Critical material for Wuthering Heights and Dracula-- Women

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.

 

DRACULA

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).