Yearning is bad, respect yourself

Wuthering Heights was an incredibly frustrating watch. No, it’s not because I am a literature snob, nor am I the littlest bit prudish. I was just triggered by every single character on screen, so if the point of the movie was to evoke reactions, I suppose it worked. Technically, a well-produced movie.

What didn’t work for me (apart from the narrative and not enough naked Jacob Elordi, why even lie) was the yearning. It has become SUCH a buzzword in the last few years on the internet, almost to combat hookup culture. However, I fear we might have overcorrected ourselves in the opposite direction.

Yearning by definition means to long for something unattainable, so you’re doomed to eternal damnation before you can even get started. A masochistic phantom zone. So I am quite bemused, actually, at the conflation of our desire to be yearned for with actual romance. I fear we have lost the plot. Those are two entirely different things.

As a lover of the “they don’t even kiss until page six hundred” type of slow-burn romance, I almost get it. It’s so incredibly satisfying to see Anthony Bridgerton sniffing Kate’s perfume as he walks past (that scene will NEVER get old), and Mr. Darcy’s hand twitch will forever make the girls go feral! But the only reason the “yearning” there works is because there are genuine stakes involved in those narratives. AND MORE IMPORTANTLY, we are privy to both sides of the story, which is impossible in the real world without open communication. Something we severely struggle with.

Certainly less scandalous for our generation to find love beyond the confines of race, class, or gender. Simply asking for what we want should be enough for us to get it. If you’re not being separated by certain death or the seven seas, then what the hell is stopping you two from being together if you really want it? People would go to war for love, and you can’t get on the Northern line?

We believed the reasons Romeo and Juliet couldn’t be together. Movie Cathy and Heathcliff? Well, I personally can’t say the same! Heathcliff would’ve killed Cathy’s husband with his bare hands should she wish it; hell, at one point he even offers as much.

Yet Cathy stays trapped in her loveless marriage without any compelling reasons to do so. For people who didn’t read the book, the class disparity between Cathy and Heathcliff is such a non-issue because Fenell doesn’t make much of a case for it. It’s mentioned flippantly and abandoned just as fast to make way for gorgeous but eerily zoomed transition shots that last too long.

Movie Cathy could’ve just left. After spending the first hour and a half establishing Cathy as a twisted sociopath who takes what she wants no matter who gets bulldozed along the way, I didn’t believe she was bound by the chains of her marriage. Cathy does what Cathy wants. Something that I found quite endearing about her.

You can’t make me believe the same woman who marched down the gardens of Thrushcross Grange was suddenly restrained by rules of matrimony from taking Heathcliff for herself. You want to tell me she knew where Heathcliff was but would rather wait on his word than go get him.

I don’t fucking believe that.

The man she loved was willing to raise someone else’s child with her, would’ve run away with her, and had offered to kill her husband if she’d let him, but she’d rather rot to death in her loveless marriage? Yeah, I didn’t like that. The central conflict of Emerald Fenell’s Wuthering Heights is Cathy’s masochism. And I don’t like seeing women suffer, that is a boy job.

It left me extremely frustrated. Not because it’s morally reprehensible—I love me a morally reprehensible character. I find it extremely delicious, in fact, when I have no choice but to root for the worst (fictional) people on the planet. Especially when they are women. But with Cathy I was just fucking annoyed.

And maybe that was the point. Doesn’t mean I have to like it.

The issue is Cathy HAD the option to have everything she wanted. There were absolutely hurdles in her path (Nelly, when I catch you), but nothing she couldn’t have overcome should she have truly wanted that. And yet she chose to suffer? She really did love crying.

And I am not having it.

We shouldn’t be romanticising being miserable, because ultimately that is what yearning really is. Be honest with yourself about what it is you really want. Ask for what you want—about 95% of the time you will get it—and if you’re not being given it, go get it elsewhere.

There is plenty to go around. I promise.

Happy International Women’s Day. May your Heathcliff never find you x