Lisa Newcar - 4th
Final Blog Post
Influences of Postmodernism
Introduction: Emily Bronte’s angsty romantic novel, Wuthering Heights, recounts the dangerously forbidden and majorly toxic love between Cathy and Heathcliff. Throughout the novel, the author constructs a story of never ending conflict. One person always stabbing the other in the back leading to a never ending string of petty revenge. Using world building, fragmentation, and magical realism, Bronte makes this story so emo before emo was even a thing.
A video of Cathy and Heathcliff IRL:
(Warning: Use of slight potty words and mild adult themes)
Element 1: World Building
World building in the postmodern sense can be described as “preoccupation with the external and the construction of worlds” (Nerd Central). Basically, the author goes into a lot of detail about the surrounding world of these characters. The landscape or location or lore of the setting often plays a large part in what happens to the characters.
In Wuthering Heights, the novel takes place in the English moors, known for its rough weather and hilly terrain. It’s pretty foggy, making it all the more dramatic for Bronte’s novel to be set there. The space between Wuthering Heights and The Grange can be described as having “garden trees, and the wild green park, the valley of Gimmerton, with a long line of mist winding nearly to its top (for very soon after you pass the chapel, as you may have noticed, the sough that runs from the marshes joins a beck which follows the bend of the glen)” (Bronte 63). The terrain itself is romantic and brooding, almost as if it were to represent Heathcliff and Cathy’s feelings.
Postmodern Link: “For What It’s Worth” by Buffalo Springfield
“While Stills wrote “For What It’s Worth” about a specific event in time, he creatively poised the lyrics to where they were specific to the act of sticking it to the man, yet vague enough to pin to any action oppressing the voices of young people. That is why it can so easily be tied to Vietnam. “There’s a man with a gun over there, telling me I got to beware.” If you think about the riots on Sunset, and picture the police line approaching those kids, it makes sense. If you picture a young man, barely 18, being sent to a foreign country and seeing an enemy soldier in the distance, it makes sense. If you picture a person in 2020, wearing a mask and marching for the BLM movement, staring down hundreds of police in riot gear, it makes sense.”
My take: Bronte’s world building is similar to Stills’ in how easy it is to visualize the scene being set. Her description of the moors transports readers there, so they can see the lush green hills and feel the wetness of the fog. She is quite literally building the world around her readers, much like how Stills transported his listeners directly to the Sunset Strip riots.
Element 2: Fragmentation
Wuthering Heights has a serious case of fragmented narration. The story of Cathy and Heathcliff is being told to Lockwood by Nelly, the maid. The entire thing is a story within a story. Nerd Central explains fragmentation as “narratives told from shifting perspectives, often toggling back and forth between author and narrator.”
The novel opens with Lockwood’s story of him arriving at Wuthering Heights, looking to meet Heathcliff. Eventually he encounters the ghost of Cathy and Nelly tells the story of why Cathy is hanging out around Wuthering Heights in the afterlife and why Heathcliff has such a big stick up his butt. Bronte is quite blunt with the transition, switching from Lockwood’s POV to Nelly’s in the middle of a sentence: “Before I came to live here, she commenced—waiting no further invitation to her story—I was almost always at Wuthering Heights” (Bronte 24). It’s easy to imagine those cheesy ripple effects in every movie when someone is having a flashback while reading this.
Postmodern Link: “Hey Ya” by Outkast
“Probably the best part of the entire song (other than “shake it like a polaroid picture”) is where Andre 3000 breaks the fourth wall, telling listeners “Y’all don’t wanna hear me, you just wanna dance.” It's like a weird inception type thing of how self aware he is of how listeners will perceive the song. The song is literally about a relationship that is falling apart. Like there is nothing left, no happiness, no love, but both parties refuse to leave because of the security of having one another. You really can’t help but feel bad for both the people in this scenario. But the thing is Andre KNOWS that nobody cares about that aspect of the song, and if he masks it with a happy, swinging tempo, no one will even listen. When he says “Y’all don’t wanna hear me, you just wanna dance,” he’s quite literally calling us out because he knows that not a single one of us is listening to “Hey Ya” for the lyrics, other than “shake it like a polaroid picture.”’
My take: While Outkast uses metafiction in “Hey Ya,” their breaking of the fourth wall really adds to that “unreliable narrator element.” It feels wrong that we know that there’s a story within a story. Andre 3000 telling himself to shut up and play some funky music and Lockwood acknowledging how the perspective in the novel is about to shift is like a slap in the face of reality to readers and listeners. It’s got a crazy inception type feel, like the narrators aren’t supposed to know that we’re there listening to them.
Element 3: Magical Realism
Probably one of the most common postmodern elements, “magical realism is an uncomfortable blend of mundane daily life and surreal events” (Nerd Central). It throws together things that could never actually happen, but use everyday events, objects, people, etc., so they seem almost normal. Not to mention the fact that the characters never acknowledge the strangeness of it. It’s just everyday life to them.
I’ll just state the obvious here, in Wuthering Heights Cathy turns into a freaking ghost. She grabs Lockwood when he lights a candle in the window, and not to mention that whole weird part when Heathcliff dies and she comes to him as the ghost of her childhood (What was Bronte smoking when she wrote this?), and like pulls him into the wardrobe, representing him entering the afterlife. In the book, this event is described as “Through the whole night, and far into the morning, we heard him groaning and murmuring to himself,” but in the movie it’s this whole weird series of ghost events.
Postmodern link: “Inside Where You Belong” by Kate Crosby
“Birds will never just inexplicably fall from the sky (hopefully not), but the fact that something that unrealistic is the main issue of the author’s story makes the plot magically uncomfortable. Crosby makes the plot so eerily dystopian that you can’t help but notice how she is picking away at modern society. The way the story opens with the first bird falling, one brother being intrigued by its appearance, but the other completely disregarding the fact that it’s a living thing and just chucking it into the woods (after finishing poking his own dog with a stick) matches with how this world treats things that are different from what we deem “normal.” Some will be fascinated, wanting to learn more about the unfamiliar, while others will find discomfort in it and just ignore it, or worse, mistreat it.”
My take: The birds just nonsensically falling from the sky matches with the unrealisticness of Cathy’s appearances in the afterlife. Personally, I believe in ghosts, but there’s no way on earth that the ghost of your forbidden lover as a CHILD is going to appear to you right before you die. Kind of creepy if you think about it, Heathcliff is a full grown man yet still pictures the love of his life as a child. It just goes to show that Emily Bronte was on whatever the Postmodernists were on before they even knew about it.
Conclusion: Postmodernism can truly connect to anything. Who would’ve thought that one of the most timeless and famous pieces of literature could be compared to “Hey Ya”? Regardless of genre, the similarities between Romantic and Postmodern literature show the universal archetypes that authors use. Every story can be connected in some way because every human experience is similar to another in its own nature.
