The Queer Ecological Aesthetics of Wuthering Heights

Abstract

This essay explores how the contemporary English filmmaker Andrea Arnold invents a queer ecological aesthetic to adapt Emily Brontë’s classic novel Wuthering Heights in her 2011 film by the same title. A queer ecological aesthetic combines queer, ecofeminist and postcolonial approaches to disavow the institutional and cultural ways in which white heterosexist patriarchy ‘sexualizes’ nature and ‘naturalizes’ heterosexuality. Arnold’s film forges subtle intimacies between nature and sexuality and the human and the non-human by focusing on Catherine and Heathcliff’s ambiguous erotic encounters on the moor. In lieu of a formal plot, dialogue and musical score, Arnold locates Catherine’s and Heathcliff’s desires within a complex mesh of ecological and creaturely narratives. Her film critiques ecophobic and erotophobic discourses in the West by depicting tactile and affective gestures between Catherine and Heathcliff that may be deemed ‘queer ecological’. This is also evident in Heathcliff’s intersectional character as a feral/non-white/non-human child whose presence threatens the white heterosexist patriarchal structures of the Yorkshire gentry. The essay reveals how Arnold revives the subversive impact of the original novel in the Victorian age for a contemporary ecophobic and erotophobic audience.