The God of Wuthering Heights

An awkward comparison in this recent paper:

Comparative Gyunocriticism of Brontë's Wuthering Heights and Roy's The God of Small Things

by Melisa Genç 

Humanitas. International Journal of Social Sciences,  Volume: 12 Issue: 24, 150 - 164 (2024)

Abstract

The present paper focuses on two influential female novelists and their ardent endeavours to claim a gender-specific structure and voice within the discourse of the novel. Emily Brontë and Arundhati Roy nauseated their contemporary readers and most of the critics by making use of bi-sexuality and incest as salient structural and thematic features of their narrative. In Wuthering Heights, both thematic and structural elements of Brontë’s feminine narrative operate as meta-narratives reverberating with the becoming of Brontë as a female novelist. The particular impinge of Brontë’s feminine narrative on the discourse of the novel reveals itself through the reversal of the oedipal projectile motion of history. Similarly, Arundhati Roy has weaponized her Indianized language to break from the strict linguistic laws of the symbolic so that the semiotic or the maternal realm has become blatant in The God of Small Things. Like Brontë, Roy wields incest and bi-sexuality to prevent the phallic development of the grand history; instead of the oedipal identity formation process, she displays the motif of incest as an opponent of a linear progression of the hero. Consequently, this study emphasises the differentiation of the two female novelists from the monolithic discourse in the novel. It also explains how feminine narrative structure owing to its immanent on-hand polyphony and bi-sexuality goes hand in hand with what Bakhtin calls heteroglossia and dialogic discourse in the novel.