scholarly inquiry: Wuthering Heights

A close reading of Dr. Lodine-Chaffey's essay and an unexpected connection to Stranger Things???

Dear close reader,

It’s been about a week since we finished reading Wuthering Heights together, and perhaps you’ve started to dive into some of the scholarly conversations about the novel — and the many, many pieces being written about Emerald Fennel’s new film.

Having not seen the film yet, I’m engaging curiously with the polarized nature of the reviews I’m seeing. Frankly, they remind me a lot of polarized attitudes toward the original novel.

The Brontë Sisters by Patrick Branwell Bronte, circa 1834.

One of our readers shared this Vanity Fair piece with me (thank you C Cannon!) that I wanted to forward to everyone — it’s about how weird the film and novel both are, yet it maintains that Emily Brontë is singular in her strangeness, “a defiant enigma” through life and death.¹

The article also calls Wuthering Heights “the horniest Gothic novel ever written” which is, I think we can agree, a fair assessment.

A biographical tidbit caught my eye in the piece, and had me thinking about our reading group:

“The Brontës had a habit of scribbling text—symbols and poems in tiny handwriting—in the margins of a book or on ripped scraps, as new paper was expensive.” (Source)

The Brontë sisters were, then, annotators. That is, they wrote in their books and they used the margins to take notes. Like us, they detailed their experiences of reading right on the pages they were reading, and like us, they perhaps found themselves unsettled by ideas and scenes they were encountering.

This exercise felt especially present while I was reading the novel (for the first time, as you know) and therefore had little-to-no idea of what to expect. My margins are riddled with exclamation marks, frown-y faces, giant question marks, and “omg!” to capture the literal gasps I exhaled while reading.

Because Wuthering Heights is maybe the weirdest book I’ve ever read, I’ve been extra reliant on the scholarly conversation surrounding it to grapple with my confundity. I have really enjoyed getting to know the “landscape” surrounding the novel (and the new film) as I continue to grapple with what the novel means, why it is still so relevant and beloved by readers today, and how to talk about it with you, my fellow readers.

Enter: scholarship as a reliable shoulder to lean on.

I’ve always struggled with the point-of-view that scholarly work is some kind of navel-gazing or masturbatory exercise in pontification; the type of scholarly work I’ve engaged with has always been meaning-making — not repetitive or obvious, but working hard to trot-out an understanding of difficult texts and to make that text more understandable for others.

In much scholarly work, our author becomes a kind of tour guide through their own mind, as they attempt to locate meaning within a work of art — a novel, a poem, an epic, a play. In the small network of academic work I’ve encountered on the novel, I’ve found lots of scholars who take a posture of amusement and befuddlement toward the novel, sharing with readers the understanding that Emily Brontë’s novel is deeply weird and very hard to “get” in any single way.

So let’s talk about a great example of such work: Dr. Lodine-Chaffey’s essay, “Heathcliff’s Abject State in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights.”²

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How theories can unlock literature

One of the most engaging puzzles you learn to play in the graduate study of literature has to do with what is called “theory.” Literary theories, which are essentially like philosophies about how stories and story elements work, are used by scholars to analyze literature.

Dr. Lodine-Chaffey uses psychoanalysis as a theoretical lens, and leans specifically on Freud’s theory of “the uncanny” and Kristeva’s theory of “the abject” to understand the deeply complicated Heathcliff. These theories essentially operate as frameworks within which she can situate her reading of Heathcliff and therefore “demystify” him for herself and other readers.

Demystification is the core action most scholarship is after: How can I take this beautiful, strange, complicated thing (this novel I love, this character who breaks my heart, this plot move I don’t understand) and start to grapple with it in a deep, meaningful way? Not to impart meaning upon it, but to recognize the meaning already right there on the page, willing me to engage?

(I don’t make this distinction lightly: the pontificating, navel-gazing brand of scholarship I mentioned earlier will always only impart meaning onto art and therefore often override whatever meaning(s) were already there and take the single, academic self as more important than the work.)

Dr. Lodine-Chaffey does the good kind of scholarly work by asking, essentially: what are readers to do with a character as cruel as Heathcliff? How are we to understand his decisions? Why is he so committed to his revenge plot?

“Abjection, for Kristeva, is a uniquely human response to a threatened collapse of the concept of self.”

—Dr. Lodine-Chaffey

Her answer is that, by leveraging literary theories of “the Other” and “the abject,” we can attune ourselves to a deeper reading of Heathcliff and therefore of the novel. And in turn, we can credit Brontë for the depth of the work and appreciate even the more complex or strange parts of the novel with more understanding and awe.

(That’s the other thing great scholarship tends to do: rather than give you a single answer that completely demystifies the novel at hand, they’ll help you see it more deeply than ever — and thereby compound the power of its mysteries and remind you that there really is no such thing as “tidiness” in good art.)

So, let’s dig into LC’s reading.

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Last year, I told you there are three things every piece of scholarly work does in literary study:

1. Responds to prior academic and literary analysis of a novel or short story or author.

2. Asks a new question about that specific text.

3. Proposes a new reading of the text, by exploring how the text works (typically via close reading).

Here’s how LC (Lodine-Chaffey) does that:

1. Responds: On page 207, she clarifies: “Although few authors apply Kristeva’s concepts to Wuthering Heights, Marci M. Gordon does analyse the character of Catherine Earnshaw in terms of abjection.”

   1. Here, LC points out that she’s treading new ground in Wuthering Heights studies by invoking Kristeva’s theory of abjection.

   2. She responds to a previous scholar, Gordon, who has made a connection to the novel, but who focuses on Catherine rather than Heathcliff.

   3. For LC, the previous reading “neglects fully to apply her reading of Kristeva’s theory,” and this creates the entry point for LC to make a new contribution to the scholarly conversation by focusing a reading of abjection in the novel on Heathcliff’s character arc.

2. Asks: On page 207, LC posits her new reading: “In this essay I view the character of Heathcliff through Kristeva’s ideas of abjection.” The question she is asking is inherent in her shift of the abjection lens from Cathy to Heathcliff: What would happen to our understanding of the novel if we read Heathcliff, not Catherine, as the abject Other of the novel?

3. Close reads: From page 207 onward, LC posits her new reading of Wuthering Heights.

   1. Page 208: LC close reads Heathcliff’s “exile” and perpetual state of Otherness thanks to his enigmatic race (he is not white)³ and his alignment with animality and demons.

      1. In all these ways—racially, socially, emotionally—Heathcliff “exists apart from [the] known social order.”

   2. Page 209-210: LC clarifies that Heathcliff isn’t just an Other because of his own self, but his Otherness is crucially defined, encountered, and deepened by other people’s reactions to him. (Hence: a revenge plot emerges.)

“Heathcliff’s revenge efforts and disrespect for the social order reveal his abjection, further defining his status as a continual outsider.”

You can, in essence, read the entire novel through this lens of “the abject,” as LC points out.

Her close reading of Heathcliff’s increasingly violent actions and thoughts, including his treatment of Isabella and her dog, showcase his continued de-evolution into a constant state of Otherness, from which he seems to desire no redemption, but only longs for revenge. (LC will complicate this at the end of her essay!)

One of her most compelling readings, for me, was her reading of Heathcliff’s strange behavior toward Catherine’s grave:

“Heathcliff shows his disregard for social boundaries by disturbing the grave of Catherine twice, which functions as a perversion of societal norms….Nearly twenty years after her death, Heathcliff once again desecrates her grave. This time Heathcliff instructs the sexton to remove a side of her coffin so that he can be buried with her. Heathcliff’s disturbance of Catherine’s grave disregards not only the sentiments of her family members, but also plays on fears prevalent during the early nineteenth century. About a decade before the publication of Wuthering Heights, the British Parliament passed the Anatomy Act of 1832 legislating the supply and use of corpses for medical students and attempting to mitigate the illegal actions of bodysnatchers or ressurrectionists.”

Reading this, I couldn’t help but think of Frankenstein.⁴

I also love that LC clarifies that “Heathcliff’s exhumation of Catherine’s corpse not only reveals his disregard for social laws, it also exposes Heathcliff’s inability to escape from his abjection.”

It’d be one thing for us to read the novel, and Heathcliff, as a willful embrace of the abject. (Which, I think you could viably do; after all, Henry Creel of Stranger Things made a devastating eleventh-hour confession in the finale that he wasn’t ever interested in being good and only ever wanted to eradicate human beings from the planet. A truly nasty level of sociopathy that deserves Winona Ryder’s unforgiving axe.)

“Never able to separate himself psychologically from Catherine despite her death, Heathcliff increasingly spends his time searching for signs of her absent presence in the natural world.”

LC invites us to view Heathcliff differently: not as someone who has willfully chosen to hate the world, but who has — through being Othered and from having the subject/object of his longing violently removed from him in life and in death — entered a state of perpetual searching, longing, and feeling lost. Heathcliff is searching for resolution for the anguish of his longing.

(This makes him very different from Henry Creel!)

LC helps us understand this by closely reading Heathcliff’s relationship to “the sublime,” which represents a “possible escape” from his perpetual abjection and lostness.

This is where you could get into a fantastic conversation with LC, by asking yourself if you agree with her final assessment:

“At his end, therefore, Heathcliff questions his abjection. He expresses awareness of his violence and the liminal state of his mind. He contemplates taking hold of his own being and his own thoughts and moving beyond an abject state.”

• Does he truly question his abjection? How do you know? Where do you see him engaging in questioning?

• Are his questions enough to make him sympathetic for you? Does this change anything about his character for you?

• Basically: do deathbed confessions change anything for you?

“Emily Brontë creates a character who constantly fails to construct a boundary between himself and the other.”

In the end, she argues, Heathcliff “fails” to understand the boundaries between his own self and Catherine, between his own life and her death, and between his enforced social Otherness and his right to an independent selfhood.

After reading her essay, I find myself grappling the most with that final implication: that Heathcliff was never given the tools, education, parenting, love, or connection that would teach him how to differentiate in a world of blurry enmeshment.

Because he never had a centralized, core sense of self, he falls victim to a lifetime of dependencies on people who loathed him as a child and the one person who believed he had a soul. After all, Catherine believed their souls, whatever they were made of, were twinned forces, born of the same material. If he loved Catherine, then, surely, by some extension of logic, he could learn to love his own self — because they are “one.” Perhaps he clings to Catherine so desperately precisely because she, for him, represents his one connection to a possible self.

My therapist reminds me that “hurt people hurt people,” and this seems like a painfully reductive read of Heathcliff, but one that sums him up in a compassionate way. He was a deeply hurt child, foundationally Othered and brought into a household he was never integrated into, but only tangentially forced into though physical proximity. The fact that he made any connection at all to Catherine feels remarkable and special; that she loved him back, and that she also “constantly failed” to establish her own sense of self, feels like the ripest indictment of the novel overall.

We all know Tom Cruise’s “you complete me” speech is romantic, but it’s also a screaming red flag. Another person can’t complete you; you have to show up whole in your life — and it’s your job to pursue and define that wholeness. That Emily Brontë understood the profound emotional deaths wrought by codependency long before psychoanalysis was a thing is a testament not just to her poetic and sensitive soul, but to her understanding of people and how much we can hurt each other, and ourselves, when we don’t grapple with the profundity of what we’re able to feel.

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Continue reading —

• The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction

• The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Imagination

• Powers of Horror

→ Browse more related reading recommendations, curated by yours truly!

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1. I’ve recently decided to subscribe to a few online magazines; Vanity Fair is one of them, thanks to their publication of recent photojournalism by Christopher Anderson, which has frankly delighted me on a level I didn’t know I could be delighted by in the current political landscape in the United States.

2. I emailed the link out to everyone, but if you’re a new subscriber, feel free to DM me and I can email you the PDF.

3. Confession: I get the vibe Emerald Fennel has a crush on Jacob Elordi and wanted an excuse to write a bunch of sex scenes for him?

4. Speaking of, I really liked the new film and thought it was clear the director has great respect for the original text. I think Fennel’s will lose out on this comparative ground, as from the jump, her casting choices reveal an inherent misreading of what makes the novel Gothic. (i.e., the racial Other.)