WUTHERING HEIGHTS

EMILY BRONTE

EXTENDED ESSAY TEXT 2

Wuthering Heights

Lesson 13

LQ: Am I able to understand the

effects of the narrative structure?

THE BIG PICTURE

Outstanding Progress: you will confidently explore and evaluate through detailed and sophisticated critical analysis how writers use these aspects to create meaning.

Good Progress: you will show awareness of structure, form, language, themes and contexts, and comment on specific aspects with reference to how characters could be interpreted

Excellent Progress: you will explore structure, form, language, themes and contexts, commenting on specific aspects with reference to how characters could be interpreted.

B4

B3

B2

LQ: Am I able to analyse Bronte’s presentation of Catherine Earnshaw in the novel?

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STARTER

Novel, Genre: Romanticism / Realism / Gothic (mysterious family relationships, vulnerable heroines, secrets, wild landscapes). Setting: Yorkshire, England, late 18th/early 19th century. Protagonist, Antagonist, Narrative (story-within-a-story), Point of View, Structure, Symbol, Motif,

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LQ: Am I able to understand the effects of the narrative structure?

Read through the following informations, then, in pairs, come up with a diagram to represent the structure of the novel…

Emily Bronte was before her time in her choice of narrative structure for Wuthering Heights. So much so, that many

nineteenth-century critics (and some more modern ones too) found the whole novel confusing and muddled.

STARTER

Novel, Genre: Romanticism / Realism / Gothic (mysterious family relationships, vulnerable heroines, secrets, wild landscapes). Setting: Yorkshire, England, late 18th/early 19th century. Protagonist, Antagonist, Narrative (story-within-a-story), Point of View, Structure, Symbol, Motif,

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A … fault of construction … makes the beginning of one of our greatest masterpieces of passion and romance, Wuthering Heights, exceedingly difficult to read … As if the step-relations and adopted relations in the story were not sufficiently puzzling, Emily Bronte gave the narrative to several different people, at several different periods, people alternating what they had been told with what they actually witnessed. (‘Vernon Lee’, ‘On Literary Construction’, Contemporary Review, 1895)

STARTER

Novel, Genre: Romanticism / Realism / Gothic (mysterious family relationships, vulnerable heroines, secrets, wild landscapes). Setting: Yorkshire, England, late 18th/early 19th century. Protagonist, Antagonist, Narrative (story-within-a-story), Point of View, Structure, Symbol, Motif,

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LQ: Am I able to understand the effects of the narrative structure?

In spite of the brilliantly successful timeshifts and what has been called, not very happily, the ‘Chinese Box’ ingenuity of construction, it certainly isn’t a seamless work of art and candour obliges us to admit ultimately that some things in the novel are incompatible with the rest, so much so that one seems at times to find oneself in really different novels. (QD Leavis, 1966)

STARTER

Novel, Genre: Romanticism / Realism / Gothic (mysterious family relationships, vulnerable heroines, secrets, wild landscapes). Setting: Yorkshire, England, late 18th/early 19th century. Protagonist, Antagonist, Narrative (story-within-a-story), Point of View, Structure, Symbol, Motif,

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LQ: Am I able to understand the effects of the narrative structure?

The structure Bronte chose is called a ‘framed’ or ‘nested’ narrative, where one ‘outer’ narrative contains a number of ‘inner’ narratives. These inner narratives are also known as ‘embedded narratives’ or ‘Chinese box narratives’.

In pairs, come up with a diagram to represent the structure of the novel, starting with Lockwood’s diary as the ‘outer’ or ‘frame’ narrative…

DUAL NARRATION – MAKE NOTES #1

Novel, Genre: Romanticism / Realism / Gothic (mysterious family relationships, vulnerable heroines, secrets, wild landscapes). Setting: Yorkshire, England, late 18th/early 19th century. Protagonist, Antagonist, Narrative (story-within-a-story), Point of View, Structure, Symbol, Motif,

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LQ: Am I able to understand the effects of the narrative structure?

Although there are several narrators in the Chinese box structure, there are two characters that principally carry out a dual narration: Lockwood and Nelly Dean. Dual narration was an almost unprecedented technique when Bronte wrote Wuthering Heights (Mary Shelley used a frame narrative in Frankenstein) and gives the novel its distinct and complex structure. As discussed last lesson, Lockwood, who tells the frame narrative, is unreliable. Although Nelly has known all the characters of the novel her whole life and her accounts are more difficult to contradict, we mustn’t forget that her narrative is subjective and not impartial thus the reader has a responsibility to uncover the ‘truth’ of the story for themselves.

DUAL NARRATION – MAKE NOTES #2

Novel, Genre: Romanticism / Realism / Gothic (mysterious family relationships, vulnerable heroines, secrets, wild landscapes). Setting: Yorkshire, England, late 18th/early 19th century. Protagonist, Antagonist, Narrative (story-within-a-story), Point of View, Structure, Symbol, Motif,

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LQ: Am I able to understand the effects of the narrative structure?

Traditionally, the narrator has an authority born of the fact they have survived the story and are present to recount it retrospectively. In nineteenth-century fiction, nearly all narrators are male. It is therefore doubly significant that Bronte chose two narrators, one male and one female, and that the narrative of Nelly outranks and dispossess that of Lockwood. Feminist critiques of the novel have focused on how unusual and revolutionary this technique must have seemed to Bronte’s Victorian audience and that Bronte is rejecting the male bias of Victorian literature. Others have said it is a destabilising of the conventional authority of the narrative voice.

GROUP TASK 1

Novel, Genre: Romanticism / Realism / Gothic (mysterious family relationships, vulnerable heroines, secrets, wild landscapes). Setting: Yorkshire, England, late 18th/early 19th century. Protagonist, Antagonist, Narrative (story-within-a-story), Point of View, Structure, Symbol, Motif,

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LQ: Am I able to understand the effects of the narrative structure?

Complete the tasks on your sheet and get ready to feed back.

GROUP TASK 2- CARD SORT

Novel, Genre: Romanticism / Realism / Gothic (mysterious family relationships, vulnerable heroines, secrets, wild landscapes). Setting: Yorkshire, England, late 18th/early 19th century. Protagonist, Antagonist, Narrative (story-within-a-story), Point of View, Structure, Symbol, Motif,

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LQ: Am I able to understand the effects of the narrative structure?

1. Sort the cards into descriptions of Nelly and Lockwood or both of them. Find examples from the novel to support the descriptions they choose for each narrator. Share/feedback.

2. Attempt to find opposites in the descriptions. What does one narrator do that the other does not?

3. Are there any descriptions which you want to challenge, adapt or qualify in some way? If so, re-write the description. For example, if you chose ‘often suppresses information and deceives’ to describe Nelly, you might want to change it to ‘sometimes she suppresses information but without the intention to deceive.’

PLENARY – CHOOSE ONE:

Novel, Genre: Romanticism / Realism / Gothic (mysterious family relationships, vulnerable heroines, secrets, wild landscapes). Setting: Yorkshire, England, late 18th/early 19th century. Protagonist, Antagonist, Narrative (story-within-a-story), Point of View, Structure, Symbol, Motif,

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LQ: Am I able to understand the effects of the narrative structure?

1. Review reasons for Chinese box narrative from starter. Do you still think the same? Why? 2. Do you agree with these statements:To highlight the partial and subjective nature of the narrative voice?To show the reader that they must find the truth of the story? 3. In your goups discuss the following: What if Bronte had used a single first person narrator?A single third person narrator?What if the novel had been recounted entirely by Nelly?