'Mother Fixation' and 'Rebellion against the Father Figure' in Wuthering Heights: A Projection of Emily Brontë's Neurosis

Abstract

Attempts to present a definitive rational explanation of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights have been a growing concern since its publication in 1847. The abundant, yet incoherent, interpretations of Wuthering Heights, each taking one element of the novel and extrapolating it towards total explanation, make the need for this research timely. This article focuses on ways to achieve a truer and more rational interpretation of the novel. The study indicates that in order to solve the enigma and crack the codes of the novel, the conscious and unconscious thoughts of the author, performing within the text, have to be discovered. The research approach adopted in this study is what is referred to as psychobiography or the Freudian psychoanalytic criticism. Freud's ideas have been employed due to the increasing shift to him in the recent decades, particularly in the discipline of psychobiography. The findings of this research underline that: First, Emily Brontë grew up in an oppressive milieu, and she compulsively created phantasy worlds within which she continuously repeated certain patterns; Second, nearly all the characters of the novel are stricken by their mother's death, and they not only undergo the processes of dejection, melancholia, and hysteria, but also suffer from certain core issues—fear of intimacy, fear of abandonment, fear of betrayal, low self-esteem, insecure or unstable sense of self; Third, in Wuthering Heights, religion, civilization, and conventional principles of Victorian novel writing are satirically rejected. The main conclusion to be drawn from this article is that Emily Brontë was a neurotic person whose unconscious obsessions of psychoanalytic love of mother and hatred of father are projected in Wuthering Heights.