wuthering heights context

• Written by Emily Bronte but published under her pseudonym 'Ellis Bell' to make it easier to get her work published and circulated
• Emily's own mother died when she was young
• Written in the Victorian era, published in 1847 but set in the Georgian era
• Victorian idea of physiognomy - the study of facial features and their relationship to character
• Marriage in Victorian era

  • Men usually marry first for political gain, arranged usually in the upper class that we assume Heathcliff is as he is a land-owner
  • Men remarry as their wives die of childbirth
• Lacan's theory on the mirror phase

  • Lacanian critics read Catherine's declaration of love as a powerful reenactment of the pre-liguistic symbiosis of mother and child
  • In the mirror phase of infancy, the child understand that they are a separate self from the mother
• Domestic violence

  • When Brontë was writing, the topic of domestic violence was being addressed behind the closed doors of Parliament during debates over divorce and what constituted cruelty as a just rationale for divorce.
  • From a list that included rape, sodomy, desertion, transporta- tion, penal servitude, incest, bigamy, and cruelty, they accepted only the last three, indicating that they did not regard crimes of sexual violence or prolonged absence by the husband as fatal to the marriage bond.
• Domestic violence

  • The general view was that domestic violence was limited to the labouring classes
• Emily's love for the Yorkshire moors which were home for her is apparent in the Gondal landscape
• Part of the Romanticism movement - political radicals that celebrated the primative, revolvted against the Industrial movement, 2 generations the second more politically cautious following the violent death of Louis XVI
• Influuenced by realism - elevated the provincial way of life whilst the Romantics were often focussed on the upper class, aims to be mimetic, product of the Enlightenment
• Victorian novel - read novels as communication between author and reader, didactic novels (esp to strengthen Christian beliefs), great readers of the novel (wider schooling and increasing literacy rates, gas and electic lighting). Believed in the negative capabilities of novels esp fror women who were more vulnerable to excitement and over-identification + working classes
• The Gothic

  • Constricted environment, persecuted heroine (The Castle of Otranto)
  • The Mysteries of Udolpho - Ann Radcliffe, feminist strand in the gothic, exlplained away the supernatural - gothic came alive in the fear and anxieties of her characters
  • John Ruskin - gothic became a moral force
  • Frankenstein and Jekyll and Hyde - the double
  • Freud's uncanny - making strange of what shoulf be familiar
• Gothic tropes

  • Strange places
  • Relationship between the modern world and the past - past erupts the present and deranges it (ghost motif)
  • Supernaturally powerful figures and people who are completel vulnerable - position of women
  • Perverse and dangerous expressions of sexuality - incest, same sex desire, violence, abduction, rape
  • The uncanny, the sublime, crisis
• Women go into a period of 'confinement' when they have their babies
• Children were the property of the father so women would often have to leave without their children and leave them vulnerable to their father, father could claim the child back legally, financial
• The use of the epistolary form - using the vehicle of realism to expose the real monster - not found in the Gothic text but in realism, and this monster is the white patriarchy