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Refractive Depths of Passion in Wuthering Heights: Brontë, Buñuel and Beyond Humanism

2018; University of La Laguna; Issue: 77 Linguagem: Inglês

10.25145/j.recaesin.2018.77.04

2530-8335

Sue Hall Pyke,

Narrative Theory and Analysis

There is a counter-tradition to the Enlightenment project of silencing the sentience of country which can be traced from Romanticism to contemporary times.In 1858 Emily Brontë's novel Wuthering Heights introduced its readers to a Yorkshire moor of cradling flora, interventionist waters and ghost-accommodating winds.One hundred years later this brilliantly productive novel inspired Abismos de Pasión, ably directed by Luis Buñuel.Buñuel's film connects with Brontë's decentralisation of the human, demonstrating a similar conceptual openness to representing communicative exchanges between the human and non-human.Buñuel, like Brontë, resists the humanist project of silencing the non-human by the simple but powerful act of accepting that the other-than-human can be heard.The most recent Wuthering Heights film, directed by Andrea Arnold is made in this tradition.The animal and non-animal are given room to speak, highlighting the actant properties of the non-human, permitted in Brontë's novel.Such communications are instrumental if not reasonable, for they invite attentive audiences to listen in newly porous ways.