Gender and Genre in Wuthering Heights: Gothic Plot and Domestic FictionLyn Pykett

As a combination of nature and visionary experience, shaping process of art doesnt count that much in Wuthering Heights. According to Pykett, however, there are plenty of mundane sources for the novel (p.72). The novel combines elements of Romanticism and Gothic such as the use of ballad and folk material, romance forms and the fantastic, the emphasis on passions, the view of childhood and the aspiring of a selfhood with typical traits of Victorian realistic fiction for instance, the focus on community and on duty and the idealisation of the family. Even though these two styles are mixed up continuously and that their boundaries are often blurred so as to produce a structural continuity, its possible to say that the Gothic is deeply associated to the first part of the novel, whereas the Domestic is noticeable in the second. Perhaps, some would risk saying, this is part of the reason why its impossible to categorise Wuthering Heights.

To such an extent, in the 18th and 19th centuries, Gothic was identified with women writers in a type of writing that has been called Female Gothic - female power and the power of women in a family, besides the female condition as both confinement and refuge were all themes for this genre. In Wuthering Heights, similarly, domestic atmosphere can be seen both as refuge and as prison for one thing, Catherine Earnshaws childhood alternated a sort of prison and a relative freedom for unconfined moors. And, as to the female lot, there was a choice between degrees and varieties of imprisonment, Isabella and Catherine, the daughter, were particularly confined, being dominated by different men at different times of their lives. Its only in the second generation that most of Gothic traits are left behind Heathcliff is an exception giving place to the conventional closure of a dominant form of the Victorian Domestic Novel, where social, cooperative values are renewed within the bosom of the family (p.77). The gap between domestic and gothic is maintained since there is, apart from Lockwood, Nellys inner narrative, which the former simply mediates with a sophisticated language which, its important to say, has nothing to do with the (hard) life in Wuthering Heights.

Mainly focused on the form of the narrative, Pykett brilliantly argues that in Bronts masterpiece, domestic is the source of gothic for instance, its disrupted chronology and the persistence of disturbing power of Catherine and Heathcliff are ways of bringing about the themes of the domestic space as prison and the family as source of passion, violence and control. Wuthering Heights might be read both as support and resistance to the dominant ideology according to which women are powerless and presumably ignorant of their real situation.