Wuthering Heights

Sometimes you read a classic and you have to wonder, what is all the fuss about? I felt that way with Wuthering Heights, a Gothic romance by Emily Bronte, her only published novel, which was published in 1847.

The novel tells the story of two families, the Earnshaws and the Lintons, and the orphaned boy who grows up to destroy both of them. He is Heathcliff, a child found on the streets of Liverpool by Mr. Earnshaw. He brings him back to his home, Wuthering Heights, and is resented by Earnshaw's son, Hindley. But the other child of the family, Catherine, becomes his constant childhood companion.

Though Catherine and Heathcliff are in love, she chooses to marry Edgar Linton, who lives at the nearby Thrushcross Grange, because Heathcliff lacks the proper standing in society. This drives Heathcliff away, but he returns months later much richer. Catherine has died, though, and he marries Edgar's sister, Isabella, to get revenge.

That's basically the first half of the book, and the part that is covered in most adaptations. It goes on, though, with Heathcliff trying to arrange the marriage of his weak son, Linton, to Catherine's daughter, also named Catherine.

The problem I had with the book is the structure. It is told from the point of view of a maid, Nelly Dean, who is telling the story to a Mr. Lockwood, years after the fact. Lockwood is renting Thrushcross Grange, and has stopped by a snowy evening to meet his landlord, Heathcliff, who is an irritable old man living with a teen-aged girl who he eventually learns is his daughter-in-law. While staying the night he reads from the original Catherine's diary and thinks he sees her ghost.

So the story is narrated by Lockwood, who hears Nelly's story. At times Nelly is telling the story of another character, such as Isabella's misery at being married to Heathcliff. This remove puts everything at arm's length, and many events, mostly the deaths of major characters, happens off page.

Also, the characters don't seem well-formed. Heathcliff is at times a mustache-twirling villain. "Then he drew his hand over his eyes, stood a moment to collect himself apparently, and turning anew to Catherine, said, with assumed calmness--'You must learn to avoid putting me in a passion, or I shall really murder you some time!'"

Of course the book has highly charged romantic language, such as hen Heathcliff compares his love to Edgar's: "If he loved with all the powers of his puny being, he couldn't love as much in eighty years as I could in a day. And Catherine has a heart as deep as I have: the sea could be readily contained in that horse-trough as her whole affection be monopolised by him. Tush! He is scarcely a degree dearer to her than her dog, or her horse. It is not in him to be loved like me: how can she love in him what he has not?"

But because Heathcliff is such a brute, I could never sympathize with him. He's like the mean old man next door who won't give you your ball back. This made the novel a chore to get through for me.

Wuthering Heights has been made into many films, most notably the one with Laurence Olivier in 1939. I have seen none of them. There is another coming this fall, directed by Andrea Arnold. I'll be interested to see if dramatization can put some zip into this otherwise sluggish material.