Between Passion And Annihilation

A new paper published in a Romanian literary journal:

Between Passion And Annihilation: The Imaginary Of Love And Death In Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights

Ana-Blanca Ciocoi-Pop

Journal of Romanian Literary Studies, 42 (2025), pp 137-40

Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights has long been read as a tale of destructive love and haunting passion, but this article proposes to examine the novel through the prism of the imaginary of love and death. Catherine and Heathcliff’s relationship transcends conventional social and psychological categories, entering instead a symbolic realm where love is inseparable from violence, transcendence, and mortality. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, particularly Lacan’s concept of the imaginary order and Jungian archetypes, the study argues that Brontë constructs an alternative space of desire where union is achievable only in annihilation. Death emerges not as an end but as a continuation of passion, an “other world” where the lovers’ identities fuse beyond the constraints of society and narrative. The moors, spectral apparitions, and the Gothic atmosphere of the novel reinforce this imaginary, staging an interweaving of erotic intensity and existential dissolution. Ultimately, Wuthering Heights exemplifies how literature can project an imaginary where love is meaningful only through its proximity to death, offering both a critique of Victorian norms and a timeless exploration of the human psyche.