Wuthering Heights

Considering Form

Form - Generic Conventions

AO2 Demonstrate detailed critical understanding in analysing the ways in which structure, form and language shape meanings in literary texts.

• Wuthering Heights has often been read as a Gothic novel. However, it is also often read as a powerful and passionate love story.

• The following activities look at some of the different ways in which Wuthering Heights has been read.

Generic conventions

Gothic novels• Preoccupied with the supernatural and the

fantastic• Locations such as gloomy forests and ruins• Charismatic villain (mysterious, powerful,

driven by ambition)• Gothic protagonist has contempt for

conventional forms of authority (eg the church and law)

• Landscape is charged with the emotions of the characters

• Brooding atmosphere of gloom and terror• Dealing with aberrant psychological states,

looking at the realm of the irrational• Aims to evoke terror by dwelling on

mystery and horror generally

Love stories• Relationships lead the novel• Focus on a few characters

usually male/female, often youthful and attractive

• Misunderstandings• Happy endings• Characters often stereotypes eg

the brooding, arrogant hero• Obstacles threaten relationships• Jealousy• Superficial sexual encounters

‘Wuthering Heights is a story about ...’

How would you rank these in order of importance?• Class conflict• Obsessive revenge• The soul of a vindictive man• The relationship between Catherine [1] and Heathcliff• The society on the Pennine moors• Wealth and power• Obsession• Death

Metanarrative

What is a Metanarrative?• A metanarrative is either a narrative that talks

about another narrative, or a narrative which refers to itself and the way in which it is being narrated. It is a term that is often used with reference to postmodern fiction, but can also be applied to any work of fiction that comments upon its status as a literary text.

• To what extent could WH be considered an example of metanarrative?

Metanarrative?1. He ... relaxed, a little, in the laconic style of chipping off his pronouns, and auxiliary verbs;(Lockwood of Heathcliff , p50/p8)2. ‘But Mr Lockwood, I forget these tales cannot divert you ... I could have told Heathcliff ’s history, all that you need hear, in half-a-dozen words.’ (Nelly, p101/pp61-62)3. Why not have up Mrs Dean to finish her tale? I can recollect its chief incidents, as far as she had gone. Yes, I remember her hero had run off , and never been heard of for three years: and the heroine was married (Lockwood, p130/p91)4. ‘now continue the history of Mr Heathcliff , from where you left off , to the present day. Did he finish his education, on the Continent, and come back a gentleman? or did he get a sizar’s place at college? or escape to America, and earn honours by drawing blood from his foster country? or make a fortune more promptly, on the English highways?’ (Lockwood, pp130-131/pp91-92)5. ‘What a realization of something more romantic than a fairy tale it would have been for Mrs Linton Heathcliff , had she and I struck up an attachment’ (Lockwood, p335/p304)

Metanarrative

Characters are seen in differing relations to books ... Edgar (at one point to Cathy’s fury) has his library; Heathcliff gives up book-learning in his adolescence. Lockwood tries to bar the dream-Cathy’s entry with books. Catherine and Joseph threaten each other’s library ... That Catherine is able to protect her own literacy at the Heights, and then resocialise Hareton through literacy, constitutes a powerful undermining of Heathcliff ’s strategies. This shared literacy becomes the central motif of the new Wuthering Heights. (Peter Miles, An Introduction to the Variety of Criticism: Wuthering Heights)

Metanarrative

It is a tale told by the fireside on a winter’s evening by an elderly woman, the family nurse, sitting and narrating as she sews. Fleeting echoes of childhood fairy tales are recalled as she proceeds. Mr Earnshaw’s journey to Liverpool and his promise to bring back presents for the three children left at home resemble the journey and promise of the merchant in ‘Beauty and the Beast’ ... What Mr Earnshaw brings home is a ‘dirty, ragged, black-haired child’ (Chapter 4) who wins his daughter’s heart. In the fairy tale the Beast is transformed into a handsome prince and this idea is echoed in the novel where Heathcliff appears to be the Beast’s equivalent.Fairy-tale transformations are constantly taking place ... (Hilda D Spear, Macmillan Master Guides: Wuthering Heights)

Critical Readings

19th Century Novel, 21st Century Text Types?• As well as reading Wuthering Heights in the

context of different generic conventions, it is also possible to read it in relation to ideas developed during the 20th and 21st centuries. These ideas can be seen to infuence both ways of writing and ways of reading texts.

Critical readings

Postmodern texts• Multiple perspectives, plots and

narratives• Awareness of form• Self-conscious and metatextual

(interested in the process of writing)• Unreliable narrator or narrators• Distortions of desire, memory or dreams• Use of mise en abyme (story within a

story)• Intertextuality (implicit or explicit

reference to other texts)• Uncertainty: difficulty in finding the/a

truth• Contradictory

Feminist texts• Lack of identity of women under male

power• Questioning of role of women to find

their natural state or to fulfil roles defined for them by men

• Strong presence of female characters• Polarised gender differences• Examining the empowerment of women• Raising awareness of male and female

stereotypes• Domination of women, controlling the

selection of events• Use of ‘female’ forms of writing such as

letters and diaries, often marginalised in traditionally male writing

How does it help or hinder our reading of the novel to read it as:• a Gothic novel?• a love story?• a postmodern text?• a feminist text?

Using literary theory

AO3 Explore connections and comparisons between different literary texts, informed by interpretations of other readers.

Using literary theory

• Marxist criticism: a way of reading texts, in which the critic analyses the social, economic and historical context.

• Feminist criticism: a way of reading texts that focuses on the roles of female characters, on the female writers, and on the language of women in a predominantly male culture.

• Psychoanalytical criticism: a way of reading texts with reference to the works of psychoanalysts such as Freud, Jung and Lacan applying their theories to the text, explaining relationships between characters, their actions or motives, for instance.

Critical extract 1Catherine’s death drive involves two foundational desires: the desire to merge with Heathcliff and the desire to return to an innocent state of childhood. In a now-famous speech, Catherine tells Nelly that she could no more separate from Heathcliff than she could from herself. ‘Nelly,’ she explains, ‘I am Heathcliff ’. But while she is alive, this union can only be represented; in the representation, the union is always failed. ‘My great thought in living is himself,’ she continues, ‘If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and, if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger. I should not seem a part of it.’ Her thought, not her self, is Heathcliff. Their union is only maintained through Catherine’s identity; neither envisioned future makes a space for her dissolution. As it is, then, their love is tied to the convention which establishes subjectivity, namely language. Though she conceptualizes their merger, her attempts at communication always recategorise the union into a decidedly live – and limited – outcome. When she begins to beg for her death, celebrates its onset, Catherine seems to be recognizing that an intense and masochistic dissolution – death – is the only way truly to merge with Heathcliff. (Robin de Rosa, To Save the Life of the Novel at www.rrmla.wsu.edu/ereview)

Critical extract 2In social terms the Heights can be read as embodying the world of the gentleman farmer: the petty-bourgeois yeoman, whereas the Grange epitomises the gentry. Eagleton argues that Heathcliff ’s social relation to both the Heights and the Grange is one of the most complex issues in the novel. Heathcliff fiercely highlights the contradictions between the two worlds in opposing the Grange and undermining the Heights. He embodies a passionate human protest against the marriage market values of both the Heights and the Grange, while violently caricaturing precisely those values in his calculatedly callous marriage to Isabella. In this, Heathcliff can be seen to be a parody of capitalist activity, yet he is not simply this, for he is also a product of and participant in that system. The contradiction of the novel is that Heathcliff both embodies and antagonises the values which he wishes to contest. (Claire Jones, York Notes Advanced: Wuthering Heights)

Critical extract 3There is a conflict of the primal nature of woman (which is a state of freedom) and the socially acceptable woman of discipline and etiquette. Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange act as symbols; Wuthering Heights as the natural state where women can be free, and Thrushcross as society where women are expected to act according to social law. The dramatic transformation of Catherine after five weeks’ stay at the Grange reinforces the idea that ladylike attributes are not natural, rather constructed. Catherine’s illness represents her downfall as she is unable to be the natural, free woman that she can be at Wuthering Heights and with Heathcliff. Notably, her original visit to Thrushcross Grange trapped her there, as opposed to her choosing to go there ... In the same way, Catherine suffers her illness at Thrushcross Grange. This idea of being trapped is articulated when Catherine admits ‘I’m tired, tired of being enclosed here’. (http://hschelp.wordpres.com)