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Wuthering Heights isn’t a love story Heathcliff is a sado-masochistic wretch

'If some readers have been seduced by him, it is because everyone likes a rogue.' (Wuthering Heights, 2009)

'If some readers have been seduced by him, it is because everyone likes a rogue.' (Wuthering Heights, 2009)


October 2, 2024   6 mins

Not many films are panned even before they’ve gone into production. Such has been the fate, though, of yet another version of Wuthering Heights. Already derided as melodramatic trash, some reviewers are wondering whether the director, Emerald Fennell, has actually read the book.

Whether she has or hasn’t, you can’t pluck the tormented love story of Heathcliff and Catherine out of its complex context without inflicting some serious damage on Emily Brontë’s fiction. The novel is about a lot more than love. In its intensely materialist way, it also concerns the conflict between nature and culture, labour and gentility, power and rebellion, struggles over property and inheritance, the relations between the English landowning class and the small farmers or yeomanry, and a good deal more besides. 

How do you put these issues on screen? You can’t. You can tell a story entitled “Cathy and Heathcliff”, but it isn’t what Emily Brontë wrote. Our own civilization is obsessed by sex but bored by yeomen and landowners. The background to the Brontës is the world of poverty, political repression and smouldering social rebellion known as the Hungry Forties. The sisters would have seen a good deal of destitution on their own doorstep, and were alive to the turbulent times in which they lived. They were shrewd, hard-headed, lower-middle-class Yorkshire women, not three weird sisters lost in erotic fantasy in the moorland mists.

Nor is Wuthering Heights what you might call a romance. In fact, you might even call it an anti-romance. The relationship between the two lovers, if you can call it that, is implacably impersonal. There’s a relentless, elemental, even brutal quality to it, which lies much deeper than mere feeling. We are no longer in the mannered world of Jane Austen. Heathcliff is no Hugh Grant but a pitiless exploiter. Beneath his flinty exterior beats a heart of stone. If some readers have been seduced by him, it is because everyone likes a rogue. In his dealings with Catherine, what Freud calls eros and thanatos, sexuality and the drive for extinction, are impossible to disentangle. Like Jane Eyre, the best-known work of Emily’s sister, Charlotte, the novel is shot through with sado-masochism. If this is love, then there’s nothing in the least pleasant or affable about it. One can’t even speak of it as sexual. It’s more like a fight to the death — an absolute, remorseless, inhuman need for each other with a fierce undertow of violence, one which has little to do with tenderness or affection and perhaps refuses to be placated even in the grave. Almost uniquely, we have a Victorian novel which doesn’t end on a genially upbeat note with that magical solution to all human heartache: marriage.

This is an important milestone in the evolution of the English novel. With the exception of Samuel Richardson’s great 18th-century work Clarissa, which few have read because it’s a million words long, hardly any English novel before Wuthering Heights ends on a tragic note. Even Wuthering Heights is ambiguous in this respect: do Catherine and Heathcliff find fulfilment beyond the grave or not? Then, from the fiction of Thomas Hardy to our own time, the norm becomes a tragic (or at least non-comic) ending. There are a number of reasons for this seismic literary shift, among which is the fact that the Victorians (who lived in perpetual fear of revolution) saw a link between gloom and political disaffection. Part of the purpose of art was to edify its audience, and edified audiences were less likely to tear up the paving stones to build barricades. Charlotte Brontë conforms to this demand in Jane Eyre, blinding and disfiguring Rochester in order to punish his bigamy and bring him, chastened and repentant, to a marriage in which Jane is definitely the boss. Emily bravely refuses this conventional strategy.

Wuthering Heights may tacitly suggest a reason for the strangely asexual nature of the bond between its protagonists. Heathcliff is brought home one night by Cathy’s father and dumped unceremoniously on the family, but he might be “family” even so. He may be old Earnshaw’s bastard child, in which case he and Catherine are half-siblings, and their non-sexual relation springs from an unconscious incest taboo. It’s hard otherwise to see why this gruff yeoman farmer, who doesn’t seem given to spontaneous acts of charity, should give house-room to such an unprepossessing little brat. We shall, alas, never know. Anyway, the intense unity of selves which Catherine and Heathcliff feel, which is hard to speak of as a relationship since relationship implies otherness, works even without this incestuous subtext.

Heathcliffe’s ethnic origins are hard to pin down — hence the pearl-clutching at the news of Fennell casting a white actor in the role. Variously labelled as a gypsy, a Lascar or Indian sailor, a Creole, and a Spanish castaway, it’s hard to know how dark he is, or how much of it is pigmentation and how much the fact that he needs a bath. The fact is, his origins are deliberately made obscure, to highlight his status as an outsider in the tight-knit patriarchal community of the Heights. What kind of outsider doesn’t really matter. Whether he comes from Bournemouth or Borneo is less important than the fact that he is cruelly treated, and thus turned into a monster who seeks to wreak vengeance on those who have abused him. As W.H. Auden writes, “Those to whom evil is done/ Do evil in return.” 

Even so, there are a number of clues buried in the story to Heathcliff’s actual identity. One can make a strong case that he is Irish, as Emerald Fennell is to judge by her surname; and whether the Irish are black or white, as well as orange or green, wasn’t clear to the Victorian middle-class mind. They are of course formally “white” — whatever that means — but they were consistently portrayed at the time (in Punch cartoons, for example) as dark, dangerous and chronically rebellious. They were perceived, so to speak, as spiritually dark-skinned, the Blacks of the British isles. 

Why might Heathcliff hail from John Bull’s other island? Well Wuthering Heights was written as the Great Famine was beginning to grip Ireland, resulting in a million dead and a further million driven into exile. As John Lennon and Paul McCartney illustrate, a lot of the latter group ended up in Liverpool, a city to which the Brontës’ ill-starred alcoholic brother Branwell took a trip in 1845 and perhaps reported to his sisters what he had witnessed there. A few months later, Emily began writing her novel. By 1847, 300,000 destitute Irish immigrants had landed in the port. Images of them as starving scarecrows dressed in rags and with an animal-like growth of black hair appeared in various English magazines. Earnshaw picks up off the Liverpool streets “a dirty, ragged, black-haired child” who speaks a kind of “gibberish”. Many of the children who washed up in Liverpool would have been Irish speakers. In fact, the Famine almost dealt the language the coup de grace, since it was spoken mainly by the poor, and the poor were mostly the ones who died or emigrated. The Irish language didn’t in fact die, but nor did it ever fully recover. Most Irish people speak some Irish in the way that most educated English people speak French, i.e. very badly.

Consider, too, the fact that the name “Brontë” was originally “Brunty”, which like most surnames ending in y (aigh in Irish) is an Irish name. The sisters’ Right-wing clerical father Frenchified it in his quest for respectability in England. Brontë country in Ireland isn’t the Yorkshire moors around Haworth but the region of County Down from which Patrick came. When the gin-soaked, stage-Irish Branwell displeased the local people, they burnt an effigy of him with a herring in one hand and a potato in the other. Branwell was a loyal supporter of the Irish politician Daniel O’Connell, leader of the greatest reform movement of 19th-century Europe.

So assuming, therefore, that Heathcliff really is Irish, perhaps it’s fine for a white actor to represent him. But why are we even thinking in these terms? Why cling to such a naive view of dramatic representation? For to think that every aspect of an actor must accurately represent every aspect of the character he or she plays is absurd. Margot Robbie, who will play Catherine, represents her accurately in so far as she’s a woman, but not in so far as she’s quite a bit older than Catherine is in the book. She may also have a differently shaped nose. Nobody imagines that every feature of an actor’s performance is in this sense representational. If an actor trips and falls over, is it an accident? Or is it required by the script?

Why cling to such a naive view of dramatic representation?

On this view, then, a black actor can play a white figure because his or her ethnicity need not be representational, any more than their height or weight need be. And white actors can play black individuals because we, the audience, provisionally bracket off their ethnicity and don’t take it as representational. But obviously this means that white actors muscle in on most of the parts. 

Surely, though, ethnicity is too important an issue to be bracketed off. And actors from minorities have been cut a rough deal for far too long. So we should aim for a situation in which ethnic minority actors can play white individuals, which means having their actual skin colour temporarily disregarded by the audience without this constituting a put-down. And, indeed, without the audience thinking they are being told that, say, Julius Caesar or Elizabeth I really were black. It also means white actors being able to play black or brown individuals without the audience seeing imperial overtones. 

For all this to happen, though, we will need change not just in the theatre or film industry but in society at large. And the signs, as the far-Right continues to rise throughout the Western world, are not propitious.


Terry Eagleton is a critic, literary theorist, and UnHerd columnist.


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Jerry Carroll
Jerry Carroll
10 days ago

What’s wrong with a handsome, strong-jawed hero for the ladies to flutter over? My next question: Is Terry Eagleton wrong about everything? That has been my reading experience so far.

Geoff W
Geoff W
9 days ago
Reply to  Jerry Carroll

Actually, I thought this was much better than Eagleton’s usual tosh, because he’s writing about literature, which is the field he’s qualified in, whereas usually he writes about something else.
Still, it was disappointing that he was too lazy to spend two minutes online to establish whether Emerald Fennell is Irish or not (the answer seems to be No).

jane baker
jane baker
8 days ago
Reply to  Jerry Carroll

Strong. Even his girlfriend didn’t want to actually marry him.

Sayantani G
Sayantani G
9 days ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lascar
I would expect Mr Eagleton to know that ” lascar” was a term used as a generic for most dark skinned sailors, from Asia as well as Africa.
I am sure he wouldn’t disbelieve his Leftist echo chamber( Wiki) on this
The rest of his diatribe on WH and assorted issues are too ridiculous to respond to!

Caradog Wiliams
Caradog Wiliams
9 days ago
Reply to  Sayantani G

I think that ‘lascar’ meant Asian, and not African. Obviously, people will have used the word to mean anything. Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu books used it a lot and it meant people under the sway of the Chinese, not Chinese but from those countries near to China.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
9 days ago

Funny, I had always understood that a lascar (the word is French) originated in Napoleonic times, in Egypt, and was used to refer to lazy, often treacherous local mercenaries, who would be a liability if they actually saw combat. The word is somewhat dated in French, but still exists. It has roughly the same meaning as the equally dated American word “yardbird”: a useless, uncooperative soldier who is always in trouble.

Caradog Wiliams
Caradog Wiliams
9 days ago
Reply to  UnHerd Reader

I certainly accept what you say. Language is like that, isn’t it? A word is borrowed, the meaning and sometimes spelling changes over the years and then new generations grow into a completely different concept. I guess that different authors at different time have adapted the word to suit their purposes.

mac mahmood
mac mahmood
9 days ago
Reply to  UnHerd Reader

Lascar comes from Persian via Arabic askari which may have a linguistic relationship sicarii, a group of Jewish people who tried to give the Romans a hard time. The French involvement was in adding la or le preceding the word rendering it as l’ascari and then lascar.

Paul Hemphill
Paul Hemphill
9 days ago
Reply to  mac mahmood

The Sicarii were named for their weapon of choice, sharp knives, good for throat cutting. The Arabic word for knife is “sikiyn”. Askari is Arabic and person for military. Everything in etymology is related, eh.

Moshe Simon
Moshe Simon
7 days ago
Reply to  Paul Hemphill

The sica was a long curved Roman dagger that was worn under the bearer’s clothing. The word sicarius in Latin, meaning a stealthy killer, is derived from the name of this implement.

jane baker
jane baker
8 days ago

Specifically from what we now call Bangladesh.

Brett H
Brett H
9 days ago

If an actor trips and falls over, is it an accident? Or is it required by the script?
It might have been Brando. Did he do it on purpose or not? Apart from that not much depth in this piece.

Jonathan Weil
Jonathan Weil
9 days ago

“ Surely, though, ethnicity is too important an issue to be bracketed off. And actors from minorities have been cut a rough deal for far too long. So we should aim for a situation in which ethnic minority actors can play white individuals, which means having their actual skin colour temporarily disregarded by the audience without this constituting a put-down. And, indeed, without the audience thinking they are being told that, say, Julius Caesar or Elizabeth I really were black. It also means white actors being able to play black or brown individuals without the audience seeing imperial overtones.”

Hang on: isn’t this a pretty exact description of “the audience temporarily bracketing off” the actor’s ethnicity? Which is it to be? Brackets or no brackets?

Jerry Carroll
Jerry Carroll
7 days ago
Reply to  Jonathan Weil

I consult Neanderthal cave artwork for original meanings. Anything else is inauthentic or appropriation.

Wild Mare
Wild Mare
9 days ago

I’m amazed that people read this book as a love story, unless their idea of love is a folie à deux between two narcissistic, cruel, manipulative sociopaths. They are a ghastly pair.

Dumetrius
Dumetrius
9 days ago
Reply to  Wild Mare

I do, but then my love life tends to be a bit like this. I haven’t hung any puppies lately tho

Gordon Black
Gordon Black
9 days ago

Your last sentence corrected … “And the signs, as the Western world continues to rise throughout the Western world, are not propitious”.

William Amos
William Amos
9 days ago

“…an important milestone in the evolution of the English novel… hardly any English novel before Wuthering Heights ends on a tragic note.”
Much of the air of numinous mystery which surrounds the genesis of Wuthering Heights is disspiated if one accepts that Emily Bronte drew heavily both in form and content, not from examples drawn from the written novel but rather from the Traditional Ballads of the British Isles.
The Douglas Tragedy (Roud 23), for instance, or The Maid and The Palmer (Roud 2335) both provide potential thematic material but the novel most most obviously resembles the the Scottish Border Ballad -The Raggle Taggle Gypsies (Roud 1) which begins –
“Three gypsies stood at the castle gate.
They sang so high, they sang so low.
The lady sate in her chamber late.
Her heart it melted away as snow.”
Walter Scott had the decency to always include snippets from the ballads on which he drew as prefaratory couplets to his chapters. Not so with the Brontes.
This also, to my mind, clearly locates Heathcliffe’s ethnicity, and clarifies his obscure parentage, as a Romany.

C C
C C
9 days ago
Reply to  William Amos

Do you have any idea why the « murder ballad  » emerged in these areas as a popular theme for songs? The wife or girlfriend gets dispatched in gruesome fashion etc etc. Something to do with social relations in relatively lawless and poor rural societies, perhaps. In anycase , it’s interesting what you say about these types of ballads and their influence on novels, makes sense.

William Amos
William Amos
8 days ago
Reply to  C C

Who can know? But you are right to notice the persistence of the theme.
My own theory is that, apart from the fact that many of the ballads do record historical events, there appears to be a lingering memory, particularly in the the Murder Ballad and the Death Ballad, of the pagan Norse ethic. The Death of Balder from Mediaeval Prose Edda seems to provide something like a plausible model.

jane baker
jane baker
8 days ago
Reply to  William Amos

Little Kathy and her cousin,the son of Linton who H+K drove to drink,go off to live a happy life in the sunshine. How is that not a happy ending,and it’s not ‘tacked on’.

William Amos
William Amos
7 days ago
Reply to  jane baker

Did you find it sufficient consolation for all the pain and anguish that went before? I found it a little bit like the ending of Tate’s Lear, or even the Oresteia.
In the sense that a great deal of the tension is resovled in death (deaths the reader is suborned and induced to find blameable relief in) it could be described as ‘cathartic’ but not, to my mind, as ‘happy’.

jane baker
jane baker
7 days ago
Reply to  William Amos

You so obviously have not read the book. You reveal not the slightest insight.

William Amos
William Amos
7 days ago
Reply to  jane baker

With respect, I have read it with great pleasure a number of times but whether or not my comments ‘reveal any insight’, is of course, entirely beyond me to say.
Opinions, it has been said, are apt to differ – particularly on books.
I will only add that my own reading of Wuthering Heights has probably been irretrievably coloured by Georges Bataille’s dark and unsettling study of it in his Literature and Evil – which you might also find interesting.
That may explain why our conceptions of it differ.

Jerry Carroll
Jerry Carroll
7 days ago
Reply to  William Amos

No one has yet brought up the fact the Brontes were ill from the pollution of the graveyard uphill from them. You’d be depressed, too.

Caroline Galwey
Caroline Galwey
9 days ago

Terry Eagleton sounds as if he hasn’t read ‘Wuthering Heights’ any more than has Emerald Fennell. Why else would he say that the book ends unhappily when in fact it ends with oblivion for the destructive love/haters, reconciliation between the warring houses and, yes, a marriage?
Agree with his points about Heathcliff, though. It’s beyond idiotic that pundits are going on as if the role is a heart-throb or role model that’ll provide ‘positive’ representation for an actor of colour, instead of what he is, one of literature’s great monsters.

William Amos
William Amos
9 days ago

More than that, Professor Eagleton made the same erroneous point, in an earlier essay, about the novels Thomas Hardy.
On the 16 Aug 2023 in an essay for Unherd he wrote “Before Thomas Hardy came to write in the late 19th century, there was scarcely a novelist in Britain whose work concluded on a downbeat note.”
That immediately struck me, a humble autodidact book-worm, as a wobbly thing for a Professor of Literature to assert.
Since writing that he appears to have moved his error back 40 odd years.
Eventually, perhaps, he will be pleased to finally inform and remind us all that in fact Caxton’s 15th Century prose reworking of Malory’s Morte D’Arthur, the very first English Novel, itself has an unimpeachably ‘unhappy ending’.

jane baker
jane baker
8 days ago

Exactly. It seems almost no one has actually READ THE BOOK.

Dumetrius
Dumetrius
9 days ago

In about 1988, someone should have installed a nice little polished bell, emitting a particular tone, such that when you rang it, someone came to politely usher Terry Eagleton away.

Fran Barrett
Fran Barrett
9 days ago

Nice article Tezza, but you couldn’t help yourself at the end there, could you?

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
9 days ago

This essay seems foolish to me. Many traditionally white characters of the Western canon are being “re-imagined” now as people of color, but if a white person attempts to adopt any elements of a non-white culture, they’re excoriated for “cultural appropriation.”

jane baker
jane baker
8 days ago
Reply to  UnHerd Reader

A good actor can portray the character whatever.

Jerry Carroll
Jerry Carroll
7 days ago
Reply to  jane baker

You must be an actress. The Method kind would be my guess.

jane baker
jane baker
7 days ago
Reply to  Jerry Carroll

I’m a star at histrionics.

William Amos
William Amos
7 days ago
Reply to  jane baker

I entirely agree and Lucian Msamati was spellbinding as Iago at the RSC. But it needs to work both ways.
How I would love to have seen Rory Kinnear play Othello, once in my life. What a perfect role for him.

William Amos
William Amos
7 days ago
Reply to  UnHerd Reader

Indeed and various roles which were once of ambiguous or contestable ethnic makeup have been decisively annexed to the ‘Black ouevre’.
Othello, for instance, was for many years understood to be a moorish North African and a key role for actors to master. Cleopatra, similarly. Now Heathcliff appears to have been excised from the acceptable multi-racial portfolio.
We are asked at to be colour-blind and yet acutely aware of the colour of the actors skin at one and the same time. And crash goes the fourth-wall, to everyone’s detriment.
Othello is one of the great roles in English theatre, in all theatre. It is about the themes of wickedness, jealousy and revenge, not at all ‘race’ as we now understand it. And yet I doubt within my lifetime I will be able to see a young non-black actor try his mettle in that role again.

A J
A J
8 days ago

Eagleton has seriously misunderstood the zeitgeist of purity spirals and oppression Olympics. Yes, ethnic minority actors can play white characters, because that redresses a historical wrong, but white actors must never play ethnic minority characters because that perpetuates the same wrong; that ethnic minority actors have been overlooked for parts because white actors could play any part while ethnic minority actors could only play those ethnic minority characters that the white actors hadn’t nabbed.

This was a reasonable correction at the outset, but the advent of purity spiralism is taking it too an absurd degree, as is evidenced by this particular casting outcry. It is now being asserted that only gay actors can play gay characters, ditto for disabled and so-called trans actors. No doubt other minorities will emerge as the spiraling continues, until “acting” will become meaningless; each “actor” will only be able to play his-, her- or xir- self.

The irony is that Eagleton himself was a major proponent of cultural Marxism, which has led us to this sorry state, but seems himself unable to recognise the monster he created.

jane baker
jane baker
8 days ago
Reply to  A J

It might be problematic for a black actor to play Heathcliff. We might hear shouts of dissent and racial stereotyping as Heathcliff is a very nasty character who behaves with appalling cruelty both actual and psychological. It’s a bit akin to our political administrations,the last one and this one,keenness to get young people is areas of high unemployment interested in working on farms. They are NOT THAT STUPID. I mean the areas they target are mainly black population,the idea of suggesting black young people,male or female,work in the fields,dress it up how you will. Ooh,Dodgy!

jane baker
jane baker
8 days ago

But Wuthering Heights does have a happy ending. I’ll get back to that.I read WH when I was 14 as it seems masses of girls have and do. But I was in the 20%? who thought Heathcliff was highly undesirable and a nasty piece of work. About 80% of those 14 year old girls fall in love with Heathcliff. I can’t see why. That must explain all the abusive relationships and battered wives. I loathed Kathy too (Big Kathy). In the book it’s made clear that she and Heathcliff form this snarky mean-spirited bond and set out to,and do,psychologically destroy her brother Linton,who is weak and pathetic and turns to drink to cope with the constant mocking snarkiness from K+ H. There were Kathys like that in my class at school,the Mean Girls,so I recognised her! Now whether or not H+K had a sexual thing going on,rolls in the heather,and I think they did,but for all her passion Big Kathy chose to MARRY.nice Edwin who.could give her status in their enclosed community,a nice house,nice clothes,and an income. So much for the Grande Passione. I recently reread WH as I was given a copy as a thank you gift. Of course as an (old) adult I saw a lot more of the detail I missed as a child but I saw I was right about Heathcliff. He is even more horrible second time round. The real heroine of the book is Big Kathys daughter Little Kathy who marries Heathcliffs horrible son,as they didn’t have dating apps then dnd her choice is limited. She stands up to Heathcliff and gets knocked about by him but stays defiant. The happy ending that all the film + tv makers ignore is that Little Kathy befriends Lintons son who lives at WH,has never been educated and who Heathcliff treats with malicious cruelty. This young man is the real heir but H has kept him in a state of idiocy. Kathy gently leads him into the sunshine and at the end of the book they are leaving WH all locked up in dark cold with the two tortured spirits inside and going to live in a sunny farmhouse down in the valley.