Wuthering Heights: Violence and cruelty
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- Опубликовано: 5 июн 2014
- Professor John Bowen explores Emily Brontë's extraordinary use of violence in Wuthering Heights. Filmed on location on the moors around Haworth.
Explore more films, together with thousands of Victorian and Romantic literary treasures, at the British Library's Discovering Literature website - www.bl.uk/discovering-literature.
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I read wuthering heights last week for the first time ever. Something about it really gripped me. I thought it was brilliant and inspiring despite being so cruel and dark
I ADORE it. Love the cruelty,the darkness...it has a few lighter moments though that everyone seems to overlook
Prof Bowen queries why Emily Bronte depicted violence and cruelty, suggesting it was some kind of fascination of hers linked to primal emotions in her childhood. Violence and cruelty were not foreign to Victorian life in Haworth (England as a whole) and in her own life. Remember the school she attended as a child, which came to life as Lowood school in Jane Eyre. Corporal punishment was the order of the day. When Mr. Bronte asked Emily, as a young child, how to control Branwell, she responded that her father should first try to reason with him and next beat him. She and the family as a whole were interested in battles and military life -- a violent life certainly and full of flogging as a means of discipline. The younger Catherine has led a different kind of existence, but eventually she too learns what the real world is like, and that is the operative word -- real. Emily Bronte was unconventional because she brought reality to the page-- foolish infatuation, alcoholism, domestic violence, and ever present death.
Also, I'm sure she heard stories of domestic abuse, etc., from people around her. There weren't all the social services around that people could turn to back then, and women had precious few rights, even against abuse.
foolish infatuation, it was a deep and destructive love.
foolish infatuation?
@@elizabethcsicsery-ronay1633 Isabelle.
The irony is the book outlines the bare essencial fact of family violence & how generational cyclic it actually is.
True
Beautiful speech
This is an interesting synopsis, but the music is really irritating and too loud at times.
I have been thinking about Emily Bronte's direct single use of the myth of Milo - Catherine Earnshaw says that if anyone attempted to separate her and Heathcliff they would suffer the fate of Milo - Milo was destroyed by wild animals after his arm got fixed within a damaged tree Milo wished to destroy - dogs or lions then tore this mythological man to pieces; if one uses symbolic interpretation Milo seems quite ambivalent toward this symbolic and withering phallus-tree that he is attached to inescapably; violence was natural to Emily Bronte and to the egocentric men of her time - she may have foreseen both the destruction of the ultimate controlling male and societal patriarchy and its eventual profound decline and increasing death; think today and gender role ambivalence and conflict; Emily Bronte did not like men I think who controlled. Catherine Earnshaw loved Heathcliff totally - if Heathcliff is visualised as being part of herself.
Heathcliff was her Jungian animus.
John Bowen you are a genius!!!!!! Thank you for sharing your culture with us!!!!!!!!
I would love to know which review that came from so that i may use and cite it in my essay.
If it's not too late for your essay, I think that quote is from The Examiner. Wikipedia has a list of snipets from early reviews, so that would also be a good starting point to find the full reviews. If you can't, you could even cite this video though. It's by the British Library. You're as good as gold :D
writerspen010 thank you very much... I'll check into it! : )
Almost definitely too late, but it may help anyone else looking for review:
Anonymous, Douglas Jerrold's Weekly Newspaper, January 15, 1848
Thank you for guiding us in this extraordinary, magnificent, mind-blowing but also terrible and shocking book. To tell the truth, if were the author myself I would have not make Heathcliff cruel to those who didn't had nothing to do with his suffering!!!! It is really unimaginable that this book was written by a woman and NOT by a man. However, Emily, extraordinarily finishes this book when Heathcliff says something to little Cathy before he dies. "Will you come, chuck? I will not harm you although you think that I am worse than the devil!!!!!" At least at the end of the book Emily Bronte finishes it extroardinarily by recognition of Heathcliff on being cruel and violent himself. Before he says that to her, Nelly, hears him, talking to himself, but with full of reproaches of what he had done to those who were completely innocent, I think.
It's been proven that though men commit violent crimes and murder more than women, when women do it they are crueller, more cunning, calculated and patient.
sometimes the angelic bonds with the violent for some reason
Emily Jane Bronte was a macho-sadistic lesbian; totally brilliant, totally honest, totally unafraid of what people might say. She was not a timid recluse afraid of people - people were usually greatly offended by her behaviour socially - if you read the historical records that describe her behaviour it has been fashionable to accept that she was timid; yet the silence that surrounds the life of Emily Bronte is indicative of her real stance whilst alive - a fierce feminist and not at all like Charlotte Bronte public relations techniques she used in censoring what Emily really was. Charlotte Bronte was afraid of Emily Bronte - Charlotte influenced posterities concept of her sister. Emily Bronte was a hostile, commanding woman; she found people hypocritical essentially in nature; which they are. The novel is full of shame and disgust and structured around the endless polarities of good and evil - you can describe the book as amoral - it is amoral - but then so is nature and people are surely part of nature? Emily Bronte believed in god - however, it was not the usual rule-book God she defined - it was a personal god that she posited; she was a free-thinker and proud of it. I have sent several rough idea essays to the Bronte Society Library in Haworth in England; I hope this is eventually recognised. I certainly have own my copies and further notes; Emily Bronte has fascinated me since the age of 14 - I am now 73 and live in England. Emily Jane Bronte did not over-react to or misunderstand human existence - she endorsed its violence, its brutality and its glory. Although Emily Bronte existed just after the Romantics - she in many ways rejected their non-realistic stance about human nature. These views of mine are not popular - and neither was Emily Jane Bronte during her short life; would she had lived longer; the world may have been left a legacy of further work by her that would, I am sure, have made her one of the major literary creative artists - European stance. Had she lived today I am pretty sure she would have been writing feminist, realistic drama that would be screened globally in film-form.
I had to say all of this in order to state that in total I sent 8 quick essays to the Bronte Society Library in 2020; I have them in copy form.
@@-DistantHorizons- The considered analysis of Heathcliff and Cathy Earnshaw is that neither were sociopaths; both of these characters show profound depths of feeling - love and need and concern for the other - and the essence of a sociopath is the superficiality of affect and a profound selfishness; Emily Bronte was very selfish but very emotional too; I would have loved to have met Emily Jane Bronte; I have grave doubts about liking Emily Bronte as a fellow human being if I encountered her. To be a genius is a very, very isolating condition; Emily Bronte was a sadist though - her feelings are very, very apparent in Wuthering Heights. I tend to be a psychoanalytical literary critic; I shall give you an example of such criticism - the child ghost scene when Lockwood sees the child ghost Cathy Earnshaw through a window - in terror, when the ghost hand locks onto Lockwood's hand, he deliberately cuts the child's wrist so that blood flows through the window. I think that as well as being indicative of the writer's cruelty and sadism - in terms of symbolism and metaphor the child Cathy is pre-adolescence and the blood flow is the first female issue of blood; also adulthood and the loss of childhood. The window imagery is womanhood penetrated by a male. Emily Bronte was deeply immersed within a terrible sense of loss - she lost her mother when Emily Bronte was almost four years old. Deep primal feelings and thoughts are very evident within Wuthering Heights - Carl Jung said that Emily Bronte had a very, very strong male animus; he was correct.
Why are you sayingshe was a lesbian? How do u know? Its totally disgusting the way u describe her even down to personal behavior no one would know except herself. No shame whatsoever.
@@BUBBLESPOGO Why should I feel shame? I suspect you are a religious person - rule book religions constrict the mind as well as the body and they are rejected in Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights; Emily Bronte walked like a man, had a deep hoarse voice, dressed in unfeminine clothing, whistled, was aggressively dismissive of others very often, and was very, very selfish; Charlotte Bronte thought her sister Emily was in her forcefulness of character almost mad; Emily Bronte seems to have disliked dominant men especially those that she thought were fools; if you met either Heathcliff or Cathy Earnshaw you would not like them - they are not the romantic couple so many people think that they are - they are totally amoral and totally selfish and inclusive. Also, since Wuthering Heights is a work of the human imagination - using violence as one of its constructive ideals - why can't I use my own imagination to think of Emily Jane Bronte as a sadistic lesbian based on that proposition? Free will does exist?
@@brianscates5225 the Creator's Holy Word is not a rule book religion. Its was given to mankind to know their God, what happened that we are all in a sick and dying condition, and what has happen to correct the misery in the near future.
There is nothing whatsoever to prove Emily Bronte was the kind of female you decribe her to be. Its not right to speak of the dead in such ugly unwarranted terms.
Wuthering Heights is a book about the ugly tentacles and the long reaching effects of child abuse and neglect of innocent children that can forever darken the lives of adult survivors , and the vengeance on others because of the abuse.
Child abuse was very common in Emily Bronte's time and still is today. It will end when the Creator ends all wickedness forever. Psalms 37;10-11, 29.
Why do you think Emily was a lesbian and a sadist?
AMSR right here.
When I studied English Literature, Wuthering Heights was among the books to be studied . I had already read the book but not "in depth" and the one character I could not understand was Cathy. What did she really want ? To be a lady ? To be with Heathcliff ? She could not really decide and that's why she presented this senseless behaviour, so that whoever was near her was destroyed... In my opinion, although much tortured, she is a very "negative" heroine...
And the novel is also full of bitterness and hatred.
W.H. too dark for me....depressing! But I ADORE Jane Eyre! The sisters must have been very different personalities.
I loved Wuthering Heights. More than those repressed Victorian books.
Wuthering Heights is not my type of book for me to read at all!
SO glad you shared this!
What is the bloody awful muzak for? British Library, we expect higher production standards, not dumbed down guff like this.
Too bad the music competes with the narrator. Very hard to concentrate.
There’s nothing else wrong with the video, other than the music, which would enhance the video if it was only used during the pauses in his speech. The rest of the production is beautifully done. They travelled to shoot on site in Yorkshire, the camera shots are beautiful, the professor is excellent. He just needs to be mic’d up and the volume edited a touch. No need to be so negative! Diabolical hate! Lol
Here are the three novels by Charlotte Bronte and the two novels by Anne Bronte that I would recommend for anyone to read and collect which are, Jane Eyre, Shirley, Villette, Agnes Gray and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. These are the novels of books that have a pure moral theme in them with clean sentences in them and good happy well-finished endings. These are the five books by two Bronte sisters that I would encourage people to read and keep. But never read or have anything to do with Wuthering Heights. It is not a type of book that anybody should read.
Wuthering Heights is an amazing book. I personally like it more than Jane Eyre. I think it's a personal preference but you shouldn't tell others not to read something just because you didn't like it.
@@Tan-ps3dg Ok then.
Oh my GOD, the Index of prohibited books😅
@@Tan-ps3dg Alright then I won't.
Nonsense. Then you wouldn't read Dostoevsky or Faulkner, either. Or Shakespeare for that matter. What a limited view!
All I can say is that Wuthering Heights is a very evil, immoral and blasphemous ungodly novel! There is no moral theme in the story at all, just violence, swearing, full of adultery of being in love with a other man's wife and full of two families being nasty to each other. I don't know why Emily Bronte one of the Bronte sisters, could write such a pure nasty, blasphemous and evil novel. I much rather prefer Jane Eyre or the The Tenant of Wildfell Hall over Wuthering Heights! At least one of the Bronte sister's novels have a moral theme in them.
This does have a moral theme, it’s just not as allegorical as Jane eyre or some other Victorian novels. Wuthering heights highlights the significance of generational violence, and showcases the disastrous combined effects of obsession and alienation
What a rant! What a limited view!