Libidinal Heights: Love, Lust, and Redemption in Emily Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights”

Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is considered a passionate love story, a “tale of love that is stronger than death,” centering around the generational story of Catherine Earnshaw, an orphaned young man turned tyrannical master, Heathcliff, and a young headstrong Cathy Linton who uncovers the tragedy of Wuthering Heights in her dealings with an older Heathcliff that entangles her in a multi-generational struggle of love, lust, and redemption. The reading of Wuthering Heights as a love story, however, is deeply misconstrued and dangerous—especially when focusing on Catherine and Heathcliff. There is a love story that moves the plot, the love of Cathy toward Linton and Hareton—the compassion and mercy and forgiveness that she exhibits in those relationships—not the erotic demons of Heathcliff and Catherine which cast their destructive shadows over the Welsh moorlands. The so-called love of Heathcliff and Catherine serves as a warning to the reader, the love of Cathy, meanwhile, serves as the healing and redemptive antidote to the original sin of Heathcliff and Catherine: and two different types of “love” the story tells with degenerate moderns falling in love with the warning Brontë was preaching.

Echoes of Adam and Eve

It is fashionable for postmodern and feminist critics to laud the love of Catherine and Heathcliff. They also highlight the headstrong confrontational spirit of Cathy to Heathcliff in the second half of the novel (if they bother to go that far at all). The reason for these ideological readings are obvious: Catherine, as a woman, acts on her own agency regarding love (though she dies) rather than remaining submissive to the structures and forces surrounding her; Cathy, as a young adult, acts on her own agency in confronting Heathcliff—the toxic male overlord—and comes out victorious. Furthermore, the romanticization of the eros exhibited by Catherine and Heathcliff allow one to brush aside the more obvious critiques and warnings Emily Brontë inserts into the storyline. In an early encounter between Catherine and Heathcliff, for example, Heathcliff rebuffs, ‘You needn’t have touched me…I shall be as dirty as I please: and I like to be dirty, and will be dirty.’” This declaration is hardly something to ignore, but ignore our critics do in focusing on Catherine and Heathcliff.

What does “dirty” mean here? Heathcliff is a sinner. He is darkened soul. Not later in life, but as early as a child. Heathcliff’s “dusky fingers” and “dirty” self-confession reveal his character and soul. He is a danger to Catherine and will be the death of Catherine. His dirtiness, among the dirtiness of many characters, will cast its destructive spirit over Wuthering Heights.

Catherine’s inability to control her passions and Heathcliff’s manipulative ability to turn Catherine’s spirit of compassion into a maelstrom of emotions, is what leads to her early death. But focusing on how the false love of Heathcliff and Catherine is a form of dirty lust and sin, and how the merciful compassion of Cathy Hinton is the redemptive antidote that breaks the original sin of Heathcliff and Catherine smacks of too much theology and implicit Christianity for modern interpreters who would rather the story be a tragedy about erotic love (Heathcliff and Catherine) and the triumph of the militant feminine (Cathy) rather than the merciful compassion of Cathy’s agency which breaks the curse of Heathcliff. For Cathy to fall into a feminine model of merciful compassion, to postmodern readers and feminist critics, means that she would lose her agency; au contraire, it is precisely Cathy’s freedom to exert her merciful compassion against all the forces working against her that is her greatest triumph and Emily’s point in the progressive characterization and development of Cathy’s storyline. Emily Brontë’s “feminism” is in female agency as agency, not necessarily in the combative and headstrong spirit of voluntaristic equity or female ascension over male subjugation. Cathy’s freedom to choose mercy and compassion and break down the walls and barriers that restrict her is her ultimate triumph.

I find Wuthering Heights (not to mention Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë), to be a triumph of the modern feminine reality: the elevation of female agency against male and social institutional subjugation (which is self-evident) while retaining that desire for family, marriage, and consummated love in two flesh brought together to bring life into the world (which should be also self-evident by the story’s conclusion). The stories are triumphs of feminine compassion emerging despite all the forces and individuals arrayed against it.

What Emily Brontë achieves is the freedom for females to be females, the freedom of the feminine to assert its own femininity rather than be coerced to accept its own nature by social and institutional pressures (as happens with Catherine which does cause her death). This is what modern critics miss, deliberately so, because their ideological criticism rejects nature qua nature and is grounded by a metaphysic of rebellion. Because their axiom for literary interpretation is the metaphysic of rebellion, it comes as no surprise that their heroes are the rebels (Heathcliff and Catherine) and that Cathy is heroic only insofar as she rebels against Heathcliff (ignoring the true heroism of Cathy in her feminine compassion for Linton and Hareton).

Let us begin, then, with the false love of Catherine and Heathcliff. I have asserted that this love story serves as a warning, Emily’s in-situ novelization of the Christian idea of the Fall and of original sin which casts its dark shady of Wuthering Heights and prevents its original Edenic beauty from shining forth in its splendor. Wuthering Heights should be a serene place. It is situated in the beauty of the Welsh moors, its landscape is that of a garden paradise, a castle of life, yet it is beset by problems which prevent that serenity from being seen. In contrast to its neighbors, Thrushcross Grange, Wuthering Heights is a dark and dangerous place.

Why is Wuthering Heights a dark and dangerous place? We mustn’t forget that the story is told in flashback through the arrival of Mr. Lockwood and the story-telling memories of Nelly Dean. The narrative begins post-fall; we are in a postlapsarian world, and we learn through the frame narrative and the memorial storytelling of Nelly of how it all began.

Heathcliff may have had a tragic backstory, but he does nothing to change that fact. As mentioned, he declares himself “dirty” and that he will always be “dirty.” He is later upbraided for taking joy in the misery and pain of others and how he can extract revenge against Hindley: ‘For shame Heathcliff…It is for God to punish wicked people; we should learn to forgive,’” Nelly recalls in speaking to Mr. Lockwood about a young and rebellious Heathcliff. She also recalls Heathcliff’s response, ‘No, God won’t have the satisfaction that I shall.’”

From Nelly’s reminisces we realize Heathcliff is an ungodly man, a sinner, a man who takes onto himself what is due to the Love that structures the cosmos and orders the spirit of nature. He is a Lucifer, a fallen child and man from a former beauty and grandeur that refuses to change and exists only in opposition to others; his existence is in separation rather than unity, hate rather than love. True, Hindley is no saint. Hindley is an abusive hindrance that taunts and harms the young Heathcliff. But by living out an eye for an eye rather than turning the other cheek, Heathcliff’s desire for revenge and his own brutality helps to destroy Wuthering Heights. He is a man, who by his own confession, will not forgive.

This seductive rebel is also the fancy of Catherine Earnshaw. The young Catherine is caught between the social norms of her environment, particularly her prospective expectation to marry Edgar Linton and the erotic temptation of Heathcliff. To be more like Heathcliff entails becoming the dark and sinister rebel he is. To marry Edgar is conceived as capitulation to social and institutional pressures that rob her of her freedom.

Though she marries Edgar at the expense of Heathcliff, it is also clear from the narrative that she did have erotic desire for Heathcliff. She was not in a zero-sum game. She chose, in an interior sense, to be more like Heathcliff while maintaining the façade of social expectations in marrying Edgar. Critics who assert that her coerced acceptance of Edgar spelled doom miss the fact that she was always beside Heathcliff, watching Heathcliff, and mimicking Heathcliff. She became Heathcliff as she exclaims to Nelly: ‘My greatest thought in living is Heathcliff. If all else perished, and he remained, I shall still continue to be…Nelly, I am Heathcliff! He’s always, always in my mind.’” As she also says, ‘I have no more business to marry Edgar Linton than I have to be in heaven.’”

Catherine, in choosing Heathcliff at an interior, spiritual, level, confesses that she is abandoning heaven for Heathcliff’s world of bodily torment and torrent. What makes Catherine a remarkable character is she is conscious of it all. She willingly, and knowingly, chooses Heathcliff and all the ramifications that her choice entails. She openly wants to be cast out of heaven for Heathcliff’s hell. And in doing exactly that despite the outward marriage with Edgar, the heaven of Wuthering Heights turns into a hell. Her choice, like Eve’s in Genesis, leads to death—not merely her own but a death that extends to the land around her and Wuthering Heights which is tainted by that free choice of sin.

But the desecration of Wuthering Heights and the death of Catherine Earnshaw isn’t the end of the story. Heathcliff grows up and inherits the castle. He confronts his adolescent bullies and bullies them. He is now the tyrannical master of a dying and decadent place.

Cathy Linton, the daughter of Catherine Earnshaw and Edgar Linton, comes to Wuthering Heights to fulfill Heathcliff’s declaration that he wishes to be haunted by Catherine:

Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest as long as I am living! You said I killed you—haunt me then! The murdered do haunt their murderers. I believe—I know that ghosts have wandered on the 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.

So Cathy Linton appears, the spirit of Catherine Earnshaw in many ways, come to haunt Heathcliff and fulfill his dark desires and the curse he called down upon himself.

What precipitated this dramatic outburst was Catherine’s death and her want for forgiveness, ‘Forgive me!’” she cries to Heathcliff on her deathbed. Catherine’s wish for forgiveness is refused by Heathcliff, forgiveness is a bridge too far for it would clean him of his filth that he gleefully rolls in and enjoys. Recall Nelly’s conversation with a young Heathcliff about learning to forgive. He cannot. So he rejects reconciliation through forgiveness and causes the darkness descending upon Wuthering Heights to plunge further into “death” and “hell.” After Catherine’s death he calls upon the curse of sin to consume him for the rest of his life. The second half of the novel brings forth the resolution to this problem of refusal to forgive.

Cathy Linton and the Redemption of Wuthering Heights

Cathy’s appearance in the novel serves as the second half of the story—the part of the story often forgotten in public memory and eulogization of Brontë’s great novel. Cathy is not only the fulfillment of Heathcliff’s dark desire to be haunted, she is also the antidote to the original sin of Wuthering Heights: the lack of compassion and forgiveness exhibited between Catherine and Heathcliff, between Heathcliff and Hindley, between all the individuals who couldn’t manifest that compassion and forgiveness when most needed.

But Cathy is no saint at the beginning of her storyline (and rightly so, for it makes her transfiguration all the more potent and memorable, indeed, admirable). Again, Emily Brontë’s genius is in Cathy’s free choice to be a woman—to embrace the feminine mystique of compassion, mercy, and love that has been absent in the dark toxic world of Wuthering Heights since Heathcliff’s presence. She falls into the coercive machinations of Heathcliff and acts snobbishly toward the uneducated Hareton.

Toward Linton Heathcliff, Cathy is caught in an abusive trap with Linton’s outburst and compassionate allure toward his weakly state whilst prodded by Heathcliff’s machinations to marry the two. Cathy does seem to fall in love with the dying Linton but mostly to spite Heathcliff, to prove she is stronger than Heathcliff’s tormenting oppression. Linton, however, dying of tuberculosis, dies—freeing Cathy of the tyrannical lordship of Heathcliff which permits Cathy’s free embrace of her femininity in standing up to Heathcliff and coming to love Hareton whom she had acted callously toward earlier. Linton’s death also frees her to love without the motivation of spite toward Heathcliff but even her love of Linton, which she confesses, was important in her transfiguration (more on this later).

Cathy’s complex relationship with Hareton reveals her inner soul and transformation. She does act snobbishly toward his lack of education at the beginning of their relationship, but she grows to have compassion toward his disposition. Hareton is weak where Cathy is strong, and Cathy’s strength will give Hareton strength. In time, Cathy takes merciful pity on Hareton’s disposition and decides to help him to spite Heathcliff, but in spiting Heathcliff she genuinely begins to love Hareton who experiences a mystical and powerful force he has never experienced thus far in his life—an experience that Wuthering Heights has also lacked since Heathcliff’s presence.

Cathy becomes a teacher for Hareton. She helps him in his education. The two do fall in love with each other—a love that was the outgrowth of Cathy’s feminine compassion and mercy which breaks Heathcliff’s heart of stone.

Under the vindicative gaze of Heathcliff Cathy exhibits her love in a world bereft of love, Heathcliff’s gaze over the love between Cathy and Hareton makes him realize of the love he missed with Catherine because of his inability to forgive. Heathcliff still can’t forgive. So he dies. But his death ends the dark curse that had ensnared Wuthering Heights which allows Cathy to escape the miserable shadow of Heathcliff which inhibited her total transfiguration. (So long as Heathcliff is around, there is the terrible possibility of relapse.)

What makes Cathy a heroine is her knowledge of the power of compassion and forgiveness that she willingly chooses and exhibits. In confronting Heathcliff about her love of Linton, she states, ‘I know he has a bad nature…he’s your son. But I’m glad I’ve a better, to forgive it; and I know he loves me, and for that reason I love him. Mr. Heathcliff, you have nobody to love you.’” But she also acknowledges an ulterior motivation, ‘[H]owever miserable you make us, we shall still have the revenge of thinking that your cruelty arises from your greater misery! You are miserable, are you not? Lonely, like the devil, and envious like him?’”

While Cathy’s love for Linton has peripheral motivations that are subsequently freed upon his death—permitting her entirely self-giving love to Hareton later in the story—her confrontation with Heathcliff during her love of Linton reveals many things that modern critics gloss over. First is the theme of forgiveness, the very quality of love that Heathcliff refuses to embrace even as Catherine lay dying and wished for his forgiveness. Cathy forgives Heathcliff for his miserable tyranny which sets her on the path for the transfiguring forgiveness between her and Hareton toward the novel’s conclusion. Second, she correctly identifies Heathcliff as Lucifer, a devil, envious and lonely just like Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost who is miserable and envious upon espying the joyful love of our first parents. Third, Cathy understands that love entails relationships and that loneliness can never produce the love that humans seek and that forgiveness seems to be an alluring force that brings people together in love.

Cathy’s agency doesn’t change. The purpose of her agency does. And the direction of the agency of Catherine and Cathy is what Emily Brontë calls us to consider. From spiting Heathcliff to loving Hareton, Cathy’s freedom is found in her choices—but Emily Brontë extols the consummation of Cathy’s freedom in her choosing to love Hareton with full knowledge of what her love means and entails in the world rather than the self-centered love of Catherine Earnshaw which caused her death and the selfish envy that governs Heathcliff leading to his desire for vengeance. In loving Hareton and exhibiting the compassionate mercy and love that such a relationship demanded, Cathy’s manifestation of love causes Heathcliff to be broken and destroyed. His death, a result of Cathy’s agency, frees Wuthering Heights from the dark curse hanging over it.

In the penultimate transfiguration of Cathy, she kisses Hareton on the cheeks as the image of compassion for her earlier torment of the boy. She asks for his forgiveness, knowing that forgiveness is not a one-way street; she has learned forgiveness in dealing with Heathcliff but now must experience forgiveness from the agency of Hareton to absolve her of her earlier crimes. ‘Say you forgive me, Hareton, do! You can make me so happy, by speaking that little word.’” Hareton initially hesitates but eventually forgives. Forgiveness, that ultimate expression of Christian love, triumphs over Wuthering Heights and brings love and life into the world.

Cathy and Hareton marry. Their love consummated in marriage is brought forth by forgiveness (the very things missing in Heathcliff and Catherine) and because of it the beauty of Wuthering Heights is restored. Peace has come at last. We have the promise of new life in the newly serene world: “I lingered round them, under that benign sky: watched the moths fluttering among the heath and hare-bells; listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass; and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.”

I wonder how anyone could ever imagine that the “love” between Catherine and Heathcliff is what Emily Brontë was praising instead of the love of Cathy in her compassion, mercy, and forgiveness that undoes the original sin of Heathcliff’s refusal of forgiveness and Catherine’s choice to be the devil Heathcliff instead of the angel we are called to be and that Cathy singularly becomes over the course of the novel. Many critics, however, would rather choose Heathcliff and be cast out of heaven under the “delusion” of “heroic romance” in the form of self-deluded heroic rebellion instead of being transformed by the forgiving love that transfigures Cathy and redeems Wuthering Heights. By cutting off Cathy’s transfiguration and redemption of the land by focusing only on Catherine and Heathcliff, we miss the true power and majesty of Emily Brontë’s sublime novel and that enduring reminder that forgiveness is the hardest, most heroic, most loving, thing we can manifest.

Print