ABSTRACT
Nature becomes an ally of the woman hero, keeping her in touch with her selfhood, a kind of talisman that enables her to make her way through the alienations of male society. Jane Austen in Sense and Sensibility and Emily Bronte in Wuthering Heights are to expand upon the problem of binary division and give added nuance to our understanding of the fundamental incompatibility of the two gender-yoked halves of the hypothetical whole woman. In Wuthering Heights , Emily Bronte images female development as a circular journey from "feminine" nature to "masculine" culture to "feminine" nature. In killing off Catherine Earnshaw in the act of giving birth to the prematurely-born Cathy Linton, Bronte indirectly invests Cathy Linton with an heroic challenge similar to that faced both by Burney's Evelina and Radcliffe's Emily—the task of restoring mother's honor and reclaiming her good name.
