The Text Of Subversion And Reconstruction

Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights is generally viewed as one of the classic Englishnovels. With its rich theme and peculiar artistic style, this novel greatly contributes to theauthor’s position in literary world. The influential critics Oliver Schreiner refers to EmilyBronte as the greatest woman writer of genius that the English-speaking people haveproduced and she includes Emily Bronte in her list of the world’s twelve greatest women.Upon its earliest appearance, Wuthering Heights was not a novel that readers took totheir hearts in an era when literature was evaluated for the truth of its representations andthe inspiration of its moral stance. As time goes by, the novel has aroused considerablecritical attention. Many critics and scholars have given wide and deep discussions andthoroughly explored the novel from many aspects. Yet so far, few critics have interpretedsystematically the novel from the perspective of semiotic theory and structural mythcriticism.Published in1847, Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights shocked its audience with itspowerful fusion of ruthlessness, violence, and passion. Bronte’s novel continues to shockreaders today. With its distorted presentation of social and natural reality, WutheringHeights lends itself to mythical interpretation. This study first examines WutheringHeights with tools of structural myth criticism provided by Propp, Levi-Strauss, and Frye.Then, utilizing semiotic theory, the study analyzes myth as a distorted or displacednarrative of social rules and conventions. Thus, Wuthering Heights emerges as acounter-cultural, subversive narrative, a narrative seeking the origins of chaos as well ascivilization, and the origins of individual identity as well as social identity. Finally, thestudy concludes that the mythical realm of Wuthering Heights—the timeless, chaotic,and asocial world of Catherine and Heathcliff—ultimately remains a haunting image ofa past that may return.In this thesis, the myth critical interpreting of Wuthering Heights was carried out inthree ways:First, this thesis attempts to interpret the mythical idea of the novel from the thoughtforms of the characters. As to the mythical consciousness of the characters, Emily did notdraw strict distinctions between realistic depiction and true feelings, dreams and realities, or visionary and entities. The protagonist and his lover immerse themselves in thedelusion of a half-waking and half-real life. We could say that, in Wuthering Heights,only within the realm of myth can the characters’ thoughts perform as a whole. Therefore,it is of significance to interpret the work by chiefly focusing on the mythical thoughtforms of the author.Second, the thesis seeks to interpret the characters’ thoughts by analyzing theirbehavioral patterns. In this way, we can get some direct information. And from where westand, the original purpose of the novel is to represent people’s thoughts which can be thebeginning of their behavior as well as the terminal of the mythical thought. That is thereason why we say Heathcliff’s persistent love and Catherine’s “super-ego” are bothmythical thought forms that just exist organically through the pattern of life.Third, we try to decipher the particular life pattern in the work by seeing thecharacter of the novel as a certain form of life. The existence and the disappearance ofcharacters in the novel are arranged by the author according to different backgrounds.The overwhelming features of that time are distortion and struggle. The “exist anddisappear” continues to repeat itself, but only “love and hate” stays still forever.In a nutshell, this thesis looks into the protagonist’s thought, behavior and life witha myth critical perspective.In the first chapter, it focuses on the objectives and deconstructional analysis of the“myth criticism theory”. Also it uses some referential materials to illustrate the theoryand analyze the novel.The second chapter analyzes the novel with the semiotic theory, to show the closerelations between myth and its social background.The third chapter presents the Victorian society as a paradigm—especially theVictorian women, against which to compare the Emily Bronte’s view of the society. Itanalyzes women, their social status and the social influence on their emotions and familywith a critical eye.The last chapter gives a comprehensive comment on the novel and a specificanalysis of several chapters so as to highlight the key points of this thesis.Based on the analysis and the discussion，the innovative writer Emily Bronte’sWuthering Heights has been appeared in front of us. It is a hope that this kind of study will be more helpful to understand the literary charm of Wuthering Heights. If such effecthappens, it shows that this thesis is of value.