Abstract
Set in West Yorkshire, England, in the early days of the industrial revolution, this quintessential gothic novel employs binary oppositions to heighten the drama between two neighboring families, the Earnshaws and the Lintons, and the control of their estates. The novel’s inheritance plot triggers the main characters to identify themselves strongly with their ancestral homes, which are surrounded by windswept, open moors – a harsh and forbidding landscape. First, we trace how Brontë scaffolds the novel around binary oppositions such as nature and civilization, passion and rationality, desire and duty, and discuss how the landscape and weather function as a third-space and symbolic Sinnbild of the characters, in particular the troubled lovers Catherine and Heathcliff. Second, we employ a deconstructivist lens to argue that Brontë unravels those apparently stable binaries with the unknowability of Heathcliff, the adopted son of the Earnshaw family, who usurps the ancestral power and turns both estates into his personal property and their inhabitants into his dependents. Heathcliff’s obscure origins, his suggested foreignness, and his dark ambition position him in a spectral third-space, both inside the Earnshaw’s household, yet always-already an outsider. We conclude by drawing meaningful parallels between the novel’s plot and British imperialism, the colonial trafficking of people and resources, and the way industrialization impacted West Yorkshire.
Presenters
Kirsten MøllegaardProfessor, English, University of Hawai'i at Hilo, Hawaii, United States Kassidy Wilson
Student, English & Psychology, University of Hawaii Hilo, Hawaii, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Bronte, Deconstruction, Otherness, Gothic, Landscape
