‘Doomed to decay:’ Endogenic Nature and Impersonal Affect in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights

This essay examines the ecological and affective dimensions of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (Citation1847), arguing that the novel functions as a Gothic climate narrative, deeply aware of the consequences of a rapidly changing anthropocentric world disconnected from nature. By analysing Brontë’s depiction of human and non-human encounters within the novel, particularly those of Catherine and Heathcliff, the article argues that the moor’s landscape and climate act as active agents that catalyse material and affective change. Brontë’s textual, literal and affective juxtapositions of landscape and climate with Catherine and Heathcliff critique anthropocentrism as an unsustainable and artificial orientation towards the natural world. Brontë depicts the boundaries between life and death, human and non-human, and inert and vital as inextricably connected through these affective and ecological consequences. Severed from their endogenic connection to the earth, the lovers become fragmented and estranged, ultimately achieving full ecological integration through their regenerative deaths.