Friday, May 15, 2015

I am having trouble coming up with how to connect the research sources for the notion/theory of social script/contract and gender performativity...

I am not sure I can exactly meet your needs, but I can offer some thoughts based on Butler's theory of gender performativity. First, I would say the original Catherine (Catherine Earnshaw Linton), as depicted by Nelly Dean, subverts gender roles by being so assertive and aggressive in her personality. She is the leader in her relationship with Heathcliff, the one who calls the shots. As Heathcliff says when she is dying, "... nothing that God or Satan could inflict would inflict could have parted us, you, of your own will, did it." (chapter 15) Catherine assumes responsibility for taking care of Heathcliff rather than vice-versa (assuming he, as the man, will take care of her, which would be the "normal" role) in chapter 11 in her "I am Heathcliff" speech in which she asserts she is marrying Edgar with the intent of helping Heathcliff out of his degraded situation.Catherine also calls the shots with Edgar when she throws the key into the fire, locking him into the kitchen with Heathcliff to be beaten. This gender performance is not entirely "clean:" Catherine absolutely performs according to gender stereotypes in marrying the rich man to get ahead, but her strong, masculinely assertive and athletic personality (she loves being out on the moors and is contemptuous of the Lintons in the scene where she and Heathcliff as children peek in their window--and she wants to be thrown on the moors after death rather than go to heaven--another rejection of feminine gender performance, where dying female "angels" in Victorian literature normally look forward to heaven) subverts her "feminine" role. Rather than saintly in death, the dying Catherine "Seized his [Heathcliff's] hair, and kept him down," performing male violence and domination, and "had a wild vindictiveness" (ch. 15).  

Gender performance is exploited by Heathcliff as he deliberately uses violent "love" rhetoric to woo Isabella, knowing she will take it as rhetorical or figurative language: wishing for example he could hang her as he does her dog--see the chapter before Catherine dies when Nelly comes to the Wuthering Height to see the newlywed Isabelle and Heathcliff. 


Again, gender is inverted when Isabella's sickly son comes to Wuthering Heights and is forced by Heathcliff into a marriage with the mores assertive Cathy, the daughter of Linton and Catherine. This "sugar candy" sucking Linton lying on a sofa plays a passive, sickly, petulant role more associated with a "feminine" character, and becomes even more repellent when he then asserts, having been taught by Heathcliff, that he "owns" everything of Cathy's, even her books, because he is her husband: there is little more damning of arbitrary patriarchy than that passage. See chapter 27: "All her nice books are mine ... I told her she had nothing to give, they were all, all mine." When Cathy pushes him, he "shrieked out," language we would normally associate with a woman. 


As for Hobbes, Heathcliff behaves with complete brutality in his will to power, using the law of the land to do so. Anachronism is an interesting concept vis-a-vis the book: we can't forget it is a "historical" novel, written in the 1840s but ending in 1800--most of the action takes places in the late 1700s. 

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