ABSTRACT
The work of Gayatri Spivak has for some years served to stimulate a vigilance against the universalist assumptions of Western feminism. Anita Levy chooses Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights as an illustration of the progressive dominion of 'gender rules' over the supposed chronological span of the novel. Aidoo's novel-poem is also a radical critique of the contradictions between the self-advertisements of so-called European democracies and the wretchedness of those who these systems conspicuously fail to address, account for, attend to, again and again. This consideration points in the direction of analyses which explore both the relationships and non-relationships between culturally distinct or differing gender productions and the oppression of women in different cultural circumstances.
