Encountering Heathcliff and the Madwoman in the Attic in Taboo (2017—)

Abstract

This article discusses the extent to which the television series Taboo (2017 –) can be considered a (neo-)Brontëan text due to its (re-)appropriation of Brontëan discourses, specifically those connected to Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), as well as to Jean Rhys’ neo-Victorian rewriting of the latter, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). The series appears to do so in order to delve deeper into the problematics of fictionalising nineteenth-century conceptions of “the wild” that replicate stereotypes of the British colonial past and its violence. That is, this work analyses how Taboo seems to question the particular power structures that are responsible for that violence through its rewriting and revising of distinctively Brontëan characters and tropes such as Heathcliff, the “madwoman in the attic,” and the “hilltop lovers” motif, which attests to the politicising and neo-Victorian potential of the above-mentioned narratives.