Aims
This course aims to:
• consider Emily Brontë’s perspective on issues of her day
• investigate her treatment of her themes
• explore her narrative method through close textual analysis
Content
An unorthodox Victorian novel which puzzled even those first readers who did not reject it for its “coarseness”, Wuthering Heights focused on themes such as adultery, class tension, race, domestic violence and mental health. Such themes were not unfamiliar to the Victorian reader but it was the brutal honesty and unconventional mode of narrative in which they were presented that disturbed her contemporaries and disturbs many of us when reading the novel today.
Published in December 1847 when Europe was on the brink of political revolution, Wuthering Heights questions class relations, structures of power and authority, and established gender roles. Brontë’s angry and frustrated protagonists emerge from dysfunctional families to challenge the authority of patriarchal education, religion and social convention. Heathcliff, the outsider, is not accommodated in the novel’s dominant society, the landed gentry. Having acquired wealth and social status, he takes his revenge by hounding them to their deaths both by psychological and physical means. Catherine is tempted into a conventional marriage and suffers what we would now consider a mental breakdown. Catherine and Heathcliff, the novel’s strongest characters, are also its most self-destructive figures. Weaker characters, men, women and children, suffer physical and mental abuse but survive. Outlandish scenes are relayed in a pragmatic, commonsensical tone by the servant Nelly Dean, and we ask ourselves whether this renders events more credible or whether she does not understand what she is witnessing.
The ending raises many questions but our close textual analysis and perspective on the social background of the novel should help provide some answers.
Presentation of the course
The course will consist of informal lectures with student participation and class discussion strongly encouraged.
Course sessions
1. Introduction: Life and Literary Influences
2. Characters
3. Narrative structure
4. Handling of themes
5. Responses
Learning outcomes
You are expected to gain from this series of classroom sessions a greater understanding of the subject and of the core issues and arguments central to the course.
The learning outcomes for this course are:
• a critical appreciation of literary and historical contexts
• an informed response to the text and some of the issues covered on the course
• progress towards an analytical approach to reading a literary work
Required reading
*Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights* many paperback and other editions
