notes taken from:
Feminist
criticism of "Wuthering Heights"
PATSY
STONEMAN
Critical
Survey, Vol. 4, No. 2, Feminist criticism (1992)
Gilbert and Guber argue that ‘the story is part of a bildungsroman
about a girl’s passage from innocence to experience
Helen Moglen, writing in 1971, also uses psychoanalysis in a
straight forward biographical way, reading 'the theme of Wuthering Heights as
the development of the female personality from childhood to maturity.
Gilbert and Gubar propose 'the following parodic,
anti-Miltonic myth: There was an Original Mother (Catherine), a daughter of
nature. . . . But this girl fell into a decline, at least in part through eating
the poisonous cooked food of culture. She fragmented herself into mad or dead
selves on the one hand (Catherine, Heathcliff) and into lesser, gentler/genteelers
elves on the other (Catherine II, Hareton). The fierce primordial selves
disappeared into nature, the perversely hellish heaven which was their home.
Homans stresses that the narrative is organised by Lockwood
and conforms to his need endlessly to defer the realisation of desire; unlike
Gilbert and Gubar, she also sees Heathcliff, even as a child, adopting the
compensatory strategies of symbolisa-tion.51T he elder Catherine, in contrast,
by seeking literallyt o replicate the joys of her childhood, is threatened by
madness and ends in death. Thus 'Brontë probes the psychic and imaginative
possibilities that the literal represents, yet in the end she identifies these
possibilities as dangers within the only terms in which she can write, and she
seals up her novel's defenses against them.
Nancy Armstrong, in her essay, 'Emily Brontë in and out of
her Time' (1982), gives a historical dimension to the formal characteristics
of the novel, pointing out that Wuthering Heights appears to change genre from
Romantic passion to Victorian Realism.
CAPITALISM OR PATRIARCHY AND IMMORTAL LOVE: A STUDY OF 'WUTHERING
HEIGHTS'
Author(s): MARGARET LENTA
Source: Theoria: A Journal of Social and
Political Theory, No. 62 (May 1984), pp. 63-76
Published by: in association
with the Berghahn Books Faculty of Humanities, Development and Social Sciences,
University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa
Arnold Kettle's, published in 1951
It ends with the
claim that the novel is ‘an expression in
the imaginative terms of art of the stresses, tensions and conflicts, personal
and spiritual, of nineteenth Century capitalist society. .. The men and women of
Wuthering Heights are not the prisoners of nature; they live in the world and
strive to change it, sometimes successfully, always painfully, with almost infinite
difficulty and error.’ This emphasis on
the seriousness of the book is necessary and valuable.
A Vampire in the Mirror: The Sexuality of Dracula
John Allen Stevenson
PMLA
Vol. 103, No. 2
(Mar., 1988), pp. 139-149
Published by: Modern Language Association
Both Craft and
Maurice Richardson call them Dracula's "daughters" ( 110, 4 27); Carol F ye terms them "wives"( 21); Leonard Wolf the count's " beautiful
brides"( 249); and C. F. Bentley says that" they are either Dracula's
daughters or his sisters " but insists that an "incestuous " relation existed between them in the past
(29). The difficulty here is a false either/or: these women must either be kin
or be wives. What these readers ignore is
the possibility that Dracula's relation to these women has, quite simply, changed,
that they have occupied both roles not simultaneously, as in incest, but sequentially,
because of the way vampire reproduction works.
Stoker's description of the first women we see in Dracula,
the vampire women at the castle, strongly emphasizes their overt sexuality. The
word voluptuous is repeated they have" voluptuous lips" and a
"deliberate voluptuousness" in their approach to Harker (46). And he,
in turn, is quickly aroused by their seductive appeal, as he feels" a
wicked, burning desire that they would kiss me with those red lips" (46).
They project themselves as sexualized beings and have power to inspire asexual response
in others. The pattern is exactly repeated when Lucy’s transformation into a
vampire is complete. Shortly after Van Helsing and Seward note the disappearance of the wounds
in her neck, the young doctor reports that she speaks in a "soft, voluptuous
voice, such as I had never heard from her lips" (167); and when the whole
band confronts the undead Lucy outside her tomb," we recognised the
features of Lucy Westenra. Lucy Westenra,
but yet now changed. The sweetness was turned to . . . cruelty, and the purity
to voluptuous wantonness"(217).
