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149 8 The Legacy of Hell Wuthering Heights on Film and Gilbert and Gubar’s Feminist Poetics Hila Shachar Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s analysis of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) in The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) remains one of the most influential interpretations of the novel. Under the title “Looking Oppositely : Emily Brontë’s Bible of Hell,” Gilbert and Gubar construct an analytical framework that presents Brontë’s novel as an oppositional “bible” to Milton’s patriarchal poetics in Paradise Lost.1 “Milton’s Bogey” (quoting Virginia Woolf) is the shadow of patriarchal assumptions and the inheritance of ideological models of gender which nineteenth-century women writers have inherited in that culture (Madwoman, 188). The feminist framework that Gilbert and Gubar provide for the novel has been discussed, extended, and contested by other feminist writers since the first publication of Madwoman in the Attic, providing a plural history of the critical reception of both Gilbert and Gubar’s work and Wuthering Heights.2 However, the purpose of this essay is not to revisit treatments of the novel in academic writing but rather to examine the relationship between the type of feminist poetics that Gilbert and Gubar help to shape and the reproduction of Wuthering Heights in popular culture, in the form of the novel’s film adaptations. In these adaptations, we can locate the engagement with feminism beyond the pages of academic criticism. The films I examine form a type of ongoing cultural criticism of Gilbert and Gubar’s feminist poetics. 150 Hila Shachar It is important to point out however, that I am not working under the notion of direct or literal translation of Gilbert and Gubar’s analysis of Wuthering Heights, but rather under the notion of cultural inheritance and a shared tradition. Madwoman in the Attic helped to shape both the feminist analysis of the novel and feminism as a critical discourse, and the films draw from a cultural history of evolving gender politics and feminism. I have found Gilbert and Gubar’s analysis of Wuthering Heights to be relevant to many of the novel’s film adaptations and believe that such relevance is due to the overall influence that Gilbert and Gubar have within feminism as a primary cultural discourse in Western culture. It is perhaps useful to approach Gilbert and Gubar’s Madwoman in the Attic as not simply a specific set of analyses but also as a set of ideas and ideologies that participated in and helped to construct the feminist discourse with which the films engage. At the heart of Gilbert and Gubar’s analysis of Wuthering Heights lies the central supposition that the novel is a “myth of origins” (Madwoman, 292). Using the binaries of heaven and hell, innocence and experience, that are evident in both Wuthering Heights and Paradise Lost, Gilbert and Gubar argue that Brontë provides “a parodic, anti-Miltonic myth,” in which “Heaven (or its rejection), hell, Satan, a fall, mystical politics, metaphysical romance, orphanhood, and the question of origins . . . cohere in a rebelliously topsyturvy retelling of Milton’s and Western culture’s central tale of the fall of woman and her shadow self, Satan. This fall, says Brontë, is not a fall into hell. It is a fall from ‘hell’ into‘heaven,’ not a fall from grace (in the religious sense) but a fall into grace (in the cultural sense)” (Madwoman, 303, 255). The notion that Brontë is rebelliously “looking oppositely” at her culture’s norms and that the novel she has produced is tied to a narrative of myth is certainly not unique. Since its initial publication, Wuthering Heights has been the subject of much mythmaking, with various arguments that position the novel within a critical frame of mythical and rebellious storytelling.3 What is new about Gilbert and Gubar’s conceptual framework—indeed, in many subsequent feminist rereadings of Wuthering Heights—is linking the novel’s supposed “mythical” status with overt feminist politics. In doing so, Gilbert and Gubar have contextualized Wuthering Heights in a specific social and cultural environment, helping to remove its problematic definition as a “transcendent ” text while retaining the mythic aura that surrounds the novel in both critical writing and the popular imagination. Many of the film adaptations of Wuthering Heights have inherited this logic of cultural interrogation and cultural myth, and display this inheritance with varying degrees of self-consciousness. Since the first publication of Madwoman in the Attic and the first feminist rereadings of Wuthering...

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