Exploring Binaries: The Melding of Realistic and Gothic Elements in Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights

Abstract

This paper explores “binary oppositions” inherent in the nineteenth century English novel, as epitomised in Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, through subversion and embracing of duality. The recognition of the novel as a fictive narrative form separate from general prose narratives, coincided with the Enlightenment bringing in a strict divisioning between fact and fiction, on the heels of the rise of scientific method. Simultaneously, the Gothic emerged as a reactionary genre, navigating through this ‘scientific’ overreach into the literary. What resulted is a narrative in which the lines between the real and the fantastical blur, where the factual and the fictional cannot be easily distinguished and where one fails to differentiate between reality and imagination. Realism, as opposed to Gothic fiction, deals with the real, trying to expose or portray life as it is. Emily Bronte’s only published novel, Wuthering Heights, is a juxtaposition of the two. The paper aims to establish the premise that Bronte subverts  ‘binary opposites ’ to erase the differences between the real and the fantastical. This study has applied I.A. Richard’s ‘close reading’ as an interpretive strategy and Derrida’s deconstructive method to probe beneath the surface of the apparant. In addition, the research aims to establish how Bronte utilises ‘binary opposites ’ to achieve both realistic and gothic modes of storytelling. In conclusion, the study also looks at Bronte’s adoption of the gothic to voice out social injustices, in another example of the deconstructive strategy.