Above or Below? The Begrudging Business of Wuthering Heights and the Canon Anonymous 12th Grade

Incest, violence, gambling, and the North of England - just several topics central to Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights that were abhorrent to the polite Victorian elites who originally devised the principle of 'Canon'. The Literary Canon of the West was conceived as a gathering of texts deemed 'worthy of study' by the establishment, as a result of what were defined as 'universal themes' and 'aesthetic' qualities. It is uncommon for texts to enter the canon, especially texts which deviate from this set of 'qualities' deemed fixed, while remaining coated in ambiguity. The canon is intended for classifying distinct and timeless literature due to the aforementioned qualities, yet the selected works still exude a complexity which can be viewed as 'unified' with those of other canonical works. For this reason, the canon appears to be a contradictory, arbitrary category for which varying contexts of reception and production ultimately make the merit and meaning of each entirely subject to the individual, and should not be categorised according to the 'ruling ideology'.

Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights is within the number of works often considered canonical, due to its transcendence among certain readers, which defies the expectation...