‘Written by an eagle’: The Domestication of Character Through Nature in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights

Few literary works are as strongly associated with nature as Wuthering Heights (1847). This article explores the representation of nature in Emily Brontë’s novel as embedded in the narrators’ discourse. It contends that the two main narrators, Nelly Dean and Lockwood, enact a process of narrative reinscription that appeases the perceived threat of events. This process entails Catherine and Heathcliff being turned into figurative language so as to be ‘spoken’ and tamed. On the basis that stories equate layers of protection, Nelly Dean and Lockwood reinscribe the landscape symbolically, re-reading those signs whose referent needs to be made palatable. The said signs point to a source of excess in Catherine, Heathcliff and the moors. This paper follows John Hillis Miller, Carol Jacobs and Margaret Homans in the exploration of narrative gaps and patterns, yet it delves deeper into the literary function of nature as a medium to rewrite and domesticate the semiotic geography of Wuthering Heights, and not as mere landscape, however representative of the novel it can be.