Analysis of Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights

The purpose of this research is to examine three separate schools of critical thought with regard to Emily Bronte's Wuthering_Heights. The plan of the research will be to set forth the principal characteristics that define each school of criticism, and then to discuss the views of at least two critics whose literary evaluations position them within a particular critical theory. No less significantly, this examination of various approaches to analyzing Wuthering_Heights will include a discussion of how adequately the various critical theories answer the problems of interpretation that the novel poses. As appropriate, reference will be made to the similarities, differences, and points of confluence of the theories. The three schools of critical thought the research will discuss are psychoanalysis, feminism, and deconstruction (a subset of poststructuralism).

Two principal theorists of psychoanalytic criticism are Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, the former for the reason that he essentially founded psychoanalysis, the latter for the reason that, although his professional and theoretical antecedents are undoubtedly Freudian, his views of the human psyche depart in significant, fundamental ways from those of his master. To understand how a Freudian view of art may affect interpretation of Wuthering_Heights, it is necessary to know the basics of Freud's interpretation of fundamental human impulses and actions. There are two, both of which have relevance for a Freudian interpreta

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ching. For Cixous, these are features of a 'feminine economy' which she describes as antagonistic to the 'male economy', to the symbolic, the philosophic and to discourse. Woman is like the unconscious which has been repressed and excluded from the male order. It is therefore possible in her view for woman to let the repressed appear in her writing without making a detour by traversing the discourses as Irigaray suggests.23 On this view, Wuthering_Heights would hardly be the workingout of Bronte's repressed anxieties as the Freudians would have it, but a literary illustration of the effects of repression, hence a conscious work of art. In this regard, Weigel comments that she does not "believe that the discovery by men of 'feminine elements' in literature leads us very far. . . . Although fired by the good intention of freeing the gender roles from their biological determination, this thesis in fact only prescribes a gender dichotomy in a much deeper and more significant way because it eternalises that dichotomy in terms of social gender roles."24 It is therefore not the author who is on the shrink's couch but the characters of her novel. More, Bronte may be seen as a competent

Category: Literature - A