Idiomphobia: The EFL Learner's Syndrome

Abstract

Though separated by no less than the Atlantic Ocean, Emily Bronte and Nathaniel Hawthorne are indeed close intellectual neighbors . None of them is likely to have heard of, or even read the other. Their expressions of the fierce impact of nature, of the unaccessible depths of human naturalness , specially the domain of heathen love, however, prove, among other things, that they could have been nurtured in one social milieu. The issue of heathen love, however , introduces a major cross-cultural element for comparison. What looks probably paradoxical in this similitude is that an authoress has portrayed a male heathen in love, while an author has done the opposite. The condition and evolution of love in two heathen characters : Heathcliff in Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, and Hester Prynne in Nathaniel Hawthorne 's The Scarlet Letter, are respectively expre sions of the masculine and feminine variants of two heathen "subordinates" determined, as this study would show, by "cultural constructions" or "cultural conceptions" (terms used by Morris) of gender differences, as well as differences between two cultures: the British and the American..