Moorland Sublimity and Ecological Desire in Wuthering Heights: An Affective Ecocritical Perspective

This paper offers an affective ecocritical reading of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, examining the Yorkshire moorland as an active material force in the formation of human subjectivity, desire, and narrative experience. It argues that the moors function not merely as a romantic or symbolic background but as an agential more-than-human entity that participates in the production of ecological desire. The study distinguishes ecological desire from romantic desire by demonstrating how Catherine Earnshaw’s and Heathcliff’s identities are shaped through sustained bodily, affective, and material interactions with the moorland. Methodologically, the paper adopts a qualitative, interpretive, and text-based approach that brings together Sara Ahmed’s theory of affective economies, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, and Jane Bennett’s material ecocriticism. Through these intersecting frameworks, the study examines affective “stickiness,” embodied perception, material agency, and the assemblage of human and nonhuman actors in the novel. The findings demonstrate that repeated encounters with the moorland produce an embodied and affective consciousness that cannot be fully separated from the landscape. Catherine’s enforced separation from the moors consequently becomes a form of ecological and phenomenological dislocation, while Heathcliff’s later attempt to possess and master the landscape transforms ecological attachment into destructive power. The analysis further shows that weather, terrain, vegetation, and other material forces participate in the development of the narrative itself, challenging the conventional distinction between human agency and environmental background. The paper concludes that Wuthering Heights presents ecological desire as an irreducible relation between human bodies and more-than-human materiality, while revealing the destructive consequences of ecological separation and the attempt to dominate nonhuman agency.

Affective Ecocriticism, Moorland Sublimity, Material Agency

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