Dr Rachel Mann - 13/02/26

Available for over a year

Good morning. Well, after months of hype and controversy, the day has arrived. Emerald Fennell’s version of Wuthering Heights is out in cinemas today, just in time for the Valentine’s weekend. Critics report that it takes some bold decisions about Emily Brontë’s classic novel, but at its heart is the tumultuous love story of Cathy Earnshaw and Heathcliffe. As a picture of love I have always found the novel disconcerting. Heathcliffe is obsessed with Cathy, so much so that he opens her grave after her death and asks her to haunt him. For me, Wuthering Heights is really a genius gothic story about revenge and hatred, as Heathcliffe seeks to get back at the Earnshaws for their treatment of him. If Fennell is presenting it as a vision of love for modern times, I am troubled. Heathcliffe and Cathy are not just star-crossed lovers but toxic ones, shaped by obsession. The theologian W.H. Vanstone says ‘where the object of love is truly an “other”, the activity of love is always precarious.” What he means is that when we truly love someone, we respect their freedom and difference and allow them to be themselves. He adds, ‘Love proceeds by no assured programme.’ Love, then, is not controlling or coercive or obsessive but sets people free. In suggesting this Vanstone draws on those words of St Paul: ‘Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way’. Part of what attracts audiences to Wuthering Heights is its intensity, amplified by the wild Yorkshire moor setting. Cathy and Heathcliffe might be doomed lovers, but I think we find them deeply attractive precisely because their passion is so charged and dangerous. In contrast, it might seem that a Christian picture of love is passionless and dull. I’m not so sure. St Paul also says that ‘love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.’ This is a vision of God’s love for humanity, but it also applies to human love. I find this vision alive in a work like Jane Austen’s Persuasion. Its lovers, Captain Wentworth and Anne Eliot, take the entire novel to get back together after wounding each other emotionally in their youth. Despite their anger and doubt, their love quietly endures. And as for passion, how about this? Just before being reunited, Wentworth says to Anne, ‘You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope … Unjust I may have been, weak and resentful I have been, but never inconstant. For you alone, I think and plan.’ A picture of love, that for me, beats Cathy and Heathcliffe’s every time.