Mother in Wuthering Heights by Margarret Homans,

¶ … Mother in Wuthering Heights" by Margarret Homans, and "Myths of Power: A Marxist Study on Wuthering Heights" by Terry Eagleton, rely very heavily on their respective critical paradigms in their analysis of Bronte's novel. In some ways, to fully understand the intricacies of their arguments the reader must be steeped in the rhetoric and discourse of Marxist and Feminist criticism. However, that being said, I believe Eagleton's article provides the most illuminating and useful interpretation of the novel. There a few reasons for this. For one, Eagleton's analysis deals more with the tensions of the novel, whereas Homan's article is more concerned with Bronte as a women writer. Secondly, Eagleton's analysis sheds light on the motives of the characters in the novel, whereas Homan's article is more concerned with the motives of the author as it is reflected in her characters. Thirdly, and most importantly, Eagleton's analysis engages with the cultural tension that existed during Bronte's time, namely between Industrial Capitalism and the old agrarian way of life, thus placing the novel in a cultural context. Homan's article, on the other hand, attributes 20th century ideas of feminism, of gender and language to a 19th century text. She is attempting to fit the text, and the motives of the author and her characters, into her feminist critical paradigm, one that didn't really exist in Bronte's time. For all of these reason, Eagleton's article is the more illuminating and useful than Homan's

Eagleton's analysis deals more with the tensions of the novel, whereas Homan's article is more concerned with Bronte as a women writer. Eagleton's analysis of Wuthering Heights hinges on a contrast between the novel and the works of the author's sister Charlotte Bronte. In Eagleton's opinion, "Charlotte's novels are ideological in that they exploit fiction and fable to smooth the jagged edges of real conflict...Wuthering Heights, on the other hand, confronts the tragic truth that the passion and society it presents are not fundamentally reconcilable" (400). As this passage indicates, Eagleton's main area of interest is in the tensions and contradictions in the novel.

Homan's article, on the other hand, is more concerned with Emily Bronte as a women author. After almost 2 pages of theoretical background, Homan's first mention of the novel demonstrates her main interest concerning Wuthering Heights. "Emily Bronte," Homan argues in her essay's thesis, " understands the problem of her own writing in relation to the dominant myth of language that exclude the possibility of women writing, and she writes her own relation to this myth, and her enabling revision of it, by writing about the relation between her female characters and their language"(344). As this passage demonstrates, Homan's interest in the novel and its characters is in how they reflect the motives of its author, thus she commits the authorial fallacy of attributing motives to the author that are far more steeped in her own critical paradigm than in any discourse that existed during Bronte's time.

Eagleton's analysis sheds light on the motives of the characters in the novel, whereas Homan's article is more concerned with the motives of the author as it is reflected in her characters. The way Eagleton engages with the conflicts in the novel is by analyzing the motives and actions of the novel's characters, mainly Catherine and her decision concerning Heathcliff and Edgar Linton. "That choice," he argues "seems to me the pivotal event of the novel, the decisive catalyst of the tragedy" (401). Throughout his essay, he analyzes the relationship between Catherine and Heathcliff, and illuminates how their motives reflect certain cultural tensions. As he says "the friendship of Heathcliff and Cathy crystallizes under the pressures of economic and cultural violence" (403). Also, in discussing Heathcliff's motives concerning the Heights and the Grange, Eagleton analysis places these motives in a cultural context. "He behaves this way," Eagleton argues, "because his 'soul' belongs not to that world but to Catherine; and in that sense his true commitment is an 'outdated' one, to a past, increasingly mythical realm of absolute personal value which capitalist social relations cancel"(408).

Homan, on the other hand, in her analysis of the novel's characters is more interested in how their motives and actions reflect the author's motives, or to be more precise the motives Homan attributes to her. For example, her analysis of Lockwood's relationship with women attempts to link it to what she sees as Bronte's motives concerning gender and language. "Just as, erotically, Lockwood never wants to come to the end of a series of substitutes, one woman for another, linguistically he never wants to refer in a determinate way to nature" (345). In addition, Homan's analysis of Cathy and Nelly also demonstrates her primary interest in Bronte's motives. "In the significant differences between the motives of her child and adult narrators, Bronte dramatizes the conflict between, on the one hand, the tremendous appeal of the literal and, on the other, the threat that the literal poses to the articulation within the symbolic order. We might say that Bronte shares Cathy's aim to preserve literal nature from symbolization, and that she achieves it by speaking through the voice of a character like Cathy"(350). Clearly, this demonstrates that Homan's interest in the novel's characters has to do with how they reflect Bronte motives, and not, like Eagleton, how they reflect the cultural tensions Bronte is writing from. Eagleton methodology, in my opinion, is much more effective and persuasive.