Caged Eagles, Songsters and Carrion-Seekers: Birds in Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights

Abstract

Recent essays in animal studies attempt to dismiss the significance of animal symbolism in works of literature such as Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, arguing that animals should be seen for themselves rather than only as symbols or otherwise used to illustrate distinctive features of human characters. This approach turns a literary device into a mode of scientific exploration; it presupposes that the achievements of traditional studies of animal symbolism have included answering the questions of why nineteenth-century British authors frequently used animals as symbols in their novels, and why they consistently and deliberately associated certain characters with them. One animal crucial to the history of both literature and animal studies is the bird, and those two questions have remained unanswered, as scholars have limited their observations to the birds as if the novelists’ associations between birds and characters did not exist. A deeper understanding of representations of birds in two of the period’s most famous novels illuminates both their characters and the era’s fascination with ornithology itself.