Reflections on a Classic...
Wuthering Heights is the tale of two families both joined and riven by love and hate. Cathy is a beautiful and wilful young woman torn between her soft-hearted husband and Heathcliff, the passionate and resentful man who has loved her since childhood. The power of their bond creates a maelstrom of cruelty and violence which will leave one of them dead and cast a shadow over the lives of their children.
Emily Brontë's novel remains a stunningly original and shocking exploration of obsessive passion.
- Penguin Books Australia
First published in 1847, it has remained well read, highly acclaimed, and in circulation ever since. Emily Brontë died in 1848 after catching a cold at her brother's funeral. Wuthering Heights was her only novel.
I first read Wuthering Heights when I was in my early twenties, when I read most of the more well-known classics for the first time. I was not a fan. I wonder now, looking back, if this was because I read it on the back of reading all of Jane Austen's work, which of course, is very different in theme and tone. It may have also been to do with expectations. Wuthering Heights has long been sold as a story of passion and undying love, which has translated all too often into being considered a love story, or even more misleading, a romance. Let's just start right there: Wuthering Heights is not a romance. It's not even a love story. What it is, is a story of obsession and diabolical revenge. Cathy and Heathcliffe are not the couple that you quote at your wedding; theirs was more the original toxic relationship. I will never be swayed from that opinion. Perhaps it could just be age. Twenty-five years on from my first read, I feel as though I have read an entirely different novel to the one I read originally.
I had no plans to ever read Wuthering Heights again, but the recent film, Emily, caught my attention and I watched it a few weeks ago and was instantly drawn to giving her one and only novel another chance. Written and directed by Frances O'Connor in her directorial debut, it is a part-fictional portrait of Emily Brontë. I read in an interview with O'Connor that Emily is inspired by both the author's life and Wuthering Heights, in that, she blends the two to create a fictional biography, rather than a more traditional autobiographical account. The film is sublime. I loved it. And I could recognise scenes from Wuthering Heights, here and there, reworked into the film within the context of Emily's life, giving the impression that she may have been inspired by certain real-life events, if not actually, then thematically, when penning her novel. I'm sure there are plenty of hardcore Wuthering Heights fans out there who detest the film and the way O'Connor portrayed Emily, particularly the more lascivious side of her, but O'Connor herself professed a deep admiration for Wuthering Heights and Emily Brontë and I enjoyed seeing the end result of where that creative vision and admiration led her.
I toyed with the idea of a reread for about two weeks, but then one day during a lunch break at work, I downloaded a copy to my Kobo and just started reading. I was immediately drawn into it and remained so for the whole 600 pages, which I read across four days. It's not my favourite classic, and Emily has not become my favourite Brontë. That honour still rests upon Anne's shoulders, with Charlotte a close second. But I do appreciate Wuthering Heights now in a way I was unable to previously, and I admire Emily for her bold vision and the way in which she used her characters to demonstrate the very fine line between love and hate, passion and fury, and the spoils of greed and envy.
I still despise Cathy, she is one of the most spoilt and detestable characters from literature, ever. And don't even get me started on Heathcliffe. I don't want to hear about hidden depths or that he was the product of being mistreated and deserves our sympathy...the man was one thing, and one thing only. Those two, with their toxic addiction to each other, ruined the lives of everyone around them, not just within their own generation, but within the next one as well. But I can hate them and still like the book. I have no idea at all what Joseph, the groundsman, was saying. Ever. All I got was a general gist that he hated everyone and was very religious. And I feel that the idea that Nelly (Ellen), the nursemaid/narrator, could retell a decades old story, word for word, a major stretch, plot wise. But again, I can accept these things and still like the novel.
Some favourite quotes:
...because he's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same...
Yes, Cathy, your souls were indeed the same. Black as pitch, and self-centred to the core. Of course, this quote has long been misrepresented as something romantic - don't get me started.
'What has Heathcliffe done to you?' I asked. 'In what has he wronged you, to warrant this appalling hatred? Wouldn't it be wiser to bid him quit the house?'
'No!' thundered Earnshaw, 'should he offer to leave me, he's a dead man, persuade him to attempt it, and you are a murderess! Am I to lose all, without a chance of retrieval? Is Hareton to be a beggar? Oh, damnation! I will have it back; and I'll have his gold too; and then his blood; and hell shall have his soul! It will be ten times blacker with that guest than ever it was before!'
Earnshaw really made it way too easy for Heathcliffe to exact his revenge. And unfortunately, particularly for Hareton, Linton and Cathy junior, it took everyone way too long to see what he was up to.
Poor thing, I never considered what she did with herself after tea. And though frequently, when she looked in to bid me good night I remarked a fresh colour in her cheeks, and a pinkness over her slender fingers; instead of fancying the hue borrowed from a cold ride across the moors, I laid it to the charge of a hot fire in the library.
Ahh, Ellen. There is a special place for you in my heart, with all you'd seen and heard to that point, to remain so entirely blind and trusting.
Shame at her scorn, and hope of her approval were his first prompters to higher pursuits; and instead of guarding him from one, and winning the other, his endeavours to raise himself produced just the contrary result.
Where we see exactly just how far the apple falls from the tree as Cathy junior channels Cathy senior with a sharply cruel tongue and a scornful attitude towards Hareton, who is possibly the most wronged character in all of English literature.
In summary, Wuthering Heights is a case in point for getting out of the neighborhood. These people needed to get away from each other. Revenge is the beating heart of Wuthering Heights, and I'll say one thing for Heathcliffe, he certainly took his in spades. For me, Wuthering Heights is a gothic tragedy, and by viewing it through that lens, I can appreciate it on a whole new level.
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