Emily Bronte - Life and works, Dispense di Inglese

Scarica Emily Bronte - Life and works e più Dispense in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! EMILY BRONTË was a very reclusive person, and little is known of her life. She was born on the 30 of July, in 1818, in Yorkshire. After her mother’s death, she and her siblings were brought up by their aunt. Emily Brontë studied very briefly at school, and, with her brother Branwell and her two sisters (Anna and Charlotte), she delighted in inventing stories. In 1846, they published together a collection of poems —> “Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell”, with pseudonyms. In 1847, Emily wrote “Wuthering Heights” and on the 19th of December of 1848, she died of tuberculosis. Wuthering Heights. The novel revolves around two houses: Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange, respectively inhabited by the Earnshows and the Lintons. The story starts with Mr. Lockwood, the new tenant of T.G., visiting his landlord, Mr. Heathcliff, at W.H. Forced to stay the night because of a thunder, Mr. Lockwood has a strange dream about a girl named Catherine, who is tapping on his window, asking to let her come inside the house. The following day, the housekeeper, Nelly Dean, tells him the whole story of the family. Mr. Earnshows, one day, came back home with a foundling, whom he called Heathcliff — > the kid Immediately has a bond with Catherine and they fell in love. Unfortunately, the girl tells Nelly Dean she wouldn’t marry him, because he was socially inferior; so, she marries their neighbour, Edgar Linton. At this point, Heathcliff goes away and returns 3 years later, rich and determined to take his revenge. 1. he takes possession of W.H. 2. marries Edgar’s sister, Isabella. 3. after Catherine’s death, he obliged Cathy, her daughter, to marry his son, Linton. Nelly’s narrative ends here. Mr. Lockwood leaves Yorkshire and comes back after a year to find out that both Linton and Heathcliff are dead, and that Cathy has married Hindley’s son, so now they live in peace and happiness. Nelly says that the locals have seen the ghosts of Catherine and Heathcliff wandering abroad together. Lockwood passes by the graves of Catherine, Edgar, and Heathcliff, and is convinced they are finally at peace. • Themes The novel is completely built around the contrast between Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange; we could say that the setting is as important as a character! If W.H. represented the life of his owner, Heathcliff, T.G. reflects the stability and kindness of Linton’s family. So, the two mansions stand for two opposing forces: the principle of storm and calm. The spirit of Romanticism is still very present in the novel —> especially in the correspondence between the violent passions of the characters and the wild natural landscape. Death is another important theme, and unlike other Victorian’s novel, death is not just the end of life, but the liberation of the spirit, in fact, only after their deaths, Catherine and Heathcliff are free from social conventions and can happily be together. The double is the main key to understand the book. In fact, love is presented in all of his forms and in the book has a great Importance the contrast between the real self and the social self —> represented mostly by Cathy, who choose the stability of a respectable life, over love. Social conditions of the characters is a huge theme and Emily Brontë portrays the reality of the Victorian society, in which she was living. As members of the gentry, the Earnshaws and the Lintons occupy a precarious place within the hierarchy of late eighteenth-century. At the top of British society was the royalty, followed by the aristocracy, then by the gentry, and then by the lower classes. Although the gentry, or upper middle class, possessed servants and often large estates, they held a nonetheless fragile social position. The social status of aristocrats was a formal and settled matter, because aristocrats had official titles. Considerations of class status often crucially inform the characters’ motivations in Wuthering Heights. Catherine’s decision to marry Edgar so that she will be “the greatest woman of the neighborhood” is only the most obvious example. • Structure Regarding the structure of the novel, the narrative mode is a system of Chinese boxes, a concentric system of narratives. There are two narrators: Mr. Lockwood, an outsider, and Nelly Dean, who tells everything she new about the story of the family and is the Insider. The narration doesn’t proceed according to chronological time, but it has a complex structure, filled with flashbacks and flash forwards. Emily Brontë created a masterpiece that anticipated the novelist of the 20th century. • Comparison between Brontë and feminism in literature Emily Brontë emerged, alongside her sisters, as one of the pillars of Victorian writing. The expansion of the feminist movement has been responsible for giving just recognition to many female figures that history and the patriarchy had tried to erase. Emily and her sisters, Anne and Charlotte, started off writing by using male pen names. That gave them the chance to write free from taboos which strongly reigned over the conservative Victorian society. Female writers of that time could not even publish their literary works: they either wrote hiding their true identities (and sex) or were forced to live enclosed and ostracized in their own houses, which was the case for Emily Dickinson, who decided to confine herself in her bedroom. The characters created in each of the Brontë sisters’ novels reflected strong, brave and independent women who experienced passionate love stories. They portrayed abuse, domestic violence, alcoholism and everyday life negotiations which were subjects that were not allowed for women to explore in literature. They made visible what many people would have preferred remained invisible. For this reason, I believe it’s very important to compare Emily Brontë’s masterpiece, Wuthering Heights, with the feminist’s literature of the 19th and 20th century. One of the first composition to deal with the role of women in society is “A doll’s house”, a play written by the Norwegian playwright, Henrik Ibsen. The play describes woman's right and individual freedom. Nora, the protagonist, is like the most women of our modern society having all the natural talents for developing into a successful member of the society as much as her husband. When asked about his purpose of the play A Doll's House Ibsen declares that the play was not a 'feminist' play, he said that it was a 'humanist' play. What Ibsen meant was that the theme of the play was the need of every individual, whether man or woman, to find out the kind of person he or she really is and to strive to become that person.