A Spatial Analysis Of Modernity’s Effects On Human Beings In Wuthering Heights

Emily Bront?, as one of the most prominent novelists in the English literary history, is famous for her only novel—Wuthering Heights. Critics and scholars find the excellent qualities of the novel from different perspectives. The author of this thesis finds the force of the novel lies in its profound exploration of the relationship between spaces and human beings.The French geographer and sociologist Henri Lefebvre, as one of the pioneers of the spatial theory, raises the trialectics of space and he argues that any social space is simultaneously produced by spatial practice, representations of space, and representational spaces. Despite there are voluminous researches on Wuthering Heights, very few of them analyze it from the social spatial perspective. This thesis utilizes Lefebvre’s social spatial theory to analyze Wuthering Heights, to explore modernity’s effects on human beings and to prove that Emily Bront? encodes the time spirit of the Victorian age into the depiction of characters’ living spaces and that human beings’ characteristics, personalities, and fate are closely linked to the spirit of their living social spaces, and that the production of social spaces is closely related to human beings’ subjectivity.Wuthering Heights is the representative of the traditional agricultural social space and it disciplines people into sincere, straightforward, and kind bodies; on the contrary, Thrushcross Grange is the miniature of the modern social space. In it, instrumental modernity and its tendencies towards standardization, homogeneity, and materialization ceaselessly control, repress, and discipline people, making them hypocritical and selfish, snobbish and indifferent, and extremely genteel. In the novel, love stories unite Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange together, transforming them into traditional-modern mixed social spaces. In them, under the repression of modernity, people who used to live in the more traditional social space become the twisted spatial products. While individuals’ resistance against the modern social space reversely shapes their own living spaces, making them conform to the balanced development of humanity.From the spatial analysis of modernity’s effects on human beings in Wuthering Heights, readers can see Emily Bront?’s deep concerns over society and human beings’ living condition, and her attack towards spatial modernity. China now is at a stage of rapid economic growth. Its modernization process accelerates. The discussion of modernity’s effects on human beings can also arouse readers’ thinking of their own situation.