This book was published in December of 1847 so I thinks it’s fair game to give spoilers, but just in case: *spoiler alert*
“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.”
-Emily Bronte
Wuthering Heights is set in knotty and wild swamps of England. The gothic mansions, sombre ambience, and isolated moors of Yorkshire are the perfect setting for this romance.
It’s a romance, technically. It’s your classic boy meets girl, boy falls in love with girl, and girl falls in love with boy. That’s where it’s romantic tendencies begin to fade. Girls family torments boy and girl marries another. Intense jealousy festers between boy, girl, and husband of girl. Boy leaves for several years then returns to wreak revenge on girls family through physical, emotional, and psychological havoc on girl and everyone she loves.
It’s best not to think of Wuthering Heights as a romance. It’s a very bad romance.
The novel centers on one fierce and passionate relationship between the two protagonists Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw. It’s a relationship that’s so intense it could be mistaken for a nightmare; a passion so powerful it destroyed them and everything it came in contact with. Rather than a romance, this novel is a ghost story, a moorish nightmare, a dark and turbulent relationship, and an insightful case study on human malice.
The most unique aspect of this book is its characters. I was taken back at the relentless and inhuman nature in these characters, their spiteful and fallen souls: they were doomed to the grave and yet their hand was on the shovel. Heathcliff was sullen and moody from childhood, Catherine tormented her enemies with taunts and jeers, Catherine’s husband, Edgar, was spoiled and cowardly. Each without empathy and all wallowing in self-pity and toxic jealousy. It was genuinely the most pitiful set of characters I have ever witnessed. I hated them. All of them.
I grew to hate Heathcliff. I wished pain, suffering, torment and even death on this protagonist. I grew to relish when characters exacted their revenge on him. It was frightening seeing my empathy drain with each flip of the page, but it’s an effect that befell every character each passing year they spent in those dark moors of Wuthering Heights. I thought of Heathcliff and Catherine as inhumanly malicious, mainly because I didn’t want them even remotely associated with me, but there lies the irony: they are very much humanly malicious.
I’m hesitant to how well my espoused beliefs of empathy, love,
The book for next week is The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde.