Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as Socially Symbolic Art. 1981. New York: Routledge, 2008.
Valero Redondo, María. Determining Wuthering Heights: Ideology, Intertexts, Tradition. New York: Peter Lang, 2021.
María Valero Redondo, Determining Wuthering Heights: Ideology, Intertexts, Tradition. New York: Peter Lang, 2021, 366 p.
1Twenty-first century scholarship on the Brontës and Wuthering Heights pays renewed attention to social, historical and cultural factors that had been overlooked by earlier critics, leading to a variety of perspectives and ongoing debates surrounding the novel and its author. However, despite these sociological and interdisciplinary approaches, the novel is still considered a hermeneutic singularity in the history of English literature. María Valero’s approach, in contrast, focuses on the literary and ideological factors in Wuthering Heights by considering the literary context of the time period. Detaching herself from new formalist approaches such as surface reading and all its variants, which tend to imply an immediate approach to the literary text, Valero Redondo vindicates the importance and efficacy of symptomatic reading to shed light on the novel’s formal, thematic and ideological structure, contributing to the lively scholarly debates about interpretation and post-critique.
2The monograph is comprised of seven chapters, excluding the introduction. Within each chapter, Valero Redondo establishes a direct connection between Wuthering Heights and other literary texts that have a substantial impact on the novel’s ideology. The author takes care to emphasize that these selected texts are not haphazardly chosen, but rather influential works that gained prominence in the literary world during the early 1800s, following the decline of the rigidly defined Augustan literary field.
3In Chapter two, entitled ‘Wuthering Heights: “The Housekeeper’s Tale”’, Valero Redondo puts Wuthering Heights into dialogue with Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, a novel which also features a servant as the narrator of the story. According to Valero Redondo, by choosing a female servant as the narrator of Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë is performing a social subversion which shapes the ideology of the novel, advocating for the social emancipation of lower-middle class women. Nelly Dean’s uncertain social position and her moral authority in the novel is vital in a society where social identities are becoming increasingly fluid.
4In chapter three, entitled ‘Wuthering Heights and Kleist’s Novellen: Rousseauian Nature, Implosive Communities and the Performative Subversion of the Law’, Valero Redondo examines the formal and thematic similarities that Wuthering Heights shares with the narratives of German author, Heinrich von Kleist. Although she cannot provide direct evidence that Emily Brontë read Kleist’s Novellen, she supports this uncommon pairing by arguing that both authors were well acquainted with Rousseau’s works. One of the most prevalent themes present in Kleist’s narratives and in Wuthering Heights, is a strong hostility towards a corrupt society which suppresses the character’s more genuine feelings. Therefore, the characters resort to three strategies to escape from the oppression of institutions: to escape from society to a natural setting which promotes authenticity and confraternity; to form erotic and anomic communities of lovers; and to subvert the normative community through a parodic reiteration of its societal norms.
5Chapter four, ‘Wuthering Heights: A Gothic Novel’, focuses on the numerous formal and thematic motifs that Wuthering Heights shares with Matthew Lewis’s Gothic novel, The Monk. Both novels have a complex narrative structure characterized by the compulsive repetition of stories and characters. Additionally, both narratives contain themes of revenge, subrogation, violence, incarceration, the supernatural and insanity. The author suggests that this combination of Gothic motifs subvert both the conventions of the realist novel and challenges the social order of the time, particularly the power and legitimacy of the aristocracy in the face of the budding bourgeoisie. Valero Redondo argues that the character of Heathcliff serves as a representation of this rising class, challenging the status quo and exposing the anxieties and fears of the nobility around issues of inheritance and property.
6Chapter five, ‘Wuthering Heights: An Epic Poem’, examines the connection between Wuthering Heights and Byron’s poem, Manfred, in terms of form and ideology. This intertextual comparison reveals that Wuthering Heights is in fact an epic drama whose protagonist shares many traits with Byron’s Manfred and Milton’s Satan. The author analyzes the Romantic motifs that pervade both texts, such as the intimacy with a rough nature, the transcendental communities of lovers, elegiac mournings, and the fatal heroes. For Valero Redondo, Romantic motifs convey an underlying ideological meaning: both Manfred and Heathcliff represent two anomic forces which disrupt the domestic and social order. This is perhaps the least original chapter in the book, since numerous Brontë scholars have already underlined Byron’s influence on Emily Brontë. However, her contention that both Manfred and Wuthering Heights contain ‘an epic-dramatic component that goes back to Milton’s Paradise Lost’ (166) is quite provocative and it certainly sustains this intertextual comparison.
7In Chapter six, entitled ‘Wuthering Heights: A Social Novel’, Valero Redondo reformulates Fredric Jameson’s assertion that Heathcliff is the ‘the locus of history’ (114) in the novel and states that Heathcliff is ‘indeed the displaced locus of infrastructure’ (206). To this purpose, the author makes an intertextual comparison between Wuthering Heights and Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley and Jane Eyre, and William Thackeray’s Barry Lyndon. This confrontation reveals the different perspectives and voices present in Emily Brontë’s novel. The author proves that the character of Heathcliff has a complex and multifaceted voice which integrates four different suppressed voices that collide in the novel: a social voice, a colonial voice, a professional voice and, indirectly, a woman’s voice. This allows him to represent different forms of oppression and marginalization in the novel, including those of the working class, colonized peoples, and soldiers brutalized by war.
8In Chapter seven, ‘Wuthering Heights: A Bildungsroman’, Valero Redondo examines the narrative of Heathcliff’s life and development in Wuthering Heights in relation to the Bildungsroman genre, using some novels by Charles Dickens and other nineteenth-century novels as intertexts. She focuses on how Heathcliff’s story, both what is explicitly stated and what is left unsaid, can be read as a potential coming-of-age story. The argument is that Heathcliff’s status as an outcast, his transformation from a naïve state to one of experience, his rise as a wealthy and powerful individual, and his self-determination, all contribute to his personal story becoming a type Bildungsroman. However, it is an inverted version of this genre, where certain aspects of Heathcliff’s past are left unknown. This literary device highlights the novel’s critical view of the social system, and how Heathcliff’s eventual success within it ultimately exposes its flaws and failures. The themes and motifs discussed in the previous chapters remain latent in this chapter and add to the overall critique of the normative system. All the intertextual comparisons at work in this book reveal the conflicting ideological forces at play within the novel, which ultimately determine its meaning.
9Chapter eight acts as a conclusion to Valero Redondo’s critical study. She underpins the idea that Wuthering Heights is a hybrid text that is influenced by and draws from other texts. Furthermore, she shows how Emily Brontë’s novel can be read through the lens of dialectic and post-structuralist criticism, rather than increasing the stigma of rarity that accompanies the novel. Her approach to Wuthering Heights is formalistic, focusing on the linguistic, textual and narrative elements of the novel to understand its meaning, rather than looking on extratextual or extraliterary factors. Hence, she has focused on the literary context of Wuthering Heights, comparing it to other literary texts that she believes have a significant impact on its meaning.
10Overall, Determining Wuthering Heights: Ideology, Intertexts, Tradition is a systematic and effective attempt to place Wuthering Heights within a literary tradition. Valero Redondo’s approach is ground-breaking in that she specifically focuses on the narrative and literary context of the novel, leaving aside other biographical, historical and social contexts which monopolize the text and neglect the intertextual mediations that haunt Wuthering Heights. Despite employing a methodology that may not be very popular in nineteenth-century studies, Valero Redondo’s monograph is captivating. She adeptly incorporates her approach into the ongoing discussion withing nineteenth-century studies concerning post-critique and new formalism. Through her intertextual approach, Valero Redondo poses similar questions about scholarly reading practices as those raised by scholars such as Caroline Levine, Sharon Marcus, Stephen Best, Rita Felski, and the V21 collective. In short, this study is a noteworthy addition to criticism on Emily Brontë’s novel. It is clearly and nicely written and it offers new critical assessments alongside intriguing insights into Wuthering Heights, renewing our understanding of this singular novel. Determining Wuthering Heights: Ideology, Intertexts, Tradition would definitely appeal to both scholars and students interested in Emily Brontë’s novel or Victorian literature in general.
Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as Socially Symbolic Art. 1981. New York: Routledge, 2008.
Valero Redondo, María. Determining Wuthering Heights: Ideology, Intertexts, Tradition. New York: Peter Lang, 2021.
Francisco José Rodríguez-Mesa, « María Valero Redondo, Determining Wuthering Heights: Ideology, Intertexts, Tradition », Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens [En ligne], 97 Printemps | 2023, mis en ligne le 21 mars 2023, consulté le 20 juin 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/cve/12630 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/cve.12630
Haut de pageLe texte seul est utilisable sous licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.
Haut de page