genre and structure

Question 1

Wuthering Height has been noted for generic ambiguity. Charlotte Bronte labelled it “ a rude and strange production”
“expanded fairytale” by Elliot Goss

Answer 1

“Wuthering Heights is like dream and like life…Bronte rejects the exclusiveness of these categories…”

-generic uncertainty ( pleasure of realism provided by text’s realism is challenged by subversive power of the genres of fantasy and horror )

-read it as romantic escapism, also counterpointed by the stand it takes against convention

Question 2

seen as Gothic novel occupied with fantastic and supernatural
Romantic novel -> fascination of dreams and the unconscious - a visionary novel, preoccupied with metaphysical issues of mystical politics

Answer 2

Gothic literature often leads to psychological realism, combining atmospheric power and the imaginative range of romance
-dealing with the uncanny and the ambiguous
-aesthetic based on feeling and emotion, associated with notions of sublime

Question 3

references to wild animals

Answer 3

• Hareton’s whiskers encroached bearishly over his cheeks
  -Heathcliff is fierce, pitiless, wolfish man

Question 4

psychoanalytic realisms

Answer 4

Heathcliff is he a ghoul, or vampire
-intervention into Victorian prejudice against outsiders, prejudice against supernatural

Question 5

Landscape as a metaphor

Answer 5

“human conditions are like the activities of the landscape”
-Catherine experiences seasons of gloom

Question 6

interlocking structure - “Chinese box”

Answer 6

texts within texts are palimpsests (overwritten with other narrations)
layers and repetition