Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë (1847)

An otherworldliness of atmosphere pervades the text, this is perhaps the purest piece of gothic literature I have read, it seizes at the heart of the gothic most completely, so much so that rather than being written by the hand of man or woman, Wuthering Heights reads like like a tale being pulled out of the soul of a ghost, a ghost of the moors. Both the isolation of the setting and the utter desolation of the heart of all the main characters, and how genuinely dark some of the imagery is, especially for the time and the place its coming from, easily places it as one of my new favourite British 19th century novels.

As I’m sure there are hundreds, if not thousands, of interpretations concerning what exactly is Heathcliff “the little dark thing, harboured by a good man to his bane”. For me he is the evil that evil begets, an all-consuming spite against a cruel humanity, and once his spite is spent, and his revenge upon the race of man complete he is gone. Heathcliff’s death, and the reasons for it, is for me probably the most strange part of the entire novel. Seems in an almost epiphanised state, in his last days he is slowly ascending, but to hell rather than heaven.

And yet how much of the reality of such an evil being can we even believe, as here its not just the active characters manipulating each other, not even the narration is to be trusted, Mr. Lockwood is a puffed-up fool who believes himself some kind of Byronic hero come to save the day and Nelly, while yes she presents herself as maternal and caring, why wouldn’t she? There’s no-one to challenge the story she tells Lockwood, and so there’s no way to tell exactly what she embellishes, omits and distorts in her favour. Not only that, but its not uncommon in books with unreliable narration for pieces of the actual truth to be implanted in scenes where the exact opposite is assumed to be found, like for example, during Catherine’s semi-conscious ravings as she is on the verge of death, “Nelly had played traitor. Nelly is my hidden enemy”. Maybe she was more right than she knew.

One of the things I picked up on is the evolution of character through the generations. While the first generation, that of Mr Earnshaw and Joseph, are very one dimensional and can be quite easily defined by a single thing, such as Joseph with his cruel and twisted Christianity, the second generation, Heathcliff, Catherine, Hindley etc. show a growth, mainly in the growth of their passions, passions often taken to the absolute extreme, and often ending in misery and ruin.
It is only the third, that of Cathy and Hareton, which are able to move past this violence of emotion and truly grow into people capable of a love which raises up and builds everything around it, rather than the previous kind of passion we have seen, a love, if you would even call it that, maybe obsession is a better term, only capable of destruction.

The atmosphere of Wuthering Heights is really something rare, its more than something you can see, understand or imagine. I’d say feel, but I don’t think that’s the correct word either. The energy which the book contains is at all times being thrust upon you, this for me is why so many people dislike this book as so much of it is so hateful and spiteful that they themselves in turn begin feeling the same towards it. Not me luckily, I’m comfortable with saying its my book of the year so far, and Emily Brontë’s death only a year after this was published, at the age of just 30, has got to be one of the greatest losses in all of English literature.

4.5/5

by marqueemoonchild