Essay
‘To what extent is the construction of Victorian femininity challenged in Wuthering Heights’
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English Literature essay for coursework in sixth form - achieved an A* (full marks)
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‘To what extent is the construction of Victorian femininity challenged in Wuthering Heights’‘Wuthering Heights’ establishes unconventional dimensions of women’s situation and their want for
autonomy. According to the Literary Theory by H Bertens, ‘gender has to do not with how females
(and males) really are, but with the way that a given culture or subculture sees them, how they are
culturally constructed.’1 The Victorian feminine ideal was a woman that was ‘the angel in the house’ 2;
a feminine figure that ensured hospitality and a moral guide, and also to be a paragon of virtue. These
characteristics of a female being naturally timid and intuitive is evidently constructing a role for them.
Women were to be moulded into this ideal and were expected to live by it. Catherine is seen by many
as a feminist role model and her independence in the beginning of the novel separates her from the
female norms of this period – Bronte clearly advocates the idea of female independence rather than
criticising it.
‘Wuthering Heights’ presents the opposition of nature and culture in traditionally gendered terms,
with nature as female, and culture as male. Indeed, this asserts that the novel is predominantly gender-
obsessed. Within the novel, a reading of the gendering of nature is supported by the manifestation of
the storm as a female witch-child, the original Catherine, in Lockwood’s second dream. Heaven and
Hell are seen in similarly gendered terms. Catherine’s choice of culture over nature, in marrying
Edgar is overlaid by her assertion that she has ‘no more business to marry Edgar Linton than I have to
be in Heaven’.
Catherine reaches puberty relatively dispossessed by parental notions of appropriate feminine
conduct. On the whole, her childhood is spent with Heathcliff in a private, unsocialised and
ungendered moorland world. Her associations with adult authority, through her brother’s domestic
oppression and Joseph’s Methodism, develop her capacity for defiance and resistance, and she
becomes a firm child affiliated with the realm of nature, its freedom and power, rather than with the
domestic and restrictions. Emily Bronte’s portrayal of Catherine’s sudden and dramatic
transformation into a refined young lady during her stay at Thrushcross Grange focuses on the way in
which the particular version of femininity involved in the ideal of female gentility is socially
reinforced, rather than derived from the women’s “nature”. Instead of returning as a ‘wild, hatless
little savage’, Catherine has transformed into ‘a very dignified person, with brown ringlets falling
from the cover of a feathered beaver’. Catherine’s transformation described by Nelly as a ‘reform’, is
shown as, in fact, a process of emergence or construction which perhaps illuminates the power of the
social production of female gentility.
1
Berten, H. (2001) Literary Theory: The Basics – Critical Anthology: Feminist ways of reading
2
Berten, H. (2001) Literary Theory: The Basics – Critical Anthology: Feminist ways of reading
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