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Article

Abstract

[First paragraph]

<1> "Nature," to Emily Brontë, was "an inexplicable problem, it exists on a principle of destruction" (qtd. in Torgerson 191). Taken from her private writings, this quote serves as a critical signpost for approaching Wuthering Heights, the "savage" and "gnarled" novel that the Victorian reading public rejected on the basis of a moral duty to outcast modes of human behavior outside the precincts of their ethical systems (Surrage 171). Brontë's oppositional treatment of the two binaric terms, nature and destruction, supports a bifurcated reading of the novel that positions acts of violence committed at the title abode against those at Thrushcross Grange. The two great estates are marked as models of two distinctive systems of human-animal violence, one predicated and justified by an interspecies drive to assert and maintain self, the other, on the enforcement of an exploitative and unequal 'domestic contract.' Further, that Brontë's own "problem" lies in the uncomfortable appropriation of value to violent action (destruction) preformed in service of the continuation of conditions necessary for all life (nature), is valuable to a reading that orients Wuthering Height's many violent human-animal encounters as communicative and identitive positives for both parties. Though Brontë's own words may, in some ways, grant credence to such a reading, critical animal theories concerning systems of legitimized violence against nonhuman subjects at once work to challenge the impermeability of interspecies selfhood at the two houses, and to substantiate acts of violence within them as communicative. I aim to contribute to this discourse by advocating that the novel's formulation works to undermine platitudinous and essentialist Victorian visions of moral relations with animals through the shared ethical values between humans and nonhumans at Wuthering Heights, and the arbitrary interspecies violence by which those values are generated.

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