wuthering review

Emily Brontë rocked the Victorians’ world with her cast of characters on the wuthering Yorkshire moors. The reticent, strong-willed preacher’s daughter created a masterwork that has no equal in literature. Published in 1847, Wuthering Heights stands alone in the pantheon of immortal novels with its unflinching view of human nature at its most extreme. To view this unique book as simply a love story is to overlook the remarkable accomplishment that a supposedly unworldly author achieved. Yes, it’s a love story, but one at its most primordial and complex. This is no pretty, romantic view of everlasting love. This is savage, unrelenting passion meshed with pain. Raw, violent and beautiful as the moors themselves...that untamed tract of wilderness, home to sheep, lapwings, grouse, rock, bog and heather. Cathy and Heathcliff, the incendiary core around which the entire novel revolves, are the human (and possibly, inhuman) manifestations of the elements. “My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath–a source of little visible delight, but necessary.”

Two families figure prominently in the book. The Earnshaws of the Heights and the representatives of “civilized” behavior, the Lintons of Thrushcross Grange. In contrast to the wild, exposed location of Wuthering Heights, the Grange is set in a cultivated park sheltered from the storms that the Heights is constantly prey to. This pronounced difference between locations mirrors the glaring personality differences between the residents of the Heights (Cathy, Heathcliff, Hindley Earnshaw) and the gentry of the Grange (Edgar and his sister, Isabella). Edgar’s proposal of marriage to Catherine Earnshaw is the catalyst for a juggernaut of disasters that consume all of the principal characters.

The second generation, Cathy Linton (daughter of Catherine and Edgar), Linton Heathcliff (son of Heathcliff and Isabella) and Hareton Earnshaw (son of Hindley, Cathy’s brother) are swept into the ensuing maelstrøm with only Cathy and Hareton surviving and thriving. The story is recounted by multiple narrators (primarily Nelly Dean, the housekeeper and Mr. Lockwood, the new tenant at the Grange) in a series of flashbacks that deftly peel back the outer layers of the story to expose its wild heart. Wuthering Heights is a genius work of craft and passion, blending the supernatural with the down-to-earth, the base with the sublime. Heathcliff, the orphan whom Cathy’s father took a strange liking, became the whipping boy for a jealous Hindley and a soulmate for Cathy. In turn, Heathcliff became tormentor of Hindley’s son, Cathy’s daughter (whose birth brought her mother’s life to an end) and even his own son, Linton, who is a pale, carping shadow of Edgar. Taking revenge upon the Lintons for taking Cathy, Heathcliff deceives Isabella into thinking that he loves her. Once married, he brings her to the Heights, debases and terrorizes her. Hindley, now a hopeless alcoholic after the premature death of his wife, Frances, is equally baited and tortured. Maddened by events he has no control over, Heathcliff becomes and exists in the nightmare from which there is no waking.

Although Cathy dies in the middle of the book, her presence is still as vivid as when she drew breath. Heathcliff’s impassioned cry for her to haunt him becomes, for him, a reality. After Edgar dies, he tells Nelly, “I'll tell you what I did yesterday I got the sexton, who was digging Linton's grave, to remove the earth off her coffin lid, and I opened it. I thought, once, I would have stayed there: when I saw her face again - it is hers yet - he had hard work to stir me; but he said it would change if the air blew on it, and so I struck one side of the coffin loose, and covered it up: not Linton's side, damn him I wish he'd been soldered in lead. And I bribed the sexton to pull it away when I'm laid there, and slide mine out too; I'll have it made so: and then by the time Linton gets to us he'll not know which is which.”

Nelly is scandalized by his words and asks if he was not ashamed to disturb the dead to which Heathcliff replies,
“I disturbed nobody, Nelly,” he replied; “and I gave some ease to myself. I shall be a great deal more comfortable now; and you'll have a better chance of keeping me underground, when I get there. Disturbed her? No she has disturbed me, night and day, through eighteen years - incessantly - remorselessly - till yesternight; and yesternight I was tranquil. I dreamt I was sleeping the last sleep by that sleeper, with my heart stopped and my cheek frozen against hers.”

Wuthering Heights is more than mere words on a page. It is a mind set, an experience that stays with the reader long after the last page is read. For some, it lingers forever. The story of the gypsy boy and the headstrong daughter of a country squire running free on the windswept moors can mesmerize and capture the imagination of those readers who actually get it. When Wuthering Heights speaks to you and claims you for its own, consider yourself taken for the rest of your life.