Wuthering heights and the politics of space

This article argues that representations of space in Wuthering Heights provide a framework for Brontë’s interrogation of several aspects of Romantic and Victorian ideology. I explore this thesis in relation to three spaces within the novel: the domestic, the natural and the liminal. The first part of the paper explores how Brontë critiques the Victorian ideal of domesticity by presenting the home as an ideologically hybrid space that is repeatedly disrupted by economic and political struggles emanating from the public sphere. The second part of the paper considers how Brontë’s representations of nature in Wuthering Heights engage with eighteenth-century aesthetic theories of the sublime and the picturesque and provides a commentary on their social and ethical implications. I argue that Brontë rejects aesthetic theories that are grounded in universal models of subjectivity, such as those purported by Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant, by exploring a range of different subjective relations and responses to nature in the novel. The final part of the paper argues that Brontë claims liminal spaces in the novel as sites of transcendence thereby resisting traditional philosophical and Christian dichotomies such as matter and spirit, self and other, immanence and transcendence.C