This document summarizes feminist criticism of Emily Bronte's novel Wuthering Heights in 3 paragraphs. It discusses how feminist critics examine the portrayal of women characters, patriarchal power structures represented by Edgar Linton, and how the novel traces the emergence of the modern family and domestic realism as a site of violence and control rather than a prison. Feminist critics focus on Bronte having a female author and issues of equality, motherhood, and the experiences of the female characters like Catherine Earnshaw.

1. Name:Muhammad arif, ms 423
Presentation topic : Feminist criticism on wurtehring heights
Presented to: Sir usman ghani

2. Feminist Criticism of ‘Wuthering Heights’ by
Emily Bronte
Author(s): PATSY STONEMAN is Reader in English at the University of Hull, where she
has taught since 1966. Her main areas of study are the nineteenth-century English novel,
especially the novels of the Bronte's and Elizabeth Gaskell, and women's studies in English.
She is a convener of an MA course in 'Women and Literature in English‘
Source: JSTOR
Published by: Berghahn Books Critical Survey, Volume 4,No 2 Page 147-153 (1992)

3. FEMINISM
 The term feminism can be used to describe a political, cultural or
economic movement aimed at establishing equal rights and legal
protection for women. Feminism involves political and sociological
theories and philosophies concerned with issues of gender difference, as
well as a movement that advocates gender equality for women and
campaigns for women’s rights and interest.

4. Background on Feminist Criticism:
Feminist critics have various objectives, such as:
 retrieving the over looked works of women writers in a patriarchal society
 analysing the male-derived attitudes expressed in literature that have held women back
 observing the progress of women in a masculine-dominant culture
There have been three main streams of feminist criticism;

5. First wave of feminism:
 The feminists refers mainly to women suffrage movement of the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries(mainly concerned with women’s right to vote).
 Their focal point is language and the manner through which meaning is produced
 They consider the very structure of the language is male oriented, as it favors
masculinity by associating it with terms and values that are appreciated in society
 Some also draw a distinction between the writings of the two genders and refers two
feminine language as unifying and balance.
 A more controversial topic amongst them as the idea that feminine writing as an
expression of the female body.

6. Second wave of feminism
 The second wave refers to the ideas and action associated with the women liberation
movement beginning in the 1960s (which campaigned for legal and social rights for
women).
 Instead of theorising, they closely observed the patriarchal patterns and ideologies
embedded in the literary tradition, by studying the portrayals of women characters
 They also coined the term ‘gynocriticism’, which refers to the works of women who
produced a literature of their own, placing interest on the recovery and rediscovery of a
body of women’s texts, along with their history and culture

7. Third wave of feminism
 The third wave refers to a reaction to the perceived failures of Second wave of
feminism, beginning in the 1990s.
 More political rather than more historical
 Saw the American oppositions of male stereotypes often led to counter-stereotypes of women
themselves and their famine virtue.
 All women are female, but they are ‘somethings else’ as well
 Lastly the role of class in the construction of feminism.

8. What feminist critics do
 Rethink the canon intended to rediscover text written by women
 Revalue women experience
 Challenge representation of women as part of nature in any work
 Examine representation of woman in literature by men and women.
 Raise the question of whether men and women are essentially different
because of biology or socially constructed as different

9. Characters sketch of wuthering heights novel

10. Analysis of the novel
 Feminist critics would focus on the importance of wuthering Heights having a female author, and
would examine issues of equality and motherhood.
 Virginia woolfs perception that ‘intellectual freedom depends upon material things and
women have always been poor. Q.D Leavis, the truth of the novel lie Catherine-
Earnshaw’s story which is at once a unique personal history, a method of discussing
what being a women means and a tragedy of being caught between socially
incompatible cultures.
 Emily Bronte in the hands of male critics; demonstrate a spreading hatred of women
criticism of Wuthering Heights up to date.
 It is however , indicate of the uncertain position of Wuthering Heights in the developing
feminist consciousness that collect chose Jane Eyre and sherley, not Wuthering Heights
, to represent women’s writing of 1848.

11.  Patriarchy, represented in wuthering Heights by Edger Linton. ( Edgar restricts Young
Catherine from leaving the house because he did not want her to know of Wuthering
Heights and those who lived in it. Even though Isabella and Catherine resist their
patriarchs' orders, they are both penalized for defying these orders).
 Jacobs argues that in Wuthering Heights we approach a horrific private reality only
after passing through and than discarding the perceptual structures of a narrator
significantly approves the excess behind the closed doors of the pre-Victorian
homes.(Lockwood)
 Wuthering Heights repeats literary history by beginning with a gothic tale(Catherine
and Heathcliff) and ending with a domestic one (Cathy and Hareton). Pykett argue both
domestic and Gothic are concerned with the relationship among family members and
with driving home to women, with enforced confinement and paranoid fears it
generates.
 She concludes wuthering Heights traces the emergence of the modern family and its
hegemonic fictional form of domestic realism…. The domestic space is prison, the
family as site of primitive passions violence, struggle and control.
 For more than a century it seems that women avoided Wuthering Heights, fearing that
to enter into Catherine Earnshaw’s experiences might be to share her fate.

12. Findings
Patriarchy
Deprivation of due rights
Humiliations