BRONTE SISTERS AND THEIR WORKS, Appunti di Inglese

Scarica BRONTE SISTERS AND THEIR WORKS e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! EMILY BRONTE Life Emily Jane Bronte was born on 30 July 1818 in Bradford, Yorkshire. Her mother died when she was 3 years old, she and her siblings were brought up by their aunt. She studied for a short period of time in a school with four of her sisters but then two of them died there after 1 year, so she returned to her family home in Haworth, Yorkshire, where she spent most of her life. With her brother Branwell and two sisters, Anne and Charlotte, she enjoyed inventing and telling stories. She later spent a year studying in Brussels with her two sisters but they got back to Yorkshire when her aunt died. Anne, Charlotte and Emily spent their time at home, writing poems. In 1846 Charlotte included some poems in a collection called Poems by Currer, Ellis and Action Bell (their pseudonyms to hide their feminine identity, because women writers' works were not published in an easy way). Two years later, Emily published her only novel, Wuthering Heights (1847). Soon after she died of tuberculosis on 19 December 1848, at the age of 30. Emily was a very reclusive, retiring person and very little is known about her life, as she appears to have had few friends and to have written few letters. She had a deep bond with Yorkshire's landscape and nature constantly stimulated her imagination. WUTHERING HEIGHTS (1847) Plot Wuthering Heights tells the story of two households of Yorkshire: Wuthering Heights, Earnshaws’ house, and Thrushcross Grange, Lintons’ house. The story begins 30 years earlier, when Mr Earnshaw finds a homeless boy on a journey to Liverpool and adopts him as his son. The boy is named Heathcliff and Catherine, Mr.Earnshaw’s daughter, grows attached to him. When Mr.Earnshaw dies, his son Hindley declares that Heathcliff will no longer be allowed an education and sends him to work in the fields. Heathcliff is angry when Catherine gets married to a rich man, Edgar Linton (who lives in Thrushcross Grange), because he loves her. So he runs away and returns as a rich man to exact revenge on both families. Even the death of his beloved Catherine can’t free Heathcliff from the torments of his love-hate relationship with her and he is haunted by her ghost until the end of his life. After his death, their ghosts are said to be walking together on the Yorkshire’s moor. This story combines romantic and gothic elements of unbridled passion, stormy natural settings, dreams and ghosts. The narrative technique When published, the novel was considered excessively passionate, without a clear moral message and clumsy in its structure. Nowadays, the novel has won praise for its complex construction, its interesting use of flashback, its vivid use of idiomatic language and its striking descriptions of the natural environment of the Yorkshire moors. The story is told by two narrators: one is Nelly, Catherine’s housekeeper, who has witnessed most of the events that happened between the two families. The other is an outsider, a visiting gentleman called Mr.Lockwood, who asks Nelly to tell him the story and writes it down in his diary. Through the double-narration, the novel achieves an effect of impersonality that was quite unusual at the time. This, combined with the brilliant characterisation and the effective use of dramatic dialogue, makes Wuthering Heights a great romantic novel about love, hate and revenge, and one of the most engaging and challenging to interpret. The novel’s complex structure The novel is not based on a conventional sequence of events. It goes back and forward through flashbacks and personal recollections. It begins at the end of the story, when Mr.Lockwood visits Heathcliff at Wuthering Heights and is forced to spend the night there because of a snowstorm. During the night he is woken up by the noise made by a tree branch tapping on the window. He then realises that it was a hand, a ghostly hand which seizes his own, and a voice who asks him to be let in. Heathcliff hears Mr.Lockwood’s screams so he gets in the room and begs Catherine to return. When Mr.Lockwood, terrified, goes back to Thrushcross Grange the next day, he asks Nelly to tell him the story. Landscape as a symbol One of the remarkable features of the novel is its landscape description and the way the landscape and the main character mirror each other. Heathcliff’s name itself ties him to the land: heath is an area of uncultivated land and cliff is a steep rock. So, the landscape becomes a symbol of the protagonists’ nature and passion. Heathcliff represents a romantic hero while Catherine is a modern, revolutionary figure who is torn between social conventions and wilder instincts. Charlotte Bronte on Wuthering Heights