ACADEMIA Letters

“It is unutterable”: Sexual Transgression in Emily

Brontë’s Wuthering Heights
Brontë Schiltz, Manchester Metropolitan University

When we speak of Gothic texts, it is tempting to do so with reference to gender, with ‘[a]lternate
traditions of “male” and “female” … Gothic’ (Spooner and McEvoy, 2007:1) frequently drawn
upon in critical discourse. However, as Carol Margaret Davison argues, this discrete categori-
sation is perhaps ‘too essentialist … in attempting to universalise women’s identity and expe-
rience’ (2009:32). Moreover, these categorisations largely ignore the prevalence of queerness
(used here to denote non-normative depictions of gender, sex and sexuality) within Gothic
fiction.
In the nineteenth century, gender and sexuality were not regarded as separate entities,
but as inherently interconnected through Karl Heinrich Ulrichs’ concept of the “invert”. As
Jean Kennard explains in “Lesbianism and the Censoring of “Wuthering Heights””, in which
she delineates a queer reading of Brontë’s novel, ‘[s]exual inversion is not, like homosex-
uality, only a question of desire, of the choice of sexual object, but implies a much wider
range of cross-gender behaviour’ (1996:19). Although Ulrichs’ work was not published un-
til after Brontë’s death, he drew on existing associations within contemporary culture – to
transgress expectations of gender in the Victorian period carried deep-rooted connotations
of sexual transgression as well. Such transgression features so frequently and prominently
in eighteenth and nineteenth century Gothic fiction that William Hughes and Andrew Smith
posit that ‘Gothic has, in a sense, always been “queer”’ (2011:1). Furthermore, as George
Haggerty argues in Queer Gothic, ‘Gothic fiction offered the one semirespectable area of lit-
erary endeavor in which modes of sexual and social transgression were discursively addressed
on a regular basis,’ and, therefore, it actually ‘helped shape thinking about sexual matters’
(2006:3). That is, the Gothic played an integral role in the theorisation of gender and sexu-
ality. This paper seeks to build on Kennard’s work, exemplifying the significance of Emily

Academia Letters, September 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Brontë Schiltz, bronte.schiltz@gmail.com

Citation: Schiltz, B. (2021). “It is unutterable”: Sexual Transgression in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights.
Academia Letters, Article 3536. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL3536.

1
Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) in this context.
Prior to Ulrichs’ groundbreaking publications, depictions of queer experience, bereft of
tailored language, were couched in metaphor. This includes the Gothic itself, which ‘can be
read as mobilising conventions which have come to double as both Gothic tropes and tropes
within the language of sexual “deviance”’ (Rigby, 2011:38). The Gothic gained this status
in sexual discourse, however, by drawing on existing associations in the popular imagination,
such as racial Otherness. Well into the twentieth-century, Gothic villains were frequently ‘the
products of foreign lands’ (Benshoff, 1997:58). Heathcliff’s race is never specified, but he
laments that he ‘must wish for Edgar Linton’s great blue eyes and even forehead,’ to which
Nelly replies: ‘A good heart will help you to a bonny face, my lad … if you were a regu-
lar black … Who knows but your father was Emperor of China, and your mother an Indian
queen[?]’ (Brontë, 1960:65,84). Corinna Wagner argues that, in the Gothic, ‘the body demon-
strates truths about the self that the individual could not – or would not – articulate’ (2007:80).
However, she acknowledges that this is not always the case, and that sometimes ‘immorality,
deviance and crime are not the result of science or social institutions failing to control or
understand the body; rather immorality, deviance and crime are a result of those institutions
themselves’ (Wagner, 2007:86).
In Wuthering Heights, physiognomy figures centrally within the institution of the home.
From the moment he is introduced, Heathcliff is vilified, ‘referred to repeatedly as demonic or
monstrous; he is an “evil beast”, an “imp of satan” and “a goblin”; his eyes are “black fiends”,
his teeth “sharp, white”’ (Chaplin, 2011:83). Even the benevolent Mr. Earnshaw dehumanises
him, describing him as ‘as dark almost as if it came from the devil’ (Brontë, 1960:64, emphasis
added). Likewise, upon first seeing him, Nelly ‘was frightened, and Mrs. Earnshaw was ready
to fling it out of doors’, and Cathy’s brother Hindley vehemently hates him (Brontë, 1960:64-
5, emphasis added). His Otherness is written on his body. This is principally what makes
Cathy’s desire for Heathcliff transgressive – as she bewails, ‘I’ve no more business to marry
Edgar Linton than I have to be in heaven; and if [Hindley] had not brought Heathcliff so low,
I shouldn’t have thought of it. It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now; so he shall never
know how I love him’ (Brontë, 1960:106). In Wuthering Heights, as in many Gothic texts,
Heathcliff’s racial and sexual Otherness are inextricably linked. Less commonly, however,
Brontë constructs the prejudicial treatment that Heathcliff (and, by extension, Cathy) receives
are figured as the origin of monstrosity, rather than this Otherness itself.
Cathy and Heathcliff are also directly characterised in androgynous terms. Kennard sug-
gests that Heathcliff is introduced as ‘a gift to Catherine, a substitute for the whip she had
asked her father to bring her from Liverpool. He lost the whip in adopting Heathcliff, who
thus takes its place’ (1996:26). She thereby reads the whip as ‘a symbol not so much of “a

Academia Letters, September 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Brontë Schiltz, bronte.schiltz@gmail.com

Citation: Schiltz, B. (2021). “It is unutterable”: Sexual Transgression in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights.
Academia Letters, Article 3536. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL3536.

2
powerless young daughter’s yearning for power” … as of the sexual inversion that is later pro-
jected into Heathcliff’ (Kennard, 1996:26). The whip would have enhanced the masculinity of
Cathy’s character; its substitute, Heathcliff, serves the same purpose. Their association like-
wise feminises Heathcliff. After Cathy’s death, he cries: ‘Oh, God! it is unutterable! I cannot
live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!’ (Brontë, 1960:189). He mourns her
death as the loss not of a loved one, but of part of himself. Furthermore, when his own death
is imminent, Nelly remarks: ‘I never expected that your nerves would be disordered: they
are, at present, marvellously so, however’ (Brontë, 1960:343). As well as mirroring Cathy’s
condition prior to her death, Heathcliff is feminised here in that insanity was conceived of
in the nineteenth century as a feminine malady, and Heathcliff therefore becomes both more
like Cathy and more feminine generally. Brontë queers the gender of both protagonists rather
explicitly.
Following Ulrichs’ publications, the nineteenth century also marked a radical shift in
thinking about dissident sexuality when, in 1886, fellow German sexologist Richard von
Krafft-Ebing popularised the term “homosexuality” in Psychopathia Sexualis, categorising
it as a pathological condition and thus lending credence to existing widely-held beliefs about
sexual transgression. In Wuthering Heights, however, sickness is associated not with this
transgression itself, but with attempts at its containment. Immediately after Heathcliff’s de-
parture from Wuthering Heights, Cathy suffers a ‘commencement of delirium’ and is pro-
nounced ‘dangerously ill’ (Brontë, 1960:113). As Kennard puts it, ‘[t]he separation of Heath-
cliff from Catherine makes Catherine ill’ (1996:28). When he returns, after Cathy’s marriage
to Edgar Linton, much to Edgar’s displeasure, Cathy declares that ‘if I cannot keep Heathcliff
for my friend – if Edgar will be mean and jealous, I’ll try to break their hearts by breaking my
own’ (Brontë, 1960:142). She subsequently becomes seriously ill with ‘a brain fever’ (Brontë,
1960:157) once again, and dies soon thereafter. It is not her transgressive desire for Heath-
cliff that marks the destruction of her health, but her inability to indulge it – as she remarks
to Nelly, ‘we separated! … Not as long as I live, Ellen: for no mortal creature. Every Linton
on the face of the earth might melt into nothing, before I could consent to forsake Heathcliff’
(Brontë, 1960:106). Later, as she lays dying, Heathcliff chastises her:

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. I have not broken your heart—you have broken it; and in breaking it,
you have broken mine (Brontë, 1960:183).

Academia Letters, September 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Brontë Schiltz, bronte.schiltz@gmail.com

Citation: Schiltz, B. (2021). “It is unutterable”: Sexual Transgression in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights.
Academia Letters, Article 3536. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL3536.

3
 Cathy suffers not because she loves Heathcliff, but because she cannot allow herself to love
him as she really wants to. If, as Kennard argues, Emily Brontë’s own transgressive sexuality
is encoded in Wuthering Heights, then the implication is that her source of torment is not that
sexuality itself, but her unwillingness, or perceived inability, to indulge in it.
It is notable, therefore, that Cathy and Heathcliff are eventually reunited in death: ‘a lit-
tle boy’ tells Lockwood that he saw ‘Heathcliff, and a woman’ roaming the moors (Brontë,
1960:347). As Alison Milbank notes, ‘the most vivid materiality is accorded to the ghosts of
the novel’ (2015:162) – when Lockwood encounters Cathy’s ghost, he ‘pulled its wrist on to
the broken pane, and rubbed it to and fro till the blood ran down and soaked the bed-clothes’
(Brontë, 1960:54). The reunion of Cathy and Heathcliff is not, in this sense, merely spectral,
but corporeal, too. Significantly, their spectrality does not evoke horror – the novel’s final im-
age is of ‘moths fluttering among the heath and hare-bells’ and ‘soft wind breathing through
the grass’ (Brontë, 1960:348). Even if the indulgence of their desire for one another is per-
missible only in death, it is permissible nonetheless, and not only permissible, but beautiful.
George Haggerty argues that ‘gothic fiction can be read as reinscribing the status quo.
Gothic resolutions repeatedly insist on order restored and (often) on reassertion of heteronor-
mative prerogative’ (2006:10). In Wuthering Heights, however, the concluding restoration is
the spectral reunion of Cathy and Heathcliff, the most transgressive characters in the novel. In
this sense, despite the proliferation of representations of gender indeterminacy and transgres-
sive sexuality in Gothic fiction from its inception, Brontë demonstrates not only originality,
but also genuine radicalism, offering a glimmer of hope in a world that was deeply hostile to
those marked in any way as “queer”.

References
Primary texts

Brontë, E. (1960) Wuthering Heights. London: Collins Clear-Type Press.

Secondary texts

Davison, C. M. (2009) ‘Getting Their Knickers in a Twist: Contesting the ‘Female Gothic’
in Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya.’ Gothic Studies, 11(1), pp. 32 – 45.

Haefele-Thomas, A. (2012) Queer Others in Victorian Gothic: Transgressing Monstrosity.

Cardiff: University of Wales Press.

Haggerty, G. E. (2006) Queer Gothic. Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

Academia Letters, September 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Brontë Schiltz, bronte.schiltz@gmail.com

Citation: Schiltz, B. (2021). “It is unutterable”: Sexual Transgression in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights.
Academia Letters, Article 3536. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL3536.

4
 Hanson, E. (2007) ‘Queer Gothic.’ In Spooner, C. and McEvoy, E. (ed.) The Routledge
Companion to Gothic. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 174 – 182.

Hughes, W. and Smith, A. (2011) Queering the Gothic. Manchester: Manchester University
Press.

Kennard, J. E. (1996) ‘Lesbianism and the Censoring of “Wuthering Heights”.’ NSWA Jour-
nal, 8(2), pp. 17 – 36.

Krafft-Ebing, R. (1998) Psychopathia Sexualis: With Especial Reference to Antipathic Sexual

Instinct. New York: Arcade Publishing.

Milbank, A. (2015) ‘The Victorian Gothic in English novels and stories, 1830 – 1880.’ In
Hogle, J. E. (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, pp. 145 – 166.

Rigby, M. (2009) “‘Do you share my madness?’: Frankenstein’s queer Gothic.” In Hughes,
W. and Smith, A. (eds.) Queering the Gothic. Manchester: Manchester University Press,
pp. 36 – 54.

Spooner, C. and McEvoy, E. (2007) The Routledge Companion to Gothic. Abingdon: Rout-
ledge.

Townshend, D. (2011) “Love in a convent’: or, Gothic and the perverse father of queer enjoy-
ment.’ In Hughes, W. and Smith, A. (eds.) Queering the Gothic. Manchester: Manchester
University Press, pp. 11 – 35.

Wallace, D. (2004) ‘Uncanny Stories: The Ghost Story as Female Gothic.’ Gothic Studies,
6(1), pp. 57 – 68.

Academia Letters, September 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Brontë Schiltz, bronte.schiltz@gmail.com

Citation: Schiltz, B. (2021). “It is unutterable”: Sexual Transgression in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights.
Academia Letters, Article 3536. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL3536.