学士学位论文--生态批评视域中的《呼啸山庄》.doc

中图分类号：I106.4
学号：

南阳师范学院

本科毕业论文

论文题目：
生态批评视域中的《呼啸山庄》
作 者：

指导教师：

学 院：
外 国 语 学 院
专 业：
英 语
班 级：

二〇一三 年 三 月

生态批评视域中的《呼啸山庄》

南阳师范学院
外国语学院
英语专业
申请文学学士学位
毕业论文

作 者：

指导教师：

Wuthering Heights from Eco-critical Perspective

A Thesis Submitted to
English Department,
School of Foreign Languages,
Nanyang Normal University
in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements
for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts

By

Supervisor：

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank all those who have given me their generous help, commitment and enthusiasm, which have been the major driving force to complete the current paper. Especially I would like to take this chance to express my sincere gratitude to my supervisor, , who is my supervisor as well as an excellent teacher in our Foreign Language School for her kindly assistance and valuable suggestions during the process of my thesis writing. Her willingness to give her time so generously has been very much appreciated.
My gratitude also extends to my classmates and peer friends, for their encouragement and support for the completion of this thesis.

摘 要

艾米莉·勃朗特是英国维多利亚时期一位杰出的作家，她的杰作《呼啸山庄》被公认为英国最杰出的小说之一。一百多年来，学术界对《呼啸山庄》从不同角度进行过研究。然而，从生态批评角度对其进行研究却寥寥无几。本文从生态批评的角度来解读《呼啸山庄》中自然与文明的关系，二者之间的相互斗争，相互交融，最终达到和谐统一的天人合一状态。
生态批评自诞生以来因其强烈的现实性而大受追捧。本文运用生态批评的方法阐释两家人在斗争中最终走向和谐的过程，反映了回归自然融入自然，人与自然和谐相处，人与人和谐相处的生态哲思。除此之外，精神生态理论认为人的心灵健康是生态平衡的重要因素。没有良好的精神家园，必然会造成大自然的生态平衡。这对当今建设生态文明，建设和谐社会具有一定的启蒙作用。

关键词：《呼啸山庄》；生态批评；自然与文明；回归自然和回归自我；社会生态和精神生态

Abstract

Emily Bronte was a brilliant writer in Victorian Period. Her work, Wuthering Heights, is generally considered a masterpiece that stands outside the mainstream of Victorian Literature. As time passed by, her novel Wuthering Heights, has gained more and more attention. Scholars study it from different views. However, few critics have done from the perspective of Eco-criticism. My thesis tries to apply eco-criticism to analyze the relationship between nature and culture, with elaboration on how their conflicts lead to the loss of selves and how their balance helps bring back the harmony and the modern revelation embodied in this novel.
Since its debut, eco-criticism is popular with critics because it concerns much about reality. According to eco-critical integrity, this thesis holds that in spite of conflict and struggle, nature and civilization can arrive at the harmony through conflicting development, which forcefully attacks the idea maintained by ecological pessimists that nature and civilization could never co-exist harmoniously. That is to say, the novel reflects the idea of returning to nature and integrating with nature, and keeping a harmonious relationship between man and nature. Otherwise, ecologists hold that man should have a sound mind in order to lead a well-balanced life. Meanwhile, the upsetting of spiritual balance will lead to the unbalancing of the whole ecology, which has the enlightening and profound significance for constructing a harmonious society.
Key Words: Wuthering Heights; Eco-criticism; nature and civilization; returning to nature; social and spiritual ecology
Contents

Acknowledgements I
摘要 II
Abstract III
Contents V
1. Introduction 1
1.1 Literature Review and the Current Studies 1
1.2 Eco-criticism 2
2. Confliction between Nature and Culture 3
2.1 The Symbol of the Wilderness 3
2.2 Description of the Wilderness that Reflects the Confliction between Nature and Culture 5
2.3 Nature as Wuthering Heights 5
2.4 Culture as Thrshcross Grange 7
3. The Distorted Relationships in Wuthering Heights: The Crisis of Social Ecology 8
3.1 Alienation 8
3.2 The Loss of Self: the Crisis of Spiritual Ecology 9
3.2.1 Catherine’s Identification with Nature 10
3.2.2 Catherine’s Betrayal of Her Identification 11
4. Rehabilitation through Returning to Nature 13
4.1 Heathcliff’s and Catherine’s Eventual Return to Nature 13
4.2 The Second Generation’s Identification with Nature 14
4.3 Return to Nature: The Way Out for Civilization 15
Conclusion 18
Bibliography 20

VII

1. Introduction
1.1 Literature Review and the Current Studies
Emily Bronte is remembered and extolled chiefly as the author of one novel, Wuthering Heights, which is regarded as one of the greatest masterpieces in the world literature. It is well-known that since “Emily heat” and “Wuthering Heights doctrines” formed in the twentieth century, new interpretations of Emily and Wuthering Heights have come into a continuous stream. The Belgian essayist and poet, Maeterinck, says Emily is a woman who is expert in meditation and she is highly skilled in experiencing and observing what she has seen and heard. She has never fallen in love with anyone but she has already understood love and talked about it and got into its most incredible myth. (Cecil, 2002:139)
At that time many people judged this novel from the theme, the characters, the plot and the motif, such as these common factors. It involves a lot of themes to talk: passion, love, clash of elemental forces, the clash of economic interest and social classes, the striving for transcendence, the abusive patriarch and patriarchal family, study of childhood and the family, the effects of intense suffering, self-imposed of self-generated confinement and escape, displacement, dispossession, and exile, communication and understanding, the fall.
The universe is made up of two opposite forces, storm and calm. Wuthering Heights and the Earnshaws represent the storm; while Thrushross Grange and the Lintons, the calm. Catherine and Herthcliff are elemental creatures of the storm. That is David Cecil’s theory---a principle of calm and storm. The single principle that ultimately directs them sooner or later imposes equilibrium.
His interpretations trying to prove the novel had a unified structure. Surveying these myriad efforts, J. Hills Miller challenged the assumption that the novel presents a unified, coherent, single meaning: The secret truth about Wuthering Heights, rather, is that there is no secret truth which criticism might formulate in this way… It leaves something important still unaccounted for… The text is over-rich.”(Miller, 1998:204)
Perhaps F.R. Leavis penned the most quoted modern interpretation of Wuthering Heights when he excluded it from the great tradition of the English novel because it was a “sport,” i.e., had no meaningful connection to fiction which preceded it of influence on fiction which followed it. (Leavis, 1988:132)
1.2 Eco-criticism as A Literary Approach
Eco-criticism is one of the most recent interdisciplinary fields that have emerged in literary and cultural studies. It began in the 1970s, burgeoned in the late 1990s and is still experiencing its booming development at present. Stressing the linkage between the literary texts and the natural world, or environment, it is developed against the background of the increasingly severe environmental crisis and the development of global movement of Environmentalism.
Due to its broad scope of inquiry and vision, Eco-criticism cannot be limited to one single methodology, but rather is required to be integrated with other literary theories and disciplines. For instance, while interpreting the texts, Eco-criticism often applies to the close reading approach of new criticism. With the appearance and formation of Eco-criticism, it is possible to see the book in the light of the new theory. It not only offers new and elaborates frameworks in which the book might be discussed, but also raises questions about the very motivations that have driven critics of earlier decades to write so persistently about the novel.
Eco-criticism emerges as a response to a growing worldwide environmental pressure and the need for humanistic understanding of our relationships with the natural world. Because of this unprecedented ecological crisis, many disciplines of humanities, such as history, philosophy, law, sociology, and even religion, have been felt by scholars of literature, who have realized the necessity and importance of environmental concern and revising the critical focus of their studies. The word “eco-criticism” traces back to William Rueckert’s 1978 essay “Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Eco-criticism” and apparently lay dormant in critical vocabulary until the 1989 Western Literature Association meeting, when Cheryll Glotfelty not only revived the term but urged its adoption to refer to the diffuse critical field that heretofore had been known as “the study of nature writing.” Cheryll’s call for an “eco-criticism” was immediately seconded at that same WLA meeting by Glen Love in his Past President’s speech, entitled “Revaluing Nature: Toward an Ecological Literary Criticism”. Since that meeting in 1989, the term “eco-criticism” has bloomed in usage.

2. Confliction between Nature and Culture
2.1 The Symbol of the Wilderness
The word “wilderness” derives from the Anglo-Saxon “wilddeoren”: where “deoren” exists beyond the boundaries of cultivation. So the useful part is “wild” which has been endowed with different meanings. In the course of human’s conquering nature, wilderness gradually loses self-discipline and its value. Particularly, with the roaring of anthropocentrism, wilderness is enduring disaggregation and reference being read. Generally speaking, the symbolic idea of wilderness presents two complex archetypes: the result of human’s moral desolation and spiritual degenerateness, and the place of moral returning and spiritual purifying. In literary history, it is regarded as the shadow of civilization connecting with evil as well as the synonymy of civilization relating to spiritual purifying, which is tinted with different cultural colors. The wilderness is also associated with Satan. In Judaco-Christian conception, wilderness combines trial and danger with freedom redemption and purity; and furthermore, is the place nearer to God. American environmentalist Nash Roderick argues that wilderness is not only the title for desert and droughty places, but also the symbol of moral evil; as a result that God usually chastises disobeyed and evil people in wilderness.
About the idea of wilderness, Greg Garrard, an eco-critic, in his book Eco-criticism, wrote: The idea of wilderness, signifying nature in a state uncontaminated by civilization, is the most potent construction of nature available to New World Environmentalism. It is a construction mobilized to protect particular habitats and species, and is seen as a place for the reinvigoration of those tired of the moral and material pollution of the city. The wilderness question is also central to eco-criticism’s challenge to the status quo of literary and cultural studies. In that it does not share the predominantly social concerns of the traditional humanities. (Garrard: 59)
The Green Studies Reader, Laurence Coupe pointed out:
Wilderness doesn’t mean chaos; it “alludes to a process of self-organization that generate systems and organisms, all of which are within the constraints of and constitute components of larger systems that again are wild, such as a major ecosystem”(Laurence Coupe 127). Eco-critics stand by the concern that wilderness is the essence of nature, and is very essential to man, especially to his spirit.
2.2 Description of the Wilderness that Reflects the Confliction between Nature and Culture
A symbolic image means concrete representation, as in art, literature, that is expressive or evocative of something else, a personification of something specified. In this novel Wuthering Heights, nature becomes one of the indispensable elements in symbolism-symbolic image. With regard to the power of nature, it “plays a much larger part in Emily Bronte’s book than it does in most novelists.” “Emily often uses symbolism to express the enormous serene passion instead of the simple words and actions since they fail to powerfully convey it. One of Emily’s writing craft is that nature images function as symbols to show the characters’ psychological activities. Emily describes the natural images as if they can communicate with people and as if they have feelings and sagacity like human beings. Nature has become the symbol of characters. Especially in the confliction between nature and culture, it implies in this symbol: wilderness.
2.3 Nature as Wuthering Heights
In Emily Bronte novel Wuthering Heights, there are two places where virtually the characters all the actions take place. From the symbolic description of the settings, the readers can learn clearly the characteristics of the owners of the two houses and foresee the hideous conflicts between the two families. These two places, Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange differ greatly in appearance and mood. These differences reflect the universal conflict between storms and calm that Emily Bronte develops it as the theme in her novel Wuthering Heights. Emily associates the symbolic settings with the novel’s characters. And the meaning and the suggestiveness of these symbolic settings increase the readers’ understanding of the theme. Wuthering Heights is always in a state of storminess while Thrushcross Grange always seems calm. David Cecil maintains that, “On the one hand what may be called the principle of storm—of the harsh, the ruthless the wild, and the dynamic; and on the other the principle of calm—of the gentle, the merciful, the passive and the tame.”
Wuthering Heights has the same mood as Heathcliff and Catherine. The symbolic setting accords with their intrinsic natures. The title of the book Wuthering Heights involves the meaning, “Wuthering may be viewed as a premonitory indication of the mysterious happenings to be experiences by those inhabiting the edifice.” (p.2). It’s main characteristic is to expose to the power of the wind, which makes it appear fortress-like. The name of the place itself is symbolic of his nature. Heathcliff is described as a storm, living as he does in the tumult of a tempest. The Heights and its surroundings depict the coldness, darkness, and evil associated with Hell. This parallels Heathcliff: In addition, the author depicts specific parts of the house as analogues to Heathcliff’s face. Emily Bronte describes the windows of the Heights as “deeply set in the wall.” Similarly, Heathcliff has deep-set dark eyes. This symbolizes that Heathcliff has the very spirit of Wuthering Heights---the cold, dark, wild dismal dwelling.
2.4 Culture as Thrshcross Grange
“Wuthering Heights