We Other Victorians

On Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights, Banned Books, and Improper Feelings

I am still unreasonably turned on after watching Emerald Fennell’s new Wuthering Heights; I am dripping, moist, and aware of certain animal forces that are not going to resolve themselves politely, so I’ll be working some of that out in a free live show tonight at 5pm EST on my OnlyFans. This is not metaphorical horniness, but the old‑fashioned kind the nineteenth century worried about when a woman read or watched too much and started taking her own sensations seriously.

In that light, Wuthering Heights plays like a dispatch from the fault line between appetite and respectability. Catherine and Heathcliff are not upgraded so much as unmasked, less romantic ideal than symptom, embodiments of what happens when the interior life grows larger than the social script will tolerate and refuses to be resized into something reasonable. Emma Bovary belongs in their company; she read herself into fantasy and disgrace, and the men in charge put her maker on trial not because the text was obscene, but because it made a woman’s hunger legible and therefore contagious. To say this film left me “Madame Bovary‑horny” is to admit that art still crosses the line from content into dangerous instruction, that it still teaches the body to want.

Because I am not interested in pretending otherwise, I’m choosing to process this in public instead of in private decorum. At 5pm EST on my OnlyFans, I’ll be reading, answering questions, and letting my body be part of the commentary, a For those who prefer their trouble in a quieter key, I’ll also be showing a portion of my collection of banned and censored first editions in a strictly SFW format on ManyVids, putting the actual objects in front of the camera: the worn spines of books once put on trial, the sober covers of volumes that supposedly endangered the social order simply by being read.

We flatter ourselves that we have outgrown the follies of the nineteenth century, but the nervousness around women who read, feel, and speak without shrinking suggests otherwise. Fennell’s Wuthering Heights does not let us keep that illusion; it reminds us that the storm never left, it only changed its platform. If you want to sit in that weather with me for a while—thinking, watching, wanting—come to the live show at five, and click through for the banned‑book ritual.