Wuthering Heights

This addition to Twayne's Masterwork Studies presents an engaging and provocative appraisal of Bronte's novel, arguing that Wuthering Heights is about margins and marginality - the perceptions and uses of domestic, bodily, and textual spaces by men and women. The most revealing object of this focus, asserts Maggie Berg, is Catherine's diary, written in the blank spaces of culturally revered tomes and reflecting Catherine's oppression by and rebellion against a patriarchal society. Wuthering Heights, Berg avers, "offers a striking demonstration of how patriarchal ideology can issue in the abuse of women and children, and, more importantly, it demonstrates women's creative ways of resisting oppression.". In discussions centering on the historical, literary, and critical contexts of the novel, Berg points to its enduring ability to agitate readers, to seize the popular imagination, to meld Gothic with realistic genres in ways that keep eroticism and domestic violence ever present and the novel's characters ever elusive. Also included is a seven-part reading of the novel that focuses on individual characters. Lockwood, Joseph, Nelly, and Edgar Linton, for example, are shown to prefer being inside societal institutions, whereas Catherine, Heathcliff, and Cathy intentionally position themselves outside the social mainstream; Catherine's diary is shown to be paradigmatic of the novel itself, a subversive statement against the repressions of Victorian society. A conclusion, evaluating visual aids to Wuthering Heights furthers readers' appreciation of the novel, as do a detailed chronology, notes, and bibliography.