A Child Makes a Future, and What Future Had We?

Carol Senf reviews Kathe Koja’s “Catherine the Ghost.”

By Carol SenfOctober 16, 2024

• Fiction

• SF

CHOOSING TO ADAPT a classic novel is an audacious act—even more audacious when one considers that so many film adaptations of Wuthering Heights fail to capture the complexity of Emily Brontë’s original story. Nonetheless, American writer Kathe Koja has achieved in Catherine the Ghost (2024) both a remarkable adaptation of Brontë’s classic novel and an entirely independent work that can resonate with people who are unfamiliar with Brontë’s passionate story of love and revenge. As someone who has admired Wuthering Heights since the 1960s, I admit to great appreciation of Koja’s ability to channel Emily Brontë while simultaneously creating something unique and original.

Koja, who writes fiction for adults and young adults, is especially well equipped to write a ghost story, having worked in speculative fiction and horror (she won the Bram Stoker Award in 1992 for her first novel, The Cipher), as well as having written a fictional biography of the Elizabethan playwright and spy Christopher Marlowe. In Catherine the Ghost, Koja adapts Brontë’s settings, characters, and plotlines to tell a story that will resonate with 21st-century readers. Importantly, Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is dominated by the patriarchy as Emily Brontë knew it in 1847: the novel focuses on Heathcliff and the way he manipulates the established families until he controls the properties Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange, not to mention the children of his peers, Hindley Earnshaw and Edgar Linton. The story of how he achieves economic and social control evidences Brontë’s familiarity with the laws of wills and inheritance. However, while Brontë answers many questions readers may have about the law, she leaves unanswered questions about both Heathcliff’s origins and about the inner lives of Catherine Earnshaw and her daughter.

Coupled with the story of how Heathcliff comes to control both the people and property in the neighborhood are also two love triangles and a ghost story. The first love triangle consists of Heathcliff, Catherine Earnshaw, and Edgar Linton, while the second love triangle consists of the second generation: Catherine Linton, Linton Heathcliff, and Hareton Earnshaw. In Brontë’s novel, the names scratched in the windowsill of Catherine Earnshaw’s childhood bedroom—Catherine Earnshaw, Catherine Linton, and Catherine Heathcliff—suggest the limited social and economic possibilities available to both mother and daughter.

Introducing ghostly elements introduces other possibilities. Shortly after Lockwood comes to Wuthering Heights and spends the night in Catherine Earnshaw’s childhood bedroom, he is confronted with a ghostly figure that knocks on the window and asks to be let in, and Brontë concludes her story when Heathcliff’s death frees his daughter-in-law to marry Hareton Earnshaw and enables the Earnshaws and Lintons to reclaim their properties. Not one to ignore minor details, Brontë also adds a haunting conclusion by suggesting that people in the neighborhood see the ghosts of Heathcliff and Catherine walking the moors they had loved as children. The existence of the ghosts is undermined by the voices of the two narrators, Lockwood and Ellen Dean, both serving as voices of the patriarchy. Ellen Dean speaks in religious terms—“I believe the dead are at peace”—while Lockwood denies the existence of ghosts entirely, wondering “how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.” The two conclusions represent Brontë’s desire to write both a ghost story and a novel that focuses on the social conditions of the time.

Koja embraces the ghostly figures, however, and chooses to emphasize female power and autonomy in three very important ways. Instead of focusing on patriarchy and inheritance, Koja focuses on Catherine, as evidenced by the title, Catherine the Ghost. She also tells the story through the voices of the two Catherines, mother and daughter. Finally, instead of telling their story as a generational one, she concentrates on the relationship between mother and daughter by alternating chapters between the two women, a strategy that de-emphasizes the centrality of Heathcliff. She also largely ignores the voices of both Lockwood and Mrs. Dean, though the latter remains an important character. As a result, Catherine and her daughter are allowed to speak for themselves, independent of the patriarchal values that had limited the choices available to Brontë’s women characters.

Even before diving into Koja’s novel, the reader is confronted with the emphasis on Catherine in the title. This novel is her story—the story of a woman instead of a piece of property. The title also indicates Catherine’s singularity by emphasizing that Catherine is the ghost.

The most remarkable change that Koja makes, however, is allowing Catherine and Cathy to tell their own stories. For the purpose of clarity, the rest of this review makes the same distinction that Emily Brontë had Edgar Linton use, referring to the mother as Catherine and the child as Cathy. By taking the narration away from Lockwood and Ellen Dean, who identify with patriarchal power, Koja gives voice to characters marginalized in Brontë’s novel because they would have had no political or economic power at the time. Koja follows the basic plotline of Brontë’s novel, alternating the telling between the two teenagers.

What is even more striking, though, is that Koja also chooses to alternate between first-person and third-person points of view. The more powerful is the first-person perspective from which she tells the story of the first generation, and Catherine the Ghost opens with her revelation of Catherine’s determination to return to the Heights: “Let me in / Let me in,” she says,

the moors stretch as far as the stars that circle like moths in the great blackness—I have climbed past those vast crags, past what Heaven is, past the scorn of the angels, back to these moors that hold this night’s hissing snow and churning trees, back and back and back to the Heights

my struggle is immense.

Koja appropriately gives Catherine the last words as well, clearly indicating that she is finally reunited with Heathcliff: “[W]e have ours now / bliss upon bliss upon bliss / whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.” Prevented from having any kind of legitimate relationship in Brontë’s novel because of class differences, Heathcliff and Catherine are united in both novels in a realm where class no longer matters.

Koja also suggests two reasons Catherine is restless. One is her desire to reunite with Heathcliff, as referenced above. Another is her desire to reach out to the daughter she never knew. In fact, Koja suggests that Cathy and Heathcliff together are required to bring Catherine back:

she and Heathcliff together, their pain and their belief, their pain and their belief, their human hearts, have welcomed me back from the cold. […] but he must learn better, learn who she is

she is my daughter

Catherine Linton, Catherine Heathcliff, Catherine Earnshaw, another Catherine has come home to the Heights.

Catherine thus emphasizes home and family, concepts she had rarely known.

The voice of her daughter is less passionate, and Koja chooses to use a different narrative strategy to tell Cathy’s story—that of a third-person limited omniscient narrator. Cathy, who had lived at the Heights since being kidnapped by Heathcliff and forced to marry her cousin Linton, is just now beginning to explore her new home after Linton’s death and the death of her father. Entering her mother’s girlhood bedroom, she attempts to understand the mother who had died giving birth to her, and Koja reiterates their differences most strikingly when Cathy discovers her mother’s books: “She pages through each one, reading everything written in the margins—her mother’s writing hand is swift, nothing like her own careful script, these words hurry and scrawl together.”

Here, Koja highlights Catherine’s power as well as Cathy’s more modest desire to understand her elders. Ultimately, the motherless girl, who had been controlled by her elders—her father, Ellen Dean, and Heathcliff—comes to recognize her own power and that of her mother. “[A]ll at once,” the narrator recounts, Cathy “feels, as fully and truly as she feels Hareton’s sleeping body beside her own, a presence there in the room, unknowable, living and wild, convincing beyond any need for belief: her mother has come back to this place that was her home, her mother is here.” The connection between the two women is Koja’s invention, one that focuses on women’s power.

Brontë, who was criticized by her contemporaries for being too passionate, too unconventional, and too untamed, had nonetheless attempted to rein in her story of passion and contain it within a more conventional story. Koja, less constrained by social conventions, is free to give voice to her women characters who wish for home and relationships and the opportunity to make their own decisions. One of the clearest ways she expresses that female agency is by having Catherine relate that she had seduced Heathcliff at Penistone Crag and had chosen to use folk wisdom to avoid being encumbered by a child, using “the penny‐royal and the yarrow, to make certain no child would come from our coupling—a child makes a future, and what future had we, under Hindley’s rule?”

Focusing on her women characters’ freedom to choose allows Koja and her characters to undermine patriarchal control and tell their stories openly. Catherine the Ghost is thus a modern novel that will appeal to readers like me who love both Emily Brontë’s decision to critique the social conditions of her day and later writers’ attempts to undermine them by providing an alternate reality. However, Catherine the Ghost will also appeal to readers who appreciate experiencing the voices of strong women characters, women who triumph at the end and, in the process, discover who they are.