Emily Bronte ---a Great Novelist Towering over Her Own Age
一、课题的目的和意义
Emily Bronte is an outstanding female writer in Britain in the 19th century. In the history of English literature,even in the history of world literature, Emily Bronte can be recognized one of the greatest novelists.She is best known for her romantic novel Wuthering Heights which is one of the English language’s greatest novels.This novel is not only the romantic novel,but also exist realism and gothic.what’s more,we can see the author towers over her own age through the Wuthering Heights.The novel is also distinguished that exceed the other romantic novels in the 19th century.
二、文献综述
Emily Bronte is one of the most important writer in the nineteenth-century English literature. Although she leads a brief and circumscribed existence, spending most of her life in relative isolation in a parsonage on the Yorkshire moors, she has left behind a literary legacy that includes some of the most passionate and inspired writing in Victorian literature. Early critics did not like the work, citing its excess of passion and its coarseness.Also having written much poetry, Emily Bronte’s works did not receive wide acclaim until after her death at the age of thirty. Today Emily’s poems are well regarded by critics, but they receive little popular attention, and her overall reputation rests primarily on her only novel---Wuthering Heights. The novel is first published under Emily’s pseudonym Ellis Bell, the combination of its structure and elements of passion, mystery and doomed love as well as social commentary have made Wuthering Heights an enduring masterpiece. A second edition was published in 1850, two years after the author’s death. And Wuthering Heights is still in print today.
A brooding tale of passion and revenge set in the Yorkshire moors, the novel has inspired no fewer than four film versions in modern times. As with most of the Bronte sister’s popular novels, people have tried to find biographical parallels in them. Emily has been characterised to mythic proportions as deeply spiritual, free-spirited and reclusive as well as intensely creative and passionate, an icon to tortured genius. Sympathetically prefaced by her sister Charlotte, it met with greater success, and the novel has continued to grow in stature ever since.
Many researchers are making researches on the theme of Wuthering Heights. There is now an implacable conflict between passion and society, rebellion and moral orthodoxy. It can be said that Emily’s great novel is rare phenomenon, but is a tragic novel in the epoch of high realism.But Victorian reviewers of Emily Bronte’s classic Wuthering Heights find it to be far too harsh and dreary for their tastes. Some of them compare Wuthering Heights with Jane Eyre and say that “Wuthering Heights casts a gloom over the mind that is not easily dispelled while Jane Eyre manages to provide some cathartic elements that offers its reader a release.” Some criticize that the novel lacks of realistic elements and that “a few glimpses of sunshine would have increased the reality of the picture and given strength rather than weakness to the whole.” They consider that Wuthering Heights is a strange, inartistic story. It seems that early critics find this novel baffling in its meaning----they each agree separately that no moral value exists within the storyand therefore it is deemed to have no real literary value. The original critical reviews have very little in the way of praise for the unknown author or the novel. The critics acknowledge begrudgingly that the elements of Wuthering Heights could be considered strengths---such as “rugged power”, “unconscious strength” and “purposeless power”. Strange and powerful are two recurring critical interpretations of the novel. The critics do not attempt to provide in depth analysis of the work, simply because they feel that the meaning or moral of the story is either entirely absent or seriously confused. Contrarily, the relationship of nature, culture and society is the theme of the main difference from other romantic novels.
Wuthering Heights also stands out when compared with other novelist about her time. Female writers like Jane Austen often aimed at daily business such as social visits and matchmaking that happened in country villages. And other well-known writers works at that time such as Dickens.The Tale of Two Cities or David Copperfield were almost set against the great events like French Revolution and the general social phenomenon posed by those events.
At first glance, this novel may seem just like a story about love and revenge which is nothing more than a fictional work. However, after a close study, we can find Wuthering Heights is actually an expression of the struggle between the traditional
value about social status and personal inward passion. And it is these conflicts that Emily used to create the vivid characters and entangle love, which was quite unique in her times.
The novel is a riddle which means different things to different people. From the social point of view, it is a story about a poor man abused, betrayed and distorted by his social betters because he is a poor nobody. As a love story, this is one of the most moving: the passion between Heathcliff and Catherine proves the most intense, the most beautiful and at the same time the most horrible passion ever to be found possible in human beings.
The novel has a unique structure: the story is told through independent narrators unidentical with the author, whose personality is therefore completely absent from the book. The story is told mainly by Nelly, Catherine's old nurse, to Mr. Lockwood, a temporary tenant at Grange. The latter too gives an account of what he sees at Wuthering Heights. And part of the story is told through Isabella's letters to Nelly. While the central interest is maintained, the sequence of its development is constantly disordered by flashbacks. This makes the story all the more enticing and genuine.
It seems that there are several elements that make Wuthering Heights so unique from other novels. Bronte’s environment shaped her life and her work. The village of Haworth was isolated and surrounded by moors. Thus, the one world she knew and lived in became the setting for her only novel. Paralleling her own life, she creates motherless characters in Wuthering Heights. Like most authors, Emily Bronte was a product of her environment, and this directly influenced her writing. During her life she had no close friends, was interested in mysticism, and enjoyed her solitude outdoors. All of these elements grace both her poems and Wuthering Heights. In fact, many contemporary critics praise Emily Bronte first and foremost as a poet, marveling at the poetic nature of Wuthering Heights.
Set in 18th Century England when social and economic values were changing and land ownership did not always the man make, it is a world of patriarchal values juxtaposed with the natural elements. Bronte explores themes of revenge, religion, class and prejudice while plumbing the depths of the metaphysical and human psyche. Bronte’s own home in the bleak Yorkshire moors provides the setting for the at-times other-worldly passions of the Byronic Heathcliff and Catherine.
So the aim of this paper is to analyze the blackgrounds the author writing the novel and see Emily Bronte towers over her own age through the Wuthering Heights. 参考文献：
[1]Bronte, Charlotte. Charlotte Bronte’s preface to the second edition, Wuthering Heights[M]. London: J. M. Dent Sons Ltd.1907, 20-25.
[2]Bronte, Emily. Wuthering Heights[M]. Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press.2005,50-52.
[3]Guo Qunying. British Literature（1）[M]. Shanghai: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press..2001,35-38.
[4]Murray, Andy. Into the Unknown: The Fantastic Life of Nigel Kneale [M].London: Headpress. 2006,53-58.
[5]Punter, David.The Literature of Terror [M]. London: Longman.1980, 6-8.
[6]Smith, Angela. York Notes Wuthering Height [M].London: Longman York Press.1984,22-23.
[7]艾米莉?勃朗特.吴晓晓.《呼啸山庄》[M].北京：中央编译出版社.2005,40-44.
[8]雷彩霞,杨桂林.艾米莉?勃朗特的呼啸山庄(上)[M].内蒙古自治区：远方出版社.2003,324-326.
[9]李满. 论《呼啸山庄》的爱情及爱情哲学［J］, 南昌职业技术师范学院学报, 1997, 第2期, 36-37.
[10]张同乐，毕铭. 爱和恨都是生命在燃烧[J]. 外国文学研究, 1999,第1期，66-67.