Wuthering Heights — 1994

A Study

By U. C. Knoepflmacher

“Knoepflmacher... as well as providing interesting and challenging interpretations of Wuthering Heights, also makes fresh, illuminating and detailed use of contemporary literary parallels and biographical material.”

— Notes and Queries

Wuthering Heights at once fascinates and frustrates the reader with the highly charged, passionate and problematic relationships it portrays. This study provides a key to the text by examining the temporal and narrative rhythms through which Brontë presents the dualities by which we commonly define our selfhood: child and adult, female and male, symbiosis and separateness, illogic and common sense, classlessness and classboundedness, play and power, free will and determinism. The novel’s concern with unitary and fragmentary selves has romantic antecedents in DeQuincey and Shelley and in Charlotte Brontë’s figuration of Emily as a lost other self. This concern is, in turn, reflected in the “after-life” of the text in the work of later artists such as George Eliot, Lawrence, Buñuel, and Truffaut.

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U.C. Knoepflmacher, Paton Foundation Professor of Ancient and Modern Literature at Princeton University, has written extensively on nineteenth–century British literature.