Central to Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) is its famous haunting scene. As this paper suggests, it is in the haunting scene that the novel’s themes are at their most potent and where Brontë is at her most daring, challenging the socially prescribed, gendered binaries of her time. The primary interest of this paper is in describing the particular power of Brontë’s feminine ghost, an archetypal figure of the female Gothic, using theoretical frameworks from poststructuralism and psychoanalysis. I propose a feminist interpretation of the novel which emphasizes the catalyzing effect of the haunting scene and its reversals– and which keeps Brontë, herself an uncanny figure, close at hand. The paper proceeds through a close-reading of the haunting scene and considers it in relation to the novel’s disquiet end. In the final section, I consider the inherent ghostliness of women in Brontë’s time, arguing that the novel’s narration style forces the reader into this peripheral perspective.
","abstract_html":"<p>Central to Emily Brontë’s <em>Wuthering Heights</em> (1847) is its famous haunting scene. As this paper suggests, it is in the haunting scene that the novel’s themes are at their most potent and where Brontë is at her most daring, challenging the socially prescribed, gendered binaries of her time. The primary interest of this paper is in describing the particular power of Brontë’s feminine ghost, an archetypal figure of the female Gothic, using theoretical frameworks from poststructuralism and psychoanalysis. I propose a feminist interpretation of the novel which emphasizes the catalyzing effect of the haunting scene and its reversals– and which keeps Brontë, herself an uncanny figure, close at hand. The paper proceeds through a close-reading of the haunting scene and considers it in relation to the novel’s disquiet end. In the final section, I consider the inherent ghostliness of women in Brontë’s time, arguing that the novel’s narration style forces the reader into this peripheral perspective.</p>","abstract_has_math":false,"creators":["Shearer, Corinne H"],"institution":null,"degree_name":"Master of Arts (M.A.)","degree_level":"Thesis","degree_discipline":"English","degree_department":null,"school":null,"contributors":["Elazar Elhanan","Václav Paris","András Kiséry"],"advisors":[],"committee_chairs":[],"committee_members":[],"year":2023,"date_issued":"2023-01-01T08:00:00Z","date_published":"2023-01-01T08:00:00Z","updated_at":"2026-07-24T01:58:07Z","subjects":["Spectres","Gothic","Bronte","Women","Psychoanalysis","Poststructuralism","Arts and Humanities"],"languages":[],"rights":[],"rights_urls":[],"identifier_entries":[]},"links":{"outbound_url":"https://academicworks.cuny.edu/cc_etds_theses/1230","outbound_label":"Repository record","outbound_source":"dc:identifier"},"metadata_groups":[{"id":"people","label":"People","entries":[{"key":"dc:contributor","label":"Contributor","values":["Elazar Elhanan","Václav Paris","András Kiséry"]},{"key":"dc:creator","label":"Author","values":["Shearer, Corinne H"]}]},{"id":"academic_context","label":"Academic Context","entries":[{"key":"dc:date.available","label":"Dc Date Available","values":["2024-01-04T08:00:00Z"]},{"key":"thesis:degree_discipline","label":"Discipline","values":["English"]},{"key":"thesis:degree_level","label":"Degree Level","values":["Thesis"]},{"key":"thesis:degree_name","label":"Degree Name","values":["Master of Arts (M.A.)"]}]},{"id":"subjects_keywords","label":"Subjects and Keywords","entries":[{"key":"dc:subject","label":"Dc Subject","values":["Spectres","Gothic","Bronte","Women","Psychoanalysis","Poststructuralism","Arts and Humanities"]}]},{"id":"identifiers","label":"Identifiers","entries":[{"key":"dc:identifier","label":"Identifier","values":["https://academicworks.cuny.edu/cc_etds_theses/1230"]}]},{"id":"additional","label":"Additional Metadata","entries":[{"key":"dc:description.abstract","label":"Abstract","values":["Central to Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) is its famous haunting scene. As this paper suggests, it is in the haunting scene that the novel’s themes are at their most potent and where Brontë is at her most daring, challenging the socially prescribed, gendered binaries of her time. The primary interest of this paper is in describing the particular power of Brontë’s feminine ghost, an archetypal figure of the female Gothic, using theoretical frameworks from poststructuralism and psychoanalysis. I propose a feminist interpretation of the novel which emphasizes the catalyzing effect of the haunting scene and its reversals– and which keeps Brontë, herself an uncanny figure, close at hand. The paper proceeds through a close-reading of the haunting scene and considers it in relation to the novel’s disquiet end. In the final section, I consider the inherent ghostliness of women in Brontë’s time, arguing that the novel’s narration style forces the reader into this peripheral perspective.
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