I'm reading more of this paper about Wuthering Heights (so spoilers):
https://creativematter.skidmore.edu/...=eng_stu_schol
And I like these parts a lot:
The cast-aside Catherine finds joy in the harsh heath just as the diminished Lilith finds solace by the desolate and demon-infested Red Sea. Both women find comfort in inhospitable landscapes because their wild spirits need space to rule and roam. The connection between the moors and Hell appears in Catherine's dream: "Heaven did not seem to be my home; and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; and the angels were so angry that they flung me out, into the middle of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights; where I woke sobbing for joy" (63). God and the cherubim block Lilith from Heaven, the angels toss Catherine back onto the moors, and Bronte brings Hell to Yorkshire.
Bronte kills Catherine giving birth to Edgar Linton's daughter thus weakening Gilbert and Gubar's assertion that Catherine is the Eve of Bronte's Bible of Hell. Gilbert and Gubar argue that Catherine, by marrying Linton, falls into rather than from grace. Catherine rejects the Hell and the devil and accepts a place in Heaven with her Adam when she chooses to marry the decent Edgar Linton rather than "that devil Heathcliff" (216).12 No longer does Catherine roam the wild moors; she instead languishes under the "pure white ceiling bordered by gold" of Thrushcross Grange (38).Bronte uses Catherine's dream to foreshadow that Heaven will reject her. Gilbert and Gubar's argument falters here because the ultimate ascent would be for the motherless Catherine to fulfill her maternal mission and raise moral children in the heavenly Thrushcross Grange.13 Instead, Catherine dies without her dual spirit. Heathcliff understands that Catherine dies because she attempts to untether their souls
Why did you betray your own heart, Cathy? I have not one word of comfort. You deserve this. You have killed yourself?You loved me--then what right had you to leave me? What right--answer me--for the poor fancy you felt for Linton? Because misery and degradation, and death, and nothing that God or Satan could inflict would have parted us, you, of your own will, did it?What kind of living will it be when you--oh, God! would you like to live with your soul in the grave? It is hard to forgive, and to look at those eyes, and feel those wasted hands?Kiss me again; and don't let me see your eyes! I forgive what you have done to me. I love my murderer-- but yours! How can I? (125-126)
It is Catherine, and Catherine alone, who cuts Heathcliff from her soul. Catherine attempts to be a good wife just as Lilith attempts to be Adam's handmaiden, but she relinquishes her spirit in the process. The amputation is too much for her. Without the added strength of Heathcliff's soul, her body cannot bear harboring her daughter. Catherine dies in the golden Thrushcross Grange, away from her beloved hellish moors, but her spirit haunts the heath. The first generation fails to unite Lilith and Samael, so Bronte must act as the Blind Dragon and create a second generation to satisfy destiny
^ Again this is very platonic sounding /s (to quote one of the websites I mentioned yesterday):
https://medium.com/@smashlee011/plea...t-ec14582298a7
There is zero indication that Catherine or Heathcliff have romantic, sexual chemistry. They aren't physically attracted to one another like Catherine is to Edgar Linton (the man she marries), and since she is pregnant and dies after giving birth, we, as readers, know Catherine has had sex.
In fact, if you analyze this story from a historical lens (which is important since mores, morals, and day-to-day living was different), a modern audience might better understand that Victorian-era audiences considered the "opposites attract" rule to be the epitome of romantic love.
The only reason we consider Wuthering Heights a romance is because of moody film adaptations and bad high school English teachers. So, I plead with you all, the betrothed, married, and stupid-in-love couples of the world, please stop using this quote to describe your relationship.
It doesn't mean what you think.
If I imagined you really wished me to marry Isabel, I'd cut my throat!'
'Oh, the evil is that I am not jealous, is it?' cried Catherine. 'Well, I won't repeat my offer of a wife: it is as bad as offering Satan a lost soul. Your bliss lies, like his, in inflicting misery. You prove it. Edgar is restored from the ill-temper he gave way to at your coming; I begin to be secure and tranquil; and you, restless to know us at peace, appear resolved on exciting a quarrel. Quarrel with Edgar, if you please, Heathcliff, and deceive his sister: you'll hit on exactly the most efficient method of revenging yourself on me.'
I saw the quarrel had merely effected a closer intimacy--had broken the outworks of youthful timidity, and enabled them to forsake the disguise of friendship, and confess themselves lovers.
In bed at Wuthering Heights, Lockwood finds three names etched into the bed frame: Catherine Linton, Catherine Earnshaw, and Catherine Heathcliff.
Sex in Wuthering Heights
I was told by a teacher that there were two different sex scenes or sex references in Wuthering Heights before chapter 21. This teacher has yet to tell our class what they are yet, I was wondering if anyone already knew what she might be talking about? I have yet to find them myself and I have searched multiple forums and articles online and none of them mention anything about two "sex scenes" before chapter 21.
I'm pretty sure there isn't. Maybe your teacher just read fanfiction too.
I can't (easily,) find what this person is talking about so I may actually have to read the entire book at some point lol:
At the time they're teens, Cathy and Heathcliff often hang around together and some time they end up in such an old medieval bed which is a room in itself kind of. They are caught lying there with the doors closed by Hindley who in turn expells Heathcliff from the house if I remember rightly.
Any minute now some little plonker is going to suggest that Heathcliff was gay.
Well...
It is giving 'And they were roommates' hetero edition. Sappho and her friend (this is a letter written by Emily Dickinson to her friend):
I have but one thought, Susie, this afternoon of June, and that of you, and I have one prayer, only; dear Susie, that is for you. That you and I in hand as we e'en do in heart, might ramble away as children, among the woods and fields, and forget these many years, and these sorrowing cares, and each become a child again -- I would it were so, Susie, and when I look around me and find myself alone, I sigh for you again; little sigh, and vain sigh, which will not bring you home.
I need you more and more, and the great world grows wider, and dear ones fewer and fewer, every day that you stay away -- I miss my biggest heart; my own goes wandering round, and calls for Susie -- Friends are too dear to sunder, Oh they are far too few, and how soon they will go away where you and I cannot find them, don't let us forget these things, for their remembrance now will save us many an anguish when it is too late to love them! Susie, forgive me Darling, for every word I say -- my heart is full of you, none other than you is in my thoughts, yet when I seek to say to you something not for the world, words fail me. If you were here -- and Oh that you were, my Susie, we need not talk at all, our eyes would whisper for us, and your hand fast in mine, we would not ask for language -- I try to bring you nearer, I chase the weeks away till they are quite departed, and fancy you have come, and I am on my way through the green lane to meet you, and my heart goes scampering so, that I have much ado to bring it back again, and learn it to be patient, till that dear Susie comes. Three weeks -- they can't last always, for surely they must go with their little brothers and sisters to their long home in the west!
I shall grow more and more impatient until that dear day comes, for till now, I have only mourned for you; now I begin to hope for you.
Dear Susie, I have tried hard to think what you would love, of something I might send you -- I at last say my little Violets, they begged me to let them go, so here they are -- and with them as Instructor, a bit of knightly grass, who also begged the favor to accompany them -- they are but small, Susie, and I fear not fragrant now, but they will speak to you of warm hearts at home, and of something faithful which "never slumbers nor sleeps" -- Keep them 'neath your pillow, Susie, they will make you dream of blue-skies, and home, and the "blessed contrie"! You and I will have an hour with "Edward" and "Ellen Middleton", sometime when you get home -- we must find out if some things contained therein are true, and if they are, what you and me are coming to!
Now, farewell, Susie, and Vinnie sends her love, and mother her's, and I add a kiss, shyly, lest there is somebody there! Don't let them see, will you Susie?
Why do I feel like that woman walks by everyday talking like that and he was ready for her that particular day?
Nah there's no way that video wasn't staged. It's too convinient.
I'm sorry but this is stupid to me. Yes it's an unhealthy relationship and was very controversial for the time period. Most of the characters are also not really good people and also are basically mentally ill and physically abusive to other characters. But I don't get how you can argue there's no romantic chemistry...
It's not mutually exclusive.
https://www.maramarietta.com/the-art.../emily-bronte/Some readers and critics have interpreted the relationship between Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff in Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights as a lesbian or [BEEP] relationship
My reading of Wuthering Heights as a lesbian text is an argument based on probability. I interpret the doubling of Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw as a projection of Emily Bronte's ambivalence about her sexual inversion and the narrative patterns of sameness and difference in the novel as a conflict between homo- and heterosexuality.But the doubling that is Catherine-Heathcliff is echoed throughout the novel in other forms of repetition and merging. One of the frequently identified patterns of Wuthering Heights is the movement toward sameness and the obliteration of difference. Furthermore, it is sameness in difference that evokes passion in the novel, reflecting homosexual rather than heterosexual intensity.
Loooool.
Sameness is challenged by difference, however, when the Lintons enter the children's lives. Edgar Linton, who is to provide Catherine?s introduction to acceptable heterosexual love, is from the beginning associated with separation and difference. Heathcliff and Catherine watch the young Lintons quarrel in the living room of Thrushcross Grange through the barrier of a window, a window Heathcliff imagines shattering. Here Catherine is bitten by a dog in a scene replete with sexual imagery. Catherine stays several weeks at Thrushcross Grange, where she is transformed into a typical young lady. This is the beginning of Catherine?s denial of Heathcliff, of Emily Bronte's attempt to deny her sexual identity. When Catherine returns to the Heights, Heathcliff sees 'a bright, graceful damsel enter the house, instead of the rough-headed counterpart of himself, as he had expected'. Difference appears to have prevailed over sameness, cultural conformity over rebellion, heterosexuality over homosexuality. Heathcliff sickens in proportion to Catherine's growing friendship with Edgar Linton and their separation is marked by increasing violence. Heathcliff hurls a tureen of hot applesauce at Edgar; Catherine strikes both Nelly and Edgar; Hindley drops his son over the banister.
Heathcliff is at his most sadistic, his most monstrous, in this heterosexual relationship with Isabella. Bronte's presentation of Heathcliff as monster reflects her effort to repudiate her sexual identity, an indication of the power of internalized homophobia.
I have no idea what the context of this is like is it a quote from a TV show? A conversation she was having with someone? I dunno:
I'd been thinking about Emily, about her ravaging love story, ever since Ingrid had told us she’d been commissioned to write the music for a dance version of Wuthering Heights that a Dutch troupe was developing.
-How do you explain it?
-The book doesn’t flatter the reader, it guards its secrets. And that, as every woman knows, is an aphrodisiac.
-And yet she died a virgin. Unknown.
-But not unknowing. She may or may not have loved someone at Law Hill School, but what's certain is that she loved herself. That's enough to know the essential.
-You think so?
-Yes.
-I don't.
-My view, Sprague, is this: All the mirroring in the book, the mixing of names and genders, suggests a lesbian consciousness. When you understand the role of Heathcliff, it all becomes clear.
̶ So you believe Emily was lesbian?
̶ I'm sure of it.
We cross the border into France.
̶ What makes you so sure?
̶ Wuthering Heights is a book shot through with ambivalence, and driving it all is Emily's sexuality. She was your age, Sprague--twenty-seven--when she wrote it. And at that age…
Her demonic masterpiece, and my humble haiku.
- …all she knew was that she was an oddity. The language didn't have the resources for her to conceive of herself any other way. 'Invert', maybe.
- So the tension in the book, it derives from her response to her sexuality?
- Yes. It's an expression of her ambivalence. And all the violence is a sign of her frustration.
- At what?
- At not being able to affirm herself frankly.
The traffic's light; you're pushing one sixty.
- 'I am Heathcliff': How do you interpret it?
- Heathcliff is the cipher of Emily's homosexuality. The outsider, the alien, the odd one out. He's Catherine's double, not her complement.
- He embodies her sexuality?
- Yes. That strategy of doubling is very lesbian. Catherine and Heathcliff are one and the same.
- So when she has to choose between Heathcliff and Edgar Linton…
- She has to choose to affirm or deny her homosexuality. She chooses Linton and her world falls apart. The pain of abandoning such a fundamental part of herself kills her.
I don't think ambivalence is lesbian because lesbian is something concrete. Also it's flattening a lot of stuff.
Contrapoints once referred to what I think they're trying to get at in a patreon video as the 'genderfluid gaze' while also quoting from a book by Lucy Neville and some other stuff:
Many perverse but enjoyable relations of looking... the imagined 'self' has the freedom to mutate into alternative manifestations... a shifting gaze, one where they can watch m/m pornography from a number of perspectives - Lucy Neville, Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys
It reminds me of a quote from The Second Sex where Beauvoir describes a dynamic where lesbians:
"when embracing each other other, each one was both man and woman and was enchanted with the other's androgynous virtues."
Love that. This to me is the genderfluid gaze, the verse gaze. If you'll excuse me making a value judgement. Clearly the superior gaze.
"A large proportion of the women I spoke with often identify as male, if not in a day-to-day sense than in a sexual sense." - Lucy Neville, Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys
[...]
Well one of the survey participants says.
"Despite the fact that my significant other is female and we've been together for thirty years [f/f] is of little interest in my fantasy life. Plus, my significant other and I relate to each other in our shared fantasies as 'male'" - survey participant, to Lucy Neville, Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys.
I definitely have done this myself. In my gender presentation on YouTube I often will kind of lean into this paradoxical presentation of like a gay woman who is also somehow a gay man. In consuming media I'm drawn to relationships like Hannibal and Will, Louis and Lestat.
I think part of it has to do with the usual guilt trip. Attraction to women often makes me feel like a predator and I feel like this is especially heightened because I'm a trans woman and there's all these kind of tropes floating around in the discourse. But I can kind of guiltlessly enjoy a predatory dynamic if it's between two men.
Which is not to say I only identify as the predator, part of the appeal is that you can kind of shift identification between predator and prey.
I think a mistake Contrapoints makes (I've said this before,) is to imply this is the preference of most women, and that most women are into slash fanfiction and also (not quoted,) twinks. Especially since she's mostly quoting bisexual women like Beauvoir, and bisexual women are more often writing slash fanfiction on AO3 at least according to surveys.
I mean there's an entire genre:
Honestly it's more poetic at this point to refer to it as pagan (I just found this quote on goodreads):
"Some critics say that Cathy is justified for not marrying Heathcliff because their love is a very pagan one that can't be realized in a Christian marriage. This reading ignores the fact that this does not really apply to Heathcliff. He seems to think that they should have married."