A Comparative Study Of Revenge Motif And Narrative Methods Between Beloved And Wuthering Heights

Revenge is a universal cultural phenomenon that exists in every stage of human development,which reflects all kinds of sufferings and hardships experienced by human beings in the course of evolution.For thousands of years,revenge has a profound influence on the social order and the formation of human activities.Also,revenge has been presented in different forms as narrative motif.Beloved and Wuthering Heights share a common motif—revenge.In these two works,one avenger was a ghost coming back to man's world after 18 years,the other was an orphan adopted by the old Mr.Earnshaw,named as his dead son,Heathcliff.No matter being deprived of the survival right,or named an orphan as a dead person,the actions actually are the negation to the avengers' values.Being killed by her own mother,Beloved returned to man's world to ask for love from her mother and messed her mother's normal life with hatred.Similarly,Heathcliff was abandoned by Catherine because of his low social status and bullied by Hindley Earnshaw,the new owner of the Heights.His hatred made him leave the Wuthering Heights.After he gained lots of wealth,he came back to the Wuthering Heights and executed a plan of revenge against the Earnshaws and the Lintons.In these two works,Morrison and Bront? applied various narrative methods to present the same reasons and plans of the revenge to readers,and made the novels full of aesthetic values.In this thesis,the author will apply the narrative discourse theories of Genette to analyzing how the narrative methods in Beloved and Wuthering Heights present the revenge motif,and try to find the same effects of narrative methods on the development of revenge themes in both novels,which can help us have a better understanding of the narrative methods and theirs functions on the revenge motif in these two works.This thesis includes four parts.The first chapter is the introduction to the two writers,works,the previous comparative studies on both novels and the foundation of the topic.In Beloved,Beloved's hate to her mother originates the deprivation of the survival rights and the abandonment from mother,which is the negation of a person's self-value.Similarly,the most important reasons of Heathcliff's hate are the humiliation form Hindley after old Mr.Earnshaw's death and the abandonment from the past lover.However,there is very few comparative study about the revenge motif and the narrative methods between both novels.The author believes that by exploring how Morrison and Bront? use similar narrative methods to make the revenge motif more prominent,readers can easier get the attractiveness of both novels from the aspect of narrative methods.In the second and third part,the author will apply Genette's narrative discourse theories to discuss how the narrative methods promote the development of revenge in the Beloved and Wuthering Heights,mainly from the aspects of narrative focalization and time strategies.By discussing the choice of narrative focalization in the Beloved and Wuthering Heights,the author finds that both of works mainly use internal focalization,i.e.,the narrative focalization is clearly limited to some characters in the text.By choosing different internal focalization to present the story,Morrison and Bront? diluted other factors and made the revenge motif more prominent.Through discussing the similarities of narrative time order and frequency in two works,the author finds that by using flashbacks,the demarcation between past and future,even the boundary of life and death is blurred in two works,which make the stories more mysterious and revenge—as the main plot of the article—also develop in the chaotic sequence of time.By analyzing the frequency in two works,the author finds that with the combination of the uniform effects of singulative narrative,the swings in repeating narrative and the fast-forward effects of iterative narrative,the rhythm of Beloved and Wuthering Heights presents the characteristics of turbulence and harmony,and revenge—as the motif of two works—has been developed and promoted in this kind of rhythm.The fourth part is the conclusion of the thesis.Although Beloved and Wuthering Heights tell two different revenge stories,after comparing Beloved and Wuthering Heights from the effects of narrative methods,the author finds that based on the needs of expressing revenge motif,Morrison and Bront? skillfully combined the internal focalization,non-chronological time order and different time frequency together,presenting the revenge reasons and revenge methods to readers and promoted the revenge motif effectively.