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Nothing about the reception of Emily Bront毛鈥檚 first and only published novel,听, in 1847 suggested that it would grow to achieve its now-cult status. While contemporary critics often admitted its power, even unwillingly responding to the clarity of its psychological realism, the overwhelming response was one of disgust at its brutish and brooding Byronic hero, Heathcliff, and his beloved Catherine, whose rebellion against the norms of Victorian femininity neutered her of any claim to womanly attraction.

The characters speak in tongues heavily inflected with expletives, hurling words like weapons of affliction, and indulging throughout in a gleeful schadenfreude as they attempt to exact revenge on each other. It is all rather like a relentless chess game in hell. One of its early reviewers wrote that the novel 鈥渟trongly shows the brutalising influence of unchecked passion鈥�.

Moral philosopher Martha Nussbaum claims, however, that 鈥渨e must ourselves confront the shocking in Wuthering Heights, or we will have no chance of understanding what Emily Bront毛 is setting out to do鈥�. The reader must give herself over to the horror of Bront毛鈥檚 inverted world.

She must jump, as it were, without looking to see if there is water below. It is a Paradise Lost of a novel: its poetry Miltonic, its style hyperbolic, and its cruelty relentless. It has left readers and scholars alike stumbling to locate its seemingly Delphic meaning, as we try to make sense of the Hobbesian world it portrays.

The author remains as elusive as her enigmatic masterpiece. As new critical appraisals emerge in this, Emily Bront毛鈥檚 bicentenary year, the scant traces she left of her personal life beyond her poetry and several extant diary papers, are re-fashioned accordingly.

Described as the 鈥渟phinx of the moors鈥�, her obstinate mystery has lured countless pilgrims to the聽in which she passed almost all of her life, and the surrounding moorlands that were the landscape of her daily walks and the inspiration for her writing. Bront毛 relinquished her jealous hold of the manuscript only after considerable pressure from her sister Charlotte, who insisted that it be published.

Wuthering Heights was released pseudonymously under the name Ellis Bell, published in an edition that included her sister Anne鈥檚 lesser known work,听. Emily was to die just 12 months later, in December 1848.

As Bront毛 biographer Juliet Barker writes, the writer stubbornly maintained the pretence of health even in the final stages of consumption, insisting on getting out of bed to take care of her much loved dog, Keeper. She resisted death with remarkable self-discipline but, 鈥渉er unbending spirit finally broken鈥�, she acquiesced to a doctor鈥檚 attendance. It was by then too late; she was just 30.

After her sister鈥檚 death, Charlotte Bront毛 wrote two biographical prefaces to accompany a new edition of Wuthering Heights, instantiating the mythology both of her sister 鈥� 鈥渟tronger than a man, simpler than a child鈥� 鈥� and her infamous novel: 鈥淚t is rustic all through. It is moorish, and wild, and knotty as the root of heath.鈥�

A feminist icon

It is that property of wildness that has compelled artists from Sylvia Plath to Kate Bush, whose 1978 hit single, Wuthering Heights, was representative of the magnetic pull of Bront毛鈥檚 fierce heroine, Catherine. The novel has maintained its relevance in popular culture, and its author has risen to a feminist icon.

The elusiveness of the woman and the book that now seems an extension of her subjectivity, gives both a malleability that has seen Wuthering Heights transformed into various mediums: several Hollywood films, theatre, a ballet and, perhaps most incongruously, a detective novel. Bront毛鈥檚 name is used to sell everything from food to dry-cleaning products.

Film versions have tended to indulge in a surfeit of romanticism, offering up visions of the lovers swooning atop windswept hills, most famously in the 1939 movie, with Laurence Olivier as a dashing Heathcliff, a heavily sanitised re-telling of what the promotional material billed as 鈥渢he greatest love story of our time - or any time!鈥� Andrea Arnold鈥檚 gritty, pared-back聽聽is the notable exception; bleak and darkly violent, the actors speak in an at times unintelligible dialect, scrambling across a blasted wilderness as though they are animals.

Contrary to Charlotte Bront毛鈥檚 revisioning, however, Wuthering Heights was not purely the product of a terrible divine inspiration, emerging partially formed from the granite rock of the Yorkshire landscape, to be hewn from Emily鈥檚 simple materials.

Instead, it is the work of a writer looking back to past Romantic forms, specifically the German incarnation of that aesthetic, infused with folkloric taboos and primal longings. Her tale of domestic gothic is housed in an intricately complex narrative architecture that works by repetition and doubling, at the fulcrum of which stands Catherine, the supremely defiant object of Heathcliff鈥檚 obsession.

At the novel鈥檚 core is the corrosiveness of love, with the titanic power of Shakespearean tragedy and the dialogic form of a Greek morality play. Two families, locked in internecine war and bound together by patrilineal inheritance, stage their abject conflict across the small geographical space that separates their respective households: the luxury and insipidity of the Grange, versus the shabby gentility, decay, and violence of the Heights.

A claustrophobic novel

It is a distinctly claustrophobic novel: although we read with a vague sense of the vastness of the moors that is its setting, the action unfolds, with few exceptions, in domestic interiors. Despite countless readings, I can conjure no distinct image of the Grange. But the outline of the Heights, with each room unfolding into yet another set of rooms, labyrinthine and imprisoning, has settled into my mind. The deeper you enter into the space of the Heights - the space of the text - the more bewildering the effect.

The love between Heathcliff and Catherine exists now as a myth operative outside any substantial relationship to the novel from which the lovers spring. It is shorthand in popular culture for doomed passion. Much of this hyper-romance gathers around Catherine鈥檚 declaration of Platonic unity with her would-be lover: 鈥淚 am Heathcliff 鈥� he鈥檚 always, always in my mind.鈥� Yet their relationship is never less than brutal.

What is it about their unearthly union, with its overtones of necrophilia and incestuous desire, that so captivates us, and why does Emily Bront毛 privilege this form of explicitly masochistic, irrevocable and unattainable love?

Bront毛鈥檚 great theme was transcendence, and I would suggest that it is the metaphysical affinity that solders these two lovers that so beguiles us. The greediness of their feeling for each other resembles nothing in reality. It is hyperreal, as Catherine and Heathcliff do not aspire so much as to be together, as to be each other. Twinned in that shared commitment and to the natural world that was the hunting-ground of their childhood play, they try, with increasing desperation, to get at each other鈥檚 souls.

This is not a physically erotic coupling: the body is immaterial to their love. It is a very different notion of desire to that of Jane Eyre and Rochester, for instance, in Charlotte Bront毛鈥檚聽, which is very fleshy indeed. Both Catherine and Heathcliff want to get under each other鈥檚 skin, quite literally, to join and become that singular body of their childhood fantasies. It is a dream, then, of total union, of an impossible return to origins. It is not heavenly in its transcendence, but decidedly earthly. 鈥淚 cannot express it鈥�, Catherine tells her nurse Nelly Dean, who is our homely, yet not so benign, narrator:

This notion of the self eclipsing its selfish form seems impossible for us to conceive in an age where one鈥檚 individuality is sacred. It is, however, the essence of Catherine鈥檚 tragedy: her search for her self鈥檚 home among the men who circle her is futile. Nevertheless, Emily Bront毛鈥檚 radical statement of a shared ontology grounds the eroticism between the pair so that we cannot look away; and neither it seems, can the other characters in the novel.

The book鈥檚 structure is famously complex, with multiple narrators and a fluid style that results in one focalising voice shading into another. The story proper begins with Lockwood, a stranger to the rugged moorlands, a gentleman accustomed to urban life and its polite civilisations.

The terrifying nightmare he endures on his first night under Heathcliff鈥檚 roof, and the gruesomely violent outcome of his fear sets in motion the central love story that pulls all else irresistibly to it. Heathcliff鈥檚 thrice-repeated invocation of Catherine鈥檚 name, which Lockwood finds written in the margins of a book and mistakenly believes to be 鈥渘othing but a name鈥�, works as an incantation, summoning the ghost of the woman who haunts this book.

Emily Bront毛 speaks of dreams, dreams that pass through the mind 鈥渓ike wine through water, and alter the colour鈥� of thoughts. If the experience of reading Wuthering Heights feels like a suspension in a state of waking nightmare, what a richly-hued vision of the fantastical it is.

Sophie Alexandra Frazer is a Doctoral candidate in at the University of Sydney.聽This article first appeared on on 31 July 2018.