Women's voices in Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights: the challenging of moral standards in The Victorian Age

• Autor(a) principal: Luisa Kiesling Casali
• Data de Publicação: 2021
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Institucional da UFMG
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/1843/39148
• topic: Victorian Age; Morality; Emily Brontë; Feminism; Christianism; Brontë, Emily, 1818-1848. – Wuthering Heights – Crítica e interpretação; Ficção inglesa – História e crítica; Feminismo na literatura; Mulheres na literatura; Literatura e moral

The aim of this dissertation is to show, through the analysis of the characters Catherine Earnshaw and Catherine Linton, how Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights challenged the moral standards for women in the Victorian age. In order to achieve this goal, I compare the choices of both women during the narrative, based on several approaches on philosophical morality, Christianity, feminism and ideology. I then analyze the consequences of their actions and the ending of the narrative for both characters, considering this the ultimate outcome of their attitudes. I discuss the situation of women in the sexist Victorian England according to Mary Wollstonecraft, John Stuart Mill and Simone de Beauvoir and the influence of ideology and class struggle as claimed by Karl Marx, Louis Althusser and Terry Eagleton. In addition, I consider the role of Christianity in the characters’ lives according to Friedrich Nietzsche and discuss the justification of their choices based on principles by Jean-Paul Sartre. Concerning the end of the narrative for each woman, I examine their level of well-being as conceptualized by Thomas M. Scanlon. Both Catherine Earnshaw and Cathy Linton acted in disagreement to the standards for women in the Victorian age. However, the majority of Cathy’s decisions was made in good faith according to Sartre’s principles, in opposition to her mother’s. Cathy managed to overcome the suffering inflicted on her by the men in the novel, responding with love and charity instead of with revenge. Her level of well-being in the end of the narrative was considerably superior to her mother’s. This proves that, even though conforming to a Christian view on virtue to a certain extent, Wuthering Heights challenged the moral standards for women in the Victorian Age.