Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and Irigarayan Ethics of Love

Abstract

This paper examines Emily Bronte’s masterpiece Wuthering Heights (1847) through Irigarayan non-possessive and irreducible love of dual subjects in terms of non-duality within duality to argue how Bronte’s main characters, Catherine and Heathcliff, challenge the traditional hierarchical dualities of patriarchal society of Victorian age through their love relationship. As romantic lovers, they act upon their feelings and desires in contrast to Victorian restrictions and Christian religious tradition that give importance to the soul rather than the body. Catherine and Heathcliff try to express their emotional desire and autonomous being and subjectivity by sharing the same air in the natural landscape of Wuthering Heights, the moors, which allow them the possibility of love. However, they cannot achieve the full measure of non-dual love at the end of the novel due to Catherine’s marriage to Edgar and acceptance of patriarchal dualities represented by the Lintons’ world.