Follow the Hatred: The Production

of Negative Feeling in Emily Brontë’s

Wuthering Heights
CAROLINE KOEGLER

Introduction

Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is deeply entangled in the reproduction of impe-

rialist sentiment, including notions of racial otherness and white (English) suprem-
acy, as has long been established by a range of scholars.1 Indeed, the rise of fields
such as critical race studies and postcolonial studies has been accompanied by a
mounting awareness of the extent to which not only Brontë and her sisters2 but
in fact a wide range of Victorian novelists were shaped by colonial discourse, and
how they contributed to empire being “processed and naturalized” in nineteenth-
century Britain (Perera 7).3 References to empire and plantation economies, how-
ever marginal, frequently enable nineteenth-century novelists to install powerful
game changers in their plots: white protagonists in distress turn to empire and find
affordable routes to financial wealth, happiness, independence, individuality, and/
or subjecthood. They encounter manifold “realms of possibility” (Said 75) and reap
“just rewards” (Kitzan 91). Something similar happens at the level of feminist

I am indebted to the anonymous peer reviewer for encouraging a stronger focus on what hatred
reveals about practices of reading. I am also indebted to Laura Schmitz-Justen and Dr. Marlena
Tronicke for offering feedback on a previous draft of this article.
1
Suvendrini Perera writes, “The anxieties of engulfment, revenge, and miscegenation discernible
in the subtext of Belinda, for instance, may be traced more plainly in Emily Brontë’s Heathcliff, a
dark, vengeful figure from the slave-trading city of Liverpool who invades and disinherits the
remote Yorkshire households of Wuthering Heights” (13). Terry Eagleton links Heathcliff’s racia-
lization to the construction of the famished Irish as infantile and underclass, also allegorizing the
Irish revolution itself that haunts the English gentry. Elsie Michie extends this reading (126). See
also Maja-Lisa von Sneidern; Susan Meyer; and Humphrey Gawthrop.
2
Widely discussed in this context is the novel Jane Eyre, triggered by Gayatri Chakravorty Spi-
vak’s early critique (1985). Here, Spivak not only traces the novel’s complicity in colonial racism
but also targets dominant feminist readings at the time, such as by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan
Gubar in Madwoman in the Attic, which denied Bertha subjectivity and instead positioned her as
the personified reflection of Jane’s own unconscious. See also Firdous Azim; Joyce Zonana;
Edward Said; Susan Zlotnick; and Sue Thomas.
3
Martin Green discusses a range of adventure stories (including Robinson Crusoe and canonical
texts by Rider Haggard and Rudyard Kipling) that excited a preferred self-image of the British
as explorers and (just) conquerors, a self-image that in turn stimulated colonial endeavors in
this spirit or buoyed by such expectations (49). In Rule of Darkness (1988), Patrick Brantlinger
builds on Green’s and Said’s research to widen the scope for investigating how ideologies of
imperialism shaped the Victorian literary imagination in even more subtle ways and in a range
of texts.

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critique: Suvendrini Perera observes how nineteenth-century feminists evoke

images of subordinated oriental femininity to condemn gender oppression in their
own societies; and critics such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Jenny Sharpe, Laura
Donaldson, and Firdous Azim make this point regarding feminist deployments of
references to slavery.4 This kind of white feminist “owning” of gender oppression,
and experiences like enslavement and racism in other cultures, signals nineteenth-
century feminism’s naturalized “claim” or “access” to empire and its subjugated
others and, as such, to experiences that were, in truth, significantly different from
those of most white women at the time.5 Empire is thus precisely turned into a
Saidian “realm of possibility” for white feminism, based on an airbrushing of those
power imbalances that enable the appropriation in the first place.
This article explores these dynamics in Brontë’s Wuthering Heights by focus-
ing on the novel’s deployment of emotion. One of the most frequently remarked
features of Wuthering Heights must be what Gilbert and Gubar have called its
“general air of sour hatred” (260). Generations of readers have been confronted
with excessive levels of violence when reading Wuthering Heights, encountering
pages and pages of scenes depicting verbal, physical, and emotional abuse. This
indicates that negative feelings and particularly hatred might not circulate in
the novel in conventional measure, or coincidentally, but for specific reasons and
to particular effects. This article argues that hatred functions as the affective
link between Brontë’s feminist concerns—the implications of Catherine’s (failed)
rebellion—and the harrowing image of what Susan Meyer and others have framed
as the colonial other inflicting anticolonial revenge and oppression on the British
domestic scene: Heathcliff. After entering the plot as a racialized6 orphan brought
to Yorkshire from Liverpool by old Earnshaw, Heathcliff grows to “appropriate
English land and wealth[,] . . . encourages [Hindley’s] self-destructive addictions
(to drink and gambling)[,] . . . and sexually appropriates, imprisons, and beats
British women” (Meyer 116). It is because of these dynamics that Beth Newman

4
Fanny in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park remains a powerful example. For a more positive take, see
Meyer, who argues that women’s inferior position, “in combination with their feminist impulses
and their use of race as a metaphor, . . . provoked and enabled an (albeit partial) questioning of
British imperialism” (11). In her introduction to Sentimental Figures of Empire (2006), Lynn Festa
draws out the extent to which sentimentalism was complicit with the proslavery argument, and
Stephen Ahern further sharpens our vision for sentimentalism’s anti-abolitionism. Notably, as
many of these works emphasize, the dominant imperialized emotion situated in colonial others
was gratitude. In other words, what might be called the “fantasy of gratitude,” as in the figure of
the grateful slave, can be considered the ideologically necessary counterpart to the imperial
fantasy of violation that I focus on in this article.
5
It has remained popular even in much more recent feminist assessments of Victorian novels to
interpret racialized antagonists as, literally, “dark doubles” that illuminate the “dark uncon-
scious” of oppressed white female protagonists. See Gilbert and Gubar chaps. 8 (on Wuthering
Heights) and 10 (on Jane Eyre). These kinds of interpretations perpetuate the instrumentalization
of the suffering of racialized subjects; see, e.g., Spivak for a critique of Gilbert and Gubar’s
argument.
6
Heathcliff’s racialization as a Black or mixed-race subject is overt and has drawn a lot of
scholarly attention that I will not re-trace in this article but simply take as a given.

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also has understood Wuthering Heights as a “crypto-abolitionist narrative” (29),

harking back to Christopher Heywood’s discussion of the novel’s inversion of the
master-slave relationship and his suggestion of a link to Wilberforcian ideas that
were circulating at the time (“Yorkshire Slavery”). Richard Dellamora agrees that
“[t]he dynamic reversibility of the master-slave relationship is a point frequently
made in anti-colonial and anti-slavery rhetoric of the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries” (538). And Meyer concludes that, in Brontë’s exploration of
“energies of resistance to the existing social structure” (101), Heathcliff increas-
ingly “escapes the bounds of metaphor” (107; i.e., of female rebellion), which means
his “reverse imperialism” (96) finally outlives and outweighs the concern for female
liberation in Brontë’s novel. Challenging such a disentangling of feminism and
(anti-)colonialism, I read Wuthering Heights for its deployment of negative feeling,
suggesting that it is precisely through the novel’s particular production and orga-
nization of hatred that Brontë can turn “empire”—that is, references to both colonial
oppression and anticolonial rebellion—into an ultimately consistent metaphorical
“realm of [feminist] possibility” (Said 75).
In my proposed reading of Wuthering Heights, my approach will be to follow the
hatred. I trace how Heathcliff is installed in the text to become the overt, emotive
center of negative feeling: anger, violence, oppression, and, indeed, hatred. It is my
goal to show not only how the novel produces—stimulates and normalizes—hatred
for Heathcliff at the level of the characters and turns Heathcliff into a character who
hates others, but also how hatred expands and proliferates beyond Heathcliff,
ultimately infecting every relationship in the novel and even spilling over to its
readers. Indeed, as Lockwood and Isabella corroborate to varying degrees Nelly’s
narrative and present blueprints for how readers might react to the novel’s pro-
tagonist, there is no preventing hatred—and particularly hatred for racialized
others—from infecting the audience. Ultimately, I am interested in how Wuthering
Heights can be read as installing a disembodied and deindividualized Heathcliff
whose primary function is not to exhibit agency or individuality (either as victim or
aggressor, as popular readings have it) but to function as a catalyzer of hatred,
channeling negative feelings in particular ways and to particular effects.
Follow the hatred is indebted to Sara Ahmed, who titles her introduction to The
Cultural Politics of Emotion (2014) with the words “Feel your way.” Ahmed’s study
focuses on the social functions of emotion in society—on how, for example, “‘being
emotional’ comes to be seen as a characteristic of some bodies and not others” (4);
how specific emotions, negative or positive, come to be attached to some people and
not others. Rather than ask, What are emotions? Ahmed asks, “What do emotions
do?” (4). Fear, for example, insinuates that there is something to be afraid of in the
other person or group, when in fact discriminatory discourses might be attribut-
ing this quality to them without much or any foundation, thus normalizing their
rejection and ostracization. Though mainly focused on current public discourses,
Ahmed’s framework for understanding the social functions of emotions is adaptable
to what historians of emotion have termed “emotional regimes,”7 that is, past and

7
William M. Reddy first used this now fairly popular phrase to describe how the meaning of
emotions differs across communities and across different historical periods. According to

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present conventions for understanding and “doing” emotions in particular contexts

and/or communities. What Ahmed’s theory enables history-of-emotions approaches
to do is to see how, in all social and historical contexts, emotions tie in with attribution
and how these attributions are contingent on power relations. Clearly, for example,
racialized others and other minorities are vulnerable to negative attributions of feel-
ing, as the power of signification resides elsewhere. With regard to hatred, this means
that society’s (racialized) others have often been depicted as injurious, malicious, and
indeed as driven by hatred: “‘[T]he hated’ . . . are assumed to ‘cause’ injury to the
ordinary white subject” (43), writes Ahmed, which makes it seemingly plausible to
hate them in “return.” They have not only frequently been conceptualized as the
source of violation of white bodies; they have also been turned into “the origin of bad
feeling” housed by white bodies—bad feelings that masquerade as a form of self-
protection (43–44). Crystallizing her thoughts on hatred, Ahmed advances the
concept of a “fantasy of violation” (44). This fantasy encapsulates the narrative
of a persistent and continuing (threat of) violation of “the pure [white] bodies”
(44), which is instrumental in upholding the myth of these bodies’ (racial) purity.
Differently put, white bodies “can only be imagined as pure by the perpetual resta-
ging of this fantasy of violation” (44).
My approach to follow the hatred is inspired by Ahmed’s observations while it also
develops them, seeking to foster a better understanding of how, specifically, liter-
ary texts participate in social processes of emotional attribution, indeed, how they
participate in rendering plausible the emotional (re-)actions of those with signifying
power—which can include the emotional response of readers (depending on their
positionality)—and how such attributions pan out for those who hold less or no such
power. In the context of Wuthering Heights, this means I am interested in gaining
a better understanding of how and to what effect the novel instates a fantasy of
violation with Heathcliff as its supposed origin and how the force of this fantasy
ultimately ties in with, and depends on, the politics of reading the novel. I will
discuss how, from early childhood (when he arrives in the Earnshaw family),
Heathcliff is literally positioned as a harbinger of “bad feeling,” a formulation
used by the intradiegetic narrator Nelly Dean (32) that is coincidentally synony-
mous with Ahmed’s own words. I will explore how, in the course of his life and
particularly as he reaches manhood, Heathcliff frequently encounters hatred,
exhibits hatred, and instills hatred in others; is positioned as a threat; and eventually
becomes a force of large-scale, multidimensional injury in the text. In this context, it
is crucial to note the extent to which Brontë relies on uncanny plot features and on
stirring boundary panic, thereby investing the narrative with anxious thrills and
many twists and turns. Not only does she evoke a disquieting sense that Britons
exploit, enslave, violate, and manipulate colonial subjects (in the colonial periphery
and, at times, in the homeland), and not only does she install the possibility of a
“reverse imperialism”8 in the novel, but she also simultaneously permits and denies

Reddy, these variations in emotional expression are tied to convention and yet are not entirely
inflexible; for example, different spaces (e.g., theaters) would have allowed styles of emotional
expression frowned upon in other places (such as at court in the ancien régime).
8
Meyer titles her chapter on this novel “Reverse Imperialism in Wuthering Heights.”

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Heathcliff’s humanity while rousing excitation and dread over the idea of attach-
ments and desires across racial lines. Heathcliff’s harrowing racialized rebellion—
social, economic, and sexual—paired with the proliferation of hatred that he trig-
gers in the story, hinge exactly on Brontë’s instrumentalization of commingled
Victorian anxiety and thrill over violated (female) white bodies, boundaries, and
hierarchies. Indeed, Brontë’s novel can be understood as making overt the extent to
which the fantasy of violation facilitates white self-consolidation in mid-nineteenth-
century British fiction and how it renders pleasurable the horrors of empire even
as they erupt within British minds, bodies, and feelings in the home country.
Following my analysis of Heathcliff and hatred, I give attention to “Catherine’s
Liberation” to scrutinize how the fantasy of violation ties in with Brontë’s feminist
politics. The conclusion is dedicated to considering the impacts of the follow the
hatred approach on the practice and politics of reading, both Wuthering Heights
and more generally.

Heathcliff’s Hatred

It all begins with Heathcliff: when Nelly Dean describes the changes that the arrival
of the foundling Heathcliff introduces to the characters, she suggests that “from
the very beginning, he bred bad feeling in the house” (32). It goes unquestioned
that it is Heathcliff’s fault that, by the time old Earnshaw dies, “the young master
[Hindley] ha[s] learnt to regard his father as an oppressor rather than a friend, and
Heathcliff as a usurper of his parent’s affections and his privileges, and he grew bitter
with brooding over these injuries” (32–33; emphasis added). Nelly’s description of
Heathcliff’s earliest scenes in the Earnshaw family is starkly reminiscent of Ahmed’s
concept of the fantasy of violation: Nelly posits an injury to the white male subject
and heir who is emotionally (“affections”) and socioeconomically (“privileges”)
disenfranchised: first in line to inherit his father’s estate and yet (seemingly)
threatened, if not replaced, by the racialized orphan-incomer. In various other
situations, Heathcliff is similarly framed as a threat: when captured as a child (and
in Catherine’s company) at Thrushcross Grange, Heathcliff is treated with much
negative scrutiny, with Isabella referring to him as a “[f]rightful thing!” and
demanding, “Put him in the cellar, papa. He’s exactly like the son of the fortune-
teller, that stole my tame pheasant” (43). Lumped together with other racialized
others, Heathcliff is attributed malice (stealing; also “villain[y]” [43]) even as he
is greeted with the same. Mr. Linton ponders whether it would be in society’s
interest to “hang him at once” (43). In Meyer’s words, “[T]hey find in [his ‘dark
face’] a license to punish him for crimes of property putatively committed by
others of similar appearance” (97); at the level of the politics of emotion, this
means that Heathcliff is pictured as an offensive invasion that legitimizes his
society’s fear and disdain.
As Meyer suggests, Catherine’s laughter at Heathcliff’s treatment possibly tells
readers something about Catherine’s own and perhaps even Brontë’s satirization of
and hence distance from, particularly, Isabella’s overwrought reaction. Also,
Catherine’s romantic feelings for Heathcliff valorize him to an extent, and yet there

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is little evidence that Wuthering Heights actively encourages readers systemati-

cally to question the narrative of Heathcliff as a hateful threat to society. This is
not least because Heathcliff’s destructive energies increase and proliferate in the
course of the novel and eventually turn against even Catherine, the romantic
heroine. As Nelly Dean narrates the return of Heathcliff after his long absence,
she emphasizes how Catherine and the genteel Edgar had just begun to settle in
at Thrushcross Grange, increasingly enjoying each other’s company: “I believe
I may assert that they were really in possession of deep and growing happi-
ness” (81). Nelly’s self-reflective hesitancy, “I believe I may assert,” lends special
emphasis to the significance of this achievement, not least because Catherine
herself is an ambivalent character prone to flouting convention, particularly con-
cerning the kind of female domesticity here favorably presented by Nelly. At the
same time, “in possession” signals that Catherine and Edgar’s mutual happiness is
something that might eventually be taken away from them. Moving on to Heath-
cliff’s return, Nelly simply and abruptly states, “It ended” (81)—literally turn-
ing Heathcliff into disruption personified: he is back, and with him the violence
and the “bad feelings” (32). “I wish Heathcliff may flog you sick” (102), Catherine
will soon tell Edgar, “dashing her head against the arm of the sofa, and grinding her
teeth, so that you might fancy she would crash them to splinters” (105). In a heated
exchange with Heathcliff, Edgar accuses him: “Your presence is a moral poison
that would contaminate the most virtuous” (101). Nelly warns Heathcliff that,
given Catherine’s by now precarious health, his resolution to start visiting
her again is one of “cruelty and selfishness” (135). Catherine will die after one of
these visits—which are mutually desired—so exhausted that she will never regain
consciousness.
As Heathcliff establishes his dominance over Wuthering Heights, the sense of
thoroughgoing hate, violence, and abuse that “poison” the characters becomes
omnipresent. For example, Edgar’s sister Isabella has for some time been in love
with Heathcliff when Heathcliff marries her to spite Catherine and Edgar. Seeking
to torment all three, it is Heathcliff’s pronounced intention that Isabella should hate
him once they are married: “Can I trust your assertion, Isabella, are you sure you
hate me? If I let you alone for half-a-day, won’t you come sighing and wheedling to
me again?” (133). Heathcliff here disowns Isabella of the right to love him, repeat-
edly delegitimizing her attempts to break down the walls of “bad feeling” between
them. Clearly, Heathcliff’s hatred of Isabella and his attempts to make her hate
him can be read as a subversive appropriation of the emotional politics of colo-
nialism that so often positioned racialized others as objects of hatred. In the pro-
cess, he also counters the popular myth of the “grateful slave” or, more generally,
the grateful colonial subject who receives the civilizing mission with gratitude and
grace. Heathcliff here can be read as positioning himself as an agent of emotional
politics, seeking to control affective relationships. And yet there can be no doubt
that such a reading has its limits—self-isolating, destructive, and bereft of positive
emotions as Heathcliff’s manipulations ultimately are until he breathes his last. By
the end, traces of his own subjectivity and purpose, beyond making others suffer,
are minimal.

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Heathcliff succeeds where instilling hatred in Isabella is concerned; she will

eventually run away to try to raise their son, Linton, safe from Heathcliff’s aggres-
sion. Heathcliff has already destroyed Catherine and Edgar’s relationship, caused
death (Catherine; later also Linton), and encouraged those in his society to develop
or increase brutish traits (e.g., Hindley and Joseph), fall victim to addictions
(Hindley’s drinking), or develop signs of abuse and neglect (Linton, Hareton,
and young Catherine). Humphrey Gawthrop observes how Linton’s dread over
Heathcliff is “the terror of a victim, and the worse for being Heathcliff’s own son”
(285), leaving him to “[wake] and [shriek] in the night, by the hour” (WH, qtd. in
Gawthrop 285). Other examples include Cathy several times receiving “terrific
slaps on both sides of the head” and showing Linton how “her cheek [is] cut on the
inside, against her teeth, and her mouth filling with blood” (285). She is told to
marry Linton or be imprisoned at the Heights, a fate that actually meets Ellen for
five nights and four days. Consequently, Gawthrop argues that “[t]hese are some
of the worst scenes of violence in literature, reminiscent, in a different context, of the
worst excesses of slavery” (285).
The escalation of violence in the novel is reflected at the level of Wuthering
Heights’s pervasive language of hatred. A count yields nearly seventy instances of
hate and hatred, which includes instances in which these terms could have been
easily avoided—for example, “I hated a good book” (17), “he hates me to be
fidgeting” (62), “you shall know the very truth. I hate to hide it” (217). This suggests
a conscious choice on Brontë’s part, opting for installing the language of hatred to
show how excessively it circulates among the characters, with Heathcliff as its
trigger and center. While readers must predominantly rely on Nelly Dean’s relation
of the events (which might or might not be false), the novel gives no hint that
readers are possibly meant to question the accuracy, let alone the ethics, of her
words. Indeed, even if Nelly’s representation were to be challenged for giving a
possibly prejudicial account of Heathcliff, from the perspective of the politics of
emotion it remains possible to continue to read her as just another individual
infected by Heathcliff’s injuriousness. Most crucially, however, the two other nar-
rators who tell brief episodes of the text, Isabella and Lockwood, at least partially
corroborate—and in Isabella’s case, even intensify—Nelly’s attributions. While
Lockwood’s account of Heathcliff at times hits more generous tones, even he is
visibly shaken by the whole story, particularly after Heathcliff’s death, suggesting
that Heathcliff will be a source of disruption and discomfort even to the impartial
outsider and even from the grave. Isabella, in turn, is so shaken, hurt, and disturbed
by Heathcliff that she goes so far as to twice question his very humanity (134; 152).
Nelly, Isabella, and Lockwood of course play unequal parts in relating the story,
and also do so from different positionalities (gender, class, age) and different
narrative positions (insider versus outsider status). That such a relatively diverse
cast of albeit all-white narrators would come to similar conclusions about Heath-
cliff has a strong validating effect; it also offers white readers a range of blueprints
for identification, encouraging broad emulation of the narrators’ “bad feelings”
toward Heathcliff. This is how hatred spills over to infect those outside Brontë’s
imaginary universe: they have been set not one but three examples.

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The idea that Heathcliff is a diabolical disrupter of happiness, a source of tears,

terror, aggression, violence (both emotional and physical), and death, is an exis-
tential and structural building block of the narrative. Heathcliff not only instills
negative feeling in the other characters and, potentially, his readers, but he is also
made to embody what Ahmed calls “the threat of loss: lost jobs, lost money, lost
land,” a common ingredient of the cultural “politics of hatred” as it intersects with
racism (44). Yet another facet of Heathcliff’s injuriousness is the perceived threat of
miscegenation. Heathcliff and Isabella’s degenerate son Linton is evidence that
Wuthering Heights is bound up in discourses of racial mixing as infection and
contamination, positing the mixing of Heathcliff’s blood with the white, gentle-
manly Linton line—through Isabella—as triggering dire consequences. There are
striking parallels between the images of emotional leakage (“bad feeling”), the
contamination of white blood, and socioeconomic disenfranchisement: Heath-
cliff is the medium through which bad feelings, ostensibly inferior genetics, and
enslavement’s politics of dispossession “leak back” to the heartland of England,
infecting its white and civilized national body with sexual-genetic, emotional,
physical, political, and economic degeneration.
It is a further striking feature of Wuthering Heights that the discourse of infec-
tion and miscegenation can be identified in Brontë’s conjoining of misplaced class
ambitions and confining gender roles: from the very beginning, Edgar Linton is
inferior to Heathcliff’s and Catherine’s more robust physicality and health. After
marrying Edgar and thus giving in to class constraints, Catherine’s fitness and
health deteriorate, simultaneously solidifying her gendered domesticated role
and leaving her unable to survive Heathcliff’s return. Brontë here can be seen as
appropriating the discourse of racial miscegenation for gender and class criticism,
implying that gender and class conventions will leave erstwhile strong white
women mentally and physically deranged. This appropriation exemplifies the
pervasive colonial structures of thinking and feeling that I locate at the heart of the
novel: they render accessible to white feminist appropriation even the concepts of
miscegenation and anticolonial retaliation, and even where they involve the vio-
lation of white female bodies and genetics. As if allegorizing the pervasiveness of
white feminism’s appropriating powers, Heathcliff’s function as a commingled
source of hatred, injury, and loss is so ubiquitous in the novel that Wuthering
Heights as a whole begins to read as a “fantasy of violation.” In Brontë’s version of
this fantasy, class and gender constraints are aligned with colonial oppression;
rebellion against class and gender constraints with anticolonial rebellion wiel-
ded through miscegenation and violence, including against white women. While
Brontë thus at least partially employs the fantasy of violation specifically against
gender and class constraints, this does not exonerate the imperialist, racialized,
and no doubt racist politics of hatred that in many ways drives the novel’s momen-
tum. Brontë’s feminist politics would not come to fruition were it not invested with
the ideology of empire.
Before closing this section, it is time to return to the notion of Heathcliff’s
ambivalent humanity. While the narrative positions Heathcliff as injurious, it also
makes occasional efforts to humanize him, particularly during his childhood, and

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there are a number of scenes that see Heathcliff trying to make himself agreeable,
particularly to Catherine. In one scene set in his youth, Heathcliff is encouraged by
Nelly to dress up and put on a “bonny face” (50) for a visit from Edgar and Isabella
Linton. However, this attempt is spoiled by Hindley’s interference and by Heath-
cliff’s own “violent nature” (51) and overreaction to one of Hindley’s provocations.
The scene leaves the impression of an impetuous yet also suffering and vulnerable
Heathcliff who is, at least in part, wronged, abused, and worthy of empathy.9 The
most important factor that encourages sympathy with Heathcliff must, however,
be that Heathcliff continues to be lovable to Catherine, no matter what he does. She
never doubts either the strength of her feelings for him or their mutual connection
(though she does sacrifice him to her class ambitions). Her affection for him and his
passionate grieving for her as she dies signal his at least partial humanity, though
Brontë also ensures that this notion does not become too persuasive. The following
well-known scene serves as an example of this: clearly embittered about having
been rejected as a spouse and replaced by Edgar, Heathcliff rails at Catherine for
the injustice she has done him and seeks to reverse the narrative of violation.
Accordingly, he lays all responsibility and blame for Catherine’s present ener-
vated and degenerated state on her:

Why did you betray your own heart, Cathy? I have not one word of comfort—you
deserve this. You have killed yourself. Yes, you may kiss me, and cry; and wring out
my kisses and tears. They’ll blight you—they’ll damn you. 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 will, did it. I have not broken your
heart—you have broken it—and in breaking it, you have broken mine. (142)

As this exchange signals, Heathcliff emphasizes Catherine’s ability to choose

(“your will”) and her choice of Edgar over himself. While feminist readings have
often blamed social class structures and/or confining gender conventions for
Catherine’s fate, it is significant that Heathcliff here posits Catherine as an agentic
subject who carries responsibility and blame. Several things can be gleaned from
this. Read positively, Heathcliff’s accusations become an empowering reminder
that (self-)destructive gender and class conventions can be resisted and that they
must be resisted whenever possible. Read negatively, there is again a sense that
Heathcliff is excessive in his accusations, inflexible in his insistence on Catherine’s
responsibility, and cruel in his refusal to forgive, particularly considering that
Catherine is seven months pregnant and on the verge of death. Heathcliff cries in
this scene, and Nelly cynically observes that this proves he “could weep on a great
occasion like this” (142). Isabella corroborates that Heathcliff feels for Catherine (he
“wept tears of blood for Catherine”) but otherwise vehemently states that “[h]e’s

9
Jennifer Lodine-Chaffey argues that Heathcliff in many ways exhibits the behaviors of an
abused child. Though he might have had these behaviors even before joining the Earnshaw
family, it cannot be denied that his experience there would have exacerbated any previous
trauma or would have been retraumatizing.

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 KOEGLER FOLLOW THE HATRED 279

not a human being” (152–53). Considering also Isabella’s acute understanding

that Heathcliff will not hesitate to do to others, including herself, what he himself
has reportedly unjustly suffered (rejection, degradation, emotional abandonment),
the impression of Heathcliff’s humanity and ability to feel remains patchy, the
necessity that readers exhibit empathy toward him uncertain. The potential for
reading Heathcliff negatively is pervasive here and can taint even those readings
that aim for more positive conclusions.
To sum up these considerations, in its portrayal of anticolonial retaliation,
Wuthering Heights engages in the depiction of a fantasy of violation that situates
Heathcliff as a source of hatred, injury, and miscegenation—a fantasy that is uti-
lized at least partially to destroy class and gender constraints. In this context, the
novel does not portray Heathcliff as entirely, or exclusively, inhuman/inhumane.
Brontë makes a point of Heathcliff’s feelings for Catherine and occasionally stirs
pity in her readers (particularly when Heathcliff is still a child), and this humanizes
him on occasion. However, by moving him further and further in the direction of
hatred and injury; by suggesting that he endangers racial purity; and by increas-
ingly suggesting that he borders on the diabolical, vampiristic, and monstrous (as
has been much discussed),10 the novel slowly but surely creates Heathcliff’s humanity
as a site of erasure. And yet from the perspective of at least some of Brontë’s readers,
this would have had its own charms. As a racialized and increasingly revolting (in both
senses) other, Heathcliff’s rudimentary humanity is both terrifying and thrilling: only
a partially humane and lovable Heathcliff can trigger those uncanny attachments,
passions, and desires for procreation across racial lines that epitomize Victorian fears
of miscegenation. This means that the novel gains momentum and excitement from a
Heathcliff who repeatedly withdraws himself from being unanimously or unwa-
veringly hated, as is signaled by both Catherine’s and Isabella’s affections for him. His
identification with hatred, though maintained throughout the text, is not without its
disruptions or question marks, and this adds to the sense of Heathcliff as an enigma
and stimulator of Gothic and sexual fantasies. Similarly, as my discussion in the next
section further emphasizes, his function as an uncanny, ambivalent, and indeed
pleasurable force of destruction renders porous some of the many conventions and
dichotomies confining Victorians, particularly Victorian women.

Catherine’s Liberation

The discourse of an injurious and destructive Heathcliff inspires at least two dif-
ferent readings where Catherine’s fate is concerned: in one, Catherine’s death is
caused by Heathcliff and his continuing visits (they destroy her nerves and exac-
erbate her already precarious health); and in another, Catherine’s death is triggered
not by Heathcliff but by gender constraints and class ambitions, which Heathcliff
repeatedly demands that Catherine defy for their joint sake. In the first reading,
Heathcliff is, whether or not engaged in anticolonial retaliation, justifiably hated, as

10
See James Twitchell for an early reading of Heathcliff as vampire; and Carol A. Senf, who
historicizes the vampire motif as especially influential in Brontë’s time. See also Beth E. Tor-
gerson; Lakshmi Krishnan; and Gillian Nelson.

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he acts as Catherine’s killer. In the second reading, he retains more legitimacy, as his
revolt against convention serves as a vehicle that energizes and justifies Catherine’s
gendered rebellion and (failed) liberation. I would like to suggest that the simul-
taneity of these two possible readings—indeed the impossibility of excluding one
or the other from the novel’s semantic universe—here again means that Heathcliff’s
injuriousness and hatefulness likely taint any reading of him as a breaker of chains.
The fantasy of violation is pervasive and can trouble any reading that is too
unanimously positive or enthusiastic where Heathcliff and his rebelliousness
are concerned.
Accordingly, it remains surprising that many scholars have situated Heathcliff
and Catherine in an egalitarian framework. For Susan Rubinow Gorsky, “In the
mystical Gothic world of the novel, Catherine and Heathcliff can achieve a tran-
scendence of society’s rules, including the rules that clearly defined and separated
male and female; in the world of realistic fiction (reflecting Victorian society), they
revert to stereotyped gender roles that destroy them as individuals and as a couple”
(179). For Gorsky, Catherine and Heathcliff either both transcend essentialist con-
cepts of gender (and class) through death,11 which hints at a form of metaphorical
liberation and androgyny (a scenario in which dehumanization means transcen-
dence), or they both remain equally structured by these concepts, which is part of
their downfall (a scenario in which dehumanization means internalized conventions,
self-alienation, and destruction).12 Gorsky’s double reading is not only egalitarian
but also optimistic in that it locates a sense of romantic heroism in the protagonists
and their union, one that either triumphantly prevails or is unjustly obstructed.13
Both readings, of course, also challenge gender essentialism in that they suggest
symbiosis at a more profound level (androgyny; transcendence) and posit social
conventions as destructive and degenerating. From the perspective of retaining the
novel’s ethical integrity, either of Gorsky’s readings would be preferable, minimiz-
ing as they would the novel’s entanglement in imperialism’s toxic ideologies of race.
The same applies to reading the novel as a “crypto-abolitionist narrative,” picturing
Heathcliff as “a Byronic version of the colonized native or the racially oppressed
person in revolt” (Brantlinger, Victorian 72). The applicability of this reading would
mean that Heathcliff could emerge as an agentic individual, seeking to destroy a
society that is responsible for his—and/or his people’s—destruction and enslave-
ment (see Bazze-Ssentongo). He could be seen as laboring for the sake of a revenge
and liberation that directly include himself. If, alternatively, it is foregrounded that
Heathcliff operates as a destructive and injurious force in the text that primarily
consolidates white (female) subjects and white feminism, triggering a proliferation

11
Deborah Lutz similarly argues that death means liberation not only for Heathcliff but also for
Catherine, who can, as a child ghost, enjoy childhood freedoms unfettered by conventions (392).
12
In 1988, Joanne Blum writes that Emily Brontë effects “a dynamic interaction between male and
female which . . . defies and transcends these gender constructs” (8).
13
Joseph Carroll writes along similar lines: “For both Catherine and Heathcliff, dying is a form of
spiritual triumph. The transmutation of violent passion into supernatural agency enables them
to escape from the world of social interaction and sexual reproduction” (253; emphasis added).

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 KOEGLER FOLLOW THE HATRED 281

of hatred even beyond the novel, then the focus of agency and liberation shifts to
Catherine and, by extension, to Brontë and her readers. This would reveal the pro-
found extent to which Brontë possibly (re-)produces feeling negatively about racialized
incomers, legitimizes stigmatization, and ultimately corroborates logics of racial
hierarchization and exclusion for the sake of her own white feminist politics.
Weighing the salience of either of these readings, it is important to consider that
Wuthering Heights itself does not treat Heathcliff and Catherine’s rebellions, their
destructions of colonial hierarchies or gender and class structures, and their deaths
as equally desirable. The novel largely embraces those destructions that sig-
nal a challenge to Catherine’s confinement as a white woman. It does not embrace
Heathcliff’s own revenge plot with its purported destruction of the white fami-
lies’ happiness, bonds, genealogies, properties, and, indeed, lives—most crucially
Catherine’s. Also, Heathcliff’s destructions are always more excessive: Catherine
pinches Nelly’s hand (62); Heathcliff confines, beats, and emotionally abuses a range
of characters. He introduces miscegenation to the Heights; Catherine, though origi-
nally strong and enduring, herself physically deteriorates. Indeed, Heathcliff’s power
and injuriousness allow Catherine’s unruliness to appear comparatively measured
or childish in some cases and thus do something to dispel perceptions of her as
hyper-violating gender conventions. Heathcliff’s presence makes her not only more
civil and fully subject (as Gilbert and Gubar have suggested) but also more grie-
vable in the Butlerian sense;14 it renders her more fully human—a contested cat-
egory according to Butler. Specifically, Catherine’s death as a vulnerable, enervated,
and physically weakened white woman creates this effect as it moves her into the
realm of a “swooning” Victorian femininity that is socially valorized. This means
that Catherine’s death is in itself ambivalent: her weakness renders readers more
inclined to view her sympathetically; it not only is a powerful reminder of the
devastating effects of patriarchal class ambitions on women but also, as Heathcliff’s
power increases and more than ever descends into violence, signals his legitimate
framing as an aggressor. This goes to such extremes that, in contrast to Catherine’s
death, Heathcliff’s death is unlikely to instill horror, grief, or regret in the reader,
most strongly evoking instead “a feeling of sheer relief,” as Joseph Carroll has
suggested (250). Grieved only briefly by Hareton, who cries over Heathcliff’s grave,
the pervading sense after Heathcliff’s demise is one of a “right order” having been
reestablished, an order that sees a repatriation of property to rightful owners and
the promising union of two young, white offspring—Catherine II and Hareton—
who will likely build a new, joint lineage for both houses. And most importantly
from the perspective of the politics of emotion, Heathcliff’s death sees an end to

14
Judith Butler discusses the category of the “human” and its investment in privilege. In Notes,
she asks: “Which humans count as the human? Which humans are eligible for recognition
within the sphere of appearance, and which are not? What racist norms, for instance, operate to
distinguish among those who can be recognized as human and those who cannot?” (36). The
applicability of these questions to Wuthering Heights is demonstrated in Heathcliff’s comparative
lack of grievability. If Catherine really “is” Heathcliff (73), why is her humanity never drawn
into question? See also Butler’s Precarious Life and Frames of War and my own analysis of Butler’s
concern with these questions throughout her writing (Koegler).

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the “bad feelings” in the novel: its defining atmosphere of hatred, aggression, and
injury. As Heathcliff is gone, the proliferation of hatred comes to a halt. Simulta-
neously, as the characters in the novel enter into a new phase of reconciliation,
Brontë’s historically majority-white readers are delivered from a potentially haz-
ardous and disorienting reading experience that has threatened, though ultimately
enabled, self-consolidation: the closing of ranks in the process of white (female)
identity building and the closing off of white society against racialized aggression
and miscegenation. Indeed, even genetically, the influence of Heathcliff is removed
as Linton, the mixed-race son, dies. The emotional purification at the closing of
Wuthering Heights is analogous with the purification of the white bloodline.

Conclusion: Reading Wuthering Heights

My follow the hatred approach has crystallized how Wuthering Heights can be read as a
“fantasy of violation” with Heathcliff as its core and origin. Manifesting a complex
entanglement of emotional and physical aggression; racialized, sexualized, and in
parts romanticized otherness; and not-quite-erased humanity, Heathcliff is over-
whelmingly positioned in the novel as a dreadful-thrilling source of violation and
“bad feeling” (32). In this way, and despite reversing the master-slave relationship in
a “crypto-abolitionist” move, Wuthering Heights remains heavily indebted to emo-
tional politics that position racialized incomers within the framework of miscege-
nation and as actively corrupting white families’ lineages, wealths, bodies, and
emotions. The novel simultaneously produces and corroborates hatred against such
incomers, and it does so to the advantage of white women and white feminism in
particular: Brontë seems to want to render visible the physical-emotional violence
that white women daily suffer in a patriarchal class system and the violence they
themselves might wield against this system if ever they got half a chance. Unable,
however, to stage a full-fledged Amazonian rebellion, Brontë uses Heathcliff, the
revolting other, his destructions and violations, to consolidate white womanhood
and white feminism as epitomized by Catherine’s own destroyed-yet-mourned
body. In other words, if Heathcliff can be considered Catherine’s “whip,” as Gilbert
and Gubar suggest (265)15—that is, Catherine’s metaphysically incorporated
(though eventually waning) instrument of asserting dominance and autonomy at
the Heights—then, in my reading, Heathcliff is also Brontë’s own “whip.” He is
the strategically deployed device of destruction in a white feminist fantasy of
violation, utilized to shatter the prison that is intermingled patriarchy and class
consciousness. Using Heathcliff to channel grief toward destroyed white female
bodies, Brontë not only highlights the urgency of broadening the scope for female
agency but also walks the path of a double disenfranchisement: by condoning
racialized hatred and exclusion, Wuthering Heights domesticates and depoliticizes
the discourse of anticolonial revolt, appropriating it for white feminist politics. It is
then that Catherine’s enigmatic profession of symbiosis with Heathcliff—“I am

15
See Gilbert and Gubar chap. 8, “Looking Oppositely: Emily Brontë’s Bible of Hell,” 248–309.

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Heathcliff!” and so on—is perhaps not primarily symptomatic of an actual likeness

in character, constitution, fate, or positionality. Instead, it can be read as symp-
tomatic of white privilege and blindness to the true level of violence experienced by
those who suffer under, or rebel against, racism and the yoke of colonial oppres-
sion. It can further be read as symptomatic of either obliviousness or indifference
toward the disempowering effects of appropriation.
Follow the hatred is an approach that readers can choose when engaging with
Wuthering Heights. This is a choice because Wuthering Heights is one of those texts
that afford a multiplicity of at times distinctly diverging readings, which is why I
have used the term salience in relation to the novel. However, no scope for decision
making is absolute, for various reasons: epistemological, positional, ideological,
ethical, political. Many readers like to settle for a particular reading and compart-
mentalize meaning (e.g., reading the novel for romance or feminism or colonialism
as primary frameworks). And yet Wuthering Heights in many ways defies and
withdraws itself from such clear-cut compartmentalization, easily unsettling and
threatening to “toss about” its readers (as the etymological root of “wuthering”
in fact implies). Indeed, I would like to suggest an analogy between what I have
discussed here as the novel’s production of proliferating hatred and the potentially
disorienting multitude of seemingly competing readings. Differently put, at the
level of thematic representation and reading, it is possible to understand hatred’s
emotional onslaught in and beyond Wuthering Heights as mirroring the novel’s
sublime effects of ostensibly aggressively competing readings and interpretative
frameworks—“ostensibly” because these different readings and frameworks are
also, of course, interrelated, as here shown (e.g., feminism and anticolonial rebel-
lion, romance and miscegenation). Wuthering Heights then incorporates not two
but three dimensions of violation: it employs the revolting, racialized other to
consolidate Catherine as a white, liberal-minded, and comparatively more moral
even if rebellious subject; it relies on a destructive or at least ambivalent Heathcliff—
a Heathcliff who will never entirely shed his aggressiveness, hatefulness, or
humanity—in order to facilitate the higher purpose of consolidating Brontë’s white
feminist message; and it potentially triggers the perception of violation even on the
part of readers, both emotionally (proliferation of hatred) and epistemologically
(aggressively competing readings). All these notions—or fantasies—of violation are
productive of self-identity: “[T]he pure bodies” of white subjects, writes Ahmed,
“can only be imagined as pure by the perpetual restaging of [the] fantasy of vio-
lation” (44). Wuthering Heights is one such “restaging,” its ending facilitating not
only closure but also a closing off and exclusion of the racialized other, thereby
rehearsing a politics of nonrelation that condones pushing back against the (alleg-
edly injurious) colonial subject rather than against the originally injurious system:
imperialism. The novel thereby consolidates an emotional-cultural position that
shields (white) readers from fully acknowledging the equal humanity of racialized
others (and the sociopolitical consequences that such an acknowledgment might
have), just as it shields them from the acceptance of white accountability. This
affective “shielding” also works at the level of reading, as Wuthering Heights
stimulates pushing back against those types of reading that might be disorienting

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or distasteful in their implications because they threaten the integrity of white,

liberal-minded (female) subjects. Follow the hatred is, of course, one such reading,
as it fundamentally is a reading for complicity: a complicity with Catherine and
with Brontë (including Brontë’s white feminism) in reproducing and, indeed,
extrojecting the violating, destructive powers of imperialism via an emulation of
imperialism’s emotional politics. It is an approach that encourages its own readers
to take the plunge and tackle how empire is “processed and naturalized” at the level
of emotion, including in texts celebrated for their important if partisan achieve-
ments (Perera 7). In the context of nineteenth-century fiction and beyond, following
the hatred can bring to light social inequality at the level of attributing positive
and negative emotion. It can illuminate views and relationships that are toxic,
abusive, or exploitative, though possibly fully normalized in society and in the
literary community; it can reveal how and where individual texts, ways of reading,
or political projects, such as feminism, thrive on, or go along with, feeling to the
detriment of others. While the awareness and exploration of such violations can
be unwanted, empowerment can be true to itself only when reflecting on its own
exclusions and its own violations that it commits in the course of liberation.

* * *

caroline koegler is assistant professor of British literary and cultural studies at the
University of Muenster, Germany. She is currently writing a book on the cultural politics of
emotion in long eighteenth-century literature, with a particular focus on intersectionality. She
is author of Critical Branding: Postcolonial Studies and the Market (2018) and coeditor of Locating
African European Studies: Interventions-Intersections-Conversations (2020). Other current publi-
cations include the coedited special issue of Neo-Victorian Studies “Queering Neo-Victorianism
beyond Sarah Waters” (2020), the coedited special issue of Journal of Postcolonial Writing titled
“Writing Brexit: Colonial Remains” (2020), and a coedited collection, Law, Literature, and Citi-
zenship (2021).

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