Chapter 5 Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights

It has been a hundred years since Charlotte Bronte was born, and she has now become the center of so many legends, loves and literatures. However, in these hundred years, she lived only thirty-nine years.It is inconceivable that the legends about her would have been different if she had lived to the lifespan of an ordinary human being.She would, perhaps, like some of her contemporaries, be a regular encounter in London or elsewhere, the subject of innumerable pictures and anecdotes, the author of many novels (and possibly memoirs), and when she was gone , we bask in reminiscences of the illustrious reputation of her middle age.She may live a prosperous life and have a smooth sailing.However, it is not.When we think of her, we cannot but think of someone whose fortunes have passed in our modern world; we have to look back to the previous 1950s and think of a remote vicarage in the wild Yorkshire Moors.In the vicarage, in that wild swamp, wretched and alone, she was forever destitute and exuberant.

As these circumstances affected her character, it is probable that they also left their traces in her work.We imagine that a novelist must build up the structure of his novel out of many very impermanent materials, which at first give it a sense of reality, but which in the end weigh it down with useless waste.When we turned again, we could not suppress the suspicion that we would find that the world of her imagination was as old, mid-Victorian, and out-of-fashion as the wild vicarage, where nothing but curiosity Only the pious will set foot in it, and only the pious will preserve it.We opened it with such a mood, and after reading only two pages, all doubts were wiped from our minds.

"The folds of the scarlet curtain blocked my view to the right; the bright pane of glass to the left protected me but could not separate me from that gloomy November day. As I page by page Flipping through my book, I often stop to think about the scene of that winter afternoon. In the distance is a vast expanse of white clouds; near by are wet grass and windswept shrubs, endless rain in a long gust of wind Flying past the wail." Nothing is more impermanent than the wild swamp itself, nothing more fashionable than the "long howl of the wind."And nothing is more short-lived than this state of excitement.It prompts us to read entire works in a hurry, without giving us time to speculate or take our eyes off the page.We are so engrossed that if someone moves around the room, his actions seem to take place not in the room but in distant Yorkshire.The author takes us by the hand, forces us to follow her path, forces us to see what she sees, and she never leaves us, or makes us forget her.At last we are basking in the genius, passion and righteous indignation of Charlotte Bronte.Unusual faces, well-formed figures, and eccentric features pass before us; yet it is through her eyes that we see them.Once she's gone, we'll never find them again.Thinking of Rochester, we have to think of Jane Eyre.Thinking of the wild swamp, Jane Eyre came to our eyes again.Think of the parlor, even those "white rugs that seemed to be stamped with garlands of brightly colored flowers", that "pale and white Parisian mantelpiece" inlaid with bohemian glass friezes of "ruby color" splendor , and the “mixed colors of snow and fire” in the room—what would all this be without Jane Eyre?

As a character, Jane Eyre's flaws are not hard to find.She was always governess and always in love, a serious limitation in a world where, after all, most people were neither teachers nor lovers.Compared with these limitations of the character of Jane Eyre, a character in a Jane Austen or a Tolstoy will present many, many different aspects.They live and complicate themselves by their influence on the many different characters who truly reflect them.Whether their creators guard them or not, they go about, and the world they live in seems to us, now that they have made it, a separate world that we ourselves can visit.Thomas Hardy is closer to Charlotte Bronte in the power of his personality and the narrowness of his vision.However, their differences in other respects are enormous.When we read "Jude the Obscure," we don't rush through it, we meditate, we leave the text, drift away with branching threads of thought, and build a sense of reality around the characters. An atmosphere of questioning and suggestion, of which they are often unaware.Since they are simple and unsophisticated farmers, we have to let them face fate and the most connotative questions. As a result, in a Hardy novel, the most important characters often seem to be those who have no names and no surnames. people.Charlotte Bronte had nothing to do with this peculiar faculty, this curiosity of reasoning.She does not attempt to solve the problems of life; she is not even aware of the existence of such problems; and all her powers, all the more intense by being repressed, are poured into this decisive statement: "I love" , "I hate", "I suffer".

Writers who are self-centered and self-limiting have a strength to reject the broader, tolerant conception.Their impressions, bound tightly between the narrow walls, are deeply stamped.Everything that comes out of their minds bears their stamp.They learn little from other writers, and what they adopt they cannot assimilate.It seems that both Hardy and Charlotte Brontë seem to have built their style on a prim and cultivated journalism.The main ingredient of their prose is clumsy and unruly.Yet, by painstaking labor and the most obstinate unity, they weighed every thought until it conquered the word, and made it one with itself, and they forged for themselves a prose, and it has a peculiar beauty, strength, and agility.Charlotte Brontë, at least, has not benefited from extensive reading.She never learned the fluency of a professional writer, or the ability to pile and manipulate words at will.She wrote: "I could never be at ease with a strong, thoughtful, debonair mind, male or female." This seems likely to be the work of a leading writer for a provincial magazine; But she mustered her fire, increased her speed, and then said in her own authoritative voice: "Until I've passed the perimeter of traditional reservations, crossed the threshold of self-confidence, by their inner fire Earn a place." There she sat, and it was the red, flickering light of that inner fire that illuminated the pages of her book.In other words, we do not read Charlotte Brontë for her meticulous observation of characters—her characters are animated and crude; not for the comedy in her books—her books are Harsh, rough; nor for her philosophic views on life--hers were but those of a country parson's daughter; we read her for its poetry.Perhaps this is true of all those writers who have the same irresistible personality as hers, and it turns out that they, as we say in real everyday life, simply open the door and make their presence felt, and they win People's goodwill.There is in them some untamed, ferocious and terrible power, ever at war with the accepted order of things; which makes them desire to create something at once, rather than wait patiently on the sidelines.It is this ardor to create, which resists some dark shadows and other minor obstacles, and detours away from the everyday behavior of common men, and binds itself to their more inexpressible passions. alliance.It makes them poets, or, if they prefer to write in prose, makes them intolerant of its limitations.It is for this reason that sisters Emily and Charlotte always turn to nature.They both felt the need for some stronger symbol, which could express more than words or deeds the great, latent passions of human nature.Charlotte's best novel, Villetti, ends with a description of a storm. "The night is low and the sky is dark—a broken ship sails from the west, and the clouds change into various strange shapes." This is how she used nature to describe a state of mind that cannot be expressed enough.However, neither of the sisters observed nature so accurately as Dorothy Wordsworth, nor described it so delicately as Tennyson.They seize those aspects of the earth that are closest to their own feelings or to those they ascribe to the characters in their books, so that their winds and rains, swamps, and lovely summer skies are not meant to embellish a dry page or to express the author's Ornaments of observation—they keep that mood going, show the meaning of the work.

The meaning of a work often does not lie in what happened or said, but in a certain connection between things that are different in themselves and the author. Therefore, this meaning must be difficult to grasp.This is especially true of writers like the Bronte sisters.This is a poetic writer whose meaning is inseparable from the words she uses, and the meaning itself is more an emotion than a unique observation.is a harder work to understand than because Emily is a greater poet than Charlotte.When Charlotte writes, she pours out eloquently, gorgeously, passionately: "I love," "I hate," "I suffer."Her experience, though more intense, is on the same level as our own.However, there is no such "I" in the book.There are no governesses.There is also no master who employs teachers.There is love, but it is not love between man and woman.Emily was excited by some broader idea.What drives her to create is not her own pain or injury.She looked out and saw a world that was in disarray and chaos, and she felt an inner force within her to bring that divided world back together in one work.Throughout the work, there is a sense of great ambition—a battle, a little thwarted but still confident, in which she has more to say through her characters than "I love " or "I hate", but "We, the whole of humanity" and "You, the Eternal Power..." are not finished.It is not surprising that she has a lot to say; what is surprising is that she is completely able to make us feel what she wants to say but does not say.It emerges in Catherine Earnshaw's hesitant words: "If all else is ruined and he stays, I shall go on living; if all else is left and he is ruined , the whole universe would become a very strange place; I would no longer seem to be a part of it." In her words before the dead, this idea burst out again: "I see a A rest that neither earth nor hell can break, I felt a guarantee of an unending, shadowless afterlife--they had passed into the eternal afterlife--where life stretches on infinitely; love has no bounds. Harmony; joy infinitely overflowing." It is this hint of a power that lurks beneath the illusions of human nature and raises them to sublime heights that makes this work stand out among other novels. tall.However, it was not enough for Emily Bronte to write a few lyric poems, to make a cry, to express a belief.She has done all this thoroughly in her poetry, which will probably outlive her novels.But she was a poet and a novelist.She had to take upon herself a more arduous and futile task.She had to face the facts of other ways of being, to fight the mechanism of the objective, to build farms and houses in recognizable form, and to report the speeches of men and women who existed independently of herself.And so we reach the heights of these emotions, not by exaggeration or wild words, but by hearing old songs sung alone by a little girl dangling on a branch, by seeing sheep gnawing in the moor, by hearing The gentle wind blows gently across the grass.Life on that farm, with all its absurd legends, looms before our eyes.She gives us ample opportunity to compare Heathcliff with a real mansion, and Heathcliff with a real person.She allows us to ask: How can there be truth, insight, or those finer sentiments in these men and women who are so different from the people we usually see ourselves?Yet, even as we ask the question, we see in Heathcliff that brother that a sister of genius might see; In literary works, there is no more vivid image of a teenager than him.The same is true of Catherine and her daughter.We say that no woman feels the way they do, or acts the way they do.Still, they are some of the loveliest figures of women in English fiction.Emily seemed to be able to tear apart all the external signs by which we recognize people, and then infuse these unrecognizable transparent phantoms with such a breath of life that they transcend reality.Her power, then, is the rarest of all powers.She can free life from the facts on which it depends; with a few strokes she can shed light on the inner spirit of a face, so that it needs no body; whenever she speaks of wild swamps, we hear the howling wind, Thunder rumbled.