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Wuthering Heights | The Waif at the Window: Emily Bronte's Feminine "Bildungsroman"

In the following essay, Annette R. Federico maintains that Wuthering Heights is a bildungsroman—a novel which outlines the initiation of a young character into adulthood—focusing on the development of young Cathy Linton rather than that of her mother.

In their study of nineteenth-century women writers, The Madwoman in the Attic, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar argue persuasively that because the story of Wuthering Heights is built around a central fall—generally understood to be Catherine and Heathcliff's anti-Miltonic fall from hell to heaven—"a description of the novel as in part a Bildungsroman about a girl's passage from 'innocence' to 'experience' (leaving aside the precise meaning of...

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