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Emily Bronte
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Bronte: Wuthering Heights
In this course we look at several aspects of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. In the first six sections, we focus on Romanticism and what it means to call Heathcliff a Romantic hero. In second six sections, we focus on individual themes in the novel, including the concepts of alienation, madness and hysteria, town and country, nostalgia, and the Gothic.
Emily Bronte
This first module looks in more detail at the author of Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte (1818 – 1848). In particular, we think about the influence of Romanticism in her writing.
Okay.
00:00:03Hi,
00:00:03I'm Dr Alfie Bowne and lecturer and teacher at the
00:00:03University of Manchester specialist in the 19th century literature.
00:00:07So it's a pleasure to be giving you the first
00:00:11of two lectures on Weathering Heights by Emily Bronte.
00:00:14I've also provided to lectures on Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte,
00:00:18and I made just at times gesture towards some of those lectures.
00:00:23Of course, two novels written in the same year, Weathering Heights and Jane Eyre
00:00:26Risk, both written in 18 47.
00:00:31Of course, there are many crossovers between the two,
00:00:33as there are crossovers between Emily
00:00:35and Charlotte's upbringing and their biography.
00:00:38So if you want a few more biographical details,
00:00:41do do do listen to section one of my first lecture on Jane Eyre when I give some of those
00:00:44specifically, I do want to say a few things about Emily.
00:00:50She was born in 18 18 and died in 18 48 aged just 30
00:00:53and this was one year after
00:00:59Weathering Heights was published. So
00:01:03weathering heights she was encouraged to publish,
00:01:05she was actually still editing the text,
00:01:07and she was encouraged to publish it by the massive success of Jane Eyre,
00:01:09her sister's novel
00:01:12and that that means that she pushed it out early and then then passed away.
00:01:13And actually, it was published under the pseudonym Ellis Bell,
00:01:19which is deliberately designed to be a sort of not a gender specific
00:01:22first name so that the readership wouldn't know it was a woman writing,
00:01:26as as had happened with previous publications by the Brontes.
00:01:30But it's interesting that she wanted to actually edit, continue editing the text.
00:01:34And actually, Charlotte Bronte, I believe,
00:01:38edited a new version and that was published posthumously after Emily died.
00:01:39So those are interesting things to bear in mind.
00:01:45Along with the other biographical details, Um, I mentioned in the previous
00:01:48Jane Eyre lecture.
00:01:53That's, you know, biography can be a problematic way of reading a text,
00:01:55and actually we can.
00:01:58If we try to explain the text using the author's biography, we can often limit
00:02:00and what the text is really doing. Sometimes the text do far, far more
00:02:05than the the author intended or than the author's life.
00:02:09I would suggest they were capable of doing,
00:02:14and I think that it's important to refer back to that
00:02:16here because Emily Bronte is a great example of that.
00:02:19I mean, Charlotte Bronte writes about her schools and being a governess,
00:02:22and her travels in Belgium and these all things that Charlotte Bronte, the author,
00:02:30actually did.
00:02:35But Emily Bronte's text Weathering Heights is nothing to do with
00:02:36Emily Bronte's life for nothing directly to do with it anyway.
00:02:40Emily Bronte lived in Howarth, which is an amazing place to go and visit.
00:02:44If you want to learn a lot about the Broncos,
00:02:48you can see how they were writing on
00:02:50incredibly small manuscripts, the sort of book about two inches
00:02:53in length
00:02:57at the most
00:03:00and how they were just passionate writers passionate about
00:03:01storytelling from the youngest age from the age of 678
00:03:04and Emily's was, I'm not sort of saying this just in praise of her imagination.
00:03:07It's just that the text goes far beyond
00:03:12what the biography of Emily Bronte could explain.
00:03:15So it's a text that, once we delve into it in these lectures,
00:03:18will really be leaving a lot of this biographical information behind.
00:03:21One thing that is relevant is the idea of upbringing and childhood. Um,
00:03:25and I think it's relevant indirectly,
00:03:34whereas in Jane Eyre is relevant quite directly.
00:03:36Um, uh, Emily Bronte.
00:03:38I want I would like to talk about as quite an early 19th century writer,
00:03:41and that's surprising when she's when she's writing in 18 48.
00:03:44But I think you know this period 18 thirties, 18 forties.
00:03:48It marks the end of what we call Romanticism,
00:03:53and I'm going to be talking about romanticism in the next section.
00:03:56Um,
00:03:58but what what often happens is that we
00:03:59look at the context of an author's publication.
00:04:02So we look at 18 48 because this is when
00:04:05the novel was published and we think about the 18,
00:04:08the mid 18 hundreds, because the novel was published in the mid 18 hundreds,
00:04:11but actually for me, and this is my own personal argument you could disagree with.
00:04:15My argument would be that Weathering Heights
00:04:19is a novel completely informed by Romanticism,
00:04:22which is the period running up to the 18 thirties.
00:04:24So
00:04:29and that is that, of course, the time Emily Bronte was growing up in.
00:04:29So when Emily Bronte was a young girl
00:04:32and a young woman, we were still in the in the realms of Romanticism,
00:04:34and I think there's actually a critical neglect
00:04:39of that in people's in Writing about text,
00:04:41Emily Bronte was formed as a writer during a
00:04:45time she would have been saturated with romantic,
00:04:49the ideas of Romanticism.
00:04:51So perhaps those are the ones which she takes on and uses in her novel.
00:04:53And I think that's what I'd like to stress in this, especially if you think about
00:04:57the importance of upbringing.
00:05:02Uh,
00:05:03the only other biographical thing to say there is
00:05:04the Brontes were obsessed with that bringing they actually,
00:05:06As I've said in the Jane Eyre lecture,
00:05:09they actually started their own school because for them, uh, your formative years,
00:05:12your childhood years were the most the most important ones.
00:05:17And they were your formative years, the ones which formed you.
00:05:21And I think Emily Bronte's novel is
00:05:23completely formed and structured by romanticism,
00:05:25and I'll be pursuing that in the next section.
00:05:28Following that, I'm going to talk about Heathcliff, who you know,
00:05:31is a popular romantic figure,
00:05:36and I'm going to offer to readings of
00:05:38Heathcliff in light of these discussions of romanticism.
00:05:40Um, the first of those is going to look at Heathcliff as a romantic,
00:05:43and obviously that's how he's been
00:05:47sort of idolised by cinema and film,
00:05:48and I'm going to pursue why and how he's a
00:05:51romantic and how that relates to actual ideas of romanticism.
00:05:53Um,
00:05:58in the in the in the section following, uh,
00:05:59I'm going to talk about Heathcliff as a figure of real fear,
00:06:02actually a figure that we really are, who's scary, who's dangerous,
00:06:06a figure of danger and fear.
00:06:11And I think they're They're a different set of reasons for that.
00:06:14And Heathcliff.
00:06:18He's got this kind of strange double nous where he is on the one hand,
00:06:19this figure who is much desires
00:06:23and idolised and idealised, uh, and romantic.
00:06:25And on the other hand, a figure who is unusual, dark, even degenerates,
00:06:30dangerous and untrustworthy.
00:06:36So you've got this kind of double nous,
00:06:39which I'm going to treat into discrete sections before offering
00:06:41some conclusion as to what this all teaches us about.
00:06:46Weathering heights as an awful
00:06:48
Cite this Lecture
APA style
Bown, A. (2018, August 15). Bronte: Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte [Video]. MASSOLIT. https://massolit.io/courses/bronte-wuthering-heights/fear-desire-and-the-uncanny
MLA style
Bown, A. "Bronte: Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte." MASSOLIT, uploaded by MASSOLIT, 15 Aug 2018, https://massolit.io/courses/bronte-wuthering-heights/fear-desire-and-the-uncanny