Wuthering HeightsHuman / Animal / Nature / Culture

The Bronte Sisters:

Anne, Emily, Charlotte

(c. 1834, painted by

Branwell)

Emily Bronte, 1818-1848

Wuthering Heights, pub. 1847; action: 1764 (Heathcliff Born)-1803 (Cathy II and Hareton)

“This is a strange book. It is not without evidences of considerable power: but, as a whole, it is wild, confused, disjointed, and improbable; and the people who make up the drama, which is tragic enough in its consequences, are savages ruder than those who lived before the days of Homer.” --Examiner, January 1848

A Disenchanted World?

“[The bourgeoisie] has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. […] In one word, it creates a world after its own image.”

--Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848)

The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization, and, above all, by the ‘disenchantment of the world.’

—Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905)

The boundaries of “the human”

Wuthering Heights

Nature

No books!

Violence

“Animal”

Self?

Thrushcross Grange

Culture

Learning

“Peace”

“Human”

Sympathy?

CUSTOM

LIBERTY

Time…………..

“Civilization”…….

• “In the part [of conduct] which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own mind and body, the individual is sovereign” (On Liberty 13)

• Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement… Liberty, as a principle, has no application to any state of things anterior to a time when mankind have become capable of being improved by free and equal discussion. (On Liberty 13-14)

Mill’s Myths of Modernity

Mikhail Bakhtin, The Chronotope

Chronotope = “time-space”

“We will give the name chronotope to the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature… In the literary artistic chronotope, spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole. Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history. This intersection of axes and fusion of indicators characterizes the artistic chronotope.”