Am I a villain?
I ask myself very often
In books I read,
As pages flow
Villains I find,
Characters blind
Deprived of love,
In dark, alone they grow
They suffer and suffer,
Till pain overflows
Not with sense,
But on impulse they act
And a day comes,
When the devil tastes blood
Now no way remains
To stop madness n’ doom
Every villain has a tale
A tale of love and love doomed
So am I a villain,
Oh! Villains we all are
But villainy we seldom profess,
And as heroes we dress
To look in eye of the world,
Where villains are a shame
The Tale
Wuthering Heights is basically a Love Story dressed in a Gothic dress.
Wuthering Heights leads it’s protagonists to degradation, doom and destruction. Love is just a path leading to these various destinations.
The tale grows in between two families The Earnshaws & The Lintons and their respective estates Wuthering Heights & Thrushcross Grange
From the narration point of view, Wuthering Heights is distributed among two main narrators, Mr. Lockwood & Ellen Dean (Nelly).
Lockwood is a tenant, who finds himself asking for refuge in Wuthering Heights. His narration serves as an envelope over the chief narrator of the story Nelly Dean. Nelly is involved in the story from the very start. She knows each and every character of the story. Wuthering Heights is told by Nelly Dean to Lockwood to the reader.
The tale unfolds in a very complicated narrative form. But as one gets hold of the characters, Wuthering Heights is a book one will find tough to put down.
Heathcliff, an orphan is adopted by the owner of Wuthering Heights, Mr. Earnshaw. An unbreakable bond is gradually formed between Heathcliff and Mr. Earnshaw’s fiery daughter and his forster sister, Catherine Earnshaw. This bonding soon evolves into undieing love. However Catherine’s brother Hindley doesn’t like his newly found brother. Mr. Earnshaw dies, and Hindley finds his own ways to torture Heathcliff. Heathcliff is left as nothing more than a servant at Wuthering Heights.
Catherine meets Edgar Linton and his sister Isabella Linton from the neighbouring estate Thrushcross Grange. A desire for social prominence sees Catherine married to Edgar Linton which lead to Heathcliff’s steep downfall as a person. This humiliation sparks his need to earn revenge on his foster brother and sister. He makes their children, Hareton (Hindley’s son) and young Catherine (Catherine’s daughter) to repent. Now Heathcliff has grown powerful but more than powerful, cruel. Heathcliff gains control over both Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange using his extraordinary will-power.
Quotable Quotes:
Catherine: ’’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 Edgar’s is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire.’’
Nelly: ’’Proud people breed sad sorrows for themselves.’’
Catherine: ’’Kiss me again, but don’t let me see your eyes! I forgive what you have done to me. I love my murderer--but yours! How can I?’’
Heathcliff: ’’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.’’
Heathcliff: ’’I pray one prayer, I repeat it till my tongue stiffens, Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest as long as I am living! You said I killed you, haunt me, then! ... Be with me always, take any form, drive me mad, only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! ... I cannot live without my life. I cannot live without my soul.’’
Wuthering Heights:
The love story between Heathcliff and Catherine forms the crust of Wuthering Heights. A love story not tender but rather ferocious one.
Wuthering Heights is an intense Gothic romantic fiction.
How dark can a character get? Dark enough to influence the tone of whole tale by his own existence. That’s what Heathcliff’s character does to Wuthering Heights.
Heathcliff’s tortured and frustrated emotion called ’’Love’’ for Catherine expresses itself in his cruel acts.
Catherine’s character is nothing but a mirror image of that of Heathcliff’s. She is as wild and fierce as Heathcliff can be. At one point in the book, Catherine speaks about Heathcliff, ’’...he’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same...’’ This explains the bond between the two protagonists.
Wuthering Heights comes as a dark and brooding tale of love lost and regained. Authoress Emily Bronte creates mystic atmosphere around her characters. She creates stubborn characters and how their stubborness creeps on their relationship and eventually this very stubborness kills them. However the reader feels an array of emotions for the central characters. One likes them, pities them, hates them and mourns for the same characters. The climax of the book is somehow dual. It sees end of two wild lives but the end of their lives starts their afterlife together.
In the same way as Catherine and Heathcliff’s character’s don’t undergo changes, young Cathy and Hareton change themselves for love and defy the stubbornness that left Heathcliff and Catherine thirsty for love. Somehow the end of this dark book turns out to be a happy one. Happy for the souls who meet after death as well as the young couple who through out the book, never seemed to even distantly like each other.
The Author:
Emily Bronte lived with her sisters Charlotte and Anne Bronte, both of whom were also authors. The moors of Yorkshire where they spent their childhood, take a major part in atmosphere creation of Wuthering Heights.
Emily Bronte died at an early age of thirty. Wuthering Heights was her only published book. When the book was first published in 1847, it received mixed reviews. The readers found it heavily dark in atmosphere. But years after Emily Bronte’s death, Wuthering Heights carved for itself, a special place in English Literature.
Emily Bronte wrote ’’Wuthering Heights’’ a way before it’s time.
An Excerpt
’Heatcliff had knelt on one knee to embrace her; he attempted to rise, but she seized his hair, and kept him down.
--’’I wish I could hold you, ’’ she continued bitterly, ’’till we were both dead! I shouldn’t care what you suffered. I care nothing for your sufferings. Why shouldn’t you suffer? I do! Will you forget me? Will you be happy when I am in the earth? Will you say twenty years hence, ’That’s the grave of Catherine Earnshaw. I loved her long ago, and was wretched to lose her; but it is past. I’ve loved many others since: my children are dearer to me than she was; and at death, I shall not rejoice that I am going to her: I shall be sorry that I must leave them! Will you say so, Heatcliff?’’
--’’Don’t torture me till I am as mad as yourself, ’’ cried he, wrenching his head free, and grinding his teeth.’’