Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (1847; this edition Penguin Classics 2014)
If such a novel were to come to me today, I’d critique it quite heavily.
The society portrayed is so antiquated as to be almost incomprehensible to the modern reader. I found myself wondering, ‘Are Cathy and Heathcliff ghosts? Are they servants?’ ‘Are we talking about Catherine the mother or Cathy the daughter?’ I constantly lost track of who is living at the Heights and who at the Grange. I had to go to Wikipedia before I got the characters straight. It’s way too long; I had to skip the last 10 or so chapters.
The twisted love affairs and ingrained resentments are revealed in a flashback through the voice of servant Nelly Dean’s filling in the new tenant Mr Lockwood on the family’s backhistory. The dark backstory goes on for most of the entire novel without so much as a breather to put a new log on the fire. In Chapter 13 the narrator POV shifts to Isabella, presumably a letter to Nelly Dean, with long passages unclear as to who is the ‘I’ referred to, and Mr Lockwood is only brought back into the story at the end of Chapter 14, leaving us to wonder ‘are we still in the backstory, or in present time?’. Structurally, it’s a mess, 2 out of 10 at best.
However, I give it 10 out of 10 for mood and atmosphere. You can just hear the whistling wind of the desolate Yorkshire moors. It’s the most Victorian and most Gothic novel ever, complete with grave-robbing, ghosts seen in mirrors, haunted rooms in dark decaying manor houses with portraits of ancestors on the wall, crumbling gravestones covered in ivy, mothers languishing and dying of consumption or childbed, people lost on the moors at night in the rain and women left deceived and abandoned with child.
And 10 out of 10 for character development; the characters are deeply intricate. The dialect-talk of the servant Joseph is almost entirely incomprehensible to me, but it is believed to be accurate for a Yorkshire dialect of the time, so, this work is also of anthropological value.
Cathy is an entitled Little Madam, what we nowadays would call a Histrionic Narcissist, believing ‘though everybody hated and despised each other, they could not avoid loving me’; Heathcliff is a Malignant Narcissist. ‘The more the worms (his family) writhe, the more [he] wants to crush out their entrails’. Together they form a folie à deux, ruining everyone in their wake.
From adopted child spoiled by the old master of Wuthering Heights, Mr Earnshaw, Heathcliff grows up resented by his brother Hindley, who marries Frances. Of the children at Thrushcross Grange, Edgar despises Heathcliff. Cathy loves him, though she marries Edgar, because Heathcliff is ‘so low’. Heathcliff loves Cathy, but he marries Isabella, just to spite everyone. These unions have children, and much vengeance is enacted.
A recurring theme of storm and calm after a storm is a powerful metaphor for the battling civilised and wild sides of Man’s nature, and the bleak beauties of the Yorkshire moors are a perfect setting for it. Cathy, in her anguish, is desperate to open the window and feel on her face the wild wind of the moors, where she once roamed free with Heathcliff.
At the time it was published, it made quite a stir, for its portrayal of cruelty and challenges to classist assumptions. It was criticised for ‘vulgar depravity and unnatural horrors’. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who loved the book, called it ‘an incredible monster’.
What a contrast to Jane Austen, where intricate emotions have to be delicately winkled out, imbedded in elegant, wordy conventions of social politeness. Here, all the beastliness of Man’s nature (and mind you, there’s no sex) is exposed on the surface like festering wounds.
In that sense, it reminds me of the 1975 film ‘Mandingo’ about the depravities of slavery, which upset me so much that I vomited after leaving the cinema, and since that day I refuse to watch any film, documentary or read any book about slavery unless I am promised some kind of happy ending.
I had to force myself to read it, but I’m glad I did. This is not a love story; as Cathy dies Heathcliff curses her soul to ‘live in torment’. Yet it’s one we will never forget. A dark masterpiece with no happy ending, may induce vomiting.
Susie Helme 