The Failure of Feminine Identity in Wuthering Heights

A new thesis with Brontë-related content:

"Half Savage and Hardy, and Free": The Failure of Feminine Identity in Wuthering Heights
Crider, Emily

Norman, Oklahoma, 2022

Over the last half-century, much of the scholarly discourse concerning Wuthering Heights has considered Catherine Earnshaw’s struggle for belonging in the social order, using a transgressive mode of gender criticism to push against the constraints of traditional femininity found in both the space of Brontë’s world and within the norms of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries at large. Using Lacanian theoretical analysis, however, I argue that Brontë’s novel effects an uncanny interpretation of womanhood, placing Catherine between two impossible, failed identities. The first, beginning in childhood, is rooted in an Imaginary form of identification with Heathcliff, who acts as the image with whom she identifies. The second emerges through her participation in the Symbolic order as a socially recognized wife, mother, and upper-class lady. Unable to find satisfaction in the self-mediation necessitated by these Imaginary and Symbolic identities, she lacks any identity at all. Instead, it is only in death that Catherine attains true freedom from the agony of identification. By tracing this search for a fully realized sense of self throughout her life, I endeavor to illustrate how Lacan’s theory offers a framework for understanding Catherine’s inner conflict, revealing the fundamental futility of searching for oneself in an external object or system.