ABSTRACT
Chapter 6 argues that in Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë offered an early and sophisticated argument about the pattern of containment as a dominant liberal mode for handling internal tensions. At stake in the novel was not only the problem of status hierarchies, but a messier set of ideas often considered problematic for liberal idealizations, among them irrationality, untamed passion, and the supernatural. My main motivation in observing these tensions is to point to an aesthetic enactment of the anguish that liberal structures of complexity were to evoke for the decades that followed. That anguish was registered in Wuthering Heights’ troubled reception.
At the close of Chapter 6 I discuss some of the theoretical implications of ideological dysfunction, to which the patterns discussed in Part II speak.
