Episode 97: Wuthering Heights

It has taken your favorite commie book jerks nearly 100 episodes to answer the much-debated question – what is the horniest novel of the British 19th century? Comrades, it’s Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847). We absolutely love this brilliant novel about the torrid love affair between Catherine Earnshaw and the mysterious, often sinister, Gothic villain/anti-hero Heathcliff. (Did we mention he’s her adoptive brother? He’s her adoptive brother. It wouldn’t be a Gothic novel if it wasn’t HAVING THOUGHTS about endogamy and incest.) We talk gender, sexuality, patriarchy, repression that’s kind of not, and racialization, as well as the pressure this novel puts on Victorian “realism.” This is one damp novel, folks. Who knew the Yorkshire moors were so turnt?

We read the Oxford edition with notes and introduction by John Bugg. For a wonderful and concise reading of Wuthering Heights that explores Brontë’s novel as a critique of normative Victorian epistemology, we highly recommend Nathan K. Hensley’s blog post “The Lapwing’s Feather (Wuthering Heights)”: http://www.nathankhensley.net/blog/the-lapwings-feather-wuthering-heights. There is a ton of great scholarship on Heathcliff as a figure of otherness, but one book we recommend is Terry Eagleton’s Heathcliff and the Great Hunger which discusses many texts but builds part of its analysis by thinking of Wuthering Heights in the context of the Great Famine, ongoing as Wuthering Heights was published.

Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at [email protected]. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.