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Repression and Sublimation of Nature in Wuthering Heights

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Margaret Homans
Margaret Homans*
Affiliation:
Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut
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Abstract

Although most of Wuthering Heights takes place indoors, readers sense that nature is a major element in the novel. Nature is present in figurative language, which accounts for the impression of realism, but why does Bronte choose an indirect mode of presentation over a direct one? The figurative uses of nature form a highly abstract symbolic system, distinct from “real” nature, while “real” nature is unrepresentable. Psychoanalytic theory may account for this discrepancy, if the text is treated as if it were a psyche. Nature, or the destructive reality it represents, is so threatening that it must be repressed, while the figurative use of nature is a sublimation, redirecting the dangerous force into a safe and constructive channel. Analysis of the heroine, Cathy, helps to confirm this reading. Similar forces are at work in her psyche, but unlike the author she cannot sublimate and succumbs to nature’s power.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 93 , Issue 1 , January 1978 , pp. 9 - 19
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1978

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References

Notes

1 See, e.g., Arnold Kettle, An Introduction to the English Novel, I (London: Hutchinson, 19.51), 139–40, or Mark Shorer, “Fiction and the ‘Matrix of Analogy,‘” Kenyon Review, 11 (1949), 544–50.

2 Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (London: Penguin, 1965), pp. 124–25. All subsequent page references to the novel will be from this edition.

3 The narrative structure has been discussed at length by many critics; in this and the following paragraph I reiterate this standard element of Wuthering Heights criticism only to introduce it as an assumption of this essay.

4 Beginning with Dorothy Van Ghent's classic study (in The English Novel, Form and Function [New York: Holt, 1953], pp. 160–63), the importance of house imagery has been acknowledged by many critics; my interpretation does not contradict this kind of reading but simply provides a context for it.

5 Poetry and Repression (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1976), pp. 1–27.

6 “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” in French Freud: Structural Studies in Psychoanalysis, Yale French Studies, 48 (1972), 73–117.

7 The Problem of Anxiety (New York: Psychoanalytic Quarterly Press and Norton, 1936), pp. 11–16; The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1953), VII, 206.

8 “Repression,” Standard Edition, xiv, 152–53.

9 For a more complete discussion of this theme, see Wade Thompson, “Infanticide and Sadism in Wuthering Heights,” PMLA, 78 (1963), 69–74.

10 Several critics have dwelt on the strange mixture of passions in the relationship between Cathy and Heath-cliff, most notably Georges Bataille, Literature and Evil, trans. Alastair Hamilton (London: Calder and Boyars, 1973), pp. 1–16.