Colonialist Ideology and Construction of the Other: A Postcolonial- Psychological Reading of Wuthering Heights

Abstract

This paper proposes a postcolonial-psychological reading of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, revealing how representations of the "other" are encoded not only in the novel's content but also in its narrative and linguistic structure. The analysis begins with Edward Said's concept of Orientalism to understand the construction of the “Other” within British society, highlighting the limits of this concept by employing Romani studies and the Liverpool Maritime Archive to expand the framework of marginalization from the external to the internal. The paper also draws on Homi Bhabha's proposition of "unhomeliness" to highlight the experience of alienation in the homeland, Spivak's thesis in “Can the Subaltern Speak?” to explain the silencing of Heathcliff and the marginalization of his narrative voice, and Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks to reframe ‘Epidermalization’ and the ‘Gaze’ as two textual processes that embody racism in the novel's language. The analysis has shown that melancholia, splitting, and introjection are not individual psychological traits but states produced by the novel through repetition, image patterns, discontinuous grammatical structure, and focalization, demonstrating how domestic desire and power intersect with imperial grammar in the story of Cathy and Isabella. Finally; the paper shows how literary narratives employ psychological strategies to perpetuate differences between ‘self’ and ‘the other’. This means, ‘among other things’ that the novel is not merely a piece of an aesthetic work but a space for symbolic conflict that pinpoints spheres of power and resistance. The paper hypothesizes that combining a postcolonial approach with colonial psychoanalysis provides an effective critical tool for understanding classical literary texts.