How to be a “poet of furniture”: Brontë’s Settle in Wuthering Heights

IF 0.2 3区社会学 0 HUMANITIES, MULTIDISCIPLINARY

VICTORIAN STUDIES Pub Date : 2023-02-01 DOI:10.2979/victorianstudies.64.4.15

Summer J. Star

引用次数: 0

Abstract

Abstract:This essay considers the unique aesthetic significance of massive household furnishings in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847). Using Gaston Bachelard’s notion of “infinite quality of the intimate dimension” associated with furniture, the essay focuses on the relationship between humans and objects that play such a large role in both the poetics and plot of the novel (86). If human touch and human trace can be said to vivify cornices, knobs, and rims; if cabinets and drawers model ideas of secret knowledge and intimacy, Wuthering Heights, this essay contends, is at least equally interested in an inverse and heavier truth as well: furniture presses back. It presses into humans in return, resisting any psychological modeling or symbolic meaning we might like it to perform. Like the iron weight that Heathcliff as a boy bids Hareton hurl at him, Brontë’s domestic objects stagger our theories of interpretation of them by virtue of their mass.

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如何成为“家具诗人”：勃朗在呼啸山庄的定居

摘要：本文认为艾米丽·布朗特的《呼啸山庄》（1847）中的大型家具具有独特的美学意义。本文运用了Gaston Bachelard与家具相关的“亲密维度的无限质量”的概念，重点探讨了在小说的诗学和情节中扮演如此重要角色的人与物之间的关系（86）。如果人类的触摸和人类的痕迹可以说使飞檐、旋钮和边缘栩栩如生；如果橱柜和抽屉是秘密知识和亲密关系的典范，那么本文认为，《呼啸山庄》至少对一个相反的、更沉重的事实也同样感兴趣：家具向后压。作为回报，它会压迫人类，抵制我们可能希望它表现出的任何心理建模或象征意义。就像小时候希刺克厉夫让哈里顿向他投掷的铁重物一样，勃朗特的家庭物品由于其质量而使我们对它们的解释理论发生了动摇。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

VICTORIAN STUDIES HUMANITIES, MULTIDISCIPLINARY-

CiteScore

0.90

自引率

9.10%

发文量

期刊介绍： For more than 50 years, Victorian Studies has been devoted to the study of British culture of the Victorian age. It regularly includes interdisciplinary articles on comparative literature, social and political history, and the histories of education, philosophy, fine arts, economics, law and science, as well as review essays, and an extensive book review section. An annual cumulative and fully searchable bibliography of noteworthy publications that have a bearing on the Victorian period is available electronically and is included in the cost of a subscription. Victorian Studies Online Bibliography