The Power of Excommunication: Sex and the Feminine Text in Wuthering Heights

Abstract

Nelly Dean [sat] sewing and singing a song, which was always interrupted from within, by harsh words of scorn and intolerance, uttered in far from musical accents.

‘Aw’d rayther, by th‘haulf, hev’em swearing i‘my lugs frough morn tuh neeght, nur hearken yeh, hahsiver!’ said the tenant of the kitchen, in answer to an unheard speech of Nelly’s. ‘It’s a blazing shaime, ut Aw cannut oppen t’Blessed Book, bud yah set up them glories tuh Sattan, un‘all t’ flaysome wickedness ut iver wer born intuh t’warld!... O, Lord, judge’em, fur they’s norther law nor justice among wer rullers!’

‘No! or we should be sitting in flaming fagots, I suppose,’ retorted the singer. ‘But wisht, old man, and read your Bible like a Christian, and never mind me. This is “Fairy Annie’s Wedding” - a bonny tune - it goes to a dance.’

‘Read your Bible like a Christian and never mind me’, is Nelly Dean’s reply to Joseph’s ‘interruption from within’. Nelly will continue to sing. In doing so, she continues to create an alternative, feminine text which forms a parallel to Joseph’s punitive, stuttered threats. Nelly’s song, like the other texts created by the female characters of Wuthcring Heights, indicates an appropriation of the power of language which women then use as an instrument of control against the dominant order. They appropriate the power of inscription. They invert the paradigmatic system in which women are absorbed and oppressed by the unavoidably patriarchal nature of language. In other words, it is the female characters of Wuthering Heights who create and shape all the language play of the text. Women in Bronte’s novel take control of language, in much the same way as they take control of sex – and for the same reasons. They claim the Editority of the ‘Editor’ – the initiator and the inscriber; they usurp the male prerogative. They create a system of feminine ‘excommunication’, whereby they appropriate discourse and desire, surrounding the patriarchal text, so to speak and render it ineffective, if not obsolete.