Naslov
Space and Landscape in Emily Brontë's “Wuthering Heights” and George Sand's “Mauprat”

Autori
Šepić, Tatjana

Izvornik
The Confidential Clerk (2454-6100) 4 (2018); 119-139

Vrsta, podvrsta i kategorija rada
Radovi u časopisima, članak, znanstveni

Ključne riječi
space/landscape, Romantic/female aesthetics, nature/culture, dualism, dialogue/unity of opposites

Sažetak
Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (1847) and George Sand's Mauprat (1837) absorb the common reader, enwrapping her/him in violent, passionate love stories of their main characters. More attentive readers and critics have been enticed by the abundant “material inviting for interpretation” and by coded meanings underlying the surface of literal representations of these two texts. Apart from some similarities in the plot and characters, both novels are structured on the principle of dualism, where themes and motives not only of love and the denial of love, but also of nature/culture, man/woman, cruelty/kindness, speech/muteness, freedom/confinement, heaven/hell, appear as antithetical polarities in dialogue. These contraries do not represent only the principle the characters are shaped on, but also the universe of both texts. In the context of the novels, the real Yorkshire and Berry obtain a metaphorical meaning, where the landscape and the spaces of the houses mirror emotional states and (tormented) souls of their inhabitants. The contrast between Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange is the same as the one between Roche-Mauprat and Sainte-Sévère, namely, a wild, uncontrolled energy of the dark Dionysian world opposed to the tamed and controlled nature, of static and rational characters, the embodiment of the Apollonian order, harmony and perfection. These contraries coexist creating the totality not only of the fictional, but of the real world as well. In Emily Brontë's and George Sand's narratives, the function of nature is representational and semantic, metonymic and metaphorical at the same time, which is typical for the Romantic period. Only here the traditional roles are changed, male characters (Heathcliff, Hareton, Bernard) take the place of nature, instinct and irrationality, usually associated with the female principle, while heroines (Edmée, Catherine, Isabella and partly Catherine Earnshaw) embody reason, culture and are capable of verbalizing emotions, all typically male characteristics. The dual image of the book and education, together with the recurring words, images related to nature/animals or hell, fire, damnation used as metaphors for human characteristics, frailty or moral deficiency, are all closely connected with the two opposing spaces of the Heights and the Grange, Roche-Mauprat and the chateau of Sainte-Sévère. Both novels can be read as the confluence of their authors' personal experience and the Romantic aesthetics, creating a vision of the world from the female perspective, revising the traditional binary structures which have influenced the Western thought since the age of Antiquity. On the level of landscape, and space in general, the writers' poetic syncretism combines representational and metaphorical function to show antithetical polarities of “nature” and “culture” in dialogue and exchange.

Izvorni jezik
Engleski

Znanstvena područja
Filologija

POVEZANOST RADA