For Monday: Bronte, Wuthering Heights, Chs.7-11

NOTE: If you missed class, the handout I gave everyone is posted below these questions. The first two passages are from the biographical/editorial preface that Charlotte Bronte published with the reprint of the book in 1850. It shows how she was trying to defend and in a sense apologize for the book's tone and outlandish "rustic" ideas. The third passage comes from Emily Bronte herself, and is a satirical essay about cats and why anyone who says they don't like cats is a hypocrite. It relates in many ways to our reading of Wuthering Heights. 

Answer two of the following: 

Q1: How does Nelly characterize Cathy throughout these chapters?  Has she become corrupted by society?  Or does she remain a primal, ‘innocent’ woman throughout?  How much of what we see is her, and how much is how Nelly ‘reads’ her?

2. A similar question, but this time for Heathcliff: can we be sure that his emergence as the true ‘villain’ of the story is not of her making?  What passages might be less empirical fact than Nelly’s Romantic imagination? 

3. How should we respond to the love of Catherine and Heathcliff?  Is this passionate, ‘romantic’ love, or is it something more masochistic and even dangerous? Would this be the kind of relationship that Wollstonecraft or Austen would sanction? Or would they warn her to run away? Consider Cathy's famous statement, “my love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath—a source of little visible delight, but necessary.  Nelly, I am Heathcliff!” 

Q4: An anonymous reviewer of the book in 1848 wrote, quite critically, that "The book sadly wants relief. A few glimpses of sunshine would have increased the reality of the picture and given strength rather than weakness to the whole. There is not in the entire dramatis persona, a single character which is not utterly hateful or thoroughly contemptible. If you do not detest the person, you despise him; and if you do not despise him, you detest him with your whole heart." Why do you think Emily Bronte avoided the "relief" the reviewer craved, and only let us choose between "despising" and "detesting"? Or is this a very 19th century view, that couldn't appreciate characters who flirted with darkness? 

A FEW CONTEXTUAL PASSAGES TO CONSIDER AS YOU READ: 

From Charlotte Brontë’s “Biographical Notice” (1850):

“Neither Emily nor Anne was learned; they had no thought of filling their pitchers at the well-spring of other minds; they always wrote from the impulse of nature, the dictates of intuition, and from such stores of observation as their limited experience had enabled them to amass. I may sum up all by saying, that for strangers, they were nothing, for superficial observers less than nothing; but for those who had known them all their lives in the intimacy of close relationship, they were genuinely good and truly great.

From Charlotte Brontë’s “Editor’ Preface to the 1850 Edition of Wuthering Heights”:

“With regard to the rusticity of Wuthering Heights, I admit the charge, for I feel the quality. It is rustic all through. It is moorish, and wild, and knotty as the root of heath. Nor was it natural that it should be otherwise; the author being herself a native and nursling of the moors…Where delineation of human character is concerned, the case is different. I am bound to avow that she had scarcely more practical knowledge of the peasantry amongst whom she lived, than a nun has of country people who sometimes pass her convent gates. My sister’s disposition was not naturally gregarious, circumstances favored and fostered her tendency to seclusion…Had she but lived, her mind would of itself have grown like a strong tree; loftier, straighter, wider-spreading, and its matured fruits would have attained a mellower ripeness and a sunnier bloom.

From Emily Brontë, “The Cat” (May 15, 1842)

“I can say sincerely that I like cats; also I can give very good reasons why those who despise them are wrong. A cat is an animal who has more human feelings than almost any other being. We cannot sustain a comparison with the dog, it is infinitely too good; but the cat, although it differs in some physical points, is extremely like us in disposition…A cat, out of self-interest, sometimes hides its misanthropy under the guise of amiable gentleness; instead of tearing what it desires from its master’s hand, it approaches with a caressing air, rubs its pretty little head against him, and advances a paw whose touch is soft as down. When it has gained its end, it resumes its character of Timon [Timon of Athens, from Shakespeare]. Such artfulness in it is called hypocrisy; in ourselves, we give it another name, it’s politeness, and he who would not use it to disguise real feelings would soon be hunted out of society…

I have seen you embrace your child ecstatically, when he came to show you a beautiful butterfly crushed between his cruel little fingers; and at that moment, I really wanted to have a cat, with the tail of a half-devoured rat hanging from its mouth, to present as the image, the true copy, of your angel. You could not refuse to kiss him, and if he scratched us both in revenge, so much the better…The ingratitude of cats is another name for discernment. They know how to value our favors at their true price, because they guess the motives that prompt us to grant them, and if those motives might sometimes be good, undoubtedly they always remember that they owe all their miseries and all their evil qualities to the great ancestor of humankind. For assuredly, the cat was not wicked in  Paradise.”