Brontë Studies

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The Queer Ecological Aesthetics of Wuthering

Heights

Anhiti Patnaik

To cite this article: Anhiti Patnaik (2021) The Queer Ecological Aesthetics of Wuthering�Heights ,
Brontë Studies, 46:1, 30-42, DOI: 10.1080/14748932.2021.1835059

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14748932.2021.1835059

Published online: 01 Dec 2020.

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 € STUDIES,
BRONTE Vol. 46 No. 1, January 2021, 30–42

The Queer Ecological Aesthetics of

Wuthering Heights
Anhiti Patnaik

This essay explores how the contemporary English filmmaker Andrea

Arnold invents a queer ecological aesthetic to adapt Emily Bront€e’s classic
novel Wuthering Heights in her 2011 film by the same title. A queer eco-
logical aesthetic combines queer, ecofeminist and postcolonial approaches
to disavow the institutional and cultural ways in which white heterosexist
patriarchy ‘sexualizes’ nature and ‘naturalizes’ heterosexuality. Arnold’s film
forges subtle intimacies between nature and sexuality and the human and
the non-human by focusing on Catherine and Heathcliff’s ambiguous erotic
encounters on the moor. In lieu of a formal plot, dialogue and musical
score, Arnold locates Catherine’s and Heathcliff’s desires within a complex
mesh of ecological and creaturely narratives. Her film critiques ecophobic
and erotophobic discourses in the West by depicting tactile and affective
gestures between Catherine and Heathcliff that may be deemed ‘queer eco-
logical’. This is also evident in Heathcliff’s intersectional character as a
feral/non-white/non-human child whose presence threatens the white het-
erosexist patriarchal structures of the Yorkshire gentry. The essay reveals
how Arnold revives the subversive impact of the original novel in the
Victorian age for a contemporary ecophobic and erotophobic audience.

KEYWORDS €, nature, non-

Andrea Arnold, ecofeminist, ecophobia, Emily Bronte
human, queer

The concept of a ‘queer ecology’ in contemporary theory refers to the conver-

gence of the struggle against sexual oppression and homophobia and the struggle
for environmental justice and conservation. It encompasses an interdisciplinary
gamut of aesthetics and politics that subvert structures of white heterosexist
patriarchy and institutional articulations of the ‘natural’ and the ‘normal’ in the
West. Although it may appear as if the two terms ‘queer’ and ‘ecology’ have
nothing in common, critics like Timothy Morton argue that they are (or should
be) connected. Morton states that it is impossible to work against the structures
of compulsory heterosexuality without working simultaneously against

# The Bront€e Society 2020 DOI: 10.1080/14748932.2021.1835059

 THE QUEER ECOLOGICAL AESTHETICS OF WUTHERING HEIGHTS 31

compulsory nature. Without subsuming one category to the other, Morton

believes that ‘fully and properly, ecology is queer theory and queer theory is ecol-
ogy’.1 Queer theory in the West no longer resists homophobia alone, but also
deconstructs the perceived ontological and cultural gap between the ‘self’ and the
‘other’. By locating human narratives within an ecosystem of creaturely desires
and relations, a queer ecological aesthetic generates empathy for the ‘other’. It
removes the anthropocentric bias in scientific discourse that defines sexual
dimorphism and creates an imaginative and ecologically sensitive language to
envisage a ‘nontotalizable, open-ended concatenation of interrelations that blur
and confound boundaries at practically any level: between species, between the
living and the nonliving, between organism and environment’.2 Comprehending
this ‘mesh’ or ecosystem of relations between the human and the non-human3
does not come naturally to us; as Morton observes, ‘visualizing the mesh is diffi-
cult: it defies our imaginative capacities and transcends iconography’.4 Indeed, it
is challenging to read fictional narratives that transcend racial and heteronorma-
tive boundaries and portray erotic love using a hybrid cross-species relationship
— but this does not imply that it is impossible to imagine.
The English filmmaker Andrea Arnold’s 2011 cinematic adaptation of Emily
Bront€e’s novel Wuthering Heights provides an imaginative framework for a queer
ecological aesthetic. Catherine and Heathcliff’s iconic love story, which has been
central to most cinematic adaptations of the novel, is treated as but one of the
many creaturely relationships and narratives that flourish in the irremediably
complex environment of rural Yorkshire. The film strips human dialogue to a
minimum and opts instead for an ecologically sensitive language composed of
feral, tactile and affective gestures of desire that may be deemed ‘queer’. The film
also works against traditional adaptations that have portrayed Heathcliff as a
Byronic hero with traits of white toxic masculinity. Arnold produces a hybrid
and intersectional character for Heathcliff that threatens the white heterosexist
patriarchal structures of the Yorkshire gentry. She thus draws attention to the
physical and symbolic violence inherent in speciesism, or what Greta Gaard calls
the ‘ecophobia’ and ‘erotophobia’ of Western culture. Gaard asserts, ‘Western
culture’s devaluation of the erotic parallels its devaluation of women and of
nature; in effect these devaluations are mutually reinforcing’.5 On the basis of
certain universally recognised dualisms like nature/culture, male/female, white/
non-white, normal/queer and human/non-human, Gaard claims that any form of
miscegenation is unequivocally repressed and denaturalised. These dualisms
define nature as being natural or ‘normal’ rather than the domain of the natural
environment. Gaard unveils the common historical, epistemological and political
roots of homophobia and ‘ecophobia’ in the West by showing how both emerge
from ‘erotophobic’ discourses that territorialise human bodies and desires. To be
truly inclusive therefore, Gaard argues that ‘any theory of ecofeminism must take
into consideration the findings of queer theory’.6
Del Kathryn Barton’s ecofeminist adaptation7 of Oscar Wilde’s short story
‘The Nightingale and the Rose’ beautifully captures the ‘queer’ and non-human
32 ANHITI PATNAIK

elements of Wilde’s original fairy tale, where a nightingale is the heroine of an

intensely ‘human’ tragedy. The ecological environment of the garden in Barton’s
immersive film bears witness to the nightingale’s suicide through large sentient
eyes on the leaves, trees, grass and flowers. Barton constructs the nightingale’s
body with exquisite detail down to each paper feather. Her choice to depict the
nightingale with a pair of human breasts is the most well-defined aspect of her
queer ecological aesthetic. Barton’s animation draws attention to Wilde’s valor-
isation of empathy, sentimental love and the Romantic imagination in the nine-
teenth century. The nightingale appears more ‘human’ and humane than the
student and his beloved, whose romance is depicted as superficial, self-centred
and ‘ecophobic’. The ‘mesh’ between the human and the non-human is perfectly
visualised in Barton’s film in the shot where the nightingale sits on the student’s
face when she promises to deliver a red rose to him. The ornate attire that
Barton designs for the Professor’s daughter also fuses fabric, flesh, flora and
fauna in a literal representation of the tapestry of queer ecological relations that
Morton calls for in his essay. Similarly, Arnold’s version of Wuthering Heights
questions the ‘erotophobic’ power structures that had circumscribed Catherine
and Heathcliff’s love in Emily Bront€e’s novel in two crucial ways — first, by
emphasising Heathcliff’s ‘otherness’ through his racial and sexual alterity and
second, by narrating the tragic love story almost entirely from the perspective of
the animal and insect life on the moor. Representing the ecological environment
as a human witness allows contemporary feminist artists like Barton and Arnold
to ‘visualize the mesh’ between the human and the non-human.

‘Bonny bird’: on the epistemological irreducibility of a

queer ecology
It is worth interrogating how the term ‘queer’ functions in a neo-Victorian queer
ecological aesthetic as opposed to how ‘queerness’ is often defined in Victorian
literary criticism. For instance, Jean Kennard’s essay ‘Lesbianism and the
Censoring of Wuthering Heights’ avers that the ambiguity of Catherine’s and
Heathcliff’s desires may have originated in Emily Bront€e’s own homoerotic lean-
ings. Kennard is struck by the ‘curiously asexual’ relationship between Catherine
and Heathcliff in the novel and Emily Bront€e’s goal to produce sympathy for a
‘sadistic, vengeful hero’. Kennard speculates that Heathcliff’s desire to avenge his
repression at Wuthering Heights may have been symbolic of Emily’s own
repressed sexuality. She draws attention to the fact that Charlotte Bront€e heavily
edited Wuthering Heights in 1850 and ‘adopted the role of mediator between
Emily Bront€e and an uncomprehending Victorian public’.8 She alleges that
Charlotte destroyed some of Emily’s poetry and posthumous letters apparently
because ‘it was Emily Bront€e’s lesbianism that Charlotte knew of, feared the reve-
lation of in Wuthering Heights, and was attempting to repress’.9 To call Emily
Bront€e a ‘lesbian’ is of course anachronistic, which Kennard acknowledges: ‘I do
not claim that Emily Bront€e was a lesbian in any modern sense of the term [ … ]
 THE QUEER ECOLOGICAL AESTHETICS OF WUTHERING HEIGHTS 33

nor am I claiming that Emily consciously set out to encode homosexuality in

Wuthering Heights’.10 However, Kennard attributes the tragic fate of Catherine
and Heathcliff’s thwarted love story to Emily’s repressed lesbianism. She
proposes that, ‘Charlotte’s censorship of Emily’s life and work is far more typical
of someone who is trying to hide information she thinks of as shameful, informa-
tion that, if revealed, would damage not only her sister’s reputation but by
association her own and that of her family’.11
This biographical approach is fairly commonplace in queer readings of
Victorian literature, be it of Tennyson’s In Memoriam or Wilde’s The Picture of
Dorian Gray. Critics such as Kennard believe that novels like Wuthering Heights
challenge white heterosexist patriarchy only as a form of authorial wish-fulfil-
ment or ‘queer dream’.12 Nevertheless, it is too narrow, perhaps even specious,
to categorise the ‘queerness’ of a fictional love story primarily through the
repressed sexuality of its author and other Victorian medico-legal discourses of
same-sex desire. All that this determinist approach accomplishes is to confine the
‘body’ of a novel to the body of its author. A more fundamental question regard-
ing the ambiguous representation of nature and sexuality in Wuthering Heights
needs to be posed — how did Emily Bront€e portray queer and non-human desires
using the ecological environment? With regard to the term ‘ecology’, Ivonne
Devant provides information about Emily’s strong emotional connection to the
natural environment. In the heyday of industrialism and urban culture, Devant
claims that Emily was not only a ‘worshipper of nature’ but may be called a
‘forerunner of environmentalism’.13 Once more, to refer to Emily as an
‘environmentalist’ is anachronistic, but Devant discusses scenes from the author’s
diaries that describe Emily’s deep empathy for the non-human:
Significantly, in her diary paper written on a rainy night in July 1841, Emily
described an ordinary day at home, including her beloved pets as inhabitants of the
house. She wrote: ‘I am seated in the dining room alone [ … ] Victoria and
Adelaide [Emily’s geese] are ensconced in the peat-house — Keeper is in the
kitchen — Nero [Emily’s tame hawk] in his cage’.14

This ecological sensitivity is manifested in Emily’s novel — set as it is in a small

rural community like Haworth — where Catherine and Heathcliff’s childhood
interactions on the moor blur the boundary between flesh and fowl, human and
non-human. Devant states that the post-mortem return of Catherine’s ‘half-
human half-nature spirit’15 would have disturbed the Victorian reader’s dualistic
view of nature versus culture, civilisation versus wilderness, and the ‘inside’ ver-
sus the ‘outside’. By adopting an ‘ecopsychological lens’ to read the novel, which
she defines as a ‘re-earthing’ of the mind that privileges ‘our psychological rela-
tion with the environment from the inner viewpoint of the earth itself’, Devant
critiques older readings of Wuthering Heights that locate Catherine and
Heathcliff’s love in the ‘traditional Romantic context of human self-
centredness’.16
34 ANHITI PATNAIK

Contemporary queer theory is no longer restricted to studying how homosex-

ual and transsexual bodies were forced to comply with white heterosexist patri-
archy. Its scope has broadened radically to include multiple and multiplying
zones of desire and danger. Judith Halberstam, David Eng and Jose Esteban
Munoz assert in their essay ‘What’s Queer about Queer Studies Now?’ that noth-
ing deters the emancipatory and deconstructive project of queer theory as being
tied to the biological framework of a homosexual body. This ontological deter-
minism relies on another kind of ‘erotophobia’ where ‘nature’ becomes a dirty
word used to refer to reproductive and evolutionary discourses of the Victorian
age. ‘Nature’ was an evaluative medico-legal term — to be natural or unnatural.
However, the definition of nature as an alien domain of the non-human — wild,
feral and creaturely — is often overlooked by queer theorists. Halberstam, Eng
and Munoz thus believe that we must be ‘ever vigilant to the fact that sexuality
is intersectional, not extraneous to other modes of difference, and calibrated to a
firm understanding of queer as a political metaphor without a fixed referent’.17
Such efforts have overcome various homo-normalizing political agendas in the
West that do not address intersectional problems of ontological apartheid and
speciesism. In the same vein, Nicole Seymour insists that ‘nature’ possesses the
same semantic elasticity as the term ‘queer’; both imply an essence as well as a
site of lived experience. Seymour’s book Strange Natures: Futurity, Empathy, and
the Queer Ecological Imagination refuses to collapse ‘“nature” qua the threat-
ened natural world into “nature” qua the threats of heteronormativity and
homophobia’.18 Arnold’s film deconstructs this speciesism quite deftly by locat-
ing Catherine and Heathcliff’s love in the raw and sublime wilderness of the
Yorkshire moor. She employs an ecologically sensitive musical score of insect
noises, wings fluttering, rain thrashing against windows, leaking roofs and crea-
tures burrowing at night. In Strange Natures, Seymour focuses on such ecofemin-
ist depictions in contemporary film and fiction that ‘explicitly link the queer to
the natural world through an empathetic and ethical imagination’.19
In Arnold’s film, when Mr Earnshaw brings an uncivilised ‘creature’,
Heathcliff, to Wuthering Heights, the other uncivilised ‘creature’, Catherine, spits
at him. This initial feral reaction is succeeded by words of deep compassion and
affinity: ‘Are you hurt? Can you understand me? Come’.20 Catherine then
teaches Heathcliff the word ‘lapwing’ and like an amateur ornithologist, shows
him her large collection of bird feathers. Arnold also promotes Catherine’s role
from the mere object position of Heathcliff’s love interest — as is common in
most cinematic adaptations of Wuthering Heights — to her original subject pos-
ition in Emily’s novel as a budding naturalist. Take for example how Catherine
shreds her pillow when she is bedridden in the novel, and identifies the bird
feathers in it: ‘And here is a moorcock’s; and this — I should know it among a
thousand — it’s a lapwing’s. Bonny bird; wheeling over our heads in the middle
of the moor. It wanted to get to its nest, for the clouds touched the swells, and it
felt rain coming’.21 In her essay, Devant argues that from an ‘exclusive human
angle’ Catherine appears ‘mad’ in this episode, but from an ‘ecopsychological’
 THE QUEER ECOLOGICAL AESTHETICS OF WUTHERING HEIGHTS 35

lens, her naming of the feathers shows her empathy with the birds and natural
life of the moor. Catherine’s descent into mania is thus a ‘queer’ return to the
ecological language of her childhood. Instead of depicting Catherine as a caged
bird longing to fly home but dying in captivity, Arnold’s film transforms her into
that very ‘bonny bird’. Catherine’s spirit returns at the end of the film not as a
spectre, but a lapwing that Heathcliff observes flying over the moor. ‘She’ sheds a
feather guiding him away from the ‘erotophobic’ confines of Wuthering Heights
towards the ‘queer’ realm of the wilderness. Devant notes that, ‘Catherine’s ghost
seems to leave an ecological message focused on the value of inhabiting nature,
which is central to the novel’.22
Arnold departs from Emily’s original plot by beginning and ending the love
story in the nursery that Catherine and Heathcliff grew up in; Lockwood and the
second generational characters of the 1847 text are absent. In the opening scene
of Arnold’s film, Heathcliff weeps and listens to Catherine’s spirit ‘speaking’ to
him through the branches of a tree tapping on the windowpane. On the walls of
the nursery, the audience sees the memorable engraving from the novel
‘Catherine Heathcliff’. However, the other heterosexist patriarchal inscriptions
‘Catherine Earnshaw’ and ‘Catherine Linton’ are missing. The names ‘Catherine’
and ‘Heathcliff’ are located one on top of the other to erase the distinction
between masculine and feminine and the self and the other. It is almost as if they
are fused into one hybrid creature rather than signifying an appellative shift in
Catherine’s name after marriage. The rudimentary engraving of a bird next to
Catherine’s name is an important feral image that reappears at the end of
Arnold’s film when Heathcliff sees the lapwing fly over the moor. Benjamin
Secher states that the film ‘cleaves fiercely to the wild spirit, if not the word, of
Bront€e’s unsettling text, steering a ragged course far removed from the conven-
tions of period romance. There’s no swooning here, no happy endings’.23 This
does not mean, however, that Arnold’s film has a tragic ending. Catherine’s death
is unfortunate to be sure, but it is shown to be a part of the natural processes of
life and death on the moor she and Heathcliff played in — where flies are caught
in spider webs and rabbits hunted by dogs. Arnold also shows the naturalness of
Catherine’s return to the earth as opposed to the Gothic unnaturalness of her
spectral presence in Emily’s novel.
Like the nightingale in Wilde’s fairy tale, Catherine proves herself to be a ‘true
lover’ and not merely Heathcliff’s love interest in Arnold’s film. ‘Here at last is a
true lover’24 exclaims the nightingale in Wilde’s story before she sacrifices herself
for the creation of a red rose. The rose inseminated by the nightingale’s song and
blood is born of a strange mystical union between art and flesh, as it blurs the
boundary between nature and culture and the human and the non-human. Even
as the nightingale dies for the gift of this rose to the student, he proves himself to
be a false or callous lover when he tosses the rose aside. The story shows how an
animal is capable of an exalted spiritual love that transcends normative defini-
tions of erotic desire. Wilderness is not an emotional backdrop to the story, as in
the traditional English pastoral, and erotic desire is no longer defined as a lowly,
36 ANHITI PATNAIK

creaturely or bestial impulse. The plot of Wilde’s story shifts from the peripheral
human drama to the central moment of the bird’s martyrdom. Wilde’s story
appears ‘queer ecological’ due to its intimacy with the creaturely as opposed to
other works in his oeuvre that have been classified as queer for homoerotic con-
tent. Like Emily’s novel, Wilde’s Romantic empathy and imagination have a great
resonance for the contemporary project of queer ecology, ‘since humans cannot
always see the consequences of their actions on the environment immediately,
nor the intricate relationships among all the components in an ecosystem, they
must be able to imagine them in order to act empathetically and ethically’.25 This
‘intricate relationship’ with nature is precisely what the student fails to imagine
in Wilde’s story.
By detaching the term ‘queer’ from its fixed referent of same-sex human desire,
queer theory may thus be feralized on Halberstam’s terms. A queer ecological
aesthetic links homoeroticism with wilderness to generate a reverse-discourse to
the traditional pairing of homosexuality with high culture, elite art and literature,
decadence and artifice through gay icons such as Oscar Wilde. As Catriona
Mortimer-Sandilands writes, ‘queer ecology suggests, then, a new practice of eco-
logical knowledges, spaces, and politics that places central attention on challeng-
ing hetero-ecologies from the perspective of non-normative sexual and gender
positions’.26 When queer theory looks beyond biological same-sex desire, it is
able to define the ‘queerness’ of a literary work without looking for biographical
evidence in its author’s sexuality. A queer ecological aesthetic addresses how the
continued cultural devaluation of women, homosexuals and non-white persons
in the West mimics the destruction of wilderness. ‘Erotophobia’ is a combination
of the violence with which white heterosexist patriarchy feminises male homosex-
uals, feralizes persons of colour and ‘naturalizes’ animals and creatures in order
to define them as the other. By simultaneously ‘sexualizing nature/naturalizing
sexuality’,27 ‘erotophobia’ and ‘ecophobia’ create the illusion that racism, sexism,
homophobia and environmental degradation are discrete or disconnected prob-
lems. It becomes impossible to imagine epistemological intersections between
their respective goals for justice and sustainability. But in one stroke of rhetorical
brilliance, Emily shattered these dualisms as early as 1847, when her heroine
declared emphatically, ‘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’ (WH, p. 64).

‘We might all be Heathcliff’: decolonising ecophobia and

erotophobia
Catherine’s queer ecological assertion ‘I am Heathcliff’ is located at the centre of
Emily’s novel, revealing how both these young ‘creatures’ struggle against the
norms of white heterosexist patriarchy. Heathcliff rejects Catherine immediately
when she returns ‘civilised’ from Thrushcross Grange; the erstwhile ‘wild, hatless
little savage’ (WH, p. 41) is dressed properly and coiffured. Arnold recapitulates
 THE QUEER ECOLOGICAL AESTHETICS OF WUTHERING HEIGHTS 37

this poignant episode in her film when Catherine recoils upon seeing Heathcliff
covered in mud and says, ‘All you have to do is wash and clean up. You do look
dirty’, to which Heathcliff replies sullenly, ‘You did not have to touch me. I like
being dirty’.28 In moments like this, the audience is invited to appreciate how cer-
tain sexualities, races and species were colonised through discourses of English
civilisation and propriety. Subsequently, in her assertion ‘I am Heathcliff’ it
becomes quite clear to the audience that Catherine’s newly acquired civility is
merely a veneer; she is also covered in that eternal dirt. Arnold depicts this erotic
communion when Heathcliff pins Catherine down on the grass and rubs her face
with mud. In his essay ‘Nature and the Non-Human in Andrea Arnold’s
Wuthering Heights’, Michael Lawrence writes that Arnold’s film ‘functions not
only to divide our attention across human and non-human realms but also to
counter nostalgic and ultimately ideological idealizations of “white” and
“English” natural landscapes and rural lifestyles’.29 The opposite of a cultivation
of nature (as nature) is then the naturalisation of culture (being natural), and it is
precisely such discourses that Arnold works against using a queer ecological aes-
thetic. Arnold’s film casts Heathcliff as the most vulnerable creature struggling to
survive at Wuthering Heights, rather than a diabolic or sadistic agent who poses
a threat to the Yorkshire gentry.
Heathcliff’s progression from a ‘dirty, ragged, black-haired child’ (WH,
p. 29) to the saturnine brooding landlord of Wuthering Heights in Emily
Bront€e’s novel has fixed his character as a Byronic hero. The Byronic hero in
Victorian literature was a deliberate foil to the normative English gentility of
Edgar Linton. It originated in images of rebellion, solipsism and vengeance in
Lord Byron’s poetry, Charles Maturin’s fiction and the Gothic and sensation
novels of the nineteenth century. Heathcliff is often classified in popular cul-
ture alongside other anti-heroes of Victorian literature like Van Helsing and
Dorian Gray. Atara Stein notes how Emily’s conception of Heathcliff is more
‘sympathetic’ than Byron’s or Maturin’s heroes, while remaining cognisant of
‘how dangerously tempting the Byronic male can be, she [Emily] works very
hard to make Heathcliff’s self-absorption, violence, and ruthlessness appar-
ent’.30 Nelly Dean notices Heathcliff’s cold stoicism in the novel when he is
beaten by Hindley:
I was surprised to witness how coolly the child gathered himself up, and went on
with his intention, exchanging saddles and all, and then sitting down on a bundle
of hay to overcome the qualm which the violent blow occasioned. (WH, p. 32)

However, Emily shows the limits of this stoic masculinity when the repressed
surly child grows into the manic depressive landlord weeping and yearning to be
united with Catherine:
He got on to the bed and wrenched open the lattice, bursting, as he pulled at it,
into an uncontrollable passion of tears. “Come in! come in!” he sobbed. “Cathy,
do come. Oh, do — once more! Oh! my heart’s darling, hear me this time —
Catherine, at last!” (WH, p. 23)
38 ANHITI PATNAIK

Arnold’s version of Heathcliff deviates consciously from the cold stoicism and
hyper-masculinity of previous cinematic performances such as by Laurence
Olivier or Ralph Fiennes. She breaks these stereotypes of white toxic masculinity
by portraying Heathcliff as a queer creature with empathy and ecological sensi-
tivity. Her brilliant revision of Heathcliff’s character undoes the ecophobic and
erotophobic justifications that are often used to produce regressive period adap-
tations of the Victorian age.
Heathcliff returns as an adult to Wuthering Heights in Arnold’s film, not with
the intention to take revenge on Hindley but to reconnect with Catherine.
Heathcliff even pities Hindley, who is reduced to an alcoholic poverty-stricken
widower, and sees a version of his own childhood in Hindley’s neglected feral
son Hareton. His nuanced and understated masculinity in Arnold’s film also con-
notes an empathetic and ecological need to return to his ‘roots’ rather than pun-
ish Catherine for rejecting him. When Catherine crushes a side of Heathcliff’s
face under the heel of her boot on the moor, he does little to fight back or assert
his masculine power over her. In fact, the film begins with Heathcliff mourning
Catherine and beating his head against the walls of their nursery. Through these
flamboyant non-masculine gestures, Arnold’s depiction of Heathcliff inhabits a
‘queer’ body of liquid expansion. Wilde also used tears and sentimentality to
counter Victorian ideals of masculinity, and his story ‘The Nightingale and the
Rose’ commences with the young student who ‘flung himself down on the grass,
and buried his face in his hands and wept’.31 In A Lover’s Discourse, Roland
Barthes writes that the sentimental male lover weeps in order to convince himself
that his love and the excessive emotions associated with it are not illusory, but
real. The production of masculine tears is equated with the production of a fem-
inine myth by which the crushed ego of the lover can soothe itself by claiming
visibly, ‘By my tears, I tell a story, I produce a myth of my grief’.32 No one under-
stood this non-masculine aestheticism better than Wilde, who used tears in his
fairy tales as a gesture of expiation and empathy. Masculine tears were consid-
ered ‘queer’ according to Barthes because they exemplified ‘Love’s Obscenity’: ‘I
take for myself the scorn lavished on any kind of pathos: formerly in the name
of reason’.33
Heathcliff gains an additional layer of ‘queerness’ in Arnold’s film through his
racial alterity. Arnold’s remarkable decision to cast the black actors Solomon
Glave and James Howson in the role of Heathcliff also complicates Emily’s ori-
ginal characterisation of the Byronic hero. In ‘Non-white Reproduction and
Same-Sex Eroticism: Queer Acts against Nature’, Andil Gosine argues that both
homosexual sex and interracial heterosexual sex are ‘queer’ as they threaten the
masculinist nation-building ideologies of white heterosexist patriarchy. Racial
miscegenation was often described in Victorian anthropology and science using
signifiers of unnaturalness or going against nature, much like same-sex desire. A
black Heathcliff embodies the moor quite literally for a white heterosexist audi-
ence; the word ‘moor’ linking wilderness with the racial alterity of those of
Turkish or Moorish descent. Arnold’s film draws attention to the Orientalist
 THE QUEER ECOLOGICAL AESTHETICS OF WUTHERING HEIGHTS 39

narratives of ‘wild men’ and ‘monstrous races’ in the nineteenth century — from
Leo Africanus to Joseph Conrad — that compared dark skin explicitly with the
wilderness, or the ‘heart of darkness’ so to speak. Gosine employs a postcolonial
approach to queer ecology to propose that the main factor that linked homopho-
bia with racism and ecophobia was the fear of mixing with the ‘other’:
In Malthusian environmental discourses, heterosexual, potentially reproductive sex
between non-white people is a central cause of earth’s demise. Non-reproductive
homosexual sex has also been represented in dominant readings of ecology and
environmentalism as incompatible with and threatening to nature.34

Arnold parodies this by showing how Heathcliff’s re-entry into the white civilised
domestic space of Thrushcross Grange arouses a repressed wildness in Isabella
Linton. She scratches Catherine’s forearm in jealous rage and bites Heathcliff’s
lip in an attempt to steal an illegitimate kiss. Significantly, Arnold erases
Heathcliff’s marriage to Isabella and the birth of Linton Heathcliff lest her pre-
dominantly white heterosexist audience bear witness to the ‘unnatural’ birth of
an interracial or black child.
Arnold then pushes the question of Heathcliff’s ‘otherness’ to its ontological
limit where her white heterosexist audience cannot see Heathcliff as being any-
thing but ‘dark’ and ‘dirty’. Heathcliff’s origin in Emily’s novel is left vague, and
all that is provided by way of explanation is that Earnshaw had found the out-
cast child on the streets of Liverpool and upon finding no ‘owner’ decided to
adopt him: ‘See here, wife; I was never so beaten with anything in my life; but
you must e’en take it as a gift of God, though it’s as dark almost as if it came
from the devil’ (WH, p. 29). Much of Nelly Dean’s descriptions in Emily’s novel
also emphasise Heathcliff’s racial alterity through invocations of darkness, diab-
olism and exoticism: ‘Who knows but your father was Emperor of China and
your mother an Indian queen’ (WH, p. 45). But when Hindley whips Heathcliff
in the film, Arnold transforms the body of her hero into that of an ex-slave
whose back already bears the scars of past floggings. Hindley’s hatred for
Heathcliff is far more complex in the film as it stems from institutional racism
rather than jealousy: ‘He’s not my brother. He’s a nigger’.35 The father, Mr
Earnshaw, berates Hindley repeatedly in the film for not being a ‘good Christian’
— a charge that is made equally against Heathcliff during his forced baptism —
rather than teaching Hindley how to love and empathise with a non-white per-
son. Conversely, the ease with which Catherine accepts and loves Heathcliff
allows Arnold to expose the imbrication of racial and gender discrimination in a
white heteropatriarchy. Both Catherine and Heathcliff symbolise a kind of feral
or non-human ‘otherness’ in the film — the former for her gender, the latter for
his race — and the triumph of Arnold’s adaptation is how she renders their fail-
ure to be domesticated and colonised.
A black weeping and feral Heathcliff is already ‘queer’ for an ecophobic and
erotophobic audience; in their minds, the moor belongs exclusively in the moors.
Catherine’s assertion ‘I am Heathcliff’ in the film exemplifies the same cultural
40 ANHITI PATNAIK

anxiety that Emily had exposed in the nineteenth century — of Catherine marry-
ing Heathcliff and becoming ‘Catherine Heathcliff’. However, Arnold shows that
Catherine is Heathcliff by focusing on their fused bodies and earthy eroticism as
children. She invites the audience to break the boundary separating the ‘self’
from the ‘other’ and the human from the non-human and to cultivate empathy,
imagination and ecological sensitivity. The film’s ‘most electrifying’ and morally
transformative moment according to Secher is the scene when Catherine soothes
Heathcliff by uncovering his bleeding and scarred back and licking his wounds
clean. This moment of deep empathy fuses Catherine and Heathcliff in an erotic
exchange of fluids — tears, blood and saliva — that transcends the ‘erotophobic’
limits of white romantic and heterosexual reproduction. The scene disrupts a cul-
ture that practises ontological apartheid, forbids children of the opposite sex or
race, persons of the same sex, and the human and the non-human from entering
into any tactile or affective relationship. Another important queer ecological shot
in the film is when Heathcliff traverses the moor with dead rabbits slung on his
back. Arnold tells Benjamin Lee in an interview that she wanted to convey the
picture of ‘a misty moor on a day when the earth and sky are merging, and
there’s a big animal climbing inside of the moor. The audience then realises that
the animal is in fact a man, carrying rabbits on his back’.36
Lawrence observes that Arnold’s adaptation of the novel ‘is inherently political
due to its revelatory exposure of the history of multiculturalism in England and
the realities of cross-species interactions in agricultural landscapes’.37 To recall
the four aspects of ecophobia and erotophobia that Gaard defines in her essay,
Catherine’s statement ‘I am Heathcliff’ in Arnold’s film pierces the ideological
strategies of the nineteenth century that produced an ontological apartheid based
on the sexualization of nature, feminisation of male homosexuals and feralization
of persons of colour. Through such affective gestures of love in Arnold’s film,
Catherine and Heathcliff rescue each other from the tragic fate in Emily’s novel.
It is their feral attraction and refusal to comply with either compulsory nature or
compulsory heterosexuality that produces a queer ecological aesthetic. Arnold
strikes a skilful balance between the plot and the setting so that much of the nat-
ural drama escalates the progression of the plot. Following a shot of beetles col-
lecting leaves and rocks to build shelter in the rain, we see Heathcliff lifting
stones on the field. When Heathcliff brushes the hair of the horses in the stable,
he remembers the time he had scrubbed dirt from Catherine’s wet dark hair. The
evolution of this creaturely love is part of the natural evolution of ecological sto-
ries in the film that are narrated through ‘expansive views of the empty country-
side and intimate vignettes of insect activity; we are given shots of cloudbanks in
the sky and of lichens on the ground; we are invited to contemplate the moon-
light on a spider’s web and mist descending on a herd of cows’.38
Since Dominic Pettman locates the category of ‘creaturely love’ squarely within
the category of ‘human love’, it is worth mentioning his book Creaturely Love:
How Desire Makes us More or Less than Human by way of conclusion. Rather
than construing it as a dualism, Pettman claims that the distinction between
 THE QUEER ECOLOGICAL AESTHETICS OF WUTHERING HEIGHTS 41

‘natural’ heterosexual love and ‘unnatural’ queer or ‘creaturely love’ emerged

only in the Enlightenment. It was the English Romantic tradition from
Wordsworth to the Bront€e sisters and Wilde that posed the first serious chal-
lenge to the spiritualisation of white heterosexual love in the West. By queer-
ing, decolonising and feralizing the erotic attraction between Heathcliff and
Catherine in their childhood, Arnold’s film gives legitimacy to this ‘creaturely
love’ that, according to Lawrence, ‘extends far beyond representing the charac-
ter’s ordinary interactions with pets, working animals and livestock. Non-
human animals that serve no obvious purpose (as pets or food) for the human
characters are nevertheless privileged by the film’s expanded mode of atten-
tion, and are not always utilised for the purpose of augmenting the human
story’.39 In lieu of an ‘erotophobic’ Darwinian reduction where animals are
ancestors and their non-human sexual urges become an ‘erotic equivalent’ to
human ‘love’, Pettman claims that the ‘creaturely’ impulse is inherent in all
natural forms of attraction:
Whether it is the texture of the beloved’s skin or hair, their singular scent, the way
they drool in their sleep, the way they eat with their mouth open, or the way they
are trapped within their own umwelt of semiotic disinheritors: we love the
creaturely in the other, as much as their humanity.40

Arnold’s queer ecological aesthetic in her portrayal of Catherine and Heathcliff’s

‘creaturely love’ avoids fetishising Heathcliff’s character through Byronic tropes
of period drama and disavows Victorian ‘domesticating’ discourses. In a provoca-
tive recapitulation of Catherine’s statement, Arnold confides with Secher that,
‘We’re all just behaving ourselves but really, underneath … I think we might all
be Heathcliff’.41

Notes
1 8
Timothy Morton, ‘Guest Column: Queer Jean Kennard, ‘Lesbianism and the Censoring of
Ecology’, PMLA, 125.2 (2010), 273–82 (p. 281). Wuthering Heights’, NWSA Journal, 8.2 (1996),
2
Morton, p. 275. 17–36 (p. 17).
3
I borrow the term ‘non-human’ from Michael 9
Kennard, p. 17.
Lawrence’s essay ‘Nature and the Non-Human 10
Kennard, p. 17.
11
in Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights’, Journal Kennard, p. 17.
12
of British Cinema and Television, 13.1 Kennard, p. 62.
13
(2016), 177–94. Ivonne Devant, ‘Inhabiting Nature in Emily
4
Morton, p. 275. Bront€e’s Wuthering Heights’, Bront€e Studies
5
Greta Gaard, ‘Towards a Queer Ecofeminism’, 42:1 (2017), 37–47 (p. 38).
14
Hypatia, 12.1 (1997), 114–37 (p. 115). Devant, p. 41.
6 15
Gaard, p. 115. Devant, p. 42.
7 16
Del Kathryn Barton’s ‘The Nightingale and the Devant, p. 38.
17
Rose’ adapts Wilde’s short story, which was Judith Halberstam, David L. Eng and Jose
published originally in 1888 in the collection of Esteban Munoz, ‘What’s Queer about Queer
fairy tales called The Happy Prince and Other Studies Now’, Social Text, 23.3–4 (2005), 1–17
Tales. It was produced by Brendan Fletcher and (p. 1).
18
exhibited in Melbourne at the Australian College Nicole Seymour, Strange Natures: Futurity,
of Management and Information in 2016. Empathy, and the Queer Ecological Imagination
42 ANHITI PATNAIK

(Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: University of Hero in Film, Fiction, and Television (Southern
Illinois Press, 2013), p. 4. Illinois University Press, 2009), p. 25.
19 31
Seymour, p. 1. Wilde, p. 79.
20 32
Arnold, 2011. Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse:
21
Emily Bront€e, Wuthering Heights, ed. by Fragments, trans. by Richard Howard (London
Richard J. Dunne, 4th edn (New York and and New York, 1978), p. 182.
33
London: W. W. Norton and Co., 2002), p. 96; Barthes, p. 176.
hereafter WH. 34
Andil Gosine, ‘Non-white Reproduction and
22
Devant, p. 42. Same-Sex Eroticism: Queer Acts against Nature’,
23
Benjamin Secher, ‘Dark Depths of Andrea in Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics,
Arnold’s Wuthering Heights’, The Telegraph, 5 Desire, ed. Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and
November 2011. <https://www.telegraph.co.uk/ Bruce Erikson (Bloomington and Indianapolis:
culture/film/filmmakersonfilm/8870091/Dark- Indiana University Press, 2010), p. 154.
35
depths-of-Andrea-Arnolds-Wuthering-Heights. Arnold, 2011.
36
html> [accessed 9 December 2019] Benjamin Lee, ‘Andrea Arnold: I find my
24
Oscar Wilde, ‘The Nightingale and the Rose’, in adaptation of Wuthering Heights “hard to look
The Complete Short Stories, ed. by John Sloan at”’, The Guardian, 19 April 2016. <https://
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), www.theguardian.com/film/2016/apr/19/andrea-
p. 79. arnold-wuthering-heights-american-honey-
25
Seymour, p. 12. tribeca-film-festival> [accessed 11 December
26
Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce 2019].
37
Erikson, Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Lawrence, p. 180.
38
Desire (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana Lawrence, p. 179.
39
University Press, 2010), p. 22. Lawrence, p. 186.
40
27
Gaard, p. 115. Dominic Pettman, Creaturely Love: How Desire
28
Arnold, 2011. Makes Us More or Less than Human
29
Lawrence, p. 178. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
30
Atara Stein, ‘“A Fire and Motion of the Soul”: 2017), p. xi.
41
Nineteenth-Century Origins’, in The Byronic Secher, n.p.

Notes on contributor
Anhiti Patnaik is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Humanities and
Social Sciences, Birla Institute of Technology and Science–Pilani, India. Her areas
of interest include Neo-Victorianism, crime fiction, world literature, trauma
studies and queer theory, and she has been published by Neo-Victorian Studies
and Victorian Network. She is an Ontario Trillium Scholar and Fellow of The
School of Criticism and Theory, Cornell University.
Correspondence to: Dr Anhiti Patnaik, Department of Humanities and Social
Sciences, Birla Institute of Technology and Science–Pilani, India. Email: anhiti-
patnaik@hyderabad.bits-pilani.ac.in