ROMANTICISM & REALISM:
 Literary-Historical Contexts for WUTHERING HEIGHTS
Lecture Notes prepared by Cora Agatucci for
English 103: Survey of British Literature - 19th & 20th Centuries (Spring 2001)

Under Construction

1.  European Romanticism (from Mid-18th c.)

•     Folklore & Popular Arts of “uncultivated” “spontaneous” volk  
[Grimms’ fairy tales, folk song & ballad]

•     Shakespeare: myth of popular, untutored, rule-breaking, original “genius”

•     Medievalism & Gothic Romance: Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1765)

•     Literature of “Sensibility”: Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther (1774)

2. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778)
”God makes all things good; man meddles with them and they become evil” (1762)

•     A “Man of Feeling” attuned to heart, emotion

•     Confessions: Know [define, invent] thyself (childhood innocence, adolescent rebellion)

•     Reveries of a Solitary Walker (1782): tortured alienation in sublime Nature  

3.  Age of Revolutions

•     American Revolution (1776) stimulated by Enlightenment ideas

•     Industrial Revolution (1770-1840): Invention, Urbanization, Capital(ism) & Labor

•     Rise of Bourgeoisie or “Middle” Class

•     French Revolution Rising Discontent of “Third Estate” against monarchy, church

•     1787-88: bad harvests, bread riots

•     July 14, 1789: Storming the Bastille

 

4.  French Revolution (1789 - 1795)

Phase 1 -  Idealistic Hope & Possibility:

•     “Liberte, egalite, fraternite!” 

•     Declaration of Rights of Man: individual rights, freedoms

•     Revolutionary Reform in New Republic

“Radical” Phase 2 - & Disillusionment

•      1792-1795: Reign of Terror (Robespierre)

•     Violent excess:1000s guillotined, Regicide

•      Economic chaos

•      Nationalism & War

 

5.  Napoleonic Era (1804 - 1815)

•     Reactions against Reign of Terror, Regicide, France’s War of expansion

•     Napoleon rises to power in Army: (universal conscription, upward social mobility)

1804: Napoleon crowns himself Emperor:

Dangerous unbounded ambition: betrays Revolutionary &  Republican ideals

1815: Napoleon defeated at Waterloo

6.  The “Romantic” Revolution

•     French Revolution & Napoleon both inspire & haunt:

•     New beginnings, limitless human possibilities to make right, regenerate the world

•     Desire to democratize, revolutionize literature

•     Dangers of limitless aspiration, insatiable ambition, but also…

•     “Magnificent Failures”: glory of Imperfect (over) reaching human visionaries risk all on “road of excess”

7.  The Romantic Revolution, cont.

•     Enlightenment. Rationalism, Empiricism is limited, superficial 

•     Reject artifice, elitism of Neo-classical “decorum” & “imitation”

•     Critical of Middle Class materialism & exploitation of poor

•     New sources of inspiration: common folk’s life-language, original genius, innocent child, “noble savage, ”exotic past/places, irrational,,supernatural sublime nature

8.  Romantic Literature

•     Innovation & experimentation in subject, form, style

•     Mix genres, break “rules; “Organicism”

•     Poetry =“spontaneous overflow of powerful emotions”; intuitive, inspired original genius

•     Ballads, Children’s & folk songs, common language, simplicity, “natural” genius

•     Lyric Revival: personal expression of state of mind, emotion, thought process of poet-speaker “I”

9.  Literary Romanticism

•     Poet-Seers turn inward

•     Individual authority, subjective experience, emotion & intuition, visionary imagination

•     Solitary quests & dangerous self- exploration – reward: higher wisdom & “invisible” truths

•     Satan, Prometheus, Cain: outlaws, rebels, outcasts, non-conformists, exiles

•     Journeys into hell & human nature’s dark side, confront “warring contraries”

10. “Dark” Romanticism

•     The “Romance”: colorful, adventurous, heroic, fantastic: idealized / sensationalized views of life

•     “Strange” stories of the  non-normative, original, imaginative, extra-ordinary

•     Settings: exotic, remote times & places

•     Worlds of fantasy, myth, dream, magic

•     Explorations of dark side of self & unconscious, the hidden, subterranean

11.  Charlotte Bronte on sister Emily’s Wuthering Heights:
”…She did not know what she had done;” creative artists “work passively under dictates [they] neither delivered nor could question.”

12.  Romantic Elements [in Wuthering Heights]

•     “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

13. Romantic Elements, cont.

•     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

14. Romantic elements, cont.

•     Internal & external conflicts:

     Nature vs. Civilization

     Wild vs. Tame

     Deep & elemental vs. Superficial & impermanent;

     Natural impulses vs. Artificial restraint

•      Byronic hero/ine – villain . . .

15. 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)

16.  Romantic Byronic hero/ine - villain

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

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

•     Emotional honesty: seeks deeper truths

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

17.  Byronic hero/ine, cont.

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

•     Refusal to compromise

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

Catherine & Heathcliff: dual protagonists?

•     Unrestrained rebellious spirits

•     Twin souls: union of  feminine + masculine sides?

18.  Literary Realism

•     Realistic novel becomes dominant in 19th c.: Industrial Revolution, rise of middle class, literacy, education

•     Can make $ writing: e.g. female novelists, popular press

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

To be continued . . .
(Eng 103 Lecture:  Week #2, April 10, 2001)

19. Literary Realism, cont.

•     Subjects: people living in society & their relationships: birth, death; money, love, courtship, marriage; childhood, adolescence, parenthood; infidelity; social problems
of times

•     Mixed characters, not idealized: both good & bad, strong & weak elements

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

20. Illusion of reality: Hide the Art(ifice)

•     Plots: deterministic logic, plausible dramas of social causes & their consequences

•     Particular settings, circumstances (of time, place, speech, customs, socio-economic situation)

•     Sensory “physical” descriptions (pre-TV)

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

•      “Show” (vs. “tell”) in dialogue, action, detail

21.  Realistic elements

•     Class lines: haves (Lintons) vs. have nots (Earnshaws, peasants)

•     Nelly Dean created as participant-narrator: conventional, common sense, human “mediator” (dislikes Cathy)

•     Realistic detail accumulates

•     Regionalism: rooted in time & place (vs. Gothic tales) – e.g.Joseph

•     Geography & chronology carefully worked out  

22.  Realistic elements, cont.

•         “Authenticating” structures to make this “strange story”
plausible &  believable

•         Narrative frame:
double narrators

•         Pretense reader is not there - “suspend disbelief”

English 103 Course Texts used in Spring 2001:

Bronte, Emily.  Wuthering Heights.  [1847.]  Norton Critical ed.  3rd ed.  Ed. William M. Sale, Jr., and Richard J. Dunn.  New York:  W. W. Norton, 1990.

Damrosch, David, et al., ed.  The Longman Anthology of British Literature: Vol. B. Compact ed. New York: Longman - Addison Wesley Longman, 2000.

Recommended Background Reading:

Longman = Damrosch, David, et al., ed.  The Longman Anthology of British Literature: Vol. B. Compact ed. New York: Longman - Addison Wesley Longman, 2000.

WH = Bronte, Emily.  Wuthering Heights.  [1847.]  Norton Critical ed.  3rd ed.  Ed. William M. Sale, Jr., and Richard J. Dunn.  New York:  W. W. Norton, 1990.

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