In Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë explores the gender identity of both herself and her characters. She published the book under the name Ellis Bell, which many readers assumed was that of a man. As critic Nicola Thompson points out, most critics of the time noted the “'power' of the book, a characteristic invariably associated in Victorian literary criticism with male authors” (Thompson 346). Indeed, the novel was deemed by some to be “too 'masculine', and perhaps therefore not suitable for a 'feminised' reading public” (Thompson 361). In a biographical preface to the 1880 reprint of the novel, Emily's sister Charlotte explains that the sisters chose to write under assumed names to protect themselves from the scrutiny often faced by Victorian women writers. Considering the reaction to Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë has clearly achieved this goal. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay The question of author gender raises an interesting question about literary interpretation. A feminist perspective is that gender should not influence the analysis of a work; words should be all that matters. Emily Brontë never revealed the true female authorship of the book, but perhaps it was only her premature death that prevented its disclosure. We cannot infer from his decision to write like Ellis Bell that he would support a genderless interpretation of the novel; rather, we might look to the way Brontë portrays gender in Wuthering Heights to better understand her beliefs on this issue. With this perspective, we see that the tumultuous love story between Catherine and Heathcliff represents Brontë's tumultuous struggle for gender identity in a Victorian society composed only of male or female ideals. According to Jean E. Kennard, "Brontë's sense of her sexual identity would have been modeled on what the nineteenth century called 'sexual inversion'" (Kennard 19). Kennard defines sexual inversion as "not, like homosexuality , only a question of desire, of choice of sexual object, but implies a much wider range of behavior between the sexes [...] Sexual inversion in women implied [...] 'masculine' behavior” (Kennard 19).The idea of ​​"masculine behavior" is easily evident in Brontë's work. Not only was her writing style considered masculine by reviewers and critics of Wuthering Heights, but her fellow villagers described her as "more like a boy than to a girl" (Kennard 22). Many others who met her also described her masculine appearance, including a girl she had worked with, a servant, and Ellen Nussey, a close friend of Charlotte Brontë (Kennard 22).Her father called her "the Major", a very "masculine" nickname (Kennard 22). Drawing on Kennard's claims that Brontë's gender identity was one of "sexual inversion", one can begin to see the lives of Catherine and Heathcliff as representing Brontë's ideals of gender and sexuality. Wuthering Heights becomes a reincarnation of Brontë's transformations realizing the ideal presented by Charlotte Goodman of the dual male-female coming-of-age novel in which “the paired male and female protagonist […] seem to function as psychological 'doubles', as each character is intensely involved in the psychic life of his counterpart” (Goodman 31). We must first see the characters of Catherine and Heathcliff not as two separate beings, but rather as reflections of each other. In the novel, Catherine confesses this ideal to Nelly: “[Heathcliff] is more myself than I am. Of anything. 24: 4 (1995): 341-367