Wuthering Heights

Wuthering Heights at once fascinates and frustrates the reader with the highly charged, passionate and problematic relationships it portrays. This study provides a key to the text by examining the temporal and narrative rhythms through which Bront presents the dualities by which we commonly define our selfhood: child and adult, female and male, symbiosis and separateness, illogic and common sense, classlessness and classboundedness, play and power, free will and determinism. The novels concern with unitary and fragmentary selves has romantic antecedents in DeQuincey and Shelley and in Charlotte Bronts figuration of Emily as a lost other self. This concern is, in turn, reflected in the after-life of the text in the work of later artists such as George Eliot, Lawrence, Buuel, and Truffaut.