the single pleasure I can imagine is to die

or to see him dead

(Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights)

Language is transgression and the primary mode of revelation. I am ostensibly writing about Wuthering Heights but see no need to focus on it in microcosmic fashion. Much has been written about the book. Therefore let us start with a checklist of accepted facts and move on from there. The book clearly concludes the following:

(1) we have no power to tell our own stories;

(2) marriage is a form of economic sadism;

(3) transformation is a constant.

These conclusions come from the mythically tormented Emily Brontë who wrote in the rapidly industrializing Haworth on the periphery of those around her. Always-already a ghost she determined that forever we would

get rid of all decent people only to run to ruin a little faster

have no power to tell our own stories

Active in the 21st century art world I often hear discussion about the ethics, the morality of storytelling. Critics ask, audiences ask: ‘who has the right to say what about who?’ ‘Who has the right to represent whose stories?’ Today in a dinner table conversation somebody might answer ‘Cathy has the right to tell Cathy’s story. Heathcliff has the right to tell Heathcliff’s story.’ And perhaps we would leave it there, get on with the paté, never mind that this is really another way of saying that only a woman has the authority to tell this woman’s story, or that only an Englishman of mixed racial descent has the authority to tell this man’s story. All of which neglects the fact that of course Emily Brontë was austere, secluded, violent, alone. All of which even in itself neglects the fact that Emily Brontë never wrote about herself and all we know of her comes through the voices of others. It is also too easy to forget that Wuthering Heights is Nelly’s story, that Wuthering Heights is Lockwood’s story, at least in the telling. The voice of the book has nothing to do with either Cathy or Heathcliff.

This is the revelatory nature of Wuthering Heights: contradictorily, it is only possible to understand the socially transgressive nature of Heathcliff’s and Cathy’s love for each other because it is told by people who could not possibly have understood them. They are people with no power over the narratives told about them. Like most of us are at the end of the day.

Whilst questions of artistic ethics may very well be productive in the short-term, their unfortunate side effect is the freezing of ethics and morals into a perpetual present. Just as our current epoch is characterized by the prevalence of an acceptable, state-sanctioned transgression that sits comfortably within the dominant ideological regime, transgression is widely accepted when it’s about something we’re viewed as authorities on. Three of my four books, for instance, are often labeled “transgressive,” ostensibly because they are about violence and sex, especially queer sex and queer-specific violence. Yet the violent and sexual dimensions of those books are in large part just honest. True transgression would look like filtering the events of those very same books through the voice of somebody external, somebody outside.

Never Speak Never Touch Never Transform: Wuthering Heights as a Transgressive Object in the 21st Century

by Josiah Morgan

As Nuala Loges writes,

“[f]alse unifying concepts, such as the / very notion of categorizing / persons with a term like ‘Native American’, / simplify identification and / ways of living and knowing.”

Whole slews of officials tell us that we have the power to tell our own stories. Social media offers us the opportunity to perpetually narrativize our own success. In fact we focus so frequently and so obsessively on doing this, on ‘telling our own stories,’ that the vast majority of the populace doesn’t notice the state-sanctioned narrative perpetually shifting over our heads. Of course it is radical when ava hofmann writes “I am a good transgender,” in the same decade as the state of Texas increases its legislative drive for fascistic bodily control. This is work that forces us to notice. I suspect it is equally radical for Isabelle Nicou to write that “The feminine was reduced into this nameless thing,” in her beautiful novel, Paresis, about the paralyzing nature of contemporary power. This is work that does not force us to notice.

In a present context, art that is ethically and morally concerned supports the neoliberal regime. This is because the neoliberal regime thrives on the fact that there is a deficit between corporate definitions of morality and real-world action. In particular, morality is shaped by cultural artifacts always (is it not the fault of the beauty industry that women are viewed as dirty if not shorn of hair? is it not the case that Coca Cola profit from the premise that sugar is harmful as it allows them the opportunity to maximize profits through distributing not just one but two, even three products in the form of Coke Zero and Coke No Sugar?) therefore morality should be of very little concern to an engaged artist as the engaged artist must therefore understand that the moral dimension of existence is constantly in flux.

All of which is to say that when we are reduced to talking about ourselves always, it is impossible to make genuine social change…to transgress. In another time and space, to create in such a way would be after all truly moral: to write without concern for the ethical dimension of the present allows artists to be concerned with the ethical dimension of the work itself. So Brontë herself signified that

the threatening danger was not so much death as permanent alienation of intellect

marriage is a form of economic sadism

There is a common view of Wuthering Heights in academia positing that the book is primarily about Heathcliff’s drive for economic control of the land such that he can establish himself as an upwardly mobile individual, which he strives to access through marital status. In the context of the novel, then, marriage is intrinsically tied with sadism. Why wouldn’t it be? Heathcliff tortures Cathy, hangs the dog, acts in a manner increasingly volatile and violent. “[T]he….words I uttered were a wish that I had the hanging of every being belonging to her” declares Heathcliff in a drive toward violence, and in fact he so succeeds at stifling Cathy’s world beyond himself that Cathy later declares “I am Heathcliff.”. Never mind that Heathcliff and Cathy do not marry, and never mind that marriage eventually re-establishes the equilibrium of the novel. All of the sadistic violence directed outward in the novel derives from the marital institution. Love, of course, has nothing to do with it.

Related to this is the fact that even now we belong epistemologically to Christianity in the colonized West. Part of the transgressive nature of Wuthering Heights lies in its criticism of the fact that romantic love is an inherent and necessary part of the marriage institution, and that therefore love is not a given, and not in fact necessarily natural, but part of a complicated equation designed to exercise materialistic control over the autonomy of others’ bodies, and, in fact, not just their bodies, but their spirits even beyond the time of their death. The new and ongoing transgression then is that Brontë herself materializes her spirit and her body into the form of the novel’s pages as a physical object, speaking against the marital institution and against love as a natural and normative mode of being. Brontë demonstrates in the book over and over again the dangers of loving someone

more myself than I am

transformation is a constant

So the world beyond books changes, so the world within books changes, so all that remains is the neutralizing pain of the page. Behold, the transformation of Heathcliff into a symbol for the way the present reduces us to self-conscious individuals propelling forward. Our cells regenerate every seven years and our language regenerates every time we love someone new or stop loving. Language itself is a transformative violence, a torture, as Heathcliff puts it. Let’s call a spade a spade and notice that a rose is a rose is a rose and finally, once and for all admit that transgression is just another word for honesty, and honesty rings true forever, even as the world around it transforms. Honesty might inform ideology, but there is nothing ideological about that.

Books, in order of reference

Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë

Ontologies of Environmental Collapse, Nuala Loges

love poems / smallness studies, Ava Hofmann

Paresis, Isabelle Nicou

Images, in order of appearance

Edna Hall, Study for ‘Wuthering Heights’

Robert McGinnis, Wuthering Heights

Wal Paget, I bought me a slave (Lithograph for Robinson Crusoe)

New York Public Library, Louis M. Alcott

Salvador Dalí, My Wife, Nude, Contemplating her own flesh becoming Stairs

Clare Leighton, Heathcliff’s grief, “Wuthering Heights”