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Women in English literature throughout the ages
Women in the 19th essay
Women in English literature throughout the ages
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The non-established model of woman In the context of Hard times and Wuthering Heights, women were conceived as “angels in the house”, they had to put their own desires aside in order to dedicate their entire self to their house and family, according to Sarah Ellis’ books, as it is said in Natalie McKnight’s work,” it was stipulated that women should always be self-sacrificing, subservient, dutiful, meek - in short, angelic [...] This role falls to women because men are too consumed with the world of work”. This last affirmation is due to the thought of Victorian Era that women and men lived in a separated atmosphere and whereas men’s duty was work, women’s obligation was in their homes, giving birth to children and taking care of the house(except …show more content…
In Wuthering Heights, as J. Beauvais affirms “reflects the [Feminine gothic] genre’s concern with the fears and anxieties that women face in the reality of their everyday lives, including their ‘confinement within the domestic space’, their place within the family, the loss of their self identity and the threat of male sexual energies” In the book, two main characters are example and antithesis of that affirmation. Isabella Linton is the prototypical women of his society who behaves as society expects from her. She is the ideal of femininity. On the other hand, Catherine is the most clear example of the fears before mentioned. In her first years, as it is pointed in Beauvais article, “The proper education required to instil in young Catherine the desire for domesticity and femininity is absent, as a child Catherine’s true nature runs wild among the moors, [..] she learns soon that she does not ‘fit into’ the domestic space and begins to search outside the boundaries” this marks the perpetuation of her own nature, and although she tries to be ‘domesticated’ looking for a feminized men, but she as Beauvais says “finds freedom through mutability and transformation”, and when her true love, Heathcliff appears, she cannot hide her real nature. Catherine seems a feminist character in the fact
In society, there has always been a gap between men and women. Women are generally expected to be homebodies, and seen as inferior to their husbands. The man is always correct, as he is more educated, and a woman must respect the man as they provide for the woman’s life. During the Victorian Era, women were very accommodating to fit the “house wife” stereotype. Women were to be a representation of love, purity and family; abandoning this stereotype would be seen as churlish living and a depredation of family status. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" and Henry Isben’s play A Doll's House depict women in the Victorian Era who were very much menial to their husbands. Nora Helmer, the protagonist in A Doll’s House and the narrator in “The Yellow Wallpaper” both prove that living in complete inferiority to others is unhealthy as one must live for them self. However, attempts to obtain such desired freedom during the Victorian Era only end in complications.
At a young age, she defies her father and brother “with bold saucy looks,” and “ready words.” Throughout her life, they were the ones who tried to control her to be what they want her to be. She becomes friends with Heathcliff and they go out and do things that they want. Her brother was “entirely negligent how they behaved.” Her brother did not approve that Catherine and Heathcliff spent a lot of time together; so he arranged for Katherine to marry Edgar. Katherine, even when she is married, goes out and pursues her freedom. Heathcliff returns after a few years and wants to see Katherine. Edgar disapproves and wants Heathcliff out. Edgar walked out the room and Katherine “slammed the door and locked it.” Katherine was upset that Edgar talked to Heathcliff in the way that he did and that he wasn’t as happy as she was when Heathcliff showed up. A few chapters’ later, Catherine and Heathcliff ran away together. By doing so, Katherine escaped the wicked demands from a man she did not love and freed herself from the submission of a male with a higher status. After Catherine dies, another female is put in her same position. Isabella, Edgar’s sister, arrives back with Heathcliff and wants to see her brother. He disowns her and her now husband, Heathcliff, is not the man she imagined he was. Heathcliff is more violent and that no dangerous animal can “not rouse terror” in her like Heathcliff. Edgar’s daughter, Catherine, is the third female to witness his demanding behavior. She wants to visit her cousin and he denies her of that. Like her mother, Catherine goes against Edgar by writing letters to her cousin, Linton. Linton falls ill, and begs Catherine to visits him. While she’s there, he states that Catherine harmed him, and that he’s worse because of it. She’s upset and thinks it’s her fault, and Linton uses that to his advantages.
During the Victorian Era, society had idealized expectations that all members of their culture were supposedly striving to accomplish. These conditions were partially a result of the development of middle class practices during the “industrial revolution… [which moved] men outside the home… [into] the harsh business and industrial world, [while] women were left in the relatively unvarying and sheltered environments of their homes” (Brannon 161). This division of genders created the ‘Doctrine of Two Spheres’ where men were active in the public Sphere of Influence, and women were limited to the domestic private Sphere of Influence. Both genders endured considerable pressure to conform to the idealized status of becoming either a masculine ‘English Gentleman’ or a feminine ‘True Woman’. The characteristics required women to be “passive, dependent, pure, refined, and delicate; [while] men were active, independent, coarse …strong [and intelligent]” (Brannon 162). Many children's novels utilized these gendere...
In Charles Brocken Browns novel Wieland, he presents us with two obvious themes in his novel Wieland, one being gender and the other gothic and when reading, one can identify with female identity when reading it through a gothic lens because of how many perspectives Brown offers the reader to see through. Brown presents women in a way that often changes the reader’s perception of the women characters through gothic reading. We find when reading Wieland, women are presented as maternal figures, supernatural creatures, and objects of desire. It is the transition and mesh of these stereotypes that make the reading quite interesting. Brown allows the female characters to break away from the stereotypical limits through fantasy, ventriloquism, darkness, and suspense throughout the plot and we can see this most accurately through Clara’s character.
In the novel Wuthering Heights, author Emily Brontë portrays the morally ambiguous character of Heathcliff through his neglected upbringing, cruel motives, and vengeful actions.
...rd Times and Brontë in Wuthering Heights represent their protagonists as struggling to overcome oppression in order to survive as independent females. The struggles faced by the females provide similarities as well as contrasts to their literary counterparts. On one hand you have Louisa, corrupted by her father and never allowed to imagine or be free; and on the other hand you have Catherine, corrupted by her own aspirations and social constraints. Although Catherine does - for a short period of time, achieve some independence, she is destined to retain her traditional role of passive and dependent female; thus inevitably losing in her struggles. In contrast, Louisa faces similar struggles in the fight for the survival of her inquisitive mind; but she ultimately wins her battle against her ‘fact-loving’ father and in doing so, establishes herself as an individual.
As a child, Catherine was a “wild, wicked slip...defying [the household] with her bold, saucy look, and her ready words...” (Brontë 44). Her and Heathcliff would create mischief together and run around the moors without a care in the world. This changes when Catherine spends five weeks at Thrushcross Grange with the Lintons. After spending this time with the distinguished family, Catherine dissociates from her former self, as well as Heathcliff, and readily accepts her lady-like image. Repressing her old, untamed life, she projects her flaws onto Heathcliff and acts cruelly towards him. She calls him “an unreclaimed creature, without refinement, without cultivation; an arid wilderness of furze and whinstone”
From the time they were young children, Heathcliff and Catherine formed an almost otherworldly bond. No one else around them could understand such an attraction; even they had trouble comprehending it themselves. Heathcliff was a dark, tortured soul, a mysterious stranger thrust into the lives of the Earnshaws. Catherine was selfish and naïve, aware only of her own emotions and apathetic of how her actions affected others. Through their vast differences both in temperament and in social status, Heathcliff and Catherine grew closer than they could have imagined. Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights is by no means a love story, but a tale of twisted, murderous, obsessive love.
The aim of this paper is to provide an overview of the most prominent Gothic Elements found in Emily Brontë’s novel Wuthering Heights. Due to the fact that the number of these elements and the significance and timelessness of the novel itself by far surmount the limitations of this assignment I shall focus mainly on two major components of Wuthering Heights that could be explored in the light of being Gothic. Those are the novel’s setting (both exterior and interior) and a particular type of love that occurs between the two main characters, Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw. In order to do so, I must first offer a short explanation of the term Gothic and how it applies to this novel; secondly, I shall glimpse into Emily Brontë’s life (her life and her life-work being so closely entwined). Thirdly, I shall pay my full attention to the setting of the novel and love story that takes place in it because, in my humble opinion, the peculiar combination of these two elements along with its upside-down and unconventional concept of morality gives this novel its life-force and timeless appeal. To put it simply, it eternalizes Wuthering Heights and makes it one of the greatest and most baffling English novels of all times.
Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is deemed a complex novel, with its wide ranging themes of love, betrayal, suffering and imprisonment. It contains all the elements of a Gothic novel in nature but with the added ingredient of realism, but it is not just this blending of Gothic with realism that makes the novel so multifaceted, it is also Brontë’s use of multiple narrators that adds to the complexities of this novel. And it is the resulting effect of the different narrative voices in Wuthering Heights that this essay seeks to discuss.
Laar, Elisabeth T. M. The Inner Structure of Wuthering Heights: A Study of an Imaginative Field. The Hague: Mouton, 1969. Print.
First, Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights strongly exhibits the feministic idea of the protagonist’s rebellion. Emily Bronte emphasizes Catherine’s rebelling behaviors and the reasons behind this behavior. In Wuthering Heights--the song of rebel, Cai-yun Wu analyzes the rebellions and the influence of Emily Bronte’s personality on this novel. Wu first states, “At the beginning of the 19th century, England was a typical patriarchal society” (3). Emily Bronte chose the 19th century as the setting for Wuthering Heights because this was a time when women were expected to follow the dictates of men. In the novel, Catherine had to rely on her brother, Hindley, for survival and lived under his control. Hindley did not allow Catherine to do anything which as Wu says “... is just the product of the patriarchal society” (3). Hindley was Catherine’s master and she was hurt by this so she would write, “...how little did I dream that Hindley would ever make me cry so!” (20). This led Catherine to rebel against him which according to Wu was “ indeed the ...
Catherine’s marriage to Edgar Linton is motivated by her desires to advance socially causing severe emotional damage for herself, Linton and of course, Heathcliff, who feels total adoration towards her. The force of conventionality is shown by Brontë here, as although Catherine is so powerfully in love with Heathcliff and has such intense feelings towards him, she marries Linton instead, with whom she shares nothing like the love and connection that she has with Heathcliff. Brontë not only shows here the faults within Catherine’s character but also the problems within society at the time, that money and status are most important in finding a husband. Heathcliff views this marriage as betrayal, bringing out the worst in his character as he dedicates his life to planning revenge. By denying herself union with Heathcliff she causes herself and Heathcliff deep emotional pain. The convention in Victorian society of marriage being a way of advancing socially ...
Before anything else, I would like to talk about the nature of the principle characters of this novel. I’d like to start with Catherine as she seems to be the central character of this love story. Of course the latter is my personal assumption. Catherine is the very representative of nature and naturalism. From the first chapters of novel and Mrs. Dean’s great and elaborate account of Catherine, we encounter the portrayal of wild nature represented by the moor. Totally intractable and precarious in nature, the moor is the most appropriate identifier of Catherine’s character. In fact, her childhood interest in the moor leads us to the conclusion that she has no touch of reason till the time she is prohibited by her sister-in-law and brother after her five-week stay at Lintons’. Interestingly, she takes her playmate, Heathcliff, to the moor to spend the joyful private time with him and this is the very foreshadow that prognosticates Heathcliff’s later confusions and sufferings as a result of her precarious and wild nature. However, Heathcliff himself has no sheer difference in character with her regarding naturalism. Ironically enough, he never undergoes any obligatory changes to abandon such a character and on the contrary he is inspired by tyrannical treatment from Hindley to assume his naturalism. Based on these assumptions we can conclude that these two lovers are the representatives of id in this novel. They act upon every impulse without any contemplations or control of wild passion. To cut the long story short, they act as their unconscious bids them to do. They are not alone in this aspect as Hindley also joins them in this characteristic in a different manner. As a result of...
At first glance, Wuthering Height shows us conflict between a landlord, Heathcliff, and Mr. Lockwood. Heathcliff, one of the novel's main characters, is portrayed as an uncompromising, sadistic bully, and produces a desire in Lockwood's character to find out more about his past. Bronte uses Lockwood's character to pull in her main narrator, Nelly Dean. Nelly was a first-hand witness to Heathcliff's story and so proceeds to relate the history, as she remembers it, to Lockwood. It appears very soon, after the start of the story, that Nelly Dean is the protagonist. She appears more than happy to stir the conflict, which goes a long way in keeping the story interesting and moving right along.