By: Bigger D-6th
It’s tempting to read Wuthering Heights as just a brooding 19th-century tale of doomed love and generational trauma. But in a media-saturated, fragmented digital culture, Brontë’s wild moors and Heathcliff’s psychosis feel less like historical fiction and more like a warning. In the 21st century, identity is unfixed, narratives are nonlinear, and obsession is algorithmically amplified. Viewing Wuthering Heights through a Postmodern lens reveals how its core messages about love, identity, and social order mutate; becoming reflections of our own fractured reality. When interpreted through Postmodernism, Wuthering Heights becomes a critique of identity construction, emotional simulation, and power systems, which aligns with the nihilistic disorientation of Jonathan Haidt’s digital culture diagnosis, the emotional fragmentation in A Perfect Circle’s “Orestes,” and Gorillaz’s ironic play with persona in “Humility".
Postmodernism dismantles the idea of a stable self. Identity becomes a shifting, performative construct shaped by culture, trauma, and media. Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights exemplifies this instability — his origins are unknown, his race ambiguous, his morality erratic. In a Postmodern reading, he’s not a Byronic hero but a fragmented self, haunted by emotional simulacra. Catherine becomes an image he cannot decode or consume. This aligns with Baudrillard’s idea of hyperreality, where representations replace real emotion." Social media turned us all into performative avatars, craving reaction over reflection." Haidt argues that the digital self is shaped more by public perception than internal truth. Heathcliff’s obsession with control and appearance mirrors that he doesn’t just mourn Catherine, he weaponizes her memory, performs grief, becomes consumed by the image of her rather than her person. Link to Haidt’s article HERE!
The lyrics, “Gotta cut away, clear away, snip away and sever this umbilical residue,” evoke a yearning to detach from familial and emotional trauma, mirroring Catherine and Heathcliff’s doomed entanglement. Just as Postmodernism celebrates disconnection, “Orestes” frames love not as salvation but as an infection. Heathcliff’s love doesn’t heal; it decays. The melancholic dissonance in the song mirrors Brontë’s thematic chaos, and the lyrics reframe love as psychological violence. Where Modernism lamented meaning’s breakdown, Postmodernism plays with it. This is key to Gorillaz’s “Humility,” where the band’s animated personas ironically perform human disconnection, even as they groove.
In the video, 2D skates alone, ignored, an ironic symbol of joyful isolation. Like Wuthering Heights, there’s a performance of connection (love, community) without its fulfillment. Catherine and Heathcliff are obsessed, not intimate. Their relationship is a stylized performance of eternal love, but one that leaves both characters, and readers, unfulfilled. The imagery of digital avatars performing human emotions undercuts their authenticity, much like Heathcliff’s performative grief. In the digital mirror of Postmodernism, Wuthering Heights no longer reads as a tragic romance but a commentary on obsessive identity loops, simulated emotion, and social alienation. Brontë’s narrative fractures — temporal, emotional, even spectral, eerily align with our own fragmented digital lives.
Postmodernism doesn’t destroy Wuthering Heights; it reanimates it, revealing how love, grief, and selfhood are
unstable, media-shaped constructs. In today’s world, where identity is often influenced by social media and digital trends, the characters of Wuthering Heights feel more relevant than ever. Heathcliff, for example, represents the way our sense of self is shaped by forces outside our control. This is much like how we shape and reshape our identities online. His restless nature, forever shifting between roles of lover, villain, and victim, mirrors how we constantly adapt ourselves to fit different situations in the digital age. In a world obsessed with algorithms and constant scrolling, it’s almost as if Heathcliff is the first "ghost" of a modern world where identity is fragmented and ever-changing. The novel’s themes of love and loss seem less like relics of the past and more like reflections of how we struggle to define who we are in a world that’s constantly pulling us in different directions.
Works Cited:
Brontë, Emily. Wuthering Heights. Project Gutenberg, 1996, https://www.ucm.es/data/cont/docs/119-2014-04-09-Wuthering%20Heights.pdf. Accessed 13 May 2025.
Haidt, Jonathan. "Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid." The Atlantic, 2022, www.theatlantic.com. Accessed 13 May 2025.
A Perfect Circle. "Orestes." Mer de Noms, Virgin Records, 2000. Accessed 13 May 2025.
Gorillaz. "Humility." The Now Now, Parlophone, 2018. Accessed 13 May 2025.
"Postmodern Music & Alienation Themes." PopMatters, www.popmatters.com. Accessed 13 May 2025.
Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser, University of Michigan Press, 1994. Accessed 13 May 2025.
Wallace, David Foster. "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction." The Review of Contemporary Fiction, vol. 13, no. 2, 1993, pp. 151-194. Accessed 14 May 2025.
Childs, Peter. Postmodernism and the Victorian Novel. Routledge, 1999. Accessed 14 May 2025.
Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Accessed 14 May 2025.
Foucault, Michel. The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception. Translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith, Pantheon Books, 1973. Accessed 14 May 2025.
I like how you mention how the digital world can shape our new and "improved" personalities. the fact that we as people want to be what everyone else want to see is mind boggling and gets me looking at the world around me, realizing that we are slaves to everyone else. An everlasting loop.