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ASSESSMENT ONE: ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Newman, Beth. “The Situation of the Looker-On”: Gender, Narration, and Gaze in Wuthering Heights.” Publications of the Modern Language Association of America (1990): 1029-1041.

Wuthering Heights explores the gaze’s sexual politics in focusing on the visual acts. Bronte’s novel makes the gaze thematically vital because it encompasses a means of surveillance as well as psychosexual. Additionally, it highlights that narration is mostly dependent on gaze and produced by the same gaze. However, through treatments of its two narrators, Catherine and Hareton as gazing subjects, the author emphasizes that the gaze raises some issues which are fundamental for feminists’ criticism, principally those that draw on psychoanalysis for gender difference theory. James’ criticism in the novel pays explicit attention to all sorts of formal matters that readers have come to associate with in the novel, and the criticisms have been coherently conveyed in visual metaphors. The Wuthering Heights’ narration is linked emphatically and repeatedly to the visual phenomenon, especially to a gaze.

Bronte’s novel appears to raise questions specifically about “orality” and about the audience as well as the words spoken than to disentangle the relationship between telling and seeing, and the relation between the gaze and the narration. This particular relation appears not only to be the structuring principle, but also a central thematic concern. According to the phrase “If looks have language” (p. 1030), the expression put forward that looking is both a source of pleasure as well as a mode of telling something. Therefore, Lockwood cannot enjoy looking immediately his look has been detected.  Notably, this particular limitation is vital as the word Lockwood uses to beseech the charms of his goddess or creature suggests fascination. On the other hand, the spectator’s horror in response to female’s genitals is located by Freud’s readings of Medusa.  The details linked to Medusa put forward that her gaze might be a more important aspect of the horrors she has been provoking. Medusa defies the male gaze as constructed by western culture which shows a means of trying to relegate women to the object’s status.  Such defiance is certainly disturbing and unsettling the pleasure that male character takes in gazing as well as the hierarchical relationships by which the male subject avows his dominance. In this regards, Lockwood retires at every glance.

The second part of the novel embroils Catherin’s first encounter with Lockwood. Lockwood’s gaze provides him with the context of reading Catherine as more dissident compared to what readers have ever been enthusiastic to grant. Lockwood’s initial encounter with Catherine emphasizes Catherine’s defiance of a male gaze.  Immediately seeing Catherine, he usurps her as a subject of visual pleasure, although he expresses incongruity about her irresistible eyes. Lockwood is in two minds for the reason that Catherine is doubly a looker an attractive woman who never opens her mouth, but only stares.  Through Catherine, the novel periodically engraves the dynamics which are involved in the gaze as well as articulation of psychological facts that if a woman looks back, then she asserts her presence as a subject. The novel confronts these particular dynamics by having Catherine explicitly or overtly denying to Heathcliff that he has nothing to panic or fear over the gaze. He says, “I will not take my eyes away from your face until you back at me” (p. 1032). It is important to note that Catherine’s coquettish teasing is a sign of a give-and-take gaze which neither annihilates nor appropriates if Hareton’s gaze is anything a part from the male gaze.