Wuthering Heights (a review)

Published August 2, 2010

Proud and steady on my list of Top 10 Favorite Novels rests the beloved “Wuthering Heights” by Emily Brontё. Traumatic, grief-soaked, appalling—it goes against the grain of what I most desire in a book, and yet I can’t ever seem to unravel myself from its horrific beauty. Because that’s what it is, you know–a thing of beauty.

Against a backdrop of bleak, cloud-curdled skies and barren Yorkshire moors, Ms. Brontё weaves her story around the ominous Wuthering Heights, a manor house whose walls keep secrets better than the housekeeper, Nelly Dean. At times through tears—other moments through revulsion—Nelly’s memories are bequeathed upon our narrator, Mr. Lockwood, in a tragic tale of romance between the gypsy orphan, Heathcliff, and the exquisitely arrogant Cathy.

We see Cathy and Heathcliff’s relationship originate in late childhood, and while she and her brother Hindley torment Heathcliff to no end, Cathy soon falls in love with him. Sadly however, like many a young female her love is finicky—swinging wildly between compassion and selfish vanity, to the taunting of Heathcliff’s emotions. Hindley, whose level of cruelty and abuse only amplify when his father dies, takes over Wuthering Heights and treats Heathcliff as a slave, humiliating him and despising his bond of spirited devotion with Cathy. Over the years, Hindley encourages Cathy into a relationship with the neighboring Linton family in hopes that Cathy’s undisciplined heart will reject Heathcliff for the niceties of proper society and Edgar Linton. Eventually he sees this wish fulfilled and Cathy betrays her love for Heathcliff and commits her future to Edgar, with the reasoning–”It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff 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.”

After a life of mistreatment, this abandonment from his one, needed friend nearly rips the heart out of Heathcliff. He leaves to seek his fortune and nurse his brokenness into revenge—henceforth becoming a monster in sole pursuit of ruining others.

And here emerges what I truly love about the book…it’s what Brontё does so well: The multi-layered journeys her characters take–the paths chosen for them and the ones they choose–which bring them to such levels of brokenness that even the reader, though at once horrified and repulsed, is also moved to pity by the events the poor creatures suffer through. And while, as the book proceeds, one feels antipathy at Heathcliff’s unadulterated cruelty toward others—those who have wronged him and those who have not—the reader is turned to greater nausea by the pretty, petty Cathy whose years of emotional fastidiousness have helped mutilate Heathcliff into the man he is (as well as driving a stake into the heart of her honorable husband, Edgar). I find the novel, in this way, very similar to Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” where the obvious monster (Dorian) is in reality a sort of puppet for the passive-aggressive master (Lord Henry) who prefers to direct and destroy life without ever accepting responsibility.

In the case of “Wuthering Heights” the puppet-master is Cathy, and it is only on her deathbed that reconciliation is found, if merely for a moment, between her and Heathcliff. Shortly after, she dies in childbirth–abandoning Heathcliff yet again–while he waits outside under the stormy sky, his rain-soaked curses revealing the depth of his anguish: “Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest as long as I am living; you said I killed you–haunt me, then! The murdered DO haunt their murderers, I believe. I know that ghosts HAVE wandered on earth. Be with me always–take any form–drive me mad! only DO not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! it is unutterable! I CANNOT live without my life! I CANNOT live without my soul!”

The years hemorrhage by after Cathy’s death, and we watch as Heathcliff’s life further uncoils, tearing apart everyone near him until bitter and cracked, he becomes obsessed with Cathy’s ghost and his miserable existence–eventually, mercifully, to the disregard of his own hatred even. And it is in this season, this last breath of the book–when we are exhausted of the sadness–that Ms. Brontё allows hope to niggle its way into Wuthering Heights. Offering us an ironic twist of life and joy with which, like Heathcliff, we can reflect back in grief while looking forward in peace.

So…there you have it, dearest reading friendlies…my thoughts on Emily Brontё’s Wuthering Heights.

Have you read it?

What’s the mood noise of the moment?  A sample.

Tags: book review, Catherine's ghost, Heathcliff and Cathy, Wuthering Heights review, Yorkshire moors