masturbation on the moors

Emerald Fennell's "Wuthering Heights"

On May 20, 1955, Sylvia Plath learned that she’d won a Fulbright Fellowship to Cambridge. To celebrate, she spent time in New York with Richard Sassoon, and saw Wuthering Heights starring Laurence Olivier. Sylvia “wept buckets” watching him play Heathcliff.

Plath would meet her destiny on February 25th of the following year, at the launch party for a student literary magazine.

Cambridge friends remember young Ted Hughes as brooding, “craggily handsome,” and “physically overpowering…someone one could easily see as Heathcliff.”¹ Anne Sexton would later call him “Ted Huge.” He knew how to use a Ouija board and he wore his uncle’s World War I leather jacket in the cold. “There was something dark about Ted,” one woman told Plath’s biographer Heather Clark.

Plath’s American ambition—the fact that she wrote to publish and wanted to earn income for writing—“was held against her” at Cambridge, Clark writes. She once told the young men who worked on the literary magazine that they could earn money by writing for American magazines like Mademoiselle. They found this advice hilarious.

Ted brought his girlfriend Shirley to the literary magazine party, but Shirley was no obstacle for Sylvia. Sylvia asked a friend to point out Ted to her and then she proceeded to quote his poem “Fallgrief’s Girl-Friends” aloud to his face. You like? he asked. Did she want to go to another room and have a drink? She did.

Behind the door, I poured more brandy. We drank.
I kissed you. Whether you were drunk
Or concentrated for a masterpiece, suddenly
You fastened to me, your limbs steely,
Like a trap. Our kiss developed
Till my left cheek was in your teeth
And your screwed-up ball-face of joy
Bit & held with all your strength. I broke free,
I was laughing & you were laughing…²

“When we came out of the room, blood was running down his face,” Sylvia wrote in her diary. “Such violence, and I can see how women lie down for artists. The one man in the room who was as big as his poems, huge, with hulk and dynamic chunks of words; his poems are strong and blasting like a high wind in steel girders. And I screamed in myself, thinking: oh, to give myself crashing, fighting, to you.”

Heathcliff, it’s me, I’m Cathy!

Plath and Hughes would each come to see the other as an embodiment of an aesthetic as much as a real person—“chapters in a mythology,” as Hughes once put it. They saw themselves as Cathy and Heathcliff…. As Plath wrote in her journal in April 1956, “I lust for him, and in my mind I am ripped to bits by the words he wields and wields…and glory in the temporary sun of his ruthless force.” Sylvia sensed immediately that he was “the only man I’ve met yet here who’d be strong enough to be equal with.”

— Heather Clark, Red Comet

My teenage obsession with Sylvia’s poetry was inextricable from my obsession with her doomed romance with Ted. As a young (depressed) poet, I wanted the kind of love that makes you insane. I wanted a tall, sexy, brooding maniac. I wanted an artist. I believed good art was the result of suffering. I wanted to see how much I could endure. I met my Heathcliff at an audition for a tragedy when I was twenty-two.

There is one exciting moment in Emerald Fennell’s quote unquote Wuthering Heights adaptation and it lasts only a couple seconds: Edgar and Cathy are having sex—he’s behind her—and he’s covering her eyes with one hand and her mouth with another. This gesture shows the indelible erotic imprint Heathcliff has made on Cathy, after an earlier scene in the film when he—shirtless, from behind—covers her eyes and mouth to prevent her from watching two servants have sex in the stables below the loft where he sleeps. Fennell doesn’t show us the servants; she holds the camera steady on Cathy’s flushed cheeks. Blindfolded by Heathcliff’s hands, she can only listen. It’s a moment Cathy wishes would last for eternity.

The next morning, she goes to the moors to masturbate.

Heathcliff leaves a sexy, violent impression that tortures women—to death.

“To understand the story’s enduring power, you must go back to the source,” BDM writes in the Times. “For some readers, Brontë’s novel is the interminable story of two terrible people determined to destroy everybody around them. (It often features in the answers to social media prompts about the worst book you had to read for school or classic novels you hate.) For others, the novel is one of the greatest love stories of all time. The secret to its enduring strangeness, though, is that it has always been both.”

The problem with Fennell’s Wuthering Heights is not that Heathcliff is miscast but that he is neutered. It is a film by a woman who lacks the lived experience of loving and desiring—against all better judgment, against any instinct of self-preservation—a Heathcliff.

Fennell’s Heathcliff is an orphan in a bad wig. He sacrifices himself early in the film for Cathy, enduring a whipping meant for her. He’s no devil.

Nelly, help me to convince [Emerald Fennell] of her madness. Tell her what Heathcliff is: an unreclaimed creature, without refinement, without cultivation: an arid wilderness of furze and whinstone…. Pray, don’t imagine that he conceals depths of benevolence and affection beneath a stern exterior! He’s not a rough diamond—a pearl-containing oyster of a rustic: he’s a fierce, pitiless, wolfish man.

Stripped of his violence and temper and the pleasure he takes in cruelty and his instinct for vengeance,³ Cathy’s half-overheard confession to Nelly that it would “degrade” her to marry Heathcliff is completely meaningless. Why would it degrade her to marry the orphan in the bad wig? He seems like he has a crush on her and they came close to having sexy time in the stable loft!

The entire plot hinges on this speech—it’s one of the greatest examples of dramatic irony in English literature—because it’s what spurs Heathcliff to run away and Cathy to follow through on her marriage to Edgar Linton.

Because the film is neither a faithful adaptation of the harrowing novel, nor a plausible romance between Cathy and Heathcliff, Fennell relies heavily on cinematic allusions to make the audience remember other great on-screen romances in order to feel something—like Cathy imagining that Edgar’s hand on her mouth is Heathcliff’s.

Look at Jacob Elordi’s sexy deltoid through his wet linen shirt. Doesn’t it remind you of the sexy wet deltoids of films past?

Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” doesn’t reference Wuthering Heights, the novel, as much as it references romantic film classics.

In a positive review for Vulture, Alison Willmore writes, “Wuthering Heights has the tunnel-vision horniness and girlish aesthetic sensibility of a high-school freshman who’s been assigned to read Brontë in class while tearing through a pile of explicit bodice-rippers under the covers at home.”

“Well why shouldn’t Wuthering Heights be a steamy bodice ripper? Why shouldn’t Beloved be about a girlboss making it in the big city?”

My Wuthering Heights does not belong on the same family tree as Bridgerton or Austen. It isn’t about the transformative power of love. It’s not grumpy/sunshine or opposites attract. My Wuthering Heights is Sylvia and Ted. It’s about how obsession can make you monstrous. It’s furious.

In Anne Carson’s narrative poem “The Glass Essay,” the speaker visits her difficult mother, on the moors of Canada, after a breakup, and proceeds to closely analyze the life and work of Emily Brontë, “who remained a girl all her life despite her body as a woman,” for she “didn’t have friends, children, sex, religion, marriage, success, a salary / or a fear of death.”

I find myself tempted

to read Wuthering Heights as one thick stacked act of revenge
for all that life withheld from Emily.
But the poetry shows traces of a deeper explanation.

As if anger could be a kind of vocation for some women.
It is a chilly thought.

Sylvia wrote a poem a day in the month of October 1962, after Ted left her for Assia Wevill. These final poems, which would be collected in Ariel, are filled with images “of torture, murder, genocide, war, suicide, illness, revenge, and fury,” Clark writes. Impossible to know who Sylvia would have become, and what she would have written, without Heathcliff, the literary invention of a young woman who grew up beside a crowded graveyard, the prototype for degradation mixed up with desire.

I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look

And a love of the rack and the screw.
And I said I do, I do.

Upcoming Events

Mark your calendars:

• Wednesday February 18th at 1pm EST, I’m doing a Substack Live with novelist Candice Wuehle about Wuthering Heights. Open to everyone!

• Monday February 23rd at 1pm EST, I’m doing a Substack Live with essayist Chelsea Hodson, founder of Morning Writing Club. Chelsea will be bringing a writing PROMPT to our live. Open to all!

• Friday February 27th at 1pm EST will be my next Chat Room with David Brown, director of publicity and marketing at Atria. This conversation will be available exclusively to my diamond medallion subscribers.

• Friday March 13th at 1pm EST, I’ll be hosting Megan Tripp, social media director at Penguin Random House, in Chat Room (open to paid subscribers only)

My next plot structure class starts March 8

I’m teaching my Plot Curious class again, on Sunday afternoons, just in time for the Netflix adaptation of Vladimir, starring Rachel Weisz.

You’ll learn the most common mistake literary novelists make, what bestselling novels all share, and how to inject more pleasure into your writing. If you’re worried that you’re wasting time by figuring out an 80,000-word story arc as you go, if you studied creative writing in graduate school but never learned plot structure, or if you feel like crying every time someone asks “what’s your book about?,” you may be plot curious.

Each week, we’ll meet live on Zoom to discuss a TV show, movie, or novel, breaking it down to its essential conflict, web of characters, moral argument, designing principle, pleasure inventory, and scenes. Like the little boy in The Sixth Sense, you will soon be able to say, “I see plot structure everywhere.” The syllabus includes one romcom, one courtroom thriller/murder mystery, one campus satire, one Gothic mystery, and a craft book. This is not a writing workshop and you won’t have to read anyone’s pages.

Enrollment is limited to 20 students. Register here!

I am also offering one full tuition scholarship, plus a one-hour coaching call with me, to a content creator. I started publishing my own writing to Livejournal in 2003 and would not have a writing career without the internet. I dropped out of high school and published my first two books before I finished college. I want to pay it forward, by helping an aspiring novelist who is building a platform on Substack, TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube to help them sell a novel in the future. Apply here by March 1 if you’d like to be considered for the scholarship.

“This class taught me more about structure and narrative than the three years I spent getting my MFA in film. Leigh is an excellent instructor and this class is truly worth every penny and every minute.” — Sarah

1. Heather Clark, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

2. Unpublished draft of “St. Botolphs,” quoted in Red Comet

3. When young Heathcliff returns from Thrushcross Grange without Cathy, because she’s been injured by the Lintons’ dog, he tells Nelly, “I’d not exchange, for a thousand lives, my condition here, for Edgar Linton’s at Thrushcross Grange—not if I might have the privilege of flinging Joseph off the highest gable, and painting the house-front with Hindley’s blood!”