Why Wuthering Heights Matters (to Me)
Feb. 24th, 2026 07:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
labingiDreamwidth, I have been cheating on you with Substack. I love you much more, Dreamwidth. My relationship with Substack is purely a matter of convenience. However, the following post is also on my Substack, which may explain its reading as a bit more formal than I usually hold forth here.
Content warning: This is a dark book with lots of abuse, and I discuss some of it.
The discourse over Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights movie has prompted a resurgence of conversation about Emily Brontë’s novel and reminded me just how controversial the book remains almost 180 years after its publication. Wuthering Heights recounts the obsessive attachment of Catherine and Heathcliff, two young people growing up on Yorkshire moors at the end of the 18th century, and the harm done to them and by them. Many love it; many hate it. I am in the “love” camp, and I want to explain why Wuthering Heights is an important book, both to me and in our world to this day.
Spoilers for the novel follow.
Wuthering Heights is a book for misfits, and I am a misfit. My sense of difference from most people started young and persists to this day. I’m an introvert in a pro-extrovert society; I’m an asexual in a society that still defaults to assuming that all people are allosexual. It recently came to my attention that some metadata somewhere has miscategorized my adult science fiction novel, A Soldier in the Borderlands, as a young adult fantasy. I take this as a sign that I defeat market expectations. I am eccentric, outside the circle.
Wuthering Heights is centered on the relationship between two people who are also outside the circle, whose bond cannot be slotted into any recognizable social categories (in their times or ours). They are not siblings; they are not lovers (in the sense that they never have sex—more on this later); they are not married; they do not have an adulterous affair; they do not have children with each other. They are, at most, only marginally in the same social class: Heathcliff may manage to hobnob with gentlemen, but he is never accepted as one. His ostracism is very much related to race: he and Catherine are not same race either.
By the standards of their society, therefore, they should not be family; they should not be lovers, or married, or friends. Edgar speaks for the mainstream view when he assumes Catherine should greet the returned Heathcliff in the kitchen as a former servant. The social world has no signifiers for them. Their realm is on the moors, beyond society’s grip.
But if they aren’t lovers in the literal sense of having sex, isn’t that just because society keeps them apart? Isn’t that the point? Their relationship is certainly sexually charged: Catherine contemplates marrying Heathcliff; Heathcliff is jealous that she married Edgar. But I would also argue that Catherine reads as what we might today call a “romantic asexual”: she’s bursting with emotional passion, but I don’t see any sign that sexual attraction computes to her. She’s in a sexual relationship with Edgar, and her response to him is generally “meh.” She doesn’t mind him, but she isn’t drawn to him. But isn’t this because she’s drawn to Heathcliff? She is certainly drawn to him, but sexually? She describes herself as content with Edgar letting her spend time rambling the moors with Heathcliff and bridles at the fact that Heathcliff isn’t content. This suggests to me someone who just doesn’t “get” that sexual desire is a powerful drive for most.
Of course, this is a Victorian novel, so one could argue that Catherine’s lack of sexualization is simply of its time. But I don’t think that’s all there is to it. The book is by no means shy about expressing emotional passion, including hugging and kissing—but not in a sexualized way. Catherine and Heathcliff’s great kissing scene happens when she’s gravely ill, seven months pregnant, and about to go into labor: it’s not a sexy situation. I can’t imagine it was meant to be.
Here we have a book (arguably) about two somewhat incestuous pseudo-siblings who madly love each other. But do they? Readers of Wuthering Heights still argue about whether it’s really “love.” Is it a romance? Is it a revenge tragedy? We can’t agree on how to categorize the book, let alone its protagonists.
This novel was way ahead of its time in the 1840s, but I’d argue it is still ahead of ours. We still (mostly) can’t comprehend the idea of passionate love without sexual desire. (See Fennell and many, many... many other adaptations.) As an asexual, it irks me how we still almost never represent asexual characters, certainly not as more than caricatures. We still don’t allow the idea that two people can be passionately attached without being in love (which is itself not synonymous with being sexually in love).
Then, there’s the novel’s moral dimension. Catherine and Heathcliff do have an unhealthy relationship; they harm themselves and each other badly. Some can’t abide the book for this, and that’s valid. But I personally prefer to take it all in. It’s realistic, in the sense that such singular, thwarted devotion would be unhealthy; it would cause harm. Brontë understood this. That doesn’t mean it can’t also be amazing, moving, sympathetic. It is all those things to me. And, yes, I’m going to say it: Heathcliff is a rapist. By our modern definition (not their 18th-century legal definition), this is incontrovertibly clear. There is no other way to read his relationship with Isabella. The leading man and co-protagonist of the book is a rapist. (It’s odd how few people actually say that, even among the book’s haters.) That fact is hard to sit with. I admire the novel for challenging us to do so. Its situations are sick and complex, and it refuses to fit its lead characters, its content, or its narrative structure into any of its culture’s (or our culture’s) norms.
I cannot overstate the value of works of literature like this to misfits like me. They make us seen. They remind us that life is more complex and variable than any social schema can possibly capture. In refusing to bow to convention, they rise to reality. I love this book. My life—in a small way—has been made easier because this book exists. It has made me less alone.
Content warning: This is a dark book with lots of abuse, and I discuss some of it.
The discourse over Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights movie has prompted a resurgence of conversation about Emily Brontë’s novel and reminded me just how controversial the book remains almost 180 years after its publication. Wuthering Heights recounts the obsessive attachment of Catherine and Heathcliff, two young people growing up on Yorkshire moors at the end of the 18th century, and the harm done to them and by them. Many love it; many hate it. I am in the “love” camp, and I want to explain why Wuthering Heights is an important book, both to me and in our world to this day.
Spoilers for the novel follow.
Wuthering Heights is a book for misfits, and I am a misfit. My sense of difference from most people started young and persists to this day. I’m an introvert in a pro-extrovert society; I’m an asexual in a society that still defaults to assuming that all people are allosexual. It recently came to my attention that some metadata somewhere has miscategorized my adult science fiction novel, A Soldier in the Borderlands, as a young adult fantasy. I take this as a sign that I defeat market expectations. I am eccentric, outside the circle.
Wuthering Heights is centered on the relationship between two people who are also outside the circle, whose bond cannot be slotted into any recognizable social categories (in their times or ours). They are not siblings; they are not lovers (in the sense that they never have sex—more on this later); they are not married; they do not have an adulterous affair; they do not have children with each other. They are, at most, only marginally in the same social class: Heathcliff may manage to hobnob with gentlemen, but he is never accepted as one. His ostracism is very much related to race: he and Catherine are not same race either.
By the standards of their society, therefore, they should not be family; they should not be lovers, or married, or friends. Edgar speaks for the mainstream view when he assumes Catherine should greet the returned Heathcliff in the kitchen as a former servant. The social world has no signifiers for them. Their realm is on the moors, beyond society’s grip.
But if they aren’t lovers in the literal sense of having sex, isn’t that just because society keeps them apart? Isn’t that the point? Their relationship is certainly sexually charged: Catherine contemplates marrying Heathcliff; Heathcliff is jealous that she married Edgar. But I would also argue that Catherine reads as what we might today call a “romantic asexual”: she’s bursting with emotional passion, but I don’t see any sign that sexual attraction computes to her. She’s in a sexual relationship with Edgar, and her response to him is generally “meh.” She doesn’t mind him, but she isn’t drawn to him. But isn’t this because she’s drawn to Heathcliff? She is certainly drawn to him, but sexually? She describes herself as content with Edgar letting her spend time rambling the moors with Heathcliff and bridles at the fact that Heathcliff isn’t content. This suggests to me someone who just doesn’t “get” that sexual desire is a powerful drive for most.
Of course, this is a Victorian novel, so one could argue that Catherine’s lack of sexualization is simply of its time. But I don’t think that’s all there is to it. The book is by no means shy about expressing emotional passion, including hugging and kissing—but not in a sexualized way. Catherine and Heathcliff’s great kissing scene happens when she’s gravely ill, seven months pregnant, and about to go into labor: it’s not a sexy situation. I can’t imagine it was meant to be.
Here we have a book (arguably) about two somewhat incestuous pseudo-siblings who madly love each other. But do they? Readers of Wuthering Heights still argue about whether it’s really “love.” Is it a romance? Is it a revenge tragedy? We can’t agree on how to categorize the book, let alone its protagonists.
This novel was way ahead of its time in the 1840s, but I’d argue it is still ahead of ours. We still (mostly) can’t comprehend the idea of passionate love without sexual desire. (See Fennell and many, many... many other adaptations.) As an asexual, it irks me how we still almost never represent asexual characters, certainly not as more than caricatures. We still don’t allow the idea that two people can be passionately attached without being in love (which is itself not synonymous with being sexually in love).
Then, there’s the novel’s moral dimension. Catherine and Heathcliff do have an unhealthy relationship; they harm themselves and each other badly. Some can’t abide the book for this, and that’s valid. But I personally prefer to take it all in. It’s realistic, in the sense that such singular, thwarted devotion would be unhealthy; it would cause harm. Brontë understood this. That doesn’t mean it can’t also be amazing, moving, sympathetic. It is all those things to me. And, yes, I’m going to say it: Heathcliff is a rapist. By our modern definition (not their 18th-century legal definition), this is incontrovertibly clear. There is no other way to read his relationship with Isabella. The leading man and co-protagonist of the book is a rapist. (It’s odd how few people actually say that, even among the book’s haters.) That fact is hard to sit with. I admire the novel for challenging us to do so. Its situations are sick and complex, and it refuses to fit its lead characters, its content, or its narrative structure into any of its culture’s (or our culture’s) norms.
I cannot overstate the value of works of literature like this to misfits like me. They make us seen. They remind us that life is more complex and variable than any social schema can possibly capture. In refusing to bow to convention, they rise to reality. I love this book. My life—in a small way—has been made easier because this book exists. It has made me less alone.
