Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

This is also a summary of a presentation given by classmates in a 19th century British novel class.

Wuthering Heights is the only novel written by Charlotte Brontë's (the author of Jane Eyre) sister, Emily.

A summary of the novel's characters can be found here.

Family Trees:
                                                                      Wuthering Heights
                                                                  Mr. and Mrs. Earnshaw
Hindley m. Frances      Catherine m. Edgar Linton   Heathcliff (adopted) m. Isabella Linton
Hareton Earnshaw       Catherine Linton

                                                                   Thrushcross Grange
                                                                    Mr. and Mrs. Linton
          Edgar m. Catherine Earnshaw           Isabella m. Heathcliff (adopted by Earnshaw)
          Catherine Linton                               Linton Heathcliff    
                            
 Catherine and Linton marry.  After he dies, at the book's end, she is planning on marrying Hareton Earnshaw.

Time-line:
1771: The owner of the manor Wuthering Heights Mr. Earnshaw, adopts an orphan, Heathcliff.
1773: Mrs. Earnshaw dies.
1774: Their son, Hindley, is sent to college.
1777: Hindley Earnshaw marries Frances; Mr. Earnshaw dies.
1778: Hareton is born to Hindley and Frances; Frances dies.
1780: Heathcliff runs away; the owner of the manor Thrushcross Grange Mr. Linton dies.
1783: Edgar Linton and Catherine Earnshaw marry, uniting the two families
1784: Heathcliff and Isabella Linton marry; Edgar and Catherine Earnshaw Linton have a daughter, Catherine; Catherine Earnshaw dies; Heathcliff and Isabella have a son, Linton Heathcliff; Hindley Earnshaw dies.
1797: Isabella dies.
1801: Catherine Linton and Linton Heathcliff marry; Edgar and Linton die.
1802: Heathcliff dies.
1803: Catherine and Hareton are to be married.

Themes:
Love: destructive love, marriages based on social advancement vs. passionate love, weakness and manipulation, successful/hopeful love, familial love.
Social Class: can be seen in the architecture of the manors, within the characters
Revenge

The trailer for the 1992 film:

Buy the book here:

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

Based on a summary by some of my classmates in a 19th century British novel class.

Plot Summary:
When the creature that Victor Frankenstein comes to life, Victor is so frightened he leaves but so does the monster. Victor becomes depressed thinking about the monster's possible return. When he hears of his five-year-old brother's death he goes to the scene of the murder in Geneva where he discovers that the creature he made has killed his brother. Eventually the two speak, the creation sharing with the creator stories of his bouts of loneliness. He asks Frankenstein to create a female creature to accompany him, an "Eve." Although Victor initially agrees, under the condition that his creature will stay far from him and his family afterwards, apprehension over the mayhem that two creatures could cause to humankind, he destroys the second creation before she comes to life. His creature is so angry that he kills Victor's fiancée in revenge. Victor is charged with the murder and imprisoned although he is later acquitted of the crime. He marries his cousin, Elizabeth, but she too is murdered by the creature. Victor thus pursues the creature in an attempt to destroy it, keeping it from causing further harm. He follows him to the Arctic where Victor meets Walton, a ship captain, and shares his unbelievable story with him. The novel is composed of letters that Walton writes to a Mrs. Saville to convey the account. Frankenstein dies and his creature, overwhelmed by sorrow, destroys himself on a funeral pyre.

Themes:
Death: many characters die throughout the novel; an execution; murders; suicide; manhunts; cemeteries; creating the monster from bodies.
Effects of Rejection and Isolation: Victor and society rejects his creation. Victor does so out of guilt and fear. Society out of fear and prejudice. The monster feels lonely, unloved, and unwanted which leads to murder.
Reversal of the Roles and the Burden: Victor is the hunter, then the monster becomes the hunter, ending with Victor again being the hunter.

The trailer to the 1931 movie:

And that of the 2004 version:

Buy the book:

Hard Times by Charles Dickens

As the 2 past posts, this is based on a summary prepared by fellow students in a 19th century British novel class.

Like Gaskell's North and South, Dickens' novel is also an industrial/social novel which takes place during England's industrial revolution. It is also a moral tale, didactically revealing the downfalls of being overly dependent on the rational to the detriment of the enjoyable. Hence, the two main concepts of the novel are the opposing poles of fact and fancy.

Characters:
Fact:
Mr. Gradgrind: a school principal, a utilitarian. He raises his children to follow the philosophy of fact.  He adopts one of the students in his school, Sissy, when her circus performer father deserts her.
Mr. Bounderby: one of Mr. Gradgrind's friends, also a utilitarian, claims to be a safe-made man.
Louisa Gradgrind: Mr. Gradgrind's eldest child. She marries Mr. Bounderby based on rational evidence. She falls prey to a seducer.
Tom Gradgrind: Mr. Gradgrind's second child. He works with Mr. Bounderby to escape his father's influence. He does not have the necessary tools to manage his life.

Fancy:
Sissy Jupe: Represents the balance between fact and fancy.
Stephen Blackpool: the embodiment of the working class.

Themes:
Utilitarian education: be efficient to achieve the greatest amount of happiness for the most people. Children are therefore raised to be machines that will please their future industrialist employers.
Economic laissez-faire: capitalism without limits
Social mobility and humanism.

Buy the novel here:

North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell

This summary is also based on presentations made by fellow students in a 19th century English novel class.

North and South was first published as a serial in Charles Dickens' weekly, Household Words from September 1854 to January, 1855. In it, Gaskell presents the industrial life of Manchester, England by portraying the fictitious Milton. She had settled with her husband in Manchester so she had a first-hand account of this massive industrial city (based mostly on the cotton industry), using it as a backdrop of her industrial novels.  In 1847 trade slowed causing wage reduction and generated a strike.

Plot Summary:
Margaret Hale is an emotionally-strong young middle-classed woman. Her family moves from the prosperous south of England to the industrial north. There she meets John Thorton, the wealthy owner of the local mill. He exposes the struggles of industrialization from a businessman's perspective. She also makes friends with Bessy Higgins, from the working class, and from her learns of the harsh realities of the mill workers that are on strike. A love/hate relationship develops between John Thorton and Margaret as she attempts to make him aware of the strikers' needs and of their miserable living conditions.

Themes:
North of England vs. the South of England: The differing lifestyles of those living in northern England from those living in the south greatly caused great cultural differences among the two areas. Industrialization brings technology, factories and a burgeoning economy, but also diseases and pollution to Milton. Industrialization commoditized humans as dispensable workers.

Sickness and Death: Create a separation between the strong and the weak. Strong-minded characters (Margaret, John) survive in Milton despite the poor living conditions while weaker characters (Bessy and Mr. and Mrs. Hale) often get sick and die.

As a social/industrial novel, North and South reveals feminist concerns, addresses educational deficiencies, discusses some of the economical issues of colonialism, as well as putting the industrial revolution to the forefront.

This is a trailer of the 2004 BBC television series based on the novel:

Buy the book:

Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility

These summaries are based on presentations given by fellow students in a 19th Century British Novel class.

Pride and Prejudice (1813)
This is Austen's second of six novels. The original title was First Impressions which perhaps better captures the moral lesson of the dangers of mistaken first impressions. It is a romantic comedy of manners, but it is also a moral tale, offering biting social satire as to the superficiality of the gentry.

It has consistently rated in the most popular novels ever written: over 20 million copies have been sold. It has faux-sequels, been adapted to screen and stage, reworked with Zombies and spawned fan clubs and guides to romance.


Plot Summary:

The five unmarried Bennet sisters cannot inherit their father's manor as it is entitled to a male heir. The novel, set in turn-of-the-19th-century England, present the ups and downs of their searches for the right husbands, aided by their mother. Austen humorously portrays this "man hunt" by exposing the prejudices and vanity of aristocrats. The underlying social reality of the period is made clear: a woman's social status is directly related to that of her husband, while a man's social status is based on wealth.

Themes and Social Context:
The opening sentence of the book, "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife," touches neatly on three of the principle themes.

Prejudice: Most characters harbour prejudices, both positive and negative, towards those of higher and lower social classes. The main plot is based on a negative prejudice that leads Elizabeth to abhor her suitor, Darcy, and refuse his hand in marriage

Personal Fulfilment: As demonstrated by Elizabeth, fulfilment of a married woman depends on her ability to find love, her capacity to reason well, and the freedom to make her own decisions.

Marriage: Jane Austen presents three types of marriages in the novel.
Desirable marriage: based on love, mutual compatibility, and good manners.
Practical marriage: based on financial needs and convenience
Undesirable marriage: based on poor judgement and lust

Check out the difference between the 1940 version and the 2005 version of the same scene!

 

And just for fun, the book trailer for Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dawn of the Dreadfuls

Sense and Sensibility (1811)

Austen's first published novel.


Major Themes: 
Marriage: Presented as the ultimate fulfilment in a woman's life
Matriarchy vs. Patriarchy: Absence of paternal authority and controlling mothers.
Reason vs. Emotion: Finding equilibrium between them.














The book trailer for Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters. (It won Amazon's best book video of 2009)

Psychological Disorders in White Noise

My friend and classmate, Vanessa Bergeron, explores mental disorders in Don Delillo's novel White Noise. She argues that these mental disorders are caused by the rapid tehnological and social changes which took place in the western world in the 1980s. Here is a summary of her essay:

Don Delillo’s novel White Noise, which takes place in the mid-eighties in the fictional Midwestern town of Blacksmith, encapsulates the mental anguish caused by such change, a state for which American writer and futurist philosopher Alvin Toffler has coined the term “future shock.” Delillo has said that his novel “is about fear, death, and technology. A comedy, of course." (This is a great insight into the postmodern Black humour that pervades the novel). “Fear, death, and technology” cause most of the adult characters to suffer from mental disorders. By referring to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (the DSM IV), published by the American Psychiatric Association, mental diagnoses can be made of the characters. While technology acts as a gateway to schizophrenic behaviour for Jack, Murray’s concerns about urbanization are reflected in his various sexual disorders. Babette’s fear of death and upcoming loss of her identity as a mother trigger dependence related and amnestic disorders and the mental illness observed in other minor characters help in painting a bigger picture of collective mental illness experienced in adulthood.

             The most obvious mental disorder in White Noise is thanataphobia or fear of death, a phobia which stands at the very basis of the novel’s plot. In fact, white noise refers to Jack and Babette’s theory that death may be “nothing but sound,” an electrical, uniform, white noise that you hear forever and from all directions, a notion they find terrifying.  It also refers to the incomprehensible buzz of advertisements, media outlets, pointless conversations, in short the background noise of postmodern American culture which forms the backdrop of the novel.

 For an overview of these characters, visit this site.

Jack Gladney, the narrator of the novel

Paranoid Schizophrenia, which is characterized by hallucinations and fear of being watched or secretly manipulated by others.

-                                  Hallucinations: he sees floating spots at stressful moments and feels the television and radio are communicating with him

-                                   Fear of being watched/influenced: he feels that television has a “narcotic undertow and eerie diseased brain-sucking power,” “where the outer torment lurks, causing fears and secret desires.”

Murray Siskind, a professor at the College-on-the-Hill, where Jack also teaches

Sexual disorders

              One of the first things Murray tells Jack about himself is that he has run away from urban life so that he could free himself from the “the heat of food and sex”, “sexual entanglements” and “situation,” leaving the reader with the impression that sex is as much a source of torment for him as technological advancement is for Jack.

- Paraphilias is defined as: Any of a group of psychosexual disorders characterized by sexual fantasies, feelings, or activities involving a nonhuman object, a nonconsenting partner such as a child, or pain or humiliation of oneself or one's partner. Also called sexual deviation.

Examples: The way in which Murray is aroused by a woman “wearing stockings”, or by a woman “in spike heels and a slit skirt, with high-impact accessories” demonstrate how, despite his saying that he is mainly attracted to women’s minds, his sexual arousal also highly depends on the presence of certain objects.

- Fetishist = “fetish object is required or strongly preferred for sexual excitement”  

Example: he reads the magazine "American Transvestite," which reveals a transvestite fetishism.

- Necrophilia = sexual arousal stimulated by a dead body

              Example: He tells Jack that some writers he knows only have one topic of conversation: Sex and death. The two are therefore interlinked in his mind. He pays a prostitute to pretend to be choking so that he can perform the Heimlich manoeuvre on her...to act like she’s dying.

           

Babette, Jack's wife

Anxiety disorders caused by thanataphobia and gerascophobia, the  fear of aging

-                                Substance Dependence Disorder: She's addiction to nicotine, caffeine, chewing gum, and call-in radio shows)

-                               Generalized Anxiety Disorder: She says she feels “keyed-up or on the edge.”

-                              Amnestic Disorder = “unable to recall previously learned information, or “new information” 

                Examples: She has “difficulty concentrating without her mind going blank.” She asks “What is...” about common things mentioned in conversation. She tells Jack that she forgets “names, faces, phone numbers, addresses, appointments, instructions, directions.” Other things she forgets: her children’s names, how her children want to be called, she dials a number and forgets who she’s calling, goes to the store and forgets what she came to buy, having to repeatedly ask the same information.  She says, “I forget where I’ve parked the car and then for a long, long moment I forget what the car looks like.”

           

Minor characters

Tweedy, one of Jack's ex-wives.

                Hypochondriac: she wears gloves, eyeshades and socks because she believes that sunlight, air, food, water, and sex are all carcinogenic

                Shared Psychotic Disorder: She shares Jack’s schizophrenic tendencies. 

Dunlop, Jack's German teacher

We know little about this character but from these statements: he never comes out of his room, which is described as a “dark crowded room” in which he accumulates objects “against the walls and windows," we can conclude that he probably has a social disorder and is also prone to compulsive hoarding (which may be a type of OCD) 

Winnie Richards, works at the College-on-the-Hill with Jack

            Agoraphobia = Phobia of open spaces

               Extreme shyness

             White Noise indicates that most adults find themselves unable to adapt to a world that they perceive to be transforming at an unsettling pace. They thus gradually lose touch with reality, leading to a form of collective mental illness that affects “hundreds and thousands of people.” As Babette’s father says before leaving, “the mind goes before the body”, an undeniable fact which establishes a certain kinship and strong empathic bond or “odd affection” between the elderly, the mentally ill and aging parents. The slowly approaching sunset at the end of their lives is contemplated with either “wonder or dread” and while “[s]ome people are scared by the sunsets, some determined to be elated” but until the time comes, they will all keep “trying to figure out the pattern, discern the underlying logic” of an ever-changing world.


There is an interesting review of this work here:
http://www.hipsterbookclub.com/reviews/copy/0210/white_noise_don_delillo.html

Buy White Noise here:

The Oedipus Complex applied to Canada and Quebec in Hugh MacLennan's Two Solitudes

                 A review of Hugh MacLennan’s novels led literary critic T.D. MacLulich to declare that “all of MacLennan’s novels exhibit oedipal motifs."  MacLennan’s fascination with the Oedipus complex, shorthand for the Freudian theory of the child’s (usually male) fondness for the parent of the opposite sex and the subsequent jealousy and animosity towards the parent of the same sex, stems from his relationship with his parents. Whereas he developed a close friendship with his mother, his attempts at being accepted by his father were futile. Dr. Samuel MacLennan, a third-generation Canadian descended from Calvinist highland Scots, was a severe man; in fact, many family members remember being “terrified” of him. Having achieved the dreams his father had set out for him, Hugh finally rebelled against his father as a twenty-five year old man, disillusioned with the path he had taken in order to please his father. As he wrote late in life, upon reflection of his youth, he considered his rebellion to be the “slaying of a father-image."  MacLennan’s relationship with his father led to his interest in the Oedipus complex, which he applied to the characters of Athanase and his son Marius Tallard in his novel Two Solitudes, in which this Freudian concept is also applied to the relationship between federalist and nationalist Quebeckers.

Like Hugh and Samuel, Athanase and Marius have a strained relationship. Their rupture occurs when Marius becomes aware that Athanase makes love to Kathleen in a hospital room while his wife and Marius’ mother, Marie-Adèle, dies. In Freudian oedipal theory, this moment is the “primal scene” in which the son realizes that his father’s relationship with his mother is sexual. In their case, the mother-figure is not Marius’ biological mother, but his youthful step-mother who is not much older than him. Consistent to the framework of the Oedipus complex, Marius feels a sexual attraction towards a maternal figure. When Marius feels “sick from shame” after lusting after Kathleen’s “lush body," he recovers by focusing on the “virginal face” of his mother which is like a “nun’s."  Thus, he considers his own mother to be sexless, but Kathleen, his step-mother, to be a sexual being. A latent rivalry develops between Athanase and Marius as they position themselves as Kathleen’s lover. Hence their relationship echoes the oedipal myth which is based on sexual tensions within family triangles. Since the root cause of the animosity Marius develops towards Athanese is not vocalized or acknowledged, it reveals itself in the secondary political dissention of the nationalist son and his federalist father.

The political debate surrounds the decision for the Canadian parliament to force conscription on Quebeckers during the First World War. Athanase, a parliamentarian, supports the bill, but only in an effort to improve the perception that English-Canadians have of Quebeckers. He reasons that the English-speaking provinces would force conscription on French-Canadians no matter how he votes, but by voting with the other provinces Quebec appears willing to cooperate in the war effort. However, Marius reacts against his father and his political position, without trying to understand the reasons behind Athanase’s federalist leanings. After speaking at an anti-conscription rally, punching an English-Canadian soldier, and then fleeing from the scene, Marius “felt wonderful. He felt as if he had broken all the chains that had held him all his life." He is thus an Oedipus overthrowing his father’s ideology. As his neighbour Yardley reflects, “Marius is the mathematical product of conflict within the country and also within his own family." Their troubled father-son relationship magnifies the federalist and nationalist debate in Canada.

Marius’ desire to bring about the demise of his father is based on misunderstanding. His father is not advocating the colonization of the French, but rather a unified country. Until Canadians came to view each province as an equal partner, rifts between the French and the English would continue to surface. Yet, at the time of the First World War, Canada had not yet adopted a flag, how could it be expected to have forged an identity based on the views of ten equal provinces? The epigraph that MacLennan chose for his novel suggests that until the “two solitudes” come together to “protect, and touch, and greet each other,” Oedipus would attempt to overturn the father, King Laius. In the last moments of Athanase’s life Marius reconciles with his father. He is relieved that as he lies dying, he calls out for Marius’ mother, the religious Marie-Adèle, and also hints of a desire to return to Catholicism. Athanase is thus re-baptised into the faith and into his son’s favour. In fact, Athanase dies in a similar way to MacLennan’s father, Samuel. Both die from complications of high blood pressure. Both sons arrive at the deathbed in the final moments to hear the Cheyne-Stokes breathing that announces the end of life is near. For MacLennan the oedipal struggle is over, as inscribed on his father’s gravestone, in “Peace, Perfect Peace," but for Marius his struggle continues as he now places his efforts on convincing his half-brother to follow nationalist ideals instead of the more moderate position Athanase had hoped for him. Such is Quebec’s continued struggle for a national identity within Canada.

Biographical information taken from Elspeth Cameron's book Hugh MacLennan: A Writer’s Life. She has provided a short biography here:  Hugh MacLennan: Biocritical Essay 

Information about the Oedipus complex from T.D. MacLulich's Oedipus and Eve: The Novels of Hugh MacLennan.