Hybridity in “Wuthering Heights”, Essay Example

“Wuthering heights” is a novel, which was compiled by a renowned English author known as Emily Bront. The novel features the life of Heathcliff, who has been portrayed as a mysterious person sin his whole lifespan. He struggles to raise his status while still in the adopted family but the occurrences in the novel leads the readers to affirm an ironical twist and a kind of climax in which he ends up in suffering as the woman he loves gets married to another man. There are several incidences of hybridity in the novel. The story has several genres too that will be discussed in this paper based on the work of other researchers. The novel obtains a secure position in the world literature canon. It is one of the most popular as well as highly regarded novels in most of the Chinese matriculation institutions and literature. The book has been published almost 48 times since its first Chinese translation in 1930. Among the editions, about four translations have been selected for the crucial small self-construct form of monolingual corpus. This study involves a corpus-based research, which will be conducted in order to probe into hybridity phenomenon mainly from cultural, linguistic, as well as translational skills via both quantitative and qualitative skills.

Explanations of hybridity are based on the various factors influencing it in all the translations. In addition, explanations are based on all the factors that influence hybridity. Bakhtin defines hybrid as a passage, which employs a single speaker, the author in most cases, but has one or more types of speech. Juxtaposition and comparison of the two distinct speeches comes with it a conflict and a contradiction in various belief systems (Watson 66).  Bakhtin one specific type of discourse, which he reveals to be “the authoritative discourse” which normally demands to be associated with or assimilated with the listener or the reader. Typical examples are religious dogma or the common scientific theories. Hybridity is also termed as heteroglassia.

On scrutinizing the history of Emily’s novel as a genre, readers come across a certain constant struggle between two different forces, the centrifugal and centripetal forces, drawn into a particular battle. The battle is among the most fundamental prose styles and undergoes certain artistic elaborations throughout the historical background of literature, considering the novel. Analytically, it is very possible to trace Emily’s novel using its oscillation between the two forces. In other words, the entire novel centers on two distinct forces as revealed by the characters’ activities in the novel. Centripetal forces do the work of unifying people and trying to bring reconciliation and unity in the novel whereas the centrifugal forces do the opposite. Bakhtin viewed Emily’s novel as a genre quite separable from the epic former ever-changing, incomplete and flexible most fluid genres. Bakhtin also notes that the novel defies the obvious organizing genre principles with various experts unable to isolate a stable, definite of the novel with no addition of reservation. The stylistic 3-dimensionality with certain multilingual consciousness has been realized in the novel. “The novel orchestrates all its themes, the totality of the world of objects and ideas depicted and expressed in it, by means of the social diversity of speech types and by the differing individual voices that flourish under such conditions. Authorized speech, the speeches of narrators, inserted genres, the speech of characters are merely those fundamental compositional unities with whose help heteroglassia can enter the novel; each of them permits social voices multiplicity and a wide variety of their links and interrelationships. These distinctive links and interrelationships between utterances and languages, this movement of the theme through different languages and speech types, its dispersion into rivulets and droplets of social heteroglassia, it is dialogization-this is the basic distinguishing features of the stylistic of the novel” (Bakhtin 263). The excerpt shows the way and principle used by Bakhtin in describing hybridity in the novel.

The novel has been considered the most popular literary genre in China and some parts of the world since its emergence during the early 18^th century. Considerable the plot of the novel, it is evidenced that the emergence of this novel will be linked with the new way of looking or understanding the world. This new form involved a form of break with the narrative of the olden days, which majorly had their focus on the universal truths. According to Miller (25), the novel came into existence during the modern period, which is a period of the general intellectual orientation and was separated from its medieval and classical heritage mainly by its rejection. From its particular very nature, it is predictably and observantly evident that the novel needs a certain degree of realism, which forms its definitive characteristic (Watson 86). The novel combines a particular sense of material and social reality with human awareness. It does reflect the existing tension between the private and social forces. In essence, Emily’s novel seems to be the best vehicle acting as a pictorial representation of a life that is lived in a society against the normal stable background of the moral and the social values. Besides, the novel also acts as a representation of the social, ethical as well as the moral codes of the times or periods in which it’s writing took place. It is a prose narrative of the actual characters and their actions in everyday life.

Emily Bronte, through the novel, introduces a multiple of contrasts, which she incorporates into the novel enabling the reader to visualize as well as hear various characters, and the different voices whose effects seem to be projected onto different directions. Bronte’s actual idea in the novel is never given in a direct manner it is refracted among different areas. It particularly seems that the author has no voice as the narrative evidently divided into two basic sections or parts due to different narrators. There are two narrators in the book, Mr. Lookwood and Nelly Dean. The reader starts the novel with the guidance of Lookwrd, who introduces readers on the early parts of the novel setting up a presumably good interesting plot for the narrative at the beginning. The story has no omniscient narrator. Notably, the story of this novel is not told by Emily Bronte, the author, it is told by Lockwood who transmits it to the readers. Lockwood, in the novel, fails to experience the first generation events at the early stage, but only partially witnesses the second-generation events in the final year of the story. In other words, the events of the plot in this story are lucidly outlined by the two mentioned narrators within the context of a story within a story. This is an aspect common with traditional writers like Bronte. As stated earlier, the consciousness of the two main narrators of the story merge and the plot of this particular story is also narrated by various unreliable filters. The real events and the real feelings of the novel go through Nelly’s consciousness first. Nelly introduces her own particular interpretation and nature as an active observer and participant within the story. Lockwood’s filter is then introduced in the novel before reaching to us the readers of the novel. This is noteworthy considering the fact that there exists a real or true huge span between the reader as well as the factual story. Due to its inception, it is possible to hear various voices in full dialogism and interaction as it continues triggering the next one hence contrasting each other. This forms the main source of hybridity in the novel.

Whenever the author’s primary narrator is prostrated to pay attention or listen to Nelly, his case is seen as essentially that of a “subject-ego transforming and becoming an “object ego.” The beginning of the novel proves very crucial to the readers since it is possible since it shows the existence of different voices in the same plot. With this, it is possible for the readers to discover several things on the way the author uses the voices of the narrators and that of other characters simultaneously. The characters have completely different voices and existence from the narrators. “Joseph, take Mr. Lockwood’s horse; and bring up some wine…” (Bronte 3). These voices are transmitted to Nelly Dean. This forms a typical example of how the author uses two narrators in the novel.

Work Cited

Alexander, C. (Ed.). The Oxford Companion to the Brontes, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2003. Print.

Bakhtin, Mikhail. “Towards a Methodology for the Study of the Novel” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. C. Emerson and Holquist, ed. M. Holquist, University of Texas Press, pp. 3-11. 1981. Print.

Bronte, E. Wuthering Heights (ed I. Jack; introduction and additional notes Small), Oxford World’s Classics, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2009. Print.

Hillis, Miller. ‘Wuthering Heights: repetition and the uncanny’ in Fiction and Representation: Seven English Novels, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, pp. 42-73, 1982. Print.

Watson, Nicola and Towheed Shafquat (ed.). Romantic and Victorians: “Emily Bronte: Wuthering Heights: at Home and Abroad” London, Bloomsbury, pp. 351-410, 2012. Print.