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like the morning star full of life and splendor and joy. 0, what a revolution! and what a heart must I have, to contemplate without emotion that elevation and that fall! Little did I dream, when she added titles of veneration to those of enthusiastic, distant, respectful love, that she should ever be obliged to carry the sharp antidote against disgrace concealed in that bosom; little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor, and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult.

“She was rather thin, but young, and fresh-complexioned, and her eyes sparkled as bright as diamonds.  I did remark, to be sure, that mounting the stairs made her breathe very quick; that the least sudden noise set her all in a quiver, and that she coughed troublesomely sometimes: but I knew nothing of what these symptoms portended, and had no impulse to sympathise with her.  We don’t in general take to foreigners here, Mr. Lockwood, unless they take to us first.”(Chapter VI)

“Certainly she had ways with her such as I never saw a child take up before; and she put all of us past our patience fifty times and oftener in a day: from the hour she came down-stairs till the hour she went to bed, we had not a minute’s security that she wouldn’t be in mischief.  Her spirits were always at high-water mark, her tongue always going—singing, laughing, and plaguing everybody who would not do the same.  A wild, wicked slip she was—but she had the bonniest eye, the sweetest smile, and lightest foot in the parish: and, after all, I believe she meant no harm; for when once she made you cry in good earnest, it seldom happened that she would not keep you company, and oblige you to be quiet that you might comfort her.”

(Chapter V)

The Labor of Reading Like a Victorian: Serializing and Tweeting the Novel in The Undergraduate Classroom

This presentation queries the theoretical and practical implication of two ways in which we can harness contemporary reading practices to make students not just read Victorian works, but read like Victorians. My first interrogation is into serialization: having students read a novel in separate chunks over the course of a semester, rather than in a concentrated clump. Doing so may be truer to the formal intents of a novel, which, as Nicholas Dames points out, used chapters (and, I would argue, serialization), as a means to “aerate” the novel that both “helps to root novels in the routines of everyday life” and “openly permitted a reading oriented around pauses—for reflection or rumination, perhaps, but also for refreshment or diversion.” This aeration seems suspiciously similar to the reading practices we disparage, allowing time to check facebook, play Grand Theft Auto, go out to dinner, and then return to the world of the novel. The second practice I examine is the social nature of reading. In his jeremiad against contemporary reading practices, Mark Bauerlain suggests that students cannot read complex texts because of the proliferation of digital diversion, exacerbated by pedagogical practices such as “having students read and write blogs, wikis, Facebook pages, multimedia assemblages, and the like.” Yet, in tandem with serialized reading, such practices encourage the rumination and reflection encouraged by the very structure of the novel. They also mimic the public sphere in which reading frequently took place during the Victorian period, suggesting that we can not just make students work, but make them recognize that they are already working as readers in ways very similar to those of the Victorians.

The French Revolution, 1789-1799

. Economic factors included:

Widespread famine and malnutrition, which increased the likelihood of disease and death, and intentional starvation in the most destitute segments of the population in the months immediately before the Revolution.

Louis XV fought many wars, bringing France to the verge of bankruptcy, and Louis XVI supported the colonists during the American Revolution, exacerbating the precarious financial condition of the government. The national debt amounted to almost 2 billion livres. The social burdens caused by war included the huge war debt, made worse by the monarchy's military failures and ineptitude, and the lack of social services for war veterans.

An inefficient and antiquated financial system unable to manage the national debt, both caused and exacerbated by the burden of a grossly inequitable system of taxation.

The continued conspicuous consumption of the noble class, especially the court of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette at Versailles, despite the financial burden on the populace.

High unemployment and high bread prices, causing more money to be spent on food and less in other areas of the economy.

There were also social and political factors, many of which involved resentments and aspirations given focus by the rise of Enlightenment ideals:

Resentment of royal absolutism.

Resentment by the ambitious professional and mercantile classes towards noble privileges and dominance in public life, many of whom were familiar with the lives of their peers in commercial cities in The Netherlands and Great Britain.

Resentment by peasants, wage-earners, and the bourgeoisie toward the traditional seigneurial privileges possessed by nobles.

Aspirations for liberty and (especially as the Revolution progressed) republicanism.

Writing in a time of potential revolution, Bronte returns to the context of the French revolution, particularly in terms of fears of outside influences. Heathcliff represents the dark, animal outsider that the French were often portrayed as, but both Mr. Earnshaw and Catherine’s attraction to him suggests that the English are partly responsible for the problems they face.

Friday Write 11/6

"Book 1"

theoretical frame

Terry Eagleton Myths of Power

If Heathcliff and Cathy's relationship can be read as pre-social, or avoiding a "fall into history," which relationship potrayed in the book so far seems the most "historical" relationship?

Critique of

treatment/fear/attraction to others/foreigners

modernity/society

loss of female agency in marriage

reading ractices

Heathcliff disturbs the Heights because he is simply superfluous:

he has no defined place within its biological and economic

system. (He may well be Catherine's illegitimate half-brother, just

as he may well have passed his two-year absence in Tunbridge

Wells.) The superfluity he embodies is that of a sheerly human

demand for recognition; but since there is no space for such surplus

within the terse economy of the Heights, it proves destructive

rather than creative in effect, straining and overloading already

taut relationships. Heathcliff catalyses an aggression intrinsic to

Heights society; that sound blow Hindley hands out to Catherine

on the evening of Heathcliff's first appearance is slight but significant

evidence against the case that conflict starts only with Heathcliff's

arrival.

The effect of Heathcliff is to explode those conflicts into antagonisms

which finally rip the place apart. In particular, he marks

the beginnings of that process whereby passion and personal intensity

separate out from the social domain and offer an alternative

commitment to it. For farming families like the Earnshaws, work

and human relations are roughly coterminous: work is socialised,

personal relations mediated through a context of labour. Heathcliff,

however, is set to work meaninglessly, as a servant rather

than a member of the family; and his fervent emotional life with

Catherine is thus forced outside the working environment into

the wild Nature of the heath, rather than Nature reclaimed and

worked up into significant value in the social activity of labour.

Heathcliff is stripped of culture in the sense of gentility, but the

result is a paradoxical intensifying of his fertile imaginative liaison

with Catherine. It is fitting, then, that their free, neglected

wanderings lead them to their adventure at Thrushcross Grange.

For if the Romantic childhood culture of Catherine and Heathcliff

exists in a social limbo divorced from the minatory world of

working relations, the same can be said in a different sense of the

genteel culture of the Lintons, surviving as it does on the basis of

material conditions it simultaneously conceals. As the children

spy on the Linton family, that concealed brutality is unleashed in

the shape of bulldogs brought to the defence of civility. The

natural energy in which the Linton's culture is rooted bursts liter-

ally through to savage the 'savages' who appear to threaten

property. The underlying truth of violence, continuously visible

at the Heights, is momentarily exposed; old Linton thinks the

intruders are after his rents. Culture draws a veil over such brute

force but also sharpens it: the more property you have, the more

ruthlessly you need to defend it. Indeed, Heathcliff himself seems

dimly aware of how cultivation exacerbates 'natural* conflict, as

we see in his scornful account of the Linton children's petulant

squabbling; cultivation, by pampering and swaddling 'natural'

drives, at once represses serious physical violence and breeds a

neurasthenic sensitivity which allows selfish impulse free rein.

'Natural' aggression is nurtured both by an excess and an

absence of culture - a paradox demonstrated by Catherine Earnshaw,

who is at once wild and pettish, savage and spoilt. Nature

and culture, then, are locked in a complex relation of antagonism

and affinity: the Romantic fantasies of Heathcliff and Catherine,

and the Romantic Linton drawing-room with its gold-bordered

ceiling and shimmering chandelier, both bear the scars of the

material conditions which produced them-scars visibly inscribed

on Cathy's ankle. Yet to leave the matter there would be to draw

a purely formal parallel. For what distinguishes the two forms of

Romance is Heathcliff: his intense communion with Catherine is

an uncompromising rejection of the Linton world.

The opposition, however, is not merely one between the values

of personal relationship and those of conventional society. What

prevents this is the curious impersonality of the relationship between

Catherine and Heathcliff. Edgar Linton shows at his best a

genuine capacity for tender, loving fidelity; but this thrives on

obvious limits. The limits are those of the closed room into which

the children peer - the glowing, sheltered space within which those

close, immediate encounters which make for both tenderness and

pettishness may be conducted. Linton is released from material

pressures into such a civilised enclave; and in that sense his situation

differs from that of the Heights, where personal relations

are more intimately entwined with a working context. The relationship

of Heathcliff and Catherine, however, provides a third

term. It really is a personal relationship, yet seems also to transcend

the personal into some region beyond it. Indeed, there is a

sense in which the unity the couple briefly achieve is narrowed

and degutted by being described as 'personal'. In so far as

'personal' suggests the liberal humanism of Edgar, with his

concern (crudely despised by Heathcliff) for pity, charity and

humanity, the word is clearly inapplicable to the fierce mutual

tearings of Catherine and Heathcliff. Yet it is inadequate to the

positive as well as the destructive aspects of their love. Their

relationship is, we say, 'ontological* or 'metaphysical' because it

opens out into the more-than-personal, enacts a style of being

which is more than just the property of two individuals, which

suggests in its impersonality something beyond a merely Romanticindividualist

response to social oppression. Their relationship

articulates a depth inexpressible in routine social practice, transcendent

of available social languages. Its impersonality suggests

both a savage depersonalising and a paradigmatic significance; and

in neither sense is the relationship wholly within their conscious

control. What Heathcliff offers Cathy is a non- or pre-social

relationship, as the only authentic form of living in a world of

exploitation and inequality, a world where one must refuse to

measure oneself by the criteria of the class-structure and so must

appear inevitably subversive. Whereas in Charlotte's novels the

love-relationship takes you into society, in Wuthering Heights

it drives you out of it. The love between Heathcliff and Catherine

is an intuitive intimacy raised to cosmic status, by-passing the

mediation of the 'social'; and this, indeed, is both its strength and

its limit. Its non-sociality is on the one hand a revolutionary

refusal of the given language of social roles and values; and if the

relationship is to remain unabsorbed by society it must therefore

appear as natural rather than social, since Nature is the 'outside'

of society. On the other hand, the novel cannot realise the meaning

of that revolutionary refusal in social terms; the most it can

do is to universalise that meaning by intimating the mysteriously

impersonal energies from which the relationship springs.

Monstrous Relationships: Women

Book 2:

Literary Analysis:

Fiction Responding To Life:

Mary Poovey Uneven Developments

Fiction Responding to Life:

The property rights of women during most of the nineteenth century were dependent upon their marital status. Once women married, their property rights were governed by English common law, which required that the property women took into a marriage, or acquired subsequently, be legally absorbed by their husbands. Furthermore, married women could not make wills or dispose of any property without their husbands' consent. Marital separation, whether initiated by the husband or wife, usually left the women economically destitute, as the law offered them no rights to marital property. Once married, the only legal avenue through which women could reclaim property was widowhood. Women who never married maintained control over all their property, including their inheritance. These women could own freehold land and had complete control of property disposal. The notoriety of the 1836 Caroline Norton Case highlighted the injustice of women's property rights and influenced parliamentary debates to reform property laws. The women's movement generated the support which eventually resulted in the passage of the Married Women's Property Law in 1882. England's mid-nineteenth century focus on married women's property rights culminated in the transformation of the subordinate legal status of married women.

Hiam Brinjikji, Property Rights of Women in Nineteenth-Century England. http://www.umd.umich.edu/casl/hum/eng/classes/434/geweb/PROPERTY.htm

"I was only going to say that heaven did not seem to be my home, and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; and the angels were so angry that they flung me out into the middle of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights, where I woke sobbing for joy. That will do to explain my secret as well as the other. I've no more business to marry Edgar Linton than I have to be in heaven; and if the wicked man in there had not brought Heathcliff so low, I shouldn't have thought of it. It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now, so he shall never know how I love him; and that not because he's handsome, Nelly, but because he's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same; and Linton's is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire.“ (Ch 9)

Data Collation

81 Caroline Norton violated separation of spheres and “expos[ed] the extent to which politics and money matters always underwrote and undercut her domestic life”

65 Norton “collapses the boundary between the private sphere, where injustice goes unchecked, and the public domain, where laws are made and enforced by men”

• “And Hareton has been cast out like an unfledged dunnock! The unfortunate lad is the only one in all this parish that does not guess how he has been cheated." (Ch 4)
• Young Catherine seems displaced
• Heathcliff takes place of oldest, “lost,” son

Critique of:

legal systems and disinheritance

marital violence

enclosed communities

__Specific Detail 1__ is surprisingly like __Specific Detail 2_ in terms of _choose 1 from box below____.

Shape

Size

Placement/Timing (either in terms of plot or in terms of the actual text)

Make-up/components/ function within a group

Use/Purpose

Outcome

Definitions

Reasoning

Causes

By this, I mean _____term from the box above__ is ____description of how it fulfills the term in the box__ in ____Specific Detail 1___ and the same holds true in ___Specific Detail 2___ in terms of ____description of how it fulfills the term in the box__. Noticing this pattern of ____a more precise definition of term from the box above-___ suggests that ____Specific Detail 3 that was not in original dump____ is also a part of this collation because it _____ description of how it fulfills the term in the box__.

 "If I were in heaven, Nelly, I should be extremely miserable."

   "Because you are not fit to go there," I answered.

   "All sinners would be miserable in heaven."

   "But it is not for that. I dreamt once that I was there."

   "I tell you I won't hearken to your dreams, Miss Catherine! I'll go to bed," I interrupted again.

   She laughed and held me down, for I made a motion to leave my chair.

   "This is nothing," cried she. "I was only going to say that heaven did not seem to be my home, and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; and the angels were so angry that they flung me out into the middle of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights, where I woke sobbing for joy. That will do to explain my secret as well as the other. I've no more business to marry Edgar Linton than I have to be in heaven; and if the wicked man in there had not brought Heathcliff so low, I shouldn't have thought of it. It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now, so he shall never know how I love him; and that not because he's handsome, Nelly, but because he's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same; and Linton's is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire." (Ch 9)