Playing Safe: The Writer behind the Text of Wuthering Heights

Abstract

In Wuthering Heights, Brontë provides us with the opportunity to meet two writing subjects; Emily Brontë herself and her character Catherine Earnshaw. Both these writers resist and challenge the authority of the patriarchal. Their different methods of interaction, though, cause one to fail and the other one to succeed. The objective of this paper is to have a look at the strategies that culminate in such a result from a Kristevan viewpoint. Findings indicate how Brontë can, unlike Catherine, play successfully with ideas in the text, sublimate her desires through her metaphors and finally achieve a sense of jouissance by playing at the borders without being entrapped in the forbidden realm of the abject. In addition, it is discussed that through metaphors, Brontë simultaneously establishes and demolishes the codes of an apparently accepted patriarchal world in the symbolic territory, destabilizes the text and deconstructs the fake reform of the ending of the story while constantly remaining on the safe side.