On Setting

Written by Mel

I think that one of the things that can make or break a novel is the setting.

You might be saying, well, no duh -- or you might be wondering what on Earth I mean:  After all, an exciting/interesting set of characters, emotion-evoking writing, and/or a great plot should serve if the setting fails, shouldn't it?  Many of Shakespeare's plays, it could be argued, have a mutable setting, and I certainly wouldn't disagree with you on that point (my favorite version of Richard III is set as a World War I allegory, eschewing everything but Shakespeare's own mentions of the War of the Roses!).  But I'm beginning to note that 'setting' doesn't just apply to things as superficial as historical era or geographic location.

So, I shall pose a question:  Could you set Wuthering Heights away from the moors, and still retain the innate feel of the setting it had before?

Oswaldtwistle Moor (Orphan Wiki, Wikipedia Commons)

Depends.

Setting is inevitably tied to theme; you can look at countless other works and see that.  Though works of genre fiction, C.J. Sansom's Matthew Shardlake mystery books are rooted firmly in Tudor England, a setting in which the main character is treated with flippancy, derision, and even sometimes disgust because of his disability and his status as a lawyer -- and further, being a contemporary author, C.J. Sansom uses the status of women in that era quite often to make statements on sexism and illustrate certain qualities in his characters.  If you set Revelation in the 2000s, Shardlake's views on equality and his kindness toward women would be a pleasant surprise, but not shocking or immediately endearing; in fact, given his beliefs in the original Tudor-set novels, he might seem a little stiff or old-fashioned.  And while lawyers are still scoffed at and people with disability still suffer prejudice, he would have a lot easier of a time than he did in the early 1500s.

The setting of that book gives the reader an immediate connection with one of the characters, as both an outcast and a man with borderline revolutionary ideas on gender roles; even his inner religious conflict is flavored by the Reformist/Papist tensions at the time.  Everything about Sansom's mysteries is painted by the fact that his characters are living in London under King Henry VIII.  It would be unthinkable to tear them away from that setting.

Illustration by Ivan Lapper

Without including too many spoilers (since I have no way of knowing how many of you have read it before), setting also figures greatly into Frankenstein.  Being a piece of period literature, the reader has to doubly consider the setting -- both when it is set and when it was written.  Thankfully, the two aren't terribly far displaced, but it's still quite different than reading a contemporary work written in the late 1700s; the narrative is rife with Enlightenment and Early Modern ideals.  This is a story that is almost entirely a product of its time, from the sneaky references to the Natural State and social justice to the outright classical/theological allusions and natural philosophy name-dropping.  If you've never read it before, you might even laugh aloud in places at the weirdly-placed digressions into tourist-y description.  (Maybe even if you've read it before.  Catches me off guard every time I read it.)

And yet, it is absolutely possible to translate it into the modern era,  because in the end it's not about the obvious setting, just like Emily Bronte's work isn't about the setting. 

So my answer to the original question would be that you can indeed set Wuthering Heights elsewhere, and almost anywhere -- the story itself, with its isolation and wildness and desperation, has Northern England's vast rocky moors engraved into its soul.  To translate it and retain the real meat of the setting would be effortless because the story itself is the setting, just as in Frankenstein -- the narrative itself is a product of its setting, from its morals to its characters.  The characters are embodiments of their time's (and author's!) moral disputes and musings.

You see this a lot more with literary fiction, I think, because setting in genre fiction tends to be an excuse for escapism and cool period description.  Sansom isn't the only author that does this, but there are a lot of contemporary historical fiction writers that don't, and mostly they're those that are esteemed as literary; Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall is lush with the moral conflict of the time period, such that the word "doublet" or a mention of rushes on the floor can jar you out of the conflict if you aren't familiar enough with the time period to know it's not just coming out of nowhere.  She doesn't need to mention the setting very much because the thoughts and struggles of the characters are so thick with it.  And while Umberto Eco offers a rich setting to get lost in in almost all of his books -- he's technical about the setting to the point of massive descriptions of monastery life or medieval religious conflict that can last pages or even chapters -- that's not the point, in the end.  If you examine his work as a literary critic and not just a lover of history, you can get just as much if not more out of it.  The theme itself stands out starkly, and is timeless.

This post is probably a lot more rambly than a lot of mine since I've been out a lot of days and haven't attended several classes that were probably enlightening -- and I realize it's not really about anything specific from English class, other than Wuthering Heights.  But the presence of setting has been weighing on my mind as both a writer (National Novel Writing Month, you say?  What?  [weak, horrible laughter]) and a reader, and I think it's an important thing to consider the entanglement of the setting with the ideals and themes of the plot; if I'm reading a book with a setting that isn't reflective of its plot, and a plot that isn't reflective of its setting, something that I can't put my finger on feels off.

The time and ideology should breathe through its characters.  It should feel alive, no matter whether it's a Shakespeare play set during WWI or some outlandish adaptation of Wuthering Heights set in the bustle (but stark, strange isolation) of New York City.

Don't kiss the girl

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Discussing chapters twenty-four through twenty-eight this week reminded me of the 1997 classic american crime movie, Kiss the Girls. In Kiss the Girls a few girls from nearby Durham, North Carolina have disappeared. As a viewer I knew that they had been taken, captured, and put into a home like place where they were used for their talents. However, in Wuthering Heights Heathcliff traps Little Catherine. Much like in Kiss the Girls Heathcliff keeps Catherine for what he can use her for. Heathcliff wanted her to marry Linton so that he could inherit Thrushcross Grange when Edgar dies. The kidnapper in the movie keeps his victims in order to enjoy their talents. Now I am almost positive people will say the same about this blog they said about one of my previous ones, "why did you chose to compare these things when they really have nothing in common?" Except, in my head they do. The problem is getting it out. When I think Wuthering Heights, I immediately see a cavernous house. Yes, I know that is not actually what it is, but it's how I envision it. When I read these chapters my immediate thought was about the movie Kiss the Girls I don't know why, I had not seen the movie in YEARS. However, I can semi understand why now. When I first heard about the movie I dreamed the place that the kidnapper kept his victims as a massive house, colossal. Therefore, I realized the same house was the one I thought Wuthering Heights would look like, and that connection astounded me because of the similarities to the way that Heathcliff and the kidnapper had chosen their victims. I envisioned Catherine as one of those women, trapped away only to be used when needed/wanted. I felt bad for Catherine, while I really hadn't anytime before. 

The Complexity of The Maze Runner Characters

Written by Kathy

WARNING: MAJOR SPOILERS FROM THE MAZE RUNNER SERIES (EXCEPT THE KILL ORDER AND THE MAZE RUNNER FILES) BY JAMES DASHNER
Seriously. I name almost all the major deaths. Don't read this if you don't want spoilers.

Last class, we talked about the complexity of the characters in Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights. Mr. Mullins wanted us to look at all of Brontë's characters and notice their complexity, because he wanted us to appreciate the book more. I already appreciate the book, because I like every single book I read. The reason I never hate a single book I read is because I look at all the books I read in a more complex way, instead of just looking at the surface of the story. Most readers tend to only look at the surface of a story. One book series I love that no one else seems to appreciate is The Maze Runner Series by James Dashner. Most of the time, people say the books are "too confusing" and all the characters are "bland." First of all, The Maze Runner Series is supposed to be confusing. Thomas is put into a large Maze without his memories. We are reading from his point of view. We are supposed to be confused with him. Secondly, the Maze Runner characters are some of the most complex characters I have ever read in a story. A few of the most complex, but unappreciated characters in The Maze Runner Series are Teresa, Gally, and Alby.

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When I first read The Maze Runner, I didn't like the character Teresa at all. She seemed too perfect, because she had absolutely no flaws except for "sassyness," which is a stereotypical "flaw" for strong women in books. I kind of held a grudge against her the entire series until she saved Thomas' life and got crushed by a ceiling, which is when I started to feel sorry for her. After I finished the series, some friends helped me realize how complex Teresa's character actually is. In the first novel, The Maze Runner, you mostly see her annoying perfectness and her sassyness, but during The Scorch Trials, real flaws start to appear. One of her biggest flaws is caring too much about others and not enough about herself. She even ends up beating up her best friend, Thomas, to save his life and ultimately ruining their friendship forever. On top of that, she ends up pushing him away from a falling ceiling, only to be crushed by it. So I guess you could call this flaw her fatal flaw.

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Another character that is often looked at too simply is Gally (or Captain Gally as he likes to be called). He is first introduced as the bully of the series, because he passionately announces his hatred for Thomas every time he sees him. He even tries to kill Thomas after they escape the Maze, but Chuck sacrifices himself and the dagger hits him instead. Gally is actually being controlled by WICKED. Thomas, however, can't get this into his head, but Thomas is just clueless sometimes (and by sometimes, I mean all the time). Gally is obviously crying and trying to gain back control of himself before he throws the dagger, but Thomas doesn't notice and just blames Gally for Chuck's death. Later on, when Thomas meets Gally again in Denver, Gally reveals to Thomas he was controlled by WICKED and never really wanted to kill Chuck. He also sarcastically remarks he wanted to kill Thomas, which shows he is both sarcastic and serious (Gally seems to take himself too seriously sometimes. Example: Captain Gally). Even after Gally tells Thomas why he killed Chuck, Thomas still hates him, but he, at least, tries to not show it as much. If we, as the readers, look at Gally from Gally's perspective and not Thomas' perspective, we would see that Gally is actually a really complex character. If you do your math correctly, you can notice that there is a Keeper missing on the pole at Ben's Banishment. Gally is already declared a nemesis by Thomas at this point, so if Thomas looked at the pole, which had all the Keepers on it, wouldn't he think "What? Gally's a Keeper? I didn't know that. I hate him so much. Ugh." He doesn't, however, think this, because Gally wasn't there (Thomas doesn't realize Gally is a Keeper until Thomas' first gathering much later). And why would Gally not be at Ben's Banishment? Well... Ben is a Builder and Gally is the Keeper of the Builders, so they probably spent a lot of time together not working (Have you seen the quality of the Homestead?). My theory is that they are really close and Gally couldn't handle watching someone that close to him sent out into the Maze to become Griever food. Dashner shows that Gally actually does have feelings and isn't just the bully Thomas perceives him to be.

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One of the most complex, but unappreciated characters is Alby. I have never heard a single person say that he is his/her favorite character. That might be due to the fact that he died in the first book, or it could be due to the fact that people aren't looking at him closely enough. Even though I don't usually choose favorites, I would say that Alby is probably my favorite character, for a number of reasons: (1) he is fearless, (2) he is efficient, and (3) he is a really caring person. Alby usually only shows the first two to other people. He wants the other Gladers to know he's a good leader, especially since he is fairly new at leading (The previous leader, Nick, died somewhere between Chuck's arrival and Thomas' arrival. Chuck arrives only a month before Thomas, so it was fairly soon). When Minho tells Alby there's a dead Griever in the Maze, Alby quickly agrees to investigate it the next day. He pokes the "dead" Griever with his foot. I don't think any other Glader besides him (not even Minho) would poke a Griever. The Gladers are completely scared of the Grievers, but Alby believes it is important and he pokes the Griever in order to double check that Grievers can actually die (They actually can, but this particular one wasn't really dead). Alby makes decisions in a quick and rational manor in order to get things done in a time efficient manner (except after he goes through the Changing). An example of this is when Teresa first arrives in the Glade. He takes the situation very seriously and questions Thomas on whether he knows her or not. He doesn't spend a lot of time on questioning Thomas, because he figures that's a waste of time (because Thomas isn't answering all that well) and he orders the Med-jacks to take Teresa in their care. He also tells the many excited and hormonal teenage boys not to touch her. This shows that he cares a lot about people, even people he doesn't even know. There are many hints he is a caring person throughout The Maze Runner, but the biggest event that shows how much he really cares a lot about others is the time he saves Newt. In The Death Cure, as Crank Newt is begging for his death, he tells Thomas the story of how he really got his limp: After Newt climbs up one of the Walls inside the Maze, throws himself from the side, and lands on the ground, he is somehow still alive. Alby finds him and drags him all the way back to the Glade, most likely going against orders to save his friend (Guessing that Alby was a Runner at this point, because Alby would've not gone into the Maze with Minho if he wasn't: Runners had to map their sections then immediately come back). Alby cares a lot about Newt and about his fellow Gladers. He wants to ensure that everyone's lives are safe and they escape the Maze. Well, until he goes through the Changing. After he goes through the Changing, you can tell he still cares a lot, because he doesn't want the Gladers to face the horrors of the real world. He believes it is preferable to be killed by the Grievers than to face what's outside the Maze. Even though Alby may not always show it, but he has many different sides to him: He has a fearless and efficient leader side and he has a caring guardian side.

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The Maze Runner Series is full of complex characters. I can't even begin to comprehend people who don't believe the characters are complex. They are extremely complex. All the characters in the Maze Runner series have many different sides to their personalities. Shuck it, even the "Rose took my nose" Crank has many different sides to his personality (We know he likes to eat noses, but the words "Rose took my nose, I suppose." sounds like a nursery rhyme. He probably was a father or an uncle or another family figure before the Flare took him over). Even the smallest characters can have complex personalities. Not all characters need an entire book in order to portray their personality. The personalities Gally, Teresa, and Alby were portrayed through the writing of James Dashner quite well. They are complex and different from every single other character in The Maze Runner Series. People who read the series probably perceive the characters as simple, because they are reading from the perspective of Thomas, the main character. Thomas is an introvert (You can tell by the way he complains about not getting enough alone time and the way he runs off to the Deadheads to hide from his problems), so he won't naturally be able to perceive other people's personalities as well. Since the readers are in the perspective of Thomas, probably the most clueless character in the entire series, they won't be able to look through other character's perspectives unless they look closer at the series. The most subtle of hints can give away an entire character's personality. Figuring out a character's personality is like finding the Code to the Maze, you have to put the small facts and ideas together to come to a conclusion. That conclusion will help you escape the Maze of "flat" characters and go into the real world of discovering round characters. Sometimes the key to solving the character's personalities is right in front of you and "maybe you should just push that button." - Chuck (The Maze Runner, Page 346)

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What An Actual Young Adult Romance Would Look Like

Written by:  Mel H.

 (This is my first post for Amber's, Lizzy's, and my blog; for anyone who doesn't know what happened, I moved from my one-person blog to their group.  From now on, I'll be writing every third post.  Hi everyone!)

**spoilers for Cassandra Clare's Mortal Instruments books**

It is undeniable, laughably and obviously undeniable, that whatever feelings exist between Catherine Earnshaw Linton and Heathcliff are unhealthy.  To say the very least.

When I first started reading Wuthering Heights, I'd heard reviews quite to the contrary of the actual material; of course, there are always going to be fangirls who make Heathcliff out to be some sort of brooding bishounen with hidden spots of softness, but even aside from these extremists and Heathcliff apologists, the status of WH as a swooning, grand romance is lauded far above the crooked abusiveness of the relationships depicted in it.   I knew, for one, how I thought the story was going to go:  I knew beyond all knowledge that Heathcliff, after having been treated terribly by Hindley Earnshaw, would sweep back in from his three year absence on a white horse and sweep Catherine away from her husband, who would turn out to be A Terrible Person Indeed.  There would be all sorts of social and class conflict, and maybe someone would die, but only tragically.  And maybe Heathcliff would commit a few acts of brutality along the way, but he'd end up being a good person after all.

Haha.  Ha.  Hahaha.  Haha.

The blaring warning sign -- what began to tear down my childish expectations -- was Catherine's "I am Heathcliff" speech, where she asserts that, unlike loving Edgar Linton, she needed Heathcliff; she identified with him.  This essay does a good job of exploring that particular facet of their relationship, which is, I think, one of its most telling aspects.  It's almost as if Heathcliff and Catherine see the other as an alter ego, empathizing and identifying with one another to such an extent that they seem like individual parts of a whole. 

Further, the Freudian sense of the word 'identification' (other than going down into a horrible dark rabbit hole full of Oedipal complexes and political incorrectness) lends WH's central relationship an even darker, more socially backwards tone: Not only does it insinuate a mental strategy that reflects dangerously low self-esteem, but it also paints the picture of two individual personalities barreling ever closer toward one another, losing sight of the individual 'self' in favor of assimilating as much of the other person and the couple as possible.  More on that here.

I don't want to get into psychology because that's not what this blog post is about -- I'm merely bringing these things up to ask you, as a reader, if they're at all familiar.  Are they?  If you're saying 'yes' right now, then I agree with you; and if you're saying 'no', I'd recommend you rent any Twilight movie or read the first book -- or, more to the point, pick just about any brooding vampire romance for teens off the shelf that you can find.

I've never read Twilight, so I can't say one way or the other whether it actually DOES follow this pattern, but I read a lot of things like Twilight back in middle school and early high school.   Girl meets brooding boy who thinks he's a monster, there's an immediate attachment, girl becomes so smitten with him that she can barely think of herself, boy tries to acquit himself from the relationship but fails because he's so absorbed in her, they do lots of creepy things like watching each other sleep and sniffing each other's hair and trying to kill themselves for each other, and eventually...

...what, did you think I was going to say it usually ends tragically?  No.  They usually wind up happily ever after -- and if not, with just as much unhappiness as it takes for the author to churn out another novel and make loads of money off of their lovelorn wretchedness.

The Mortal Instruments:  Obligatory Shirtless Man Cover

 One of my favorite fictional relationships way back when was Jace and Clary from City of Bones, who function quite a bit, in retrospect, like Edward and Bella, or Heathcliff and Cathy.  Of course, Jace and Edward both are much kinder love interests than Heathcliff -- it doesn't take much, surprisingly -- but the rhythm of the story still stands.  Clary winds up so utterly smitten for Jace that she's willing to do all sorts of unpleasant things for him; if I recall correctly, they wind up resolving to ignore the fact that she's 100% convinced that he's 100% her brother.  She shoves herself through all sorts of damaging trials for him.  As the story goes on, it feels almost like she's losing herself to this great tempest that is I love Jace I love Jace I love Jace and as a young girl, reading that, I started to feel very, very weird.

And that's the point.  She loves him so much that incest is okay.  She loves him so much that killing herself is okay -- even preferable to a life without him, as Bella suggests in Twilight with her "him".  She loves him so much that she'd like to lose herself in his shadow; in fact, that's what love is about, isn't it?

That's what love is about, isn't it?

I think Catherine Linton would say so.  I think Heathcliff would tell you directly that the relationship is unstable and ugly and he likes it that way.  So do a lot of people.  And I understand why you might want to fantasize about a relationship like Catherine's with Heathcliff:  The world is so turbulent, our identities so full of self-loathing, so ever-changing, that to shelter oneself in the persona of another, even if he is a wicked and terrible man, is preferable to living in our own skins.

Let me ask you a question, though.  We've all already seen how Brontë depicts her savage, selfless romances:  Destructively, and exactly how they are.  But that's not the story you get from Clare's books, or Meyer's, is it?  There seems to be an entire genre now devoted to telling the story of a young woman who falls in love with a man/woman who's bad for her but can't leave him/her because they are entirely become one another -- and how it's all okay, because it's love, and young people (even adults!) are that way.

Is it love?  Do we need to be telling our daughters this same story over and over again?

That to crawl inside the persona of a destructive man or woman, to be incapable of living without him or her, is just part of their existence as a woman with romantic feelings?

Fire and Ice

By: Izzy Lewis

Literature is any written work that achieves a story about life. It has at least one theme and is able to connect to one's life. In Robert Frost's poem "Fire and Ice," he states "Some say the world will end in fire, / Some say in ice." Fire and ice are both factors that are needed in a story.

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Fire is the explosion of ideas in a story. Fire, or "desire" as Frost calls it, is what makes life exciting. Ideas are what drives humans on to do new and exciting things. Without ideas, everything would be boring and life would have no meaning. Without ideas in a story, the story would lack meaning. The story needs fire.

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Not only is fire a necessary element in a story, but ice is also. Ice is the cold, hard facts about human life. One can't have ideas without having facts to back them up. Sometimes it's hard to accept the facts and only pay attention to the ideas, but the facts are also necessary to understand the story. The story needs ice.

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Fire is what starts the story and ice is what calms it down. There needs to be a balance in order for the story to work. If there is too much fire, the reader will be overwhelmed with ideas and reading it will be straining to the brain, because the reader will have to think too much. If there is too much ice, the reader will be bored with the story, because there isn't anything in it challenging to the mind. With a perfect balance of fire and ice, one will be challenged by the story but also understand the story and be able to relate it to human life.  Fire and ice together, of course, make water. With water, the ideas and facts flow easier to the readers' minds. So, if the world was going to end, it should end in both fire AND ice in order to achieve a perfect balance.

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Escaping the Maze = Happiness?

Written by: Kathy

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Like Nikolay Ivanovitch in Anton Chekhov's "Gooseberries," the Gladers in James Dashner's The Maze Runner have a goal. Nikolay wants to own a farm, whereas the Gladers want to escape the Maze. Like Nikolay, once the Gladers reach their goal, unfortunately, they are disappointed. Their journeys to reach their goals, however, are different by (1) the reason they want to achieve the goals, (2) the way they work to achieve their goals, and (3) what happens after they achieve their goals.

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Nikolay and the Gladers have completely different reasons why they want to achieve their goals. Nikolay is tired of living life in the boring city and wants to live on a farm and grow gooseberries. Contrarily, the Gladers want to escape the Maze, because they believe that is their purpose for being put in there. Nikolay and the Gladers all have a purpose they believe they need to fulfill to be happy.

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Unlike the Gladers, Nikolay takes the greedy way to get to his goal. He spends all his time worrying about money and he even marries an old widow and, basically, kills her, because he is to cheap to buy more food. His way of reaching his goal is completely different from how the Gladers are working to reach their goal. The Gladers use teamwork. They work together to find a way out of the Maze. They give specific jobs for everyone to do so everyone does their part in helping the community, and, unlike Nikolay, they actually feed each other (Thanks to Frypan and the Cooks). The Runners (the Gladers that go out into the Maze and map it) work really hard to find a way out, but they also have some free time to hang out with their friends during the evening. Differently, Nikolay works all day.

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Eventually, Nikolay and the Gladers reach their goals. Their happiness isn't fulfilled, however, because reaching their goal isn't what they thought it would be. Nikolay's farm is definitely not what he dreamed it to be. The stream on the farm is murky and his gooseberries taste horrible. He believes that he is happy, because he finally reaches his goal, but he really isn't. With the same disappointment as Nikolay, the Gladers finally escape the Maze, but they are eventually thrown back into another set of trials and are exposed to a disease called the Flare and the people who have it, called Cranks. They think everything is going to be fine and dandy (except for those who went through the Changing, of course), but everything turns out even worse than their experiences in the Maze. They are even more disappointed than Nikolay.

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Even though "Gooseberries" and The Maze Runner are contrarily different, like why they want the goal, how they work for that goal, and what happens when they reach their goals, they have characters that share similar experiences. Characters in both stories feel disappointment with the outcome of their goals coming true. From both of these stories, one can learn that even when someone's goal is fulfilled, it doesn't mean that person is happy. Nikolay and the Gladers are not happy with their outcomes.

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Doctor Who Does the Best

BY: Izzy Lewis

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The Doctor is a very widely known character and easily connectable to many different types of people. In A Good Man Is Hard To Find we are set with a scene of tension between families and they just don't know what to do. However, the husband/ son forces the family to go to Florida instead of Tennessee. Bailey, the son, seems more interested in what he wants than with experiencing things different from the world. Bailey drags his family to Florida instead of going to Tennessee to experience the reminiscence of his mother. He chooses to let his family be uncultured and unprepared.... This is very much UNLIKE the Doctor.

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No matter what the grandmother in A Good Man is hard to Find believes in, the Doctor will never leave anyone alone. The Doctor always makes sure his companions know he's leaving. Even if the tardis is going to be sitting around, the Doctor makes sure to "enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can." The Doctor never let anyone go, he always said goodbye.

(YOUTUBE VIDEO)

Even though the grandmother was saying to The Misfit that she didn't believe he would shoot an old lady, she still died at his hand. One by one her family was taken into the forest and killed by The Misfit's gang and the whole time she was "praying" and trying to convince The Misfit that she could be saved. However, The Doctor knew otherwise and it seems The Misfit's thoughts weren't far off. People have their time and when their time is up... They will die.

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