Kathleen's Reviews > Wuthering Heights

I don’t love this book for its perfection, for the way it meets expectations, for playing by the rules. I love it for the opposite of those things, and I love it with the kind of passion I imagine Emily felt for things she loved: personal, indefensible, aesthetic, undaunting.

The only easy-to-explain reason I have for loving it is the structure, the multiple narrators that don’t allow you to forget you’re being told a story. While the wind blows through the heather, settle in and listen to a tale unlike any you’ve ever heard …

“There was no sound through the house but the moaning wind, which shook the windows every now and then, the faint crackling of the coals, and the click of my snuffers as I removed at intervals the long wick of the candle.”

It seems this is a book written by a young woman exposed to very little except a family of diverse characters, the early death of loved ones, the harsh conditions of the Yorkshire moors, and a whole lot of moralizing from religion and social expectations. All of that comes across in her story.

Looking out on the landscape around her, I imagine Emily, intimately in touch with her surroundings, tried to make sense of it all. Why is the winter so bitter and deadly? Why does the heather grow so strong in the sunshine? To better understand, she turns them into characters: Heathcliff is the storm, Cathy the heather. Perhaps each day brings the possibility of danger because of a deep and enduring love between the two forces, a love gone wrong. Perhaps this provides some explanation to Emily, for the wild nature in which she lives, the restrictions on her existence, and the anguish that love has brought to her short life.

There are so many ways to read this novel:
1. It’s about Heathcliff, that evil monster, and all the destruction that can be caused by one bad dude.
2. It’s about Heathcliff that poor orphan boy, dreadfully abused as a child.
3. It’s about the powerful, timeless love between Heathcliff and Cathy.
4. It’s feminist. All the men are either evil or stupid or weak. The women have strong natures, a moral compass, and fight hard for what is right.
5. It’s an anti-romance novel. There is a marriage early on, but the reader doesn’t hear any wedding bells. It’s skipped right over in the text, as if that didn’t matter to Emily. Marriages are just means to an end. “Blessed events” are treated similarly, often leading to death.
6. It’s about the dangers of a patriarchal society. Emily shows how easily society’s propriety and the laws of primogeniture can be used for evil.
7. It’s a mystical novel, showing lives that reflect the natural world that contains both sunshine and shadow, that maintains life and destroys it, that provides both beauty and destruction, and beings that live on beyond death in a world we neither see nor understand.

For me it’s a combination of all of these, and more.

And to those who say this is no love story, I beg to differ. It’s a love story alright, just not the kind we have learned to expect, which provides my favorite literary twist. In Wuthering Heights, going for the happily-ever-after is a deal with the devil. It sets in motion all manner of horrible things, including death and destruction. EM Forster says “Only connect.” This story is about a connection, a connection discarded for want of happily-ever-after. But a true connection cannot so easily be undone, as the story proves.

“If he loved her with all the powers of his puny being, he couldn’t love as much in eighty years as I could in a day. And Catherine has a heart as deep as I have: the sea could be as readily contained in that horse-trough as her whole affection be monopolized by him.”

Aristotle said, “There is no great genius without some touch of madness.” This book is a celebration of Emily’s madness, and her genius.

I think the reason I’ll keep returning to this book is the depth and complexity of feeling it contains. I expect to re-read it many more times, and expect each read to bring a different connection to it, a different sympathy, and a reminder to embrace the wildness and danger that living brings.