Wuthering Heights---a Female Gothic Novel英语毕业论文.docx

第17页Wuthering Heights-a Female Gothic NovelI. IntroductionEmily Brontë is an English woman writer of superb talent during the Victorian Age. She is well known for her only novel Wuthering Heights, a strange and powerful book, said by many to be the finest novel in the English language. Since it was published, this great book suffered peoples attack and criticism. These who censured it regarded it a book full of abnormal psychology and heathenish thought. “Anyone who did read it was repulsed by the brutality and violence of the characters” (James, 1979:7) and by the fact that it differed so much from the romantic novels of that time. They do not want realism as Emily depicts it, and they do not want wild, fierce antiheroes like Heathcliff who is more like a villain or willful, passionate heroines like Catherine Earnshaw. And that is the reason why Emily Brontë is kept away from the mainstream of the 19th century literature, and people do not accept her fair fame until the coming of the 20th century. Both Emily and her works are mysterious and unique. There are various approaches applied by the critics to study Wuthering Heights from the aspects of the theme, the writing technique, love and revenge, and so on. However, there is hardly any attempt to research Wuthering Heights by combining its Gothic context with the feminist viewpoint. In view of this blank, this article is trying to reread this work as a Female Gothic novel mainly based on the following three facets: Firstly, from the development of literary movement, the early Gothic novels arose in the second half of the 18th century. The origin of Wuthering Heights, its development and the ending were between 1771 and 1802. At that time, the English Gothic novels were catching on like fire throughout the country. With the development of Gothic novels people gradually forgot the early Gothic novels. Yet from the Brontë sisters Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights we can still find the Gothic features evidently. Secondly, from the social development since the Industrial Revolution in the second half of the 18th century, the social class in English society had undergone radical changes. The life style was broken by the Enclosure Movement and expropriation. The majority of peasants were driven off their land which had been passed into the hands of the landlords. The landless peasants went to cities and became workers who owned nothing but labor and had to work long hours for low wages. People were tired of the old life style, they looked forward to seeing song fancy and new things, and this kind of aspiration became the social foundation of gothic novel. Finally, Wuthering Heights was connected with Emily Brontes individual life experience. “Stronger than a man, simpler than a child.” (Yang, 1983:21) Charlotte Brontë used these words to describe her. We hope to find some new connotations from the novel to enable us to have more enlightenments and considerations. Emily is the truly free spirit of the family, one who could not live away from her beloved extensive though dangerous and bleak moors-Haworth. Her father is of Irish stock and famous for his fluent speech and imagination. He played a very important role in shaping Emilys character and genius- “the temperament of the Irish- melancholy, passionate, proud, restless, eloquent, and witty- and the Methodist religious fervor and enthusiasm shown by the followers of John Wesley.” (James, 1979:6) Besides, “environment also played its part in creating the uniqueness of Emily Brontë. The village of Haworth was very isolated and intensely. Yorkshire and the people living there were in strong contrast to the Celtic temperament. They were blunt, practical, stubborn, sparing of speech, vigorous, and harsh to the point of brutality.” (James, 1979:6) The product of the moors exalts the spirit of Emily and fills her soul with the love of liberty. Another factor that influenced Emilys character was her brother, Branwell, the one to whom Emily had always been closest. Branwells falling prey to drink and drugs almost made Emilys heart broken. Because of his death, Emily never left the house again and insisted on keeping up her regular round of duties. A few months after Branwells death, Emily died at the age of thirty.Emily Brontë “used the stark Yorkshire setting, not to create suspense and horror, as in the typical Gothic novel, but as a natural part of her story.” (James, 1979:7) On one hand, she carries on the Gothic tradition in her creation of the novel. On the other hand, she has not just employed the mode but promotes some improvements in this old tradition. She used the skill of Female Gothic in her writing of the novel. . From Gothic Novel to Female Gothic NovelIn studying Wuthering Heights from the aspect of a Female Gothic novel, no one can ignore the definition of this term Gothic. To do so, however, one is likely to fall into the trap of ambiguity, for there is no definite and comprehensive way to expound it. As time goes by, the connotation of this term gradually expands from its original meaning into broader sense. “The word Gothic originally referred to the Goths, an early Germanic tribe, then came to signify Germanic, then medieval.” (M.H, 2004:110) They fought against the Roman Empire at their most violent times in 5A.D. Then they gradually died away in the process of history. But the gothic peoples braveness and good at fighting caused hurt to the heart of the South Europeans, especially in Italians. Although after around 7A.D. the Goths vanishes from history, Roman Empire fell, the Italian Vasari first adopted “goth” to represent the medieval architectural style. Its feature was subterranean dungeons, secret passageways, traveling spires, heavy stone walls, narrow windows, tinny glass, gloomy room and the rest, but under the influence of the thinkers in Renaissance goth was endowed with more new meaning such as savage, terror, fear, falling behind, mystery, dark age and medieval period and so on.Around the early 18th century, Gothic developed into a genre in literary realm. In particular, “the term Gothic has also been extended to a type of fiction which lacks the exotic setting of the earlier romances, but develops a brooding atmosphere of gloom and terror, represents events that are uncanny or macabre or melodramatically violent, and often deals with aberrant psychological states.” (M.H, 2004:110) The attempt to define Gothic writings usually follows the method named by Eugenia DeLamotte in Monthly published in 1801. In such kind of works, “some writers set their stories in the medieval period; others set them in a Catholic country, especially Italy or Spain. The locale was often a gloomy castle furnished with dungeons, subterranean passages, and sliding panels; the typical story focused on the sufferings imposed on an innocent ghosts, mysterious disappearances, and other sensational and supernatural occurrences.” (M.H, 2004:110) Though the plots and themes of Gothic writings are different specifically, they focus on the depiction of a series of weird and simulative events such as murder, revenge, violence, rape and incest, thus endowing the whole work with an atmosphere of suspense, mystery and sense of fear. With its artificial over-ornamentation, its unbridled imagination, its notorious fame of seducing degeneration and corruption, Gothic writings are severely criticized and rejected by mainstream literary genres. “In the history of western literature, there are seas of schools of fiction having made strong impacts. Flourished during the end of the 18th and early 19th century, the English Gothic novel is one of the schools that exerts a tremendous influence and owns considerable uniqueness.” (Li, 2005:1)The trend of begetting moral degeneration and emotional over-indulgence bring Gothic novels an alternative name “black novel” (Brune, Pichois and Rousseau, 1989:126) which has been keeping Gothic novels on the border zone of the development history of the world fictions. Receiving general disapproval, Gothic novels are treated with indifference and left out in the cold in both western and Chinese literary criticism circles. People have been inclined to pay attention to the negative facet of Gothic novels while fail to notice their moral instruction as the positive side. Although in Gothic novels the thick black atmosphere spread all over the place; and although “the principal aim of such novels was to evoke chilling terror by exploiting mystery and a variety of horrors”, (M.H, 2004:111) behind the seemingly deliberate black and irrational content there hides inside the substantial and profound rational content. Gothic novels never cease portraying combats between the bright and the black, the good and the evil. By advocating and seeking the essence of human natures, Gothic novels rightly shock and awaken people by its unique description of complicated and eccentric plots, the mysterious atmosphere and the bloody scenes.In 1764, the English writer Horace Walpole was again a chief initiator publishing The Castle of Otranto, a Gothic story in his Gothic castle under the setting of Middle Ages. This novel becomes the foundation of earlier gothic novel from time, place, topic, plot, characters to article skill. It contributed two elements, one is the usage gothic scene-vault, passageway, castle, monster, violent wind, moon, moan; the other is usage natural power to foil a kind of atmosphere and to hint mysterious lives and a possible of vicious force controlling peoples fates. From then on, a large number of Gothic novels come out with the theme sticking to the exploration of human nature and passions in forms of indulgence and irrational excess around 1790s. Examples of Gothic novels are William Beckfords Vathek (1786), Ann Radcliffes The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794)，and Matthew Gregory Lewis The Monk (1796). The latter two works are considered to be the most outstanding and influential works among the large number of the Gothic novels during Gothic decade. Ann Radcliffe was one of the most famous female novelists whose works touch upon the typical Gothic traditions. By inheriting and developing major features of her predecessors, she attached much importance to female figures in Gothic novels, endowing her works with new characteristics and preserving their distinct ingredients. Therefore, she is highly praised for the initiatory emphasis on women and their situations within Gothic context besides her great contribution to Gothic traditions. There are typical gothic features, such as ruined castles and abbeys, isolated passageways and dark forests in her novel, as well as some unique features, which cannot be found in male Gothic novels. To some extent, she started the tradition of the so-called Female Gothic.Female Gothic, the variant of modern Gothic, first came out from Ellen Moers Literary Women. She defines Female Gothic as “the work that women writers have done in the literary mode”. (Lin, 2005(2):72) Getting flourished in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, Female Gothic novels usually focus on a female protagonist who is chased and tormented by villainous gothic figures with unfamiliar settings and horrible landscape as the background. No Gothic novel is without its suffering heroine, who is both “sexualized” as an object of desire and “victimized” by a powerful aggressor who is also a potential rapist. The first task of feminist criticism was to articulate the problem of the abuse of the female in Gothic fiction and to explore the ways in which female novelists subverted or reinscribed the cultural norms of female sexualization and victimization. (Richetti, 2005:225)The Female Gothic aims to socialize and educate its female readers by criticizing patriarchal dominion and serves as an expression of female independence. It “not only marks the introduction of gendered perspective into Gothic studies, but also opens up a new space for feminist literary studies.” (Lin, 2005(2):71) In a word, Female Gothic is a form of literature, which expresses the inner secret resistance, fantasy, and terror of the female. Women are under the oppression of men for a long time, and it is high time that women writers should subvert male dominated literary discourse and establish their own writing tradition.Applying Gothic genre as a platform, the Female Gothic writers are inclined to express their own understanding on womens conditions and communicate with readers, especially the female. The prominent representatives of Female Gothic novels include Jane Austins Northanger Abbey (1818), Mary Shelleys Frankenstein (1817), and Charlotte Brontës Jane Eyre. Emily Brontës employing of Female Gothic “should have an air of being infected by Hoffmann too is not surprising in a contemporary of Poes; Emily is likely to have read Hoffmann when studying German at the Brusselss boarding school and certainly read the ghastly supernatural stories by James Hogg and others in the magazines at home.” (Leavis, 1983:232) Emily “grows up by reading Mary Shelley, Hoffmann, and James Hoggs Gothic novels.” (Deng, 2005(4):85) Emily Bronte did not just imitate female gothic history, she also ingeniously used all kinds of method to deduce emotional story, which occurred in her age. She infused realistic content and passionate feelings into gothic novel, but let it display environment passion and customs and habits better. In order to reach her aim, Emily showed gothic novels strong points and hided its weaknesses, creatively used ancient gothic style to find new elements and improve the strength of hided its weakness, creatively used ancient gothic style to find new elements and improve the strength of emotion. In Emilys Wuthering Heights there can be found here and there the influence of the Gothic tradition. . The Embodiment of Female Gothic in Wuthering Heights3.1 Heathcliff: a Poor Inhuman Monster3.1.1 Tenant Mr. Lockwoods Impression on HeathcliffIn Gothic novels, the shaping of the characters is a commonly used vehicle for giving expression to the gothic ingredient. This is particularly true of Emilys Wuthering Heights. When we open this book, we can see various terrifying characters. The first character is the hero Heathcliff. He seems to be an inhuman monster. Being a son of the storm, his behavior is flooded with Gothic color: cruel, imperious, and he stoops to anything to get what he wants. Whats more, the love between Catherine and him goes beyond the common limitation and is quite abnormal compared with love in other works of her age. The entire action of the story takes place within the two houses- Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange and on the moors lie between. The principal character, Heathcliff, around whom all the action revolves, emerges as starkly as Wuthering Heights. He may be thought of as the personification of th