Affective Boundaries and Replication in Wuthering Heights

Year 2023, Issue: 2, 71 - 81, 23.01.2023

İpek Kotan Yiğit

Abstract

Although in the popular imagination Wuthering Heights evokes an aura of a gothic romance more than anything else, even a brief familiarity with the secondary literature makes it immediately evident that a confusion of boundaries and distinctions permeates Wuthering Heights on a formal, as well as a narrative and thematical level. In terms of genre, Wuthering Heights seems to occupy an ambiguous, liminal space; having generated a considerable amount of scholarly debate on whether it is a work of romance, or literary realism. Genre is important, as in settling this question, we also decide the manner in which we read the novel: which of its aspects to highlight and foreground, and which to assign a lesser degree of importance. Conventional literary criticism has mostly adopted an either/or approach to the question and then, often, argued for a conciliatory midpoint between the two alternatives, which are eventually discovered to be not so diametrically opposed, after all. I propose that instead of attempting to stabilize Wuthering Heights in order to subject it to this standard, supposedly dialectical hermeneutics, we acknowledge its movement and fluidity, and provide a coherent reading beginning from this grounding. I further argue that affect theory is a particularly useful instrument in reading Wuthering Heights, as it prioritizes movement and continuity rather than distinctions and categorizations, and I draw from scholars such as Sara Ahmed, Teresa Brennan, and Brian Massumi in order to demonstrate how affect theory might be brought to bear on a reading of the novel.

Keywords

novel, victorian literature, nineteenth-century literature, affect theory

References

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