The Human–Animal Relationship in Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Abstract

Many of the assumptions about animal–human boundaries and relationships, pets and pet-keeping, or animal cruelty that we take for granted today in North American society took shape in the nineteenth century, in Victorian Britain. Erika Woolgar draws adeptly on the rapidly growing body of scholarship on this subject in her analysis of the use of dogs and canine imagery in Emily Brontë‘s Wuthering Heights and Anne Brontë‘s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Erika principally focuses, as Lisa Surridge and several critics do, on cruelty to dogs as a metaphor for obliquely representing violence against women and children in each novel, whether it be Heathcliff hanging a spaniel in Wuthering Heights or Huntingdon hurling a book at one in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. A great strength of Erika‘s essay, however, is that she very capably situates this analysis within a more multi-faceted consideration of differing types of animal–human relationships in the two novels, in the process posing thought-provoking questions about the contrasting artistic visions of Emily and Anne.

Dr. Marjorie Stone