Stylistic Analysis of Wuthering Heights (original) (raw)
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Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights Narratology and narrative Structure
Incisive Insights Vol 1 Issue 1 (pg 75 - 104), 2013
The uniqueness of the narrative of Wuthering Heights has been the centre of argument for literary critics, for over a century and it enables one to study it from different angles. This assignment argues that the narrative structure of Wuthering Heights is ‘layered’ rather than ‘linear’ because the story reaches the readers after a rigorous session of editing and rephrasing, by several narrators. This renders it a ‘folkloric’ attribute because there is no authentic authorial voice to make the readers think in a particular way. The main narrators of the story are two peripheral characters – Nelly and Lockwood. Lockwood becomes the ‘frame’ narrator and Nelly becomes the ‘interpolated’ narrator who could also be considered as ‘fallible’ or ‘unreliable’ (thus rendering Lockwood’s version also unreliable). Lockwood’s intellectual and pedantic perception and Nelly’s sentimental and ‘Victorian’ perception of the events and situations in Wuthering Heights render them virtually unstable or incapacitated to fathom the psychological depth and character of the protagonists. By transferring a given narrative from teller to teller the novel creates a disjunction of voices which results in the ‘dispossession’ of the narrative. This leads to the loss of the source of the story thereby inscribing the absence of a narrative centre. But, such a ‘blurring’ between the speaker and the listener is the starting point of interpretation and analysis. Through her style, Bronte challenges the norms of narratology that existed during her time.
Literature Review Survey of Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte and Windward Heights by Maryse Conde
Intertextuality is the meaning of a text with reference to other texts. Julia Kristeva's theory of intertextuality was in response to Saussure's theory of semiotics, and how he states that text derives meaning through the structure it is placed in. She also developed on theory of Mikhail Bakhtin's 'Dialogism' which stated that a word only has meaning when it enters into dialogue with another word. Julia's theory is more evolutionary in nature and very source and reference critical at times. An analogy that comes to mind to understand it better is how a barrier reef is created by layers and layers of coral on top of each other; similarly our ideas, texts and references are all pre-existing. We add onto this repository and literature and ideas progress.
Playing Safe: the Writer behind the Text of Wuthering Heights
Advances in Language and Literary Studies, 2014
In Wuthering Heights, Brontë provides us with the opportunity to meet two writing subjects; Emily Brontë herself and her character Catherine Earnshaw. Both these writers resist and challenge the authority of the patriarchal. Their different methods of interaction, though, cause one to fail and the other one to succeed. The objective of this paper is to have a look at the strategies that culminate in such a result from a Kristevan viewpoint. Findings indicate how Brontë can, unlike Catherine, play successfully with ideas in the text, sublimate her desires through her metaphors and finally achieve a sense of jouissance by playing at the borders without being entrapped in the forbidden realm of the abject. In addition, it is discussed that through metaphors, Brontë simultaneously establishes and demolishes the codes of an apparently accepted patriarchal world in the symbolic territory, destabilizes the text and deconstructs the fake reform of the ending of the story while constantly remaining on the safe side.
Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights: An Unconventional Victorian Masterpiece
2014
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte (1818-1848) is a novel which is windswept and weatherbeaten both in the world outside and in the world inside of human emotion. The total book leaves a deep impression of an intense but dreary romantic view of life and of an unusual mystery and conflict. None of the Victorian novelists has been able to create these traits. Some of Emily's characters appear like creatures of their autonomous, unreal world. This paper shows that the novel is an expression of Emily's rare sense of imagination that is absent in many other contemporary novelists. It also shows that Emily paints an unusual love before which the demonic passion melts. So, this novel stands far apart from other Victorian masterpieces. Not only this, Wuthering Heights does not portray Victorian realism which is the focal point of most of the Victorian great novels.
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë: Window into the Soul of an Adolescent Girl
2016
My thesis concerns the understanding of the novel Wuthering Heights (1847) by Emily Brontean adolescent girl's journey towards adulthood. It covers the basic background it originates from: 19th century society, class and geographical determinism, the position of women, and the facts about Bronte's life which formed her unique writing style. It includes a part about the features of romantic literature such as its symbolism, the importance of opposition, the idea of nature as a teacher, the qualities of childhood, the supernatural and the Byronic hero. It provides a description of the main motifs in Wuthering Heights which are important for understanding it as Catherine's search for herself. It discusses the frames of mind of individual characters and repeated motifs. It pays special attention to sexual instinct as the origin of all human actions, self-acceptance and self-love, the loss and regain of identity and harmony. It discusses the idea that all characters can be se...
Literary Herald Revisiting Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights: A postmodern reading
2017
This paper attempts a postmodern study of Emily Bronte"s novel, Wuthering Heights. Set in the Yorkshire moors of England, Wuthering Heights was published in 1847, a year before Emily Bronte"s death (1818-1848). It is the only novel written by her. She wrote this novel during an era when the ideology of realism was developing on the basis of faith in individualism. Individualism was turning out to be central to the plot of the contemporary novel-writing. But, due to the complexity associated with individualism, an acute problematisation of the idea of classic realism in the novel-genre was inevitable. The notion of reality, and of classic realism, in the novel gets fractured by talking about an individual"s external as well as internal life. This paper represents some of the postmodern features responsible for causing this fracture of "reality" in Wuthering Heights. With a brief introduction to postmodern theory, the first part of this paper deals with the un...
Reading Wuthering Heights through Roland Barthes's seminal essay "The Death of the Author" (1968), this essay explores the internal dissonances and sometimes barely restrained licence of Brontë's self-narrating characters. It argues that the novel both disrupts (and even appears to taunt) its readers' efforts at narrative unification-even at moments of powerful emotional intensity. Taking Heathcliff's illegible death mask as a starting point, it suggests that Wuthering Heights, like its violent and Byronic anti-hero, wages war on bourgeois morality and conventional generic expectation, in a wider argument about deep and surface reading.
On Double Narration in Wuthering Heights
2021
Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights is characterized by the narrative mechanisms and techniques it employs. Building on its structure, the novel is obviously rich in its underlying elements that are worth examining. One of these elements is the choice of multiple narrators and the complex organization of narrative time. This theoretical framework deals mainly with narration and narrative techniques as approached by structuralist narratology. As an approach that examines narration and its major hybrids, narratology delves into a structural study of Wuthering Heights allowing for a deep examination of the underlying narrative elements in the novel. Having said that, it is believed that the study of narratology is pertaining in the sense that it sheds light on how the narrative structure of the novel puts into question the status of the narrators as reliable sources. This structure also mystifies the story giving the reader a chance to decipher the intent of the characters involved as bot...
Gothic Structures of Being in Emily Bronte’s ‘Wuthering Heights’
Dialogos, 2022
The current study attempts to uncover Gothic structures of being in Emily Bronte's novel 'Wuthering Heights'. The Gothic could be seen as illustrating a comeback to the mystery of the Middle Ages. We see mystery as a search for the unknown, unconscious part of the being. According to Jung, our past is always underlying the structure of our being, lurking beneath the rational, conscious mind. It is a pivotal part of our spirit, as, '…Without these inferior levels, our spirit is left hanging in the air' (Jung, 1997: 41). Jung states that there is a sort of primitive fear regarding the possible contents of the unconscious, a secret terror towards the 'perils of the soul' (Jung, 1997: 20). It is these 'perils' we are trying to shed light on in the current paper, in the hope of presenting a reading of the novel that will enrich its meaning and clarify some of the mythical patterns which form the basis of the story.