The sexual sublime: The revision of love in Emily Bronte's "Wuthering Heights"

This thesis is an exploration of Bronte's radical re-conceptualization of love in Wuthering Heights, which I term "the sexual sublime." Through her use of the sexual sublime Bronte achieves a number of important feminist goals. Throughout my thesis, I address Bronte's feminism via her revision of love in a variety of ways. First, I examine a series of feminist critics and explore how their analyses tend to neglect a Brontean strand of feminism. Second, I explain Bronte's re-conception of love---the sexual sublime---and show how it differs from a standard Victorian idea of love. Third, I suggest a relationship between Jungian theory on development and marriage and the sexually sublime elements in Bronte's novel. Focusing specifically on Jung's theory of individuation, and on his archetypes of the shadow and animus, I demonstrate how Jung's studies in psychoanalysis help elucidate Bronte's notion of the sexual sublime in Wuthering Heights. Finally, I delve into Bronte's metaphoric use of Nature and how that enables her to not only stratify characters and pairs in terms of their inherent and fundamental nature (sexually and otherwise) but also how she uses images of Nature in her text to outline the catastrophic repercussions of abandoning one's true nature or self.