Tag Archives: background

Walking Through History: Brontë Country

Walking Through History is a British television show hosted by Sir Tony Robinson, an actor, comedian, children’s book author, and amateur historian best known for his role in the historical comedy series Blackadder. In this episode, Brontë Country, Sir Tony takes a four-day journey across the West Yorkshire moors, visiting not only the Brontë’s home in Haworth Village, but many of the sites mentioned in Wuthering Heights, including the Penistone Crags and Top Withens, the ruin of the house widely believed to be Emily Brontë’s inspiration for the Earnshaw home.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSEHfCM5Lfg

Comments Off on Walking Through History: Brontë Country

Filed under AP Literature

Wuthering Heights Links

wh

Background Information

Lilia Melani, background information for English 40.4: The Nineteenth Century Novel, Brooklyn College (City University of New York)
http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/novel_19c/wuthering/index.html

Paul Thompson, The Reader’s Guide to Wuthering Heights
http://www.wuthering-heights.co.uk

Haworth Village
http://www.haworth-village.org.uk/brontes/bronte.asp

Wuthering Heights on Film

1939 version (Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon)
Nominated for eight Oscars, winning one for Best Cinematography
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0032145/

1970 version (Timothy Dalton and Anna Calder-Marshall)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0066585/

1992 version (Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104181/

2009 Masterpiece Theatre version (Tom Hardy and Charlotte Riley)
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/wutheringheights/index.html

2011 version (James Howson and Kaya Scodelario)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1181614/

Image of Top Withens, commonly believed to be the inspiration for Wuthering Heights, from
http://www.wuthering-heights.co.uk

Comments Off on Wuthering Heights Links

Filed under AP Literature

Emily Brontë Introduction

emilyEmily Brontë was born July 30, 1818, in Thornton, Yorkshire, the fifth of Patrick and Maria Bronte’s six children. Within a few years, the family moved to the West Yorkshire village of Haworth, where Patrick was the curate (priest) of the parish church. Bronte lived nearly her entire life at Haworth Parsonage. Within that small household, the family dealt with such troubles as sickness, poverty, brutality, alcoholism, and death. Their mother died of cancer not long after the birth of her youngest daughter, Anne, when Emily Brontë was only three. When Emily was six, she and her three older sisters, Maria, Elizabeth, and Charlotte, were sent to the Clergy Daughter’s School at Cowan Bridge. Maria and Elizabeth contracted tuberculosis at the school and died soon afterward; Emily and Charlotte were subsequently withdrawn. With each successive blow, the family grew closer, shutting out the world around them and taking comfort from those who remained—even if those people were the source of the trouble, like their brother Bramwell, who suffered from alcoholism. All six of the Brontë children died before the age of 40.

The_Brontë_Sisters_by_Patrick_Branwell_Brontë_restoredBrontë’s life was insular. She had a patchwork of formal education from Cowan Bridge, the Roe Head School in Mirfield, and a stint at the Pensionnat Heger, supplemented by a variety of lessons given by people in the Haworth community and intensive reading and study at home. Patrick Brontë had an extensive library, and along with scripture, all the siblings were encouraged to read as much as possible from classical authors such as Homer, Virgil, and Shakespeare, neoclassical writers Bunyan, Milton, Pope, Jonson, Gibbon, and Cowper, and more contemporary romantic poets and authors such as Burns, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, Southey, and Byron. Emily and her surviving sisters, the novelists Charlotte Brontë (Jane Eyre) and Anne Brontë (Agnes Grey), created the imaginary kingdoms of Angria and Gondal when they were children, and these imaginative worlds eventually spilled over into their real one.

The sisters’ first published work, a book of poetry submitted under the male pseudonyms Currer (Charlotte), Acton (Anne), and Ellis (Emily) Bell, sold only two copies. The volume contained eighteen poems authored by Emily. Of them, one reviewer complimented her “fine quaint spirit” and asserted that she had “things to speak that men will be glad to hear,—and an evident power of wing that may reach heights not here attempted.” The siblings were unusually close, lending each other critique and encouragement. The painting here of the Brontë sisters was created by their brother Bramwell; Anne sits to the left, Emily in the center, and Charlotte on the right. Bramwell originally included himself but painted out his image later, as you can see from the restoration.

All three sisters wrote fiction in addition to poetry. They submitted their respective novels under their Bell pseudonyms in a single envelope; if the submission was returned by a publisher, Charlotte would cross out that name, add a new address to the bottom, and send it out again. In 1847, Charlotte’s Jane Eyre was published to instant acclaim (Queen Victoria was a fan), becoming a bestseller. Anne’s Agnes Grey was released by a different publisher, outshone by her sister’s work. In early 1848, Emily’s novel and Anne’s second, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, were accepted and published as a set. Anne’s single volume was a sensation and sold out. Emily’s novel, Wuthering Heights, did not fare as well. Intense and passionate and peopled with characters who neither sought nor deserved redemption, as was expected by those in Victorian times, the work unsettled readers and reviewers alike.

Early copies of the novelWhen Brontë died, several reviews of Wuthering Heights were found in her desk. As you can see from these snippets, there is no common agreement about the work to be found:

Anonymous reviewer, Douglas Jerrold’s Weekly Newspaper, 15 January 1848

“Wuthering Heights is a strange sort of book,—baffling all regular criticism; yet, it is impossible to begin and not finish it; and quite as impossible to lay it aside afterwards and say nothing about it.”

Unknown reviewer from an unknown publication, about 1847:

“This is a work of great ability, and contains many chapters, to the production of which talent of no common order has contributed.”

Anonymous reviewer for the Examiner, 8 January 1848:

“This is a strange book. It is not without evidences of considerable power: but, as a whole, it is wild, confused, disjointed, and improbable; and the people who make up the drama, which is tragic enough in its consequences, are savages ruder than those who lived before the days of Homer.”

Paterson’s magazine (U.S.)

“Read Jane Eyre… but burn Wuthering Heights.”

The Penguin Classics Reader’s Guide to Wuthering Heights suggests that “This strong reaction was due in part to the book’s intense examination of the human spirit. Readers accustomed to novels such as those by Jane Austen, published thirty-five years before, sought a realistic portrayal of the mores and manners of the English upper classes. Wuthering Heights, in contrast, focused not on society, but on the minds, hearts, and souls of its members.”

In a sense, Emily Brontë is very much like the American poet Emily Dickinson. Both led secluded lives, but their seclusion masked an uncommon knowledge of human nature and the passions and questions that control it. Neither woman married, and there is much speculation about the nature of any relationships they might have had outside of their respective families. Each left behind a fixed body of work. In Dickinson’s case, none of her poems were published until after her death. Brontë lived to see one book of poetry and Wuthering Heights published, with another novel contracted by the same publisher. After Emily’s death, her sister Charlotte gathered and published more of Emily’s poems, including “Stanzas” below. The themes and passions in her poetry mirror those in her great novel, allowing us a glimpse of a woman whose imaginative inner life belied her secluded reality.

Stanzas

Often rebuked, yet always back returning
To those first feelings that were born with me,
And leaving busy chase of wealth and learning
For idle dreams of things that cannot be:

To-day, I will seek not the shadowy region;
Its unsustaining vastness waxes drear;
And visions rising, legion after legion,
Bring the unreal world too strangely near.

I’ll walk, but not in old heroic traces,
And not in paths of high morality,
And not among the half-distinguished faces,
The clouded forms of long-past history.

I’ll walk where my own nature would be leading:
It vexes me to choose another guide:
Where the gray flocks in ferny glens are feeding;
Where the wild wind blows on the mountain side.

What have those lonely mountains worth revealing?
More glory and more grief than I can tell:
The earth that wakes one human heart to feeling
Can centre both the worlds of Heaven and Hell.

The year Wuthering Heights was published, Emily fell ill, complaining of difficulty breathing and pains in her chest. It was tuberculosis. Bramwell had also contracted the disease. He succumbed in September of 1848. Emily died December 19, 1848, at the age of 30. Anne followed the next May. Charlotte, the lone surviving Brontë sibling, continued to write and publish her own work in addition to serving as editor for subsequent editions of her sisters’ work. She married her father’s curate Arthur Nicholls in 1854 and is said to have lived a happy life until her own death from tuberculosis in 1855. Their father Patrick outlived them all, dying in 1861.

Sources:
http://www.wuthering-heights.co.uk/reviews.htm

http://www.biography.com/people/emily-bronte-9227381
http://www.haworth-village.org.uk/brontes/emily/emily.asp
http://www.poetry-archive.com/b/stanza.html
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/emily-bronte
http://www.penguinclassics.co.uk/nf/shared/WebDisplay/0,,82350_1_10,00.html

Comments Off on Emily Brontë Introduction

Filed under AP Literature

Entering Yoknapatawpha County

Former Orlando Sentinel Books Editor Nancy Pate described William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County as “[a] fictional landscape…peopled by rogues and rednecks, farmers and townsfolk, descendants of soldiers, slaves and carpetbaggers. There are whites, blacks, mulattos, people of all ages. They have names like Snopes and Sutpen, Compson and Bundren, Sartoris and Varner, Benbow and McCaslin. They live on old plantations and tenant farms,  in small hamlets and crossroads smaller still. Their stories–many of them intertwining–make up what Faulkner called ‘the tragic fable of Southern history.'”

WF1946MapMuch like English novelist Thomas Hardy, whose “Wessex” is a fictional amalgam of real locations, Faulkner based Yoknapatawpha County on very real places. Faulkner lived for most of his life in Oxford, Mississippi. In Faulkner’s work, Oxford becomes the town of Jefferson, while the real Jefferson County is named “Yoknapatawpha” after the old Chickasaw word for the Yocona River south of town. The county is located in north central Mississippi not far from the Tennessee border. This 1947 map indicates the primary locations of several of Faulkner’s major works, including not only Light in August but also his masterworks Absalom, Absalom! and The Sound and the Fury.

mapwfThe second map, probably drawn in 1947 for Malcolm Cowley’s Portable Faulkner, is just one of a series that Faulkner created for each of his works. Characters, events, and locations in one work often make appearances in another. As such, many of the maps contain references not only to the current work, but other works that might have connections to it.

Stephen Railton of the University of Virginia has created a series of interactive Yoknapatawpha maps which provide commentary on places in selected Faulkner works. Those maps are available here.
Maps from the Faulkner Collection, Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia.

Comments Off on Entering Yoknapatawpha County

Filed under AP Literature

William Faulkner Intro

The past is never dead. It’s not even past.
–William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun

 

69eecb475a762e6c_largeNobel Prize-winning author William Faulkner is one of the best-known of Southern writers, if not the preeminent one. His rich and evocative writing style is unparalleled and very different from many of his contemporaries, most notably Ernest Hemingway. Where Hemingway is spare, direct, and laconic, Faulkner is lush, meandering, and protracted. One famous Faulkner sentence, located in the middle of Absalom, Absalom!, runs for 1,288 words. In that sense, Faulkner’s writing is much like the South he loved and sought to preserve on the page: a complicated, tangled mixture of the lyrical and the everyday.

Faulkner was born in Mississippi in 1897. He began writing as a young man. When World War I broke out, Faulkner attempted to enlist in the Army, but his age and height (he was only 5’5-1/2″) kept him out. Undaunted, Faulkner went to Canada to enlist in the British Royal Flying Corps. Despite never actually serving, he was fond of wearing his uniform and carrying the swagger stick he’d been issued. Soon after, he moved to New Orleans to begin his writing career. His first novel, Soldier’s Pay, was published in 1925. Apart from this brief period in New Orleans, occasional stints as a Hollywood screenwriter in the late 1930s and early 1940s, and as a writer in residence at the University of Virginia in the 1950s, he primarily lived and worked in his hometown of Oxford, Mississippi. He once remarked, “I discovered my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it.”

He was right. His interwoven collection of short stories and novels focused on his own back yard. Lafayette County became the fabled, fictional Yoknapatawpha County, whose families, history, and tales reflected both the high-minded ideals of the mythical South and the tangled, messy actualities of a region marked by pride, poverty, social status, and segregation.

Rowan OakRowan Oak, Faulkner’s home, is now owned and operated as a museum by the University of Mississippi. The house is preserved much as it was in Faulkner’s day. His Underwood typewriter sits ready on a desk, while riding boots rest on the floor next to a chair. A full outline and story notes for one of his last published works, A Fable, are penciled across the walls of his study. Faulkner’s connection to this house was legendary. One story goes that during one of Faulkner’s screenwriting jobs, the studio put him in an office and left him to work. After some time passed without much output, Faulkner said he thought he could write better from home, and the studio agreed. More time passed without any production, so the studio sent someone to Faulkner’s temporary California apartment—and he wasn’t there. When he asked to write from home, he meant Rowan Oak. They called and sure enough, Faulkner was in Mississippi, proving what he wrote for The Paris Review in 1956: “An artist is a creature driven by demons. He don’t know why they choose him and he’s usually too busy to wonder why. He is completely amoral in that he will rob, borrow, beg, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done.”

Faulkner’s life was marked by excesses—his concentration on his work, his home, his alcohol consumption (he did not drink while writing but often binged afterward). He won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in both 1955 and posthumously in 1963, and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for his body of work in 1949. In his acceptance speech he remarked, “I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work—a life’s work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before. So this award is only mine in trust.” Hear a clip of his acceptance speech here.

Faulkner’s techniques, including his exploration of stream-of-consciousness writing, his invented verbiage, and his convoluted timelines, have earned him a permanent place near the top of the Southern literary tradition. Flannery O’Connor, another celebrated Southern author, stated that “the presence alone of Faulkner in our midst makes a great difference in what the writer can and cannot permit himself to do. Nobody wants his mule and wagon stalled on the same track the Dixie Limited is roaring down.”

For all kinds of great Faulkner resources, visit William Faulkner on the Web, hosted by the University of Mississippi.

“William Faulkner’s Hollywood Odyssey,” by John Maroney about Faulkner’s screenwriting days, was published in Garden and Gun magazine in 2014. Read it here.

Comments Off on William Faulkner Intro

Filed under AP Literature

Mapping the Seven Deadly Sins

 

sinmaps

Now that we have completed our review of the Seven Deadly Sins and the Seven Heavenly Virtues in preparation for our study of Chaucer, it’s time to apply what we’ve learned to current events.  Consider the information about each sin and its corresponding virtue. Then review the map indicating the saintly vs. sinful areas of the country. After reviewing all the maps, your task is to write a short paper integrating the information from the presentation into your future life. Your paper should answer these questions:

1. Based on the information, which state/area of the country would you choose to establish your family? Give reasons why this area would be a good place to raise a family.

2. Based on the information, which state/area of the country would you avoid when selecting a place to settle down? Explain your reasoning, again by using specifics from the presentation and the maps.

You don’t necessarily have to choose a gold area–what benefit is there to raising children in an area that presents more of a challenge? Consider also how you might overcome the influence of a particular sin. Remember that gray areas on the map don’t mean the sin isn’t present; it just means that area has an average distribution of the sin compared to the country as a whole. Clickable maps that can be enlarged for detail may be found here.

Your completed paper, which may be handwritten (2 full pages) or typed (1 page), is due when you arrive in class Friday, November 7.

 

 

Comments Off on Mapping the Seven Deadly Sins

Filed under Honors IV

“The Lady of Shalott”

shalott

In the Victorian period of the late 19th century, classical themes and topics enjoyed a revival. One of the most popular sources of inspiration were the tales of King Arthur and the knights of Camelot. Sir Walter Scott’s Idylls of the King re-told many of these stories. Scott’s works were wildly popular, so it’s no surprise that characters from Arthurian legend emerged in many artworks of the time, like this painting, John William Waterhouse’s “The Lady of Shalott.” The painting depicts the Lady’s final journey down the river as she abandons her tower on the Isle of Shalott for love. It is her unrequited love for Lancelot and her urge to join him in Camelot that brings down the curse that ends ultimately in her death. Notice how in the painting she has brought with her the tapestry that she was weaving in the tower, a sad remembrance of her shadowed life.

Tennyson’s poem echoes the classical medieval ballad in its use of repetitive words and phrases (“Shalott” and “Camelot”), the inclusion of a story of destruction (the Lady’s life and death), a domestic issue (by choosing love, the Lady seals her fate), and a supernatural element (the curse).

Neo-Celtic musician Loreena McKennitt set the words of Tennyson’s poem to original music, using instrumentation and style that would not have felt out of place in the Victorian era. The video below incorporates the words of the poem with artworks from the period depicting the Lady, her chosen knight (Lancelot), and her doom.

Comments Off on “The Lady of Shalott”

Filed under Honors IV