The feminism of “Wuthering Heights”

Not long ago on Quora, I answered the question of “Is Wuthering Heights a feminist text?” I thought I may as well share it here too, since my similar post on the feminism of Romeo and Juliet has been so popular.

Is Wuthering Heights a feminist text? It’s debatable.

It’s certainly not a work of modern feminism, and just because Emily Brontë was a woman doesn’t mean she lacked internalized misogyny, per se.

From a certain perspective, it can be read as a fairly sexist story. It revolves around a brooding, violent male anti-hero, Heathcliff, who emotionally and physically abuses women (among many other dark deeds), yet whom the reader is still clearly meant to feel some sympathy for. His descent into villainy is at least partly blamed on his beloved Cathy, because she rejected him for a wealthier man. As for Cathy herself, she’s a wild, fiery figure who defies society’s ideals of sweet, passive femininity and wields the chief power in both of her romantic relationships, and yet she’s portrayed as a vain, arrogant, vicious-tempered narcissist, prone to manipulation and hysterics, who emotionally betrays both men. Ultimately she’s “punished” with anguish-induced madness, sickness and death (and implied twenty years of wandering as a miserable waif of a ghost), and from then on she serves to fuel Heathcliff’s “manpain,” with his endless grief being used to stir up pity for him despite all his cruelty. Nor is Heathcliff’s abuse of women the only male-on-female violence to be found. In one scene Hareton Earnshaw slaps the younger Catherine when she insults him (to the approval of narrator Lockwood, who overhears it and thinks her “sauciness” deserved the punishment), yet he’s still portrayed as having a heart of gold under his gruff facade and is given a happy ending where he and Catherine fall in love and become engaged.

And yet…

It’s a story told mostly from a woman’s perspective. The chapters narrated by Lockwood are more of a framing device than anything else – the bulk of the story is narrated by Nelly Dean. And her focus is really more on the young women she serves than on Heathcliff, who sometimes disappears from her narrative for months or years at a time. Heathcliff might be the driving force of the plot as a whole, but it can be argued that the two Catherines are the real protagonists, with Heathcliff as the love interest to the first and the antagonist to the second.

Furthermore, all four principle females are three-dimensional characters. The two Catherines, Nelly Dean and Isabella Linton each have distinct, multilayered personalities and none can be reduced to stereotypes of womanhood. None of them are objectified or sexualized the way even the most “feminist” male author’s female characters tend to be. Nor are any of them meek or passive; in different ways, each one is feisty, sharp-tongued and rebellious. All of them are flawed too (putting women on a pedestal is almost as anti-feminist as vilifying them) yet with the possible exception of the elder Cathy, none of them are treated by the narrative as bad people. At the very least, they’re no worse than the men around them, and even though they suffer for their mistakes, none are portrayed (again, with the possible exception of the elder Cathy) as deserving the bad things that happen to them. Young Catherine and Nelly both receive happy endings, while Isabella’s ending is bittersweet, and none of them need to conform to a societal ideal of womanhood to escape from tragedy.

It’s too bad that most adaptations cut the second half of the book, because without the younger Catherine, the elder Cathy’s portrayal might create the sense that Brontë was condemning high spirits and willfulness in women. But young Catherine, who is portrayed sympathetically and gets a happy ending, is very much like her mother: lively, strong-willed, adventurous, temperamental, and sometimes too proud for her own good. In her ultimate romance with Hareton, as she “civilizes” him and teaches him to read, she arguably takes almost the same dominant role her mother did over Heathcliff in their childhood, though unlike her mother she is willing to listen to him and compromise with him. The fact that during his reading lessons she gives him “smart slaps” when his attention wanders and playfully threatens to pull his hair for his mistakes helps to compensate for the one slap he gave her back when they were “enemies.” (It seems unlikely that their marriage bed will be a tame place.) She earns her hopeful future not by being more passive or ladylike than her mother was, but just by being a kinder, more compassionate person and more willing to recognize her mistakes and grow past them. Hareton contrasts with Heathcliff in much the same way.

Nor, contrary to popular belief, is Heathcliff ever romanticized. His horrific deeds are never excused away and he’s not portrayed as a desirable romantic partner for anyone but the equally fierce Cathy. The very notion that he’s a romantic hero is brutally deconstructed by Isabella’s storyline, as she naively idealizes him and thinks she’s in love with him, but is horribly abused after she marries him and quickly comes to despise him. Brontë might ask us to understand him and pity him, but she never tries to make us love him. He’s a tragic monster.

Nor, unlike in the Hays Code-compliant 1939 film, is Isabella trapped for decades in her miserable marriage. She leaves Heathcliff, escapes to London, and builds a new life for herself and her son Linton. True, she still dies young, but she dies free.

Without being heavy-handed about it, the book also condemns the era’s patriarchal laws and customs that made women powerless. The laws that let husbands abuse their wives (Heathcliff and Isabella), that let fathers-in-law lord over and abuse their daughters-in-law (Heathcliff and Catherine), that prevented daughters from inheriting their fathers’ property in favor of the male next-of-kin (Thrushcross Grange going to Linton Heathcliff instead of to Catherine), that gave unfit fathers custody of their children against the mother’s will (Heathcliff and Linton), and that forced women to depend on marriage to raise their own fortunes and to escape from a toxic family (Cathy).

Yet it’s what little power the women do have within these confines – emotional power – that leads to the hopeful ending. Catherine, with help from Nelly, overcomes her own bitterness and reaches out to Hareton, finally freeing him from Heathcliff’s degrading influence with her friendship and later love. This, combined with the dead Cathy’s ongoing hold over Heathcliff’s psyche, is what makes Heathcliff finally give up on life, with his death bringing peace both to himself and to everyone he terrorized.

Last but not least, let’s discuss Cathy. No, she’s not portrayed as a good person, and yes, her sins are “punished” with brain fever and death. But still, it’s gratifying from a woman’s perspective to see the object of an imposing Byronic anti-hero’s love not be a delicate ingenue whom he controls, but an iron-willed firebrand whose passion equals his own and whom he gladly lets dominate him. And any claim that she’s worse than Heathcliff (as bad as, maybe, but worse?) or that she deserves no sympathy whatsoever smacks of misogyny. Her struggles are very relatable for women who feel torn between rebellion and conformity. This quote sums it up well: “I wish I were a girl again, half savage and hardy, and free”.

As a child she was fully herself: wild, androgynous, barely distinguishable from Heathcliff. But it came at the price of disapproval from her stern father and servant caregivers, and later from her tyrannical brother, who viciously abused Heathcliff and tried to separate them. Then she discovered the world of the Lintons: wealth, status, beautiful clothes, good manners, kindness, affection. It’s so easy to condemn her as a “shallow gold-digger” for giving in to the lure of that world and choosing to marry Edgar instead of Heathcliff. But one glance over her great speeches should reveal that regardless of her other flaws, she’s not a shallow person. With her family and all of society holding up the Lintons and their lifestyle as superior, and when the only alternatives she sees are either staying under Hindley’s brutal thumb (again, remember: for a girl, marriage was the only escape) or starving in poverty as Heathcliff’s wife, it’s understandable that she should give in, even though it means betraying her true self, donning the mask of a proper lady, and rejecting her soul mate. Yet she always knows she really belongs with Heathcliff, not with Edgar, and she tries to have them both by maintaining her “friendship” with Heathcliff while married; before Heathcliff runs away and makes his own fortune, she even plans to help him by sharing Edgar’s wealth with him. But eventually and inevitably, the two men clash and her double life shatters. It’s not just the stress of the love triangle that causes her breakdown, but what it represents: her yearning for freedom while trapped in the confines of upper-class womanhood and knowing what she would loose if she were to choose one over the other. What woman hasn’t struggled with society’s demands of “proper” womanhood and felt torn between wanting to rebel and wanting the benefits of conforming? I don’t think any character who embodies that struggle as powerfully as Cathy can be labeled an anti-feminist character, no matter how deeply flawed she is or how tragically her story ends. The fact that it’s not her failure to be a proper lady that dooms her, but her choice to become one and deny her authentic, wild and androgynous self, can be seen as a particularly feminist statement.

Also, I respectfully disagree with the claim I’ve read that the only purpose of Cathy’s strong will and free spirit is to intoxicate Heathcliff. They’re essential to her entire personal character arc. None of the characters in this complex book are only written to serve another character’s development, male or female.

Is the book feminist in every way by modern standards? No. But does it still have many feminist qualities and themes? Does it speak powerfully to women and empower them in subtle ways? I think it absolutely does.

@theheightsthatwuthered, @astrangechoiceoffavourites, @wuthering-valleys, @incorrectwutheringheightsquotes, @nitrateglow

Revenge and “Wuthering Heights” by Thomas Vargish

@princesssarisa

This is a typical example of the logical leap some critics have to make to apply Catherine’s description of her love to Heathcliff’s love too. Heathcliff does say that he would tolerate the existence of Edgar in Catherine’s life but he does not say that he would be indifferent to Catherine having a romantic relationship with an another guy. He says that he loves Catherine so much that he would endure Edgar’s presence in her life for the sake of her happiness, and he “would have torn his heart out, and drunk his blood!” the moment her regard ceased. He is a jealous guy but he values Catherine’s happiness above his own feelings, which is definitely notable, but does not prove that his feelings are not romantic or possessive.

I was just thinking of two passages from Wuthering Heights that tend to be overlooked.

The first is one sentence spoken by Catherine #1 when she confronts Heathcliff about his courtship of Isabella:

“If you like Isabella, you shall marry her.”

The second is this brief speech of Heathcliff in his first meeting with Nelly during Catherine’s illness:

“I wish you had sincerity enough to tell me whether Catherine would suffer greatly from his [Edgar’s] loss: the fear that she would restrains me. And there you see the distinction between our feelings: had he been in my place, and I in his, though I hated him with a hatred that turned my life to gall, I never would have raised a hand against him. You may look incredulous, if you please! I never would have banished hm from her society as long as she desired his. The moment her regard ceased, I would have torn his heart out, and drunk his blood! But till then – if you don’t believe me, you don’t know me – till then, I would have died by inches before I touched a single hair of his head!”

Both of these moments add nuance to Heathcliff and Cathy. For all their unhealthiness and toxic behavior, and as selfish, jealous, possessive and codependent as their love largely is, there’s still a capacity for selfless love in both of them. Cathy would have accepted Heathcliff and Isabella’s marriage, despite knowing that Edgar will be furious about it and ban Heathcliff from Thrushcross Grange, if only Heathcliff had genuinely loved Isabella. Meanwhile, Heathcliff refuses to physically hurt Edgar because it would make Cathy unhappy, and claims that if she were his wife but still cared for Edgar, he wouldn’t have banned him from her presence.

Of course “I won’t kill her husband” isn’t exactly beyond basic decency, and Heathcliff’s implication that he only refrains from it to spare her feelings is hardly admirable. Besides, we could argue that Heathcliff is flattering himself in this speech. After all, he still seeks psychological revenge on Edgar and knowingly causes strife in the Lintons’ marriage, and as a boy he was very resentful of Edgar and Cathy’s friendship, even before romance or marriage were ever mentioned. It seems unlikely that Cathy could ever have had a free, untroubled friendship with Edgar if Heathcliff had been her husband, even if he never openly objected to it. As for Cathy, though she insists that her objection to Heathcliff courting Isabella has nothing to do with jealousy, few readers have ever believed her. (Although her character becomes more interesting if we assume she’s telling the truth, IMHO.)

Still, there’s at least a part of each of them that’s willing to respect the other’s love for someone else and that values the other’s happiness more than their own jealousy. It’s a weaker instinct than it could have been if they had been emotionally healthier people, but it’s still there.

I wouldn’t claim that Wuthering Heights is a romance or that Heathcliff and Cathy’s love is “relationship goals,” but it doesn’t ring true either when people go to the opposite extreme and claim “We’re supposed to completely disdain Heathcliff and Cathy’s relationship, it’s a cautionary tale about the dangers of mad passion, etc.” We don’t need to idealize them or idealize their relationship to see a fundamental purity and (in the old, “frightening” sense of the word) sublime beauty to their love, or to feel that despite everything, they really do belong together. As much as we tend to react against pop culture’s idealized view of them and highlight their blatant negative behaviors both as individuals and as a couple, sometimes it’s worthwhile to remember the better side of their bond too.

One of the main problems with Heathcliff, I think, is that he’s an outcast who responds to being oppressed by becoming an oppressor and by abusing the power he gains in same way others once abused their power over him. That’s part of the whole point of his character arc. That’s the horror and the tragedy of it. But for critics concerned with social justice, it means he straddles an uncomfortable line between Sticking It To The Man™ and being The Man™.

If you wholeheartedly sympathize with him and argue (as some do) that he does nothing wrong because his victims are classist, racist upper-class snobs, you’re excusing the fact that he abuses women, abuses his son, abuses animals, disenfranchises his foster son, is cruel to his tenants, and uses his money, status and knowledge of unjust laws to get away with it all. This is why some feminist critics (especially the understandable yet annoying “Anne Brontë is the only good Brontë” crowd) accuse the book of sympathizing with patriarchal abusers. But if, in the name of defending his vulnerable victims and in the name of feminism, you argue that he’s “evil to the core” and “vile from the start,” you’re saying that an outcast orphan of color, introduced as a homeless, already traumatized child and subsequently abused and scorned by almost all the more powerful, privileged people around him, is nothing but a bad seed. And somehow that’s the enlightened modern viewpoint?

An “oppressed becomes the oppressor” story is a uniquely difficult one.

More thoughts on “Wuthering Heights”

Recent discussions about the nature of Heathcliff and Catherine’s love, especially in @faintingheroine’s posts, have made me think about a topic that I’ve seen a few critics discuss in the past, but not many. Namely that they don’t love each other in precisely the same way. Without denying the soul connection they do share, each one’s individual love has distinctly different nuances.

Cathy is the one who describes her love for Heathcliff in the unique terms that are so often quoted as the description of “their” love: “…he’s more myself than I am,” “Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same,” “I am Heathcliff!” etc. She’s the one who emphasizes their twin souls and insists that Heathcliff is her “own being.” Her love doesn’t care about his looks (she acknowledges that he’s handsome, but only to say that it’s not why she loves him), or whether or not he’s “pleasant to be with,” or the presence of other romantic partners in either of their lives. She feels free to fall in love with Edgar, without it diminishing her deeper love for Heathcliff, and doesn’t think her marriage will change her relationship with Heathcliff at all, because she assumes he understands her perfectly. (She’s sadly wrong in that last regard.) And the same is true in reverse. This might be an unpopular, debatable opinion, but she arguably shows no real jealousy when Isabella falls in love with Heathcliff: she objects to their match because she knows it will drive Edgar to banish Heathcliff from their lives, and because she knows Heathcliff doesn’t love Isabella and will mistreat her, but she says that if Heathcliff had really cared for Isabella, then she would have been willing to let them marry. While each of them straddles the line between lover and sibling for the other, Cathy’s love is the easier of the two to interpret as an intense, codependent platonic love rather than, or in addition to, romantic love.

Heathcliff’s love definitely seems more conventionally romantic. At age thirteen he speaks of Catherine’s “beautiful hair” and “enchanting face” and describes her as “immeasurably superior to everybody on earth.” To the end of his life, Nelly’s narration refers to Cathy as his “idol,” and he calls himself her “slave” – Cathy, on the other hand, sees him as her twin soul, but never idolizes him the way he does her. Nor does he ever have romantic feelings for any other woman, he’s jealous of Edgar’s presence in her life, and he sees her as despising and rejecting him when she accepts Edgar’s proposal even though she doesn’t view it as such herself. By marrying Edgar, he describes her as having “levelled my palace” and erected a “hovel” in its place by expecting him to be content as her friend. At the same time, while he does her call his “life” and “soul,” he never claims to be her, or describes her as “more myself than I am,” or assumes that perfect understanding exists between them. She presumes that they share a deeper degree of sameness and mutual understanding than he ever mentions, while his love has layers of both worship and possessiveness that hers lacks.

This extends into the notorious love-hate aspect of their bond. The inherent ambivalence that critics often attribute to both of them (e.g. “They love each other, but they don’t like each other”) is really more inherent to Catherine than to Heathcliff. She’s the one who describes him as not being a pleasure to her any more than she’s always a pleasure to herself, and who describes her love for him as “a source of little visible delight, but necessary.” She’s the one who freely describes him as “an unreclaimed creature, without refinement, without cultivation” and “a fierce, pitiless, wolfish man,” even when they’re not at odds with each other. Heathcliff’s feelings for her seem less inherently complex; he seems to view her with pure adoration until she befriends the Lintons and his later anger toward her is the more conventional anger of a scorned lover.

Of course part of these differences lie in the class and racial difference between them. She was the privileged daughter of a genteel white family, while he was their poor foundling of a despised race, later reduced to a servant – given the time and place they live in, it makes all too much sense that he should idolize her while she views him as a brute even as she loves him. Although of course it’s complicated, since her father favored Heathcliff above her while he was alive and her wild, unladylike temperament made her a misfit in a different way. Part of Heathcliff’s anger clearly stems from the fact that he and Cathy were once “two outcasts against the world,” so to speak, but then she switched her allegiance to “the world.”

The differences in their loves are interesting, and just as interesting are the different interpretations from the critics I’ve read so far who acknowledge those differences. Some take a more positive view of Heathcliff’s love and a more negative view of Cathy’s, claiming that his more traditional, relatable romantic love is “real” love, while she, narcissist that she is, only loves him as a perceived extension of herself and is so convinced of their inner “sameness” (yet at the same time looking down on him) that she fails to consider his needs as a separate individual. Others take a more positive view of Cathy’s love, seeing the beauty in her vision of a love that features complete mutual understanding and identification with the other, that involves no unrealistic idealizing or idolizing of the partner but is no less deep for that lack, and that transcends social convention and any need to possess. Heathcliff, in this view, is the one who falls short by failing to love her without possessiveness. I think both of those interpretations are valid… I might even agree with both at once.

(Note: This is one of the main reasons why I have no patience for claims that Emily Brontë must have had a secret lover, and even less patience for claims that she must have loved someone who rejected her and used Heathcliff as a mouthpiece for her pain and anger. That hypothesis ignores the fact that some of the book’s most unique expressions of love, most different from any portrayal of love she would have found in books and poems, are Cathy’s descriptions of her love for Heathcliff, not so much vice-versa. And Cathy’s love makes perfect sense as the creation of an author whose main experience of love was familial. A love that has nothing to do with looks and no expectation of sex, where you don’t always “like” the other and sometimes even “hate” them, but you always love them, where no one understands you the way they do, nor does anyone understand them the way you do, and where you can both be more authentic with each other than with anyone else… Doesn’t that sound more like sibling love than conventional romantic love and make sense as having been written by an author with three close siblings but no romantic partner?)

A defense of the ending of “Wuthering Heights"

@astrangechoiceoffavourites, @theheightsthatwuthered, @wuthering-valleys, @heightsandmoors, @incorrectwutheringheightsquotes

 I’ve been reading other people’s opinions on Wuthering Heights this past year, I’ve noticed a small recurring theme.

It’s the idea that the ending feels out of place; tacked on; anti-climactic; too tame compared to the rest of the book. That it feels wrong for Heathcliff to simply lose interest in his revenge and then lose the will to live, or for the surviving characters to have any kind of happy or hopeful ending after so much brutality.

One book I read excerpts from on Google Books (I don’t remember the title or the author) suggested that maybe Emily Brontë originally wrote a very different, more brutal and Gothic ending, now lost. The author proposed that the final ending was probably the result of Anne and/or Charlotte urging Emily to tone down the book’s “immorality.” Of course this is pure conjecture. This same author also speculated that in the novel’s first draft, Heathcliff was explicitly Mr. Earnshaw’s illegitimate son, but that Anne and/or Charlotte persuaded Emily to change it. I’m not at all convinced by that theory, since @astrangechoiceoffavourites has argued very eloquently that to make Heathcliff and Cathy’s love forbidden because of the incest taboo rather than because of social class and race would go against the plot’s main themes and make nonsense of Heathcliff’s revenge on the Lintons and Earnshaws.

Still, this theorist isn’t the only person to think the ending (and possibly the whole second generation storyline) feels like the work of a different author than the rest of the book. Just recently I read a comment on Facebook arguing that a more cohesive, consistent Wuthering Heights would have had “a much darker and more explosive ending.” I assume a similar mindset is why some theorize that Branwell wrote the novel’s first half and Emily wrote the second. (I think I hate that theory even more than I hate the theory that Branwell wrote it all – “He didn’t write the whole book, but he did write the part everyone likes best.”) And if we compare the various adaptations’ endings to the ending of the book, there’s definitely a trend of giving Heathcliff a more brutal death.

Keep reading

Still more “Wuthering Heights” opinions (with some “Jane Eyre” opinions too)

Because I can’t seem to stop at all. That spirit medium who told me I was a close friend of Emily Brontë’s in a past life must have been right. :) :)

I don’t particularly like seeing Jane Eyre and Catherine Earnshaw compared to each other. Especially because whenever I see people compare and contrast them – i.e. in response to the question “Which Brontë heroine is the best?” – it almost always consists of Jane being praised and Cathy being bashed.

We can’t really evaluate them by the same standards. It’s like comparing apples and oranges… or bananas and watermelon. The two characters have almost nothing in common except that their authors were sisters. Not only are their personalities and storylines completely different, so are their roles within the novels. Cathy is a tragic anti-heroine; she’s clearly meant to be seen as a deeply flawed, morally gray character, whose mistakes lead to her own doom, and even if we understand her and pity her, we’re not encouraged to like her or admire her as a person. Jane, on the other hand, is the sympathetic, virtuous heroine of a Bildungsroman, whose role is to grow in positive ways and earn her happy ending; she’s clearly meant to be a surrogate friend, a role model, and arguably a bit of a self-insert for both author and readers.

When people go on about how much “better” Jane is than Cathy, it feels to me as if they either don’t understand Wuthering Heights or have narrow ideas about what a literary heroine should be like. Maybe they don’t mean it this way, but it feels as if they think we��re meant to love and admire Cathy and her narcissism and abuse are simply bad writing (the same mistake that the “It’s Wuthering Heights’ fault that 50 Shades of Gray exists!” crowd makes about Heathcliff), or else that “staunchly virtuous role model” is the only acceptable kind of heroine. The idea that all female protagonists need to be role models is a particular pet peeve of mine. If male characters were held to the same standard, then there would be no Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth or King Lear! Everyone accepts that those tragic heroes are tragically flawed and do terrible things, yet still deserve pity for the misery and death they bring on themselves. No one ever disparages them compared to other heroes (e.g. Victor Hugo’s Jean Valjean) who are defined by true heroism and integrity, because we accept that their stories are of a different type. So why should tragically flawed heroines be judged more harshly and put down in favor of role model heroines?

Another reason why the Cathy/Jane comparison makes me uncomfortable, especially when it’s in Jane’s favor, is that despite all her inner passion and quiet rebellion, and despite all her rage and defiance as a little girl, the adult Jane is a much more reserved, introverted “proper lady” than firebrand Cathy. While of course there’s nothing wrong with her personality, I should hope there’s nothing wrong with being an assertive free-spirit like Cathy either, just as long as you’re kinder and more empathetic than she is! When the two characters are compared and Jane is held up as the positive role model in contrast to Cathy’s flaws, it feels as if the message is that the only “right” way to be a woman is to be prim, proper, and self-contained unless provoked. Especially because Jane’s self-control is one of the qualities I’ve seen her most praised for, particularly compared to Cathy’s wild emotionalism.

I’ll admit to personally being more of a Cathy than a Jane in temperament, though I do relate to both of them, and hopefully I have less of Cathy’s selfishness and more of Jane’s integrity. People have tried to shape me into more of a Jane and I’ve tried to be more of a Jane, but without much success. I don’t think people are blank slates – a natural Cathy should try to be a healthy Cathy, not be told she should try to be like Jane instead.

When I see these two characters compared, I can’t help but think of two sisters, a prim, proper, practical older one and a wild, free-spirited younger one (I won’t name all the fictional examples I can think of – they’re a dime a dozen), and of parents, teachers and mentors too often praising the older one while scolding the younger one and making her feel inferior. Appropriately enough, Jane and Cathy were created by an older and younger sister. Jane was written by an older sister who combatted all controversy by carefully presenting herself as a proper lady, who loved her two little sisters but was embarrassed by their “coarser” writing, and who was mythologized after her death as a classic “angel in the house,” while Cathy was written by an intensely private, unconventional younger sister who hardly seems to have cared what anyone thought of her and who was mythologized as an odd, scary brute while her sister’s “saintliness” was praised.

I’m certainly not saying it’s wrong to like Jane better than Cathy, or vice-versa for that matter. I just don’t think we should judge their worth as characters based on which one is the better role model, or pit them (or Charlotte and Emily Brontë) against each other by praising one of them as the ideal woman at the other’s expense. There’s plenty of room in this world for both of them and more.

Heathcliff’s love feels so real to me. It is not poetic or idealized or purely soulful, it is ugly and is very much about Catherine the material person who actually existed and had veins and eyes and a mouth. But it is also very far from being animal passion or lust, it is love in the purest sense of the term. I don’t know how to articulate it but the below passage is just aghhhh to me. I don’t even know if I find it creepy or hot or sad or disgusting or romantic? Perhaps it is all of that?

“I distinguished Mr. Heathcliff’s step, restlessly measuring the floor, and he frequently broke the silence by a deep inspiration, resembling a groan. He muttered detached words also; the only one I could catch was the name of Catherine, coupled with some wild term of endearment or suffering; and spoken as one would speak to a person present; low and earnest, and wrung from the depth of his soul.”

ah, men in literature

ever since I read that one analysis of Heathcliff digging up and lying with Cathy's body and what exactly it meant back in like seventh grade I haven't been able to stop thinking about it since.

it's an intimate, quiet goodbye that lingers. a final act of love. holding close the only person you have ever loved like you're just a scared child seeking solace from all the monsters that hide in the dark. it is a desperate grasping for a heart that used to beat alongside your own. it's desperation, ugly and raw and wailing. it's praying prayers in vain and screaming towards the heavens for your angel to fall once more. it's seeking comfort from the only person left - even if they are nothing more than hollow emptiness. it is still them. you remember them, bright, lovely, laughing. it is now the only way you can be close. to them ever again. it is still not close enough, but it is all that you have left.

every ship must experience this at least once.

Look, Emily Brontë may have intended for Heathcliff to be Mr. Earnshaw’s illegitimate child. Maybe I am ignorant. That’s possible. But if I accept this as a fact, it significantly hurts my enjoyment of the book because I feel that it renders Heathcliff’s revenge moot, as I have said years ago:

“The whole story of Wuthering Heights is Heathcliff taking revenge on the power structures that separated him from Catherine. Catherine and Heathcliff were separated because Catherine was the daughter of a propertied man and the potential wife of an another while Heathcliff was a nobody with nothing. Heathcliff takes the properties of both Catherine’s father and her husband, thus taking revenge on the forces that separated them. If the primary cause of their separation was incest and not any sociological or economic reason then the whole plot of Wuthering Heights is meaningless. Incest factor will always be more important than social class. If this theory were true, Heathcliff wouldn’t be unable to be with Catherine because he didn’t own Thrushcross Grange, it would be because he was her brother, so it would be meaningless for him to own Thrushcross Grange as a way of revenge.”

This is my position. It has always been my stance on it. This is the most important thing to me. I enjoy this story primarily as a revenge story and Heathcliff and Catherine being related destroys the purpose and meaning of the revenge in my eyes. For the last couple of days I have really tried to still enjoy Wuthering Heights while accepting Heathcliff as Mr. Earnshaw’s biological son and I simply can’t do it. It fundamentally changes the story in my eyes and makes it something I like much less. I just love Heathcliff being a rando.

a relationship should be 50/50 he digs up her grave to look at her and she haunts him at night

It's funny, when I say that Austen didn't advise marrying a rake or a Gothic hero, someone replies, "They've mistaken Austen for the Brontë sisters." (usually meaning Emily and Charlotte).

Except... Emily and Charlotte didn't advocate reforming a rake either. Jane Eyre famously GTFO when she learned that Rochester was trying to commit bigamy and she didn't return without divine intervention to a man who had been half-smitted by God for his sins. Isabella may have originally thought she could reform Heathcliff, but pretty quickly she fled from her marriage, never returned, and did everything she could to keep her son from him.

Maybe we could just stop blaming these literary women for things they didn't even do, not that we really need to blame anyone since I'm fairly certain that writing a love story where a heroine reforms a rake isn't the root cause of all evil.

I was watching an interview where they asked Jacob Elordi what he read to prepare for Saltburn and he said Wuthering Heights was one of the books, so now I have a tangent to go on:

While it isn’t necessarily apparent when you first watch it there are a few similarities between Catherine and Heathcliff and Felix and Oliver. For instance, Catherine and Heathcliff were childhood friends and despite the fact that they loved each other, they never consummated their relationship; it went unfulfilled. However, they were always at their happiest when they were together, and everyone saw it; much like Oliver and Felix who became instant friends after the bike incident. They were always hanging around each other and some could see that Oliver’s interest in Felix wasn’t strictly platonic. Similarly, Heathcliff always longed for Catherine’s love even when she didn’t show she reciprocated in their younger years. As they grow older, Heathcliff especially, was jealous of Linton and his marriage to Catherine, like Oliver was jealous of all the girls Felix slept with. Moreover, when Catherine marries Linton, Heathcliff takes this as a very harsh rejection and he becomes resentful. Later, Catherine tells Heathcliff he has killed her because in his anger he has revealed the poisonous nature of his character which puts her in a state of anguish that does ultimately kill her. You could liken the entire situation to the events leading up to the maze confrontation and the confrontation itself. Here, Oliver tells Felix, “I just need you to understand how much I fucking love you” when Felix tells him he needs psychological help. Back to Wuthering Heights, when Catherine dies, Heathcliff says the famous quote everyone recognizes from the novel, “You said I killed you — haunt me, then! The murdered do haunt their murderers. I believe — I know that ghosts have wandered on earth. Be with me always — take any form — drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! it is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!” I found that in a sense this was a much more prosaic way of expressing what Oliver was trying to express in the infamous grave scene™️. Of course, there is also the obvious parallel of the estates, Saltburn and Wuthering as well as the social standing of Oliver and Heathcliff in comparison to Catherine and Felix. When Catherine passes, Heathcliff, who was nothing more than her father’s ward when they were younger takes Wuthering Heights for himself after Hindley, Catherine’s brother who would have inherited the estate drinks himself to death six months after his sister’s passing. This is almost exactly what happened to Venetia, actually, which I hadn’t realized before I started writing this. Regardless, having gotten rid of the entire Earnshaw family, Heathcliff becomes the owner of Wuthering Heights, which drives him mad in the end, as his only love was dead. The entire reason he wanted the house was because he was so happy in his childhood with her in it, and to Heathcliff, taking Wuthering Heights was a sort of revenge on Catherine and the Earnshaws for not letting him marry Catherine. Obviously, Oliver does the same in a way, after Felix rejects him in the maze and he sees that there is no way he could possibly have him, his plan to take saltburn goes full speed. The conclusion of Saltburn sees Oliver telling Elspeth that he loved Felix, but sometimes he hated him. In Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff tells Catherine on her deathbed that he hated her for keeping them apart and not allowing them to be together, for both of them the hatred was a result of the rejection they faced. At the end of the book, Heathcliff digs up Catherine from her grave and dies by her side, which I suppose could also be compared to the grave scene or Oliver taking Felix’s stone from the bottom of the river. Anyways, just food for thought, I started ruminating about the two stories and I came up with this.

Other fun points of comparison:

-in Wuthering Heights, Catherine’s father takes Heathcliff in and he becomes very fond of Heathcliff because he is much smarter than his own two children. In Saltburn, Oliver wins over Sir James by showing the extent of his knowledge. This is seen during the montage scene. Sir James is shown being appreciative of Oliver’s knowledge regarding 16th century ceramicists; his eyes light up when he realizes someone finally knows what he’s talking about, he is among a clever man.

-“she burned too bright for this world” is a line said about Catherine in Wuthering Heights. Felix was also a sort of sunbeam type character that brought joy into the lives of all those he met; it was impossible to not fall in love with him. Just like it was impossible for Heathcliff not to become enamored with Catherine.

-While Felix and Catherine were both very beautiful and great friends with Heathcliff and Oliver, their social standings made them act spoiled at times, even if it’s shown in subtle ways. They could be jealous, possessive, and even have mercurial attitudes when things didn’t go their way.

-“It is astonishing how sociable I feel myself compared with him'' is a quote Catherine says about Heathcliff, which parallels Felix’s more charming outwards persona compared to the meek, reserved demeanor Oliver shows off at Oxford. Oliver always seems to be quiet and unwilling to socialize with many others at school, unlike Felix. The only time Oliver isn’t being shy and reticent is when he’s hanging around Felix, at which time he becomes visibly more carefree and lighthearted. The same can he said about Heathcliff and Catherine. Heathcliff was off-putting to many at Wuthering Heights because of his stoic and unexcitable nature;however, around Catherine he became an entirely new person, playful and and joyful as one can be. Which is why when people try to warn Catherine about Heathcliff, she doesn’t listen, she has faith in her friend just like Felix had faith in Oliver when others badmouthed him.

yes girl you are so [if i loved you less i might be able to talk about it more] [hands are unbearably beautiful] [i'll take care of you it's rotten work not to me not if it's you] [if you are intolerable let me be the one to tolerate you] [i could recognise him by touch alone] [i love you i want us both to eat well] [on purpose i love you on purpose] [whatever our souls are made of his and mine are the same] [i am half agony half hope] [you have bewitched me body and soul and i love love love you] [he is half of my soul as the poets say] [i'm sick of people saying that love is all a woman is fit for but i'm so lonely] [i love you most ardently] [let me stay tender hearted despite despite despite] [someone has to leave first this is a very old story there is no other version of this story] [mostly i want to be kind] [tell me how all this and love too will ruin us] [you said i killed you haunt me then] [someone somewhere can you understand me a little love me a little] [i will love you as misfortune loves orphans as fire loves innocence and as justice loves to sit and watch while everything goes wrong] [sorry about the blood in your mouth i wish it was mine] [who will come into my kitchen and be hungry for me] can we kiss now

emily brontë receives the first kill yourself anon in 1848

always. and i mean ALWAYS thinking about how socio-economic class system and racism/colorism was the reason Heathcliff has suffered so much that he had to turn into a "villain" to survive and take his life in his own hands