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" Don't Turn Me Out ":. Reorienting Love and Revenge in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847). “it is, precisely the multiplicity and indeterminacy of its meaning that makes the novel irresistible.” -- Gillian Frith, “Decoding Wuthering Heights”. "Dualities and Oppositions".
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"Don't Turn Me Out": Reorienting Love and Revenge in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847)
“it is, precisely the multiplicity and indeterminacy of its meaning that makes the novel irresistible.” --Gillian Frith, “Decoding Wuthering Heights”.
"Dualities and Oppositions" First Generation Second Generation Mythic Plot Gothic Genre • The Earnshaws Yeomanry • Wuthering Heights “Storm” Realist Plot Domestic Plot • The Lintons Gentry • Thrushcross Grange “Calm”
Heathcliff is “subjectively a Heights figure opposing the Grange, and objectively a Grange figure undermining the Heights...he symbolises at once the triumph of the oppressed over capitalism and the triumph of capitalism over the oppressed.” --Terry Eagleton, Myths of Power.
Revenge ‘insofar as it is "natural," we treat its presence as a given, and insofar as it is "wicked," we take it at face value. Unlike such virtues as disinterestedness, altruism, and sympathy, that is, revenge does not seem to stand in need of demystification.’ -Daniel Hack, “Revenge Stories of Modern Life”.
"Barbarism and Civilization" “If Heathcliff combats the cannibalistic rituals of an aristocratic mode of inheritance, then he ultimately does so with the tools provided by the cannibalistic culture of capitalist competition.” --Mathew Beaumont, “Heathcliff’s Great Hunger: The Cannibal Other in Wuthering Heights.”
Wuthering Heights “How strong you are! How many years do you mean to live after I am gone?...Will you forget me—will you be happy when I am in the earth? Will you say twenty years hence, ‘That’s the grave of Catherine Earnshaw. I loved her long ago, and was wretched to lose her; but it is past. I have loved many others since—my children are dear to me than she was...” --Cathy to Heathcliff. Vol.2, Ch.1.
Wuthering Heights “He has, nobody knows what money, and every year it increases. Yes, yes, he’s rich enough to live in a finer house than this. but he’s near—close-handed; and, ...he could not have borne to miss the chance of getting a few hundreds more. It is strange people should be so greedy, when they are alone in the world!” -- Nelly to Lockwood. Vol.1, Ch.4.
Haworth of the Brontës “Most of the farmers simply scratched out a living from a few acres of inhospitable land, though some of the larger landowners, like the Taylors of Stanbury and the Haetons of Ponden Hall, had become wealthy by judicious investment in property, rents and small scale manufacturing.” --Juliet Barker, “The Haworth Context”.
Wuthering Heights “Having levelled my palace, don’t erect a hovel and complacently admire your own charity in giving me that for a home. If I imagined you really wished me to marry Isabella, I’d cut my truth!” --Heathcliff to Cathy. Vol. 1, Ch.11.
Narrative Duration “The treatment of duration is an important way of foregrounding certain events and reducing the status of others.” --Teresa Bridgeman, “Time and Space”.
Wuthering Heights • “I’m trying to settle how I shall pay Hindley back. I don’t care how long I wait, if I can only do it, at last. I hope he will not die before I do!” Vol.1, Ch.7. • “if you fancy I’ll suffer unrevenged, I’ll convince you of the contrary” Vol.1, Ch.11. • “I want the triumph of seeing my descendent fairly lord of their estates; my child hiring their children, to till their fathers’ lands for wages—” Vol.2, Ch.6. • “I get levers and mattocks to demolish the two houses, and train myself to be capable of working like Hercules, and when everything is ready, and in my power, I find the will to lift a slate off either roof has vanished!” Vol.2, Ch.19.
Wuthering Heights “it was the name of a son who died in childhood, and it served him ever since both for Christian and surname. Miss Cathy and he were now thick; but Hindley hated him” --Vol.1, Ch.4.
Charlotte Brontë on Wuthering Heights “'Wuthering Heights' was hewn in a wild workshop, with simple tools, out of homely materials. The statuary found a granite block on a solitary moor; gazing thereon, he saw how from the crag might be elicited a head, savage, swart, sinister; a form moulded with at least one element of grandeur—power. --From the “Preface” to the 1850 edition.
"Between Worlds" “ This betweeness persists, I think: Heathcliff, for instance, fluctuates between poverty and riches; and also between virility and impotence. To Catherine he is between brother and lover; he slept with her as a child, and again in death, but not between latency and extinction.” --Frank Kermode, The Classic.