ABSTRACT
The dominance of relationality as the basis of contracts and of the capitalist economy, and the patterned entanglements of contracts with statuses, open up new angles on Victorian liberalism. Relational sociality could be sentimentalized or suspected. It could be read against the alienations of atomism or as a denial of larger political communities. Recent years have seen reassessments of liberalism's normative appeal, generally leaning toward the affirmative or at least the hesitant, after years of censure. Emily Brontë did not lament the loss of some better world, nor hint at some finer vision; one would be hard pressed to find those in her tale. A more productive way to read Wuthering Heights' liberal anguish would be to treat it for what it was, and is: an effect of art.
