Transcription
[Music] Hello everybody. So now we'll talk about Wuthering Heights. Wuthering Heights, as you already know, was published under the pseudonym Ellis Bell. It is a double-decker novel in two volumes with 34 chapters. As you know, Wuthering Heights is set in the Yorkshire moors. Have you seen Yorkshire in videos? Yorkshire has rolling hills. You know, when you look at the landscape, you look—it looks like very desolate and uninhabited, because houses beyond the rolling hills you won't be able to see, and there are very few trees. Many parts have marshlands; it's dangerous. And this weird landscape that looks uninhabited and desolate affects the minds of the characters. It creates a certain mindscape. Characters are lonely, with deep passions, fears, violent emotions. So this is a novel that shows the wilderness of the mind, not only the landscape. It is a character. It is a novel that shows characters dominated by hysteric emotions, extreme relationships. This is a novel that rejects conventions. What are the conventions of 18th-century realism? In 18th and 19th-century realism, accepted conventions of character, plot, narration, etc., are stretched or subverted in this novel, Wuthering Heights.
Wuthering Heights has a double narrative with two narrators. As you know, Lockwood is the main narrator. Lockwood is a tenant at Thrushcross Grange. He has rented the place and he's living there, and very soon in the novel, Nelly Dean becomes the narrator. Nelly Dean is the housekeeper of Thrushcross Grange. So there are two narrators, and in the story of Nelly Dean, we hear yet again another narration—the story of Heathcliff and Catherine. So this is like a story within a story within a story. It is said to be of Russian doll structure. Have you seen Russian dolls? A big doll, you open it; inside which another doll is there. Again you open it, another doll. Cut it—story within story within story. This is also like Chinese box structure—box within box within box.
The narrative begins in the winter of 1801 and goes on to tell the story of two generations of two families: the Earnshaws living at Wuthering Heights and the Lintons living at Thrushcross Grange—three generations. And as you know, Lockwood, who is uh, an outsider, he is not one of the family, he is the main narrator. He has rented Thrushcross Grange, and in the opening of the novel, he is visiting his landlord, Heathcliff. And Heathcliff is a very gruff man; he is not very friendly. Lockwood tries to make friends with him, but he's very gruff, and Lockwood looks at the house, the family. He makes a lot of mistakes. He sees one young woman, Catherine, there; he thinks she is the wife of Heathcliff, but she—it turns out that she is the daughter-in-law of Heathcliff. He sees some dead rabbits there on a chair, and he thinks there are some sleeping cats. So appearance is not what it's reality—that is the meaning. And Heathcliff does not let Lockwood spend the night there. There—there is a storm brewing up. Lockwood cannot go home because it's dangerous to go in the moors, and secretly Lockwood is taken upstairs by Zillah, the servant, put in a bedroom upstairs which used to be the bedroom of Catherine. Heathcliff does not want anybody to enter that room, but Lockwood spends the night there. The bedroom is also like a room within the room. There is a wooden structure there which is bed-cum-bookshelf, and the whole thing is like a room within the larger room. And in the bookshelf, uh, Heathcliff—sorry, Lockwood—finds some books. One book is a book of sermons by one, Branderham—James Branderham—and he looks at this book and he sees that in this book, in the margins, Catherine has written her name in different, different spellings—Kathy and Heathcliff, Catherine, Heathcliff—in different ways she has written. There are some names etched on the wood also, her story she has written on the margins of this book. So it's like a book within the book. Structurally, this is amazing. The opening—and Lockwood looks at all this; the storm is raging outside—and Lockwood sleeps, and he gets two dreams. In one dream, he is dreaming of the sermon being delivered by Branderham, and he's feeling a little guilty because he got—he got a feeling, an amorous feeling towards Catherine earlier, the girl he found there, and he's feeling a little guilty about it. And then he falls asleep again, wakes and falls asleep, and then he gets a dream in which a branch is hitting against the window pane, and a hand comes and says, "Let me in, let me—" It is a hand of little Cathy, about whom he was reading in the margins of the book, and he—Lockwood—feels like he—the—can caught the hand, caught hold of him, and he is pushing the hand up, forward and backward, and in the broken glass, in the shards of the glass, the hand got rubbed and it started bleeding, and he screamed and woke up. Woke up. Heathcliff came running, and he's shocked that Lockwood would enter this bedroom, and he's even more shocked and surprised to know that Lockwood saw the ghost of Cathy. Lockwood is taken down, sent down downstairs, and Heathcliff calls out into the storm, "Oh, Cathy, come to me, once, come to me in any form. I want to see you again," but she doesn't come to him. And then Lockwood is so amazed by all this—"Oh my god, what is the story?" "Nelly," back home, he asked Nelly, and that is how Nelly, the housekeeper, starts telling the story.
Mr. Earnshaw of Wuthering Heights one day brought home a dark-skinned boy, Heathcliff. His daughter, Catherine, and son, Hindley, did not like Heathcliff. Nelly was a little girl, servant girl there at that time. Eventually, Hindley starts ill-treating Catherine—sorry, ill-treating Heathcliff. Hindley and Heathcliff hate each other. Hindley does not like it that his father loves Heathcliff so much. But Cathy eventually falls in love with Heathcliff. She's like a tomboy; they are running around the moors all the time, and Heathcliff is like her alter ego. One day, Cathy and Heathcliff go visiting their neighbor who lives four miles away, the Lintons at Thrushcross Grange, and Cathy sees—Cathy and Heathcliff see the well-brought-up children of the Lintons, Edgar and Isabella, and she gets bitten by a dog, Cathy, so she has to live there for a few days. Heathcliff does not like them. Heathcliff likes the freedom of the moors, the freedom of Wuthering Heights. You know, in Wuthering Heights, children are brought up without a mother, more freely, and Cathy gets attracted to the discipline and the ladylike life she would have with the Lintons. She gets close to Edgar, not really in love; she is more attracted to that image of class that she would be entitled to in Thrushcross Grange. Her real love is for Heathcliff, but she wants to marry Edgar. Heathcliff is hurt; Heathcliff is sad. And meanwhile, Hindley has got married. Mr. Earnshaw has died, and Hindley got a son called Hareton. Heathcliff is sad that Cathy is friends with Edgar, and Edgar proposed to her. Cathy even accepted it. Heathcliff goes away from the family for three years; he's away. We don't know what happened, and he comes back wealthy. At that time, Catherine is married. Before that, Catherine, in a very famous scene, had told Nelly, "Nelly, don't even compare my love for Heathcliff with my love for Linton. My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods, the leaves of the trees and the woods; it will fall in winter, but my love for Heathcliff is like the rocks beneath; it is unchanging. Nelly, I am Heathcliff. Heathcliff is like a part of me; he's like an alter ego. I'm just marrying Edgar for—because I want a better life, but I'm always with Heathcliff." All that she says, Heathcliff doesn't hear her, and Heathcliff hates it that she has married Edgar. He comes back, and Hindley has become a drunkard. Catherine's brother has become a drunkard, and he wants revenge. It is also a class revenge. Heathcliff is lower class, and he is struggling against the upper class of uh, Earnshaws. He destroys Hindley, gambles with him, you know, lends some money, gets Hindley's property. And meanwhile, Catherine is pregnant with that girl's child, and again Heathcliff meets Catherine at this time. Edgar's sister, Isabella, falls in love with Heathcliff, and Heathcliff encourages it. Heathcliff doesn't love her; he only wants revenge, but he wants to marry Isabella, destroy the family, get hold of their property. Edgar doesn't want this; Catherine also doesn't want this. Catherine knows that Heathcliff cannot love Isabella. Edgar and Heathcliff fight. Catherine becomes so furious with the men for fighting and making her miserable, and she throws a tantrum, and then she gets brain fever. She's dying, and she's pregnant, and Heathcliff meets her one last time. She has become so emaciated; she's like a ghost of Cathy, and she cannot get up from her bed; she's very ill. And Heathcliff says, "Cathy, why have you done this to yourself? How can you—how can I forgive you for doing this to yourself?" And Cathy says, "No, you did this to me. Why did you go away from me? Why did you fight with that girl?" And Heathcliff says, "What do you mean I did this to you? You married Edgar; you went away from me when you knew that you couldn't. I cannot forgive you for murdering my Cathy. You are—your murderers." They fight like this—both of them love each other so much, but they fight like animals. Look at that wild, hysterical kind of love. And Cathy gives birth to little Catherine in a coma state, comatose state, and she dies. Heathcliff—the death of the night—gets into her coffin, lies there with her dead body, and tells Nelly about it, and tells Nelly, "I want to be buried with her when I die," but he is strong; he will not die soon. He lives; he has to live the rest of his life pining for her, hoping that he will—she will come back to him in some form, not leave him alone to suffer like this. That is when Lockwood met Heathcliff. At this time, Heathcliff's wife, Isabella, has given birth to a child, Linton. Linton is a sickly child, and when Isabella dies, Linton comes to stay with Heathcliff. Heathcliff does not love Linton very much; he does not love Hareton, Hindley's son, who is also living there. Heathcliff wants his revenge; he uses Linton to get young Catherine, who is now a teenager, to fall in love with Linton. He gets Catherine and Linton to fall in love, and he forces young Catherine to marry him—to marry Linton. And then Linton dies very soon. Edgar also dies. Catherine is a young widow; she is now living in Wuthering Heights, and Heathcliff is the owner of both Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange. His revenge is complete, but what has he really gained from it? Nothing. He is still suffering at this point. Lockwood has to go back to London. Nelly Dean stops her story, and when—after six months—Lockwood comes back, he hears that Heathcliff went out of his mind and died. So he was destroyed by his revenge in a way, but he couldn't live without it. His revenge is what he is. It is a struggle of class; it is a struggle of unfulfilled passion which stands up against society. This is a very deep novel with very deep meanings. The novel crosses the boundaries of sexual and social mores. The novel is very subversive; it has moral ambiguity, and it is deeply psychological. It delves into the minds of characters very deeply, through dreams, supernatural elements, and the gothic. Wuthering Heights is also about the theme of nature versus culture. Thrushcross Grange stands for culture, while Wuthering Heights stands for nature. Heathcliff and Catherine stand for nature. And this novel is a world classic for no other reasons than this—an amazingly powerful and deep novel.
Now I will briefly introduce the other novels by Charlotte Brontë and Anne Brontë. Let me finish off—and Brontë first. Anne Brontë first wrote Agnes Grey, then she wrote The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Charlotte Brontë has written many more novels. I already told you her first novel is The Professor. It was rejected by many publishers and published posthumously. It is the first-person narrative of an orphan. The protagonist is an orphan who becomes—his name is William Crimsworth; he becomes a professor at a girls' school in Belgium. He represents Constantin Héger, the real man uh, with whom Charlotte had fallen in love. Then came Shirley. Shirley is the second published novel, 1849. The Shirley in the novel Shirley is a Condition of England novel or a social novel set against the Luddite uprisings in the textile industry. Then there is Villette. Villette is set in the English countryside, in London, in the fictional town called Villette. The narrator is Lucy Snowe—that is very important. Villette is modeled on Brussels, by the way. Now let me once again remind you of the importance of the Brontë sisters. The Brontës brought Romanticism into the English novel with their vital, powerful heroines and deep psychological depictions of nature. They were the first writers in the English novel to paint the sufferings of the individual psyches so deeply and to show emotion, imagination, and intellect in such powerful ways. The Brontës also used a very lyrical, poetical language and shows a new concern with the human soul, which was later taken up by writers like George Eliot. I'm reading all this from our encyclopedia, the second edition of the second volume, which is I think quite amazing. It covers points of all the classics and major writers so thoroughly. These books will be tremendously useful for preparing for NET, UPSE English Mains, SET exams and so many other exams in English literature. If you have your copy, it'll be useful. I'm just telling you; we have offers around the year. You can just get in touch with us to know the details. So read the encyclopedia, do your own research, and very importantly, read these books on your own, because getting first-hand information is very important. I hope you enjoyed this video, guys. Please remember to like the video before you go. Thank you very much. See you with amazing videos again and again for the rest of British literature soon, every day. So join me every day. Bye-bye. Happy reading.