Don’t fall in love this Valentine’s Day – read Wuthering Heights
Wuthering Heights is back in the news and racing up the bestseller lists, thanks to a new film version by the provocative director Emerald Fennell, starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi. The film is marketing Wuthering Heights as “the world’s greatest love story”.
However, if this encourages you to read the novel for the first time and you’re expecting a boy-meets-girl romance, you might be in for a shock. Wuthering Heights is less happy ever after and more girl is already dead at the start of the novel, boy is haunted by girl, and then another boy is told the whole story by the girl’s old housekeeper.
But as an expert in Romantic period literature, I would argue Wuthering Heights is actually a perfect read on Valentine’s Day because it celebrates the head-spinning, hair-raising, all-consuming experience of falling in love.
“Love isn’t all chocolate boxes and roses / It’s dirtier than that”, Emily Brontë never wrote but might have, had she been alive in the 1990s and a fan of Jarvis Cocker, the lanky lead singer of Pulp. Brontë shares with Cocker an appreciation of the darker side of romance. Both Cocker and Brontë answer the question, “What is this feeling called love?” by characterising the emotion as violent, destabilising and disorienting.
Some Brontë scholars and readers of the book have expressed some scepticism about the film’s marketing as a perfect date movie, with one commentator arguing that Halloween would be a better release date for a tale of brooding revenge, toxic relationships and even potential necrophilia.
On the one hand, yes, Wuthering Heights follows Heathcliff from a foundling in Liverpool of uncertain origins to a gentleman of just-as-uncertain means. He’s intent on the destruction of his childhood home and neighbouring Thrushcross Grange, which stole away his childhood sweetheart, Catherine Earnshaw.
At one point, he threatens his own son and Catherine’s daughter (both confusingly called Linton): “Had I been born where laws are less strict and tastes less dainty, I should treat myself to a slow vivisection of those two, as an evening’s amusement.” This is not a man who is joking.
On the other hand, Brontë’s novel explores what it means to feel inseparably connected to another person. It involves almost all the messiness of last year’s horror film, Together, in which a couple find themselves literally melting into one another, which was indeed released for Halloween.
Trying to explain how she feels to Nelly Dean, her old housekeeper, Catherine tells her: “My great miseries in the world have been Heathcliff’s miseries, and I have watched and felt each from the beginning; my great thought in living is himself. If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and, if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn a mighty stranger. I should not seem part of it.”
Emily Brontë is a great poet as well as a powerful novelist, and passages like this are poetry too. Wuthering Heights is essentially a love poem – a poem which takes love as something to be experienced rather than explained. Love is experienced in a way that threatens the boundaries between self and other, male and female, nature and culture, life and death, reason and madness, heaven and hell.
Catherine’s attempt to explain her relationship with Heathcliff to Nelly ends in inarticulacy, with Nelly declaring herself unable to “make any sense of your nonsense”.
Before she trails off, Catherine provides a key to the puzzle box of the novel when she says: “Nelly, I am Heathcliff – he’s always, always in my mind, not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself but, as my own being.” For Catherine, her relationship with Heathcliff is one of necessary union, mental, physical and spiritual.
After her death in childbirth, Catherine continues to haunt Heathcliff, who seeks his own union with her corpse in ordering his own coffin to be laid next to hers and opened up so they can rot together – a scene Fennell riffed on in her last film Saltburn as a naked Oliver graphically “grieves” over Felix’s grave.
Heathcliff hopes their bodies will literally become one in death. Their love may not have ended in a legal and religious union, but neither could death part them. As Jarvis Cocker once sang: “This is hardcore!”
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Andrew McInnes received funding from AHRC for his Early Career Researcher Leadership Fellow project, "The Romantic Ridiculous", which ran from 2020-2022.