Digital Object Identifierhttps://doi.org/10.66376/criterion.v17.n5.24
Victorian Gothic is an amalgamation of psyches tormented by social inheritance and the navigation of the self, while still promulgating the scientific and medical anxieties that were prevalent in the Victorian era. The ideological conflicts and unsaid or rather unprocessed emotions create a substantial foundation for ulterior motives to dwell upon, and move towards more psychologically driven tropes than the primal dispositions of the antecedents of Gothic literature in terms of resurrection, haunted castles etc. Wuthering Heights is a quintessential Victorian Gothic novel, with a family setting, a quest for identity and the inherent gesture of Victorian societal construct to look at the uncivilised while portraying a rigidity towards their own framed mannerisms. The evocation of laceration on the psyche, accentuating the psychological concepts of ‘The uncanny’ by Sigmund Freud, ‘The Burkean sublime’ by Edmund Burke,‘Wolfreys’s framework of spectrality’and Freudian psychoanalysis navigates the atmosphere and psychological analysis of Heathcliff as a Byronic hero. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë is not just a work but a verisimilitude, connoting the Victorian agitations, notions of spectrality and a cataclysm of love, hatred, revenge, perdition with a devoid sense of redemption. It has elements that question the pragmatism and beliefs of the human mind. This article argues that it is a Victorian Gothic text because the horror lies in the human psyche rather than the supernatural.
Sharma, Kunjal. “Exploring the Emanation of Victorian Gothic in Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë.” The Criterion: An International Journal in English, vol. 17, no. 5, Oct. 2026, pp. 434-47, https://doi.org/10.66376/criterion.v17.n5.24.
© 2026 The Author(s). Published by the Research Centre for English Language and Literature (RCELL) under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence.
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