wuthering heights: classical reality t.v
- paigenherbooks
- Jan 23, 2024
- 7 min read
5/5
I have tried reading Wuthering Heights at least two times in my life. The first was solely due to the fact that it was Bella Swan’s favorite novel and I truly believed that I was the living y/n of her character, but my 13 year old brain was shut off by the third page. The second time I tried was a little later, when I was trying to cross it off my list, and I again failed. Now, I came to her as a 23 year old, while seemingly internally having a lot of turmoil and found comfort within her pages.
Why?
Because everyone in this book is actually so unlikeable and their lives so caught up in misery that it made me feel quite a bit better about mine. I called my mother and told her I was reading Wuthering Heights and she said “oh lord”. That being said, I’m thoroughly disappointed in my self for not reading her sooner, but I think the universe kept her for me at this moment. I loved this book, once the story started going I was sucked in, I couldn’t get enough. It was as if I was watching reality television sat in the early 1800’s and it was glorious. Emily Bronte has such a way with words, descriptions, and dialogue, that Wuthering Heights has climbed up my classical ladder and is wholly deserving of her 5/5.
Synopsis: Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë is a gothic novel that follows the antihero, Heathcliff, as he gets revenge the people who kept him away from his love, Cathy Earnshaw. After over a decade, he finally succeeds in his revenge and gains: Thrushcross Grange, the family home of Cathy's husband.
Wuthering Heights is not for the faint of heart but if you find yourself itching for a damn good novel, with the atmospheric feeling of a time long forgotten, enemies to lovers, and obsession so pure even death can’t part it, than you’ll find everything you want and more within these pages.
Bronte does such a vivid job of making every single character in this novel totally unlikable, if not for the full duration of the story, for a least large parts. You’re reading this story about Heathcliff and Catherine, combined with the nanny and narrator, Mrs. Dean and the other woefully unlikable cast, and you’re following them as they go about in their misery.
I loved it.
Our main character is in the novel for about 0.5 seconds, as he simply meets Mr. Heathcliff and then is told the lore by Mrs. Dean, who is recalling this story in great detail twenty years later. I am eating it up off of a silver spoon. The essence of this story being told from an “outside” source of Mrs. Dean but being very detailed in the lives of Heathcliff & Catherine, is something that is so nuanced to me.
A lot of people say that they didn’t like this way of the story, saying it gives it an “unauthentic tale” or is unreliable, and to that I say “yes exactly”. That’s the whole point and why this story is so intriguing. You as the reader are only getting to know Heathcliff and the senior Catherine Earnshaw through someone else's perspective, someone who has their own prejudices, thoughts, feelings, and holes in their memory.
This is genius.
Wuthering Heights, at it’s core is a story about yearning, want, and things being just out of reach, to a point of madness, as is reading this novel! You as the reader are getting this tale, this beautifully haunting tale, but from an outside perspective, the “real” story is just out of reach, and you’ll never get it because Heathcliff and Cathy are not the narrators and I adore that they aren’t. Emily Bronte has crafted a story that is just as haunting as it is thematically deep. Just like Heathcliff and Cathy you don’t ever get to reach fully what you want. Instead you must be satisfied and satiated with the story that you are being told from the perspective of Mrs. Dean. Who actually knows how they were feeling or what was going on? She’s a vaguely unreliable narrator but this is the closest you’re going to get to the story so you sit down and you listen. Page after page, enthralled. It gives the book a sense of yearning that is so deep and painful that you can’t help but feel it, just the same as the characters.
Emily Bronte woke up one day and decided to write the most savagely and controversial story known at the time, or at least I like to think she did. In her story her women are fierce, they feel and aren’t quiet and docile. Both Catherine senior and little Cathy are both firecrackers, feeling no hesitation in speaking up and out and saying exactly how they feel, to both men and women alike. This was obviously very “taboo” for the time, not to mention deeper than what’s on the page, as Emily Bronte herself was described as being painfully shy to the extent of not even speaking. She must have been keeping those insults such as “insolent slut” to herself and then poured them into her novel.
Which brings me to the dialogue, this book had me laughing at loud. The way that Emily Bronte crafts these insults or just scenes packed with such a fierce and sharpness to the words, it comes off as the classical rendition of the Kardashian sister bickering, and it’s quite frankly, hilarious. The moments of passion and dramatics between all of the characters is something that I found highly amusing and a contrast to the dull lives that they were living. The use of the word “saucy” or “sauciness” in reference to people being sassy was a top ten moment in literature for me.
It’s obvious that you can’t read and review Wuthering Heights without talking about the infamous romance between Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw. It was deep, it was painful, full of passion and obsession, one that extended the grave. It’s important to acknowledge that this love is dark, and pulsating, one that wraps you in it’s arms and squeezes so tight that you can barely breath, and it enjoys that. This romance between them was overcast skies and passion that throw dramatics into the air like confetti.
They are awful people with awful love.
Though it’s one I myself became obsessed with.
The way in which Emily Bronte pours the yearning and desire as well as love and hate into her words, makes it impossible for the reader, as much as I truly detested the cruelty of both characters, to not keep reading. The quotes that can come out of this novel in relation to them are deep and soul piercing, they speak of a love that is almost painful, one that wasn’t chosen but was thrust upon them in an act of fate.
Even after death, Heathcliff holds strong to his girl, to his love, even going as far as insinuating necrophilia (Wuthering Heights walked so Saltburn could run).
This obsessive love destroys everything though, and that’s where this story, for being branded a “romance” gets interesting. We see throughout the story these two “lovers”, these two people drawn to eachother, their souls are one in the same, and when they are parted, they make it everyone elses problem. Heathcliff lets his grief and agony destroy the lives of everyone around him. He becomes cruel and unkept, he becomes violent and outrageous, because that is how he feels without his Catherine. That life is a punishment and therefore he must inflict this punishment onto everyone else, he refuses to be alone in his agony. While this may have a hint of romanticism, it’s depressing and saddening.
This man lets love destroy him.
Maybe Emily Bronte wrote this story like this in indication that she herself had never wanted to experience romantic love, and this was her interpretation of it. That if you let love in like that, it could destroy you and if you loved someone deeply, how could it not? Or maybe it was a warning, to showcase that misery loves company and those who are deserving of each other can only make each other better or worse.
Or maybe Emily Bronte just wanted to write a book where everyone is absolutely awful but damn do they have some good one liners.
The last thing I want to touch on in this novel concerns Heathcliff again, and his appearance, his being a “gypsy” boy. Looking past everything else and secluding it down to Heathcliff and the way he was treated for looking different, particularly not white, was very present within the novel. We see Heathcliff be continuously treated, quite frankly, like shit because of how he looks and how he is.
Dark, bad, unworthy, dirty.
All words to describe him from a very young age. Yet everyone in this story is surprised that he has manners at times and at others is an awful beast, as if they didn’t raise him thinking that is exactly what he is.
A beast in the eyes of the white men and women who stare at him, watching and waiting for him to mess up, to showcase his “blackened soul”.
I appreciated that Bronte kept him vile, even while being in love with Cathy, that he was only ever kind to her and those who were kind to him, and had no issue turning his back on those that didn’t deserve it. While he was vicious, and vile, angry, and abusive at times, he was all acting out due to his treatment. After Catherine dies he has no one. No one that see’s him as a person and not a monster, no one to look into his dark eyes and not see trash. I too would probably become a menace to society for the rest of my existence. The way that Bronte unapologetically lets Heathcliff reign terror on everyone around him, in inspiring.
He’s doing it for love, he’s doing it for justice, he’s doing it for people’s rights, and he’s doing it because they deserve it.
Wuthering Heights was masterful, it was funny, dark, and ferocious something that will stay with me for a very long time and a story I’m sure I will return to on a dark, rainy afternoon. A story of love, loss, obsession, justice, anger, and the concept of feeling everything, really feeling everything, all the time.
As an empath, I relate.
xoxo,
paige
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