Wuthering Heights
Emily Bronte's visionary ‘Wuthering Heights’, with its
emotional extremes and perplexing questions regarding the nature of life and
death, is still challenging today.
The novel is immaculately structured. Its resonance and
power are accomplished as much through the form as the content. Her narration
resembles architecture - the reader gathers information from an accumulation of
speeches delivered as rhythmic and oblique reflections of one another.
Many of her motifs, also, stem from a whole range of
architectural components, such as windows, doors, sliding panels, lattices,
attics, beams and rooftops. She uses these to powerful effect, for we often
share with her characters a feeling of breathless claustrophobia. This applies
both to the conditions of our lives and the sense of confinement within the
contradictions of our own personalities. Through, outside, above, and beyond,
the monumental landscape exists, in the form of the Yorkshire moors, which
simultaneously threaten and call out to us.
Central to her philosophical observation is her sense of opposing forces: order versus disorder; need versus want; nature versus culture; personally satisfying versus socially acceptable. Her characters express the pressing need to try to balance these opposites, while simultaneously accepting the utter impossibility of sustaining this equilibrium.
In my compositions, I have attempted to create a visual
parallel with her words. As she has a tendency to distil symbolic occurrences, I
have chosen to adopt a tableau format, which often combines two or more events
taking place concurrently.
In creating these etchings, I have tried not only to capture
some of the extreme emotions which Bronte evokes, but also to encompass the
cerebral enquiry that is at the heart of this extraordinary novel.
Rosalind
Whitman