Abstract
Wuthering Heights can be read as a novel of warfare against women and women-associated spaces to be conquered to prove male superiority, authority and power. This paper aims to discuss how Emily Bronte challenged not only the established Victorian literary traditions but also the prevailing ideals of the Victorian society by subverting the hierarchically constructed power and gender relations with an emphasis on various strategies employed by Heathcliff and Edgar in the war they launch against nature, property and women to conquer, possess and control domestic households, external nature and female body. Their strategies include reductionism which includes the commodification and objectification of female body, separation of women from their female bond, family and female spaces, physical and emotional uprooting which causes the loss of independence, self-confidence and positive self-image, masculinization of nature and home, brutalization through which the female characters are exposed to male violence and oppression and destruction of a sense of security, commitment and resistance. The female characters are disconnected not only from their domestic households and nature but also from female bonds. The sense of placelessness and homelessness along with the lack of female solidarity is aggravated by transforming home and the natural world into an imprisoning, dominating and tyrannical web for women. Bronte ends the novel with a hope that subjugation and subordination does not have to be the inevitable destiny for women who can fight back to restructure the existing power relations and reclaim their bodies and home along with nature turned against them.
Highlights
Wuthering Heights can be read as a novel of warfare against women and women-associated spaces to be conquered to prove male superiority, authority and power
Victorians enjoyed the progress and advancement made possible by imperialism and capitalist industrialism, there were many challenges that disturbed the sense of stability and confidence in the Victorian Society
Bronte is described as the mixture of two important pre-Victorian writers, Walter Scott who celebrates “the common sense, ordinariness of the lowlands and of the ideal of quiet domesticity” and presents the Highlands as “dangerous”, “seductive”, “threatening” and “doomed” and Mary Shelly who uses the mountains, the Alps and Gothic extremes in her novel Frankenstein (Levine 145), she is more interested in exploring the gender and gender-related issues within the framework of power relations which are never stable and fixed but in flux and constantly subject to deconstruction and reconstruction
Summary
Bronte is one of the most controversial and daring novelists of the Victorian Era and her only novel Wuthering Heights (referred to as WH on) was received by harsh criticism, hostility and rejection. Charlotte Bronte in the preface to WH describes her sister as “home-bred, country girl” who writes in “nunlike seclusion”, what makes WH “exceptional” (Tytler 44), “unique” (Levy 158), an extraordinary novel is Emily Bronte’s untraditional and nonconformist personality which challenges the ideals of femininity in the 19th century as observed by her teacher Constantin Heger: “She should have been a man - a great navigator Her powerful reason would have deduced new spheres of discovery from the knowledge of the old, and her strong, imperious will would never have been daunted by opposition or difficulty, never have given way but with life” To Eagleton, Heathcliffs gaining wealth, power and social status can be considered along with his insurgency “revolution from below” which can be likened to “the various stages of the Irish revolution” against Britain in the 1840s (18-20) Bronte wrote this novel in the 1840s while England was undergoing rapid industrialization and urbanization, and Ireland was resisting against the British imperialism by launching Young Ireland Movement of independence. The characters, though situated in Yorkshire, should be construed in a far-reaching nationwide social, political and cultural context with references to current events
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