Wuthering Heights, Movie, Emily Bronte, Psychoanalysis,
Psychology, Nellie, Catherine, Heathcliffe, Edgar, Isabella, Fifth Business
I first read Wuthering Heights many many years ago – when I
lived in a middle class culture in middle America where class was not
determined by birth or by income, but by physical and emotional attributes – we
had pretty privilege, and jock privilege and some of us had the ability to be
cool – and these were what determined our social standing in our apparently
homogenous suburban world. So I don’t
think I could have then understand the central tension in Bronte’s melodramatic
story of love across a class divide.
Emily Bronte could subtly signal the class divide to her
readers because they grew up with it.
They knew the boundaries and the third rail that resulted from crossing
those boundaries. I also imagine, not
having read the book in many decades, that the sado-masochistic elements in the
story were similarly subtly portrayed – perhaps because of official or
unofficial censorship – the kind of details that decorum precludes, but because
decorum is necessary, readers knew how to read between the lines to access the
brutality,both subtle and blatant, that was part and parcel of a rigid class
system.
In 2026, with the patriarchy struggling to reassert itself
and when decorum has been thrown to the wind, the director, Emerald Fennell,
hits us over the head with both the class distinctions, the rot of the upper
class spending down their inheritances, the nouveau riche overspending, and the
transcendent allure of pretty privilege.
At the same time that these contemporary issues are articulated, by
emphasizing the brutality of the public hangings that both shock and titillate,
combined with the filth of living among livestock on the heath and the hot and
cold running servants of the Victorian era British system, we are able to find
the distance to imagine that this is not about us.
The framing of the drama is the traditional frame of four
lovers caught in a web of intrigue and a fifth – someone apparently outside of
the drama but essential to making it move forward. The person of this fifth business – Nellie –
is, I think, the most subtly acted and convincing element in this particular
rendition of the classic melodrama. The
romantic leads are Catherine Earnshaw (Margot
Robbie and Charlotte Mellington as young Cathy) and Heathcliff (Jacob
Elordi and Owen Cooper as young Heathcliff), a street urchin
“rescued” by Catherine’s besotted father
(Martin Clunes) from his
own abusive father, to live at Wuthering Heights as a servant – and who is
adopted by Catherine as her pet.
Heathcliff quickly falls in love with the young Catherine and offers
himself up to be beaten by her father when she has kept them out in the rain on the father’s
birthday, cementing Heathcliff’splace in Catherine’s heart.
Nellie (Hong
Chau with Vy Nguyen as young Nelly), our person of interest, had previously been taken
in by the father. The bastard child of a
nobleman, she is Catherine’s girl in waiting – her maidservant and friend,
though she is replaced when Heathcliff arrives as it is Heathcliff now that is Catherine’s
favorite and Nellie, aware of Catherine’s fickle nature from her own experience
of it, starts to look out for Catherine’s best interests as Catherine,
beautiful but unprincipled, lures but then repulses people with her
capriciousness.
We then move forward in time, and Catherine is now of
marrying age, beautiful, but her father has wasted his fortune on gambling and
Wuthering Heights is falling into disrepair around them. At this point, Edgar Linton moves into town
with his vacuous ward Isabella. Nellie
knows that Catherine’s only hope is marrying Edgar, and we quickly see that
Isabella is no match for Catherine when Catherine manages to sprain her ankle
trying to climb into the garden where Isabella is talking with and trying
desperately to engage Edgar who is bored by her. Six weeks of recuperation at Edgar’s house
leads Edgar to visit Wuthering Heights to propose marriage, which Catherine must
needs accept. Indeed, that has been hers
(and Nellie’s) goal all along.
The critical scene here is a conversation between Nellie and
Catherine where Catherine tells Nellie of the proposal and her acceptance of
it, and Nellie sees Heathcliff approaching the room where they are talking and
knows that he is listening to their conversation, including when Catherine says
that it would degrade her to marry Heathcliff, after which Nellie sees
Heathcliff leaving before Catherine protests that, despite his station,
Heathcliff is her true love.
Nellie’s pivotal position is one in which she implicitly
makes the decision for Catherine about Catherine’s future. She knows that Catherine loves
Heathcliff. She also knows that what is
“best” for Catherine is to accept the offer of marriage from Edgar. Heathcliff, not surprisingly, based on what
he has heard, decides to leave without so much as a fair-thee-well for
Catherine, which she takes as a desertion.
She puts off the marriage for a year, hoping Heathcliff will return, but
when he doesn’t she marries and moves into a world of untold riches – with a
guy who appears to be decent, but who has no chance because her heart belongs
to Heathcliff.
Ok, this is pretty stock stuff, What the director has loaded
into it are frank depictions of sado-masochism. The opening scene is a public hanging. We are introduced to it by hearing the sounds
of the dying man before seeing it, and we think we are hearing sex, but we are
hearing death. We then see the onlookers
delighting in the death – pointing out the man’s erection and, presumably,
ejaculation as he dies. Heathcliff
“catches” Catherine observing a male servant having sado-masochistic sex with a
female servant and covers her eyes so that she doesn’t see the consummation of
the clearly consensual interaction between the two.
So, when Heathcliff returns five years into the marriage,
now a wealthy man, even buying Wuthering Heights, Catherine invites him to her new house, Egar's house, and she plays coy with him, taunting him sadistically with her lack of
interest in who he has become. Pushed to
the brink in this interaction, they each hide behind the hurt that they feel,
ultimately confessing the love that they continue to feel for each other. Heathcliff clarifies Nellie’s role in the
earlier conversation, and Catherine fires Nellie. Nellie, not to be outdone, goes to Edgar and
hints that Catherine is being loose with Heathcliff, and Edgar bans Catherine
from seeing him and from firing Nellie.
Catherine, a prisoner of her position and pregnant with Edgar’s child,
withdraws from Heathcliff.
Enraged, Heathcliff seduces Isabella, clarifying the terms
of his relationship to her as they enter into it. He will be having a relationship with her
only to hurt Catherine. Isabella, who has an enormous crush on Catherine,
succumbs to the seduction, perhaps in part to exact her own kind of
revenge/love for Catherine. Heathcliff
marries Isabella and spirits her away to Wuthering Heights, which is still in a
state of disrepair, and treats Isabella as, quite literally, a dog. He leashes her and commands her to sit and
come and rewards her with bits of food but also sex.
A word about sado-masochism in general here. There are multiple intersections of S-M in
this movie. On is the current S-M
community, about which I know only a little.
A critical aspect of that community is consent. As noted above, consent is clearly spelled
out in many of these S-M interactions.
This is certainly an anachronistic nod to the S-M community. The idea here is that consenting adults can
be brutal towards each other in a kind of play – one where the experience,
whether of physical pain, or psychological degradation – enhances the sensory
and relational pleasure of the romantic interaction.
The non-consensual Sado-masochistic relationships depicted
in the film include the relations between the young Catherine and Heathcliff
and Heathcliff’s father, and before that, the sadistic relationship of
Heathcliff’s own father with him.
Similarly, Nellie is in a masochistic relationship with Catherine’s
family as they “care” for her by making her a servant – a lady in waiting – in
a dreary house at the edge of nowhere.
Another is Nellie’s interactions with Catherine, but more about that
later.
The non-consensual sado-masochistic relationships involve
differences in power that lead to trauma.
Heathcliff bears the physical scars of the Catherine’s father’s beating
into adulthood, but he also bears the scars of Catherine’s taunting him about
his inability to learn to read – which is at least partially the result of her
inability to empathically teach him a skill that is now second nature to her,
having learned it at an age when it was relatively easy to learn. The problem with this trauma is that it is
preferable to the trauma of being ignored.
It is a psychoanalytic truth that the opposite of love is not hate, but
disregard. Being hurt by someone
indicates a relationship with them.
Being in that relationship, as painful as it may be, is preferable to
not being in a relationship at all.
The danger of this kind of trauma is that it becomes a
template for interactions later in life.
We seek out a connection with someone else that includes the kind of
harm that we received by those who loved us.
Catherine’s love for her father is just such a love. She desperately wants his affection – and if
she can’t have that, because he is drunk or just plain mean, she will create a
scene so that he has to acknowledge her, even if only out of anger at her
apparent thoughtlessness towards him – even though that behavior may actually
be carefully calculated as a means of enraging him to elicit the very reaction
he begrudgingly, but then wholeheartedly wreaks.
In the contemporary consensual S-M relationship, paying very
close attention to the exact amount of pain that the other can tolerate enacts
the caring and concern that the pain itself conveys in traumatic masochistic
relationships. He or she cares enough to
hurt me in just the way that I need to be hurt. When Catherine’s father dies, she is overcome
with grief and rushes to his side torn by the feelings of loss, but then she
draws back and kicks his carcass lying on the floor in his own filth twice. When she confesses her guilt about having
kicked him to Heathcliff, who witnessed the kicking, Heathcliff responds that
he was amazed at her restraint. This
kind of love is deeply entwined with hate.
So, when Heathcliff has married and abducted Isabella, he
repeatedly demands that Isabella write to Catherine (he is still illiterate)
with various news that will necessitate her coming to see them – to rescue
Isabella, to connect with Heathcliff, whatever it will take to get a rise out
of her. Each of these letters is thrown
into the fire by Nellie – who “knows” that Heathcliff is no good for
Catherine. She is looking out for
Catherine’s well-being.
At the same time, Catherine tells Isabella that the child
she is carrying is dead. Nellie
classifies this as more manipulative hysterics on Catherine’s part and does
nothing to address it, even as Catherine goes on a hunger strike protesting
living in a loveless marriage. Nellie
manages all this by instructing Edgar to ignore Catherine’s childish behavior
and by chastising Catherine for being such a child.
When it becomes apparent that Catherine is dying from the dead child within, Nellie confesses to Catherine that she has mishandled everything and Catherine dismisses this confession, reassuring Nellie that she has had the best intentions, and Nellie reflectively answers that she does not believe this to be the case. Suddenly, Fifth Business bursts into the headlines – she is not just propelling the action forward, she is enacting it. Rather than having been the cool calm collected one, protecting her mistress from self-destructive acts, she glimpses the very real possibility that she has been the chief architect of her misery and that she may have done this for unconscious and but not hard to imagine motives. Having been severed from her own family at a very early age - her father experienced her as a reminder of his infidelity, she was attached to Cstherine, but then was thrown over as her favorite, and she has enacted sadistic revenge on Catherine directly, if unconsciously– with the cruelest consequence of all, death.
Elsewhere I have opined, following the lead of James Cone, that using death as a terror device – e.g. the hanging at the beginning of this movie, but, by extension, S-M behavior generally, has the added value of giving the sadist the illusion of having control over life and death. Nellie is alone in the world. Her father had an adulterous affair. In this film, this is marked by her Asian features. She is not a pure bred Briton. She must depend on her wits to survive. She is dependent on Catherine for her survival, but she turns the tables – it is Catherine who is dependent on her. This reassures her in addition to giving her the pleasure of revenge. She has also then, I believe, enacted her anger against her family - represented by the Earnshaw family as a whole, despoiling them as she was despoiled, making them the hated object of Edgar.
I think the director is also counting on our prejudices
about Asian characters – people who, like Nellie, keep their emotions under
tight control – to emphasize that Sado Masochistic behavioral dynamics are not
just the province of conscious control – nor are we rational in the sense of
intentional. There are reasons for what
we do – I have just articulated what I believe to be the rationale for Nellie’s
behavior – but this is not volitional on this character’s part, it is something
that she only ralizes is the case after the fact.
It is just this sort of component of our character that
analysts try to help their patients see.
The challenge in doing this, of course, is that we are often in the
position of Nellie. We are trying to
help our patients recognize their own dynamics and, at our worst – or most
human – we do not see how our own dynamics play into the situation. When we play into our patient’s dynamics, we
call that an enactment.
All analyses, at one point or another, have enactments –
they needs must if they are to be real relationships between two people deeply
engaged in the work that they are doing.
When enactments occur, it is incumbent on the analyst to recognize them, and
to acknowledge his or her own part in them as part and parcel of helping the patient
become conscious of their own part in the interaction both in the treatment,
but, more generally, in life.
Particularly when working with people who have been traumatized, sado-masochistic
enactments are liable to occur.
An early supervisor clarified to me that we are most helpful
to our patients when they re-enact their relations with those who were most
problematic. That is, when we are able
to interpret the negative transference in the relationship so that the patient
can experience us as if we were their tormentors and recognize that they are,
on some level, seeking that out, and we can offer an alternative – so they can
have the kind of “ah hah” moment that Nellie has before the tragic moment
rather than after it, as is the case in this movie. Of course the danger is that we become Nellie
and don’t see our part at all or see it only too late. Freud thought that our own analysis would
inoculate us from this, but he also cautioned that the work is perilous, and I
think the latter guide is what we should be bearing in mind.
The Reluctant Wife and I watched the film while crossing the
Atlantic when we did not have access to our usual broad array of entertainment
options. It was the film being shown and
we both had moderate interest in watching what we had seen advertised as
basically a bodice ripping romance. It
was not the most engaging film in terms of the leads – the kids were more
convincingly in love than the adults – but the role of Nellie was, indeed,
deeply satisfying. Sometimes by trying
to stay above the fray, we actually make it worse and we can hide our own
sadism in pity, empathy, superior knowledge, but perhaps also by just standing
by and letting things happen on their own.
There is no easy way out of the dramas that take place between humans,
including between she and I, nor is there an easy way to be aware of the
drama’s that emerge in our own souls.
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