Narrative strategies & ambiguity in Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights

Abstract

This dissertation focuses on Wuthering Heights as a text that achieves its power and originality of expression through narrative strategies that give rise to ambiguity. I analyse these strategies in four main parts, which I have chosen to refer to as the fabular, the narratological, the discursive and the linguistic levels. The first chapter deals with the production of mutually exclusive fabulas that give rise to ambiguous episodes. It applies Shlomith Rimmon's logical-narratological definition of ambiguity in order to describe the mechanisms of the text at a structural level of analysis. Chapter two focus on a narratological 'interpretation' of the novel which makes ample use of the terms established by Gérard Genette and taken up by other narratologists. The aim is to unveil the narrative strategies that give rise to the text's transgressive juxtaposition of logical, temporal sequence with atemporal structures that are subversively related to the unconscious world of dream, nightmare, hallucination and madness. The in-betweeness of these two modes of writing gives rise to an ambiguous space where opposites are allowed to intermingle. The third chapter explores the novel's discursive struggles through the adaptation of Mikhail Bakhtin's dialogues. Humour, irony, parody and hidden polemic ensure that no univocal and dictatorial voice is allowed to dominate the novelistic arena. These narrative strategies therefore, unveil the novel's discursive, stylistic and generic ambiguities. Chapter four is the most post-structuralist in outlook and focuses on the elusive language of Wuthering Heights. By stressing the similarity of conventional binary oppositions, the text manages to undermine linguistic boundaries. This process is paralleled on the discursive, structural and thematic level, thus giving rise to the novel's ambiguous world-view. The conclusion marks a return to silence and death, the necessary consequence of a language that plays subversively on creation and destruction, assimilating them to each other so as to inhabit that elusive, ambiguous space that characterizes my reading of Emily Bronte's novel.