Wuthering Heights in Words and Song: Female Hysteria, Melodrama, and Racial Complexity
The first time I listened to Kate Bush’s iconic hit “Wuthering Heights”, I was fairly certain I didn’t like it. I didn’t have a problem with the song itself, you understand—I’d heard it before during the Celtic Woman concerts on which my parents would eagerly turn up the volume when they happened to be playing on a public access TV channel. It was during one of these televised concerts that I felt myself fundamentally transformed by Hayley Westenra’s cover of “Wuthering Heights”. I immediately fell in love with the gorgeous, soaring vocals featured in the cover, the way that Westenra softens the words, how they take up less space despite (or perhaps because of) the earnestness with which she sings them.
Yet in the original version by Kate Bush, there is certainly not much room for softness. I was taken aback by the sheer dramatics when I finally heard it—those high, near-screeching notes, the way she twists and warbles the opening lines of the second verse. In Westenra’s hands the song is a tragic romantic ballad, but in Bush’s purview, it is akin to a theatrical experience, ratcheting the speaker’s despair and longing to an extraordinary level. The two music videos Bush filmed for the track—one especially for an American audience who, the record label suspected, would be repulsed by the oddities of the first—add to that theatricality. Bush stands in a room in a glowing white dress, or in a windy wood wearing bright red. She stares directly at the camera, eyes comically wide as she executes dance moves ranging from graceful to absurd, holding the viewer’s gaze for long enough to both unsettle and entrance.
Despite the storied place “Wuthering Heights” holds in pop culture now, I wasn’t the only one whose first reaction was skepticism. Bush’s own record label angled for a different song as her first single, and it was only after a long and sustained fight to release it with her exact vision that Bush managed to get her way. She’d written the song after catching by chance the last few minutes of a television series adaptation of Wuthering Heights and becoming inspired by the tumultuous relationship between the story’s protagonists, Catherine and Heathcliff. Shattering all expectations, “Wuthering Heights” became a massive hit, cementing 19-year-old Bush as a rising star.
There’s a delicious aspect of utter ridiculousness to the song, a melodrama as self-aware as it is sincere. I wonder if that multiplicity is what draws so many people in, while of course still scaring a few away. It mirrors Emily Brontë’s novel in this way—a book that shocked critics upon its publication, even though she wrote under a male pseudonym out of fear that audiences would judge her harshly for being female. With its unique plot structure, severe setting and tone, and unscrupulous characters, Wuthering Heights was a literary anomaly for its time.
Bush and Brontë, in their respective moments of creation, were attempting to produce and disseminate their art through apparatuses dominated by men—the publishing industry for Brontë and the music industry for Bush. Brontë was unable to lay claim to her work publicly and never saw the greater impact her book would have on the literary world, as she passed away only a year after its release. Friend and teacher Constantin Héger once described Brontë as such:
She should have been a man—a great navigator. Her powerful reason would have deduced new spheres of discovery from the knowledge of the old; and her strong imperious will would never have been daunted by opposition or difficulty, never have given way but with life.
Despite her sharp intellect and expansive knowledge, Brontë’s gender posed a fundamental barrier to achievement and acclaim. Fast forward over a century, and Bush fought an uphill battle against male recording executives to preserve her artistic vision as a young female musician, finding vindication in the way her audience overwhelmingly embraced the effusive and gleeful strangeness of her music.
I first read the novel Wuthering Heights as a teenager, assuming that I would love it due to its status as a literary classic and all the adoring reviews I had heard over the years. Instead, the deeper I trod, the more confused and repelled I felt. I had never encountered anything quite like this book and the selfish, abrasive, malevolent characters who populated it. Some of my reaction resulted from the fact that up until that moment, I had mostly read books with at least one likeable character, retaining a solid moral center even when the universe around them was cruel or unfair. But in Brontë’s etched-out world of bleak moors and shuddering winds, characters consume the cruelty they experience and spit it back out at their loved ones and the most vulnerable people around them.
The women of Wuthering Heights are neither deified nor meant to serve as moral cautionary tales, unlike the heroines of many literary works published at the time. They take up substantial space in their caustic, expansive splendor, never close to being perfect, but always compelling in their strengths and faults. In inhabiting the narrative voice of Catherine Earnshaw—the flighty, arrogant, and tragic female protagonist of Wuthering Heights—Bush gives a platform to the remarkable heights of passion that define this character, whose internal monologue is never explored in the novel.
The Cathy that Bush brings to life in her music is possibly even more demanding and incandescent than in the source material. Interestingly enough, at the point in the narrative that the song relates to, Cathy is already dead, now a ghost tormenting her former lover. But rather than silencing her, death emboldens Cathy—in it, she gains a measure of agency and clarity of thought not present in the anguished confusion of the last years of her life. No longer bound by human constraints on behavior, both in the novel and the song she fully reveals the naked longing and emotion that she had once kept controlled in her pursuit of wealth and higher social status. After all, what use is rationality to a ghost?
Bush and Brontë both evoke women overcome with hysterical emotion, laying claim to that hysteria for their own artistic works and wrenching it from the hands of creators and critics who would use the notion to denigrate and doubt women’s abilities. I wonder if, for the both of them, there was a measure of freedom in respectively creating and identifying with the character of Cathy—a woman who is openly selfish and demanding, who refuses to suppress her desires or bend to the wills of the men around her. For these female creators who must have necessarily felt a pressure to be on their best behavior in order to navigate the patriarchal structures in their lives, I imagine there to be a kind of joy in inhabiting the character of Cathy, unmitigated passions and selfish desires and all.
At the same time, as a reader of color, it’s important that I note another reason for my initial discomfort with the novel and Cathy herself. Racism and xenophobia are overarching forces in the narrative, with Heathcliff being coded as a person of color of undefined origin who faces a ceaseless onslaught of abuse and mistreatment soon after Cathy’s father brings him home as a child. The language that the novel’s narrator and characters use to refer to Heathcliff is othering and dehumanizing, and although Cathy falls in love with him, she, too, is visibly repulsed by his race. On more than one occasion, she makes derogatory, prejudiced comments about Heathcliff, and states that marrying him would “degrade” her.
If the unabashedly selfish nature of Cathy’s actions is freeing—even inspiring—for the white women who have identified with her, for women of color there is an uncomfortable aspect to the way she goes about seizing her agency. I can recognize the power of a female character such as Cathy existing in a classic 19th century novel while also noting that this power is inextricable from the racism she exhibits and benefits from. This multilayered recognition complicates, but also enriches, my relationships with the novel and the song. I could never personally identify with the Cathy of Brontë’s novel, yet I find enjoyment both in examining the complexities of her character and in singing along with Bush’s delightfully melodramatic song.
Thus, the merit and impact of Emily Brontë and Kate Bush’s creations are at once undeniable and absolutely tied to their white womanhood. It is in acknowledging the specificity of their experiences that we can also laud the immense skill they brought to their crafts. These two female artists from such different eras both, in their own distinctive ways, took the expectations of irrational hysteria and melodrama that society held for women like them and enacted a subversion that is as intricate as it is beguiling. It’s me, Cathy, I’ve come home, Kate Bush wails in a reedy soprano—and however the listener may personally feel about Cathy, we know that she’s here to stay.