Emily Brontë’s (1818-1848) Wuthering Heights, written under a pseudonym Ellis Bell in 1847, is considered one of the most perplexing novels of the Victorian era. Born and raised in West Yorkshire, mostly by their father due to their mother’s early death, all three Brontë sisters, Charlotte, Emily and Anne, lived fairly secluded lives finding the company in their imaginations and each other. Their marginalization and relative isolation limited their experiences with the society and gave rise to desires and needs that fuelled their creativity in writing. As highly educated introverts of poor wealth, they observed people and their personalities to create now timeless works of English literature. (Bronte 2010: v)
Experiences and solitary life in
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Deterioration of rural England, rapid rise of middle class and constant pressure towards unavoidable social and political reform were common themes in writing, Brontë’s included. (Abrams 1999:153) She wrote about the changing times in a darker and unconventional way using eerie and paranormal elements, depicting the struggles uniquely, and simultaneously criticising the majority of the burning questions and problems of the time.
All Brontë sisters resorted to the Gothic novel genre in their writing, but they also greatly expanded the genre and went beyond it to accommodate their ideas and by doing so they reinvented and expanded the Female gothic into the New Gothic.
This paper explores the gothic literary complex Emily Brontë used to write Wuthering Heights. The focus is on the elements of gothic and how their abundance in this work successfully enables the author to criticize all aspects of the Victorian era and depart form the established Victorian values.
Structurally, in the paper, the novel Wuthering Heights will be presented as a gothic novel in the Victorian era and explored how it is an example of the Female Gothic genre. Various elements of gothic throughout the novel, mainly through themes of duality, oppositeness of heaven and hell, dreams and reality and occurrences of ghosts will be explored and
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(Carroll 2008:242) There is an opposition between “the elemental”, represented in Catherine, Heathcliff and the Heights, and “the socially tamed nature”, represented by the Lintons, the Grange and Nelly. (Zirra