Kylie McCalmont

Ms.Wilson

AP Language and Composition

14 April, 2016

Research Outline (Synthesis Chart)

Prompt to help me write:

Many writers use a country setting to establish values within a work of literature. For example, the country may be a place of virtue and peace or one of primitivism and ignorance. Choose a novel or play in which such a setting plays a significant role. Then write an essay in which you analyze how the country setting functions in the work as a whole. Do not merely summarize the plot.

Lead Story: “Alone” by Edgar Allan Poe

Alone. Alone was the young Emily Bronte in the english moors as a young, motherless child balancing her role in society and her own desires. The 1829 poem by Edgar Allan Poe described the life of Emily Bronte in the countryside of England. The setting that she used for her first and only published novel Wuthering Heights.

Thesis:

In Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte establishes her story in the rugged english moors during the transition between the Gothic period to the Victorian period. Although England is becoming more industrial in this time period, Bronte finds comfort in the moors and uses this setting to reflect the natural desires of her rich characters, but internal darkness and deviance from Bronte’s religious principles are revealed as well. Bronte uses her self reflective style of writing, naturalistic imagery, symbolism, and practical fallacies to accurately portray all sides of a character that supports one of the biggest arguments in the book: passion defiance of both religious and social responsibility.

D.H. Lawrence believed that industrialized Western culture was dehumanizing because it emphasized intellectual attributes to the exclusion of natural or physical instincts. He thought, however, that this culture was in decline and that humanity would soon evolve into a new awareness of itself as being a part of nature. One aspect of this "blood consciousness" would be an acceptance of the need for sexual fulfillment. His three great novels, Sons and Lovers (1913), The Rainbow (1915), and Women in Love (1921), concern the consequences of trying to deny humanity's union with nature.

In The Rainbow, Lawrence captures a woman's desire for exploration and liberation of the unknown amidst a community of short-sighted men who are entrapped by the mundaneness of their own existence. She ultimately seeks to venture from the comfort of the quotidian rural life to the "magic land" beyond, eager to indulge and learn beyond the confines of her family's farm, which steams with only the "pulsing heat of creation."

Through Lawrence's lyrical, sensuous, often rhapsodic prose style, he effectively asserts that women must find fulfilment for their passionate, spiritual and sensual nature against the confines of the increasingly materialist and conformist society.

Body Paragraph 1:

Just as Wuthering Heights takes place in the english moors, Emily Bronte spent her disappointing childhood among the moors during the end of the Gothic period, writing mythological stories alongside her published sisters.
Commentary
“The Victorian Gothic moves away from the familiar themes of Gothic fiction - ruined castles, helpless heroines, and evil villains - to situate the tropes of the supernatural and the uncanny within a recognisable environment. This brings a sense of verisimilitude to the narrative, and thereby renders the Gothic features of the text all the more disturbing.” (Barrett)
Commentary
“She looked out upon a world cleft into gigantic disorder and felt within her the power to unite it in a book. That gigantic ambition is to be felt throughout the novel–a struggle, half thwarted but of superb conviction, to say something through the mouths of her characters which is not merely "I love" or "I hate," but "we, the whole human race" and "you, the eternal powers…” (Wolfe)
Commentary

Body Paragraph 2:

Throughout all of Bronte’s work, including her few published poems, she uses her past to develop her rich characterization in setting in Wuthering Heights.
Commentary
“It is on the level of visceral immediacy, as a fictional “world” is evoked through the employment of language, that a novel lives or dies, or struggles along in a sort of twilit sleep; it is on this higher level, where structure and design are grasped, and all novels make claim to be “histories” (the eager demands of how and why, as well as what, accommodated), that it acquires a more cultural or generalized value.” (Oates)
Commentary
“The novel opens in 1801, a date Q.D. Leavis believes Brontë chose in order "to fix its happenings at a time when the old rough farming culture, based on a naturally patriarchal family life, was to be challenged, tamed and routed by social and cultural changes; these changes produced Victorian class consciousness and ‘unnatural' ideal of gentility." (Kettle)
Commentary

Body Paragraph 3:

Bronte’s hearty emotion she adds to her work emphasizes the self reflective approach that she uses in her writing.
Commentary
“For writers, going beyond journal writing and diary entries, such self-reflective expressions often include letters or forms of short informal writings including poetry and short autobiographical pieces. Short stories and novels even comprise a reflection of self for many.”(Crosier)
Commentary
“The emphasis is on their desire for transcendence, to overcome the limitations of the body, of society, of time rather than their moral transgressions. They yearn to escape the limitations inherent to life and may find that the only escape is death.” (Kiely)
Commentary

Body Paragraph 4:

The imagery and symbolism of the moors, allowed Bronte to use this to reflect her characters wild desires and their humanistic dark sides.
Commentary
“Linton, for example, is described as a 'chicken' p. 207), Hareton a 'dog' (p. 310), Heathcliff a 'mad dog' (p. 162) and a 'savage beast' (p. 169). Lockwood's mistaken apprehension of a heap of dead rabbits as a chairful of cats identifies him not only as unobservant, but also as someone who is incapable of reading animal imagery.”
Commentary
“Metaphorical references to animals in Wuthering Heights are references to wild animals: 'Hareton's whiskers encroached bearishly over his cheeks', and Heathcliff denies the paternity of 'that bear'; Heathcliff is a 'fierce, pitiless, wolfish man' (p. 547).
Commentary

Body Paragraph 5:

In addition to the imagery, Bronte uses the pathetic fallacies that is created with the countryside side and the weather at Wuthering Heights to establish the mood of each character in different phases of the book.
Commentary
“They are changed from positive into negative forces; the calm becomes a source of weakness, not of harmony, in the natural scheme, the storm a source not of fruitful vigour, but of disturbance. But when they are free from fleshly bonds they flow unimpeded and unconflicting; and even in this world their discords are transitory.” (Cecil)
Commentary
“The bleak moors reflect the roughness of the novel. The weather in the moors often reflects the attitudes of the characters. The awful snowstorms create a cold and desolate atmosphere in which any wrong turn can lead to extinction. This echoes the instability of the characters. The names of the two homes in the novel, Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange expose the true qualities of the characters.” (Svicek)
Commentary

Body Paragraph 6:

Bronte’s stylistic choices ultimately argues in Wuthering Heights how passion can triumph religious and social responsibility.
Commentary
“Heathcliff’s mockery makes us aware of our own bookish expectations of him, for he is definitely not a hero, and we are warned to avoid Isabella’s error in “forming a fabulous notion of my character.” Brontë’s wit in this passage is supreme, for she allows her “hero” to define himself in opposition to a gothic-romantic stereotype she suspects her readers (well into the twentieth century) cherish; and she allows him, by way of ridiculing poor masochistic Isabella, to ridicule such readers as well.” (Oates)
Commentary
“The protagonists are driven by irresistible passion–lust, curiosity, ambition, intellectual pride, envy.” (Kiely)
Commentary

Conclusion:

http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/novel_19c/wuthering/poetry.html

https://faculty.unlv.edu/kirschen/handouts/victorian.html

The drive for social advancement frequently appears in literature. This drive may take many forms. It may be primarily financial, as in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations. It may involve marrying above one’s station, as in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. It may also be intellectual or education-based. Typically, any such attempt to improve one’s social standing must be accompanied by “proper” behavior (thus helping to provide the period with its stereotype).