NOTES

published in 1848 under the pseudonym
Ellis Bell (the same initials as hers)
•two years before the Brontë sisters had published a volume called Poems by Currer,
Acton and Ellis Bell
•her sister Charlotte describes the composition of the book as if it was involuntary, produced by creative gifts Emily was not completely aware of

• She wrote:
“ It is rustic all through. It is moorish and wild, and knotty as the root of heath ”.
feelings, passions, narrative complexity, shifts of time and perceptions

Wuthering Heights
Thrushcross Grange
• the main setting
• solitary, gloomy, strong building facing the winds and storms of the moor
• a place of the mind, where Catherine and
Heathcliff belong
• its counterpart
• light building placed on the plain
• the place of order and normality, where people are happy or unhappy for very ordinary reasons

Wuthering Heights a metaphor of childhood and adolescence, a world peopled with creatures of the imagination
Thrushcross Grange a symbol of adulthood, to which those who belong to reality must emigrate the children of storm/nature live here the children of calm/culture live here

• general suspended atmosphere
• supernatural elements, unquiet graves, wild landscapes, illicit passions, queer dreams
• contact between the living and the dead
• the mysterious male character coming from nowhere who becomes the villain of the story

• but Heathcliff is much more than that
We crowded round, and … I had a peep at a dirty, ragged, blackhaired child…
He seemed a sullen, patient child; hardened, perhaps, to illtreatment… handsome, savage, irresistible, cruel, devilish, self-destructive, a “genuine bad nature ”, INSTINCT

the features Freud ascribed to the id apply to him perfectly:
• the source of psychic energy
• the seat of the instincts
• the essence of dreams
• the archaic foundation of personality – selfish, asocial, impulsive

Freud: civilization is built on repression
People learn to live with one another by internalizing social rules which define certain forms of behaviour and speech as unacceptable
The uncanny is the return of the repressed; we are frightened by uncanny occurrences not because they are totally outside and unknown to us but because they are part of our nature that we cannot afford to acknowledge as our own if we want to be civilized

• Victorian readers found the book strange; they couldn ’t work out its moral standpoint. Some thought it was violent, morbid, immoral
• (Should social conventions be trampled on by the force of passions?)
• It illustrates a pre-moral vision of life

Friedrich Nietzsche, Jenseits von
Gut und Böse
, 1886
Was man aus Liebe macht, ist immer jenseits von Gut und
B öse.

made complex by the presence of two internal narrators /points of view
+ several other narratives interspersed in the book
= action presented as eyewitness narrations of people involved not parallel narrations, but a multi-layered narration, each springing from another

Lockwood: the outer framework of the story then becomes the recipient of Nelly ’s narrative, and she in turn the recipient of other narratives
Nelly ’s narrative: highly dramatised often records conversations of other characters direct participation of the reader; theatrical effect

Nelly reports a conversation she had with Catherine before her wedding to
Edgar Linton
Catherine tells Nelly about the reasons why she ’s going to marry Edgar
Linton

similes describing her love for Edgar and her love for Heathcliff
“the foliage in the woods”
“the eternal rocks beneath” complete identification between her and
Heathcliff