Post for week of April 9-15(Rodrigo on Chapter 8)

Chapter 8 serves to further explain the main characters backgrounds and to show why they are the way they are. Chapter 8 begins by explaining how Hareton was born and under what circumstances he came to live under. One thing that caught my attention was how Bronte decided to describe the characters in the book, through the use of metaphors and similes and antitese(Portuguese). Examples of this can be seen in various passages during the chapter such as the one shown below:
· “Joseph remained to hector over tenants and labourers; and because it was his vocation to be where he had plenty of wickedness to reprove.”
· “His treatment of the latter was enough to make a fiend of a saint.”
· “Mr. Edgar seldom mustered courage to visit Wuthering Heights openly. He had a terror of Earnshaw's reputation, and shrunk from encountering him; and yet he was always received with our best attempts at civility.”
These literary devices give more depth to the content of the novel than if Bronte were to continue to simple explain the characters as they are without using any literary devices. Another character that caught my attention was Earnshaw, who demonstrated a very stubborn character when his wife was sick and everybody was telling him that she was dyeing but he did not want to believe it:
“Poor soul! Till within a week of her death that gay heart never failed her; and her husband persisted doggedly, nay, furiously, in affirming her health improved every day. When Kenneth warned him that his medicines were useless at that stage of the malady, and he needn't put him to further expense by attending her, he retorted, 'I know you need not - she's well - she does not want any more attendance from you! She never was in a consumption. It was a fever; and it is gone: her pulse is as slow as mine now, and her cheek as cool.' He told his wife the same story, and she seemed to believe him; but one night, while leaning on his shoulder, in the act of saying she thought she should be able to get up to-morrow, a fit of coughing took her - a very slight one - he raised her in his arms; she put her two hands about his neck, her face changed, and she was dead.”
In chapter 8 the reader continues to see many characteristics of Realism which I mentioned in my last post which include describing each characters past and many events in his/her life which influenced them into being the way they are in the present. This is as I mentioned before, a very important characteristic of Realism not only in Europe but also in other countries that adopted the Realistic method of writing in literature such as Brazil. It is very often seen in Brazilian novels such as Dom Casmurro and Primo Basilio, the use of this type of characterization to give a psychoanalyses of each character. Bronte has a very distinct style of writing, in which she sets up the novel telling the story from the end to the beginning which is not very common in novels from other time periods such as the romantics for example. The first few chapters of Wuthering Heights show the main characters such as Heathcliff and Lockwood in their present state, in which the reader begins to learn about Catherine’s past along with the Heathcliff’s families past and what led him to be so alone. It is through Lockwood’s direct narration of the facts in the story along with Bronte’s unique style of portraying the story through the main character finding a diary for example and learning of Heathcliff and Catherine’s past through it that the reader is introduced to all of the characters. I personally feel that this makes understanding the novel more difficult because the reader is forced to pay attention to the time line and closely to who is speaking in order to understand what is going on. If Bronte continues to narrate the novel as she is in the first few chapters, I cant predict at what chapter she is actually going to get to the climax of the novel, however overall it is beginning to show that it is slightly interesting and probably will have some more twists and turns as the story develops.