Brontë Studies

The Journal of the Brontë Society

ISSN: 1474-8932 (Print) 1745-8226 (Online) Journal homepage: www.tandfonline.com/journals/ybst20

Queer Temporalities: Resisting Family,

Reproduction and Lineage in Emily Brontë’s
Wuthering Heights

Emily Datskou

To cite this article: Emily Datskou (2020) Queer Temporalities: Resisting Family, Reproduction
and Lineage in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Brontë Studies, 45:2, 132-143, DOI:
10.1080/14748932.2020.1715029

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14748932.2020.1715029

Published online: 12 Mar 2020.

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 € STUDIES,
BRONTE Vol. 45 No. 2, April 2020, 132–143

Queer Temporalities: Resisting Family,

Reproduction and Lineage in Emily
Bront€e’s Wuthering Heights
Emily Datskou

Following two generations of families on the Yorkshire moors, Emily

Bront€e’s Wuthering Heights (1847) focuses on family, reproduction and lin-
eage, and thus seems to follow a heteronormative sense of time. However,
as this article argues, when read within a queer theoretical context, we see
that Emily actually produces a queer temporality in the novel through the
duplication of characters and plot events. Because the characters and the
plot structure largely repeat the events of the past, the novel’s plot cannot
be said to progress but instead essentially turns back on itself. This article
also suggests that reading the novel in this way may provide a new way of
thinking about how Emily may have felt about her identity and her role in
her family and nineteenth-century society.

KEYWORDS children, Emily Bront€e, narrative structure, queer theory, temporality,

Wuthering Heights

In an early, memorable scene in Emily Bront€e’s Wuthering Heights (1847),

Lockwood reads Catherine’s improvised diary. ‘This writing [ … ] was nothing
but a name repeated in all kinds of characters, large and small’, Lockwood tells
us, ‘Catherine Earnshaw, here and there varied to Catherine Heathcliff, and then
again to Catherine Linton’ (WH, pp. 15–16).1 Falling asleep repeating these
names, Lockwood awakens to a disturbance outside the window and feels an
‘ice-cold hand’ clutching at his wrist (WH, p. 20). Looking through the window,
he claims he ‘discerned obscurely, a child’s face,’ and yet the ‘child’ announces
herself as ‘Catherine Linton’, the married and adult (and dead) Catherine (WH,
p. 20). ‘“It’s twenty years” the child cries, “twenty years, I’ve been a waif for
twenty years”’(WH, p. 21).
While this scene clearly contributes to the Gothic nature of the novel, this
interaction is also an early example of the novel’s queer temporality. The applica-
tion of the term ‘queer’ in this article refers to the resistance to norms of gender

# The Bront€e Society 2020 DOI: 10.1080/14748932.2020.1715029

 QUEER TEMPORALITIES IN WUTHERING HEIGHTS 133

and sexuality and normative institutions, such as education and marriage, that
structure society’s daily life and our conceptions of time. Employing scholar Jack
Halberstam’s concise definition, I will be using this term to refer to
‘nonnormative logics and organisations of community, sexual identity, embodi-
ment, and activity in space and time’ as it relates to my reading of the novel.2
Normative, or heteronormative, time is structured by heterosexuality, repro-
duction, the family and the future. One of the central concepts of heteronorma-
tive time is the figure of the child. For Lee Edelman, because everything society
does is for and in the name of its children, our sense of time and the future are
predicated on a heterosexual and reproductive system.3 Similarly, Halberstam
views society as structuring ‘the emergence of the adult from the dangerous and
unruly period of adolescence as a desired process of maturation’ in which ‘we
create longevity as the most desirable future [ … ] and pathologize modes of liv-
ing that show little or no concern for longevity’.4 Finally, Kathryn Bond Stockton
sees heteronormativity as organising temporality along vertical lines, that is, ‘a
movement upward (hence, “growing up”) towards full stature, marriage, work,
reproduction, and the loss of childishness’.5 Queer time, then, challenges or com-
plicates a conception of time based on reproduction and the family, and in doing
so, distances itself from a normative trajectory of generational events. Instead,
queer temporalities focus on the now and the asocial self, and resist the chrono-
logical, logical, and linear timelines supported by normative time.6
Reading this scene with Lockwood from the position of queer temporality high-
lights the way that the child represents a figure outside of a linear conception of
time. Although the child names herself Catherine Linton, her description as a ghostly
child wandering the moors undercuts this identity and instead is reminiscent of the
child Catherine before her marriage to Edgar. The child’s description thus suggests
that after death, the adult Catherine reverted back to being a child, foreshadowing
the queer circular structure that, I will argue, is found in the rest of the novel.

Time standing still in Wuthering Heights

Wuthering Heights tells the story of two generations of families on the Yorkshire
moors. The emphasis on family and generations in the novel initially suggests
that the novel upholds and promotes a normative sense of temporality, that is,
one founded on reproduction and the future and that follows a linear develop-
ment. However, upon a closer examination of these generations and how they
are positioned in the novel, we see that the second generation of children (Cathy,
Linton and Hareton) are not distinct, autonomous individuals but instead entities
defined by the identities and actions of the previous generation. James Kincaid’s
view of the child as ‘a wonderfully hollow category, able to be filled with any-
one’s overflowing emotions’ is helpful here.7 The second-generation children in
this novel are ‘hollow’ entities reproducing the past as each new character is
‘filled’, to borrow Kincaid’s wording, with the identity and, at times, even shares
the name of older characters, creating a kind of stagnant circularity. They are
134 EMILY DATSKOU

empty characters, that is, without their own sense of self, used to patch up old
feuds and continue past relationships. As a result, generations and genealogy in
the narrative appear cyclical, and thus queer, rather than straight and linear.
The repetitive nature of the novel’s storyline and the doubling among charac-
ters are frequently noted by scholars.8 However, I wish to resituate discussions of
repetition and the doubling in the novel to a queer theoretical context in order to
explore how the narrative’s structure and the repetition of characters and charac-
teristics produce a queer temporality that resists heteronormative compulsions
for linear growth and futurity. And while I am not suggesting that we need to
read the novel as an autobiography of Emily’s life, exploring the novel using
queer theory may also provide a new way of thinking about Emily herself and
her desire to remain in her childhood home with her family.
Emily queers the temporality of her novel through three strategies: by creating
the second generation of characters — primarily Cathy, Linton and Hareton —
as surrogates for the first generation of characters — Catherine, Edgar and
Hindley; by repeating the same basic plot structure and events throughout the
two halves or generations of the novel; and by creating queer characters that
exist outside normative timelines, removing the normative institutional mile-
stones from the narrative’s focus that suggest growth and temporal progression.
The duplication of characters from one generation to the next begins early on
in the novel with Lockwood’s interaction with the waif, cited at the beginning of
this article, and Heathcliff’s introduction into the narrative. Introducing
Heathcliff to his family, Mr Earnshaw tells his wife to ‘“take it as a gift of God
although it’s as dark almost as if it came from the devil”’ (WH, p. 29). ‘I found
they had christened him “Heathcliff,”’ Nelly recounts, ‘it was the name of a son
who died in childhood, and it has served him ever since, both for Christian and
surname’ (WH, p. 30). Heathcliff is an extreme example of this replication pro-
cess in the novel as he is given only one name — Heathcliff — and no surname,
so his entire identity revolves around and is subsumed by the former Heathcliff.
However, it is not until the entrances of Hareton, Cathy and Linton that we
can begin to read or recognize this duplication as a pattern in the novel. When
each second-generation character is introduced, we see the same pattern occur-
ring: each child is conceived and birthed offstage, without warning, and precipi-
tates the death or removal of the mother. These second-generation characters take
the place of their parents or predecessors as they allow for the narrative to con-
tinue many of the outstanding tensions and relationships from the first gener-
ation. Emily’s novel, then, never truly advances but continues to dwell on the
conflicts from the beginning. This focus, Leo Bersani notes, makes it seem ‘as if
Emily Bront€e were telling the same story twice, and eliminating its originality the
second time’.9 Bersani’s reading suggests the notion of a copy without an original,
or a non-originary origin, which disrupts conventional notions of temporality. If
there is no original character or origin point, then we cannot trace the character’s
progress or development.
 QUEER TEMPORALITIES IN WUTHERING HEIGHTS 135

Hareton is the first second-generation character to be introduced in the text.

Nelly announces Hareton’s arrival at the beginning of Chapter VIII. However, in
her tale to Lockwood directly preceding this announcement, Nelly recounts the
altercation between Heathcliff and Edgar at Christmas and Hindley’s subsequent
punishment of Heathcliff (WH, p. 46). Immediately before breaking off her story
to attend to Lockwood, Nelly tells readers that Heathcliff was planning his
revenge on Hindley. ‘“I’m trying to settle how I shall pay Hindley back”’
Heathcliff tells Nelly, ‘“I don’t care how long I wait, if I can only do it, at last”’
(WH, p. 48). Nelly then pauses in her story and tells Lockwood, ‘“I’m annoyed
how I should dream of chattering on at such a rate; and your gruel cold, and you
nodding for bed!”’ (WH, p. 48). Readers then have to wait until the beginning of
the next chapter to pick up her tale again. Rather than starting where she left off
with Heathcliff, though, Nelly begins Chapter VIII with the birth of Hindley’s
son Hareton, thereby structurally connecting Hareton to Heathcliff’s desire and
plan for revenge and positioning Hareton as Hindley’s surrogate on which
Heathcliff can take his subsequent revenge.
Hareton’s introduction in the narrative is similar to Heathcliff’s introduction in
Chapter IV. Introducing Hareton, Nelly tells us ‘[o]n the morning of a fine June
day, my first bonny little nurseling, and the last of the ancient Earnshaw stock,
was born’ (WH, p. 50). When we look at the wording here, and in the other
descriptions of the second-generation children, Hareton, like Heathcliff, is not
even considered an ‘autonomous’ child until after Nelly names him in her story.
Instead, Hareton is referred to as ‘it’ until Nelly gives ‘it’ a name, Hareton,
almost a page and a half into the chapter. Until then, we are told that Nelly is
going to ‘nurse it [ … ] to feed it [ … ] and take care of it [ … ] it will be all’ hers
(WH, p. 50, my emphasis). Nelly finally gives readers his name after telling us
that Frances has died: Hindley ‘raised [Frances] in his arms; she put her two
hands about his neck, her face changed, and she was dead [ … ] the child
Hareton fell wholly into my hands’ (WH, p. 51). Like Heathcliff’s introduction,
it is not until the child is connected to Hindley’s family, effectively providing him
with an identity (i.e., Hindley’s identity), that he is given a name and seen as a
real character within the narrative. Until then, the child is considered a neutral
and empty entity.
We also see this pattern occurring with the other two second-generation chil-
dren, Cathy and Linton. Cathy is born next, satisfying Heathcliff’s need for an
immortal Catherine and serving as a stand-in for Catherine’s murderer just as
Hareton stands in as the object of revenge on behalf of Hindley. Following the
pattern, Nelly tells readers about the birth of Cathy at the start of a new chapter
(Chapter XVI), after describing the emotional and dramatic confrontation
between Heathcliff and Catherine. Nelly tells Lockwood ‘[a]bout twelve o’clock
that night was born the Catherine you saw at Wuthering Heights, a puny, seven
month’s child; and two hours after, the mother died’ (WH, p. 128). Nelly then
goes on to describe Cathy as ‘an unwelcomed infant it was [ … ] It might have
wailed out of life, and nobody cared a morsel [ … ] its beginning was as friendless
136 EMILY DATSKOU

as its end is likely to be’ (WH, p. 128, my emphasis). Here, as with the other
characters, we see the use of ‘its’ to describe the child. The child is not identified
as something other than ‘its’ or the generic use of ‘baby’ until fifteen pages after
she is introduced (at the start of Chapter XVII). There Nelly tells readers that
[i]t was named Catherine, but [Edgar] never called it the name in full. [ … ] The
little one was always Cathy; it formed to him a distinction from the mother, and
yet, a connection with her, and his attachment sprang from its relation to her, far
more than from its being his own. (WH, p. 143, my emphasis)

Nelly’s description shows that the child is a structuring relation, not an emotive
entity; it does not signify the future but reproduces the past.
With her birth, Cathy becomes the object of Heathcliff’s revenge as well, as
she takes the place of Catherine in Heathcliff’s desire to punish Catherine for her
self-destruction. During the confrontation that Nelly describes right before she
tells readers about Cathy’s birth, Heathcliff, seeing Catherine’s ill and hysterical
state, places his grief and despair onto her, crying, ‘“I forgive what you have
done to me. I love my murderer — but yours! How can I?”’ (WH, p. 126). Not
only, in Heathcliff’s view, did Catherine bring on her death herself (whether
through her pregnancy or her self-created hysteria), but we can also read Cathy
herself as one of the reasons for Catherine’s death. If Catherine had never become
pregnant then it is possible she would not have died, thus marking Cathy as the
literal and figurative representation of Catherine’s murderer. As Catherine’s dupli-
cate, both in name and description, Cathy is positioned as the perfect surrogate
on whom Heathcliff can take revenge.
Although not as detailed, Linton’s birth follows the same pattern as Hareton’s
and Cathy’s. After fleeing Heathcliff and Thrushcross Grange, Isabella gives birth
to Linton in an undisclosed area, ‘south, near London,’ very much removed from
the narrative (WH, p. 142). In her address to Lockwood, Nelly tells us ‘there
[Isabella] had a son. [ … ] He was christened Linton, and, from the first, she
reported him to be an ailing, peevish creature’, similar, as we know, to a young
Edgar (WH, p. 142). Just as with the birth of Cathy, Nelly refers to Linton as an
‘it’ when recounting her conversations with Heathcliff about Linton (WH, p.
142). And while Isabella does not die immediately after childbirth like the other
two mothers, Nelly tells readers about her death shortly after she recounts
Linton’s birth; the two events are separated by only a little over ten lines in the
text, thus connecting the two for readers (WH, p. 142). Although not the focus
of the narrative in the same way as Hareton and Cathy, Linton’s birth is neces-
sary in order for Isabella to re-enter the narrative in the second half of the novel,
thus recreating the original generation of Catherine, Isabella, Edgar and Hindley,
and for Heathcliff, again, to take revenge. Linton is positioned as a stand-in for
Isabella who serves, she tells Nelly in her letter, as ‘Edgar’s proxy in suffering’ to
Heathcliff (WH, p. 114).
In presenting the second generation in this way, Emily structurally positions
these characters as stand-ins for the unresolved conflicts and relationships of the
 QUEER TEMPORALITIES IN WUTHERING HEIGHTS 137

first generation. Within this pattern, we see that the children are not distinct,
autonomous individuals with their own desires, identities and agendas but
instead entities defined by and in the previous generation. While any child car-
ries, to some extent, the traits of previous generations, in this inverted family
structure the children literally revert to the past, as if returning to a previous
state. However, the connection between the two generations is not just structural
or positional. The second generation of characters also resembles the first gener-
ation, both in terms of characteristics and in the similarities between their plot
trajectories. These structural connections between generations allow readers to
see the temporality of the narrative as resisting the heteronormative drive for-
ward as Emily recreates events and relationships from the first half of the novel.
On the broadest, most basic level in the novel, the second generation consists
of three children (two boys and one girl) involved in a triangular relationship just
as with the first generation. However, the similarities go even further than this
basic character and structure formation. The names of the children in the second
generation (Cathy, Linton, Heathcliff) play on the names from the first gener-
ation (Catherine, the Linton family and Heathcliff) and the descriptions of the
second-generation characters (both physical and behavioural) recall their prede-
cessors. For example, Cathy has Catherine’s ‘capacity for intense attachments’ as
well as Catherine’s ‘breadth of forehead’ and the same ‘arch of the nostril that
makes her appear rather haughty’ (WH, pp. 146, 246) and Cathy and Hareton
both have ‘the Earnshaws’ handsome dark eyes’ (WH, p. 146).
In addition to their names and physical characteristics, the two generations are
also similar in the events that happen to them in the novel. Many of the same
plot points and tropes that occurred with the first generation of children are
repeated with this second generation, emphasising the view that these new chil-
dren are simply copies reliving the first half of the novel. One of the most obvi-
ous similarities between the two generations is the way in which Hareton’s
degradation mirrors that of Heathcliff. Both individuals are cast out of their
homes and used for manual labour and as objects of scorn, although they both
long to be involved in the family, particularly with the Catherine/Cathy character.
Heathcliff traps both Isabella and Cathy in the different halves of the novel and
Heathcliff’s imprisonment of Cathy, Nelly and Linton (WH, pp. 206–07) in the
second half is reminiscent of Catherine’s imprisonment of Edgar, Heathcliff
and Nelly (WH, pp. 90–91) in the first half, which is similar to the alterca-
tion between Heathcliff, Hindley and Isabella (WH, pp. 134–38). Linton and
Heathcliff are both rescued from outside the narrative and brought into the novel
proper, and their respective histories and childhoods are both unknown to read-
ers. Cathy’s joy at preparing to welcome Linton home (WH, p. 154) is similar to
Catherine’s joy when Heathcliff returns to her life (WH, pp. 74–76). Catherine is
injured in the first half of the novel, leading to her relationship with Edgar, and
Linton emphasizes his frailty in the second half of the novel (albeit on behalf of
Heathcliff) in order to form a relationship with Cathy.
138 EMILY DATSKOU

Time does progress in the sense that new characters appear in the novel, but
because the novel largely replicates the same events and relationships from gener-
ation to generation and because the ‘new’ characters can be read as replications
of the older characters, time also seems to stand still, stuck in the temporality
and plot of the first half of the novel. These select examples also point to a larger
system of replication that sees the second half of Emily’s novel as a retelling of
the first. This retelling is emphasized at the end of the novel when readers are
brought back to the very beginning of the narrative. The end of the text shows
Cathy and Hareton together in possession of Wuthering Heights. While it is easy
to read this relationship as the reversal of Heathcliff’s and Hareton’s degradation
and the resolution of Catherine and Heathcliff’s doomed love, these readings dis-
regard Hareton’s role and lineage in the text. Hareton is Hindley’s son, not
Heathcliff’s, and, as I have argued, we can read Cathy and Hareton as surrogates
for Catherine and Hindley. Thus, at the end of the novel, we have direct descend-
ants of the original inhabitants of Wuthering Heights, Cathy and Hareton (or, as
I have argued, structurally Catherine and Hindley) back in possession of their
house with just the original, nuclear family and characters present: Cathy (or
Catherine), Hareton (or Hindley), Nelly and Joseph. Nelly confirms this reading
when she tells Lockwood that Cathy and Hareton’s ‘eyes are precisely similar,
and they are those of Catherine Earnshaw’ (WH, p. 246). In remarking that the
eyes come from Catherine Earnshaw, Nelly reminds readers that Hareton is
Hindley’s son (even though Hareton’s early behaviour suggests he is Heathcliff’s).
Because the characters and the plot structure largely repeat the events of the past,
the novel’s plot cannot be said to progress but instead essentially turns back on
itself, forming a circular temporal structure. This is a queer temporality. The
return to the beginning, then, suggests a moving backwards instead of forwards,
resisting the heteronormative pull towards the future.
The third way in which Emily creates a queer temporality in the narrative is by
removing society’s milestones that signify normative growth and the passing of
time (e.g., adolescence, marriage, formal education). These developmental
markers structure the normative temporality upheld by social institutions — we
are born, we mature, we get married and reproduce, and then we die — and
make sure society’s members are growing into approved and appropriate adults.
Because, as I have argued, the first generation of children is replicated by and in
the second generation, in a sense repositioning the first generation back into
childhood in the second half of the novel, this first generation of characters
resists the ‘natural’ impulse to grow up. Instead, this first generation remains
stuck as children and thus rejects or delays heteronormativity’s influence and
temporal structure. The children in the novel are kept outside the ‘maturational
models of growth’ that produce normative-abiding citizens and normative
temporalities.10 As a result, the novel structurally produces a single generation of
queer children that do not grow up and that bring us back to the beginning of
the novel rather than looking outward towards the future.
 QUEER TEMPORALITIES IN WUTHERING HEIGHTS 139

While it could be argued that the first generation of characters does in fact
grow up, because the second generation is produced, when we look at how sexu-
ality or maturity in general feature in the narrative, we see that these signs of
adulthood are kept from the novel, which suggests they are not its focus.
Pregnant mothers and pregnancy in general are largely effaced in the narrative
and the mothers removed, killed off, after they produce a child. And both the
male and female figures are largely kept out of the narrative during their adoles-
cence, re-emerging after they have matured. Both Hindley and Heathcliff are off-
stage during what is, we presume to be, their adolescence — Hindley off at
school and Heathcliff out of the narrative completely — and both return to the
novel as ‘men’. Edgar and Isabella are also out of the scope of the novel at
Thrushcross Grange, and what knowledge we do get of them suggests they have
already been converted into the roles society expects of them. Significantly,
Catherine’s development into a woman and a lady also occurs at Thrushcross
Grange while she recovers her health, and we see her only after the transform-
ation has occurred. When Catherine finally returns to Wuthering Heights, she is
no longer ‘a wild, hatless little savage’ but ‘a very dignified person’ who can now
be called ‘a lady’ (WH, p. 41). In these instances, the middle stage of develop-
ment is missing, and thus there is no sense of progression.
The children remain outside normative trajectories of time in the novel not
only because they are removed from their reproductive, and thus forward-moving
destiny, but also because they are positioned as outside the conventional family
structure, a paradigm which creates and promotes both normativity and norma-
tive time.11 Instead of being intimately involved in family life, the children appear
as orphans, outsiders and surrogates, which allows them both to access and dis-
tance themselves from the constraints of normative time. In her discussion of
genealogy in novels, Patricia Drechsel Tobin suggests that ‘[o]rphans and found-
lings, the[se] characters are let loose in the world without ever having been born
into it, foregoing the delicacy of initiation rites [ … ] which a society responsive
to and responsible for them would have institutionalized as stages in their matur-
ing processes’.12 Orphans and outsiders operate outside societal codes and thus
outside normative, heterosexual and reproductive time.
The novel’s rejection of the characters’ sexuality and maturation and the char-
acters’ location outside the family and normative institutions like school and
church allow them to sidestep the dominant social framework that requires all
participants to grow up and perpetuate this social order.13 It allows them to
access other modes of living and other (queer) temporalities that do not require
them to look to and make decisions for the future or invest in longevity.
Thinking about the characters in this way may help to explain why so many of
them engage in behaviours that may initially appear as selfish, immature and
self-destructive, such as Catherine’s reasons for accepting Edgar’s proposal (WH,
pp. 61–62), but when viewed from a queer position suggest that they are simply
focussing on their own life and desires rather than investing in the future or in
conventional structures like their families.
140 EMILY DATSKOU

€’s queer time

Emily Bronte
Examining Emily’s novel in relation to a discussion of queer temporality not only
opens up how we see the children in and the structure of the novel but also may
illuminate how Emily herself may have felt about her identity and her role in her
family and nineteenth-century society. Although the use of ‘queer’ as I am discus-
sing it here would not have been a concept familiar or available to her (and cer-
tainly not the idea of ‘queer temporality’), Emily’s own life suggests an affinity
with the idea of living outside the norm. Building on Claire O’Callaghan’s and
Lydia Brown’s works on queerness and Emily’s poetry,14 we can find similarities
between the way temporality is portrayed in both the novel and Emily’s own life
that may suggest that Emily lived outside normative conceptions of time, or at
least felt that she did.
Although our information about Emily is limited, especially compared to the
correspondence and material left by Charlotte, what we do know about her sug-
gests that she lived in such a way that the milestones and institutions involved in
normative temporality did not apply. ‘Unlike Charlotte, who craved social
acceptance’, Lucasta Miller reports, ‘Emily did not care what people thought’.15
Emily refused to follow trends in fashion, preferred solitude over social interac-
tions with strangers, and frequently favoured animals over people. Rather than
care about or cater to normative markers of maturation, she lived an asocial life.
While an avid learner, Emily’s formal education was minimal, with only a few
years in total at Cowan Bridge, Roe Head School and the Pensionnat Heger.
Instead Emily received a general education from her family and pursued her own
individual interests through ‘self-instruction’ and what she had available around
her — the parsonage, the moors and her siblings.16 Even while at her various
schools, Emily resisted the institutionalisation of education.17 Emily’s resistance
is best described by Charlotte Bront€e when she, reputedly, refers to Emily’s home
life and learning as an ‘unrestricted and unartificial mode of life’ and the life of
Law Hill as ‘one of disciplined routine’.18 By receiving her education at home
and in largely teaching herself, Emily evaded, like the characters in her novel, the
way education helps to mould students into socially-acceptable members of soci-
ety and helps to push them through the chronological maturational process asso-
ciated with going to school. Instead she was able to nourish her own way of
understanding and approaching the world around her.
Formal education was not the only social rite in which Emily did not partici-
pate. Emily never married and although scholars have tried to uncover a lover,
which Miller reads as the urge to ‘pin her down’ and ‘normalize her’, the search
has not yielded any viable results.19 Instead, Emily focussed on her own individ-
ual pursuits, especially her writing. Emily also was not interested in non-familial
social interactions, but instead preferred to stay at home and take care of her
family. In her discussion of the Bront€e family, Drew Lamonica Arms argues that
the siblings ‘were self-sufficient in each other’s company and thus did not seek
out other relationships in the Haworth community’,20 a claim also made by
 QUEER TEMPORALITIES IN WUTHERING HEIGHTS 141

Charlotte in her ‘Biographical Notice’ (1850) and her ‘Editor’s Preface’ (1850).21
Emily’s ability to stay at home became a reality when she inherited money fol-
lowing her Aunt Branwell’s death.22 While we can read Emily’s desire to stay
home as an elevation of the domestic and thus the elevation of conventional gen-
der roles and associated temporalities, a queer reading suggests that home, to
her, was actually a way to elide socially-prescribed norms and temporalities.
As housekeeper, Emily could write whenever she wanted and live in such a
way to serve her goals, her interests and her creative and scholarly pursuits rather
than follow society’s prescribed path for her gender, i.e., courtship — marriage
— reproduction. As O’Callaghan argues, ‘Emily’s place may have been firmly
located in the domestic sphere, but her decision afforded her control over her
own time. She could continue to widen her knowledge of various subjects and
write until her heart was content’.23 Similarly, Lamonica Arms claims that ‘Emily
viewed her home as a place of unparalleled freedom and thought of personal ful-
filment in terms of family togetherness’.24 ‘For the Bront€e sisters’, Lamonica
Arms continues, ‘home — and no place like home — offered the liberty to be
themselves, to be together, and, crucially, to write’.25 In staying home rather than
moving out into society, home, for Emily, became both a queer space and a queer
temporality as it allowed her to sidestep what society required of her.

Conclusion
Examining the novel’s characters and plot structure from a queer theoretical con-
text suggests that time in Wuthering Heights does not progress in a linear man-
ner, but rather circles back on itself producing a queer temporality. As a novel
that does not appear, at the onset, to be overtly queer, my discussion helps to
show the ways in which queer theory might open up texts, like Wuthering
Heights, and produce new ways of reading nineteenth-century novels. Such read-
ings do not simply impose a contemporary theory on a past work but unravel the
queer elements, in this case temporality, already structuring that work, showing
us that queer theory need not pertain primarily to twentieth- and twenty-
first-century literature. My readings of Wuthering Heights also illustrate the vari-
ous ways, in addition to identity and kinship, in which queer theory may apply
to nineteenth-century novels.
Moreover, in tracing the novel’s queer temporality, we not only see how the
characters in the novel operate outside heteronormative control but also how ele-
ments in Emily’s own life can be similarly read. Emily likewise resisted or worked
outside many of the concepts and institutions, like education and marriage, that
help to create and shepherd individuals through normative constructions of tem-
porality. Instead, Emily cultivated a life at Haworth that was focussed on her
own intellectual and creative pursuits. In doing so, her life resembles the ways in
which the characters in the novel rejected normative conventions to focus on
themselves and their desires. Examining Emily from this queer perspective helps
shift the perception of her as a victim or antisocial individual. Instead, she is
142 EMILY DATSKOU

someone who consciously rejected the normative standards that she disliked,
while making deliberate, focussed and empowered choices to ensure comfort in
her own life.

Notes
1
Emily Bront€e, Wuthering Heights, ed. by Family in the Writing of the Bront€es (Columbia:
Richard J. Dunn, 4th ed (New York: W. W. University of Missouri Press, 2003), p. 13.
12
Norton, 2003); hereafter WH. Patricia Drechsel Tobin, Time and the Novel
2
Judith (Jack) Halberstam, In a Queer Time and (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978),
Place (New York: New York University Press, pp. 31–32.
2005), p. 6. 13
While Nelly does tell readers (and Lockwood)
3
Lee Edelman, No Future (Durham: Duke that the characters are married or in love, we do
University Press, 2004). not see these events taking place in the
4
Halberstam, Time, p. 152. narrative, just through Nelly’s recounting.
5
Kathryn Bond Stockton, The Queer Child, or 14
Claire O’Callaghan, ‘“A poet, a solitary”: Emily
Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century Bront€e—Queerness, Quietness, and Solitude’,
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), p. 4. Victorians: A Journal of Culture and Literature,
6
I am using ‘asocial’ here to refer to an 134 (2018), 204–17 and Lydia Brown, ‘Absent
avoidance of or lack of motivation for engaging Emily: Ecstasy, Transgression, and Negative
in normative social interactions, not in any
Space in Three Emily Bront€e Poems’, Victorians:
diagnostic sense.
7 A Journal of Culture and Literature, 134
James Kincaid, Child-Loving: The Erotic Child
(2018), 181–92.
and Victorian Culture (New York: Routledge, 15
Lucasta Miller, The Bront€e Myth (New York:
1992), p. 12.
8 Knopf, 2004), p. 191.
See, for example, Sandra Gilbert and Susan 16
Claire O’Callaghan, Emily Bront€e Reappraised
Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic (New
(Salford: Saraband, 2018), p. 20.
Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), pp. 17
Miller, p. 191.
248–308; Lynn Pykett’s ‘Changing the Names: 18
Elizabeth Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Bront€e.
The Two Catherines’, in Wuthering Heights, ed.
Vol. I (London: Electronic Book Co., 2001), p.
by Linda H. Peterson (Boston: Bedford/St.
126. ProQuest Ebook Central.
Martin’s, 2003), pp. 468–77; Kathryn McGuire, 19
Miller, p. 274.
‘Second Chances: Doubling in Wuthering 20
Lamonica Arms, p. 19.
Heights’, CCTE Studies, 58 (1993), 56–62; and 21
Charlotte Bront€e, ‘Biographical Notice of Ellis and
Leo Bersani, A Future for Astyanax (Boston:
Little, Brown, 1976). Action Bell (1850)’, in Wuthering Heights, pp.
9
Bersani, p. 222. 307–12 and ‘Editor’s Preface to the New Edition of
10
Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham: Wuthering Heights (1850)’, in Wuthering Heights,
Duke University Press, 2011), p. 73. pp. 313–16.
22
11
See discussions in Halberstam, Failure, p. 71; O’Callaghan, Reappraised, p. 30.
23
Elizabeth Freeman’s Time Binds (Durham: Duke O’Callaghan, Reappraised, p. 30.
24
University Press, 2010), pp. 22-23; and Drew Lamonica Arms, p. 38.
25
Lamonica Arms,”We are three sisters”: Self and Lamonica Arms, p. 38.

Notes on contributor
Emily Datskou is an English PhD candidate in the Nineteenth-Century Studies
programme at Loyola University Chicago. Her dissertation explores the role of
queer theory in nineteenth-century novels. She is also the Project Manager for
the Lili Elbe Digital Archive and has recently co-published in Feminist
Modernist Studies.
 QUEER TEMPORALITIES IN WUTHERING HEIGHTS 143

Correspondence to: Emily Datskou, Loyola University Chicago, Department of

English, Crown Center 1032 W. Sheridan Road, Chicago, IL 60660, USA. Email:
[email protected]