When my book club picked Wuthering Heights, I had the vaguest of notions of what it was about. A romance in the moors, I thought. I recalled a movie trailer from the past, people standing in the rain, staring at each other with smoldering eyes; people standing in the fog, staring at each other with smoldering eyes; people staring at each other, staring, staring, staring. Also a snippet of dialogue popped into my head, overwrought and purple, the twist of phrase that sends teenage lit nerds into paroxysms: “My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it, I’m well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff! He’s always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being.”My book club is composed of six guys. We started the book club because we were tired of our wives having all the fun and drinking all the wine at their own gatherings. After our second time cycling through the club, with each member picking a book, Adam’s wife pointed out that we’d yet to read a female author. Adam decided to remedy this by picking Wuthering Heights, which had struck some kind of chord with him in high school. Based on my recollections, as noted above, I wasn’t particularly looking forward to it. I believed in romance once, a long time and two kids ago, but it’s hard for me to get excited about notions of love resembling the eternal rocks. Lucky for me, this isn’t anything like a typical love story. Wuthering Heights is set in the bleak, chilly, forlorn Yorkshire moors. The story begins in needlessly-complicated fashion with the new tenant of Thrushcross Grange, a man named Lockwood – who narrates in the first person – going to meet his landlord Heathcliff, who lives at Wuthering Heights. Lockwood is taken aback at the odd characters he meets at the Heights: the rude, taciturn Heathcliff; a young woman; and a strange young man who appears to be a servant. There is a snowstorm and Lockwood is forced to spend an uncomfortable, nightmare-ridden night at Wuthering Heights. When Lockwood returns to Thrushcross Grange, he asks his housekeeper, Nelly Dean, about the strange goings-on at the Heights. At this point, Nelly takes over the first-person narration to tell the bulk of the story. (In other words, this is a Conrad-esque nested narrative, where there are stories within stories within stories. Frankly, I find this literary technique irritating and confusing. Just use the third-person! It’s much more believable!) Nelly’s sprawling tale begins as a love affair between Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw. It was Catherine’s father who came upon the homeless Heathcliff while on a trip to Liverpool. He brought Heathcliff back to Wuthering Heights to live with him, Catherine, and Catherine’s brother Hindley. Heathcliff and Hindley don’t like each other, but Catherine and Heathcliff do. A neighbor named Edgar Linton joins this crowd, wooing Catherine. At some point, Heathcliff runs off, Edgar marries Catherine, Heathcliff returns, and the melodrama begins! At this point, I’m going to stop with the plot points. For one, I’m not SparkNotes, or CliffsNotes, if you’re of a certain age (and no, I won’t help you write your term paper). For another, I can’t keep the convolutions straight myself. This is a tangled book, filled with characters who are similarly named (Heathcliff and Hareton, Lindley and Linton, Catherine and Cathy). Suffice to say, there are EMOTIONS involved. Very strong emotions. As in character-in-a-Russian-novel strong. Wuthering Heights is one of those Romantic novels in which spiritual or emotional illness will manifest into a physical illness that can literally kill you. My initial emotion, since we’re on the topic, was one of dislike. I didn't like Wuthering Heights. I did not like the long, tedious introductory chapters narrated by Lockwood. I did not like the characters who all – with the exception of the saintly Nelly Dean – came across as either cruel, stupid, or both. I hated the character of Joseph, an old coot with a religious bent who speaks in an indecipherable colloquial dialect. (At first, I used the annotations at the back of my Penguin edition to translate Joseph’s mutterings. Eventually, up against a book club deadline, I started skipping everything he said). I did not care for the hyper-passionate dialogue, or the occasionally murky prose. The more I thought about it, though, the more I came to respect Wuthering Heights. It is exceptionally sinister, with long sections of the story an epic mind-f—k coordinated by a vengeful Heathcliff. It is psychologically dark, if not especially deep. It is a work of fiction that demands discussion, and explodes with dozens of meanings depending on who is doing the reading. No one will ever know what Emily Bronte intended when she wrote Wuthering Heights. She died shortly after publication, and due to her gender, and her famous sisters, it was sometimes hard to convince people she even wrote it. Regardless, it is a work of imaginative genius. I’ve always loved reading but I’ve always hated being told what to read. It’s my only real authority issues. Even in book club I sometimes get sulky and resentful when certain titles are chosen. I trace this issue back to all my English classes, and all the turgid “classics” I’ve been assigned throughout the years. When I finally finished my last class in a pedagogical era that lasted twenty years, the first thought I had was I can read whatever I want! (True story: after I finished the bar exam, most of my classmates gathered for an epic drunk. I stayed home and fulfilled my dream of reading a book while eating Pizza Hut pizza). Every once in awhile, I’d try to throw a classic into my reading list, mainly for that sense of intellectual superiority that comes with being highbrow, if only for a fleeting moment. The younger, mid-twenties version of myself still felt a residual resentment. I’d read something like Moby Dick and almost be angry at it. Angry at its difficulty; angry that people thought it was so good, and kept saying so, when it was self-evidently so ponderous and syntactically tortured. Now I’m coming to realize the value in wrestling with a book. For the most part, I still value a certain level of clarity when I read, because reading is fundamentally about communication. But the older version of myself can appreciate that extracting the meaning of something is worthwhile in itself. So I fought with Wuthering Heights, and the battle ended as a draw. And unlike Moby Dick, Wuthering Heights did not end up in the fireplace.
It is a testament to the overabundance of cliches clogging the realms of literature featuring romance, that readers widely associate the middle Brontë sister's tour de force with vindictive fury, abuse and emotional excesses rather than love. Because bestowing approval on an unnatural, obsessive love that devoured everything in its vicinity out of pure malice somehow throws our moral compass into a tizzy.Last time I read this, Emily Brontë had cruelly crushed a child's enjoyment of a book much like Heathcliff remorselessly causes the universe stretching between the extremities of Thrushcross Grange and Wuthering Heights to implode violently. She had sucked me into a vortex of dark, inchoate feelings for a week or so from which I found difficult to extricate myself. But this time? The pages flew by. My spirit soared every time Brontë breached a boundary of what the voices in favor of the status quo label propriety, demolished a stereotype, let her heroine roam the outdoors as freely as she could with the one person who never sought to reduce her individuality to a compilation of 'feminine' attributes. And the romance? It made me swoon. So pardon me if I shun those patriarchy-approved alpha males who infantilize their lovers, their false sheen of dignity and restraint, the promise of domesticated happily-ever-afters, and righteous, unidimensional do-gooders. I crave for Emily's brutal candour instead, her courageous glorification of this earth-shattering, all-consuming desire to melt, to unite with the one you covet, with nary a care for what it may entail. The love that heats up your blood and is food for your soul and percolates every fibre of your being. But, Heathcliff, if I dare you now, will you venture? If you do, I'll keep you. I'll not lie there by myself: they may bury me twelve feet deep, and throw the church down over me, but I won't rest till you are with me. I never will!Heathcliff and Catherine's relationship was beyond their own control and comprehension, a storm which wreaked havoc in the lives of those who sought to throttle it, a force of nature which subsided only when both its initiators were reconciled in death free to resume their wild, unchecked peregrinations across the stretch of earth which they claimed as their very own - the moors, which divorced from worldly considerations of wars, Empire and inequality, became the only utopia which could accommodate their calamitous passion for each other. I cannot look down to this floor, but her features are shaped in the flags! In every cloud, in every tree-filling the air at night, and caught by glimpses in every object by day-I am surrounded with her image!Sartre in his preface (passionate endorsement) to Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth says - "...he shows perfectly clearly that this irrepressible violence is neither a storm in a teacup nor the reemergence of savage instincts nor even a consequence of resentment: it is man restructuring himself."And that's as concise and succinct a defense I can provide for Heathcliff, his rage that won't be quelled and its devastating manifestations. The Heathcliff without a second name, the perpetual outsider in a white-washed society breeding manifold evils, the other, the 'thing' which Nelly Dean, Mrs Earnshaw, Hindley and even the infant Catherine see as nothing other than a dirty, smelly, baseborn creature deserving of contempt. A person of color stranded in a world increasingly being cleaved into virulent polarities of light and dark, Occident and Orient, powerful and powerless, colonizer and colonized, white master and black slave, abuser and abused. Violence is the language of the oppressed after all, especially because the oppressor teaches him no better. I wish I had light hair and a fair skin, and was dressed and behaved as well, and had a chance of being as rich as he will be!And Catherine? I disagree with Simone de Beauvoir when she asserts - "She uses his words, she repeats his gestures, adopts his manias and tics. "I am Heathcliff," says Catherine in Wuthering Heights; this is the cry of all women in love; she is another incarnation of the beloved, his reflection, his double: she is he. She lets her own world flounder in contingence: she lives in his universe."This certainly typifies heroines populating the wide spectrum of conventional romance novels in general. But I consider Catherine exempt from this pigeonholing. A few moments from her death she contemplates reverting to her sexless girlhood to be reunited with a childhood companion only with whom she had savoured true liberty, to travel back to a time when societal mores hadn't impressed upon her a catastrophic urge for conformity. And if Catherine finds herself to be interchangeable from her other half, then Heathcliff, too, wills himself to dissolve with her into the embrace of the earth which does not discriminate between the baptized and the heathen. '...I dreamt I was sleeping the last sleep by that sleeper, with my heart stopped and my cheek frozen against hers.'And if she had been dissolved into earth, or worse, what would you have dreamt of then?' I said.'Of dissolving with her, and being more happy still!' he answered.There. If Catherine is Heathcliff, then Heathcliff, too, is Catherine. Beings seeking to overturn the societal injunction against their individuation and find their salvation in each other. A salvation they could attain only when Emily ushers in the element of the paranormal, the much vilified, belittled 'gothic'. So take away your insidious Rochesters and sanctimonious Jane Eyres and gentrified romances put on a pedestal. Give me Heathcliff and Catherine instead. Give me their petulant anger, their restlessness and their feral love.
What do You think about Wuthering Heights (2002)?
Ah the classics. Everybody can read their own agenda in them. So, first a short plot guide for dinner conversations when one needs to fake acculturation, and then on to the critics’ view. A woman [1:] is in love with her non-blood brother [2:] but marries her neighbor [3:] whose sister [4:] marries the non-blood brother [2:]; their [1,3:] daughter [5:] marries their [2,4:] son [6:]; meanwhile, their [1,2:] elder brother marries and has a son [7:]. Then everybody dies, 1 of bad temper, 4 of stupidity, 3 of a cold, 6 because he’s irritating, 2 because he’s mean and tried to rise above his station. 5 and 7 are the only ones left, so they marry. The women are all called Catherine, the men are mostly called Earnshaw, and through intermarriage everybody is a bit of a Heathcliff. The Marxist critic: the oppressed and underprivileged [2:] revolts to improve his lot in life, but fails to make allies and loses everything, as always. The Post-colonialist critic: once again the rich [1,3,4:] meddle with the lives of the poor [2:] under the pretense of improving them, in fact wrecking havoc.The Feminist critic: if only the Catherines had read The Feminine Mystique…The Freudian critic: repeated intermarriage and border-line incest make for such good stories! The Shakespearean critic: Much Ado About NothingThe Entertainment Weekly executive: stories told by sources close to the protagonists always sell well, because most people live vicariously. And dinnertime has always been the perfect slot for gossip.
—Eliszard
There is a hidden passion that is hiding inside the pages. The passion that arises when Heathcliff and Catherine are together. From childhood, they can't be separated. They understand each other and love only each other. The world is nothing and was nothing until they found each other. "so he shall never know how I love him: and that, not because he's handsome, Nelly, but because he's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same" This quote explains the feelings she can't express to the man she loves (wasn't it illegal to marry the person you were brought up with), so instead, she rots from inside. She rots because because she is not a full person. Heathcliff rots because he is not a full person. They are both split and cannot seem find a way to attach back together, like how they were attached when they were children. Now, I know she and Heathcliff were horrible and not likable, but that is the point. I felt like this was a message to the readers. Here are two people who are supposed to go through life together, as lovers, but the cruelty of the world separated them and now they will have to live even though they are dead inside. How can you be alive when a vital organ is missing? It's like going through life with half a heart. You cannot function like a normal person. It's impossible. That is why they were horrible, they were broken. You know that feeling that something is missing in your heart? Something or someone is not by your side and you start feeling like you are not whole. ...and you start getting agitated and Impatient....like waiting for someone that won't come....ever! This novel shows how unfair life can be, how good people turn into bad peopl by child abuse, how people become bitter and cold by jealousy and revenge. How people start to really act like they don't have full hearts because they really don't.....Some might roll their eyes at this and say melodrama! But I find this novel to be true to every person's broken heart. Not being able to touch and feel the person you most love in this world can destroy you. From inside out. I think Emliy Bronte wrote a novel that desribes the hidden depth of the human emotion. I respect her. I respect this novel. I think she was a brilliant writer and observer.
—Jackie "the Librarian"
I was not prepared for how bleak this book was. I had seen movie versions of Wuthering Heights, but this was my first time reading the novel, and it was much darker than I expected. So many of the characters are utterly unlikable! Cathy is selfish and foolish and obstinate; Heathcliff is brutal and vengeful and psychotic; Hindley is spiteful and venomous and a drunkard. And when Edgar and Isabella Linton enter the story, everything goes to hell in a handbasket. Why, oh why, did Cathy marry Edgar when she admitted she loved Heathcliff? As a reader, I wanted to shake her and scream at her that she was making a disastrous choice. Let's hear it from Cathy herself: I've no more business to marry Edgar Linton than I have to be in heaven; and if the wicked man in there had not brought Heathcliff so low, I shouldn't have thought of it. It would degrade me to marry Heatchliff now; so he shall never know how I love him: and that, not because he's handsome, Nelly, but because he's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same; and Linton's is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire.Yes, I know Cathy felt she couldn't marry Heathcliff because of his low birth and lack of education, but considering how isolated they were in Yorkshire, did it really matter that much? Was that Bronte's point -- that disobeying one's heart by following the courtship rules of one's social class caused suicidal and homicidal ravings? I agreed with Heathcliff when he later scolded Cathy for her decision:You teach me now how cruel you've been -- cruel and false. Why did you despise me? Why did you betray your own heart, Cathy? I have not one word of comfort. You deserve this. You have killed yourself. Yes, you may kiss me, and cry; and wring out my kisses and tears: they'll blight you -- they'll damn you. You loved me -- then what right had you to leave me? What right -- answer me -- for the poor fancy you felt for Linton? Because misery and degradation, and death, and nothing that God or Satan could inflict would have parted us, you, of your own will, did it. I have not broken your heart -- you have broken it; and in breaking it, you have broken mine.There was such violence in this book! Women are beaten and locked up; children are bullied and abused; punches are thrown, shots are fired, and even dogs are kicked and hung. Egad. I can imagine how shocking it must have been to the good folks of England when it was published in 1847, learning that not only did a woman write it, but that she was a clergyman's daughter, and the story involved a married woman having a tryst with another man. Wowsers. Despite not liking the darkness of the novel, I thought the writing was good and the structure was interesting: the servant Nelly Dean relates the history of the doomed love affair to an outsider. The servant was an interloper and kept informed on events in both houses. I can't imagine a more effective way to tell the story of the love triangle. I wouldn't trust either Heathcliff or Cathy or one of the children as a narrator, they might only tell their parent's side of things. Of course, it's also interesting that Nelly Dean may not be a reliable narrator either. She often edits and omits what she tells the master; why should we believe she'd tell an outsider the whole truth? It took me twice as long to get through this novel as it should have -- it was so bleak that I was hesitant to pick it up. The only other Bronte sister book I've read was Jane Eyre, which I liked very much, but that love story at least has some warmth in it. In contrast, Wuthering Heights left me feeling cold and bitter. I'm glad I've read it, but I don't think it's one I'll be rereading anytime soon.
—Diane Librarian
