Trespassing Boundaries in Wuthering Heights

Abstract

The Spatial Turn as a transdisciplinary phenomenon in the Humanities was established in the 1990s, and, especially in the last few decades, geography seems to have pervaded critical analysis and language. According to contemporary geographical and environmental perspectives, the setting in narratives is not only a background defining the place where the plot is located but a complex system that is central to the construction of literary texts. Wuthering Heights (1847) provides an excellent case study. Emily Brontë’s novel is certainly characterized by its topography. Although different sources had been collected by the writer from a wide range of models across the country in Yorkshire, they were then reassembled to form a landscape that is both familiar and uncanny, self-consistent and reminiscent of real buildings and sceneries. Besides, the dynamics between displacement, departures and arrivals and the seeming immobility of the landscape is a crucial pattern of the novel. In Wuthering Heights, the natural world of the moors and its geographies are reminders of history and memory. Brontë’s weaving together of emotional stories into the moorlands suggests a mutual exchange between nature and culture. The writer constructs a textured geography representing the cycles of change, family history, and passion that have created that space.

Keywords

• Boundaries. Emily Brontë. Literary geography. Nature. Wuthering Heights