Riot’s Classic Literature Review: Wuthering Heights
Apologies for being late on this one, it was my birthday weekend.
As I have progressed through this endeavor, I’ve noticed just how much presuppositions and maybe word of mouth affected previous decisions to not pick up these books. Also, now being removed from higher education, I realize its powerful influence in ensuring that people actually read them. It’s amazing to think about how many powerful pieces of literature I have now been exposed to merely because the classes I took enforced that behavior. I can certainly guarantee, had I been walking around a bookstore, there is little chance I would have picked up a book like Wuthering Heights on my own volition. So what were some of the assumptions I had going into Emily Bronte’s 1847 novel? Being perfectly honest, I thought it was a love story, something similar to works like Pride and Prejudice or Jane Eyre (both of which are on my list of novels to cover, so I wonder if more of my assumptions will be shattered soon). What I found instead was a gothic-style tragedy/revenge story that danced between fits of rapid page turning events and stretches of tedious details. Sure it was about a love story, but that certainly wasn’t the message behind it. My initial message here being: don’t make my mistake, don’t avoid reading a book because you think you know what it’s about.
I will defer the task of doing a synopsis for the sake of evaluating some of the deeper themes and meanings behind Bronte’s work. I recommend either this site or this one for a quick, one page synopsis that will help enlighten some of the things I’ll be talking about. Let’s check out some of the themes that popped out to me:
Love? Or Revenge?: As stated before, there is no doubt that the events of Wuthering Heights are centered around a love story, but much like the “love” story I covered in a previous movie review, the sheer toxicity of the relationships being covered make me loathe to call it “love.” It can be argued that the final relationship between Cathy and Hareton can be considered actual love, but I will cover that in a later theme. My argument against labeling the toxic relationship of Heathcliff and Catherine as a love story is that their actions for nearly the entire book have little to do with love. I have read reviews stating that religion is a big theme (I didn’t find this to really be true) but if you take it at its value, the actions of Heathcliff and Catherine contradict literally everything that the Bible says love is. Heathcliff, trying to excuse what a terrible person he is by calling it love, dives headfirst into obtaining vengeance over some trivial wronging enacted on him by both Catherine and Hindley. He is quite literally consumed by it, attempting to usher in the demise of two families because he was rejected by the woman he loved. I think that Bronte takes the reader down this journey to show just how empty a goal revenge is. By the end of the book, Heathcliff, no longer having anything left to live for, simply dies. Throughout the book there are some implications that ghosts exist in the world that Bronte built and one could argue that the haunting smile that Heathcliff is portrayed as having on his deathbed is legitimate happiness for finally being able to join his beloved Catherine in the afterlife. But that would impress on the reader that this monstrous character is given a happy ending of sorts, one that he simply doesn’t deserve. Heathcliff, from nearly the start to the finish, is portrayed as a miserable soul and is described on more than one occasion of being more monster than man. His immoral bent reminds me a lot of Frankenstein’s monster, in fact, I think it would be easy to argue that Shelly’s influence is heavily shown throughout Bronte’s book. At least Frankenstein’s monster had legitimacy to his vengeful attitude though. Revenge as a theme therefore trumps love.
The Indifference of Good Men: This line, pulled from a favorite movie of mine (The Boondock Saints) is something I saw most exemplified in the story’s main narrator, Nelly Dean. I should preface this argument by saying that there is a major element of class and social order that complicates this character’s involvement in the events of the story. Since she is a servant, she is obligated to obey instructions from those in higher status than her. But, there are a number of incidents where her interference could have saved both families from the disasters brought on by Heathcliff, namely a moment later in the story where she facilitates getting herself and Cathy captured and held prisoner at Wuthering Heights. By her narration, nobody around has any doubts about Heathcliff’s nature or about what he is capable of. Yet the whole lot of them are constantly being “outsmarted” by his vicious schemes. This is not a “hindsight is 20/20” argument either, as Nelly is often portrayed as acknowledging the impending dangers or intentionally withholding information from other parties that could have prevented disaster. At the end of the day, I think there is a message imbedded here that openly states “if you see a problem, speak up!” Sometimes the inaction of the good/honest truly is the greater of evils.
Raise Your Children Right: Admittedly, this is something more gleaned from my own opinion than likely what Bronte was trying to portray but I think it is applicable to this story. The adults of the book all end up being consumed by their own evils, which unfortunately takes its toll on the subsequent generation. The first generation depicted finds the Earnshaw’s showing excessive favoritism to an adopted child instead of their firstborn, sewing seeds of resentment in Hindley as well as arrogance and pride in an undeserving Heathcliff. Not long after, the script flips and Heathcliff is reduced to a servant, cementing his irrational beliefs of being wronged. Once Hindley’s wife passes away, he devolves into a drunkard and gambler, allowing his son Hareton to become uneducated, rude, and slightly savage in his behavior. On the Linton side, Catherine’s mental and emotional deterioration ensures that she dies young, leaving her daughter motherless and completely dependent on a father that’s already meek by nature but is also emotionally crippled by the loss of his wife. His involvement in his daughter’s life is much more shallow than it should be, opening the door for Heathcliff to use her in his revenge plot. His inaction can be tied to my earlier theme, but to me, both houses end up making the case of how important it is to build up children and future generations so that they are prepared to combat the natural malevolence of not only the world but the people directly around them as well. Responsible adults, hopefully in control of their own emotions by the time they are child-rearing, need to ensure the next generation is effectively educated on the dangers of out-of-control emotions.
Human Malevolence: This is a theme that I didn’t see a whole lot of coverage on in other reviews. While revenge is the driving force behind Heathcliff’s actions, I think that humanity’s “nature” or even natural bend toward malevolence becomes a major theme of the novel. Heathcliff is obviously the biggest exemplification of this, sparing nothing in his attempts to ruin not only the Linton’s legacy but that of his adoptive family’s as well. I liken it to the boulder at the crest of a hill analogy, once you tip it over the edge, it rolls unstoppably down. Many of the other characters are shown as being easily influenced into speaking/acting terribly to each other as well. For many of the other characters, succumbing to their own pride or even societal pressures helps pave the way for Heathcliff’s evil nature to manipulate all of their lives. To be sure, it is hard to find any redeeming characters in this story, that is how depraved most of them are. The whole lot of them are emotionally unstable, flighty, and dripping with arrogance. Nelly Dean, arguably the most good-natured of the entire lot as stated before, tarnishes herself by not acting according to what she believes to be the right decision.
Hope For The Future: This isn’t a pervasive theme per se, but I think that the ending lends to this message. Cathy and Hareton, put through hell by people who were supposed to take care of them, prove resilient in the face of tragedy. They are shown, however briefly, trying to better each other, plan for the future, and love each other with openness and honesty. Since Cathy was shown actively shaming/hating Hareton on previous occasions, the reader is let in on the idea that attitudes can change when there is an active decision involved. The young couple consciously decides to be different, refusing to yield to the misery that their previous generation actively succumbed to. Though it takes time, they make the choice not to be victims allowing hope to make drastic changes to their future.
Wrap-Up: While time management proved to be a legitimate factor in my finishing of the 166 page version of this novel, I don’t think it should have taken nearly as long as it did. I would venture, for a person working full-time, it would take less than a week to finish. Bronte’s writing is very poetic in nature and spends a solid amount of time giving crisp, visual details about the setting of Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange. The extensive dialogues in the story do become tedious at times, merely for the fact that Bronte’s attention to detail is much more extensive than many other authors I’ve read. A personal hang-up of mine for the book is the drastic difference in grammatical rules that I was educated with compared to what Bronte wrote. Because of this, there were a number of times I got lost in tracking who was speaking, whether or not it was current events or past, and it made the transitions between regular scene descriptions and dialogue a bit murky. For a gothic literature piece, the ending is a bit blasé/uneventful, but I didn’t necessarily think it took anything away from the book itself. Everything leading up to the final chapter makes the reader think there is going to be a dramatic ending, so in that sense it was a little disappointing. But Bronte’s writing, along with the depth of characters and their development, is definitely worth the time spent reading. I think my only real complaint is a complicated one. When writing the dialogue from the resident servant Joseph, Bronte chose to write as he phonetically speaks. Now this is something I have done in my own writing so I feel a little hypocritical bringing this up, but the extent to which Bronte uses it for Joseph was so excessive that it was nearly unreadable. Being that Joseph’s influence in the events of the story is fairly minimal, I found myself skipping his lines in their entirety instead of inducing a headache attempting to clarify what he was trying to say. Racial insensitivity aside (the book was written in the 1800’s after all) I would have rather just known exactly what he was saying. The other characters had no trouble understanding him, but that doesn’t help us readers. Either way, this minor grievance took little away from the rest of the story.
Riot’s Rating: 9/10: Wuthering Heights is a smart, beautifully written book that I think most people would enjoy. It shattered my assumptions as well as expectations and provided a dark, yet honest look into the human psyche.
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