5/20/2023 0 Comments Books written by emily bronte![]() ![]() Like Shelley’s sculptor, the novelist Emily Brontë knows her character. And ask: what is Ozymandian Heathcliff mocking with such disdain? WHAT IS his problem? ![]() Juggle Ozymandias and Heathcliff, two male mononymities, purveyors of colossal wreckage who sneer, life-like even in death. Overlay Shelley’s antiquity with Brontë’s more recent times. Transpose creeping desert sands with peaty Yorkshire moors. Mr Heathcliff was there – laid on his back…he was dead and stark!…I tried to close his eyes – to extinguish, if possible, that frightful, life-like gaze of exultation…They would not shut – they seemed to sneer at my attempts, and his parted lips, and sharp, white teeth sneered too! – Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,Īnd wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Stand in the desert…Near them, on the sand, ![]() Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone And there are no sneers in literature as memorable as these two: Charles Darwin famously described that contemptuous expression as dog-like, revealing our animal descent, a ferocious curling of the lip ‘uncovering the canine tooth on one side’. ![]() There’s sneering in the work of Shakespeare and Beckett and Brecht. ![]()
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