Write an essay on Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights or Charles Dickens’s Hard Tim

Write
an essay on Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights or Charles
Dickens’s Hard Times. Feel free to use one of the essay prompts
below or invent your own topic.
General Requirements
Your essay should:
·
have
a thesis (i.e., an overarching argument about the work you are analyzing);
·
integrate
and analyze direct quotations from the work you have selected;
·
use
MLA style guidelines for formatting and citations;
·
not
go over or under the required word count by more than 50-100 words;
·
be
uploaded to Quercus before midnight on the date it is due.
Prompts
In Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff is described as
“a dark-skinned gypsy in aspect [and] in dress and manners a gentleman” (5).
Examine the ways in which Heathcliff straddles or even collapses divisions in
the novel. What is the novel trying to express through this contradictory
character? Is he the novel’s hero, villain, or something more complex?
In Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Catherine declares in one of
her journal entries, “H. and I are going to rebel.” Examine the ways in which
Heathcliff and Catherine’s youthful relationship challenges power structures in
the novel. How does the spectre of their relationship continue to haunt the
novel after their separation and even after their narrative concludes? What, in
other words, is the deeper significance of their relationship to the novel?
In Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Catherine declares, “I am Heathcliff—he’s
always, always in my mind—not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure
to myself—but, as my own being” (82). What are the existential consequences of
this for Catherine? How does it contribute to her decline? What is the novel
saying about gender, race, and/or class through this assertion which ostensibly
collapses a distinction between all three?
In Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Healthcliff sees an uncanny
resemblance of himself in Hareton. There is a weird way in which the second
generation of characters echoes and repeats the first, but with a difference.
What is this difference? How does it help bring the narrative to a conclusion?
How satisfactory or unsatisfactory is this conclusion and why?
Coketown—the setting of Charles Dickens’s Hard Times—“was a town of
machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke
trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled. It had a black
canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles
of building full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day
long, and where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down,
like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness” (27-28) Explore
the relationship between society and nature in the novel. How does industrial
society organize a particular kind of attitude and relationship to nature
(including, if you want, human nature)? What are the consequences of this
industrial attitude and relationship to nature? In what ways does Dickens’s
suggest that it is unsustainable?
“They cared so little for plain Fact, these [circus] people, and were in that
advanced state of degeneracy on the subject, that instead of being impressed by
the speaker’s strong common sense, they took it in extraordinary dudgeon” (42).
Charles Dickens’s Hard Times sets up an opposition between
Fact and Fancy. Define what is meant by “Facts” in the novel and then explore
some of the places where Facts is challenged or overturned by Fancy. Why is
Fancy so important to Dickens?
Examine the character of Sissy Jupe in Charles Dickens’s Hard Times.
Sissy Jupe, after being absent for a while, appears again at the end of the
novel to help bring the narrative to its conclusion. How and why is Sissy Jupe
able to help bring resolution to the characters’ lives? What special qualities
and attributes does she possess? What is Dickens trying to communicate through
her character?