(呼啸山庄)WutheringHeights英文介绍及赏析_呼啸山庄英文赏析

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Wuthering Heights transcends its genre in its sophisticated observation and artistic subtlety.The novel has been studied, analyzed, diected, and discued 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 paionate 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, moonle 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, diected, and discued 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 paionate 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 countle 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 poibility that Heathcliff is something other than what he seems—that his cruelty is merely an expreion 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 homele orphan on the streets of Liverpool.When Brontë composed her book, in the 1840s, the English economy was severely depreed, and the conditions of the factory workers in industrial areas like Liverpool were so appalling that the upper and middle claes 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-cla audience had about the working claes.The reader may easily sympathize with him when he is powerle, 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 claes felt toward the lower claes—the upper claes had charitable impulses toward lower-cla citizens when they were miserable, but feared the prospect of the lower claes 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.Neverthele, Edgar’s gentlemanly qualities ultimately prove usele 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 witneed 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 helplene and impotence.Charlotte Brontë, in her preface to the 1850 edition of Wuthering Heights, refers to Edgar as “an example of constancy and tenderne,” 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 happine, 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 ki 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 paage of time, and the rise of a new and distinct generation.Ultimately, Wuthering Heights presents a vision of life as a proce of change, and celebrates this proce over and against the romantic intensity of its principal

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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 claes, who made up the vast majority of the population.Although the gentry, or upper middle cla, poeed servants and often large estates, they held a nonethele 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 embarrament, that his neighbors did not share this view.A discuion 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 cla 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 nonethele 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 le 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 homele 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 “dre and manners”).