I’ve not yet recovered from the sex scene discourse, historical accuracy handwringing, and wild speculation about the interior sexual lives of woman during the Wuthering Heights film press junket earlier this year. By the time Emerald Fennel’s adaptation came out — on Valentines Day no less — I had no energy left for a single Hot Take.
Wuthering Heights is my favorite gothic novel, and it was a key influence on me becoming a gothic author myself. It was a foundational influence on my Unearthly Delights trilogy, a folkloric gothic whychoose which dares to ask: what if Heathcliff and Cathy had to seduce the Lintons to save themselves from a faery curse?
I wanted to keep Bronte’s magnum opus as my private comfort read, and not spoil my relationship to the novel with the troubling chatter about Fennel’s adaptation — particularly its use of sexuality and kink. In the end, I compromised with myself, releasing one essay about Wuthering Heights for my publisher’s website, and loudly proclaiming I was done talking about it otherwise.
Spoiler: I am not done talking about it.
I’m bringing you an updated version of that essay today, along with critical discussion of the ways audiences receive sex scenes, and why the eroticism of Wuthering Heights remains compelling and unsettling and unresolved, 178 years later.
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why Wuthering Heights is a generational trauma narrative before it is a love story
how scene discourse refuses to truly engage with the erotic even while prohibiting or permitting explicit material
the false binary between the sexually exciting and the intellectually stimulating
living an embodied erotic life with intellectual integrity
finding echos of yourself in the gothic labyrinth of stories that keep repeating
cycle-breaking as the ultimate expression of romance
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