Cultural Criticism and Wuthering Heights

1. What is cultural criticism?

One of the goals of culture criticism is to oppose Culture with a capital C, in

other words, that view of culture which always and only equates it with what
we call high culture. for example, cultural critics are as likely to write
about Star Trek as they are to analyze James Joyces Ulysses.
Cultural critics want to break down the boundary between high and low and
to dismantle the classification that the distinction implies. They want to get
us away from thinking about certain work as the best one produced by a
given culture, they seek to be more descriptive and less evaluative, more
interested in relating that rating cultural products and events. Cultural
studies should show works in reference to other works, economic contexts,
or broad social discourses(about childbirth, womens education, rural decay
etc.) within whose contexts the work makes sense.
Culture is really a set of interactive cultures, alive, growing and changing,
and cultural critics should be present and future-oriented.
Foucalt, another strong continental influence, on cultural criticism,
influenced by early Annales critics and contemporary Marxists, he sought to
study culture in term of power relantionships. Unlike Marxist, he refuses to
see power as something exercised by a dominant over a subservient class.
Power, rather, is a whole complex of forces; it is that which produces what
happens. Foucalt tried to view all thing, from punishment to sexuality, in
terms of the widest possible variety of discourses, he tended to build
interdisciplinary bridges and to bring inro the study of culture the histories of
women, homosexuals and minorities.
Others forerunners of the British influences on cultural studies and criticism
are:
Raymond Williams that demonstrated that culture is not fixed and finished
but, rather, a living and changing thing (the development of a common
socialist culture). His tendency was to focus on people as people, on how

they experience condition they find themselves in and how they respond to
those conditions in their social practices.
The evolution of cultural criticism is difficult to be separated entirely from the
development of Marxist thought (the background of the background of most
cultural criticism. Of particular importance to the evolution of CC are the
works of Bakhtin, Walter Benjamin, Antonio Gramsci and Louis Althusser.
Bahtin viewed language-especially literary text- in terms of discourses and
dialogues between discourses. He influence modern CC by showing that the
conflict between high and low culture takes place not only between classic
and popular texts but also between the dialogic voices that exist within all
great books.
W.Benjamin praise modernist movement and, also, saw as hopeful the
development of new art forms utilizing mechanical production and
reproduction like radio and films.
Antonio Gramsci- related literature to the ideologies of culture that produced
it and developed the concept of hegemony a term used to describe the
system of meanings and values that shapes the way things look, what they
mean and what really is for the majority of people within a culture. he
believe that people have the freedom and power to struggle against
ideology.
Althusser unlike Gramsci tended to see ideology in control of people. The
main function of ideology is to reproduce the societys exiting relations of
production. He is as good example of where Marxism and cultural criticism
part ways as he is of where cultural criticism is indebted to Marxists and their
ideas. (literature is relatively autonomous and more independent of ideology)
Althought there are Marxist CC, most of them are not Marxisr in any strict
sense.
Anne Beezer contests the ALthusserian view of ideology as the construction
of the subject and she gives both the media she is concerned with and their
audieces more credit.The analysis that Beezer has brought to bear on
womens magazines has been focused on paperback romance nolves by
Tania Modleski and Janice Radway.
Radway a femininist culturak critic, demonstrates through painstaking
research that the stories of the novels are made up by the consumerss
wishes. Radways reading is typical of feminist CC in that it political. non-

Marxist cultural critics tend to see sometimes disheartening but always

dynamic synergy between cultural forms and the cultures consumers.
Cultural critic Nancy Armstrong begins his essay by citing formalist
predecessors who have suggested that Wuthering Heights sprang from a
mind uncontaminated by political concerns. But she cannot believe that any
text can be independent of cultural contexts, including politics.
She uses some arguments to show that the novel is a certain kind of cultural
work: First, one has to have a feel for those details within a text that can
come only from its material surroundings. Second one has to decide exactly
how to link these materials together as a field of information
Armstrong offers comparison between the way the novel is narrated and the
popularity of folklore and photography, all used to exhibit a strict sense of
regionalism present within the novel. The novel is used as an example of the
symbolic practices most essential to the social group that produced
and/received it. Wuthering Heights is shown as identical to the popular art oft
he time: the collection of folklore and photography of country scenes as a
method to learn of another culture.
Looked at this way the novel is the account of a folklorist, Lockwood, of what
he founds in a remote area of Yorkshire. Folklore took off sometimes during
the 1820s and by the 1840 a substantial number of people were collecting
stories, superstitions and began to writin them down. One of the folk
products is superstition. It denotes an absence rather than an alternative
form of knowledge. To the modern observer, superstition scrambled time in
ways that seemed to overturn natural law. Catherines body, for example,
does not decompose in the grave but lingers there, just as her childish voice
and image linger outside the bedroom where Lockwood sleeps. Indeed, the
novels plot loops backward in time to establish an essential continuity of
Heathcliff present with Heathcliff past where Lockwood can see only change
and transformation. In doing so, Wuthering Heights encourages us to
regard the present as a recycling of past essences
A kind of cyclical time associated with agriculture and cottage industry,
passing away at this time. The new sense of time produces a rupture
between "social and subjective life. Lockwood's dream translates this rupture
into metaphysical terms: the violence of establishing the border of individual
consciousness and of "violating such self-enclosure".

Lockwood is a "tourist", and resembles the folklorist who was beginning to

record the countryside, and the passing of a certain way of life at this time.
Looked at in another way, Lockwood is a version of yet another new type
of individual first apprearing in the mid-nineteenth century. He appears as a
photographer who offered the viewer a countryside that was remote, exotic
and utterly passive to view. Armstrong explains, the very years when
folklore became enourmously popular , that an increasing number of
amateur photographers went out into the remote areas of Great Britain to
document the landscape, customs and people, in much the same way and
presumable for much the same reasons that the folklorists had. Lockwood,
after all, gives us what he calls pictures of a remote area, but also steps
outside the frame of his photographs to comment them. Photography
develops around this time, as a technology capable of "mechanically
reproducing images of the countryside and making them available to urban
viewers".

The novel is a part of an internal colonization that Armstrong calls

"regionalism" producing an "English core and an ethnic periphery" (446). This
colonization is characterized by "imperialist nostalgia" (447), a nostalgia and
an idealization, or stereotyping, of what is being destroyed, and evidently
also an covert expression of guilt. This is the image which has dominated WH
criticism ever since (and which would work counter to the intentions of the
author to more critically present the process of internal colonization, as in
the figure of Lockwood).
Nostalgia is a particularly appropriate emotion to invoke in establishing ones
innocent and at the same time talk about walk one has destroyed. Dont
most people feel nostalgic about childhood memories?
Like so many other works of cultural criticism, Armstrongs essay asks more
questions than it answers. It does so in part because it knows that the
answers we must come up with are no more the answers than Brontes
ideology was the way ofseeing the world. Our answers, rather, will be those
of our cultural moment and they will do our cultures work.