The course includes prose (Wuthering Heights- Emily Bronte) and poetry (a collection from Wilfred Owen). I'm quite pleased actually with the set texts this year, I usually find that set texts are incredibly dull and not even the teacher particularly likes the book. I think most people can probably remember that at GCSE - not a lot of people tend to like Dickens' Great Expectations mainly because it is incredibly dull in my personal opinion. The whole time I was reading it I was actually resenting the protagonist, Pip, and just thinking to myself 'man up!'.
As part of my coursework on it we had the option of re-writing the ending, which is often seen as very unsatisfactory! (I'll post that up at a later time).
But back to the present, momentarily. Wuthering Heights has been hyped to the extreme by modern culture, even if you haven't read it, you probably would have heard the title floating around and know that the most notable character is probably Heathcliff. Heathcliff is regarded as this strong, mysterious, attractive man by Hollywood, but on reading the book you have to think to yourself, sure it's each to their own... but have you even read the book?! Heathcliff comes across more as that arrogant, solitary guy at the all boys school down the hill, who is an absolute pig and horrible to everybody, but you still kindof fancy him even though you don't really know him very well and know him to be a tyrant - that is Heathcliff.
A brief outline of the book is as such:
Mr Earnshaw brings a gypsy boy home that he found on the streets of Liverpool. Everyone takes an instant disliking to him, claiming he came from the devil etc. Mr Earnshaw effectively adopts the boy and names him after a dead son, Heathcliff. Mr Earnshaw has two children, Catherine and Hindley. Catherine grows to like Heathcliff and she seems to have more power over Heathcliff than anybody else. The story of Wuthering Heights is a tale about passion and obsession - Catherine and Heathcliff become obsessed with one another, yet only Heathcliff is true to himself. Catherine is driven mad by it to walk the moors alone until the day that Heathcliff is 'dreaming the last sleep'.
It is safe to say that for it's time, WH was a pretty unusual novel - it was received horribly, and wasn't appreciated by readers until well after the author's death. Victorian readers thought it was ghastly and a depiction of the 'worst forms of humanity'. Whereas today, we take a more psychoanalytical perspective on things and find these mostly unpleasant characters completely fascinating! Could you imagine a person like Heathcliff walking around, it would be horribly unpleasant, but great for a psychologist! Is he mad? How did he become such a brute? Where did he come from? Where did he go? There is so much mystery surrounding his character, that it is really no wonder that his character is so well known!
For the second part of my exam, we're studying a collection of poems written by Wilfred Owen during the Great War. I don't know much about how popular Owen s amongst people today, but I personally find his poetry absolutely heart-wrenching and I can't get enough of it. The way he uses sound in his poems is really quite astounding!
"If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,---"
Dulce et Decorum Est is probably my favourite poem, simply because of the violent imagery he portrays. It is harrowing to read about a man drowning 'under a green sea' of gas, and he illustrates exactly that to all those oblivious citizens sat in their quilted armchairs raving all about the war and how great it is to die for one's country when in fact it is not glory, that war brings - war only brings pain and pity. And that is what Owen shows to the reader, "my subject is war, and the pity of war. The poetry is in the pity."
