Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights (Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations)

212 Pages·2008·0.96 MB·English

by  Harold Bloom

Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations
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Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations
Emily Brontë’s
Wuthering Heights
Updated Edition
Edited and with an introduction by
Harold Bloom
Sterling Professor of the Humanities
Yale University
Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations: Wuthering Heights, Updated Edition
Copyright ©2007 Infobase Publishing
Introduction © 2007 by Harold Bloom
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ISBN-10: 0-7910-9364-6
ISBN-13: 978-0-7910-9364-1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights / Harold Bloom, editor. — Updated ed.
p. cm. — (Bloom’s modern critical interpretations)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-7910-9364-6 (hardcover)
1. Brontë, Emily, 1818-1848. Wuthering Heights. I. Bloom, Harold. II. Title.
PR4172.W73E45 2007
823’.8--dc22 2006031148
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Contents
Editor’s Note vii
Introduction 1
Harold Bloom

Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights 9
Virginia Woolf
On Wuthering Heights 15
Dorothy Van Ghent
Looking Oppositely: Emily Brontë’s Bible of Hell 33
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar
Emily Brontë In and Out of Her Time 89
Nancy Armstrong
Baby-Work:
The Myth of Rebirth in Wuthering Heights 109
Stevie Davies
Wuthering Heights:
Uneasy Wedlock and Unquiet Slumbers 127
Joseph Allen Boone
The Power of Excommunication:
Sex and the Feminine Text in Wuthering 147
Heights
Regina Barreca
vi Contents
“Your Father Was Emperor of China,
and Your Mother an Indian Queen”:
Reverse Imperialism in Wuthering Heights 159
Susan Meyer
Chronology 185
Contributors 187
Bibliography 189
Acknowledgments 193
Index 195
Editor’s Note
My introduction meditates upon the strangeness of Emily Brontë’s Byronic
“northern romance,” which I judge to be essentially Gnostic in its very
original spiritual orientation.
Virginia Woolf, major novelist-critic, considers Wuthering Heights in
conjunction with Jane Eyre, both of which she finds to be prose-poems.
In Dorothy Van Ghent’s visionary interpretation, Heathcliff is more
daemonic than human, while the founding mothers of Feminist literary
criticism, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, read the novel as Emily Brontë’s
proto-feminist critique of John Milton’s Paradise Lost.
For Nancy Armstrong, Wuthering Heights deliberately evades all
literary genres, after which Stevie Davies gives us an account of the novel as
a singular myth of rebirth, in which every new life entails the sacrifice of a
previous one.
Joseph Allen Boone sees the book as a profound critique of societal-
approved sexual unions, while Regina Barreca emphasizes the feminist
dominance of the relations between sex and death in Emily Brontë.
This volumes final essay is a politicized treatment in which Susan
Meyer traces a mode of reverse colonialism (which I admit my inability to
locate).
vii

HAROLD BLOOM
Introduction
The three Brontë sisters—Charlotte, Emily Jane, and Anne—are unique
literary artists whose works resemble one another’s far more than they do the
works of writers before or since. Charlotte’s compelling novel Jane Eyre and
her three lesser yet strong narratives—The Professor, Shirley, Villette—form
the most extensive achievement of the sisters, but critics and common readers
alike set even higher the one novel of Emily Jane’s, Wuthering Heights, and a
handful of her lyrical poems. Anne’s two novels—Agnes Grey and The Tenant
of Wildfell Hall—remain highly readable, although dwarfed by Jane Eyre and
the authentically sublime Wuthering Heights.
Between them, the Brontës can be said to have invented a relatively new
genre, a kind of northern romance, deeply influenced both by Byron’s poetry
and by his myth and personality, but going back also, more remotely yet as
definitely, to the Gothic novel and to the Elizabethan drama. In a definite, if
difficult to establish sense, the heirs of the Brontës include Thomas Hardy
and D. H. Lawrence. There is a harsh vitalism in the Brontës that finds
its match in the Lawrence of The Rainbow and Women in Love, though the
comparison is rendered problematic by Lawrence’s moral zeal, enchantingly
absent from the Brontës’ literary cosmos.
The aesthetic puzzle of the Brontës has less to do with the mature
transformations of their vision of Byron into Rochester and Heathcliff, than
with their earlier fantasy-life and its literature, and the relation of that life
and literature to its hero and precursor, George Gordon, Lord Byron. At
his rare worst and silliest, Byron has nothing like this scene from Charlotte
1