‘Wuthering Heights’ and the birth of the toxic boyfriend

If, at any point in your life, you have ever believed that women say they want nice guys but really want bad guys, or that love has to hurt to be real, or that romance and stalking are basically the same thing, I think we all know which entities are to blame:

1. The manosphere

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2. The patriarchy

3. A young British woman who died in 1848 of tuberculosis at the age of 30, but not before unleashing upon the world the most problematic love story of all time, “Wuthering Heights.”

The novel, by Emily Brontë, was published in 1847 and critics did not immediately know what to make of it. One called it “wild, confused, disjointed, and improbable” but also full of “considerable power.” Another wrote that it had “all the faults of ‘Jane Eyre’ [written by Emily’s sister Charlotte] magnified a thousand fold” and that “the only consolation which we have in reflecting upon it is that it will never be generally read.”

More than one reviewer simply called it “strange.”

The biggest issue for contemporaneous reviewers was the novel’s lack of moral center. Nobody is good. No lessons are learned. “Wuthering Heights” is about multiple generations of Yorkshire neighbors who torment and love and hate one another until finally they die.

Catherine Earnshaw grows up running around the moors with Heathcliff, an urchin whom her father has taken in as a ward, and whom Catherine’s biological brother, Hindley, intensely envies. After the Earnshaws’ father dies, Catherine realizes she’s in love with Heathcliff, but Hindley demotes his rival to a life of penurious servitude. Enter: Edgar Linton, a decent bowl of oatmeal from a nearby estate who proposes marriage, which Catherine accepts, believing that access to her husband’s fortune will allow her to save Heathcliff from poverty.

Wow, are these people about to get miserable. Heathcliff runs away. Catherine gets pregnant. Heathcliff returns rich. He marries Edgar’s sister, Isabella, in part to secure his place in Catherine’s orbit but also to torture her for rejecting him. It works. Catherine collapses in heartbreak. Heathcliff begins abusing Isabella, who sends S.O.S. letters: “Is Mr. Heathcliff a man?” she writes the housekeeper. “If so, is he mad? If not, is he a devil?”

In modern parlance, this is what an AI chatbot would vomit out if you asked for a definition of toxic romance. Heathcliff love bombs. Catherine breadcrumbs. They are trauma-bonded through generational abuse. If my daughter tried to date Heathcliff, I would personally deliver her to Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s doorstep and beg feminism to fix her.

But we are not here to talk about what we want for our daughters. We are here to talk about what we have succumbed to ourselves.

Because along with all the psychological torture, Heathcliff has lines like this, in which he compares his own feelings for Catherine to Linton’s:

“If he loved with all the powers of his puny being, he couldn’t love as much in eighty years as I could in a day.”

Or this, after Catherine has accused Heathcliff of breaking her heart by leaving:

“Misery and degradation, and death, and nothing that God or Satan could inflict would have parted us, you, of your own will, did it. I have not broken your heart. You have broken it; and in breaking it, you have broken mine.”

Or this, after he has rushed to the dying Catherine’s side:

“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 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!”

Do you see it? Do you understand the Heathcliff Problem?

If you were the random woman sitting behind me a few nights ago in a preview screening of a new “Wuthering Heights” movie, you must not understand the problem, because she spent Catherine’s death scene snorting, sighing and at one point muttering “oh come ON.”

But if you were me, an ostensible professional who had brought her editor along as her plus-one, you spent the scene reliving all the terrible, exhilarating, terrible but exhilarating romances you had ever experienced as a young, dumb person, and ordering yourself not to sob in front of your boss.

– – –

Right, the movie. That’s the reason we are here. Emerald Fennell has directed a new adaptation of “Wuthering Heights,” except that the quotation marks are part of the title (so, “‘Wuthering Heights’”?), signaling that what you’re about to watch is not faithful to the source material.

Fennell (“Killing Eve,” “Promising Young Woman”) is one of the more compelling feminist writer-directors working today, and nearly all of the changes she’s made to the Brontë text serve to give the women around Heathcliff more agency, thereby softening him and making his brutishness more palatable. Casting Jacob Elordi was controversial – the novel calls him “dark-skinned … in aspect,” which many readers, including me, had taken to mean “non-White.” But the fact that he is not hideous to look at certainly helps.

One big difference is that the new film does away with the Hindley character, instead transferring his alcoholism and cruelty to Catherine’s father. A second change is that the movie allows us inside the wretched marriage of Heathcliff and Isabella, which has been recast as less abusive and more mutually diabolical. Yes, he treats her like dirt, but he’s explicitly clear beforehand that this is his plan – she’s a tool, not a love interest – and yet she still wants to marry him.

“Do you want me to stop?” he asks again and again, a model of consent even as he warns her of his savagery, and she repeatedly tells him to keep going. Later at their home, Isabella writes her desperate letters not in secret but with Heathcliff’s full participation: The two of them fiendishly plot what would most pique Catherine’s attention. In this version, Isabella – who also delights in mocking Heathcliff for his illiteracy – is kind of a dirty bird!

But the movie’s most profound artistic decision is to explore the squishy boundary between love and disgust. The things that draw us and the things that repel us. The movie opens in darkness to the sound of a rhythmic squeak and a man gasping and moaning, and you think – oh, you know what’s going on here – but then the sun bursts in on the scene, and we’re actually watching a public hanging, a criminal gasping on the noose. This happens again and again: Are we listening to sex, or the sound of a pig being disemboweled? When Heathcliff, and later Catherine, run their fingers through a mess of broken eggs that each has prankishly placed on the other’s bed, are they disgusted or titillated?

The trick of “Wuthering Heights” has always been that the answer is both. The opposite of love is not hate, as the saying goes, it’s indifference. In the world of romance, feeling a lot is always better than feeling a little. And that’s what all the Heathcliffs and bad boyfriends and teases and cads exist to do. They make you feel. A lot. Because they love you so much. They have to be bad because they love you so much. They love you so much that they have to treat other people terribly. The love. It’s big.

This isn’t love, actually, but try telling that to a 19-year-old lit major on her first Brontë acid trip. And try telling that to all the wingding male pickup artists out there instructing their followers that when women say no, it’s a starting point rather than a complete sentence.

Try telling that to 200 years of literary criticism, and the dozens of Reddit threads that have titles like “Heathcliff is really a monster” and responses like “I know but I love him.”

Because starting Friday, you can go to a theater and pay $16 to watch Margot Robbie as Catherine say no to Elordi as Heathcliff, and, when you spot the longing in her eyes, you can understand the same thing that he understands when he hoists her up by her bodice laces with just one hand: that she really means yes.

– – –

You know what this issue is? It’s an Old Testament/New Testament problem. The Heathcliff in the first half of the novel is a brute, but a comprehensible one. His actions aren’t good, but they exist on a spectrum of human emotion that you can wrap your brain around. Yes, one would be furious if one overheard the love of one’s life tell someone else that marrying you would “degrade” her. Yes, it would suck badly if you went off to make the fortune required to be worthy in her eyes, but by the time you’d done it, she’d married someone else.

(We’re not going to speak of the mistreatment of Isabella’s dog, which also occurs in the first half. We’re going to assume Brontë understands she literally screwed the pooch on that one and would change it if she could.)

But Heathcliff’s malevolence really peaks in the second half of the novel, which I hadn’t remembered until I reread it last week. Catherine dies and there’s still 200 pages left. Heathcliff uses those 200 pages to ruin the lives of the next generation of Earnshaws and Lintons. He punishes Catherine’s daughter because her father was Edgar, not him. He punishes his own son because his mother was Isabella, not Catherine.

He repeats the abuse that he suffered as a child, he seizes property, he’s monstrous. Nobody gets a moment’s peace until he dies, a full three decades in the future.

The new movie doesn’t show any of this, nor do other cinematic adaptations. It cuts off at the novel’s midpoint and for good reason: because when Catherine dies, any sympathy we might have had for Heathcliff dies too. Now he’s not a sexy man propelled by love and longing, he’s an absolute weirdo who needs whatever the 19th century version of therapy is. (Leeches?)

The people who create posts on Reddit about Heathcliff being a monster seem to remember that the second half of the novel exists. The people who love him anyway might have done what I did: quietly forget it. Treat it as a collection of ideas for a sequel that somebody accidentally published. Treat it as apocrypha, not canon.

Treat it as the escapism your silly heart occasionally longs for. It’s fiction, after all – the idea that somebody is so madly in love with you that they would rather your decrepit, annoying ghost shamble after them for all eternity than live even one minute alone.

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