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Impossible Love and Commodity Culture in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights
- ELH
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 75, Number 4, Winter 2008
- pp. 819-840
- 10.1353/elh.0.0019
- Article
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
This essay argues that in Wuthering Heights Heathcliff’s form of love energizes a culture of both production and consumption. The story of Heathcliff’s life provides an exciting and mysterious narrative of the origins of capitalist desire. He represents the fantasy that some erotically compelling power underlies this economy. It is, instead, Catherine’s love that functions in opposition to the culture of capitalist accumulation. Catherine stands for a kind of love that undermines the desire necessary for capitalism to function smoothly. She offers an alternative to an economy of unsatisfied desire, threatening to undermine both a capitalist and patriarchal logic.