Is Wuthering Heights a Gothic novel?
In our lesson last week we started by having to write a blurb about Wuthering Heights and had to write it like it’s a Gothic novel. This is my blurb: Heathcliff a man bound by the love he has for the daughter of Mr Earnshaw Catherine and vows that not even death can separate them. Lockwood an 18th century gentlemen uncovers the mysteries world of the Heights through the narration of Nelly. We enter a world where things are intertwined and crossing the boundaries of life and death.
We then had to do a list of all the Gothic elements in Wuthering Heights. The list consisted of elements like:
• Oppression (Isabella)
• Wild and isolated settings (the Heights)
• Liminal (Heathcliff)
• Blurring of distinctions
• The Macabre (Gruesome language)
• Terror and horror (Lockwood’s dream about Cathy/ the letters from Isabella)
• Supernatural (Heathcliff and his origins)
• The uncanny
We then read an article on ‘Beyond Feature spotting’. In the article we read about how the critic Kelly Hurley sums up the ways in which the literary Gothic has been variously defined:
Kelly Hurly says that in the gothic there are stock characters, the imperilled young heroine and stock events, like her imprisonment by and flight from the demonic yet compelling villain. The settings that the Gothic consists of are also fixed settings such as, the gloomy castle, labyrinth, underground spaces; the torture chamber of the inquisition. The recurring themes in the Gothic are that it’s preoccupied with taboo topics such as incest, sexual perversion, insanity and violence. It’s depiction of extreme emotional states, like rage, terror and vengefulness style. The article also discussed how the story is confusing because of the shifts in the narrative frame and narrative disjunction.
We then looked at the piece on ‘The castle of Otranto’, and how Professor Otto identifies how this novel was the first Gothic novel written. He says that this novel laid the platform for other novel’s to build on, things like the father and son rivalry, forbidden passion, the uncanny returns of the past in the present. He also speaks about the revelation of what has been hidden or repressed; the tomb as a liminal space between life and death or between rational and irrational.
We then looked at the article on texts; we noticed from this that the Gothic is mainly found in texts that have been written in 1760 and 1830. This would mean that Wuthering Heights does not qualify as a Gothic, because it was written in 1847. The article even speaks of Frankenstein as more of a scientific text then a Gothic novel, even though it has many Gothic elements.
Motifs were the next that we focused on. We saw ideas that where found very often in Gothic texts, such as the maiden that is locked away in a castle and held captive by a powerful villain that is both attractive and at the same time dangerous. The maiden is a very famous motif in the Gothic, seeing someone defenceless and weak. Ghosts are also a common motif as they always appear in Gothic texts, and mostly sighted towards the end.
Moods also contribute to the making of Gothic texts, we see how horror is used for gross physical shock, but terror is harder to pin down being more shadowy and more insubstantial. Taking all this in to account we found out that the central mood for the Gothic is fear.
The task that we had in class was to pass around the sheets we got, we did this in 14seconds. The other class did it in 8seconds, so let’s try and beat that.