Feminist Criticism and Wuthering Heights

I found the feminist criticism infinitely easier to relate to than the other critiques we have so far read, but I have always been a sucker for those championing the female point of view. Especially in older novels, I feel that examining the relationship between the female author and her cultural surroundings is a crucial element in understanding what she has written (this is perhaps most fully displayed in Charlotte Bronte's "Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell", which gave me a much deeper understanding of the choice to publish the work under a somewhat androgynous pseudonym).

One thing that I found most interesting was Lyn Pykett's comment on page 473: "Like so many women in Victorian fiction, Catherine dies in childbirth and is thus not required to negotiate that other profoundly ideological version of womanhood-'the mother'." Indeed, even in such an arguably feminine novel, the role of females as the mother figure is profoundly deemphasized.  Most of the mother's die with little effect on the child, as in the case of young Cathy, who never knows her mother, and Linton, whose major personality traits are primarily defined by his interaction with Heathcliff, his father. Although Isabella raises him by herself for a time, all this interaction occurs outside of Wuthering Heights, so that very little information of this period is provided in the novel. Even earlier on, Mrs. Earnshaw and Frances die with barely a page devoted to either death. The women in this novel seem more defined by their choices of marriage partners, and once that choice is made, it seems that they become passive: they are more affected then by the choices made by the males in the novel.

I find this omission puzzling. It seems that, in the world of Wuthering Heights, the most important role of a woman is to marry well, rather than to serve thereafter as the woman of the house. I have to wonder if this notable blank spot in the writing had to do with Emily's own life. As discussed in the biographical portions of the novel, and in class, Emily seems to have been much more influenced by her father than her mother. She herself never had to face the challenges of motherhood. I realize that it may be a stretch to project this much of Emily's life onto her writing, but her lack of experience in the field and the correlating lack of description of women as mother figures seems too strong to ignore.