Self-Education and Narrative Power in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights: (Re)Discovering Marginal Women Characters

Autor: Madalina Elena Mandici
Jazyk: angličtina
Rok vydání: 2023
Předmět:
Zdroj: American and British Studies Annual, Vol 16 (2023)
Druh dokumentu: article
ISSN: 1803-6058
2788-2233
DOI: 10.46585/absa.2023.16.2502
Popis: Despite the secure position of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) in academic and popular culture, the novel may not seem the first choice for a work that features both conventionally appealing characters and reliable narrators as well as modern delineations of class, gender, and race. This study argues that in Wuthering Heights reading, writing, education, and learning resist a unified interpretation, but nonetheless can provide a compass for navigating its unwieldy narrative. In the novel, the landed gentry is above the law of state, and women are at all stages disadvantaged. These depictions come in a continuous social spectrum: the woman who annotates sacred books to write her own story and chooses the cultured gentry but denies her own rough, wild nature (Catherine I), the woman exposed to culture from the cradle who educates the illiterate in a reconciliatory educator-disciple matrimony (Catherine II), the housekeeper born into the servile classes who moves beyond the limits imposed by gentility and social segregation, and has exclusive access to all the personal and social histories embedded within Wuthering Heights (Nelly Dean).
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