The Bronte Sisters: Charlotte e Emily Bronte, Jane Eyre e Wuthering Heights, Temi di Inglese

Scarica The Bronte Sisters: Charlotte e Emily Bronte, Jane Eyre e Wuthering Heights e più Temi in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! The Bronte sisters The Bronte sisters, Charlotte, Emily and Anne, were daughters of a reverend, an irish man, educated at Cambridge, who in 1812 had married a woman of dedicated institution who died very young in 1821 after giving him 6 children, 5 daughters anda son. After their mother’s death, the children were left to themselves because their father was a man who liked to stay in his room and he even had lunch and dinner there, far from his children. But he was a man of remarkable intelligence, eccentric, and he communicated his daughters this gift. In 1824, 4 of the 5 five girls were sent to a school for clergemen's daughters, a kind of college, where they had poor food, a strict education and where fees were low, but they suffered a lot. Here the 2 eldest daughters died of starvation because of the terrible conditions they were obliged to live, and Charlotte and Emily were brought back home and when they arrived, they spent their time in reading, painting and later in writing. They liked to live mentally in fantastic lands, in a world created by their dreams which represented their only possible escape from their seclusion. Charlotte Bronte Charlotte went away when she was older: she first went to a boarding school and then in 1842 in Bruxelle to learn French. Unlike Emily, whose tendency was more to seclusion, Charlotte liked spending time with other people and unlike Emily, who drew on her fantasy when she wrote her novel “Wuthering Heights”, Charlotte used her own experience at the boarding school and as a teacher, because later she was a teacher at the college where she learnt French and there she fell in love with the headmaster of the school, but since he was married, their love had to end because she was strictly convinced of the values imposed by the society of that time and for this reason this love story was an unhappy experience for her. But she wanted to express herself as an individual, as a woman, she wanted to have a voice in society even if she was a daughter of her time, and just like Dickens, she shared the values imposed by society and for this reason she decided to renounce her love story. For this reason her books are full of sad stories, but Charlotte in an age dominated by men and by conventional morality, decided to describe women's feelings openly as she did in “Jane Eyre”, considered to be her masterpiece. fare Egre The plot Jane is an orphan girl, who is sent by her stepmother to a boarding school at the age of 10. There, she lives unhappy and later she manages to become a teacher and obtains a place as a governess at the Thornfield Hall to look after the daughter of a mysterious man, Mr Rochester. They fall in love with each other and he proposes to her to marry him, but on the wedding day everything collapses because Jane finds out that he has another wife, Bertha Manson, who is closed in the upper floor of the house because she is mad. Because of this, she rejects his marriage proposal and decides to leave the house, she goes to be a teacher in another village; there she meets St.John Rivers, who proposes to her, but she refuses and the night she hears Rochester’s voice calling her and she discovers that Thornfield Hall had been destroyed by a fire caused by Bertha Manson and she had died and Mr Rochester had become blind, she goes back to help him. Finally they get married so there is a happy ending. Themes Charlotte was the forerunner of modern romantic fiction: the poor and physically not attractive Jane manages to attract Mr Rochester, who is handsome, mysterious and rich; he has been attracted by other values ofthis woman. Jane Eyre is an important feminist novel, because Jane is an independent woman who wanted to have a job and for this reason she goes living in another house with other people and also because she rebels against the male authority, when Mr.Rochester prays her to marry him, she tells him that she is not a machine or an object, but she has deep feelings and she feels betrayed because he hadn't seen in her everything about her life. As a result, this novel can also be considered a Bildungsroman, a roman of formation, because we follow Jane from her childhood to her adult age. When this novel was published in 1847, it was rejected by a society full of prejudices and puritian attitude, because to some extent it challenged the values imposed by this society, because the novel isn't the story of a poor woman, who is oppressed by this society and doesn't manage to rebel, but it is the potrait of a woman who wanted to show her inner self, full of desire and love, a woman who wanted to say that women and men were on the same level, have the same feelings, and she wanted to claim the right of her sex to free domain action. Sex was considered a taboo at that time, a woman was not expected to experience such feelings, instead Jane wants to point out the fact that women have the same feeling, have a inner side that they want to express. There are a lot of autobiographical elements. This is emphasized by the first person narrator, the point of view is that of Jane and this helps the reader understand better her perspective and analyse her feelings. Charlotte puts her own emotions in Jane's experience, this is why this novel shocked the Victorian morality because it contrasted the puritan tradition, according to which women don’ feel the same emotions and don't feel sexual attraction or physical impulses. Charlotte wanted to escape this way of living, trying to find a way in a society in which, talented, poor women couldn't have a place and couldn't receive an education and they had to do simple jobs such as teachers, governors , workers. Jane can be considered a rounded figure in her independence, passion, complexity. But Charlotte was the daughter of her time, so there is a kind of tension in her soul, between the desire to give rise to her emotions, to challenge the prejudices of this society, and the education she had received based on the idea of sacrifice and denial. There are also some elements of gothic fiction: for example in the character of Bertha Mason, who is this woman in the attic: nobody can see her because she's violent and she is full ofthose aspects which were banished in society. Bertha stands for that separation between private and public life which was so important at that time, that to say people had to obey a set of values and some aspects of human personality, such as sexual attraction, must be kept under control, just like Bertha is kept under control in the attic. Jane and Bertha can be considered two halves of the same person: Jane stands for what the Victorian society needed, so a respectful, honest, educated woman and instead Bertha stands for passion impulses, sex, all those aspects of human personality that Victorian society wanted to deny. These writers wanted to talk about this great contrast between what was possible to do and what was necessary for people to do to feel satisfied. To some extent, Charlotte wanted to point out the fact that people couldn't really realize themselves fully as individuals in a society in which all these aspects were suppressed. Jane is atonoums, she feels free and she thinks that she can feel the same emotions of men and so this desire to be atomounous and not to depend on other people are important to consider this as the first feminist novel. Pacini fare Ere any Ihe plot Jane is accused of dropping her slate and her punishment is to stand on a stool for an hour in the middle ofthe room. Mr Brocklehurst warns the other pupils to avoid her company and to shun her example and talk her out of the conversation. He warns the teachers to watch her, weigh her words and scrutinise her actions, but most importantly to punish her body to save her soul, because according to people at that time, students were educated also by giving them physical punishment. Mr Brocklehurst believes that Jane is the embodiment of the devil and lies. The Brocklehurst's family started crying because they were shocked. Jane was sent to Lowood because the woman who adopted her like her daughter, didn't want Jane's bad behaviors to contaminate the purity of her own daughters. Jane can't describe her sensations through words, she is ashamed of the punishment, she is angry because the way she is treated is not fair. A girl, Helen Burns, came by her and looked at her, bore her up, and this made Jane feel stronger, because she understands her feelings. However, Helen is condemned to have a dinner with only water and bread, but also by wearing an untidy badge, which is a kind of sign that exposes her to the community as someone that is different from all the others and this is a futile reason. The reason why Jane changed her attitude after the girl looked at her is because the girl’s eyes contained a kind of light and she gave her courage because she looked at her with love, sympathy so there is a smile in her eyes, so this helps Jane feel better and fight against her inner feelings. The narrator is a first person narrator and this makes the reader identify himself with the story and share Jane's response. Jane is different from all the other students, she has an inner life and she doesn't accept the educational method of these teachers. Jane's feelings change throughout the process, at the beginning she is paralysed with fear, then she feels a strong anger because of false accusation. This means that she gradually moves from the feeling of fear and fury and she manages to dominate her emotions thanks to the girls attitude. and in his desire to destroy both the families, decides to marry Isabella, Edgar's sister, and mistreats her; although, they have a son, Linton. Years later, he kidnapped Cathy and obliged her to marry his son Linton, even though Catherine had become attached to Hareton, Hindley's son. Therefore his revenge was complete since he became the owner of Thrushcross Grange. Nelly's narrative ends at this point, and Lockwood leaves Yorkshire and comes back after a year to find out that both Linton and Heathcliff are dead and that Cathy and Hareton are going to get married. The novel ends with Nelly describing how she met a little boy who told her he had seen Cathy and Heathcliffs ghosts wandering on the moors. A complex narrative structure This novel can be defined as modern, it doesn't follow a chronological sequence of events, but goes back and forward through memories, flashbacks and narrations. There are two sections in the story itself. the first one centered around Heathcliff and Catherine and represents the most imaginative and romantic part. Instead the second section, that is centred around Cathy and Hareton, shows a more_natural approach to love and feelings. The narrative structure is different because there are two different narrators in this story: Mr.Lockwood is the outsider and tells the story from his point of view, that to say what he knows about the situation and the characters; he is a more superficial narrator because he doesn't know anything about people's feelings and emotions. While instead Nelly is an internal narrator, because she is emotionally involved in the events and she can talk about the past that she knows very well and tells him the story of Cathy and Heathcliff. Romantic elements In this novel there is a lot of romanticism and realism. Romanticism is in the love story ofthe two protagonists, but also in the figure of the male protagonist, Heathcliff, who is a dark hero, defined as a kind of “Byronic hero”, this dark haired, with his strong and wide feelings. Another romantic element is the role played by nature, there is a close relationship between people's feelings and the outside world, that to say nature, the moors, the dark landscapes which seem to be in harmony with characters! feelings. Another important aspect is passion, which is much more than the romantic conception of love, because this passion, that the two protagonists feel, transcends everything, even life. This is a kind of strong elemental force of nature and it starts when Heathcliff and Catherine are still young and it grows with them, so it is creative and destructive at the same time. This love is neither a sensual, nor a spiritual, intellectual attraction, but it is a kind of impulse, which strictly joints these two people together as if one was an inborn part of the other. This means that they are two halves of the same unit, they completely identify with each other to the point of becoming one. This is something new in this story that Emily introduced for the first time in the English novel. She talks about a love which involves only feelings and emotions, that to say two people that are one, that count separate and even that is incapable of separating them. Emily wanted to represent these feelings through the love of the story of Heathcliff and Catherine, that is something completely new and had never been analysed before in a novel, something deeper that manages to joint two people together as a single individual. Cathy, describing her love for Heathcliff, simultaneously negates and affirms her identity by saying ‘/ am Heathcliff”, because she professes so strongly her love for him, which means that she can't live without him because he is the other half of herself. She, together with him, are a single human being. There are also some Gothic elements in this novel, for example there are ghosts, strange situations because Emily believed in a kind of connection between the world of living and dead people. She believed in this connection in a place in which there were strong beliefs in ghosts, superstitions, prophecies and untouchable presents of something supernatural. Even Heathcliff is important and has many features of the Gothic villain: handsome, dark haired, but also cruel, there is a sense of mystery around him and nobody knows about his origins, what he did when he was away. Another important aspect is symbolism: the two houses are the symbol of two different social classes, because they are really different from each other; even the place where they are located is important, because Thrushcross Grange, which is surrounded by a peaceful vegetation, stands for the calm, civilized way ofthe Lintons, that to say people who have money and who can survive; it reflects the conception of life of the Lintons, based on stability, kindness and respectability. Instead Wuthering Heights is on the bare hills tossed by storms that represent the destructive world of feelings and the deep emotions which are shared by the people who live here. The two mansions stand also for two opposing forces: Wuthering Heights, the principle of storm and energy, and Thrushcross Grange, the principle of calm and settled assurance. In this way Emily managed to make a distinction between two different social classes and the way people who belonged to these social classes behaved and what their inner world was like. There is an absence of condemnation: Emily neither praises nor blames the unhappy creatures that populate Wuthering Heights. She has a special vision of life, which recalls that shared by William Blake. They both believe in the idea of divine energy and the unity of contraries and that good and evil are manifestation of the same energy, so violence, disturbance, discord means that people have fade to live their life harmoniously, in the sense that Heathcliff is so cruel, because he has been denied a creative outlet to his form of energy through love, that to say he wanted to love Catherine, and since he has been denied this opportunity, he has tumed into a cruel and unhappy creature. Therefore love is the positive force which triumphs. I am Heathcliff- analysis Catherine is unhappy in heaven because she is not with Heathcliff. She wants to return to the earth, because she wants to be reunited with him. Even heaven isn't a joyful place without him. She prefers to be on earth with him, than in heaven without him. They are two halves of a unique human being. She desires to be cast down from heaven because she experiences paradise as a loss, because it's the loss of her vital self which she says it's contained in Heathcliff. She considers herself completely different from Linton, they are made oftwo different souls, while instead she feels at one with Heathcliff. The passage “I am Heathcliff "is a cry and is highly suggestive to understand the nature of their love. It is not only a passionate cry, that to say her love for him, but it's like a mystic cry, she merges into him in a sort of mystic fusion and in the same way as mystics leave a sense of desolation when God is silent to them, so the whole universe would sound empty and meaningless to Catherine without Heathcliff. It's something that goes beyond a simple love story, it's deep and all her existence is contained in Heathcliff. She also makes a comparison between her love for Linton and that for Heathcliff and through this comparison she manages to explain these two different kinds of love. ° Linton represents all the superficial comforts that money, social position can offer: this love is based on material comforts and she even wanted to exploit his wealth in order to help Heathcliff. ® Heathcliff, like the rocks that are eternal, represents the deepest core of her nature. She considers Heathcliff the real vital core of herself, without him she can't live. Catherine loves Heathcliff because he is more herself than she is. Their souls are the same, he is always in her mind as her own being. But Heathcliff listens only to the first part of this speech and he goes away when she says “it would be degrading for me to marry Heathcliff', so he leaves the town to make money and wants to marry her as a rich man. Kind of woman — Catherine is passionate, impulsive, she has strong feelings, she is torn by interior conflict, but at the same time she is sensitive to social positions and following the conventions of her time. This is the contrast in people at that time, they are torn apart between their own feelings, and the code of values they have to obey, so social conventions are very important in people's lives. Emily wants to describe a new kind of love, different from the other authors, according to which love is a means to achieve a social position. Instead she wants to talk about love based on strong feelings and she thinks they are two halves of the same human being: men and women are put on the same level, they are the same in terms of feelings.