Esther Liu Godfrey, University of South Carolina Upstate
Victorians: A Journal of Culture and Literature, Number 149, Summer 2026, pp. 141-161
This essay argues that Gen Z readers, equipped with a vernacular psychological literacy derived from social media and therapy culture, are uniquely positioned to reread Wuthering Heights through a diagnostic gaze: a feminist interpretive practice that recognizes the novel’s psychodynamics as patterns of abuse rather than passion. While feminist critics from Deborah Lutz to Arielle Zibrak have examined the liberating potential of portrayals of desire, contemporary students bring to the text a democratized therapeutic vocabulary—terms such as trauma bond, coercive control, and enmeshment—that reframes the dangerous lover’s allure as pathology. Drawing on pedagogical encounters and the cultural afterlife of Wuthering Heights in Twilight, Fifty Shades of Grey, and Emerald Fennell’s recent film adaptation, this essay traces how Wuthering Heights persists as a cultural trauma loop: a dopamine-driven cycle of harm and reconciliation that masquerades as romance. Integrating insights from Kirsten Shepherd-Barr, Naomi Booth, Jack Halberstam, Christine Jarvis, and Sandra Lee Bartky, I contend that therapy-speak, often dismissed as reductive pop psychology, instead informs a feminist discourse capable of dismantling the aesthetics of romanticized abuse. The diagnostic gaze thus offers a mode of reading that neither pathologizes desire nor romanticizes domination. By recognizing Catherine and Heathcliff ’s relationship as a model of dysregulated attachment rather than transcendent love, Gen Z readers illuminate new ethical possibilities for teaching and reading Brontë today: not the cancellation of Wuthering Heights, but the recovery of intimacy itself.
Santos Zunzunegui Díez, Universidad del País Vasco - Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea
SERIARTE. Revista científica De Series Televisivas Y Arte Audiovisual, 10, 45–58 (2026)
Recuperando una idea acariciada durante más de veinte años largos años y con la complicidad esencial de uno de sus mejores guionistas, Julio Alejandro, Buñuel lleva a cabo una adaptación de la gran novela de Emily Brontë, Cumbres borrascosas, transponiéndola desde los áridos páramos ingleses a las ardientes tierras mexicanas. Pero sobre todo insertando el amor imposible y transgresor que la novela describe en la tradición hispánica de la más pura necrofilia con la finalidad de proponer una ilustración cinematográfica de uno de los versos más célebres de nuestra literatura, ese «polvo enamorado» que cantó Quevedo, como destino final de cualquier amor.
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