One connection I found particularly interesting this week is between Wilde’s thoughts on sorrow and Tennyson’s thoughts on grief. Wilde’s thoughts on sorrow as “one very long moment” in which “we can only record its moods” sounds strikingly similar to what Tennyson seems to do in “In Memoriam”. Recording his own moods in sorrow. I find this quite interesting, and wonder what prompted Wilde to write his thoughts on Sorrow.

I have seen many people comparing Heathcliff and Pip in their connection posts for this week, particularly their shared experience of pining over a woman who doesn’t love them back. I’d like to point out a few differences between how the two react in these circumstances, however. When Heathcliff is faced with the loss of Catherine, in this case to death, he becomes an even more miserable man than he was before, his first words on the matter of her death are essentially the Victorian equivalent of “good riddance”, and later, when faced with the prospect of his own death, he requests to be buried next to her, knowing full well that she would likely object, were she not dead. In Pip’s case, when faced with the loss of Estella, not to death, but to another man, his reaction, while not entirely healthy, is in my opinion at least, entirely preferable to Heathcliff’s. He has one last argument with Estella about the man she’s marrying, goes on a bit of a rant about how she is a part of his identity (another all too obvious parallel to Withering Heights), and then leaves, telling her that he will remember her fondly, even after this, only associating her with the good. In the time after this, he seems to take every precaution to avoid hearing of her but doesn’t speak ill of her in any way. In addition, he forgives Miss Havisham for the part she played in driving Estella away from him, and even attempts to comfort her. Then only minutes later, ends up saving her life, and calling for medical attention when she catches fire. With these massive distinctions in Pip and Heathcliff’s reaction to finding the one they loved suddenly beyond their reach, I think it”s unfair to compare Heathcliff and Pip as if their actions are one in the same, as Pip clearly has the moral high ground here, not just between him and Heathcliff, but just in general

One similarity I noticed when reading through Great Expectations is that the way Mrs Joe Christmas is described is very indicative of the overall attitude towards both women and the lower class in Victorian England that we’ve talked about in the past. One of the first paragraphs of the chapter is a slight joke about her social status and situation, stating that her position as a blacksmith’s wife is the same thing as “a slave with her apron never off”. This heavily reminds me of the way Carlyle spoke of the ‘lowly black woman’ in the passage of his we discussed far earlier in the semester. One interesting difference I see however, is that while Carlyle seems to look on in pity and admiration at the lower class woman he discusses, Dickens, or more accurately Pip, seems to do no such thing, playing her misfortune off for laughs.

One connection that stood out to me when reading this weekends assigned works was the familiar application of reason and scientific process to religion, seen earlier with Carlyle and again with Huxley. The difference is that Huxley uses these devices to come to the conclusion that the teachings of Christianity are in no way an irrefutable certainty, where as Carlyle uses these devices to work in tandem with the teachings of Christianity in order to come up with his own worldview.

One character in “Wuthering Heights” I find particularly interesting is Mrs Heathcliff, the widow. Her introduction in chapter 2 makes her out to be particularly cold and rude. But what I find fascinating about her, and what I believe connects her to the texts of Martineau that we read last week, is her refusal to acquiesce in the face of domineering males. Mrs Heathcliff is a widow, and a young one at that, and yet, rather than spend her days feeling sorry for herself or attempting to remarry, she instead lives in the home of her father-in-law. When our narrator, Lockwood, attempts to help her with the slightest of house chores, she turns upon him viciously, scolding him, and asserting her independence. Indeed, it appears as if her desire not to be dominated by her male peers goes so far that she is willing to come across as rude and inhospitable if it means asserting her independence.

As we discussed today in class, Martineau’s position on the “acquiescence” of women in Victorian society was that this acquiescence only observed because women of her time are essentially brainwashed into accepting their supposed inferiority at a young age. One thing I wanted to try to connect this to is Carlyle’s take on the “poor Black Woman”. Carlyle takes great pains to emphasize the generosity of this woman, who, out of the kindness of her heart, fed and sang to a sick white man. I can’t help but wonder if Martineau would find these acts of kindness and generosity to also be a sort of acquiescence. Would she say that the instinct to pity and help this white man was borne out of the same brainwashing and ignorance to oppression that she believes the women of her social class to have adopted? If not, what makes this situation so different?