Feminist Criticism & Wuthering Heights PDF

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These notes will look at feminist criticism and how these can be used to analyse Wuthering Heights....

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Showalter  Women’s writing was not worth analysing.  Wuthering Heights is in binary oppositions e.g. the two houses, classes etc.  Only available language was masculine – women were writing about themselves from a male’s perspective.  They needed to change the language and write differently.  ‘Women’ – shouldn’t fix a meaning on this, essentialism.  Male and Female = Biology.  Masculine and Feminine = Constructed. Helene Cixous  Ecriture Feminine = feminine writing  ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’. Body  Women can be seen as just an appearance.  Sexually.  Are there to just give birth / reproduce.  According to Freud the women’s pleasure is to give men pleasure.  Women’s sexuality is a threat to the family – marriage / house etc. What Feminist Critics Do  Look at representation of women, style-type of language, how it has been written.  There are no fixed meanings in Wuthering Heights.

Wuthering Heights  Emily Bronte was one of six children.  Emily’s mother died when she was three.

 The Yorkshire moors – was an important inspiration for Wuthering Heights.  Wuthering Heights often centres on the unrequited love between Heathcliff and Catherine.  Binary Oppositions abound in Wuthering Heights. One of the obvious divisions is the difference between the two houses – Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange. Binary Oppositions in Wuthering Heights  Rich and Poor  Love and Hate  Good and Evil  God and Devil  Heaven and Hell  Passion and Apathy  Summer and Winter  Soul and Body  Wild and Tame  Violent and Placid  Reason and Emotion  Male and Female  Moral and Immoral  Light and Darkness  Wealth and Poverty  Educated and Uneducated

In essays try to be as clear as possible.  Need to use a plan. Nature and Culture – Binary Oppositions

 Women are there to give birth.  Culture is negative in this sense.  Culture is put on top of nature and is to develop understanding and knowledge.  Wuthering Heights shows that nature is violent and when Catherine moves to Thrushcross Grange she develops her culture. Social Classes  Landed Gentry – Lintons and Thrushcross Grange.  Yeomanry – Earnshaws and Wuthering Heights.  Wuthering Heights is a working class house whereas Thrushcross Grange is more socially advanced.  Lintons – inherit land / wealth.  Earnshaws – build their land / wealth. Heathclif  Heathcliff is introduced as a gipsy, vagrant and outsider. However, he subsequently symbolises the industrial bourgeoisie in its penetration of landed property.  ‘Gipsy brat’ – outsider / other.  ‘Imp of satan’ – devilish, evil, small devil.  Liverpool – might be part of slave trade, portrayed as black.  Industrialization was sustained by slave trade.  Catherine thinks marrying Heathcliff would degrade her.  It is hinted he is black but not openly said.  He is economically associated within the Grange but culturally closer to Wuthering Heights.  He is still closer to the Heights because of the violence.  Story set in 1801 when Lockwood encounters the story. Slave Trade 1807 – Abolition of slave trade.

1775 – 1788 – The American War of Independence. 1847 – Liverpool’s Black community had been a continuous presence for over 100 years. 1847 – Publication of Wuthering Heights.  Heathcliff’s obscure origin (Liverpool) suggests that he repressed thoughts of bourgeois slave trade, and the fear of the other (devil, fiend).  Heathcliff becomes the catalyst of all the fear. Realist / Gothic Novels  Unusually Gothic – not the typical genre of this era.  In the period from 1840 – 94, the period of the dominance of so-called classic realism …, the pole of bourgeois (middle-class) respectability and the virtues fastened in production are perhaps paramount.  While in the earlier period, that of the first expansion of novelwriting from about 1770 – 1820 a different type of novel was dominant – one which reads today like an expurgated version of sado-masochistic pornography; the gothic novel.  The gothic is a device to represent what cannot be represented because the society doesn’t want to recognise it.  Links to her childhood where her siblings and herself used to create imaginary worlds.  Gothic genre portrays the fear in Victorian Era. The Woman Question  Women were controlled in Victorian society: owned by husbands, law didn’t recognise them. Form of slavery in the house – Victorian society didn’t want to admit this.  The Victorian period was one of great change largely brought about by the industrial revolution. Historical changes brought about discussions about the nature and role of woman: what the Victorians called ‘The Woman Question’.

 Female writers such as the Brontes were challenging conventions as to what constituted femininity. Charlotte Bronte  Averse to personal publicity, we veiled our own names under those of Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell… we did not like to declare ourselves women because … we had a vague impression that authoresses are liable to be looked upon with prejudice…’  Women publishing could be seen as a threat.  Women should be protected.  Charlotte justifies Emily by saying she was naïve and ‘she did not know what she had done’. John Ruskin  Man’s power is active, progressive, defensive.  Man is the doer, creator, discoverer.  Woman is the ‘angel in the house’. Bildungsroman  Just as triumph self-discovery is the ultimate goal of the male bildungsroman, anxious self-denial, Bronte suggests it is the ultimate product of a female education.  Story of growing up.  Men building their identity, women repressing their identity.  Heathcliff and Catherine’s love could not exist because society could not bear the couple as conceivable. Suicides  Catherine starved herself – form of suicide.  Catherine and Heathcliff should have been buried in the church as it is ‘sacred ground’ but they were buried on the boundaries of the moor.

 In 1823 the burial of suicides in churchyards becomes legalised but their bodies were laid under the churchyard wall so that no one was in peril of walking over their graves. Vampires  In the start where Catherine tries to ‘get in at the window’.  Vampires were dead bodies possessed and animated by the devil.  1897 – Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Frames  The story is framed by Nelly’s telling and Lockwood’s writing.  Bronte shows us how the nature of narrative is all frame and framing. Boundaries  The wall that separates the cultivated park of the Grange from the wild and natural expanse of the moors.  The windows that separated the inside from the outside.  The lover’s graves that are suspended across boundaries (nature and culture). Linton’s frail state after only being cared for by his mother supports the feminist theory as this is the result of breaking up a family....