Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights
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Emily BrontF (1818-48) was born in the parsonage at Thornton in Yorkshire and two years later her father became rector of Haworth, also in Yorkshire. Her single novel, Wuthering Heights, is infused with the spirit of the moors around Haworth and the singular nature of the BrontF family's lives and accomplishments have made biography-based criticism the principle approach to their novels. While there is much in the novels of Charlotte and Anne that is clearly derived from their own experience, Emily's great work is less susceptible to this approach. Very little is known about her short life and much of what is known is filtered through the protective, and defensive, Charlotte. Thompson's recent analysis of the role of gender in the initial reception of Wuthering Heights and her critique of the "Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell" that Charlotte appended to the 1850 edition of Wuthering Heights suggest that critical readings of the novel may still be bound by gender and biographical expectations that are not really justified. And Stoneman's comparison of the novel with Shelley's Epipsychidion offers an innovative approach to a freer reading in which various audience expectations are set aside and the critic/reader tries to see the novel plainly. In an open reading that considers Catherine Earnshaw as a woman who rejects conventional thinking about love in favor of a radical, alternative that occurs to her because of her unconventional upbringing with Heathcliff,
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acquainted with the locality" and to whom "the inhabitants, the customs, the natural characteristics of the outlying hills and hamlets [of Yorkshire] are things alien and unfamiliar" (Preface xxxiii). Her second course was to claim that lack of familiarity with her sisters could also lead to misunderstandings. She defended Anne's orthodoxy and described her gentle, reserved character that "kept her in the shade and covered her mind, and especially her feelings, with a sort of nun-like veil, which was rarely lifted" (xxxi). Charlotte described Emily's death painfully and touchingly in the "Notice" but reserved her principal description of her brilliant but rustic sister for the "Preface". There she described Emily as a rural innocent with "a natural tendency to seclusion" who had "rarely crossed the threshold of home" except to attend church or take a walk (conveniently omitting their shared time at school and in Belgium) (xxxiv). Emily was brilliant and somewhat headstrong and was, Charlotte argued, powerfully moved by artistic impulses. But Emily BrontF merely reproduced what she saw around her. Regarding Heathcliff and Catherine, Charlotte claimed that, "having formed these beings she did not know what she had done" (xxxv
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Approximate Word count = 4357
Approximate Pages = 17 (250 words per page)
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