How does Emily Bronte use Gothic elements to enhance the novel ‘Wuthering Heights’? Discuss how Daphne Du Maurier’s ‘Jamaica Inn’ illuminates this.
How does Emily Bronte use Gothic elements to enhance the novel ‘Wuthering Heights’? Discuss how Daphne Du Maurier’s ‘Jamaica Inn’ illuminates this.
In the Victorian era we saw the revival of gothic literature; it fictionalised contemporary fears such as ethical degeneration, unmediated spiritual beliefs against a stern religious faith and also questioned the social structure of the time. Although written almost 100 years apart both Wuthering Heights and Jamaica Inn share many themes and components. Both novels thoroughly enhance the Gothic genre and contain many of the key elements you would expect. In Victorian Britain Gothic literature contained many features of the supernatural, both psychological and physical, such as; mystery, ghosts, death, doubles, madness, religion, entrapment and hereditary curses. Gothic is said to shadow the progress of modernity with counter-narratives displaying the underside of enlightenment and humanist values. Many Gothic novels consist of fragmented narration, and Wuthering Heights is no exception, it is seen from multiple viewpoints giving the reader a sense of uncertainty over what is true and imagined. Wuthering Heights is told as a Chinese box structure – stories within stories with several narrators, this effectively manipulates the reader repeatedly throughout the novel by giving views from different perspective. Bronte did this deliberately to rebel against the norms of Victorian Society which ‘provoked hostility from literary critics’ as ‘the novel’s fragmented structure permits little security for the reader’1. The narration throughout Wuthering Heights is constantly split between that of Lockwood and Nelly.
Bronte uses pathetic fallacy in order to create Gothic imagery, we see this technique used when there is a snowstorm that traps Lockwood at the Heights. Interestingly, the violent snowstorm occurs on the day Lockwood has his violent and graphic nightmare. Also storms occur on both the night of Mr Earnshaw’s
In the Victorian era we saw the revival of gothic literature; it fictionalised contemporary fears such as ethical degeneration, unmediated spiritual beliefs against a stern religious faith and also questioned the social structure of the time. Although written almost 100 years apart both Wuthering Heights and Jamaica Inn share many themes and components. Both novels thoroughly enhance the Gothic genre and contain many of the key elements you would expect. In Victorian Britain Gothic literature contained many features of the supernatural, both psychological and physical, such as; mystery, ghosts, death, doubles, madness, religion, entrapment and hereditary curses. Gothic is said to shadow the progress of modernity with counter-narratives displaying the underside of enlightenment and humanist values. Many Gothic novels consist of fragmented narration, and Wuthering Heights is no exception, it is seen from multiple viewpoints giving the reader a sense of uncertainty over what is true and imagined. Wuthering Heights is told as a Chinese box structure – stories within stories with several narrators, this effectively manipulates the reader repeatedly throughout the novel by giving views from different perspective. Bronte did this deliberately to rebel against the norms of Victorian Society which ‘provoked hostility from literary critics’ as ‘the novel’s fragmented structure permits little security for the reader’1. The narration throughout Wuthering Heights is constantly split between that of Lockwood and Nelly.
Bronte uses pathetic fallacy in order to create Gothic imagery, we see this technique used when there is a snowstorm that traps Lockwood at the Heights. Interestingly, the violent snowstorm occurs on the day Lockwood has his violent and graphic nightmare. Also storms occur on both the night of Mr Earnshaw’s
Bibliography: Gilbert Sandra and Gubar Susan, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, 1979, Yale Nota Bene Jackson Rosemary, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion, 1981, Methuen &Co Ltd Swindle Julia, Victorian Writing and Working Women; The Other Side of Silence, 1985, Minneapoli: University of Minnesota press