Character names

[kev67]

Remembering who is who in WH is more tricky than in most most books. This was surely deliberate but for what purpose? TBH I don't have too much difficulty keeping track of the characters, but I do have to think sometimes. Heathcliff is Heathcliff, and he has only has one name; however:


Next to Heathcliff there is a Hindley and a Hareton.
There are two Cathy's, Catherine the mother and Cathy the younger (I think).
Catherine Earnshaw becomes Catherine Linton.
Cathy Linton becomes Cathy Heathcliff (I presume)
Isabella Linton becomes Isabella Heathcliff.
Isabella names her son Linton Heathcliff.
Ellen Dean is often called Nelly Dean.



At least the older and younger Cathy are easily distinguishable, due to their different personalities and only one of them being alive at a time. Linton Heathcliff is also easily distinguishable from Mr Heathcliff. The other characters all seem to have very distinct names. Joseph cannot be confused with anyone else. Dr Kenneth (or is it Mr) is very distinct. Mrs Zillah, the housekeeper at WH has a very unusual name. I do not remember meeting anyone with a surname beginning with Z. Surely EB's naming strategy was not accidental.

[manuscript]

i have not read it in a long time. but the naming of characters does seem to suggest a sort of intergenerational confusion or comparison of some sort. i remember reading the words of a critic who thought that the happy ending was a cop-out, it felt too easy. did Bronte want to suggest that we are not necessarily doomed to repeat history?

i remember at the time i read this as a teenager taking delight in reciting the names and their changes to myself (and probably some unfortunate others), but these days i find myself making notes as i read on character names and their attributes in order to remember them. how far my mind has come!

i do think it is a very interesting novel. someone mentioned to me their personal theory that it is a sort of postcolonial novel, Heathcliff being of swarthy complexion, perhaps a gypsy.

i love a poem i read by Emily Bronte called The Old Stoic.

sorry off topic!

[kev67]

Oh goodie, does it have a happy ending? I prefer cop out happy endings to over miserable endings.

I don't think WH could be a post-colonial novel as it was written at the heyday of the British Empire and set while it was still expanding. I agree Heathcliff is probably a gypsy, but gypsies were not a major factor in colonialism. They tended to get about by themselves, although some were shipped as slaves to colonies before full scale slave trading from Africa got under way.

[manuscript]

well i have not read it for a long time. i did have a teacher once who told me that we should be careful not to ascribe our own contemporary beliefs and values to authors living in less humane social conditions. but i think that at the same time we should be careful not to judge authors according to the prevailing opinions of the societies in which they lived just because they were there at that time. i know for sure that slavery for example is something that was discussed by the Brontes and i think there is a reasonable case to be made from Villette at least that they did not approve of it. and even in the 21st century we find it hard to agree on slavery - some people might say that developed nations are thriving on the slavery of poorer countries, while others may maintain than slavery no longer exists in this world at all.

[kev67]

well i have not read it for a long time. i did have a teacher once who told me that we should be careful not to ascribe our own contemporary beliefs and values to authors living in less humane social conditions. but i think that at the same time we should be careful not to judge authors according to the prevailing opinions of the societies in which they lived just because they were there at that time. i know for sure that slavery for example is something that was discussed by the Brontes and i think there is a reasonable case to be made from Villette at least that they did not approve of it. and even in the 21st century we find it hard to agree on slavery - some people might say that developed nations are thriving on the slavery of poorer countries, while others may maintain than slavery no longer exists in this world at all.

Interesting about Villette. I agree it is not usually a good idea to ascribe contemporary beliefs and values to authors living in different times and places. I think that is largely what makes old books interesting, even when they are not always particularly great literature (IMO).

[manuscript]

i had a class with that teacher about chaucer's wife of bath in which she instructed us her students that when chaucer's narrator says that the wife had had a certain number of husbands at church door, what was meant that the husbands were not married within the church, and so that it was being suggested that the marriages were in some way not sanctified by religious powers, or were profane or salacious or something like that. her general theory being that because women in the middle ages were treated very badly, that chaucer was simply a misogynist, painting a misogynistic picture of a woman for the delight of his male misogynistic audience. however of course at the time chaucer was writing, marriage was actually not yet a sacrament, it was a mercantile agreement, and people were married at the door of the church simply because it was the most public place for the contract to be witnessed. so my teacher had actually extrapolated from her assumptions about the historical era, not even the actual facts of the era, information about the content of the text, building up an entire fallacious case around the prefabricated idea that chaucer must be a misogynist because he lived in misogynistic times, rather than actually looking at the text itself, and what it was really saying. if she had been prepared to examine the thing properly, she may have been surprised not just by chaucer, but by a truer discovery of the possibilities of the circumstances of that time. this teacher was associate professor. i realise these remarks are quite extraneous, i just find myself often hopelessly passionate about literature.

[kev67]

I notice in chapter xxx Hareton has started to be referred to as Earnshaw, just to add to the confusion.

I could not remember whether the doctor was Mr Kenneth (apothecary) or Dr Kenneth (physician), not that it matters to the plot much. When I looked back, it seemed he was only referred to as plain Kenneth. That is slightly odd. Whether he is a physician or apothecary, he is a professional person, not a servant. I assume Kenneth is his surname, but it is not made absolutely clear. I suppose Kenneth is a friendly, familiar sort of person, who everyone around just knows as Kenneth.

[Jackson Richardson]

i had a class with that teacher about chaucer's wife of bath in which she instructed us her students that when chaucer's narrator says that the wife had had a certain number of husbands at church door, what was meant that the husbands were not married within the church, and so that it was being suggested that the marriages were in some way not sanctified by religious powers,

That's utter drivel. In the Middle Ages, the betrothal part of the marriage took place in the church porch, the blessing taking place at the altar after acommunion. Weddings were not the over sentimenalised occasions that they are now. Of course the partners are entering into a legal contract: that's primarily what marriage is.

It may be Chaucer would have been critical of the Wife of Bath, but imaginatively he creates such a vital, confident and convincing figure of a woman who is certainly in control of her life. She accepts her sexuality and her religious instincts, she's got her men where she wants them and she runs her own business.

[Jackson Richardson]

Back to Emily.

It's a long time since I read WH and I wasn't that taken by it. However the complications of the names and the generations make me thing along two lines:

A There's an extraordinary contrast between the wildness of the human passions and the setting on the moors and the formality and symmetry of the plot, as exemplified in the pattern of the names. (Nelly Dean isn't any more significant than Elizabeth Bennett being called Lizzy.)

B Isn't that the book is not so much interested in individuals as in archetypes and recurrent situations embodied in different human lives over time?

[kev67]

I noticed in the last chapter or two, it was Mr Kenneth, but then earlier in the book he was referred to as doctor Kenneth. Hareton starts to be called Earnshaw when he starts to become a gentleman.