‘Not a country at all’: Landscape andWuthering Heights

Abstract

Abstract:This article explores the issue of women's representational genealogies through an analysis of Andrea Arnold's 2011 Wuthering Heights. Beginning with 1970s feminist arguments for a specifically female literary tradition, it argues that running through both these early attempts to construct an alternative female literary tradition and later work in feminist philosophy, cultural geography and film history is a concern with questions of 'alternative landscapes': of how to represent, and how to encounter, space differently. Adopting Mary Jacobus' notion of intertextual 'correspondence' between women's texts, and taking Arnold's film as its case study, it seeks to trace some of the intertextual movements -the reframings, deframings and spatial reorderings -that link Andrea Arnold's film to Emily Brontë's original novel.Focusing on two elements of her treatment of landscape -her use of 'unframed' landscape and her focus on visceral textural detail -it points to correspondences in other women's writing, photography and film-making. It argues that these intensely tactile close-up sequences which puncture an apparently realist narrative constitute an insistent presence beneath, or within, the ordered framing which is our more usual mode of viewing landscape. As the novel Wuthering Heights is unmade in Arnold's adaptation and its framings ruptured, it is through this disturbance of hierarchies of time, space and landscape that we can trace the correspondences of an alternative genealogy.

El modelo del amo en Cumbres Borrascosas de Emily Brontë: una lectura ecofeminista

“…He "hides and mirrors something from Oedipus, Hippolytus, Deianeira, Medea, Orestes, and Electra" (Panagiotopoulou, 2020: 257). He and Catherine incur in operations that delineate conceptual boundaries, aspects and conventions, and have led to a growing body of feminist criticism (Homans, 1978(Homans, , 2015Gilbert & Gubar, 1919;Auerbach, 1982;Evans & Evans, 1985;Yaeger, 1988, Barreca, 1990Steinitz, 2011), and of film studies criticism (Haire-Sargeant, 1999;Thornham, 2016;Lawrence, 2016;Oroskhan, 2020) of cinema adaptations of Wuthering Heights. Criticism on the novel continues to add more nuances to the layered socio-cultural anxieties and concerns brought forward by most well-known researchers on the field of Brontë studies.…”

Genre, Authorship and Contemporary Women Filmmakers

“…In her study of imperial fantasies of nineteenth-century novelists and poets, who in their portraits of Africa and India charted a link between landscape and the female body, Anne McClintock comments: 'Symbolically reduced, in male eyes, to the space on which male contests are waged, women experience particular difficulties laying claim to alternative genealogies ' (1995: 31). Film scholar Sue Thornham (2016) revisits this concept of 'alternative genealogies', taking into consideration some of the cinematic landscapes in films directed by women: '[N]ot a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made' (Moers in Thornham 2016: 214). 33 While pointing to some of the challenges that emerged from gynocriticism, marked by the much-disputed concepts of female writing, women's culture and continuity in women's tradition, Thornham addresses the concept of legacy in women's cultural creation, setting out to explore 'genealogical intertexts' in Andrea Arnold's Wuthering Heights (2011), Emily Brontë's writing, Jane Campion's films and Fay Godwin's photography.…”

“…Marked by colonisation -by those masculine crusades over a territory -it has, indeed, been associated with the female body or with the body of the cultural Other. Alternative landscapes, Thornham (2016) argues, drawing on Rosi Braidotti, correlate to other topographies, which, rather than adhering to the narrative of conquest, transmit the indeterminacy of a female nomadic subject. In Meek's Cutoff landscape is likewise characterised by displacement of this nomadic subject, but at the same time it is overwhelmed by containment, austerity and claustrophobia, evoked not only at the film's representational level, but also, as already argued, in a shared phenomenological presence.…”