Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights is the stuff Jerry Springer’s dreams are made out of. Obsession, hatred, lustful passion, sex, violence, lies, deceit, class and marriage gone awry are just some of the many themes that are explored in Emily Bronte’s powerful and only novel, Wuthering Heights, written and released before she died in her late twenties. Written in 1847, the novel spits in the face of the traditional reasons for marriage in England, such as money, status, power and offers an alternative: to marry out of love and pure, lustful passion. The novel spans two generations of families: the end of one, and the beginnings of another. In the end, Wuthering Heights is complex, but like Shakespeare or Tarantino, it is accessible. Yes, almost everybody dies, but in the end there is hope for honest life in the future.
The novel opens on a single narrator, Mr. Lockwood, who describes his own arrival at Wuthering Heights, an English manor of sorts. He immediately causes havoc at the Heights and at this same time we are introduced to the central force of the novel, Heathcliff, a seemingly short-tempered, brooding and mean man, but at the same time, honest. Through Mr. Lockwood’s interest in the history of the Heights we are driven into the heart of the novel’s story by Nelly, who tells her story of the Heights to Mr. Lockwood, who is in turn, telling it to us, the reader. Nelly goes back in time, relating to us the story of the young Catherine and Heathcliff, how their lives brought them together and pulled them apart, and slowly she brings us back up to the present day.
But I will admit, it actually took me three tries to get past the first forty pages and into the novel. There are two reasons for this, firstly, the language is complex, and hard to get into. But Bronte has a firm grip on her language and different characters speak at different levels of formality and syntax, depending upon their education and status. This fact is interesting to pull apart and play with in and of itself.
Also, Bronte has setup a structure that forces the reader to really question the events of this story as told through the novel’s narrators. Joseph Conrad uses a very similar structure in his novel Heart of Darkness, in which the story is told through a single character who is unrelated to the central events of the novel itself. This setup is effective in both ’’Heart of Darkness’’ and Wuthering Heights because it forces the reader to question the reliability of the narrator and subsequently, the characters that are involved in the story. And yet this setup also works on an entirely higher level because it suggests that the events of these stories actually have the power to transcend the lives of those who tell them, and as such, the setup makes the story all the more powerful for the reader.
Wuthering Heights was the first novel to really question the traditional roles of love and marriage in society makes it even more fascinating. It was this conundrum of clashing ideas that Bronte used to paint her textured story of love gone awry between the novel’s two central characters of Catherine and Heathcliff. There is one scene in the novel wonderfully juxtaposes Catherine’s feelings for Edgar, the man she is to marry, with her feelings for Heathcliff, the man she loves in a conversation with Nelly Dean:
’’Well, that settles it - if you have only to do with the present, marry Mr. Linton.’’
’’I don’t want your permission for that - I shall marry him; and yet, you have not told me whether I’m right.’’
’’Perfectly right; if people be right to marry only for the present. And now, let us hear what you are unhappy about. Your brother will be pleased... The old lady and gentleman will not object, I think - you will escape from a disorderly, comfortless home into a wealthy respectable one; and you love Edgar, and Edgar loves you. All seems smooth and easy - where is the obstacle?’’
’’Here! and here!’’ replied Catherine, striking one hand on her forehead, and the other on her breast. ’’In whichever place the soul lives - in my soul, and in my heart, I’m convinced I’m wrong.’’
And it is through scenes like this that the forceful passion that Bronte is exploring comes through. I believe that Bronte is suggesting that this is a kind of deep passion that is volatile and destructive, but at the same time a kind of passion that can heal and make you more whole than you’ve ever known. It’s as if Bronte is challenging her readers to have felt these feelings already, to have experienced love and loss and the feelings of deep pain associated with it before coming to her novel and fully appreciating it.
I enjoyed Wuthering Heights because it thoroughly engaged me in its text. Wuthering Heights made me laugh and cry, and so many times it made me so horribly angry and frustrated with the characters involved in the story. Often I was upset with blatant disregard for each other’s emotions, as well as for their raw anger that seemed to always be boiling just beneath their skin, from the very depths of their bleak souls. And in the end, there really is a lot to explore in Wuthering Heights, and to truly appreciate it, I found it deserves multiple reads.
My Grade for ’’Wuthering Heights’’: A+