6 research outputs found
âNot a country at allâ: landscape and Wuthering Heights
This article explores the issue of womenâs representational genealogies through an analysis of Andrea Arnoldâs 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 âalternative landscapesâ: of how to represent, and how to encounter, space differently. Adopting Mary Jacobusâ notion of intertextual âcorrespondenceâ between womenâs texts, and taking Arnoldâs film as its case study, it seeks to trace some of the intertextual movements â the reframings, deframings and spatial reorderings â that link Andrea Arnoldâs film to Emily BrontĂ«âs original novel. Focusing on two elements of her treatment of landscape â her use of âunframedâ landscape and her focus on visceral textural detail â it points to correspondences in other womenâs 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 Arnoldâs 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