Spectres of Women in Wuthering Heights

<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>

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Arts (M.A.)

Level thesis:degree_level

Thesis

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

English

Year dc:date.available

2023

Author dc:creator

• Shearer, Corinne H

Contributors dc:contributor

• Elazar Elhanan
• Václav Paris
• András Kiséry

• Spectres
• Gothic
• Bronte
• Women
• Psychoanalysis
• Poststructuralism
• Arts and Humanities

Repository record dc:identifier

https://academicworks.cuny.edu/cc_etds_theses/1230

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:academicworks.cuny.edu:cc_etds_theses-2211