에밀리 브론테의 성취와 한계

Emily Brontë's Achievements and Limits: Revisiting Wuthering Heights from the Racial Perspective

Race is the most important framework in which Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights can be analyzed for the following reasons. First, it was published in 1847 when British imperialism was at its peak. Second, racial discourse can effectively explain both the first and the second parts of the novel as a whole where the racial conflict between non-white Heathcliff and white people such as Hindley, Edgar, Isabella, Linton, the second Catherine, and Hareton is widely developed. This study takes notice of the achievements of Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights which is significant in the understanding and reconciliation between races. From the racial perspective, three remarkable achievements which are hardly found in the nineteenth-century British novel can be illuminated: the reconciliation between non-white Heathcliff and white Hareton; the spiritual union between non-white Heathcliff and white Catherine; the marriage between non-white Heathcliff and white Isabella. Despite of her valuable achievements in the novel, Brontë reveals her unavoidable limits as a white writer who is not free from the racist ideology of the day. Although Brontë allows the physical miscegenation between white Isabella and non-white Heathcliff, Linton, their offspring, is described as a nagative character who is not only physically weak dying of poor health, but also spiritually weak with sickly peevishness. This shows that Brontë unconsciously agrees to the contemporary racist discourse warning against the danger of miscegenation. Though Brontë cannot offer a comprehensive racial vision for a white dominated society due to this flaw, she can be evaluated as a writer who strongly criticizes the problems of colonialism repressing the racial other. Through portraying Heathcliff's experiences as one colonized and a colonizer at the same time, the author emphasizes inhuman attitides in which the stronger, the colonizer represses and despises the weaker, the colonized. In conclusion, Brontë is not a racist. She is both an anti-racist and humanist whose stance is neither on the white's side, nor on the non-white's side, but on the human's side.