TY - CHAP
T1 - The Lost Mother and the Enclosed Lady
T2 - Gender and Domesticity in MTV’s Adaptation of Wuthering Heights
AU - Shachar, Hila
PY - 2011/1/1
Y1 - 2011/1/1
N2 - Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel, Wuthering Heights, has been adapted repeatedly for the screen to highlight the issues of gender, family and the home. One of the novel’s most recent adaptations, MTV’s 2003 television film of the same name, engages with Brontë’s text through the cultural context of a perceived contemporary breakdown of the nuclear family and a preoccupation with ‘lost’ motherhood. This chapter focuses on MTV’s adaptation of Wuthering Heights as a case study in contemporary neo-Victorian domestic and gender politics through an examination of the character of Cate, a modernised version of Brontë’s Catherine Earnshaw. I analyse the character of Cate in relation to the Victorian tropes of the mother, the domestic woman and what Jennifer Gribble has termed the “enclosed lady” of “Victorian painting, poetry and novels”, most significantly exemplified by Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s ‘The Lady of Shalott’ (1833, 1842). I argue that the film seeks to ‘reconcile’, through the ideological paradigm of a ‘healing’ myth, contemporary concerns regarding the domestic role of women and the stability of the idealised family home through a return to nineteenth-century ideologies of femininity, domesticity and the family.
AB - Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel, Wuthering Heights, has been adapted repeatedly for the screen to highlight the issues of gender, family and the home. One of the novel’s most recent adaptations, MTV’s 2003 television film of the same name, engages with Brontë’s text through the cultural context of a perceived contemporary breakdown of the nuclear family and a preoccupation with ‘lost’ motherhood. This chapter focuses on MTV’s adaptation of Wuthering Heights as a case study in contemporary neo-Victorian domestic and gender politics through an examination of the character of Cate, a modernised version of Brontë’s Catherine Earnshaw. I analyse the character of Cate in relation to the Victorian tropes of the mother, the domestic woman and what Jennifer Gribble has termed the “enclosed lady” of “Victorian painting, poetry and novels”, most significantly exemplified by Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s ‘The Lady of Shalott’ (1833, 1842). I argue that the film seeks to ‘reconcile’, through the ideological paradigm of a ‘healing’ myth, contemporary concerns regarding the domestic role of women and the stability of the idealised family home through a return to nineteenth-century ideologies of femininity, domesticity and the family.
U2 - 10.1163/9789401207249_010
DO - 10.1163/9789401207249_010
M3 - Chapter (peer-reviewed)
SN - 9789042034372
T3 - Neo-Victorian Series
SP - 221
EP - 244
BT - Neo-Victorian Families
A2 - Kohlke , Marie-Luise
A2 - Gutleben , Christian
PB - Rodopi
CY - Amsterdam; New York
ER -