(呼啸山庄)Wuthering-Heights-英文介绍及赏析

admin管理员组

文章数量:1530518

2024年7月20日发(作者：)

呼啸山庄

Wuthering Heights transcends its genre in its sophisticated

observation and artistic subtlety. The novel has been studied,

analyzed, dissected, and discussed from every imaginable critical

perspective, yet it remains unexhausted. And while the novel’s

symbolism, themes, structure, and language may all spark fertile

exploration, the bulk of its popularity may rest on its

unforgettable characters. As a shattering presentation of the

doomed love affair between the fiercely passionate Catherine and

Heathcliff, it remains one of the most haunting love stories in all

of literature.

Today, Wuthering Heights has a secure position in the canon of world literature, and Emily

Brontë is revered as one of the finest writers—male or female—of the nineteenth century. Like

Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights is based partly on the Gothic tradition of the late

eighteenth century, a style of literature that featured supernatural encounters, crumbling ruins,

moonless nights, and grotesque imagery, seeking to create effects of mystery and fear. But

Wuthering Heights transcends its genre in its sophisticated observation and artistic subtlety. The

novel has been studied, analyzed, dissected, and discussed from every imaginable critical

perspective, yet it remains unexhausted. And while the novel’s symbolism, themes, structure, and

language may all spark fertile exploration, the bulk of its popularity may rest on its unforgettable

characters. As a shattering presentation of the doomed love affair between the fiercely passionate

Catherine and Heathcliff, it remains one of the most haunting love stories in all of literature.

Analysis of Major Characters

Heathcliff

Wuthering Heights centers around the story of Heathcliff. The first paragraph of the novel

provides a vivid physical picture of him, as Lockwood describes how his “black eyes” withdraw

suspiciously under his brows at Lockwood’s approach. Nelly’s story begins with his introduction

into the Earnshaw family, his vengeful machinations drive the entire plot, and his death ends the

book. The desire to understand him and his motivations has kept countless readers engaged in the

novel.

Heathcliff, however, defies being understood, and it is difficult for readers to resist seeing what

they want or expect to see in him. The novel teases the reader with the possibility that Heathcliff is

something other than what he seems—that his cruelty is merely an expression of his frustrated love

for Catherine, or that his sinister behaviors serve to conceal the heart of a romantic hero. We expect

Heathcliff’s character to contain such a hidden virtue because he resembles a hero in a romance

novel. Traditionally, romance novel heroes appear dangerous, brooding, and cold at first, only later

to emerge as fiercely devoted and loving. One hundred years before Emily Brontë wrote Wuthering

Heights, the notion that “a reformed rake makes the best husband” was already a cliché of romantic

literature, and romance novels center around the same cliché to this day.

However, Heathcliff does not reform, and his malevolence proves so great and long-lasting that

it cannot be adequately explained even as a desire for revenge against Hindley, Catherine, Edgar, etc.

As he himself points out, his abuse of Isabella is purely sadistic, as he amuses himself by seeing how

much abuse she can take and still come cringing back for more. Critic Joyce Carol Oates argues that

Emily Brontë does the same thing to the reader that Heathcliff does to Isabella, testing to see how

many times the reader can be shocked by Heathcliff’s gratuitous violence and still, masochistically,

insist on seeing him as a romantic hero.

呼啸山庄

It is significant that Heathcliff begins his life as a homeless orphan on the streets of Liverpool.

When Brontë composed her book, in the 1840s, the English economy was severely depressed, and

the conditions of the factory workers in industrial areas like Liverpool were so appalling that the

upper and middle classes feared violent revolt. Thus, many of the more affluent members of society

beheld these workers with a mixture of sympathy and fear. In literature, the smoky, threatening,

miserable factory-towns were often represented in religious terms, and compared to hell. The poet

William Blake, writing near the turn of the nineteenth century, speaks of England’s “dark Satanic

Mills.” Heathcliff, of course, is frequently compared to a demon by the other characters in the book.

Considering this historical context, Heathcliff seems to embody the anxieties that the book’s

upper- and middle-class audience had about the working classes. The reader may easily sympathize

with him when he is powerless, as a child tyrannized by Hindley Earnshaw, but he becomes a villain

when he acquires power and returns to Wuthering Heights with money and the trappings of a

gentleman. This corresponds with the ambivalence the upper classes felt toward the lower

classes—the upper classes had charitable impulses toward lower-class citizens when they were

miserable, but feared the prospect of the lower classes trying to escape their miserable circumstances

by acquiring political, social, cultural, or economic power.

Catherine

The location of Catherine’s coffin symbolizes the conflict that tears apart her short life. She is

not buried in the chapel with the Lintons. Nor is her coffin placed among the tombs of the

Earnshaws. Instead, as Nelly describes in Chapter XVI, Catherine is buried “in a corner of the

kirkyard, where the wall is so low that heath and bilberry plants have climbed over it from the

moor.” Moreover, she is buried with Edgar on one side and Heathcliff on the other, suggesting her

conflicted loyalties. Her actions are driven in part by her social ambitions, which initially are

awakened during her first stay at the Lintons’, and which eventually compel her to marry Edgar.

However, she is also motivated by impulses that prompt her to violate social conventions—to love

Heathcliff, throw temper tantrums, and run around on the moor.

Edgar

Just as Isabella Linton serves as Catherine’s foil, Edgar Linton serves as Heathcliff’s. Edgar is

born and raised a gentleman. He is graceful, well-mannered, and instilled with civilized virtues.

These qualities cause Catherine to choose Edgar over Heathcliff and thus to initiate the contention

between the men. Nevertheless, Edgar’s gentlemanly qualities ultimately prove useless in his

ensuing rivalry with Heathcliff. Edgar is particularly humiliated by his confrontation with Heathcliff

in Chapter XI, in which he openly shows his fear of fighting Heathcliff. Catherine, having witnessed

the scene, taunts him, saying, “Heathcliff would as soon lift a finger at you as the king would march

his army against a colony of mice.” As the reader can see from the earliest descriptions of Edgar as a

spoiled child, his refinement is tied to his helplessness and impotence.

Charlotte Brontë, in her preface to the 1850 edition of Wuthering Heights, refers to Edgar as

“an example of constancy and tenderness,” and goes on to suggest that her sister Emily was using

Edgar to point out that such characteristics constitute true virtues in all human beings, and not just in

women, as society tended to believe. However, Charlotte’s reading seems influenced by her own

feminist agenda. Edgar’s inability to counter Heathcliff’s vengeance, and his naïve belief on his

deathbed in his daughter’s safety and happiness, make him a weak, if sympathetic, character

Themes, Motifs

Themes

Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work.

Moreover, Catherine and Heathcliff’s love is based on their shared perception that they are

identical. Catherine declares, famously, “I am Heathcliff,” while Heathcliff, upon Catherine’s death,

wails that he cannot live without his “soul,” meaning Catherine. Their love denies difference, and is

strangely asexual. The two do not kiss in dark corners or arrange secret trysts, as adulterers do.

Given that Catherine and Heathcliff’s love is based upon their refusal to change over time or

embrace difference in others, it is fitting that the disastrous problems of their generation are

overcome not by some climactic reversal, but simply by the inexorable passage of time, and the rise

of a new and distinct generation. Ultimately, Wuthering Heights presents a vision of life as a process

of change, and celebrates this process over and against the romantic intensity of its principal

呼啸山庄

characters.

As members of the gentry, the Earnshaws and the Lintons occupy a somewhat precarious place

within the hierarchy of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British society. At the top of

British society was the royalty, followed by the aristocracy, then by the gentry, and then by the lower

classes, who made up the vast majority of the population. Although the gentry, or upper middle class,

possessed servants and often large estates, they held a nonetheless fragile social position. The social

status of aristocrats was a formal and settled matter, because aristocrats had official titles. Members

of the gentry, however, held no titles, and their status was thus subject to change. A man might see

himself as a gentleman but find, to his embarrassment, that his neighbors did not share this view. A

discussion of whether or not a man was really a gentleman would consider such questions as how

much land he owned, how many tenants and servants he had, how he spoke, whether he kept horses

and a carriage, and whether his money came from land or “trade”—gentlemen scorned banking and

commercial activities.

Considerations of class status often crucially inform the characters’ motivations in Wuthering

Heights. Catherine’s decision to marry Edgar so that she will be “the greatest woman of the

neighborhood” is only the most obvious example. The Lintons are relatively firm in their gentry

status but nonetheless take great pains to prove this status through their behaviors. The Earnshaws,

on the other hand, rest on much shakier ground socially. They do not have a carriage, they have less

land, and their house, as Lockwood remarks with great puzzlement, resembles that of a “homely,

northern farmer” and not that of a gentleman. The shifting nature of social status is demonstrated

most strikingly in Heathcliff’s trajectory from homeless waif to young gentleman-by-adoption to

common laborer to gentleman again (although the status-conscious Lockwood remarks that

Heathcliff is only a gentleman in “dress and manners”).

本文标签： 赏析介绍