Cultural Criticism

“Nostalgia is a particularly appropriate emotion to invoke in establishing one's innocence and at the same time talk about what one has destroyed" (page 430).

This quotation from this section really made an impact on me because it is something that I’ve always thought about. I’ve often gone back to a moment in my mind and thought about how spectacular a certain event was in my life only to discuss it further with my parents where I was told just how absolutely different the entire occurrence was in reality. It’s sort of an amazing human feature: the ability to delete what is bad from our memories with little to no effort. It is our own personal historical bias.

I believe that perhaps Brontë had this issue with the moors. Perhaps all of her supposed happiest memories were truly there, and she really did love the setting and the atmosphere the entire time she lived there. But isn’t it possible that she only remembered the greatest of the goods from that setting? 

For most people nowadays, it is assumed that someone would be much more in love with the idea of growing up on a beach than in a moor, but seeing as everyone has a unique mind and idea of living, it would make sense that there would be people out there who enjoyed the moors a lot more than a beach. However, if you prefer the beach, are you forgetting all the bad things about the beach like getting sand in your shoes? Salty, frizzy hair? Year round unbearable sunlight? Or are all these things wiped from our memories at the thought of just how much fun we used to have at the beach as children? 

Wuthering Heights, Cultural Docs; Illustrations, p. 289-330

The letters at the end of our edition of Wuthering Heights shed light a little bit as to why Catherine went through the motions of marrying Edgar. I was glad to read these because if you’ve read my comments prior, you know that this was my biggest argument with the novel. I felt like I had experienced unrequited love one times too many in my lifetime already that it is just disturbing to read the tale of someone doing it willingly and supposedly to no fault of their own (or so the reader is lead to believe). 

Instead, the letters display a sense of how women’s rights were allotted to sort of force them into marriage if they wanted to be secure and stable in any sense of the word. For example, a woman would be expected to marry the much wealthier man over the poorer man, despite whatever she would feel inside towards the two men because when it came down to it, they needed to put together the ideas of love and stability into a single unit. This must have caused a great number of compromises within a woman in order to just continue to survive in the world.

I believe that the Brontë wrote about the injustice in women’s property rights in hopes of planting the seed of revolution into the minds of the female readers, but it would appear that this is the extent of her efforts to cause anything to happen. Perhaps she passed before she did things to truly revolutionize the world of women or perhaps this was the only effort she felt comfortable pushing forward with.

Wuthering Heights (Part I)

When I first began to read this novel, I would find myself beginning to become very confused. The text begins in the middle of the tale, throwing the reader off quite a bit. It would appear, however, that this is the author’s intention. The entire reading that has been done so sort of throw the reader into this world that is very uncomfortable and a bit awkward. From the introduction, Linda Peterson makes lots of references to how Emily Brontë was raised on the moors, distant from most of civilization, so perhaps this sort of tone that the novel emits could be attributed to this alone. While the reader might feel uncomfortable and distant from the text, perhaps this is where the author felt the most comfortable.

I enjoyed the minor humor in the novel the most so far. A great example of this is from the very first chapter when Mr. Lockwood becomes trapped with the dogs that are sort of hell bent on attacking him. With little help from the table that he flips in an effort to create a barrier between him and the “beasts”, he continues to call for help, but no one seems to come running to his aid for quite some time.

However, this moment is also when we are introduced to Catherine, which becomes a depressing subject to a degree because her character is one of torment. Reading how tortured she is with being in love with Heathcliff but instead forcing herself to marry Edgar is great connection material for even modern readers. It’s a sort of “love the one you’re with” moral. I wonder if Brontë realized how long her text would continue to be relevant to readers?

Manguel (p. 125-319)

I believe one of the best chapters that were written for this book is the chapter entitled: "The Translator as Reader". I've just never really thought exactly how the functions of translating a certain text from one language to another could be seen as a type of reading that actually involves the reader in a much deeper understanding of the written word. For example, when Manguel writes how Labé uses "an arcane musical language which she, as a lute player, must have known well, but which is incomprehensible to us without a historical dictionary of musical terms". These sort of techniques for writing in one text can be viewed as puns and perhaps even witty, but when it comes to translating the text into another language, one must strive to not lose the original intent of the writing.


This makes translation tricky for most, and it obviously necessitates someone very familiar with the origin language that is being translated, right down to common knowledge of the time the text was written. I suppose I always knew that translating text was a sort of reading in a way, but I guess I never truly understood just how much of a reader's duty it is to continue a certain theme that is present in one text into its translation in another language. However, having been a student of the Japanese language for three years, I guess I should have realized this by how difficult it can be to explain certain puns to different people who are completely uninvolved in the Japanese community.


Do you think that translation is a more modern way of reading, however? I'm unsure of when texts began to be translated from one language to another, so was this sort of textual translation truly important in times long ago?