Gender and Genre in Wuthering Heights: Gothic Plot and Domestic Fiction Lyn Pykett

As a combination of nature and visionary experience, shaping process of art doesnt count that much in Wuthering Heights. According to Pykett, however, there are plenty of mundane sources for the novel (p.7 !. "he novel combines elements of #omanticism and $othic % such as the use of ballad and folk material, romance forms and the fantastic, the emphasis on passions, the view of childhood and the aspiring of a selfhood % with typical traits of &ictorian realistic fiction % for instance, the focus on community and on duty and the idealisation of the family. 'ven though these two styles are mixed up continuously and that their boundaries are often blurred so as to produce a structural continuity, its possible to say that the $othic is deeply associated to the first part of the novel, whereas the (omestic is noticeable in the second. Perhaps, some would risk saying, this is part of the reason why its impossible to categorise Wuthering Heights. "o such an extent, in the )* th and )+th centuries, $othic was identified with women writers in a type of writing that has been called ,emale $othic - female power and the power of women in a family, besides the female condition as both confinement and refuge were all themes for this genre. .n Wuthering Heights, similarly, domestic atmosphere can be seen both as refuge and as prison % for one thing, /atherine 'arnshaws childhood alternated a sort of prison and a relative freedom for unconfined moors. And, as to the female lot, there was a 0choice1 between degrees and varieties of imprisonment, .sabella and /atherine, the daughter, were particularly confined, being dominated by different men at different times of their lives. .ts only in the second generation that most of $othic traits are left behind % 2eathcliff is an exception % giving place to the conventional closure of a dominant form of the &ictorian (omestic 3ovel, 0where social, cooperative values are renewed within the bosom of the family1 (p.77!. "he gap between domestic and gothic is maintained since there is, apart from 4ockwood, 3ellys inner narrative, which the former simply mediates % with a sophisticated language which, its important to say, has nothing to do with the (hard! life in 5uthering 2eights. 6ainly focused on the form of the narrative, Pykett brilliantly argues that in 7ront8s masterpiece, domestic is the source of gothic % for instance, its disrupted chronology and the persistence of disturbing power of /atherine and 2eathcliff are ways of bringing about the themes of the domestic space as prison and the family as source of passion, violence and control. Wuthering Heights might be read both as support and resistance to the dominant ideology according to which women are powerless and presumably ignorant of their real situation.