Representations of gender in Wuthering Heights : An analysis of Masculinity and femininity and women as the abject

Sammanfattning: The aim of this essay is to analyse gender representations in Wuthering Heights byusing French literary criticism. French literary critics thought that the language ofliterature was predominantly phallocentric as male authors, who helped shape thatlanguage, dominated it. For female authors to be published, or have any kind ofrecognition for their work, they would therefore use male pseudonyms, as was the casewith Emily Brontë who was initially published as Ellis Bell. Hélène Cixous added to theliterary criticism by noting that the constructed language at the time depended on binaryoppositions such as, passive/active, weak/strong, and intuitive/theoretical, amongstothers. She suggested that these oppositions were applied to represent femininity andmasculinity where feminine attributes were negative and the masculine attributes beingpositive. In effect, the characters in literature having feminine attributes, although somebelonging to the male gender, would automatically mark them as the weaker sex and putthem in the negative category. This, she suggested, determined the outcome from theonset, as those characteristics that was deemed negative would eventually be eliminated,as the binary opposition were not able to co-exist. Kristeva who has theorised the notionof “abject” in her thesis Power of Horror, describes abject as something foul andgrotesque which is always applied to the feminine maternal figure, that also gives creditto Cixous’s theory about the feminine being seen as the negative.