How do any one or two works present the relation of individualism and guidance?

GCSE English

009911091015

P2/T2 (PRINCIPAL COURSE)

ENGLISH – MODULE 220

VICTORIAN LITERATURE

Dr. D.Wynne

I’ll walk where my own nature would be leading:

It vexes me to choose another guide: (Emily Bronte, ‘Often

Rebuked’)

How do any ONE OR TWO works present the relation of individualism and guidance?

Both Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights and Charlotte Bronte’s Villette explore individuals who attempt to “walk where [their] own nature would be leading”. To guide these highly spirited and independent characters is at once difficult and exhilarating. What sort of guides are they offered? What sort of guides do they avoid? Starting from the female protagonists, such as Catherine Earnshaw and Lucy Snowe, who find themselves trapped in the realm of womanhood and their society’s expectations of it, (especially within the domestic/family sphere); to the likes of Heathcliff, the obvious outsider, who at once seems beyond what society can offer him; these characters bring to the fore the difficult relation between guidance and what it means to be an individual. Like George Eliot’s critical essay of Sophocles’ Greek play: ‘Antigone and It’s Morals’, (Eliot 1992) the protagonists struggle and search for their own guidance, which provokes intense consequences – consequences that eventually, like Antigone (her life) end in paying (in part) with their individuality.

In fact, as women, individualism and guidance were key factors in the lives of the two authors. As the title of Elaine Showalter’s work suggests, they had to create ‘A Literature of their Own’, which refused and even struggled with the idea of guidance in a female’s life, adding that ‘in response to their cultural exclusion. [they] developed a relatively autonomous, clandestine tradition’ for themselves.(Showater 1999, 100). For Ginevra Fanshaw leading the life guided by vanity and shallow sensibilities is perfect, but Lucy adopts this clandestine tradition, so much so that the characters and the readers alike have to participate in guesswork. ‘Who are you, Lucy Snowe?’, asks Ginevera Fanshaw. She is, in some ways a blank sheet on which the assumptions of the surrounding characters and even the reader mould their ideas. For Graham Bretton she is ‘a being inoffensive as a shadow’. It is because she allows herself to be a shadow (she does not even recognise her own reflection!) that her individuality (at least on the surface) is guided by everyone else’s ideas. The reader, at least, realises that Lucy does not trust them, and that she has chosen her own path, where she does not allow anyone to get close to her inner world.

The inner individuality of Heathcliff is also complicated. The so-called ‘gypsy brat’, is at once an outsider to the novel. He is an enigma, for whom not only the readers are left to speculate about, but also the characters surrounding him; thus like Lucy, his individuality is at once guided by what other people project onto him. As Pauline Nestor has suggested, it is Heathcliff’s ‘lack of personal history, his sullen uncommunicativeness, his almost magical capacity to remake himself during his absence from Wuthering Heights which makes him a suitable focus for others projections’,(Tanner, 1997, xv). From the onset, Mr Earnshaw believes him to be the ‘perfect son’, a projection that leads Hindley to resent a boy that has said little for his own self. Lockwood, foolishly projects onto the unspeaking Heathcliff his own personality, ‘I know, by instinct, his reserve springs from an aversion to showy displays of feeling’, and at first such an explanation may be plausible, seeing as we are know little about this individual. Cathy, in her child-like way, becomes Heathcliff, taking for granted that he would ‘comprehend’ her decision to marry Edgar. This leads to the almost suffocation of Heathcliff, who can only define himself through Cathy rather than a person in his own right. He is not given a choice in his own person, even becoming for Nelly a devil like character. It is hardly surprising that after being guided by these assumptions that he becomes the hard, almost brutal individual that he does. Not only, however are outsiders guilty for projecting their thoughts onto the protagonists, but the characters themselves are guilty of doing it to each other. Cathy’s emphatic ‘I am Heathcliff’, resounds through the whole novel. He guides her to what she understands herself to be. Even after death, Heathcliff states, “what is not connected with her to me?…in every cloud, in every tree – filling the air at night and caught by glimpses in every object by day, I am surrounded by her image[!]”, (Hillis-Miller 1982, 64). Heathcliff’s own identity is guided by his remembrance, not recollection (which signifies an effort to remember) (Gezari 1999, 965-984) but a memory that appears unaided to his mind’s eye. Individuality in the case of Cathy and Heathcliff is ultimately knotted together.

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Names are also symbolic of this knot, and thus become relative to the relation between guidance and independence. The most striking example is Lockwood’s discovery, in Wuthering Heights, of the inscribed names: Catherine Linton, Catherine Earnshaw and Catherine Heathcliff. Here are three very different individuals. By stating each of them, the author avoids acting as a guide, leaving the narrator and the reader confused and confounded. The true Catherine is submerged within these three identities, (even literally with her name placed between her two lovers), and by writing them down she has shown that she has no clear idea where her life is taking her, or by whom she will be guided by – be it herself, Linton or Heathcliff. In addition, as J.Hillis Miller has stated, Linton Heathcliff’s name is an oxymoron. Thus, because his identity combines two (incompatible) families, ‘how can a name be ‘proper’ to a character and indicate his individuality if it is also held by others?’, (Hillis-Miller, 1982). Wuthering Heights presents a claustrophobic world, in which exist characters that are not unique but form part of the same system (Hillis-Miller, 1982). Not only is “the air swarmed with Catherine’s”, but different versions of the same people; who are not individuals but guide one another through the same landscapes, the same rooms and the same relationships. Yet they are not the same people. The younger Cathy is stronger, and is able to pass through the (teenage) romantic delusion, that her mother could not, by recognising and deciding to distance herself from Edgar Linton. Hareton, the embodiment of the younger Heathcliff, is able to read, so that he can interpret and understand his surrounding clearly, (rather than missing any part of ‘the conversation’). What remains to be answered, however is whether these individuals can avoid being haunted and ultimately guided by the “unquiet slumbers” of their predecessors, that Lockwood found so hard to imagine.

“Unquiet slumbers” is an apt description for the passions of the protagonists in each of the two novels. Lucy Snowe, in fact experiences an opium induced walk through the night, instead of sleeping. Yet because Charlotte Bronte centred ‘on the individual attempting to survive in [a hostile] world’, (Green, 1974) Lucy Snowe distances herself from such feminine sensibilities. She will not allow herself to be guided by her imagination, and ultimately her heart. She cannot afford to, hence “instead of presenting characters as the unimpeded flowering of individual, simple, passionate essences, Charlotte sees life as a long struggle for existence between the individual and her or his [like Heathcliff] environment”, (Green, 1974). Victorian realism is a significant guiding force in Villette, though it is one that is enforced at the expense of part of the self. Lucy denies that she has an imagination, ‘I, Lucy Snowe, plead guiltless of that cause, an overheated and discursive imagination’. It is almost as if she puts herself up for trial, in which she has to prove that she feels nothing. Even her name provokes the feeling that she is cold and unapproachable – and unapproachable she is. She lies to the reader and purposely retains information about herself and other characters that might lead to the reader to ask questions about her inner self. She only chooses to tell us about the sudden arrival of Graham Bretton when it suited her ‘habit of thought’ (Kermode, 1993). Charlotte allows Lucy to break the unwritten contract of first –person narration, and even at the end of the novel we are questioning whether we are any closer to the real Lucy. She does not allow herself to be guided by Romantic and Gothic traditions (Leavis, 1983), which lead to the repression, even literally, of her passionate feelings. After writing two letters to Graham, the one under the dry and stinting check of Reason’ and the other ‘according to the full, liberal impulse of Feeling’ she buries them. She can only allow herself to be guided by Reason, it is too much for her acknowledge herself and her feelings, and so, although the heroine of the novel, becomes almost invisible to the reader and those around her. In many ways her repressed individuality manifests itself onto other characters. She allows herself to be guided by others lives, so that she can avoid dealing with her own feelings. Polly, at the start of the novel, even appears to be the novel’s heroine. Lucy questioning over, ‘how will she get through this world, or battle with this life? How will she bear the shocks and repulses, the humiliations and desolations…?’. Yet is this question really about Polly, or herself?

Religion as the ideal guiding influence is also, in many ways, a shattered passion. Together with the repeated demonic imagery of Heathcliff, Nelly tells him ‘that from the time you were thirteen years old, you have lived a selfish, unchristian life, and probably hardly ever had a Bible in your hands’. Yet maybe the Book does not fit so easily within Heathcliff’s? The conventional and somewhat straightforward Christian good and evil are blurred within Wuthering Heights. The individual is caught between ‘The Helmet of Salvation’ and ‘The Broad Way to Destruction’, used by Joseph in his forceful preaching, so as to guide the two unruly youngsters. Heathcliff, as the outsider, shatters the sound assurance of God and the Christian hierarchy. To this individual this structured guidance signifies repression and destruction. He is treated unfairly within it, and despite being compared to Satan the reader retains a great deal of sympathy for him. As Peter Hyland, has suggested, Heathcliff resembles more the Satan of Milton’s Paradise Lost, in which the Devil becomes attractive because he is suffering and struggling to ‘fit in’, hence the ‘hero/villain’ confusion, as Peter Hyland suggested, that is attached to the character of Heathcliff. As in George Eliot’s essay ‘The Antigone and It’s Morals’, both sides are ‘contending for what [he/she] believes is right’ (Eliot 1992, 245), though it is clear that Emily Bronte blurs Victorian morals with a sympathetic ‘devil-like’ individual, and forces the reader to question what sort of society they are allowing themselves to be guided by.

Certainly the question of what justice is becomes very difficult, almost suggesting that it is only relative in relation to the individual. Charlotte Bronte’s heroine, Lucy, is, in fact asked to write an essay on Human Justice, (chapter 35). After realising that the two men asking her to write the essay were the two that scared her in the alley on her first arrival she becomes inspired by the title. ‘Pious mentors…Pure guides of truth’, she proclaims, ‘if “Human Justice” were what she ought to be, you two would scarce hold your present post, or enjoy your present credit [!]’. Like Heathcliff, here is an individual that has been ill treated by the so-called just guidance of society, not to mention religion. She goes on to write a spirited and highly individual essay that shows Justice, the guide, as sitting in a ‘warm seat’ of ignorance, not noticing individuals, ‘a swarm of children sick and quarrelsome…[that]…yelled in her ears appeals for notice, sympathy, cure, [and] redress’ (p.495), but caught up in her own high-minded block ideal of what guidance is, far from achieving the truth.

Fending for themselves in a largely hostile, alien (indicated in the foreign tongue of Villette) and unwelcoming world the characters of the two novels, in particular Lucy and Heathcliff, the two outsiders, are the exceptions to the conventional guiding forces of birth names, religion, the heart, and human justice. Lucy almost shows that she feels safer alone. She has an immense amount of courage, indispensable to her in a foreign country without any close relations, and then to find her only true love presumably swept out to sea. The metaphor of her past life - the shipwreck, shows in some cases that her life, without any family is without any real compass or direction, but she takes hold of her destiny (or repressed individuality) with a firm hand, like the nun, she realises ‘approach I must – courage one step’. Heathcliff, alternatively, finds his courage or individuality in his own hurt. The bitter man that he evolves to be cannot find another guide because the one that he felt himself to be – Cathy, in his eyes has forsaken him. Both learn to take care of themselves, yet in some ways, superficially. Lucy uses her clandestine tradition as a safe haven, retreating the minute she is hurt into her own bosom, concentrating on what the reader assumes rather than on her own feelings, and Heathcliff eventual allows himself to be guided to the ultimate void, or in his case salvation- united with his Other - Cathy (both part of his individuality and his guide) in death.

Word Count: 2, 175

(without referencing)

Bibliography

Bronte, E. [1847] 1995. Wuthering Heights, London: Penguin Books

Bronte, C. [1853] 1985. Villette, ed. by M. Lilly with an Introduction by Tony Tanner, London: Penguin Classics

Eliot, G. 1992. ‘The Antigone and It’s Morals’ in Selected Critical Writings World’s Classics ed. by R. Ashton, 243-246

Gezari, J. 1999. ‘Fathoming ‘Remembrance’: Emily Bronte in Context’ in ELH, 66, 965-984

Green, W. 1974. Writers and Their Work: The Bronte’s – The Creative Work, Essex: Longman Group Ltd

Hillis-Miller, J. 1982. Fiction and Repetition, Oxford: Basil Blackwell

Kermode, F. 1993. ‘Wuthering Heights’ as Classis’ in New Casebooks: Wuthering Heights, ed. by P. Stoneman: Macmillan, 39-52

Kettle, A. [1959] 1969. An Introduction to the English Novel, London: Hutchinson and Coltd University Library

Leavis, Q. D. 1983. ‘Villette’ in Collected Essays: The Englishness of the English Novel, ed. by G. Singh, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Pykett, L. 1993. ‘Gender and Genre in Wuthering Heights’ in Wuthering Heights, ed. by P. Stoneman: Macmillan

Sellars, J. 1997. The British Library of Writer’s Lives: Charlotte Bronte: The British Library

Showalter, E. [1977] 1991. A Literature of Their Own: from Charlotte Bronte to Doris Lessing, London: Virago Press

Skilton, D. 1977. The English Novel: Defoe to the Victorians – Contemporary Literature, London: David and Charles

Wheeler, M. 1985. English Fiction of the Victorian Period 1830-1890, London and New York: Longman

Men also seem to take the role upon themselves as guides. Graham Bretton, as the doctor, who the sycophantic Madame Beck wants to impress. Why? because she is equally fallible to male views. Monsieur Paul wants to take it upon himself to be the mentor of Lucy – ‘we are alike - there is an affinity. Do you see it Lucy when you look in the glass?’