Catherine Earnshaw Meets Katherine Lester: Revisioning the Brontë Body by Sustaining the Self in William Oldroyd’s Lady Macbeth (2016)

Abstract

William Oldroyd’s Lady Macbeth (2016) presents a recognisable Brontëan cinematic language that invites comparison between its protagonist, Katherine Lester, and Emily Brontë’s Catherine Earnshaw from Wuthering Heights (1847). Whilst Earnshaw’s self-deprivation mirrors her struggle for a disembodied self that transcends her gendered body, Oldroyd’s Katherine uses her appetite to colonise her household and preserve herself. These attempts at grasping agency in order to sustain the self are ignited by their necessity to palliate what they perceive as sickly bodies, tainted by gender and class: one in detriment to the body, and the other in its favour. In envisioning Katherine Lester as Catherine Earnshaw’s neo-Victorian double, this article sets out to revision the second’s diseased body as a politicizing force that disrupts the dynamics of power in Wuthering Heights through the commentary that Katherine’s own process of sustenance provides on the Brontë body.