I suppose the most interesting thing I learned about Victorian Literature this semester was just how emotional it can be. I had already read Middlemarch prior, and was touched at the emotion and sentiment risen in that book, but had not assumed it to be typical of Victorian literature. But it turned out to be quite typical. Naturally, my favorite book was Wuthering Heights as it bartered most strongly in this emotion. Emily Bronte was able to write deep and meaningful characters that both spoke to a greater emotional depth, one that retains a certain primitive nature, and to the facade each of us wears to mask or convert our emotions into socially normative behaviors. Charles Dickens too worked in this emotional sphere. Great Expectations fundamentally revolved around the affective power of hope, and he noted both the power of fulfillment and disillusionment in terms of achieving goals (this referring strictly to material goals). I find all this interesting as well, that the Victorian writers played so heavily within emotional works, especially since their age was one of nascent mechanical growth. The streets of London were awash with the poor and the needy, and the air was black with the smog of factories. Yet all of this isn’t to say that the authors we read ignored this, rather they knew the importance of emotional effect in dealing with these issues. Their return to the natural and easily accessible offered the best way to begin to form frameworks for how to understand the change that was sure to come. So then, the most interesting thing I learned about Victorian literature was the power of its powerful emotion and its touchingly refined sentimentality.

I’ve touched on the concept of space in Victorian England before, but the fact that it keeps coming up is quite interesting. In this case, Wuthering Heights and Reuben Sachs are both books that are emblematic of fairly different spaces in Victorian England, especially in contrast to the era’s focus on the urban center of London. In saying the usual focus is on London, I mean that the focus is on a certain strand of London, which is a London read through pure class delineation. Wuthering Heights is not in London, but it is a book that goes further than the pure class analysis that seemed so popular in Victorian England. Where Wuthering Heights separates itself is in the racial ambiguity of Heathcliff, which is not a minor factor, but a visual note that consistently pops up within the characters. I won’t go so far as to say the book takes an intersectional lens on Victorian class structures, but it does make the reader aware that class is experienced or viewed differently when race and ethnicity are brought into the mix. Likewise, Reuben Sachs is a book that talks about the Jewish population in London at the time. I think the book does deal with class as a question, but it is clear that the book is also asking what it means to be Jewish in Victorian England, and more than that, what it means to be separate from the gentile hierarchy in Victorian England. Yet the analysis the book is undertaking is far more complex, for while all the characters are Jewish, all of the characters are distinct. This is better read to in light of the fact that Amy Levy is writing against George Eliot’s depiction of Jewish people in Daniel Deronda. In contextualizing with that, Levy is clearly writing a book that is attempting to create a Jewish literary space that is accurate, reflective, and not created from an outside perspective. All in all then, each of these two books attempts to creating a sort of space for their characters to operate earnestly and accurately.

Between these two texts, there is the notion that to love something is to necessitate a killing of that something. And in both cases, I cannot help but wonder if the love causing death is because the love is always unattainable. Heathcliff is not the direct cause of his love’s death, but he does take part in it, and in especial attention to his lament whence he finds her dead, it seems his love originates, and the death of his love, allows him to turn Catherine into his ideal. He can now say (since she is dead and voiceless) that she was his cure, and he will never be adequately contradicted on this notion. Likewise, the subject of Wilde’s poem kills his wife, whom Wilde repeatedly stated he loved, in what to me seems the interest of preservation. Love is a labor, and Wilde notes this, and it is far easier to kill a love, to keep it safe and idealized, than to recognize that whole and wholly yielding love is but a fantasy. This interpretation for Wilde’s poem is reaffirmed by the continual reference to Christian imagery, and with that reference, Wilde is juxtaposing human love (which is weak and flawed) with God’s love or the love of God (which is full and perfect). However, I do not read this as Wilde supporting Christianity, but rather using that Christian conceptualization of love as a cultural touchpoint for the grander message he is attempting to convey.

While everything about Ms. Havisham is greatly interesting, nothing could be more fascinating about her than the clocks that surround her. These clocks are not ticking, but rather, are stuck on a specific time (8:40), which would be precisely when she was left at the altar. The pause is literally representative that her wedding never happened, but even presently, Ms. Havisham’s wedding has never happened. She is quite literally stuck in the moment before her wedding, and she thus acts as both a bride and not a bride, and in that contradiction, she is neither. Simply put, the ritual that would have caused her title to change from Ms. to Mrs. never happened, and the aberrance of the ritual that would have kept her Ms. never happened either. She exists caught between those two facts. All of this is not unlike Heathcliff, who after Catherine’s death exists between both life and death. However, Heathcliff is more proactive than Ms. Havisham as he recognizes he is caught in a liminal space, and seeks to do everything he can to complete the ritual of his love, even going so far as to unearth Catherine’s body. But even further than that, Heathcliff effectively kills himself so that he may escape the torturous liminality he exists in, that of being unable to fulfill his love for Catherine and also being unable to dispel his love for Catherine. Liminality exists definitively within both of these books, and it will be interesting to see how Ms. Havisham deals with her own precarious standing in contrast to how Heathcliff dealt with his.

One part of Great Expectations that I found interesting was Pip and his family’s experience with the convicts, and specifically, Pip feeding the convict. Of course, Pip feeding the convict was done out of fear, but when the convict is being led off and admits he stole the food, Pip’s father sympathetically notes that Pip does the right thing in feeding him. To me, this denotes a communal safety net in the less fortunate, a mutual network of sustenance that has to be maintained, no matter who desires it, because the government, or any other larger social entity, is not doing it for them. Herein comes England in 1819, and specifically, the lines “Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay/ Religion Christless, Godless– a book seal’d/A senate– Time’s worst statute unrepeal’d.” This seems the most apt analysis of England during the Victorian period, for it portrays England as a place that is left without a protector, and moreover, the poor are left without a protector. Because of this then, and since larger social entities have abdicated their responsibility to protect the marginalized or simply chosen not to, the lower classes (Pip and his family) have had to create a social network between other lower class families to create a support system. Interestingly, this social network is not limited, and spans to the class of felons. This is important for two reasons. First, it demonstrates that the social welfare network was not limited, and attempted not to marginalize itself (obviously, this is not true in whole), and second, it demonstrates a certain lack of faith in the legal system. Already, Shelley has underlined the fact that laws are for the most part classed against the poor and this distrust carries on in Pip and his family. As such, the connection here formed is that of the social network Pip and his family symbolize, while also receiving context of why this had to happen from London in 1819.

From the outset of Wuthering Heights, the most interesting event in the beginning chapters was Lockwood’s discovery of Catherine’s diary. However, the fascination lies not in the act, but rather, in how Catherine’s diary is presented. As it stands, the diary was not a typical diary, but a diary that constituted itself to be both a diary and an obscure book (the book’s title hardly matters). On surface level, Catherine’s diary can obviously be interpreted as a meta-reference to how Emily Brontë delivers the narrative of Wuthering Heights, which is that of the frame narrative. To wit, this object is self-referential towards the form of the novel, but it can also offer itself as a meta-object that deals with the content of the novel. To those ends then, the two content-rich narratives are separately that of the implicit and the explicit. The implicit narrative, and the framing narrative, is the socioeconomic system that prevents Catherine and Heathcliff from realizing their romantic ambitions together. This, of course, is not a traditional narrative, but a systemic narrative localized to Victorian England. Yet, the narrative of Catherine and Heathcliff’s romance is a literary narrative, yet, it also retains aspects of a dialectic (albeit a negative one). But why is this an important aspect of the novel to point out, and how does it flesh out the characters? For the first part, this aspect of the novel gains its importance in Catherine’s death, which is helplessly intertwined with her realization that the dual narratives she and Heathcliff operate within are sustained upon absence. That is to say, she has realized that not only will she never meet the societal expectation of the systemic narrative she takes part in, but she will also never fulfill her romantic expectation with Heathcliff. In this realization then, Catherine can be seen as someone who has had both of her guiding narratives fully deconstructed, and cannot stand the essential nothingness of each of the narratives she has been forced into. Thus, the meta-object of the novel opens up the necessary steps to understand this conclusion. To wit, the meta-object breaks down with Heathcliff, and in most senses, was never there for him. Thus, the breakdown of Catherine, and the unexpected stoppage of her writing their stories in the margins of the systemic narratives, leaves him in a lurch. This lurch comes because he has not yet fully died, in both the physical and philosophical sense. Of course, his narrative with Catherine is dead, but he is still left with the overarching systemic narrative that ripped him and Catherine apart. It follows then, that this narrative is the one he fully rebels against. His anger and diabolic machinations reaches to a fever peak in the following chapters of Catherine’s death. Now herein lies a new question, does Heathcliff rebel so earnestly against that systemic narrative because he hates what it perpetrated onto him and Catherine, or does he rebel because it creates an unbreakable bond of hatred (which could be seen as a good thing for the systemic narrative was deeply intertwined with him and Catherine’s personal narrative, and thus, retains a parcel of Catherine herself) between him and that system?