Wuthering Heights
| |||||||||
Few novels reward rereading—and first reading—like Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (1818-1848). During our four sessions, we will enter the windswept moors not simply to revisit the tempestuous bond between Catherine and Heathcliff but also to ask why this strange, fierce book still unsettles and compels us. What is its purpose: a love story, a revenge tragedy, a moral parable, a ghost story—or something else and wilder? We will examine its daring for-its-time narrative structure with its layered storytellers and its shifting sympathies. We will consider recurring motifs of doubling, inheritance, imprisonment, and the elemental pull of the landscape. We will compare its mirrored generations of characters and think about whether they repeat or revise one another’s fate.
We will think about the Yorkshire moors as both setting and psychic force and will explore how Emily Brontë’s secluded life, the upheavals of early industrial England, and the rigid social hierarchies of class and property shape the novel. Do come and explore this novel.
A caveat: I have not seen the most recent movie but, based on what I have read, I urge you not to assume it appropriately or adequately reflects the novel!
Tyler Knowles retired after 34 years of teaching English and chairing the English Department at the Winsor School, an independent school for girls in Boston. She also taught English and writing at the University of Wisconsin, Boston University, and Dartmouth College before Winsor. More recently, she served nine years on the GSA Board.
Judy McGeorge lives in Ellsworth and enjoys reading books with groups following the guidelines of the St John’s College method. She is on the Colloquy Downeast Steering Committtee .
Syllabus/Reading
Session 1: Read Volume One, chap. I-IX (to page 90 in Penguin Classics edition)
Session 2: Read Volume One, chap. X-XIV (to page 153)
Session 3: Read Volume Two, chap. I-IX (to page 244)
Session 4: Read Volume Two, chap. X-XX (to page 337)
▼ Registration
