Wuthering Heights: A Challenge to the Victorian Universe

Abstract

Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights (1847) is considered one of the most enigmatic novels of the Nineteenth century. Despite its centrality to the canon of Victorian literature and women’s writing in the nineteenth century, it paradoxically embodies both an anti-Victorian universe in its refusal to adhere to the moral and sexual codes of the time as well as upholds some of its major traits, especially with regard to the disappearance of the sexual body while violence keeps on reappearing. Despite this dearth of a moral universe was criticized by its earliest commentators, there was a predominantly patriarchal logic at work which led them to simultaneously grudgingly appreciate the male author, since Bronte was using a male pseudonym, who had, ‘at once gone fearlessly into the moors and desolate places for his heroes’ and discovered the deeper recesses of the mind.