Wuthering Heights: A Challenge to the Victorian Universe (original) (raw)
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Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights: An Unconventional Victorian Masterpiece
2014
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte (1818-1848) is a novel which is windswept and weatherbeaten both in the world outside and in the world inside of human emotion. The total book leaves a deep impression of an intense but dreary romantic view of life and of an unusual mystery and conflict. None of the Victorian novelists has been able to create these traits. Some of Emily's characters appear like creatures of their autonomous, unreal world. This paper shows that the novel is an expression of Emily's rare sense of imagination that is absent in many other contemporary novelists. It also shows that Emily paints an unusual love before which the demonic passion melts. So, this novel stands far apart from other Victorian masterpieces. Not only this, Wuthering Heights does not portray Victorian realism which is the focal point of most of the Victorian great novels.
“It is unutterable”: Sexual Transgression in Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights
Academia Letters, 2021
When we speak of Gothic texts, it is tempting to do so with reference to gender, categorising texts as either Male Gothic or Female Gothic. However, the definitions of these categories are somewhat nebulous – classification can depend on the gender of the author, the gender of the protagonist, elements of the narrative, or a combination therein. Moreover, this dichotomy largely ignores the prevalent depiction of queerness, here meaning non-normative experiences of sex, gender and sexuality, within Gothic fiction. In 1996, Jean Kennard published an article titled ‘Lesbianism and the Censoring of “Wuthering Heights”’. She contemplates Emily Brontë’s own identity, reading her “masculine” habits, “peculiarities”, and nickname, “the Major”, in the context of early Victorian discourse around gender and sexuality. She then reads Wuthering Heights as a subliminally lesbian narrative, in which Brontë’s ambivalence towards her own identity is encoded in the tumultuous relationship between Cathy and Heathcliff. Surprisingly, very little further work on Wuthering Heights as a queer text has been undertaken in the following quarter of a century. This paper aims to return to this site of critical enquiry, this time examining the text through the lens of the Queer Gothic, an area of study that has gained substantial interest over the past fifteen years. It begins by exploring the ways in which Heathcliff is coded as a sexual Other, drawing on the associations between race and transgression in nineteenth century England, and the ways in which these associations were articulated in Gothic fiction. It then returns to Kennard’s interest in sameness in the novel, exploring the ways in which Cathy and Heathcliff’s identifications with one another transform them into increasingly androgynous and transgressive characters. Finally, it explores Victorian notions of sexual transgression as a sickness, and the way in which the Gothic gave language and form to such notions, tracing instances of illness in the novel in this context. Ultimately, this paper reads Wuthering Heights as a deeply transgressive text that both influenced and was influenced by contemporary discourse around gender and sexuality, situating it within a history of sexuality that continues to bear heavily upon the present.
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë: Window into the Soul of an Adolescent Girl
2016
My thesis concerns the understanding of the novel Wuthering Heights (1847) by Emily Brontean adolescent girl's journey towards adulthood. It covers the basic background it originates from: 19th century society, class and geographical determinism, the position of women, and the facts about Bronte's life which formed her unique writing style. It includes a part about the features of romantic literature such as its symbolism, the importance of opposition, the idea of nature as a teacher, the qualities of childhood, the supernatural and the Byronic hero. It provides a description of the main motifs in Wuthering Heights which are important for understanding it as Catherine's search for herself. It discusses the frames of mind of individual characters and repeated motifs. It pays special attention to sexual instinct as the origin of all human actions, self-acceptance and self-love, the loss and regain of identity and harmony. It discusses the idea that all characters can be se...
Unwelcomed Civilization: Emily Brontë’s Symbolic Anti-Patriarchy in Wuthering Heights
This study aims to show how Emily Brontë's opposing attitude to civilization in Wuthering Heights reveals to a certain degree her unconscious opposition to authority and accordingly her obsession with the notion of a world in which the father figure is finally slain. The research approach adopted in this study is what is referred to as psychobiography or the Freudian psychoanalytic criticism. Freud's ideas have been employed due to the increasing shift to him in the recent decades, particularly in the discipline of psychobiography. The findings of this research underline that in Wuthering Heights, through Catherine's symbolic fall, not into heaven, but into hell, and through her strong feelings of nostalgia for a lost freedom and happiness, Emily Brontë calls into question the values of patriarchal culture and its code of conduct. The main conclusion to be drawn from this article is that whatever the benefits of civilization-which is intrinsically and necessarily patriarchal in nature-may be, the limitations imposed on its citizens are not at all welcomed.
Perdones Cañas, Rebeca. Women Empowerment through Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights
Women Empowerment through Emily Brontë's "Wuthering Heights", 2019
a biannual , peer-reviewed, full-text, and open-access Graduate Student Journal of the Universidad Complutense Madrid that publishes interdisciplinary research on literary studies, critical theory, applied linguistics and semiotics, and educational issues. The journal also publishes original contributions in artistic creation in order to promote these works. Volume 7 Issue 2 (December 2019) Article 5 Rebeca Perdones Cañas "Women Empowerment through Emily Brontë"s Wuthering Heights" Recommended Citation Perdones Cañas, Rebeca. "Women Empowerment through Emily Brontë"s Wuthering Heights" Abstract: In this paper I analyse how Emily Brontë challenges in her novel Wuthering Heights the female stereotypes to which women of the Victorian Era were submitted. In order to accomplish this analysis, I take into account the social aspects in which women had to meet expectations. For the purpose of finding answers to this issue, I have organised this study into different parts that show the pressure to which women of the Victorian age were subjected. Firstly, I start analysing the age in which this novel takes place and how the situation of women in that time was. Secondly, I continue describing one of the most important social aspects that kept women submitted in that age: marriage. I analyse the clout that it had in Victorian society and how it was a social imposition and nobody had a different choice. Thirdly, I focus on women education and how it was something almost forbidden for them and a way to control and submit them. Fourthly, my study comes to the most important issue which is the female stereotypes challenged by the characters of Wuthering Heights. Then, I explore superficially how the defiance of these stereotypes lead to tragic consequences in the case of the main female characters. Finally, I conclude that Emily defies the imposed gender roles and female stereotypes of the Victorian Era through her work although it was not a simple task.
Politics of Authorship and Pseudonymity in Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights: A Perspective
The Criterion: An International Journal in English, 2020
A text that has successfully broken through the ‘Jane Eyre Fever’ and withstood the test of time, the story of the Earnshaws and Lintons in “Wuthering Heights” has well established itself as a cult classic in literature, hailed for its rebellion against the Victorian ideals of decorum and femininity. Read and reread globally by millions, it has become a regular fixture in almost every must-read list, and yet the construction of authorship in the novel, governed by a dynamic of secrecy and disclosure is a matter that intrigues readers to date. This paper attempts to go behind the novel and analyze from a feminist point of view the sexism of the Victorian literary marketplace in terms of the existing circumstances in the publishing industry and the reception history of the novel in 19th c Victorian society as well as aspects of her personality as the possible reasons that may have made her employ a mask of anonymity.
Romanian Journal of English Studies, 2023
This study argues, through a series of close readings, that female book knowledge resists unified interpretation in Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (1847), contradicting the widely-held Victorian assumption according to which discursive freedom is an exclusively male bastion of privilege. It instead concedes that self-instruction in the novel crosses cultural boundaries and perpetuates an ideological hegemony through the book as an agent of reconciliation. Book-knowledge in the novel is not the exclusive preserve of men, but a source of creativity for both ladies and ladies' maids. Language and narrative technique, the study reveals, serve to unveil contrasts between servant and gentle folk, fashionable and popular manners, enforced and self-propelled reading.
Literary Herald Revisiting Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights: A postmodern reading
2017
This paper attempts a postmodern study of Emily Bronte"s novel, Wuthering Heights. Set in the Yorkshire moors of England, Wuthering Heights was published in 1847, a year before Emily Bronte"s death (1818-1848). It is the only novel written by her. She wrote this novel during an era when the ideology of realism was developing on the basis of faith in individualism. Individualism was turning out to be central to the plot of the contemporary novel-writing. But, due to the complexity associated with individualism, an acute problematisation of the idea of classic realism in the novel-genre was inevitable. The notion of reality, and of classic realism, in the novel gets fractured by talking about an individual"s external as well as internal life. This paper represents some of the postmodern features responsible for causing this fracture of "reality" in Wuthering Heights. With a brief introduction to postmodern theory, the first part of this paper deals with the un...
Class conflicts in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights
This paper proposes to study Wuthering Heights (1847) by Emily Brontë (1814-1848) as a class-conscious novel that highlights signs of class conflicts current in nineteenth-century England. To start with, the paper concentrates on the views concerning the structure of history and the superstructure of culture and society to manifest how these ideas are instrumental to the making of Wuthering Heights. In this regard, our study intends to look into the socio-cultural scenario of the Victorian England that had had a great sway on the insightful faculty of Emily Brontë. Simultaneously, it underscores the cross-cultural crises bolstered by financial disparity that manipulate different relationships, and contribute to the towering tensions between the two houses of the novel-Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange. The two houses represent two diametrically opposed classes of the Victorian society, and have an influence on almost all of the characters in the novel. This paper, thus, examines the issues of class conflicts mirrored in the novel's social milieu and specific forms dramatized in different layers of relationships in Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights. Emily Brontë had published Wuthering Heights (1847) one year before Karl Marx (1818-1883) and Friederich Engels (1820-1895) declared the historical 'Manifesto of the Communist Party' (1848). Our study of the early Victorian period reveals that the proximity of time between the
Feminism as a socio-political concept is an important movement related to the trial of women for breaking the gender gap in every aspects of life. This study aims at portraying the feminine attitudes and emotions that cause hopefulness in women's life and creation of their own literature through surveying the selected novel of the famous female novelist, Emily Bronte. This novel signifies the internal problems of women, namely, love, muliebrity, passion, and feelings of women toward living in the world of patriarchy as minor members of society. Eighteenth century is always considered as an era of restricted rules and laws for women who were not able to liberate themselves from dogmatic world of men. This article manifests emancipation of socalled forbidden emotions of women by focusing upon the feminization of the eighteenth century characters of Wuthering Heights and creation of a new framework for next generations of female novelists and writers with no limitation in portraying their femininity. Feminism as a proper solution and universal issue investigates the controversial problems of women in creating and expressing their feelings by examine Bronte's masterpiece.