The Serpent Defanged: RDR2’s Misuse of Wuthering Heights

RDR2 writers fail to make the most of one of their best sources of inspiration: Wuthering Heights.

All articles on this site feature detailed discussion of literary allusions in Red Dead Redemption 2, and as such contain unmarked major and minor spoilers for the game, and occasionally the eventual fates of some characters in Red Dead Redemption. Read at your own risk.

On the face of it, the writers’ choice to use Wuthering Heights to shape the narrative of Red Dead Redemption 2 was a promising one. Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar explain, is “a radically corrective ‘misreading’ of Milton . . . with the fall from heaven to hell transformed into a fall from a realm that conventional theology would associate with ‘hell’ (the Heights) to a place that parodies ‘heaven’ (the Grange)” (189). RDR2 attempts a similar project, with Arthur’s fall into knowledge being not the path to sin, but to redemption. The game, too, presents the cultural “heaven” of Saint Denis as a smog-choked hell and the untrammeled wilderness as Edenic. For all that, it uses Wuthering Heights ineptly. Brontë’s novel is unique in the number of lenses through which it can be fruitfully interpreted, but for those interpretations to be valid, they must fit with the essentially feminist quality of the work. This is where the game’s use of its source material dramatically fails. Red Dead Redemption 2’s misogyny isn’t simply an issue of justice, or even accuracy, but of how well it’s able to tell its story.

Wuthering Heights is about Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff, an orphan her father finds on the streets and brings home. The two children are soulmates, bonded by the love of the landscape in which they live and the trauma of abuse and severe neglect they undergo. In Paradise Lost, Satan’s rebellion begins because God favors the Son over all his other “sons” (the angels). In Wuthering Heights, Satan (Heathcliff) is the favored child. Catherine’s father sows discord in his household by his preferential treatment of Heathcliff over his biological son Hindley, just as Dutch Van der Linde does by playing Arthur Morgan and John Marston against each other.

When Mr. Earnshaw grows ill, “suspected slights to his authority nearly threw him into fits” (Brontë 35): another parallel with Dutch, who is furious whenever anyone dares to challenge him (“Visiting Hours” and “Our Best Selves,” for instance). Mr. Earnshaw dies when Catherine is about 12 and Heathcliff only a little older. Hindley forces Heathcliff into a position of servitude, and Catherine is compelled to abandon her true, “half savage” self and become a lady (111). Although she’s deeply in love with Heathcliff, Catherine eventually marries their neighbor, Edgar Linton, because that’s what she’s been taught she must do — and in fact, she has no other practical choices (Gilbert 277). As she points out to Nelly, the housekeeper who narrates most of the story, if she married Heathcliff, they would both be beggars.

RDR2 aligns Arthur with Heathcliff of Wuthering Heights in several ways. The most significant of these is his relationship with Mary Linton, who, like Catherine Earnshaw, married an upper-class man with the last name Linton, despite being in love with a man her social class would find unacceptable. As is often the case in RDR2, names point to allusions: Heathcliff marries Edgar Linton’s sister, Isabella Linton. Arthur’s son’s mother was named Eliza: a shortened form of Elizabeth, which is the English version of the name Isabella. (Dutch’s lost love was likely named Annabelle instead of Annabella, like Byron’s wife, to avoid creating parallels between Arthur and Dutch. As I’ve previously discussed, one of the ways RDR2 links Arthur and Hosea Matthews is that Bessie is also a nickname for Elizabeth.) In the New Hanover Gazette No. 27, the article “Family Murdered” tells the story of a family that was attacked by bandits. The father’s name is Huntington (an outdoorsy name starting with an H, like “Heathcliff”), the mother’s name is Isabella, and the son’s name is Isaac, the same as Arthur’s son’s. Like Arthur’s son, the Isaac in the article died.

Despite these ostensible links, Arthur and Heathcliff are not particularly similar in character. Both men are brooding and violent, but the type of violence is markedly different: Heathcliff thinks nothing of hitting women and children, and is cruel to his own son. When Arthur is violent, it’s generally mutual, and it’s against adults (almost always men). He clearly loved his son and is typically protective of children (see “Honor, Amongst Thieves,” for instance). Also, Arthur is white, and Heathcliff probably isn’t: Nelly guesses that he may be Romani, Native American, or West or Southeast Asian (incredibly diverse examples that don’t really do much to tell us what he looks like).

In the same way, although Mary has superficial commonalities with Catherine, in vital essence they are completely dissimilar. Both women are upper-class, though in embarrassed financial circumstances, and they both marry a man of similar social standing with the last name Linton, despite being in love with a less polished, poorer man. Catherine’s brother and guardian, like Mary’s father Mr. Gillis, becomes dissolute after the death of his wife, drinking heavily and gambling to excess.

Here the similarities come to an abrupt halt. Catherine, only 19 when she dies, is something of a child: given to throwing tantrums, passionate, idealistic, freethinking. She is “never docile, never submissive, never ladylike” (Gilbert and Gubar 265). Mary is always ladylike. And while we never see the barest hint that Mary was ever anything else, “Catherine’s assertion that Heathcliff was herself quite reasonably summarized, after all, her understanding that she was being transformed into a lady while Heathcliff retained the ferocity of her primordial half-savage self” (293). What Mary is is, for Catherine, a false mask that slowly suffocates her.

In fact, the character to whom Mary is most similar in Wuthering Heights is the one who shares her exact name: Mary Linton. She’s Edgar and Isabella’s mother. This Mary Linton’s first name is only mentioned once, in dialog, making it difficult to say if the writers meant to allude to her or not — nothing suggests that they read or understood the work deeply (Brontë 43). Mary and Mrs. Linton are perfectly behaved, concerned with propriety and upholding the social order. When Catherine is sick, Mrs. Linton visits and “set things to rights, and scolded and ordered us all” (78), which sounds very much like Mary. In “Fatherhood and Other Dreams,” her dialog largely focuses on scolding Arthur:

• Your code is … well, it’s not right!
• You know sarcasm is beneath you.
• Don’t be a pompous ass, Arthur. It doesn’t suit you.
• Leave Daddy alone. He suffers enough.
• You could have cleaned yourself up a bit.
• Don’t hurt anyone, Arthur.
• If I were fair with you, and a good person, I’d have had you hanged a long time ago.
• Shut up, and act like a gentleman, or at least try to, for once in your brainless life.

Significantly, it’s Mrs. Linton who ushers Catherine into her “ladylike” state and therefore Mrs. Linton who leads Catherine and Heathcliff to their doom. In contrast, Mary is one of several female characters who gives Arthur moral guidance that’s supposed to be good for him. Again, this points to RDR2‘s writers having understood Wuthering Heights poorly.

Although there are obvious parallels between Heathcliff/Catherine and Arthur/Mary, Mary and Arthur are almost entirely unlike the other two. While in moral terms this is a good thing (especially in Arthur’s case), their bond lacks the archetypal force of Heathcliff and Catherine’s. After all, if you find yourself in a shouting match on the street about each other’s core values, you probably aren’t soulmates.

Their love is far more quotidian. It’s true that we accept the love we think we deserve, but we also accept the love that we find familiar. We respond to people who mirror our formative experiences: who make us feel the way we’ve been taught we’re supposed to feel about ourselves. Mary loves Arthur because he’s a man who she thinks needs to be morally instructed and looked after the way her father and her brother do. Other parallels between Arthur and Mr. Gillis are drawn: in “Fatherhood and Other Dreams II,” Arthur threatens to kill a young stable hand who’s rude to him. Moments later, Mr. Gillis stumbles out of the barn, raging “I’ve half a mind to kill you myself” to Mary. He tells Mary to go home: “I insist upon it.” While “insist” isn’t an unusual word by any means, it’s arguably the word given the most weight in the entire game, and it’s Arthur who says it. Mr. Gillis is mean-spirited and prone to violence; he drinks to excess and steals: he’s not all that different from Arthur at his worst (although Arthur is at least capable of caring deeply for others).

Arthur, like Mary, loves what he finds familiar. Mary tells him he’s a useless fool: “You’re an idiot, but you’ll always be my friend,” she says (“Fatherhood and Other Dreams II”). Mary is flirting, but Dutch says this kind of thing to Arthur as a means of abusive control, insulting and then praising Arthur to keep him off-balance and insecure. It’s in these particular psychological aspects that RDR2‘s depiction of Mary and Arthur’s relationship is strongest. Beyond that, there’s a lack of chemistry between them that’s only highlighted by the choice to make such strongly stated allusions to Wuthering Heights. Catherine and Heathcliff’s passion, like Catherine herself, is almost entirely absent from RDR2.

If Mary isn’t Catherine, where does she appear? Catherine Braithwaite bears no meaningful resemblance. Karen Jones does, somewhat, to Catherine’s real self: when Catherine was a child, “her spirits were always at a high-water mark, her tongue always going—singing, laughing, and plaguing everybody who would not do the same” (Brontë 36). Karen (who “used to be the happy one”¹) and Catherine both undergo a fall that leaves them intensely self-destructive.

RDR2‘s habit of giving the stories or attributes of interesting women to male characters suggests that perhaps it’s Arthur who’s most similar to Catherine. Certainly he’s more similar to her than Mary is. Nelly explains that Catherine “had no temptation to show her rough side in [the Lintons’] company, and had the sense to be ashamed of being rude where she experienced such invariable courtesy,” which “led her to adopt a double character without exactly intending to deceive anyone” (59). Catherine eventually dies because she’s unable to bring her conflicting desires into balance, and it tears her psyche apart. Similarly, after Mary sends Arthur the letter to end things for good, he makes a frustratingly opaque journal entry: “You sad, deluded fool. Torn in two by different ideas of who you were, and it turns out you weren’t neither of them.” As I’ve discussed before, one of the game’s key themes is the concept of individuation, which involves the balancing and reconciliation of opposing forces in the mind.

The failure to do this kills Catherine: she swings between extremes, between her true wild nature and the “ladylike” self her family and the Lintons make her into, between fiery Heathcliff and icy Edgar. Needless to say, the novel has a far more sophisticated understanding of these concepts than RDR2 does: in Wuthering Heights, darkness and wildness are essential qualities—more essential to Catherine than culture, in fact—and must be incorporated into the self in order to be a whole person. The duality that RDR2 concerns itself with is based on the Christian concepts of good and evil, which aren’t meant to balanced. The narrative takes a hesitant step away from understanding the world this way, but shackled to traditional concepts, it can’t go far towards the type of radical revision Brontë achieves.

The type of Catherine Earnshaw is nowhere to be found in RDR2 because she exemplifies Wuthering Heights‘ central theme of “female rage” (Gilbert and Gubar 262), which is something the game doesn’t allow or acknowledge. Yes, there are angry women in RDR2 — but by “female rage,” we don’t just mean “anger that women feel.” We mean rage that is transgressive, rage against the many fetters and traps of patriarchy. Sadie may be the angriest character in the narrative, but her rage isn’t of this type. As Esther Wright points out, “In Rockstar’s West, women with any narrative significance can only be two things: defined by their relationship to a man, largely masculinized themselves, or both. Sadie is defined by both” (136). Sadie’s anger is on behalf of her husband, which is to say, her marriage, an undeniably patriarchal institution. Moreover, her anger is expressed in “masculinized” ways: hunting down and violently killing every last O’Driscoll.

Female rage, like any true representation of Catherine Earnshaw, is all but absent from the game. RDR2 defangs and declaws Wuthering Heights’ narrative while simultaneously attempting to make the novel’s argument for fangs and claws: for self-knowledge and autonomy, for individuation. The novel argues against Paradise Lost’s white patriarchy. The game attempts to do the same thing, but is too deeply invested in whiteness and in patriarchy — literally invested, because white men and boys are the people to whom Rockstar is catering — to achieve it. RDR2 demonstrates a clear failure to understand that Catherine and Heathcliff’s relationship is a tragedy not because Catherine breaks Heathcliff’s heart by denying him, but because Heathcliff is Catherine’s self, and her denial is merely a symptom of the way in which she’s being destroyed. The game reifies the novel’s tragedy, which is the violence patriarchy does to women’s wild selves.

New here? Visit the Table of Contents to read the essays in order, or the Index & TL;DR to explore the site by topic. New essays are published Wednesdays at 1 p.m. E.T./10 a.m. P.T. Sharing the site is always appreciated!

1. Tilly Jackson, dialog at Shady Belle. ↩︎

Bibliography