Born in the beautiful, wet and green country of England in 1818, Emily Jane Brontë would grow up and write one of the literary world’s most acclaimed work of literature. Before she wrote Wuthering Heights in 1847, Emily Brontë came from a very creative household as both of her sisters, Charlotte and Anne Brontë, were also writers with whom Emily would enjoy spending time with writing prose and poetry. Because the Brontë sisters lived a strongly patriarchal society where the ideal Victorian woman only dealt with domestic matters and left everything else to men, they wrote their novels and poems under the male pseudonyms of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. Emily Brontë, like her sisters, wrote under a male pen name because she wanted to limit the bias readers might have on her novel and she did not want readers to reject her book only because a woman wrote it. Since Emily Brontë lived a strong patriarchal society, her novel also portrays a society very similar to the one she lives in because throughout her life she has lived in and been constantly affected by a world dominated by men. While Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights portrays a headstrong young woman with the potential for heroism in Catherine Earnshaw, the novel proves that destruction and chaos emerge when patriarchal society tries to tame women and bring them out of their natural, free state.
At Wuthering Heights, Catherine finds herself in her freest state unaware of the patriarchal society she lives in. Living in a male dominated home after her mother had passed away, Catherine Earnshaw lives most of her childhood unaware of her duties assigned to her by society. Society’s use for a woman “was to bear a large family and maintain a smooth family atmosphere where a...
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... Wuthering Heights. Fourth ed. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2003. Print.
Eagleton, Terry. "Wuthering Heights Depicts a Marxist Struggle." Class Conflict in Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights. Ed. Dedria Bryfonski. Farmington Hills: Christine Nasso, 2011. 75-77. Print. Social Issues in Literature.
Gilbert, Sandra M. "Emily Brontë's Bible of Hell." Wuthering Heights. Ed. Richard J. Dunn. N.p.: n.p., n.d. 379-94. Print.
Gold, Linda. "Catherine Earnshaw: Mother and Daughter." Literature Resource Center. N.p., 2006. Web. 12 Feb. 2014.
Hagan, John. "Control of Sympathy in Wuthering Heights." The Brontës. Ed. Ian Gregor. N.p.: n.p., n.d. 59-75. Print.
Marsh, Nicholas, ed. Emily Brontë: Wuthering Heights. New York: St Martin's, 1999. Print.
Zhao, Juan. "Female Consciousness in Wuthering Heights." Literature Resource Center. N.p., 31 Oct. 2011. Web. 12 Feb. 2014.
Victorian literature is a representation of society at the time. These Victorian authors have expressed their concerns with the dangers of the restrictions of society and the effect it has on women. Both “The Yellow Wallpaper and Wuthering Heights show the repression of women, the dependency on men, but also the resistance to a patriarchal society and its norms.
Bronte is known as one of the first revolutionary and challenging authoress’ with her text Jane Eyre. The society of her time was male dominated, women were marginally cast aside and treated as trophies for their male counterparts. Their main role in life was to be a mother and a wife, “ Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life……the more she is engaged in her proper duties, the less leisure she will have for it.” A quote from a letter Robert Southey wrote to Bronte. A clear sign of the mentality and opposition Bronte was up against. A woman’s “proper duties” of course being to tend and wait on her “master’s” every whim and need. Women during Bronte’s time had no clear voice, none that was of any merit, they were a silent category of society, silenced by their male oppressors. Bronte’s book was in fact written before the first women’s rights movement had happened, yet it puts forward an image of an independent strong character, of a passionate and almost rebellious nature. A character “refusing subservience, disagreeing with her superiors, standing up for her right’s, and venturing creative thoughts.” I put forward that Bronte throughout her text not only revises the themes of male power and oppression, but reconstructs them also. The text is a female bildungsroman of it’s time, sometimes subtly and sometimes overtly tackling the patriarchal view of women.
Emily Brontë’s novel, Wuthering Heights, demonstrates a social criticism on women’s power to control their own fate and the ideal women in the nineteenth century. Specifically in Lyn Pykett’s, Changing the Names: The Two Catherines, a strong feminist perspective is explored. In her criticism she goes through many different analyses of Catherine Earnshaw-Linton and her daughter Cathy and what they represent in regard to a women’s power and social expectations in the nineteenth century. Pykett says that the two Catherines represent women’s true nature according to Brontë. Catherine Earnshaw-Linton is faced with the choice between two men but chooses based on what is accepted in her society, the man that can provide her economically, not the man whom she loves. This marriage to Edgar instead of Heathcliff is the source of Catherine’s problems and ultimately her demise. It causes one to question whether it is right to marry for the social aspect or for true love. Young Cathy seems to face the problem her mother has as well but she finds a way to be true to her nature and fight the tyrann...
Jane Eyre, written by Charlotte Brontë, was published in 1847 by Smith, Elder & Company, in London. This year is exactly ten years into Queen Victoria’s sixty-four year reign of the British Empire. The Victorian Era was renowned for its patriarchal Society and definition by class. These two things provide vital background to the novel, as Jane suffers from both. Jane Eyre relates in some ways to Brontë’s own life, as its original title suggest, “Jane Eyre: An Autobiography”. Charlotte Brontë would have suffered from too, as a relatively poor woman. She would have been treated lowly within the community. In fact, the book itself was published under a pseudonym of Currer Bell, the initials taken from Brontë’s own name, due to the fact that a book published by a woman was seen as inferior, as they were deemed intellectually substandard to men. Emily Brontë, Charlotte’s sister, was also forced to publish her most famous novel, Wuthering Heights, under the nom de plume of Ellis Bell, again taking the initials of her name to form her own alias. The novel is a political touchstone to illustrate the period in which it was written, and also acts as a critique of the Victorian patriarchal society.
Shapiro, Arnold. “‘Wuthering Heights’ as a Victorian Novel.” Nineteenth Century Literary Criticism. Vol. 16. Eds. Joann Cerrito and Paul Kepos. Detroit: Gale Research, 1992. 108-110.
It has been proven evident throughout the history of literature that authors will tend to incorporate their own lives into their works. This is the case in Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë. Although the novel is in itself fictional, Brontë invites readers into her private life by the way in which she writes her novel. Literary elements are often taken into consideration when determining the value of a literary work. However, they offer more than just layers of complexity to a work. Brontë uses countless metaphors to portray relevance to her own life. The ongoing comparison between the characters in Wuthering Heights and Brontë’s own life only exemplifies how often authors use their works to reflect their lives.
Emily Bronte, who never had the benefit of former schooling, wrote Wuthering Heights. Bronte has been declared as a “romantic rebel” because she ignored the repressive conventions of her day and made passion part of the novelistic tradition. Unlike stereotypical novels, Wuthering Heights has no true heroes or villains.
Phillips, James. "The Two Faces Of Love In Wuthering Heights." Bronte Studies 32.2 (2007): 96-105. Academic Search Complete. Web. 13 Feb. 2014.
Brontë, Emily, Fritz Eichenberg, and Bruce Rogers. Wuthering Heights. New York: Random House, 1943. Print.
McLeod, Jennifer. "Emily Brontë." Magill’S Survey Of World Literature, Revised Edition (2009): 1-4. Literary Reference Center. Web. 23 May 2014.
The nineteenth century saw rapid development and reform across the whole of the country; with the Industrial Revolution transforming life in Britain. For working class women life was an endless struggle of passivity and labour; as soon as they were old enough they worked on farms, in factories or as servants to the middle classes (Lambert, 2009). For women in general, life was oppressive; constantly overshadowed by the male gender who were considered dominant leaders. In a Victorian household, the male was head of the family; his wife and children respected him and obeyed him without question. This critical analysis of two nineteenth century novels - Hard Times by Charles Dickens and Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, will discuss the representation of the two female protagonists in the context of the Victorian period and question whether they do indeed portray an endless struggle for survival and independence.
‘Wuthering Heights’, although having survived the test of time as a work that is poignant and passionate, and eminently capable of holding the reader’s attention, received mixed criticism upon publication in 1847 under the pseudonym Ellis Bell. Apparently, the vivid description of mental and physical violence and agony was hard to stomach, and the atmosphere was too oppressive to merit popular liking. But many later readers and critics have given ‘Wuthering Heights’ the mantle of being the best of the works of the Bronte sisters, displacing Charlotte’s ‘Jane Eyre’. One of its prime merits, at least to my eyes, lies in Emily’s ability to make Nature an eloquent party to the story-corresponding closely with a character’s emotions, with the incidents, with the movement of the plot, and thus adding to the quality of the story. Emily was born in Thornton, Yorkshire, and her love for the landscape that she grew up with is reflected in the novel in the moors and the crags, the storms and the spring. One can see an extension of this one-ness with nature, this unity, in her choice of Wuthering Hei...
Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre is set in the mid nineteenth century, during the Victorian era where class and gender roles are clearly defined in the patriarchal society. The general ideology of the era expresses the idea that if gender categories were not maintained as binary oppositions, catastrophic chaos would likely ensue (Gill, 109). Throughout the novel, Jane is faced with the issue of oppression. The typical characteristics of an ideal female in Victorian society would include submissiveness, simple dress, low ambition, longing for a male love interest and passiveness. Bronte clearly shows her stance on this Victorian ideology as Jane often challenges those social institutions and changes her place in society, although she often settles for the status quo for certain periods of time. Jane plays the typical role of a Victorian woman through much of her life, but through subtle shifts in power Bronte challenges these Victorian norms by way of Jane’s education, unlikely rise in social status from teacher to governess and her relationship with a seemingly unattainable man.
Charlotte Bronte assumed the role of intermediary between her late sister and the perplexed and hostile readers of Wuthering Heights (Sale and Dunn, WH p. 267). Charlotte attempted to provide Emily’s readers with a more complete perspective of her sister and her works. She selectively included biographical information and critical commentary into the revised 1850 edition of Wuthering Heights, which gave the reader a fuller appreciation of the works of Emily Bronte. Charlotte championed the efforts of her younger sister and believed that Emily’s inexperience and unpracticed hand were her only shortcomings. Charlotte explains much of Emily’s character to the readers through the disclosure of biographical information.
Emily Bronte's master piece, Wuthering Heights, is a timeless story of love, deception, betrayal and revenge. It recognizes that life in the world is not a utopia. Revenge is the main theme in the book because it highlights important events, personality flaws, and the path to self-destruction. Bronte presents this loud and clear.