CULTURAL CRITICISM AND WUTHERING HEIGHTS

When they hear the word culture most people think of high culture but there is also its opposite, the low culture known as popular culture or mass culture. Cultural criticism is what is practiced by cultural critics, the intellectuals formerly known as moralists and publicists. Cultural critics want to break down the boundary between high and low culture and to dismantle the hierarchy that the distinction implies. In combating old definitions of what constitutes culture they sometimes end up combating old definitions of what constitutes the literary canon, that is the onceagreed-upon honour roll of Great Books. They tend to do so, however, neither by adding books to the old lists of text that every culturally literate person should supposedly know, nor by substituting for it some kind of Counterculture Canon. Rather, they tend to combat the canon by critiquing the very idea of canon. Cultural critics want to get us away from thinking about certain works as the best ones produced by a given culture. Not only are they likely to take on the literary canon while offering political readings of popular films, but they are also likely to take on the institution of the university, for that is where the old definitions of Culture have been more vigorously preserved, defended and reinforced. In the essay A CULTURAL PERSPECTIVE ON WUTHERING HEIGHTS , cultural critic Nancy Armstrong begins by citing formalist predecessors who have suggested that Wuthering Heights , more than most works, sprang from a mind uncontamined by political concerns. Since, as a cultural critic, Armstrong cannot believe that any text can be independent of cultural contexts, including politics, she sets out to show that the novel in fact represents a number of things that were going on in mid-Victorian culture. She thereby suggests, implicitly, that no work can be separated from the society by whose power structure it was shaped. Wuthering Heights like its characters, is, according to Armstrong, a kind of interloper. For one thing it bridges boundaries set by high Culture between Literature and folklore the study of which began in 1840s- just before Wuthering Heights was written.
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Looked at in this way, the novel is the account of a folklorist, Lockwood, of what he found in a remote area of Yorkshire. 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. Looked at in another way, though, Lockwood is a version of yet another new type of individual first appearing in the mid-ninetheenth century. He is a great deal like a photographer, particularly like the 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. Armstrong follows the lead of many cultural critics in seeing Wuthering Heights only as one of many manifestations or expressions of cultural work. However she is most interesting and original in showing Wuthering Heights to be part of a culture cycle of responses. 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 of

seeing the world. Our answers, rather, will be those of our cultural moment and they will do our cultures work.