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The shared metaphor of a devastated nest in Antigone and Wuthering Heights signals feminist dissent against constraining social order. This essay presents an extended reading of this significant trope. Rhetorical, intertextual, and cultural analyses reveal that patriarchal forces in the tragedy and in the novel domesticate and suppress the women's rebellions.
Antigone's struggle to assert who she is against the dictates of social authority finds a strong echo two millennia after Sophocles's tragedy, in Emily Brontë's novel, Wuthering Heights. Despite the separation of time and differences in culture, the two texts share, at crucial points in the drama and narrative of their female protagonists, the metaphor of the devastated nest. This essay presents an extended analysis of this significant trope, which, in both texts, represents feminist protest against social conformity. Although Sophocles's and Brontë's literary modes differ, patriarchal forces in the tragedy and in the novel domesticate and suppress women's rebellion. The passage about the devastated nest in Antigone offers a critically penetrating intertext to Brontë's novel. The two young women's situations mirror a joint dilemma that arises when individual identity is set against powerful social forces to conform.
The shared metaphor of the ravaged nest focuses my discussion of gender and feminist dissent. This essay examines the rhetorical mode of this feminist dissidence, suggesting an intertextual play between the two works. The devastated nest metaphor works differently in each text, but I argue that the two texts address each other meaningfully across the gulf between the classical period and the mid-nineteenth century, between Greek tragic drama and Victorian romance fiction, and within the context of the pervasive cultural presence of Antigone in the European culture of the 1800s. Ultimately, patriarchal cultures influence the writers of the tragedy and novel to put down the female. This suppression in Wuthering Heights occurs as the devastated nest metaphor is repeated, the second time through the written rather than the spoken word. But it is Brontë's first use of the nest metaphor that asserts its powerfully memorable presence in the novel and that provokes the allusion to Sophocles's tragedy.
A desperate Catherine Earnshaw, to whom Brontë has granted the personal and social clairvoyance accorded to those whom society judges as mad, struggles to define her identity in...