["Dark" Romanticism, esp.]

•     “Strange” story: non-normative, original, powerful, imaginative

•     Characters intense, passionate, violent: emotional excess

•     Super-natural: anti-rational, primitive folk legends

•     Doesn’t follow literary “rules”: experimental mix of forms & traditions

•     Gothic Setting: remote, wild nature of Yorkshire moors; sublime, sensual, primordial forces

•     Dark Romantic journey into self, explores limits of feeling, passion, subjectivity

•     Cost of journey = suffering & loss:  e.g. Heathcliff a disruptive force – no way back to community / society

•     Internal & external conflicts:

     Nature vs. Civilization

     Wild vs. Tame

     Deep & elemental vs. Superficial & impermanent;

     Natural impulses vs. Artificial restraint

•      Byronic hero/ine – [attractive, sympathetic?] villain . . .

George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824)

“He stood a stranger in this breathing world,
An erring spirit from another hurl’d . . .
What had he been?  What was he, thus unknown?
Who walked their world, his lineage all unknown?”

--from Lara (ca. 1813-1814)

Romantic Byronic hero/ine-villain

•     Rebel against social, religious custom–free, outside constraints of society (outlaw, mis-anthropist, renegade)

•     Loner, outcast - melancholy, brooding, withdrawn from society

•     Emotional honesty: seeks deeper truths

•     Self-destructive & destroys others, tortured by secret misery or guilt

•       Divided character:
warring contraries, internal & external conflicts, violent extremes

•     Refusal to compromise

•     Vengeful, vindictive, angry; brutal relationships & violent passions

Catherine & Heathcliff: dual Byronic protagonists?

•     Unrestrained rebellious spirits

•     Twin souls: union of  feminine + masculine sides?

Realistic novel becomes dominant in 19th century
> Industrial Revolution, rise of middle class, expansion of education & literacy, etc.
> Popular press journalists, female writers and novelists [often first publishing under pseudonyms], periodical & book publishers, lending libraries, etc., can make $$$ by writing and publishing for a new expanded and differentiated market of readers.

Characteristics of Literary Realism:

•     Represent everyday lives of ordinary people (though heightened) “mirror” held up to “real” life (of middle & lower classes)

•     "Domestic" Subjects focus on people living in society & their relationships: (e.g. birth, death; money, love, courtship, marriage; childhood, adolescence, parenthood; infidelity, etc.); address social problems of times & embrace art's "critical function"

•     Mixed characters - protagonists and antagonists - of both good & bad, strong & weak, sympathetic & alienating elements
(vs. Romance's idealized all-good hero/ines vs. all-bad villains)

•     Particularized settings & cultural circumstances (of time, place, speech, customs, socio-economic situation); Accumulations of realistic detail and sensory “physical” descriptions (pre-TV)

•     Conflicts:  protagonist (not “hero”) vs. antagonist (not “villain”)

•     Plots: cause-effect logic, determinism; plausible dramas of social causes and their consequences (vs. unbelievable coincidences, etc.)

Create "Illusion" of Reality
&  Hide the Art(ifice)

•     Disappearing author: distanced, “disembodied,” “objective” narrative voice

•      “Show” in dialogue, action, detail -  (vs. “tell” by omniscient, authoritative narrator closely identified to voice and values of implicit author)

•     Creation of authenticating narrative frames and/or participant-narrators the viewpoints and values of which cannot be equated to those of the implicit author:
- i.e. omniscience is limited,  mediating point of view is "unreliable" and/or "naive" - 

•     Middle and lower class Characters featured; Class lines drawn e.g. between haves (Lintons) vs. have nots (Earnshaws, peasants)

•     "Domestic" subjects focused on key stages, relationships, conflicts, socio-economic factors that characterize and affect ordinary human life (e.g. birth, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, death; family relations, love, courtship & marriage; money, class, social status, security; etc.).

•    Cultural geography featured in WH and chronology of family history are carefully worked out; 

•   Regional descriptive detail accumulates to realistically particularize the time, place, culture of the setting – e.g. WH landscape of the moors, character of Joseph - (vs. Gothic tales)

•    Plot: despite incursions of irrational excess in some WH characters and purported super-natural elements, the plot and conflicts of WH advance by plausibly logical chain of cause-effect events traceable to WH characters' natures, choices/decisions, interactions, and their consequences.

•     Narrative Frame structure of Double Narrators (1. Lockwood & 2. Nelly Dean): 
--“Authenticating” narrative frame structure helps monitoring readers "suspend disbelief" by providing a plausible scenario for the telling of the WH story--i.e. curious Lockwood entreats Dean to relate the story--while we unacknowledged WH readers are implicitly enabled to listen in.
--Main participant-narrator Nelly Dean helps make this "strange story" believable, because she has been a direct witness to many of the scenes in the story she relates; and her character is conventional, down-to earth, and ruled by common sense.   human “mediator” who helps make this "strange story" plausible;  but at the same time, this "human" participant-narrator can sometimes be "unreliable" (e.g. dislikes Cathy & may wish to color/distort representation of her own role in novel's events)