Wuthering Heights

Anyone who hasn't read it--should.

Cold, vast expanses of moor, close quartered, coal choked kitchens and the inevitable sick bed are the scenes of action in one of my favorites, published in 1847. The narrator, the elderly Ellen Dean, describes this gothic setting in words of creamy comfort, telling this excellent story in the warm confines of a storm battered home.

Ellen, our attentive heroine, was once a servant of the Earnshaws, a wealthy family in the Yorkshire Dales. They adopt Heathcliff, a ragged, Romani orphan. A tiresome family tree is needed to outline the grisly tale the plays out between the Heights clan: Heathcliff and his Earnshaw brother and sister, and the neighboring Lintons who live at the more picturesque Thrushcross Grange. I won't go into detail how the families intermarry and feud to avoid spoiling everything, but will only say much of the trouble hangs on the love affair between Healthcliff and his adopted sister Catherine, and its destructive spillover into everyone else's lives. You have to cheer for him, as he slogs through life--half villain, half romantic--harboring a sacred flame that burns through the boundaries that separate the living from the buried. His demonic sarcasm and dark soliloquies are irresistible. His observed emotion roiling and volcanic.

Deep, gratifying analysis beyond the family drama can no doubt be had in a good English class. One line of thinking I found compelling was a sprawling gender allegory (dated to be sure) between the two houses, the two families, and even in the land itself. The Heights, built on the windy open of the moors, produces the aggressively passionate Earnshaws, hardened by beatings and lack of education. They lust and prey upon the Lintons—who reside on the fertile, green land of the Grange, are decidedly softer, more prone to illness, and seem to prefer chaster love. Published in the same year as Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, the Victorian public was expecting another Bildungsroman with a tidy ending. They instead were shocked at the characters’ selfishness, voraciousness, and comparative sexual barbarism (found on a cool abstract below), guessing Wuthering Heights was actually written by a man.

For a very young Emily Brontë, herself cloistered on the moors for pretty much the whole of her short life (she died at 30 of TB, a year after Wuthering Heights was published), it’s impressive that this work is so ably told and with such suggestive, hot abandon.

Even you think it’s not for you, give it a try.

Nineteenth-Century Literature (2015) 70 (2): 165–193. https://doi.org/10.1525/ncl.2015.70.2.165