【Abstract】 Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights is a classical masterpiece, known as "the most peculiar novel" in the English literature. The paper focuses on its structure and main idea, so as to reveal its thrilling artistic glamour and its artistic style.
【Key words】Wuthering Heights structure main idea
Wuthering Heights, with its structure, characters, narration, main idea, symbolism, etc. is full of charm. The charm of this novel will be discussed in the two aspects as follows:
As regards a novel, the artistic structure first refers to the ways of narration. In Wuthering Heights, what the critics in the past couldn’t understand was the ways of narration. They thought Emily Bronte failed too. William Someriset Maugham who held Wuthering Heights in esteem also thought “Wuthering Heights structure is overstuffed”.4thus we may see that Maugham is not the intimate of Emily.
We know, the chronological narration is used frequently in many novels. No matter who the author is, no matter how distinct his design is, we had better admit, just like Algemon Charles Swinburne said, using the chronological narration to tell a story, the story sounds like a long talk.5 You’ll think if we used another narration, perhaps, this story would be full of more passion or touch our soul.
If we say the ways of narration was very distinguished, Emily should be satisfied, while she was not. She used two persons who were not the major characters to act as the narrators: one was Lockwood, the other was Nelly. The part of chronological narration was told by Lockwood, Nelly was the witness of the past things. That’s to say, in order to deliver Lockwood from boredom, Nelly told the story of Wuthering Heights. Then, through Lockwood, the story was narrated. From this, we see, the story employed bi-narrative system.
Emily narrated the story of Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange, she divided this story into two parts and chose the visit of a stranger as a thread for being an occasional thing. It included the story of formal thirty years and the story after thirty years. Seeing the time, you would find that it was irregular; it was wanton. The former part lasted for 30 years, while the latter lasted just one year. The author has her own idea. In the first-three chapter, the stranger, Lockwood, came to Wuthering Heights, saw younger Cathy, dreamed a bad dream, all these were so horrible. In fact, the first-three chapters just wanted to show that it was terrible just because of the frozen of human nature. What led the frozen? From the 4th chapter, it was the flashback of the former thirty years. This main part had a title: the degeneration of human nature. The last four chapters were the chronological narration, which was the end. We also could give a title: the resuscitation of human nature. Thus, Lockwood provided a key for the readers. The main idea through the novel was originally complex. Now, with this key, it became easy to understand its orderliness. This was the aim of the author.
No matter how Lockwood bored the world, once he broke into the world of Heathcliff, een he felt trembling with fear. From Lockwood’s eyes, we saw how cold and painful the world became. In the first place, our human kind suffered a long evolution; we could break up from the animal nature. Then, after edification of thousands of years, human kind had the human nature. While now, in Wuthering Heights, human nature almost disappeared. The people in Wuthering Heights were like the dogs, which began to narrate the story. So, in this novel, Lockwood acted a heavy usage. This skill was successful and useful. Only this point, we had to say Emily was a great writer.
Generally speaking, Wuthering Heights had become one of the classic novels of the world, although Emily Bronte couldn’t know the happiness of success. The charm of her novel Wuthering Heights would let the people remember her forever. For example, the narrative way of this novel broke off the old rule, it used the chronological narration and flashback, the multi-narrative system and third person minor point of view. Its main idea, although, wanted to show that love is more powerful than hatred, while, it proved the strength of love by hatred. Even her major character’s love was abnormal; it’s full of hatred and love. The description of abnormal love reached the highest level, not only mad but also cruel. But this madness and cruelness, one the contrary, led the readers support Heathcliff. It can be seen that Emily was really a great novelist. In Wuthering Heights, she wrote what the former couldn’t write, and changed the common meaning of love. Therefore, the irresistible charm and appeal of this novel has attracted the attention of many readers and gradually built up this world as one of the most popular and well known fictions of the world literature.
（作者单位：Foreign Language Department, Chongqing Education College）
编辑/杨帆