WUTHERING HEIGHTS: YES, LOVE IS TOXIC!

NOW FREE: Love takes hostages

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Let me begin by showing my cards: for the sake of any single chapter of Wuthering Heights, I would gladly consign everything Jane Austen ever wrote to the flames. Austen stands for non-toxic, civilized love, which progresses through self-control, rational consideration and restraint – rude words and direct brutality have no place in her work, while Brontë’s topic is toxic love, which has to end in self-destruction. Since only Brontë brings this toxicity out into the open, I fully agree with the publicity line for the latest movie version of the Heights that it is “the greatest love story of all time,” well above the usual suspects (Tristan and Isolde, Romeo and Juliet…), which are beautifully tragic but definitely not toxic.¹ This toxic dimension was perspicuously described in an often-quoted (by myself also) passage from Neil Gaiman:

“Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn’t it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses, you build up a whole suit of armor so that nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life... You give them a piece of you. They didn’t ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn’t your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like ‘maybe we should be just friends’ turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It’s a soul-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. I hate love.”²

This description echoes how, in Wuthering Heights, Cathy characterizes her relation to Heathcliff, and provides a succinct ontological definition of unconditional erotic love:

“My great miseries in this world have been Heathcliff’s miseries, and I 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 to a mighty strange place: I should not seem a part of it. My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it, I’m well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary. 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.”

Another passage sounds almost Lacanian: “He’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.” Does “more myself than I am” not evoke Lacan’s formula of objet a as that which is “in me more than myself”? This is why the object of toxic love functions like the figure of the femme fatale in film noir: the femme fatale ruins the hero, but even at his death point he declares he would choose her again. This is why the last words of Heathcliff to dead Cathy in the latest movie version of Wuthering Heights (2026, written and directed by Emerald Fennell, with Margot Robbie as Catherine and Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff) totally fit the spirit of toxic love:

“I pray one prayer, I repeat it until my tongue stiffens. Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest as long as I am living! You said I killed you, haunt me, then! Be with me always, take any form, drive me mad, only do not leave me in this abyss where I cannot find you. I cannot live without my life... I cannot live without my soul.”

This is love at its most toxic: the death of the beloved is a trauma the lover does not even try to get over and leave behind; his only wish is for the trauma to go on, for the dead beloved to go on haunting him, even if this haunting means bringing unbearable pain – pain and revenge are ways to keep his love alive. Fennell’s version was criticized for, among other things, focusing on the excessive sexual details of the passionate love affair and thereby ignoring the clear social background of the novel (racism, class struggle, etc.) – but is this really the case? In my view, those who make this critical point fail a test of intelligence and display their stupidity. In Fredric Jameson’s reading of Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff is not one among the novel’s characters but a kind of zero-element, a purely structural function of the “vanishing mediator,” a mechanism for mediating the two series, that of the old organic-patriarchal social relations and that of the modern capitalist relations, a point of passage between the two:

“Heathcliff can no longer be considered the hero or the protagonist in any sense of the word. He is rather, from the very beginning, /…/ something like a mediator or a catalyst, designed to restore the fortunes and to rejuvenate the anemic temperament of the two families.”³

Fennell’s version depicts brilliantly how, in his five years’ absence from Wuthering Heights (in the novel he is absent only for three years), Heathcliff changes from a brutally mishandled figure in the old patriarchal order to a member of the even more brutal new bourgeois order: “Heathcliff has become someone very cruel. He left an uncouth but essentially humane stable-lad. He returns a gentleman psychopath. His subsequent brutalities are graphically recorded.”⁴ The bearded Heathcliff prior to his departure would never have treated Isabella the way the suave Heathcliff after his return does. In Fennell’s version, toxic love does not stand outside social antagonisms; its toxicity explodes precisely because it takes place in the context of class struggle. This doesn’t mean that without class oppression we would have a non-toxic love: the self-destructive dimension of passionate love is inscribed into its very concept, it is always present as a background potentiality ready to explode in specific social circumstances.

That’s why it was the right choice that Heathcliff is played by a white Australian actor, Elordi, who – my suspicion – plays the upper-class Heathcliff with obvious enjoyment. And I think the choice, linked to this one, that Edgar (the rich neighbor who marries Cathy) is played by a non-white actor (Arab or Indian), in contrast to the novel where Edgar is described as a soft and weak upper-class white Englishman, is also correct. This choice implies Fennell’s gentle stab at politically correct anti-racism focused on white privileges: in today’s United Kingdom, citizens of Indian origin are on average already wealthier than Englishmen, and in the last years they also occupy the highest political posts (remember Rishi Sunak’s premiership, plus the fact that now the leader of the Conservative Party is Kemi Badenoch, a young black woman). Racism functions today in a thoroughly different way.

With regard to the novel, Fennell leaves out its second part, Heathcliff’s long work of revenge, where we see him relying on all the typical legal and financial tricks to destroy both families and own both properties. However, we should also bear in mind that, as Jameson indicates in the above quote, the novel ends with a kind of reconciliation of both ruling classes, the old patriarchal aristocracy and the new brutal capitalists, in the second generation of the two families: after Heathcliff’s death, Cathy’s daughter Cathy Linton and Heathcliff’s son Hareton thwart Heathcliff’s plan to disown them; they plan to marry and move to the Grange, of which she is now the undisputed owner. Locals report having seen the ghosts of Catherine and Heathcliff together on the moors. The graves of Catherine, Edgar, and Heathcliff are side-by-side, so it seems that all three are finally at peace. There is absolutely nothing of such a material and spiritual reconciliation in Fennell’s version: the movie ends with Heathcliff’s vision of how their love will survive by him being permanently haunted by her ghost.

Fennell’s version is inconsistent, full of meaningless idiosyncrasies that are there just to enthrall us – however, we are literally bombarded by lists of these features from numerous negative reviews of the movie, and I think that, even when they are correct, these criticisms serve to obfuscate the much more deeply upsetting message of the film. So, instead of following this path, I prefer to point out positive choices made by Fennell. Another quite perspicuous change in Fennell’s version is that Nelly is the only really bad person (she sets in motion the entire catastrophe by not telling Heathcliff the truth, by putting pressure on Catherine to marry Edgar, etc.), while in the novel she is a decent head of servants in Wuthering Heights who tells the story to the narrator.

Fennell is not the first to change the narrative of Wuthering Heights – one should mention at least Luis Buñuel’s version, a 1954 Mexican film Abismos de pasión (“Abysses of Passion”), which begins with Heathcliff’s return; the past events are only evoked as something mysterious that happened years ago between Heathcliff and Cathy, never directly shown or even narrated. Buñuel decided to leave out completely the past, and to merely evoke it as a dark spot, as something indescribable, the “absent Cause” of the story. (One should mention also the use of Wagner’s Tristan prelude as the music to his film.) One can easily imagine another version: in both the novel and all movie versions it is never explained how Heathcliff became rich, so what about a movie that would limit itself just to those three or five years of his absence, depicting him as a soldier, as involved in trading with slaves, or directly as a brutal criminal?

A further, more convincing argument against Fennell’s version is that, in clear contrast to the novel, which describes the events in a very restrained way, avoiding not only detailed reports of sexual scenes but even the details of physical brutality, Fennell does exactly the opposite. Suffice it to recall the very beginning of the movie (the public joyously watching the hanging of a criminal whose penis gets erected when he is dying and who also ejaculates), or the death of Cathy’s father (we see his corpse with hundreds of empty bottles of hard drinks in the background, and when Cathy comes to see the body, after a moment of sadness she viciously kicks him in his head), plus, of course, the scene when the sheet that covers Cathy’s dead body is pulled off and we see how, from her waist down, there is a whole pool of blood… I think that today, in our era of new forms of censorship, this strategy of directly showing excesses works better than Brontë’s restraint: we don’t enjoy obscene excesses, we are as a rule shocked and even traumatized by them.

Such excesses are in some naïve sense realist (people probably did act in this way), but the ultimate excess is the relationship between Heathcliff and Isabella, Edgar’s sister. Although the novel makes it clear that Heathcliff doesn’t love Isabella (he just marries her as part of his revenge), Isabella is presented as a shy and modest girl, while in the movie she is described as a deeply pathological masochistic young lady ready to suffer all physical and verbal humiliations from Heathcliff – say, he compels her to wear a muzzle and bark as a dog. Part of Heathcliff’s strategy is that he in a weird way acts honestly: before seducing her and abusing her, Heathcliff explicitly tells her how he will treat her and why, and she consents, obeying the basic feminist rule “only yes means yes.”

When Nelly visits her and invites her to return home, Isabella replies with a painfully perverted smile: “But this is my home, I am here at home.” This stance is unacceptable for today’s official feminism, which would, of course, reply that Isabella identified with her aggressor and internalized male-chauvinist sadism; however, such an easy way out ignores the brutal violence of love that is its immanent part. This readiness to submit oneself to violence and enjoy it is too much also for Buddhism, since it has nothing to do with personal pleasures and gluttony – it is a properly metaphysical stance located in what Freud called “beyond the pleasure principle.”

This, of course, in no way implies that to be authentically in love one should go to the self-destructive extreme of Cathy and Heathcliff (or Isabella and Heathcliff) – but it does mean that Cathy’s radical stance “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 to a mighty strange place” should throw its shadow on every passionate love attachment. It’s like Christ’s most “crazy” statements (for example, in Luke 14:26, Jesus states that his followers must “hate” father, mother, spouse, children, and their own lives to be his disciples): these are not commands to be followed in our daily lives, but they do indicate the implicit stance that should resonate as a potentiality in our lives.

1. I will not lose time retelling the story of Bronte’s novel – if there are readers who don’t know it, a quick look at the Wikipedia entry will suffice.

2. Available online at http://thinkexist.com/quotes/neil gaiman.

3. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious, London: Routledge 2002, p. 113-114.

4. https://wuthering-heights.co.uk/faq.