Kristevan Herethics in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights

Abstract

The paper explores how writing becomes a necessary means for Julia Kristeva and Emily Brontë to deal with the Law of the Father by resorting to the subjective alterity looming in the Imaginary. It argues that both Kristeva and Emily Brontë deal with the Symbolic by means of ruptures from within the structure of language; it is with the Symbolic as their medium that the British novelist and the French theorist manage to fathom the semiotic, the maternal and the jouissance in creative writing and discursive theorization. Both Emily Brontë and Kristeva attempt to obliterate essentialist, universalist and even differentialist traces of any permanent and constant peculiar identity as a woman. Both are able to compel in readers a strong consciousness of ‘otherness’, an otherness deeply rooted in the herethics of love, a new ethics based on a newly conceived relation between mother and child, the self and the other, the citizen and the foreigner, and the orthodox and the heretic.