I re-read Wuthering Heights last year and just watched the new 2026 film adaptation. This isn’t a blog about gothic romance, or a critique of the film. It is more of a personal reflection on Cathy and Heathcliff’s relationship that is beginning to make more sense to me as I re-read and re-watch various adaptations of one of my favourite books ever. I am rethinking their relationship through a new lens as I learn more about my own Autistic identity.
When Catherine Earnshaw says “I am Heathcliff,” it really resonates with me. It captures a connection to an inner world so intense it loses all sense of boundaries. For me, it captures my Autistic way of being where I can feel myself becoming part of someone or something else entirely. An all-consuming, whole-bodymind way of experiencing life. That deep monotropic pull of being totally immersed in whoever or whatever my attention is drawn towards.
There’s a theory of Autistic attention called monotropism — developed by Murray, Lesser, and Lawson (2005) that I have written about extensively. It describes how many Autistic and ADHD people organise their attentional resources. Instead of spreading attention broadly across many things at once, monotropic people tend to go deep, very deep. We tend to pour everything we have into fewer channels, whatever is inside our tunnel of attention gets the full experience: full focus, full feeling, full presence.
I think Cathy and Heathcliff’s all-consuming love can be reimagined and perhaps better understood through the lens of monotropism. Being monotropic is not just about cognitive resources, it is everything! It is about how people move, sense, perceive, and relate to each other. In their case, they are the centre of each other’s attentional worlds; they are completely entangled, even after years apart, their souls are still looped and hooked into each other. The wild Yorkshire moors aren’t just a backdrop to their relationship; they’re an important part of the environment and the shared language and memories they have created together since childhood.
Everything else sits outside of their relationship and the moors; Edgar Linton, Nelly, the drawing rooms, in fact, the whole performance of social respectability and ways of being in the world at that time, is all at odds with Cathy and Heathcliff’s relationship.
Life demands that Cathy split herself. In her attempt to try and make her marriage work with Edgar Linton, she tries to focus on her new life without Heathcliff, but it is impossible. The idea of monotropic split conceptualised by Tanya Adkin helps explain how hard dividing attention is for Autistic people. We don’t know whether Catherine or Heathcliff would now be identified as Autistic or otherwise neurodivergent, but my own personal resonance with their characters makes sense.
Catherine has to divide her attention between the competing loyalties of Healthcliff and Linton and maintain a respectable status in the society she is in. She tries to mask and fit in, she tries for years to manage how much she feels, how much she shows, how much intensity is acceptable in polite company. The neuronormative demands, the pressure on people whose minds and bodies work differently as they try to reshape themselves into a form the dominant social world can accommodate is exhausting. The cost of that reshaping runs through Cathy’s entire life. It isn’t just social pressure; it slowly begins to unravel her from the inside.
Her famous declaration — “I am Heathcliff” — makes complete sense to me. It describes exactly what it feels like when my deepest attention and my sense of who I am become genuinely inseparable, when another person or event that isn’t just important to me, it is my everything that is woven into the fabric of how I experience myself and life. Something some may be able to relate to. When that person or interest is gone, you are not just bereft. The loss goes all the way down, into the core of the self, until the flow that once held your life together may feel utterly broken.
One of the things that strikes me most, reading the novel this way, is who actually understands either of them. Edgar doesn’t understand Cathy, and Nelly doesn’t understand Heathcliff. The people around them consistently misread them, misjudge them, interpret their intensity as threat or instability. Milton’s double empathy problem (2012) describes exactly this—the way that people with genuinely different experiences can find mutual comprehension difficult, not because either person is deficient, but because the gap between their ways of experiencing the world is so great. Cathy and Heathcliff are, for each other, the only exception to that. They are the only two people in the novel who experience each other from the inside. Their connection and their relationship is the only place either of them is fully legible and are able to be their true selves.
This makes what happens at her deathbed almost unbearable to read. Heathcliff doesn’t grieve quietly; he demands she haunt him, he asks her to stay in any form — just not to leave him in the void where he cannot reach her. He says he cannot live without his life. He cannot live without his soul. He can not live without Cathy.
And I pray one prayer – I repeat it till my tongue stiffens – Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest, as long as I am living! You said I killed you – haunt me then! The murdered do haunt their murderers. I believe – I know that ghosts have wandered on earth. Be with me always – take any form – drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh God! it is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!’ He dashed his head against the knotted trunk; and, lifting up his eyes, howled, not like a man, but like a savage beast getting goaded to death with knives and spears.
Chapter 16
Where the words of human experiences run out to describe the intensity, Brontë turns back to nature, to the knotted tree trunk Heathcliff dashed his head against. The sound Brontë describes Heathcliff as exclaiming is something beyond the human, “not like a man, but like a savage beast”.
Brontë wasn’t writing a story about Autistic people and neurodivergent lives. She didn’t have this framework in 1847; it may be a leap to suggest that any of this is related to anyone else’s experience as a neurodivergent person but my own. However, she was writing about something she felt deeply, she is writing about what it looks like when a person cannot do things by halves. When people love the way they attend to everything: completely, in depth, with the whole of themselves, in a world that keeps asking them to be less.
When we read Wuthering Heights through the lens of monotropism, the double empathy problem, and neuroqueer theory, something can shift. Cathy and Heathcliff’s love is devastating, but it is also the most real thing in the novel — the only place either of them is ever fully known. The world Brontë placed them in was never built to hold their intensity and passion. Many of us may in some ways share and resonate with their world and perhaps find ourselves reflected in Cathy and Heathcliff — in the depth, the pull, the all-consuming way of loving, the trying to fit in and adapt.
What Cathy and Heathcliff never had, and what so many of us are still learning we deserve, is the safety to be fully known, and the freedom to stop pretending to be less than we are.
References
Adkin, T. (2022). What is monotropic split? NeuroHub Community.
https://neurohubcommunity.org/2022/07/14/guest-post-what-is-monotropic-split/
Brontë, E. Wuthering Heights. Penguin Classics. (Original work published 1847).
Garau, V., Woods, R., Chown, N., Hallett, S., Murray, F., Wood, R., Murray, A. & Fletcher-Watson, S. (2023). The Monotropism Questionnaire, Open Science Framework. DOI:10.31219/osf.io/ft73y
Milton, D. (2012). On the ontological status of autism: The ‘double empathy problem.’ Disability & Society, 27(6), 883–887. https://doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2012.710008
Murray, D., Lesser, M., & Lawson, W. (2005). Attention, monotropism and the diagnostic criteria for autism. Autism, 9(2), 139–156. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362361305051398
Walker, N. (2021). Neuroqueer heresies: Notes on the neurodiversity paradigm, autistic empowerment, and postnormal possibilities. Autonomous Press.