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Wuthering heights
- 6. 6
nov 316.17
Wuthering Heights straddles literary traditions and genres. It combines elements of the Romantic
tale of evilpossession, and Romantic developments of the eighteenthcentury Gothic novel, with
the developing Victorian tradition of Domestic fiction in a realist mode. Its use of the ballad and
folk material, romance forms and the fantastic, its emphasis on the passions, its view of childhood,
and the representation of the romantic quest for selfhood and of aspiring individualism, all link the
novel with Romanticism. On the other hand, the novel’s movement towards a renewed emphasis on
community and duty, and towards an idealisation of the family seem to be more closely related to
the emerging concerns of Victorian fiction. Emily Brontë’s novel mixes these various traditions and
genres in a number of interesting ways, sometimes fusing and sometimes juxtaposing them. I want
to direct attention to the ways in which the novel’s mixing of genres may be related to issues of
gender by examining some of the ways in which specific historic genres may be related to particular
historic definitions of gender.
Pykett, Lyn, Emily Brontë.—﴾Women writers﴿, 1989
Impossible to categorise
- 8. 8
nov 316.31
In its transition from patriarchal tyranny, masculine competition, domestic
imprisonment and the Gothic to the revised Domestic romance of the courtship
and companionate marriage of Catherine and Hareton, Wuthering Heights both
participates in, and engages with, the feminisation of literature and the wider
culture noted by Armstrong and Spencer. However, I would suggest that
Emily Brontë’s novel does not simply reflect or represent this process, but that it
also investigates and explores it. The narrative disruptions, the dislocations of
chronology, the mixing of genres and Brontë’s historical displacement of her
story, published in 1847 but set in a carefully dated period leading up to and just
beyond 1801, combine to produce a novel which goes back and traces both
changing patterns of fiction and the emergence of new forms of the family.
Pykett, Lyn, Emily Brontë.—﴾Women writers﴿, 1989
- 9. 9
nov 1519.23
However, at the same time as Wuthering Heights
traces the emergence of the modern family and its
hegemonic fictional form of Domestic realism, other
elements of the novel its disrupted chronology, its
dislocated narrative structure, and the persistence of
the disturbing power of Catherine and Heathcliff
work together to keep other versions of domestic life
before the reader: the domestic space as prison, the
family as site of primitive passions, violence,
struggle and control. In its mixing of genres and in
the particular genres it chooses to mix Wuthering
Heights may,perhaps, be placed with those female
fictions which, as Judith Lowder Newton argues
‘both support
and resist ideologies which have tied middleclass
women to the relative powerlessness of their lot and
which have prevented them from having a true
knowledge of their situation’.
Pykett, Lyn, Emily Brontë.—﴾Women writers﴿, 1989
- 24. 24
nov 1714.29
The Novel as a Whole
There are hundreds of approaches you can take to analyze the novel as a whole; for instance,
You can choose to analyze
the characters (their differences and reasons for their conflicts);
compare the two families and their family traits and then the two generations (see Parallel
Characters for example);
Heathcliff as a Satanic Hero or symbol of natural energy;
the narrators (their functions, and their differences from the protagonists),
the use of narrative frames, and the other structural elements such as echoes and repetition;
the major motifs of
sickness and death (& responses to it);
the function of the past as memories and inheritance;
books and learning;
the Gothic elements of ghost, storm, nightmare, etc.;
the nature imagery and the other symbols such as window and mirror, dogs and animals;
the interaction between landscape and characters;
the theme of Romantic Passion, the ideas of oneness and Liebestod (lovedeath), and how
Romantic Passion gets "domesticated";
the theme of revenge (see a student paper as an example): what does Heathcliff want specifically?
How is his way of revenge different from Hindley's or Isabella's?
the more "Victorian" issues of names (e.g. Catherine II's full name is Catherine Linton Heathcliff
Earnshaw), class, property and inheritance. (See Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights: Romantic or
Victorian for example.)
In Wuthering Heights scholarship, there are some classical approaches. You can get a brief
introduction to some from Wuthering Heights : a summary of three different interpretations.
Also, there are some approaches that involve critical theories; for instance,
there is one example of psychoanalytic approach here.
If you want to take a sociological/Marxist approach, the Wuthering Heights homepage will be
very helpful.
Also, it's interesting to talk about your responses as a reader (reader response approach). See
And The Intended Audience Is...(drum role!) for some reflections on the intended audience.
From the relevant links section of this page, you can get to read some more papers ( mostly
students' work but some very good).
