The liminal and boundaries

The liminal and boundaries

Alright, Mr. Sadds I took your advice and I haven’t typed out the whole class word for word, I have taken what I think are the main points made in the lesson and summed them up.

In the lesson we focused on “the liminal” and boundaries within Wuthering Heights

The liminal is a term that means “the condition of being on a threshold, between or on the margin of”

The liminal is simply the unfixed position between any two oppositional terms.

A boundary is “a line or plane indicating the limit or extent of something” however if you didn’t know that you don’t deserve to be in an English A level class… do you?

For the liminal to be argued, you need to observe strong oppositions (i.e. boundaries) that create a suitable threshold.

Heathcliff
Heathcliff is situated on the boundary between life and death due to his name. Heathcliff’s name originally belonged to the name of Mr Earnshaw’s dead son; therefore he is trapped on the boundary due to his being alive opposing the nature of his name creating death leaving him on the threshold between the two boundaries.

Personally, I found it more difficult to apply the liminal to characters then I did to objects, motifs or symbols. The liminal is a lot easier to identify within objects, an example of this is the window providing a threshold between life and death.

There are a lot of instances that suggest the window is a threshold, these are a few good examples.

Lockwood’s Dream
We have Lockwood’s dream, in which Lockwood “knocking my knuckles through the glass” breaks the boundary between life and death. This is then followed by the ghost of Catherine directly contacting the living (Lockwood) suggesting that the restrictions separating the two worlds has been broken. However Lockwood creates a boundary of books which we identified in class as being symbolic of civilisation and life re instating the barrier that was originally created by the window.

Heathcliff’s plea
As soon as Lockwood explains what he was screaming about Heathcliff’s realises Cathy’s ghost was present at the window and with this he “wrenched open the lattice” he then pleads for Cathy’s ghost to return, once again we see the windows open frame acting as a barrier between the realm of the living and the dead

Cathy’s death
When Cathy dies she opens the lattice to “feel the wind blow in from the moors” she asks for the window to be open claiming that she wishes for her soul to run free over the moors, this is another prime example of how windows represent the afterlife and the threshold between life and death. This suggests that Cathy needs the window to be open for her transcendence into the next life.　

However the window is not only a barrier between life and death, within class we read and agreed that window represents many other things such as the threshold for nature vs. culture and in Catherine’s case acted as a prison.　

Lockwood’s sexual desires

The nature vs. culture observation was made when we observe Lockwood’s dream in the chapter 3 the letting in of a young girl into his room could suggest sexual desire (nature) then as his desires start to get out of control (cross the barrier of the window) he panics and cuts his sexual desires off by stacking books (culture) as a protective barrier against such desires using the culture that surrounds him as a defence mechanism.

Cathy’s imprisonment
The main point we have for this interpretation of the window is that Heathcliff directly addresses it within the novel. He claims that “If Catherine had wished to return, I intended shattering the great panels to a million fragments, unless they let her out”

Guys I did some more reading and found this article I found it to be quiet helpful when doing research: http://www.shmoop.com/wuthering-heights/symbolism-imagery.html

It explains a lot about the other symbols we learnt of in class,

HOMEWORK!·
2 paragraphs on Bronte’s use of symbols/motifs
(Use the model as example and refer to critic)·

2 paragraphs summing up the idea of the liminal and how it is communicated through symbols/motifs (Windows/doors/ghosts/dreams)

Read to chapter 6 -> complete chapter summaries　

This is Badgroves example that you should use for your homework

Example of writing about the uncanny Chapter 3 of ‘Wuthering Heights’ serves as an example of what many Gothic critics deem ‘terror’ – the psychologically unsettling and disturbing element at the heart of many gothic texts. Lockwood, forced to stay at the heights, is confronted with the ghost of Cathy as ‘the intense horror of nightmare’ comes over both him and the reader. This feeling, what Freud would deem the ‘uncanny’ is created by the invasion of the ‘unheimlich’ into the world of the ‘heimlich’. In Freud’s terms, the rational self, (Lockwood) is assailed by the ghost and the ‘tenacious gripe’ of its ‘ice cold hand’. The ‘unhome-like’ ghost is (in this case literally) trying to force its way in to the home, a place where it paradoxically does and doesn’t belong. The language, like elsewhere in the novel, is characteristically violent and the imagery disturbing in its vividness. The so called ‘gentleman’ Lockwood, resorts to pulling Cathy’s ‘wrist on to the broken pane… till the blood ran down.’ This sense of the uncanny can be related to the wider concerns of the novel and is also played out in its narrative structure. Fragments of journals and letters (which are essentially unheimlich to the frame narrator Lockwood) are filtered through the multiple narrators to create a powerful sense of ambiguity to the extent that we as readers are alienated by the text. We do not belong in a world of such excessive characters and passions. Punter deems this ‘the uncanny of the monumental’ suggesting that we are forced to ‘prostrate ourselves’ before the Heathcilffs, Draculas, Marquis’ and Frankensteins of the literary world. 　　

TEAM SADGROVE….PEACE OUT!!!!!