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Wuthering Heights---a Female Gothic Novel
I. Introduction
Emily Brontë is an English woman writer of superb talent during the Victorian Age. She is well known for her only novel Wuthering Heights, a strange and powerful book, said by many to be the finest novel in the English language. Since it was published, this great book suffered people’s attack and criticism. These who censured it regarded it a book full of abnormal psychology and heathenish thought. “Anyone who did read it was repulsed by the brutality and violence of the characters”(James, 1979:7) and by the fact that it differed so much from the romantic novels of that time. They do not want realism as Emily depicts it, and they do not want wild, fierce antiheroes like Heathcliff who is more like a villain or willful, passionate heroines like Catherine Earnshaw. And that is the reason why Emily Brontë is kept away from the mainstream of the 19th century literature, and people do not accept her fair fame until ing of the 20th century.
Both Emily and her works are mysterious and unique. There are various approaches applied by the critics to study Wuthering Heights from the aspects of the theme, the writing technique, love and revenge, and so on. However, there is hardly any attempt to research Wuthering Heights bining its Gothic context with the feminist viewpoint. In view of this blank, this article is trying to reread this work as a Female Gothic novel mainly based on the following three facets: Firstly, from the development of literary movement, the early Gothic novels arose in the second half of the 18th century. The origin of Wuthering Heights, its development and the ending were between 1771 and 1802. At that time, the English Gothic novels were catching on like fire throughout the country. With the development of Gothic novels people gradually forgot the early Gothic novels. Yet from the Brontë sisters’ Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights we can still find the Gothic features evidently. Secondly,