Even given that the male pronoun was perfectly acceptable to use universally in the 19th century, many of the reviewers specifically refer to Emily Bronte (under her pen name Ellis Bell) as "he." Romantic interpretations of Wuthering Heights did not come out until well after Bronte's death and the revelation that she was, indeed, a woman. There is, perhaps, a more fundamental reason which must first be explored, though: Emily Bronte's sex.īecause the Brontes all wrote under assumed names, the public tended to assume, at first, that they were male, and most of the early reviews reflect this assumption. Why is Wuthering Heights so often treated as a romance? Of course the films play their part, and the first part of the novel revolves around the passionate obsession which Heathcliff and Catherine share, which might be called love. I'll be enlisting some help in my analysis in the form of comics from the brilliantly funny Kate Beaton, taken from her website Hark! A Vagrant. To do that, we need to examine three aspects of the issue: first, the argument to be made for reading the novel as a romance, second, how that reading came to dominate at least pop-culture discussions, and, third, what the text itself has to say about romance and romantic heroes in relationship to its characters.
The point of this site is to argue that Wuthering Heights is not a romance.
0 kommentar(er)
