Representations of gender in Wuthering Heights : An analysis of Masculinity and femininity and women as the abject
Saga Vindelhag
University of Gävle, Faculty of Education and Business Studies, Department of Humanities.
2022 
Student thesis

The aim of this essay is to analyse gender representations in Wuthering Heights by using French literary criticism. French literary critics thought that the language of literature was predominantly phallocentric as male authors, who helped shape that language, dominated it. For female authors to be published, or have any kind of recognition for their work, they would therefore use male pseudonyms, as was the case with Emily Brontë who was initially published as Ellis Bell. Hélène Cixous added to the literary criticism by noting that the constructed language at the time depended on binary oppositions such as, passive/active, weak/strong, and intuitive/theoretical, amongst others. She suggested that these oppositions were applied to represent femininity and masculinity where feminine attributes were negative and the masculine attributes being positive. In effect, the characters in literature having feminine attributes, although some belonging to the male gender, would automatically mark them as the weaker sex and put them in the negative category. This, she suggested, determined the outcome from the onset, 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 notion of “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 credit to Cixous’s theory about the feminine being seen as the negative.