CAHSS Faculty Articles
Wuthering Heights: Dreams of Equilibrium in Physiology and Physics
Publication Title
Victorian Review
ISSN
1923-3280
Publication Date
Fall 2016
Abstract
Excerpt
IN THE 1850 preface to Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (1847), Charlotte Brontë yields to the will of critics and acknowledges the purported rusticity of Emily's novel: "I admit the charge, for I feel the quality. … [Wuthering Heights] is moorish, and wild, and knotty, as a root of heath" (341). Far from condemning her sister yet never fully condoning her intensities, Charlotte accepts that Emily's novel reflects its author's sequestered life, which Charlotte considered one that wanted only worldly experience and time for Emily to realize greater mastery and a mellower maturity. While the infamously unbridled passions of the novel may have appeared vulgar in its time, however, the execution of the novel was not. On the contrary, as this article will argue, Wuthering Heights advances a holistic perspective on the ways in which material science connects with poetic imagining. By commingling the maturing disciplines of mid-century physiology and physics with literature, the novel accommodates a definition of self not as absolute and ordered but as dynamic and "knotty," conveying an appreciation of disorder similar to that which delivers psychosocial and biothermodynamic equilibrium.
DOI
10.1353/vcr.2016.0066
Volume
42
Issue
2
First Page
307
Last Page
322
NSUWorks Citation
Farrar, A. M. (2016). Wuthering Heights: Dreams of Equilibrium in Physiology and Physics. Victorian Review, 42 (2), 307-322. https://doi.org/10.1353/vcr.2016.0066
