Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights (Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations) PDF
Preview Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights (Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations)
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No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher. For more information contact: Bloom’s Literary Criticism An imprint of Infobase Publishing 132 West 31st Street New York NY 10001 ISBN-10: 0-7910-9364-6 ISBN-13: 978-0-7910-9364-1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights / Harold Bloom, editor. — Updated ed. p. cm. — (Bloom’s modern critical interpretations) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7910-9364-6 (hardcover) 1. Brontë, Emily, 1818-1848. Wuthering Heights. I. Bloom, Harold. II. Title. PR4172.W73E45 2007 823’.8--dc22 2006031148 Bloom’s Literary Criticism books are available at special discounts when purchased in bulk quantities for businesses, associations, institutions, or sales promotions. Please call our Special Sales Department in New York at (212) 967-8800 or (800) 322-8755. You can find Bloom’s Literary Criticism on the World Wide Web at http://www.chelseahouse.com Contributing Editor: Amy Sickels Cover design by Ben Peterson Cover photo: Victoria & Albert Museum, London/Art Resource, New York Printed in the United States of America Bang EJB 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 This book is printed on acid-free paper. All links and Web addresses were checked and verified to be correct at the time of pub- lication. Because of the dynamic nature of the Web, some addresses and links may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. Contents Editor’s Note vii Introduction 1 Harold Bloom Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights 9 Virginia Woolf On Wuthering Heights 15 Dorothy Van Ghent Looking Oppositely: Emily Brontë’s Bible of Hell 33 Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar Emily Brontë In and Out of Her Time 89 Nancy Armstrong Baby-Work: The Myth of Rebirth in Wuthering Heights 109 Stevie Davies Wuthering Heights: Uneasy Wedlock and Unquiet Slumbers 127 Joseph Allen Boone The Power of Excommunication: Sex and the Feminine Text in Wuthering 147 Heights Regina Barreca vi Contents “Your Father Was Emperor of China, and Your Mother an Indian Queen”: Reverse Imperialism in Wuthering Heights 159 Susan Meyer Chronology 185 Contributors 187 Bibliography 189 Acknowledgments 193 Index 195 Editor’s Note My introduction meditates upon the strangeness of Emily Brontë’s Byronic “northern romance,” which I judge to be essentially Gnostic in its very original spiritual orientation. Virginia Woolf, major novelist-critic, considers Wuthering Heights in conjunction with Jane Eyre, both of which she finds to be prose-poems. In Dorothy Van Ghent’s visionary interpretation, Heathcliff is more daemonic than human, while the founding mothers of Feminist literary criticism, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, read the novel as Emily Brontë’s proto-feminist critique of John Milton’s Paradise Lost. For Nancy Armstrong, Wuthering Heights deliberately evades all literary genres, after which Stevie Davies gives us an account of the novel as a singular myth of rebirth, in which every new life entails the sacrifice of a previous one. Joseph Allen Boone sees the book as a profound critique of societal- approved sexual unions, while Regina Barreca emphasizes the feminist dominance of the relations between sex and death in Emily Brontë. This volumes final essay is a politicized treatment in which Susan Meyer traces a mode of reverse colonialism (which I admit my inability to locate). vii HAROLD BLOOM Introduction The three Brontë sisters—Charlotte, Emily Jane, and Anne—are unique literary artists whose works resemble one another’s far more than they do the works of writers before or since. Charlotte’s compelling novel Jane Eyre and her three lesser yet strong narratives—The Professor, Shirley, Villette—form the most extensive achievement of the sisters, but critics and common readers alike set even higher the one novel of Emily Jane’s, Wuthering Heights, and a handful of her lyrical poems. Anne’s two novels—Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall—remain highly readable, although dwarfed by Jane Eyre and the authentically sublime Wuthering Heights. Between them, the Brontës can be said to have invented a relatively new genre, a kind of northern romance, deeply influenced both by Byron’s poetry and by his myth and personality, but going back also, more remotely yet as definitely, to the Gothic novel and to the Elizabethan drama. In a definite, if difficult to establish sense, the heirs of the Brontës include Thomas Hardy and D. H. Lawrence. There is a harsh vitalism in the Brontës that finds its match in the Lawrence of The Rainbow and Women in Love, though the comparison is rendered problematic by Lawrence’s moral zeal, enchantingly absent from the Brontës’ literary cosmos. The aesthetic puzzle of the Brontës has less to do with the mature transformations of their vision of Byron into Rochester and Heathcliff, than with their earlier fantasy-life and its literature, and the relation of that life and literature to its hero and precursor, George Gordon, Lord Byron. At his rare worst and silliest, Byron has nothing like this scene from Charlotte 1
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