What Matters in Wuthering Heights

Before we begin our rant:

Unless you live under a rock, and if you do, for the love of God, please invite me to live there with you, you know all about Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights”  which is referred to in the trailer as “The Greatest Love Story of All Time.”

I haven’t seen the movie yet so I’m not going to comment on it. What I do want to do is give you a teensy heads up in case you run off to read “The Greatest Love Story of All Time,” and also to talk about some of the things that matter in the novel that are frequently lost in adaptations of the novel. As I tried to sum up my points, I realized that none of them make any sense unless you know the full plot of the novel – so this is a long post. But if you want to cut to the chase, look for any time I write some version of “AND THIS MATTERS” for the highlights.

Wuthering Heights tells the story of a boy (Heathcliff) and girl (Cathy) who grow up poor, abused, and neglected, in a home in which alcoholism is rampant and women, children, and animals are routinely abused. It tells of how these two children are affected by the limitations placed on them regarding their race, their class, and their gender as they grow up, and how they embody and perpetuate the cycle of abuse. It also contains a love story – but not the one you are thinking about.

I’m going to attempt to summarize the events of the book. Bear with me since there are two Cathys, a family with the last name Linton, a character named Heathcliff, and a character named Linton Heathcliff.

Just roll with it – and prepare for child abuse, abuse of animals, and domestic violence.

For a more accurate timeline of events, look at The Reader’s Guide to Wuthering Heights. Seriously, my retelling gets pretty messy because so many storylines overlap. I’m also oversimplifying or outright eliding some stuff, like the role of religion, the role of nature, and the characters of Nelly and Jacob and the unreliable narrator/nested flashbacks writing device.

The very first thing that happens in Wuthering Heights is that a lost traveller is attacked by dogs. He is brought into a house (Wuthering Heights) where the inhabitants of the house proceed to abuse animals and spit verbal abuse at each other. There is no beauty or softness in sight. This is a world in which cruelty is baked in, people, AND THAT MATTERS because all that Cathy and Heathcliff know how to do is endure cruelty and deal out cruelty to others.

We learn in an extended flashback that when Cathy Earnshaw was six and her brother Hindley was fourteen, their father, Mr. Earnshaw, came home from a business trip with a child in tow whom their father names Heathcliff – one name only.He does not give the child his last name AND THAT MATTERS because Heathcliff’s very existence as someone without a surname immediately marks him as placeless in society.

Heathcliff’s parentage is a mystery although many readers have assumed that Heathcliff is Mr. Earnshaw’s illegitimate son which makes much more sense then him collecting a random child off the street and also adds ‘incest’ to the list of trigger warnings. Mr. Earnshaw dotes upon Heathcliff and neglects Hindley, who beats Heathcliff, because hurt people hurt people. Heathcliff and Cathy are inseparable as children, even after Mr. Earnshaw dies and Hindley forces Heathcliff to work as a servant.

DIGRESSIVE RANT AHEAD: RACE MATTERS!

Allow me to digress – a lot. Heathcliff is referred to frequently and from the onset as having dark hair, skin, and eyes. He is from a port town which caters to the slave trade, so he might be African. He may also be, and is suspected to be by various characters in the novel, Spanish, Indian, Irish, Chinese, or Romani. Of course if he is Mr. Earnshaw’s biological son, then we add that into the genetic mix.

Heathcliff’s ethnicity is deliberately ambiguous. However, the one thing Heathcliff is not, is ‘White.’ His appearance visibly, immediately, and inescapably marks him as ‘other’. He can change his clothes and his income but he cannot change his skin, AND THIS MATTERS because Heathcliff is driven by a desire to prove his superiority over the people who have told him that he is not good enough. And by ‘people’ I mean every single person in his life, including Cathy. He can’t be seen as a respected member of society and he certainly isn’t seen as a suitable match for Cathy, not even by Cathy herself. Race is not the only factor here, but it is a factor, and one that Heathcliff can’t change.

A note about systemic racism: When I read Wuthering Heights as a young teenager, I pictured Heathcliff as White, as, apparently, did Emerald Fennell when she read the book as a fourteen-year-old. This misreading, born of a culture that constantly seeks to erase Blackness by insisting on the White default, was reinforced by film adaptations in which Heathcliff has consistently been played by White actors, with the exception of the 2011 version in which he is played by James Howson, a Black actor.

This string of White Heathcliffs isn’t an accident, any more than it isn’t an accident that I read Heathcliff as looking, well, a lot like Jacob Eloridi, or Tom Hardy, or Laurence Olivier, or Ralph Fiennes, despite countless comments in the text to the contrary. The fact is, neither the Hays Code nor the culture of Britain or America would stand for an interracial couple in film.* AND THAT MATTERS because our culture’s insistence on a White Heathcliff is based in racism, just as the book version Heathcliff’s mistreatment is based (in part), on racism.

Emily Bronte deconstructs a great many damaging elements of Victorian culture in Wuthering Heights, including the racism. Surely a book that interrogates so many toxic elements of Victorian culture deserves a better reading than the one I gave it when I was twelve.

(*Trivia alert: Actually, we did get an interracial couple in the 1939 version of Wuthering Heights, because Merle Oberon, who played Cathy, had a White father and a Sri Lankan mother, but spent her career concealing her mixed-race heritage.)

A small taste of the excellent Merle Oberon:

Thus concludes my rant. Back to the story!

When Cathy is around twelve years old and Heathcliff is maybe thirteen, Cathy and Heathcliff spy on the home of the wealthy Linton family. They don’t have cable; they have to make their own fun, harr harr. The Linton’s guard dogs attack Cathy and she is brought into the house to recover while Heathcliff is forced to leave.

Years pass, and Heathcliff overhears Cathy saying that she could never marry Heathcliff due to his lower class status: cue Big Misunderstanding. He nopes off to make his fortune and Cathy, thinking that Heathcliff is gone forever and that marriage to Edgar Linton is her only chance at escaping her horrible home, gets married to Edgar Linton at the age of seventeen and suffers the fate of one who was born to be a pirate queen but instead is forced to do embroidery while smiling sweetly.

But wait! Heathcliff is back! And he has vowed revenge upon everybody! First he goes for Hindley. Hindley took time off from his busy schedule of torturing Heathcliff to get married, after which he returned to Wuthering Heights. His wife died in childbirth, leaving poor baby Hareton to the tender care of Hindley and Heathcliff, the world’s worst two dads.

Heathcliff basically turns Hindley into a gambling addict and an alcoholic and wins ownership of Wuthering Heights in a game of cards, and Hindley dies a drunk, possibly by accident, probably by murder. Got all that?

Next up: revenge on Edgar by destroying the life of Edgar’s sister, Isabella. Heathcliff convinces Isabella that he is a bad boy with a heart of gold who just needs the love of a good woman, and he then convinces her to elope with him, just to make Edgar furious and Cathy jealous. Heathcliff then proceeds to…

She has a baby whom she names Linton Heathcliff.

Meanwhile Cathy gets pregnant with Edgar Linton’s child, has a fraught meet-up with Heathcliff, has the baby and dies of childbirth and that Victorian classic – brain fever.

Here’s where I remind our readers that at the time of her death, Cathy is eighteen, AND THIS MATTERS.

Do you know why, during her short “adult” life, Cathy acts like a teenage nightmare brat from hell? BECAUSE SHE IS ONE. Her home is as hellish as possible and she is literally a teenager! As is Heathcliff, who has lived some secret life that evidentially involved a lot of suffering and maybe some crime and loses the love of his life while he is nineteen or twenty years old! And Isabella, who does a romantic and foolish thing in falling for Heathcliff, is also eighteen! Their ages matter because they are never given time to mature, to have other experiences, to grow.

Most adaptations cast older actors and lose this entire layer, and I think it sucks a lot of tragedy out of the story even when the actors are extraordinary. Heathcliff’s emotional growth is frozen at the age at which he loses Cathy, and of course Cathy’s growth is frozen by death. The very most mature of teens struggle with things like communication, emotional regulation, and impulse control. Is it any wonder that these two teenagers can’t just marry each other and grow the fuck up, given not just their ages but also the mercurial and violent upbringing that they share?

Heathcliff responds to Cathy’s death in a very healthy and normal manner.

This wraps up most adaptations. As in, they end here.

It has been so far a story about codependency and enmeshment and lust. But has it been a story about love? The Greatest Love Story Ever?

Hardly. Cathy and Heathcliff do not wish for the other to be happy, even at the cost of their own happiness. They do not bring out the best in each other. They do not sacrifice for each other’s good. They are obsessive, they are clueless (in the sense that they have no models of healthy interaction or coherent communication to draw from in their lives), and they are deeply, deeply selfish.

So while I would call it a powerful story, I personally wouldn’t call it a love story. I would call it a story about the generational trauma of abuse and alcoholism. I would call it a story about how being abused as children creates abusive adults. I would call it a story about how people who feel trapped – by race, by class, by gender, by geography, by untreated mental and physical illness – do self-destructive things in attempts to escape those traps. But I wouldn’t call it a love story.

But it isn’t over my friends! Adaptations may stop here, but the novel is only half over AND THAT MATTERS because it is in this half that the themes of the book really play out.

In the novel, Heathcliff does not die soon after Cathy does, because he has revenges to plot. He figures that the best way to continue to get back at Hindley, Edgar, and Cathy is to degrade and abuse their children as much as possible. It is Heathcliff’s deepest wish to turn all the children of his tormentors into the worst people they can possibly grow up to be.

Behold:

Heathcliff is now the head of Wuthering Heights where he terrorizes everybody. He’s still mad at himself for his failure to murder a baby, and the baby, Hareton Earnshaw (remember, the son of Hindley, Cathy 1.0’s brother?) is now a young man living like a servant under Heathcliff’s thrall. Hareton is taught to dress, work, and speak like a farmhand. He is not allowed to leave the estate or to learn to read.

Also sharing this happy home is Heathcliff’s son, Linton (Edgar’s nephew), who Heathcliff forced to live at Wuthering Heights when Linton was about twelve. He is always described as ‘sickly’ and under Heathcliff’s dubious care he becomes a petty, cruel whiner – in short, the worst version of himself.

When Linton and Cathy 2.0 (Edgar and Cathy’s daughter, who is also named Cathy) are fifteen and sixteen, respectively, Heathcliff convinces Cathy 2.0 to run away from home and marry Linton. Poor sickly Linton dies at the age of seventeen, with no doctor (forbidden by Heathcliff of course) and no company except for Cathy 2.0. Also please note that by withholding medical treatment Heathcliff essentially kills his own son just to spite his son’s mother, who is already dead.

Meanwhile Cathy 2.0 is effectively Heathcliff’s prisoner. Her imprisonment makes the formerly cheerful and kind girl bitter and furious, almost deranged with despair – the worst version of herself, as Heathcliff hoped.

When Cathy 2.0 first arrives at Wuthering Heights, she despises Hareton, and with good reason. Despite the abuse he receives, he is devoted to Heathcliff. Cathy 2.0 is essentially imprisoned at Wuthering Heights and Hareton does not offer to help her. He strikes her as dirty, illiterate, and complicit in her hellish life as a widow under Heathcliff’s control, and her assessment is initially correct.

However, over time, Hareton keeps extending small kindnesses towards Cathy 2.0, and over time, she begins to reciprocate. After she makes fun of Hareton for not being able to read, she realizes that she has hurt his feelings, repents, and offers to teach him. The next thing you know, they are wandering the moors and becoming real friends and falling in real love – they care about each other, they are kind to each other, they support one another in becoming better people. They are capable of change and healing.

Heathcliff is now, because of various deaths and marriages that he has orchestrated, the owner of both Wuthering Heights and the Linton estate, Thrushcross Grange. However, he finds himself increasingly tormented by Cathy 1.0’s ghost – so much so that he can’t even muster the energy to break up the happy couple.

Every time he tries to hit Cathy 2.0 or yell at her, he finds himself unable to move, or distracted. He feels the presence of Cathy 1.0 protecting her daughter from him. Finally he goes into Cathy 1.0’s room and starves himself to death. Cathy 2.0 and Hareton give up Wuthering Heights and get the heck outta there. The End.

For Heathcliff and Cathy 1.0, ‘love’ is selfish and ‘love’ is death.

For Hareton and Cathy 2.0, love is selfless and love is freedom and life.

So yes, there is a great love story in Wuthering Heights. AND THAT MATTERS because, if Emily Bronte wanted us to see Heathcliff and Cathy 1.0 as a great love story, why include its contrast? Cathy 2.0 and Hareton are a rebuttal to the claim that Cathy and Heathcliff are the greatest love story of all time – not just because they do horrible things but because they act without empathy, they are deeply selfish, and they cannot or will not change.

But even though Cathy 2.0 and Hareton have been abused, they are capable of growth, and they do act out of empathy, and they do want their lover to be happy. And that’s real love. It may not be “The Greatest Love Story Ever Told,” but it’s much better than Heathcliff and Cathy 1.0, no matter what the trailer says.