Literature! Part One
I've been reading a lot of 19th century fiction lately. When I was younger, I used to say that I really couldn't read fiction that was written before the 20th century, but my tastes have changed. It has largely to do with having a greater attention span, I think. I think also my skill at penetrating narrative to get at the "point" of a novel has developed somehow, partly due to my work in philosophy, and partly due to having had another decade and a half to learn to understand life. I read anything I could get my hands on as a child, but I had cut down a lot on my reading in fiction at some point in high school - I found I often could not get through a page or maybe even a paragraph without my mind wandering, because *life was so intense* and I had real stuff to work through. Music was a place to meditate; I guess reading was more of an escape, and I either couldn't or didn't want to do that. I got through a couple of classics in undergrad, mostly sci-fi: Dune, Foundation, Stranger in a Strange Land, VALIS. Anyway, I started getting into the 19th century stuff when I started getting into 19th century philosophy in depth; I wanted more of the cultural backdrop. And sure enough, having absorbed the philosophical Zeitgeist and a little bit of history, everything made so much more sense. At the same time, I wondered what they could possibly be thinking trying to get highschoolers to read The Great Gatsby or Jane Eyre. I found Wuthering Heights in the Junior Fiction section at Chapters (age 10-14). Seriously? What could a kid possibly get out of this book at that age, besides an unhealthy attraction to dubious fellows?
Anyway, I've gone through a number of these novels now, and I feel compelled to present some analysis, for anyone who's interested. I'll put parts of them under cuts, to avoid any explicit spoilers.
Wuthering Heights
I was inspired to read this book by Kate Beaton, of course. The first half is hilariously summarized in three strips: http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=322
http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=323
http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=329
This is not a romance novel.
I'm a bit confused by the idea that Heathcliff is supposed to be some manner of tall, dark, passionate lover. Emily Bronte makes him almost impossible to like. He's quite different from, for example, Charlotte Bronte's Mr. Rochester, who can be quite a sympathetic character at times, despite superficial similarities like a gruff manner and inscrutable silent moods. I think Heathcliff works better as the personification of Bad Nature, both in the sense of human nature and in the sense of the negative aspects of the natural world. He's the parasite who overwhelms its host; he's a plague that shows nature's destructive power; the survival instinct triumphing over the tended garden of human delight. What happens when you transplant a robust and thorny weed from dry and stony ground to the richness of a tilled and fertilized flower bed? It takes over the whole thing and makes it nasty and rank, of course, killing everything pleasant that stands in its path. Bad Nature does not play nice. You can't expect something born to survive in a brutal environment to sit back and take it easy when the sun comes out and people start giving it extra attention and resources. It's going to use every advantage it has to exploit and dominate. Heathcliff never stops doing this, in any way he can, throughout the entire novel.
Emily Bronte seems to be playing with a variety of themes that came through the Enlightenment of the 18th century to become problematized in the 19th. The idea of moral as well as scientific and technological progress was a dearly held expectation of many Enlightenment thinkers, but by the mid-19th a lot of cracks were beginning to show. Industrialization brought a higher standard of living for some, but relied on a dehumanizing form of labour, and demonstrated the greed and callousness of those who controlled the means of production. Wider education of the masses was promoted, but these attempts probably met with many challenges as people found that the lower classes were not readily turned away from the harsh realities of their practical lives in favour of the classical ideals cherished by their benefactors. The development of the middle class spurred the breakdown of rigid social structures - importantly, for women, the weight of considerations such as social rank and wealth were in flux, and the possibilities for movement through society by marriage were expanded. A constant theme in all of the novels I've read by women in this period is the conflict between marrying for love and for social security and status. You could say that this is by far the dominant theme in Jane Austen's novels. But in Wuthering Heights, this theme appears more as a cameo than as a leading player in the narrative. It's background; we've been dealing with those themes for quite a while by the time the Brontes were publishing - Austen was writing around 1816-1820, the Brontes in the late 1840s. Emily Bronte is looking at some of the consequences of class disruption, from a rather unique perspective: she questions the Enlightenment proposition that all people possess equal potential, and that the classes are divided more by accident than by nature. But she doesn't do this from the naive standpoint of pre-Enlightenment class prejudice. She takes the basic equality of persons as an assumption to be tested just as much as the reverse assumption that the upper classes have some sort of natural right to ascendency. The results are inconclusive, and seem to point to a more complex interrelationship between nature and education than the Enlightenment supposed.
I've come to think that the key concept in Wuthering Heights is not love, or class, but inheritance. Cultural inheritance, property inheritance, natural inheritance. All of these things can be shuffled and passed around among the characters, as two wealthy, landed families intermingle with each other and with Heathcliff, the lower-class interloper.
I'm going to assume some familiarity with the plot of this book, since otherwise you likely wouldn't be looking under the spoiler cut :p But to review, the main characters of the family at Wuthering Heights are Catherine Earnshaw, Heathcliff, and Hindley Earnshaw; the Linton family, who live nearby, have a son and a daughter, Edgar and Isabella.
So if you look at cultural inheritance, the first thing you find is that both Catherine and Heathcliff prove difficult or impossible to imbue with a standard upper-class education as children. However, both can absorb enough culture to put up a pretence of good character or worthiness as soon as it suits their purposes to do so - Catherine when she is forced to stay with the Lintons while recovering from injury, and Heathcliff when he perceives that it is necessary in order to exact revenge on - well, everybody. Bronte points out many times that Catherine and Heathcliff are made of the same sort of stuff, employing descriptions of natural phenomena to highlight their symbolic connection with Nature. But these words are often self-assessments on the part of the characters, and I don't know that we are meant to take that at face value; at any rate, there's more to Catherine and Heathcliff than their expression of untameable nature. Heathcliff brings out the worst in Catherine; Catherine speaks of him as "more myself than I am." And when Catherine eventually marries Edgar Linton, it could be read (according to wikipedia :p) as a choice she makes between nature and culture. But Edgar has his "nature," too; no person is all culture, partaking of no natural inheritance whatsoever. Edgar's character is as much the product of his genetic as his cultural inheritance, and the same goes for every other person in the novel. Catherine "chooses" culture because she marries for status instead of for passion; but she forges a "natural," genetic connection nonetheless in having a child with Edgar. Catherine's daughter, Cathy, intermingles Edgar's and Catherine's natural dispositions, resulting in some ways in a more promising human being all around. In succumbing to her passion for Heathcliff, Catherine would not just have been sacrificing culture for nature, but would have been choosing to cultivate a different sort of nature within herself and in the next generation. The "nature" that Heathcliff - and parts of Catherine - represent is a particular strain in human being: brutal, self-centred, and destructive.
Another theme Bronte plays with is the unpredictability of genetic inheritance, which could be contrasted with the stable cultural inheritance of the upper classes, as well as the freely transferrable heritability of property. Bronte speaks of the "ancient Earnshaw stock;" there's a variety of different potentials buried in those genetics, the roots of which are lost to history. Every old family has its prodigies and throwbacks, while new blood incorporates new unpredictability. The children born to the main characters are the result of the shuffling of property, culture, and genetic inheritance in a non-traditional configuration - in particular, in defiance of the "natural" order dictated by genetic inheritance - and demonstrate, to a certain extent, the superior value of genetic ties, and the greater power of the genetic/natural to the other forces in shaping character. Heathcliff can pick up the trappings of culture, but he's ultimately a prisoner to his own rancorous fury at being separated from Catherine by that culture; the only reason he survives so much longer than she does is because his hardy nature allows him to withstand as well as to inflict greater torture. He can cheat Hindley out of his property inheritance, but fails to pass it on to his own genetic heir - Heathcliff sees this genetic legacy as the greater purpose to which the other kinds of wealth should be devoted, and his satisfaction in swindling Hindley would be incomplete if it weren't for the ruin of Hindley's son. Heathcliff sees Catherine's aim of indirectly establishing him in society through her marriage to Hindley (i.e. her transfer of cultural capital) as worthless in comparison to their union in the flesh. One thing that seems to cast his love for Catherine in a questionable light is his rejection of her daughter with Edgar, who is also named Cathy. Cathy is a reminder of Heathcliff's preferred mate, and his preferred means of securing his genetic legacy, and she has none of the value to him that one might expect him to have for someone who was born of the woman he loved. He torments her despite knowing that Catherine would probably have wanted him to love her. In Hindley's son, Hareton Earnshaw, Heathcliff sees Catherine as well - he is haunted by her genetic legacy, which he can pervert and destroy, but cannot partake of. Again, unpredictable results spring from the union of different families - Hindley married a woman unknown to the region, who appeared weak and unsuited to the climate of the moors, and yet her son grew into a strong and robust man of good character, despite being turned into a servant and intentionally made rough and ignorant by Heathcliff after his parents' deaths. Heathcliff suffers the irony of seeing his own son, Linton, fail to inherit his own best qualities, exhibiting the delicate physique and weak character of his mother, Isabella Linton. He is raised far away from his native territory, as his mother runs away with him, and so it appears that Linton suffers the negative consequences both of poor genetics and poor upbringing.
I think where these themes really work the best in the novel is in the endgame. After Heathcliff comes in and disrupts the usual order of things, the native inhabitants slowly and quietly return to equilibrium. Heathcliff attempts to complete his acquisition of all the Lintons' and Earnshaws' property by arranging a marriage between young Cathy and his own son, but Linton dies soon afterward, leaving Heathcliff without a genetic heir. After Heathcliff's death, the children of Catherine and Hindley Earnshaw, both genetic descendents of the original upper-class families, forge a relationship almost in spite of themselves, and reclaim their rightful property. Cathy overcomes her aversion to Hareton's coarseness, and provides him with his rightful cultural inheritance, teaching him to read and sharing literature with him; he proves to have a strong and fertile intellect, despite years of neglect. Once the disease runs its course, the garden flourishes anew: its inhabitants may be vulnerable to attack from savage nature, but they possess their own style of resilience in being best able to lead a balanced existence in the arena that their ancestors shaped. They survive the brush fire because their seeds can withstand it, while the non-native stock burns itself out on the resources provided by the locale.
I'm uncertain how much of this Emily Bronte actually had in mind when she wrote the story. It could be that these themes come through in such a complicated fashion precisely because other things were in the front of her mind - a simpler analysis of Nature vs. Culture is also possible. But I think Bronte's awareness of the variety and unpredictability of characters and social relationships prevented a simple presentation of this dichotomy in her narrative. It channels some fantastic insights in a suggestive but inconclusive fashion, much in the same way that experience forms an inexplicit background that informs our perception of events.
Anyway, I've gone through a number of these novels now, and I feel compelled to present some analysis, for anyone who's interested. I'll put parts of them under cuts, to avoid any explicit spoilers.
Wuthering Heights
I was inspired to read this book by Kate Beaton, of course. The first half is hilariously summarized in three strips: http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=322
http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=323
http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=329
This is not a romance novel.
I'm a bit confused by the idea that Heathcliff is supposed to be some manner of tall, dark, passionate lover. Emily Bronte makes him almost impossible to like. He's quite different from, for example, Charlotte Bronte's Mr. Rochester, who can be quite a sympathetic character at times, despite superficial similarities like a gruff manner and inscrutable silent moods. I think Heathcliff works better as the personification of Bad Nature, both in the sense of human nature and in the sense of the negative aspects of the natural world. He's the parasite who overwhelms its host; he's a plague that shows nature's destructive power; the survival instinct triumphing over the tended garden of human delight. What happens when you transplant a robust and thorny weed from dry and stony ground to the richness of a tilled and fertilized flower bed? It takes over the whole thing and makes it nasty and rank, of course, killing everything pleasant that stands in its path. Bad Nature does not play nice. You can't expect something born to survive in a brutal environment to sit back and take it easy when the sun comes out and people start giving it extra attention and resources. It's going to use every advantage it has to exploit and dominate. Heathcliff never stops doing this, in any way he can, throughout the entire novel.
Emily Bronte seems to be playing with a variety of themes that came through the Enlightenment of the 18th century to become problematized in the 19th. The idea of moral as well as scientific and technological progress was a dearly held expectation of many Enlightenment thinkers, but by the mid-19th a lot of cracks were beginning to show. Industrialization brought a higher standard of living for some, but relied on a dehumanizing form of labour, and demonstrated the greed and callousness of those who controlled the means of production. Wider education of the masses was promoted, but these attempts probably met with many challenges as people found that the lower classes were not readily turned away from the harsh realities of their practical lives in favour of the classical ideals cherished by their benefactors. The development of the middle class spurred the breakdown of rigid social structures - importantly, for women, the weight of considerations such as social rank and wealth were in flux, and the possibilities for movement through society by marriage were expanded. A constant theme in all of the novels I've read by women in this period is the conflict between marrying for love and for social security and status. You could say that this is by far the dominant theme in Jane Austen's novels. But in Wuthering Heights, this theme appears more as a cameo than as a leading player in the narrative. It's background; we've been dealing with those themes for quite a while by the time the Brontes were publishing - Austen was writing around 1816-1820, the Brontes in the late 1840s. Emily Bronte is looking at some of the consequences of class disruption, from a rather unique perspective: she questions the Enlightenment proposition that all people possess equal potential, and that the classes are divided more by accident than by nature. But she doesn't do this from the naive standpoint of pre-Enlightenment class prejudice. She takes the basic equality of persons as an assumption to be tested just as much as the reverse assumption that the upper classes have some sort of natural right to ascendency. The results are inconclusive, and seem to point to a more complex interrelationship between nature and education than the Enlightenment supposed.
I've come to think that the key concept in Wuthering Heights is not love, or class, but inheritance. Cultural inheritance, property inheritance, natural inheritance. All of these things can be shuffled and passed around among the characters, as two wealthy, landed families intermingle with each other and with Heathcliff, the lower-class interloper.
I'm going to assume some familiarity with the plot of this book, since otherwise you likely wouldn't be looking under the spoiler cut :p But to review, the main characters of the family at Wuthering Heights are Catherine Earnshaw, Heathcliff, and Hindley Earnshaw; the Linton family, who live nearby, have a son and a daughter, Edgar and Isabella.
So if you look at cultural inheritance, the first thing you find is that both Catherine and Heathcliff prove difficult or impossible to imbue with a standard upper-class education as children. However, both can absorb enough culture to put up a pretence of good character or worthiness as soon as it suits their purposes to do so - Catherine when she is forced to stay with the Lintons while recovering from injury, and Heathcliff when he perceives that it is necessary in order to exact revenge on - well, everybody. Bronte points out many times that Catherine and Heathcliff are made of the same sort of stuff, employing descriptions of natural phenomena to highlight their symbolic connection with Nature. But these words are often self-assessments on the part of the characters, and I don't know that we are meant to take that at face value; at any rate, there's more to Catherine and Heathcliff than their expression of untameable nature. Heathcliff brings out the worst in Catherine; Catherine speaks of him as "more myself than I am." And when Catherine eventually marries Edgar Linton, it could be read (according to wikipedia :p) as a choice she makes between nature and culture. But Edgar has his "nature," too; no person is all culture, partaking of no natural inheritance whatsoever. Edgar's character is as much the product of his genetic as his cultural inheritance, and the same goes for every other person in the novel. Catherine "chooses" culture because she marries for status instead of for passion; but she forges a "natural," genetic connection nonetheless in having a child with Edgar. Catherine's daughter, Cathy, intermingles Edgar's and Catherine's natural dispositions, resulting in some ways in a more promising human being all around. In succumbing to her passion for Heathcliff, Catherine would not just have been sacrificing culture for nature, but would have been choosing to cultivate a different sort of nature within herself and in the next generation. The "nature" that Heathcliff - and parts of Catherine - represent is a particular strain in human being: brutal, self-centred, and destructive.
Another theme Bronte plays with is the unpredictability of genetic inheritance, which could be contrasted with the stable cultural inheritance of the upper classes, as well as the freely transferrable heritability of property. Bronte speaks of the "ancient Earnshaw stock;" there's a variety of different potentials buried in those genetics, the roots of which are lost to history. Every old family has its prodigies and throwbacks, while new blood incorporates new unpredictability. The children born to the main characters are the result of the shuffling of property, culture, and genetic inheritance in a non-traditional configuration - in particular, in defiance of the "natural" order dictated by genetic inheritance - and demonstrate, to a certain extent, the superior value of genetic ties, and the greater power of the genetic/natural to the other forces in shaping character. Heathcliff can pick up the trappings of culture, but he's ultimately a prisoner to his own rancorous fury at being separated from Catherine by that culture; the only reason he survives so much longer than she does is because his hardy nature allows him to withstand as well as to inflict greater torture. He can cheat Hindley out of his property inheritance, but fails to pass it on to his own genetic heir - Heathcliff sees this genetic legacy as the greater purpose to which the other kinds of wealth should be devoted, and his satisfaction in swindling Hindley would be incomplete if it weren't for the ruin of Hindley's son. Heathcliff sees Catherine's aim of indirectly establishing him in society through her marriage to Hindley (i.e. her transfer of cultural capital) as worthless in comparison to their union in the flesh. One thing that seems to cast his love for Catherine in a questionable light is his rejection of her daughter with Edgar, who is also named Cathy. Cathy is a reminder of Heathcliff's preferred mate, and his preferred means of securing his genetic legacy, and she has none of the value to him that one might expect him to have for someone who was born of the woman he loved. He torments her despite knowing that Catherine would probably have wanted him to love her. In Hindley's son, Hareton Earnshaw, Heathcliff sees Catherine as well - he is haunted by her genetic legacy, which he can pervert and destroy, but cannot partake of. Again, unpredictable results spring from the union of different families - Hindley married a woman unknown to the region, who appeared weak and unsuited to the climate of the moors, and yet her son grew into a strong and robust man of good character, despite being turned into a servant and intentionally made rough and ignorant by Heathcliff after his parents' deaths. Heathcliff suffers the irony of seeing his own son, Linton, fail to inherit his own best qualities, exhibiting the delicate physique and weak character of his mother, Isabella Linton. He is raised far away from his native territory, as his mother runs away with him, and so it appears that Linton suffers the negative consequences both of poor genetics and poor upbringing.
I think where these themes really work the best in the novel is in the endgame. After Heathcliff comes in and disrupts the usual order of things, the native inhabitants slowly and quietly return to equilibrium. Heathcliff attempts to complete his acquisition of all the Lintons' and Earnshaws' property by arranging a marriage between young Cathy and his own son, but Linton dies soon afterward, leaving Heathcliff without a genetic heir. After Heathcliff's death, the children of Catherine and Hindley Earnshaw, both genetic descendents of the original upper-class families, forge a relationship almost in spite of themselves, and reclaim their rightful property. Cathy overcomes her aversion to Hareton's coarseness, and provides him with his rightful cultural inheritance, teaching him to read and sharing literature with him; he proves to have a strong and fertile intellect, despite years of neglect. Once the disease runs its course, the garden flourishes anew: its inhabitants may be vulnerable to attack from savage nature, but they possess their own style of resilience in being best able to lead a balanced existence in the arena that their ancestors shaped. They survive the brush fire because their seeds can withstand it, while the non-native stock burns itself out on the resources provided by the locale.
I'm uncertain how much of this Emily Bronte actually had in mind when she wrote the story. It could be that these themes come through in such a complicated fashion precisely because other things were in the front of her mind - a simpler analysis of Nature vs. Culture is also possible. But I think Bronte's awareness of the variety and unpredictability of characters and social relationships prevented a simple presentation of this dichotomy in her narrative. It channels some fantastic insights in a suggestive but inconclusive fashion, much in the same way that experience forms an inexplicit background that informs our perception of events.