《呼啸山庄》英语文学赏析论文

Abstract

Emily Jane Brontë was an English novelist and poet, now best remembered for her novel Wuthering Heights, a classic of English literature. It's a story about love and revenge, which narrates love and hate of Earnshaws and Lintons between generations. The novel follows the life of Heathcliff, a mysterious gypsy-like person, from childhood to his death in his late thirties.

Key words: Wuthering Heights; novel; Emily Brontë; Heathcliff; Cathy

1.About the author

Emily was the second eldest of the world-famous Brontë sisters, between Charlotte and Anne. She published under the androgynous pen name Ellis Bell. She was born in 1818 and died in 1848. It’s a pity that she died when she was only thirty years old. Emily had deep love for writing poems since she was only a child. She was quiet and shy, but her poems and novel are full of rebellious spirits. We can read her thirst for freedom, equality and love between the lines.

Emily Bronte was not only shy but also independent, firm and persistent. Her life is very short and she didn’t get a complete education or get married during her short life, so people suspect that how can she accomplish such a novel, a story filled with deep love and hate, a story so complicated and intricate. Therefore, Emily has been considered a talent in literature all the time.

However, her talent is reasonable. Emily has read a lot of books and fairy tales when she was a child. What’s more, although the three sisters lived in a poor family, their parents had talents in literature. Their father once published his own poetry anthology, and their mother had written many beautiful love letters to their father before they got married. Influenced by her parents and the wasteland around their

house, Emily became a literary genius. The Brontes lived a poor life but they encouraged each other and discussed literature together, so they lived happily and improved their writing ability at the same time.

2.Writing characteristics and style of the novel

The novel is full of author’s fantastic imagination. In this novel, ferity and civilization, imagination and reality, there are strong differences between them. Mysticism

One of the characteristics of the novel is mysterious. Almost all of the people and things in the novel are mysterious. The wasteland where the story happened is very gloomy, horrible and windy. The characters in the Wuthering Heights are mysterious, too. They have strange behaviors, strange words and strange emotions. Even the dog in their house was also fierce. Mr. Lockwood had bad dreams when he slept in Heathcillf’s house. Besides, at last, Heathcliff said that he met the ghost of Cathy, and then he died. The description style and narrative style in the novel has the color of mysticism.

Ellipsis

Ellipsis is a writing technique that novelists love to use in their novels. And we can see many examples in the novel Wuthering Heights. Such as the experience of Heathcliff before he came to the Wuthering Heights; how can he became rich and gentle during the three years after he left the Wuthering Heights; what did Hindley Earnshaw do during his three years in college; how did he meet his wife…Emily Bronte didn’t tell us about these details, just because of this, the novel became more mysterious and left us a larger space to imagine.

Different narrators and perspectives

At the beginning of the novel, the author started the story through Mr. Lockwood’s eyes. The novel is narrated by Mr. Lockwood, who also takes a subsidiary role in the action. His housekeeper, Nelly Dean, provides a secondary narrative that is embedded within Lockwood's.

The author described the characters from different perspectives, and we can read