我要一段外国人用英文写的关于对《呼啸山庄》的评论或论文 2000字以上 最好配有中文翻译

我要一段外国人用英文写的关于对《呼啸山庄》的评论或论文 2000字以上 最好配有中文翻译

Analysis of Heathcliff
Wuthering Heights centers around the story of Heathcliff. The first paragraph of the novel provides a vivid physical picture of him, as Lockwood describes how his “black eyes” withdraw suspiciously under his brows at Lockwood’s approach. Nelly’s story begins with his introduction into the Earnshaw family, his vengeful machinations drive the entire plot, and his death ends the book. The desire to understand him and his motivations has kept countless readers engaged in the novel.
Heathcliff, however, defies being understood, and it is difficult for readers to resist seeing what they want or expect to see in him. The novel teases the reader with the possibility that Heathcliff is something other than what he seems—that his cruelty is merely an expression of his frustrated love for Catherine, or that his sinister behaviors serve to conceal the heart of a romantic hero. We expect Heathcliff’s character to contain such a hidden virtue because he resembles a hero in a romance novel. Traditionally, romance novel heroes appear dangerous, brooding, and cold at first, only later to emerge as fiercely devoted and loving. One hundred years before Emily Brontë wrote Wuthering Heights, the notion that “a reformed rake makes the best husband” was already a cliché of romantic literature, and romance novels center around the same cliché to this day.
However, Heathcliff does not reform, and his malevolence proves so great and long-lasting that it cannot be adequately explained even as a desire for revenge against Hindley, Catherine, Edgar, etc. As he himself points out, his abuse of Isabella is purely sadistic, as he amuses himself by seeing how much abuse she can take and still come cringing back for more. Critic Joyce Carol Oates argues that Emily Brontë does the same thing to the reader that Heathcliff does to Isabella, testing to see how many times the reader can be shocked by Heathcliff’s gratuitous violence and still, masochistically, insist on seeing him as a romantic hero.
It is significant that Heathcliff begins his life as a homeless orphan on the streets of Liverpool. When Brontë composed her book, in the 1840s, the English economy was severely depressed, and the conditions of the factory workers in industrial areas like Liverpool were so appalling that the upper and middle classes feared violent revolt. Thus, many of the more affluent members of society beheld these workers with a mixture of sympathy and fear. In literature, the smoky, threatening, miserable factory-towns were often represented in religious terms, and compared to hell. The poet William Blake, writing near the turn of the nineteenth century, speaks of England’s “dark Satanic Mills.” Heathcliff, of course, is frequently compared to a demon by the other characters in the book.
Considering this historical context, Heathcliff seems to embody the anxieties that the book’s upper- and middle-class audience had about the working classes. The reader may easily sympathize with him when he is powerless, as a child tyrannized by Hindley Earnshaw, but he becomes a villain when he acquires power and returns to Wuthering Heights with money and the trappings of a gentleman. This corresponds with the ambivalence the upper classes felt toward the lower classes—the upper classes had charitable impulses toward lower-class citizens when they were miserable, but feared the prospect of the lower classes trying to escape their miserable circumstances by acquiring political, social, cultural, or economic power.
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wuthering heights
“Nature is not merely a reality in which we live, not just the palpable context of our lives, but part of us. We are, in a sense, emanations of Nature, and our relationship to it has the intense and definitive intimacy of heart to body.”
(Lloyd Evans1982, p.121)
It is easy to treat humanity and nature as separate elements but in reality ‘the human presence' is a part of the natural world. But it is both a part and apart. According to Peckham, Romanticism embodies “an approving attitude towards the natural world.” (Peckham 1976, p.12)
The key word here is “approving”. At times, and especially in the case of Wuthering Heights, this approval is merely a nod in the general direction of what is perceived to be Romantic literature's ‘central inspiration.' Wuthering Heights seems to say that those who deny their nature, their ‘human nature' are doomed. Human nature is driven by desires and according to Schopenhauer this desire, or ‘will' as he put it, is “a violent force operating through us, creating desires and passions and provoking us to act.” (Solomon 2002, p.144)
This ‘will', or the lack of its implementation, is also a central theme, if not the theme, of the book. To be human is also to have the ability to design our fates. As Isabella says in her letter “I think the concentrated essence of all the madness in the world took up its abode in my brain the day I linked my fate with theirs!” (Brontë 1964, p.130), the linking of fates can produce madness or in the case of Catherine and Heathcliff, the linking of fates can be something that transcends the ‘natural' world.
The fates of each character of Wuthering Heights are well within their reach, only the matter of whether to take their fates and command them, conflicts. The character of Heathcliff is the driving force of Wuthering Heights and if we take will, desire, passion and the ability to design our own fate to be the driving forces of human nature, indeed what makes us human, then Heathcliff is the most honestly human and most real character of the novel. He also embodies the darkest, most infernal and perhaps repulsive facets of human nature but this dialectic only reinforces Heathcliff's humanity.
If we are to take at face value the notion that Romanticism finds its chief inspiration in the natural world then the setting of Wuthering Heights in the moors of Yorkshire may be no accident of authorial abode. Heathcliff could be said to personify the moors themselves: “an arid wilderness” (Vogler 1968, p.45). Even the name Heathcliff takes two very different features of nature (naturally, heath and cliff) and welds them together. This imagery is undoubtedly in keeping with the Romantic tradition but is misleading in its simplicity. To find where Wuthering Heights falls under the mantle of Romanticism we must look deeper into the terms that define it as a literary and cultural movement.
It is possible to see Romanticism as a reaction to the unfulfilled promises of the revolutions of the late 18th century (Lowy & Sayre 2001, p.16) or in relation to the cultural movement of the Enlightenment which preceded it and “the failure of which Romanticism was a response” (Peckham 1976, p.12). But more specifically, as in the case of Wuthering Heights , we find a sociological examination of “the conflict between bourgeois society and certain human values.” (Lowy & Sayre 2001, p.14) The Lintons and Earnshaws beingthe bourgeoisie and Heathcliff the humanity which opposed them.
The Romantic themes that Brontë explores are evident in what Peckham cites as “Romantic factors: alienation, cultural vandalism, and selfhood, or the distinction between self and role.” (Peckham 1976, p.22)
These factors see Heathcliff described almost completely. From the very moment Heathcliff is introduced he is alienated: “from the very beginning, he bred bad feeling in the house” (Brontë 1964, p.46)
Eventually Heathcliff revels in his own alienation and wreaks his revenge through “cultural vandalism” because as Peckham notes once “selfhood has been es tab lished by alienation…it was impossible for him to redeem himself” (Peckham 1976, p.24-25). It is only through destroying the culture of the families in Wuthering Heights that Heathcliff perceives he can redeem the wrongs perpetrated on him. He quickly revels in his alienation: “I'd not exchange, for a thousand lives, my condition here, for Edgar Linton's at Thrushcross Grange – not if I might have the privilege of flinging Joseph off the highest gable, and painting the house-front with Hindley's blood!” (Brontë 1964, p.54)
Here we see Heathcliff attempting to assert his selfhood through alienation, in other words “to maintain the sense of otherness and also to authenticate that sense” (Peckham 1976, p.45)
Nowhere is Heathcliff's set apart more clearly than in his relationship with Hindley. Hindley sees him as a “usurper” (Brontë 1964, p.46) and grows bitter at his presence (Brontë 1964, p.46) and once Mr Earnshaw dies, relegates Heathcliff to the role of a mere servant, belittling him at every opportunity and inadvertently sowing the seeds of his own doom and of those with whom he links his fate (Brontë 1964, Ch. VII).
Until this point in the novel Heathcliff's redemption could have been realised in the cosy apartments of Wuthering Heights itself. But Heathcliff's treatment and Catherine's decision to marry Edgar Linton result in a complete renunciation of any of the values he might have even had a notion to adhere to. (Brontë 1964, p.59) His transformation from mere outsider to absolute nemesis is complete:
“I'm trying to settle how I shall pay Hindley back. I don't care how long I wait, if I can only do it at last…
“For shame Heathcliff!” said I. “It is for God to punish wicked people; we should learn to forgive.”
“No, God won't have the satisfaction that I shall.” (Brontë 1964, p.64)
Heathcliff's vow is exemplification of Schopenhauer's theory of the will beinga “violent force…forcing us to act.” (Solomon 2002, p.144) It is difficult not to sympathise with Heathcliff in the sense of fair play and so called ‘humanity'. Other than that, this episode elicits sympathy via another recognised feature of Romanticism, that of “the rebel as an heroic figure.” (Peckham 1976, p.68)
All cultural movements need their archetypal heroes, those that embody the absolute spirit of an age orgenre, to hold up as examples of or a mould in which to pour their ideals. In the case of Romanticism, being ideologically rooted in the world of imagination and mythology, (McCredden 1997, p.1) it follows that it would take its heroic figures from that tradition. For the Romantics this resulted in the “conversion of Satan from a villain into a hero.” (Peckham 1976, p.68)
This is especially pertinent in examining Heathcliff. Throughout Wuthering Heights Heathcliff is referred to variously as “an imp of Satan” (Brontë 1964, p.47) and “that devil Heathcliff” (Brontë 1964, p.239) Isabella asks “is he a devil?” (Brontë 1964, p.124) and Nelly Dean describes his eyes as “devil's spies.” (Brontë 1964, p.60) Also, Heathcliff's banishment from Wuthering Heights mirrors that of Lucifer being demoted, disgraced and cast from heaven (Isaiah 14:12 -15).
The comparisons between Heathcliff and Satan can be found at even more fundamental levels. For example, the Hebrew root of the word Satan ‘stn' means “one who opposes, obstructs, or acts as adversary” (Pagels 1995, p.39) or consider “the Greek term diabolos, later translated “devil,” literally means “one who throws something across one's path.” (Pagels 1995, p.39) Both these definitions are eerily evocative of Heathcliff's adversarial role.
Further Satanic comparisons can be found in Heathcliff but in a humanist sense rather than a mythological one. Satanism as a philosophy is essentially humanism, that is: a philosophy which adheres to human or earthly values rather than spiritual ones. At its core, Satanism espouses an indulgence in “natural desires. ” (La Vey 1969, p.81) and an encouragement to “act upon your natural instincts” (La Vey 1969, p.53). Heathcliff is nothing if not driven by “natural desires.” As if to complete the inversion of values set in motion by the conversion of Satan from villain to hero, a tenet of Satanism is to “let no wrong go undressed” (La Vey 1969, p.47) This encapsulates Heathcliff's modus operandi almost wholeheartedly.
To understand how Heathcliff can be elevated to heroic, or even a more resolutely human status by comparison with a traditionally evil and despicable figure we must recognise that Satan (and indeed Satanism) is a human creation. The devil and the nature of evil are a necessary component by which we measure what it is to be human; they are what we pit our better qualities against togauge the strength of what we see as ‘good'. Maybe what we see in characters such as Satan and Heathcliff is a part of ourselves that we find uncomfortable to acknowledge; they “express qualities that go beyond what we ordinarily recognise as human.” (Pagels 1995, p.xvii)
It may be difficult to recognise Heathcliff's human nature in the legacy of brutality left by his saga of revenge. But human nature is not as pretty as some would have you believe. Furthermore, the Lintons and the Earnshaws are not model characters either. Their prejudices, petulance, expedience and cowardice are hardly admirable qualities. They are indeed less deservingof our sympathies than Heathcliff, for the cold and rigid codes of a society which they perpetuate affords Heathcliff the means by which to destroy them. By condemning Heathcliff as an amoral and nihilistically destructive character we may fail to recognise “the most intimate enemy of all – the enemy we call our own self” (Pagels 1995, p. 173)