Ways into Wuthering Heights

(a resource for the outcome)

Consider the following approaches to Wuthering Heights:

A Marxist viewpoint http://www.angelfire.com/tx4/marxistviews/

Consider the following interpretations of Wuthering Heights

Davies, Stevie. Emily Bronte. Plymouth: Northcote House, 1998.

Davies insightful comments show how Wuthering Heights can be read as a novel of encryptment: "The central names are clearly (but not obviously) anagrammatic."

__________. Emily Bronte: Heretic. London: The Women's Press, 1994.

Sets out a feminist case for Emily Bronte as a well-read dialectical thinker in the tradition of German Romantic philosophy, with anti-Christian and -patriarchal alignment and pro-animal sympathies.

Eagleton, Terry. Heathcliff and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture. London: Verso, 1995.

Marxist criticism. Argues that Heathcliff comes from starving Irish fleeing to Liverpool. Representative of proletariat fighting for survival in rigid class system.

Frank, Katherine. Emily Bronte: A Chainless Soul. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990.

Oscillates between an account of the Brontes in general and of Emily in particular, but is notable for its provocative emphasis on Emily Bronte as a nineteenth-century anorectic.

Jacobs, Carol. "Wuthering Heights: At the Threshold of Interpretation" Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights: Authoritative Text,

Backgrounds, Criticism 3rd ed. New York: Norton, 1990, 353-365.

Examines the struggle to separate dream and reality. Sees violence of dreams,displacement, exile, estrangement, passion, self-naming and self-sundering. "Wuthering Heights is an annunciation of excommunication, both a fabrication in language of the real world--of that which is outside language (ex-communication)--and then again an expulsion of the heretic from its own textualilty."

Knapp, Bettina L. The Brontes: Branwell, Anne, Emily and Charlotte. New York: Continuum Publishing, 1991.

Jungian criticism argues that the novel is a myth, timeless, universal unfathonable. The central theme is the birth burgeoning, and death of love on a worldly plane, and the rebirth of this passion in atemporal spheres. Lockwood's nightmare Catherine is his anima, attempting to allow him to establish emotional and sexual relationships with the opposite sex.

Levy, Anita. Other Women: The Writing of Class, Race, and Gender, 1832-1898. New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1991.

The novel provided the imaginary means for mediating a series of boundaries--between inside and outside, male and female, public and private, culture and nature--represented in the languages of sociology and anthropology and later given psychic authority within psychology.

Oates, Joyce Carol. The Ontario Review, 1999. Introduction to Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights. Oxford, Oxford UP, 1976.

Oates asks, "Have the shadowy worlds of fairy-tale, legend, gothic horror, and romantic adventure ever been so triumphantly transfigured into art?" Sees transformation of Heathcliff as a vengeful lover into one who forgives his enemies and is capable of magnanimity in allowing them the freedom to love which he himself was denied.

Smith, Sheila. "'At Once Strong and Eerie': The Supernatural in Wuthering Heights and Its Debt to Traditional Ballad,"

Review of English Studies. 172 (1992) 515-517. in Harold Bloom ed. British Women Writers of the 19th

Century. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 1998.

Argues that the novel is based on traditional ballads, especially in the supernatural which allows the characters to attain spiritual life, bringing them into accord with each other and Nature. This life transcends class prejudices, evades the law, and disregards orthodox morality. Pagan contrast to orthodox, oral tradition, and imagination as insight, as opposed to reason and orthodox morality.

Vine, Steven. Emily Bronte. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1998.

Argues that Wuthering Heights powerfully dramatizes the conflicts and dissensions that open up seeming stabilities to the wuther of the other and submits sexual, psychical, textual, and ideological identities to the tumult that constitutes them. Builds on arguments of Terry Eagleton, Woolf, Margaret Homans, Gilbert and Gubar, Anne K. Mellor, Kristeva, Stevie Davies, Abraham and Torok, and Derrida in an elegant and captivating way.

Read the full list here

It's clear from the list above that there are many ways to view this text; depending on the views and values perhaps of the writer coming to the text Earlier in the year you explored your own views and values as you created your Eden. Use these as an way forward.