Goodreads | Wuthering Heights

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Kerstin rated it:

08/21/08

Read in August, 2008

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

There is no doubt that Emily Brontë's masterpiece and her only novel Wuthering Heights is a modern myth. And superior to Charlotte Brontë's (nonetheless, excellent) period piece Jane Eyre. The ingenious mind of the latter's younger sister recognized, consciously or subconsciously, the archetypal structures of myth and the timeless forms of its characters and made them act on behalf of her own ferocious imagination. But those expecting to take a nice stroll down a comfortable lite...more There is no doubt that Emily Brontë's masterpiece and her only novel Wuthering Heights is a modern myth. And superior to Charlotte Brontë's (nonetheless, excellent) period piece Jane Eyre. The ingenious mind of the latter's younger sister recognized, consciously or subconsciously, the archetypal structures of myth and the timeless forms of its characters and made them act on behalf of her own ferocious imagination. But those expecting to take a nice stroll down a comfortable literary landscape amidst a bunch of likeable, easily understandable characters, do not need to bother with this one. Because nothing about Wuthering Heights is easy. It is a complex and uncompromising, almost morbid study of the dark side of human nature.

The dissection is done through several characters - ambiguity and immorality isn't attributed to the protagonist only, even if he towers above everyone else. Despite of that, the book itself does not lack a moral center, which is personified by the narrative voice of the housekeeper Nelly Dean and to an extent by her co-narrator Mr. Lockwood. They are the two people who, no matter how affected by what they see or have to live with, never once lose their way.

The first volume of the novel follows the growth and transformation of Catherine Earnshaw and the second volume that of her daughter, but on the whole it is an observation of the character of Heathcliff. He remains an enigma, from the day he is brought to live with the Earnshaws - a little gipsy kid - to the day he dies, in circumstances also unexplained, leaving us to speculate whether he might have been coaxed into it by the phantom of Catherine herself. Heathcliff embodies the so called literary Byronic hero - basically a variation of an anti-hero defined as a brooding and tormented semi-romantic male and often described as clad in black and having dark eyes or hair. Generally, he expresses a hateful attitude towards the world and himself and is dominated by obsessive love for one woman. In classic fiction we need look no further than the figures of Dracula or Rochester; the more modern version of this archetype can be found in J.K. Rowling's Severus Snape - a creation of another British female author. Heathcliff's major personality flaw is common - pride, and his thirst for revenge Shakespearean. Though oddly stoic (when you think at it, psychologically he doesn't really change much during the course of the book), his presence is so powerful that it grips us like a vice and doesn't let go. A wide range of emotions is aroused - hope, sadness, pity, fear, terror, frustration, anger... even secret admiration and attraction, for he is a handsome, strong-willed and intelligent man. Unfortunately he is too far gone to be saved.

Catherine is a passionate and selfish woman suffering from severe bipolar tendencies. Her anxieties - partly self-imposed, partly caused by her mental disorder - reflect the poetic duality of her nature. There's the wildness that corresponds to her fundamental love for Heathcliff and on the other hand a greedy desire for a life of a higher standard than what she is provided with at the residence of Wuthering Heights. The collision of these two forces inside of her renders her existence unbearable for her. Whilst maybe less memorable than, for example, Margaret Mitchell's Scarlett O'Hara, Cathy is a tragic heroine of her own right. A sort of a beastess, always craving and hardly ever satisfied. Looking at the bigger picture, the flesh-and-blood being seems to dissolve into something abstract and ethereal... like a fragment of Heathcliff's soul, violently ripped from him. The creepy inhuman quality that she has makes us ask the question: was she alive at all? Or did she just convince them, and us, that she was real...

For me, the third most fascinating and perplexing character might be Heathcliff's and Isabella's son Linton. An androgynous, relentlessly moody and lethargic boy, whom cruel fate robbed of any chance for a normal life the moment his biological father decided to claim him. Would he have survived and developed into a better person, had he been able to stay at Thrushcross Grange? He serves as a romantic red herring as well, because at some point we start to believe that him and Catherine junior are meant to be.

The tale told is so heavy on dramatic irony that it feels as though we encounter it at each new turn of the events. When drunken Hindley Earnshaw drops baby Hareton from the top of the stairs, it is his sworn enemy, Heathcliff, who catches the child. Hareton is then someone Heathcliff perhaps, against his wishes, becomes fond of. Disregarding her father's efforts to secure her future at Thrushcross Grange, young Catherine Linton is drawn to her mother's old home and its inhabitants and later ends up imprisoned in there. Catherine and Hareton together stand for what her mother and Heathcliff failed to obtain. And the ultimate twist - the dirty underdog and stable boy eventually raising as the triumphant master of Wuthering Heights.

The imagery is delicious and strewn with stylistically pure elements of the horror genre, and, on occasion, motifs from Nordic folklore. We have the grim interior of the house of Wuthering Heights; people getting lost in snowstorms or drenched in rain; moonlight walks, churchyards and gravestones; ghostly pale faces and locks of hair kept in lockets. Heathcliff (bless him) can't rest before he digs out his lover's coffin, and he gets so annoyed at his legal wife, he flings a kitchen knife at her. He is compared to a wolf, a vampire, a goblin, and numerous times to the devil. The idyllic Yorkshire moors play such an important role that they resemble a living, breathing entity. To the characters the heather moors symbolize freedom, a peaceful paradise, but are simultaneously a desolate place that spurs superstitious ideas about the world of the dead.

With its dynamic and tightly wound tapestry of murky, unsettling themes, Wuthering Heights represents the pinnacle of tragic storytelling. A gothic dream that lingers to haunt you for a long-long time. (Freud and Jung would surely have heaps of fun, reading it.)

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J rated it:

05/19/08

Read in March, 2006

When one thinks of books of the past, one typically thinks that today’s novels and entertainments are far more violent and vicious. There is a tendency to think of our own generation (or the one or two immediately preceding ours) as having invented sexual perversions, brutal literature, and genre bending and mixing. No one truly believes this intently, but it is a kind of humming substratum to our lives. That previous ages were “simpler” and “more innocent” and “better” and “more...more When one thinks of books of the past, one typically thinks that today’s novels and entertainments are far more violent and vicious. There is a tendency to think of our own generation (or the one or two immediately preceding ours) as having invented sexual perversions, brutal literature, and genre bending and mixing. No one truly believes this intently, but it is a kind of humming substratum to our lives. That previous ages were “simpler” and “more innocent” and “better” and “more pure and wholesome” is not only a nostalgic commonplace, but it also one of the traditional props to conservatism. “Back when I was a kid” is a statement denoting how old you’ve become and is either followed with “things were a lot more etc.” or “we never etc.”

The first few pages of Wuthering Heights must surely disabuse of anyone of this notion of the good old days. We are introduced to Mr. Lockwood, a young man in retirement from some private sorrow, who ends up at Thrushcross Grange. Upon visiting the home of his landlord, the famed Mr. Heathcliff, he is set upon by a dog, Heathcliff abuses both him and all of his servants, Joseph, Hareton Earnshaw (who is also Heathcliff’s nephew), and his own daughter-in-law. What unfolds is a tale of madness, revenge, rage, and abuse that puts many a melodramatic serial killer novel of today to shame for the sheer vituperrious spite.

And as the book progresses, Emily Brontë shows herself no slouch in putting plain savagery and abomination on the page. Catherine, the young sister of the adopted Heathcliff, with whom he falls in love, as just a teenage girl slaps a servant, beats a small baby, then turns on her cousin Edgar Linton and boxes his ear. Her older brother, Hindley, gets drunk and attacks everyone, plays with his rifle, abuses his child, and tries to shove a carving knife down his servant’s throat. Isabelle Linton, the sister of Edgar (and Heathcliff’s later wife), on being held by Catherine, sinks her fingernails into the woman’s arm. After her departure, Catherine tells Heathcliff that such nails would dart for his eyes; to this he promises he’d wrench them off her fingers should she even try. When a boy, Hareton throws a rock at his nurse and damns her when he first sees her after many years.

All in all, the book is a primer on the vicious circle that is revenge and hatred. One can easily imagine, while reading this book, all the characters in a circle, everyone beating the person first in front of him or her and being beaten by the one behind in turn. And so it turns, on and on. If literature of that time was generally expected to demonstrate some kind of moral, Wuthering Heights demonstrates it in the inverse.

What sets everything in motion is the maltreatment of the found orphan, Heathcliff which starts from the very beginning with everyone calling him an “it.” His ferocious revenge is, while truly awful in all senses of the word, such a profound manifestation of hatred against everything, against the entire world, himself included, that he rises (or is it sinks) to the level of supreme tragic hero. He is like a Samson destroying the temple with his own soul within it. Emily Brontë is remarkably less sympathetic to Catherine, with whom she deals rather sternly whereas Heathcliff gets the backlit, shadowy, windswept fen romanticism. She is Frankenstein, while he is Shelley’s monster, a tortured agent of vengeance.

What is amusing about this kind of novel, amusing for literally dozens of novels of the nineteenth century, is the level of suspension of disbelief the mechanics of the book require. Firstly, there is the narrator himself, Mr. Lockwood, Heathcliff’s tenant, who tells the story of being told the tale by Ellen Dean, the nurse who witnessed most events and tells it in a pastiche of letters, personal recollections, gossip told to her, and other such secondary type narrative devices. It is a story about a story about various stories. And we are to accept Ellen having such a detailed memory as well as Mr. Lockwood.

This is something we simply overlook after a certain point; that we disregard that we overlook it is rather interesting and a stirring testimonial to Emily Brontë’s skill as a novelist. That this should be her only novel is a powerful statement to its lasting fame and a melancholy fact: that such writing should be confined solely between two covers and no more. I never finish Wuthering Heights but wish there were a second Emily Brontë novel to read. Alas for the tuberculosis that ravished the family (at least three of the sisters died from it, and there is conflicting evidence that it killed the remaining sister and the only brother). That Emily had two sisters who were also novelists is scant consolation, no matter how enjoyable their novels may be. That she died at just thirty is as tragic as Keats death at twenty five. That the Oxford English Dictionary to this day doesn’t recognize and define “wuthering” is a shame in and of itself....less

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Larissa rated it:

10/30/07

Read in October, 2007

Certain novels come to you with pre-packaged expectations. They just seem to be part of literature's collective unconscious, even if they are completely outside of your own cultural referents. I, for instance, who have no particular knowledge of--or great love for--romantic, Anglo-Gothic fiction, came to Wuthering Heights with the assumption that I was picking up a melancholy ghost story of thwarted, passionate love and eternal obsession. Obsession turned out to be only accurate part of t...more Certain novels come to you with pre-packaged expectations. They just seem to be part of literature's collective unconscious, even if they are completely outside of your own cultural referents. I, for instance, who have no particular knowledge of--or great love for--romantic, Anglo-Gothic fiction, came to Wuthering Heights with the assumption that I was picking up a melancholy ghost story of thwarted, passionate love and eternal obsession. Obsession turned out to be only accurate part of this presumption.

Having an image of Heathcliff and Cathy embracing Gone with the Wind-style on a windy moor ironed in my mind, I was almost completely unprepared for the hermetic, moribund, bleak, vengeful, perverse, and yes--obsessive--novel that this really is. Don Quixote is not about windmills and Wuthering Heights is not really a love story. Heathcliff and Cathy's love affair (if it can be called that) is a narcissistic ("I am Heathcliff!" Cathy exclaims at one point), possessive, and imminently cruel relationship predicated on self-denial and an obsessiveness that relies not on passion, but rather borders on hatred. They are selfish, violent, and contriving people who have borne their fair share of abuses (mostly Heathcliff in this respect) and in turn, feel no compunction about raining similar abuses on those who they find beneath them.

Given this dynamic, it seems perhaps inevitable that these two characters would make not only themselves miserable, but everyone around them miserable--even after death. This is particularly easy to accomplish mainly because there are--with the exception of Mr. Lockwood, the tenant who rents a home from Heathcliff--no outside characters. Everyone in the novel (including the servants) is isolated, trapped between the same two homes, with the same two families, and have truly no chance of escaping any of the events and repercussions that occur.(One character makes a temporary escape, only to suffer all the more for it later.)

More important, however, is the fact that Heathcliff and Cathy don't even need be present (although they usually are in some fashion) for their influences to be felt by the other characters. The sins of the father, are literally, inherited and distributed among the next generation. The children of Wuthering Heights are not only physical doubles of their parents (At least 3 characters look like Cathy, and one resembles Heathcliff), but they are also spiritual stand-ins. They must suffer for past transgressions, and they must find a way to make amends for them. All, I might add, without the particular benefit of ever having the full story, the context that might be necessary to actually change their circumstances. Misery, it seems, is inevitable.

There is, of course, much more to be said about this novel. One could spend quite some time dissecting all the various repetitions and doublings, the narrative structure (the story is told by the housekeeper to the lodger who then writes it down as a diary entry), or the archetypal analogies and semi-biblical symbolism that seems to be implicit to every part of this story.

The point being, I suppose, that while Wuthering Heights may not be the wistful romance one (or maybe just I) expected to be, it is a particularly satisfying one for all of its dark and layered surprises. ...less

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Mike rated it:

(review of isbn 0679405437)

05/18/08

Read in May, 2008

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

It's not often that I hate a character. Sure, I've read plenty of books with all manner of villains and antagonists, but they've always been people that either had good reason for what they were doing or were simply Snidley Whiplash style evil-for-no-good-reason sorts and it's hard to really hate either brand. Heck, a lot of the time the villains are more interesting and enjoyable then the heroes. So I have to pause here and say congratulations Miss Bronte, you've managed what no one else...more It's not often that I hate a character. Sure, I've read plenty of books with all manner of villains and antagonists, but they've always been people that either had good reason for what they were doing or were simply Snidley Whiplash style evil-for-no-good-reason sorts and it's hard to really hate either brand. Heck, a lot of the time the villains are more interesting and enjoyable then the heroes. So I have to pause here and say congratulations Miss Bronte, you've managed what no one else to date has been able to accomplish. I hate Heathcliff,

He is arguably one of the stupidest, pettiest, most self-centered and spiteful characters in literature. And by stupid I don't mean unintelligent (throughout the entire book he displays, if not a book-larnin' type of smarts, at least a serious level of cunning and guile), I mean this is a man who makes a critically poor choice - his love for Catherine. Catherine manages to rival Heathcliff by being a conceited, spoiled, tantrum-throwing baby all the way through her womanhood, and therein lies the crux of the problem with this whole book. The entire plot hinges on Heathcliff and Catherine's love, and Heathcliff's revenge after her death against those he blames for keeping the two lovers apart. But Catherine is so blatantly unlikeable that I just couldn't buy into their romance, and, by extension, the rest of the novel. It would be like writing Pol Pot a love letter - no matter how pure the words and intent, the entire basis of the act is so ludicrous it would be impossible to take seriously. Every time he performs some loathsome deed it's multiplied a hundredfold when you remember the daffy bitch who's memory he's doing it for; by the end of the book you can't help but feel that the only true injustice in the story is that Heathcliff dies in his sleep instead of being torn apart by animals.

Not that I can really lay all of the character flaws at Heathcliff and Catherine's doorsteps; the dramatis personae for Wuthering Heights is a veritable buffet of loathsomeness. Cathy is almost as spoiled and conceited as her mother. Linton is spineless, manipulative, whiny little husk and clearly not a bully for the sole reason that he's too sickly to be one. You get the feeling that he's the kind of kid that would torture animals if he could, and Cathy's affections for him make as little sense as Heathcliff's love for Catherine. Hindley is spiteful, cowardly, drunken wreck, and his abuse of Heathcliff at the beginning of the book probably makes him the most responsible for every bad thing that happens in the story next to Heathcliff himself. Isabella is a brainless, starry-eyed idiot; Edgar falls in love with Catherine, marries her, and suffers the consequences despite mounds of evidence that bitch be crazy; Joseph is a raving fundamentalist. The only two characters in the entire book you can feel at all bad for are Nelly Dean, who's drug into pretty much everything bad that happens against her will, and Hareton , who's character flaws are by and large thrust on him by others and aren't his fault.

In the end, the characters torpedo the story. Although the novel is beautifully written and evocative, there's just so little to enjoy here that it's hard for me to imagine opening this book up again any time soon....less

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Peter rated it:

06/16/08

bookshelves: literature

Read in June, 2008

On a dismal, grey and squally day in June, I finally began to read Wuthering Heights. Glancing outside and feeling rather low in any case, I couldn't help but feel that here was a case of life enhancing the novel. Emily Bronte's book is so cast in stone, has so many expectations concerning it, has so much hype around it, that initially I wasn't keen to read it. What I found was not only an unashamedly romantic novel but also an unexpectedly brilliant psychological novel with depth and clarity...more On a dismal, grey and squally day in June, I finally began to read Wuthering Heights. Glancing outside and feeling rather low in any case, I couldn't help but feel that here was a case of life enhancing the novel. Emily Bronte's book is so cast in stone, has so many expectations concerning it, has so much hype around it, that initially I wasn't keen to read it. What I found was not only an unashamedly romantic novel but also an unexpectedly brilliant psychological novel with depth and clarity.

The famous central character - Heathcliff - is obviously Byronic, with his dark mane of hair, his deep set frown and his passionate cruelty. Other characters as a whole are secondary to him. Indeed, the book is really his tragedy. Often I felt overwhelmed by the cruelties heaped on top of still more cruelties and so on. Markedly similar to Dickens at times, Wuthering Heights also concerns prejudice, racism, superstition, religious narrow-mindedness, female servility and societal repression.

As a case study on child abuse, there is much fertile territory: Heathcliff's ill treatment when a child, his appalling treatment of Linton, the manner in which he also raised Hareton. I felt real tension and anguish when Linton, terrified of his master, was desperate to persuade the younger Cathy to come to Wuthering Heights.

And yet the ending was so sudden, almost as a meditative afterthought. Supernatural elements crop up in the book. It's pretty clear that the elder Cathy will haunt Heathcliff - in her mental breakdown she says as much. The early dream sequence or, rather, nightmare sequence, with the ghostly Cathy begging to be let in at her bedroom window is genuinely frightening. Real M.R.James stuff. Heathcliff's sudden alteration at the end of the novel is also genuinely unnerving. It becomes clear he can see the ghost of Cathy, even if the other characters can not.

So as I paused for a moment, made a cup of tea and looked out at the moors from my house - yes, in Yorkshire too - on an extremely dark day, I felt burdened by this novel. Emotionally, it wrapped me up in its lengthy mental breakdowns and in its utter despondency. Lighter times do exist, but they break the gloom only like sun's rays briefly piercing a pall of cloud. And this pall hungover and actually made me feel uneasy and nauseous. I had to read on.

So, the following evening I finished Wuthering Heights. I haven't enjoyed and yet been so adversely affected by a book in a long time, perhaps not since inhaling the paranoid atmosphere of Crime and Punishment.

Today I went for a walk in the valley outside and brooded on the book. I imagine there can't be many other fictional characters so utterly consumed by grief and hate as Heathcliff and I can't think of many other books where nature plays such a leading role.

A highly recommened book, I didn't want to spell out the plot to you as that's done elsewhere. Read it for Heathcliff alone. He's surely one of the most infamous of all literary creations - up there with Julien Sorel and Rashkolnikov certainly....less

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Bunxena rated it:

10/04/08

bookshelves: top-100-naqt

Read in October, 2008

recommended to Bunxena by: Top 100 NAQT list, the boyfriend
recommends it for: all literature lovers

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

This is one of those books that can seem intimidating at first, mainly because it has attained "classic" status and it was written a long time ago. However, the timid reader need not fear -- Wuthering Heights is very accessible and an excellent read.

The story has a frame narration. Lockwood is the first narrator of the novel, and he becomes a tenant of Thrushcross Grange, a house about four miles away from the titular Heights. Heathcliff is its landlord, and he is a most surly and ...more This is one of those books that can seem intimidating at first, mainly because it has attained "classic" status and it was written a long time ago. However, the timid reader need not fear -- Wuthering Heights is very accessible and an excellent read.

The story has a frame narration. Lockwood is the first narrator of the novel, and he becomes a tenant of Thrushcross Grange, a house about four miles away from the titular Heights. Heathcliff is its landlord, and he is a most surly and disagreeable man. He lives in the house with his daughter-in-law, Catherine, and her cousin, Hareton Earnshaw. The younger folk seem to live under a cloud of gloom and misery, and Lockwood is curious as to how they came to be stuck in that situation.

Fortunately, he is able to find out quickly enough. After catching cold, he is confined to bed and asks the Grange's housekeeper, Nelly Dean, to tell him the story of Heathcliff and his love, Catherine (NOT the daughter-in-law...I thought that at first and was rather perturbed. No, Heathcliff's lover Catherine was the mother of the Catherine whom Lockwood knows). She proceeds to tell him the circumstances leading up to the present day, and while she is telling it she becomes the primary narrator. Lockwood then finishes the story when he returns to Thrushcross Grange a year later.

This book is an excellent character study, in particular Heathcliff, who is consumed with a desire for revenge for most of the book. At times it seems difficult to accept his reasoning for wreaking the torment that he does -- running off with Catherine's sister-in-law, condemning Hareton to neglect, abusing his own son, harassing Cathy (the younger Catherine) despite the fact that she is rather a lot like her mother. I personally thought it was all a rather complicated way of going about revenge. As I thought to myself, if he really hates Edgar Linton so much for marrying Catherine, why not just beat the guy up or something? Perhaps steal her away instead? But I am sure that if he had done that, there would not be much of a story. The change in Heathcliff toward the end was also well done, although perhaps the gears switched a bit suddenly in him. Perhaps I missed the cues, but it did seem like a rather abrupt 180 in his attitude -- going from raging about and verbally assaulting people to walking around haunted, sleepless and starving.

All this aside, Brontë writes an excellent story. Nelly Dean's narration is well paced and is easy to follow. Lockwood himself remarks on how she "tells a fair story" or something like that. Nelly is also an observant narrator, capturing enough detail to paint a reasonable picture without going overboard. My only quibble is that I cannot imagine how she would be able to replicate Joseph's almost incomprehensible dialect so accurately, when the story took place starting around 20 years (give or take) before 1801. Of course, that's a bit of creative licence there, so perhaps I am just being picky where I do not need to be.

So to sum up, this book was excellent, although I think I'll read it again -- this time on a rainy afternoon with a cup of tea instead of in 20-minute bursts on the bus. This book deserves leisurely contemplation and reflection, and the time you invest in reading it will be well spent....less

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Jody rated it:

04/23/08

bookshelves: welcome-to-my-bookcase

Published in 1847, WUTHERING HEIGHTS was not well received by the reading public, many of whom condemned it as sordid, vulgar, and unnatural--and author Emily Bronte went to her grave in 1848 believing that her only novel was a failure. It was not until 1850, when WUTHERING HEIGHTS received a second printing with an introduction by Emily's sister Charlotte, that it attracted a wide readership. And from that point the reputation of the book has never looked back. Today it is widely recognized as ...more Published in 1847, WUTHERING HEIGHTS was not well received by the reading public, many of whom condemned it as sordid, vulgar, and unnatural--and author Emily Bronte went to her grave in 1848 believing that her only novel was a failure. It was not until 1850, when WUTHERING HEIGHTS received a second printing with an introduction by Emily's sister Charlotte, that it attracted a wide readership. And from that point the reputation of the book has never looked back. Today it is widely recognized as one of the great novels of English literature.

Even so, WUTHERING HEIGHTS continues to divide readers. It is not a pretty love story; rather, it is swirling tale of largely unlikeable people caught up in obsessive love that turns to dark madness. It is cruel, violent, dark and brooding, and many people find it extremely unpleasant. And yet--it possesses a grandeur of language and design, a sense of tremendous pity and great loss that sets it apart from virtually every other novel written.

The novel is told in the form of an extended flashback. After a visit to his strange landlord, a newcomer to the area desires to know the history of the family--which he receives from Nelly Deans, a servant who introduces us to the Earnshaw family who once resided in the house known as Wuthering Heights. It was once a cheerful place, but Old Earnshaw adopted a "Gipsy" child who he named Heathcliff. And Catherine, daughter of the house, found in him the perfect companion: wild, rude, and as proud and cruel as she. But although Catherine loves him, even recognizes him as her soulmate, she cannot lower herself to marry so far below her social station. She instead marries another, and in so doing sets in motion an obsession that will destroy them all.

WUTHERING HEIGHTS is a bit difficult to "get into;" the opening chapters are so dark in their portrait of the end result of this obsessive love that they are somewhat off-putting. But they feed into the flow of the work in a remarkable way, setting the stage for one of the most remarkable structures in all of literature, a story that circles upon itself in a series of repetitions as it plays out across two generations. Catherine and Heathcliff are equally remarkable, both vicious and cruel, and yet never able to shed their impossible love no matter how brutally one may wound the other.

As the novel coils further into alcoholism, seduction, and one of the most elaborately imagined plans of revenge it gathers into a ghostly tone: Heathcliff, driven to madness by a woman who is not there but who seems reflected in every part of his world--dragging her corpse from the grave, hearing her calling to him from the moors, escalating his brutality not for the sake of brutality but so that her memory will never fade, so that she may never leave his mind until death itself. Yes, this is madness, insanity, and there is no peace this side of the grave or even beyond.

It is a stunning novel, frightening, inexorable, unsettling, filled with unbridled passion that makes one cringe. Even if you do not like it, you should read it at least once--and those who do like it will return to it again and again. ...less

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Kim-kers rated it:

06/11/08

recommends it for: Gothic and/or romance readers, Brit Lit nuts

Knowing that my freedom of choice in reading materials will be limited come fall, I decided to wax nostalgic this summer and revisit some "classics" I read back when I was probably too young to know what I was reading. Nostaligia, then, was the the motivation for revisiting what I thought was an "AWESOME" novel when I was somewhere abouts 13 or 14. Oh boy, have times changed.

To begin, the narrative structure is tedious--most of the story is recounted by a servant as our ...more Knowing that my freedom of choice in reading materials will be limited come fall, I decided to wax nostalgic this summer and revisit some "classics" I read back when I was probably too young to know what I was reading. Nostaligia, then, was the the motivation for revisiting what I thought was an "AWESOME" novel when I was somewhere abouts 13 or 14. Oh boy, have times changed.

To begin, the narrative structure is tedious--most of the story is recounted by a servant as our narrator passively listens from his sickbed, breaking in every now and then right after a juicy part just to make sure we don't forget he exists (although his presence is completely unnecessary!! Help!!) I realize that the strategy is partially a reflection of the tastes of the time in which it was written, but the story is pieced together so awkwardly that I don't see how it could have escaped even contemporary criticism. It's your basic "alienated guy rents secluded house to escape society, gets a bit more than he bargained for, decides to go back to society" narrator--common to, well, much of American literature. Even so, he has no part in the action of the main characters and, though we are teased that he might be interested in striking up an affiar with Catherine Linton, he nixes the idea as soon as its suggested.

The Gothic genre has the greatest influence on the novel, and that may be the main source of my disappointment. The novel dwells on the sensational without any real groundwork to prepare the reader. Although we can sympathize with Heathcliff's trials as a young man, he is from the start described as unfeeling and brutish, which makes us believe he was not turned into a dark, malicious monster hell-bent on vengeance. No real explanation is given for the deep connection he and Catherine share, either. Perhaps in my early teenage years I was more willing to fill in the emotional gaps that created such violent swells of passion and rage, but I expect a bit more characterization from my novels in my old age. OK, psychological realism may be too much to expect from a novel of the 1840s, but I can't help but compare it to, say, Jane Eyre. (Not fair to pit sisters against each other, but I'll do it anyway.) They share Gothic influence and many thematic similarities, such as bad marriages, insanity, mistreatment of children, violence...and so forth. Yet the narrative structure, which enables the reader to experience the mystery and subsequent redemption with Jane and Roderick make it, for me at least, a more fulfilling read. And the writing is just better. Sorry, Emily.

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YangYi rated it:

(review of isbn 0141804475)

12/25/07

Has a copy to sell/swap — Read in October, 2007

Wuthering Heights has facets of life that I have been previously oblivious to. One is a natural familiarity between women, and another is familiarity of death. The women in the novel are some of the most complex characters. They are the building blocks of the novel, narrators of their own lives that are the novel. We not only know all of their life histories, we are familiar with all of them through listening to their storytelling. It is through the women’s viewpoints that the world is present...more Wuthering Heights has facets of life that I have been previously oblivious to. One is a natural familiarity between women, and another is familiarity of death. The women in the novel are some of the most complex characters. They are the building blocks of the novel, narrators of their own lives that are the novel. We not only know all of their life histories, we are familiar with all of them through listening to their storytelling. It is through the women’s viewpoints that the world is presented; it is around them that the story unfolds. Ellen Dean is the backbone of the realm, and she is the caretaker, the sister, and the mother figure of everyone. It is the world of women presented faithfully, the world that Brontë lived in.

I had as much fun reading this book as from reading the Preface, Introduction, notes, etc. and imagining the life of Emily Brontë. At first from the last name, I didn’t even know if she was a native English speaker. I also had little idea of the time frame, knowing only from clues in the social structure and speed of transportation. Brontë has done nicely to preserve the timelessness humanity of that English country life by encapsulating the story entirely within itself. The only outside contact is the broken violin “crushed to morsels” and Heathcliff that Mr. Earnshaw brought back from the Liverpool. The main character Lockwood scarcely count as a person, more like a camera crew, a conventional, male, aloof humanoid window that the readers can occupy to move around in Brontë’s story world. I wonder how much experience Brontë had with romance in her life – she is definitely intrigued about it, depicting in the book their second-hand manifestations – friend advising another, hearing about marriages, seeing the married life, gossips and looking at growths of children. The Hindley-Frances couple feels to be heavily based on real life for Brontë to draw from, and the Catherine-Hareton couple is obviously the resolved ideal that Brontë has arrived at the end of this story. The situation was that even if you found the love of your life and set up a family, the fact of death can set the happiness upside down into living hell – echoed in widowed Hindley’s destructive habits, and Heathcliff’s apparently lifelong “monomania”. Hareton’s desperate fascination with Catherine 2 follows the same subconscious premise but it ends up being a happy ending not because of their life choices, their self will. The two are forced out of their own shells and bonded together through unmediated series of events, Catherine shut in the wilderness of Wuthering Heights, Hareton chained to the domesticity of kitchen. Emily Brontë must have dreamt of a happy marriage, but not sure of how two people occupying different (social, existential) planes can squeeze together in a big wide world.

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Russell rated it:

10/14/07

Read in January, 2006

I have a confession: I never read this book in high school, so this is the first time I’ve read it.

This is a stellar book. Heathcliff is a ‘moral poison’ of the worst sort, and yet there is a part of me that can understand why he was so obsessed and why his obsession led to a hardness and a madness of mind and morals. I can almost appreciate his will, the desire to see his plan execute to the final end, regardless of the cost to others, or to himself. Almost.

His withholding of his ...more I have a confession: I never read this book in high school, so this is the first time I’ve read it.

This is a stellar book. Heathcliff is a ‘moral poison’ of the worst sort, and yet there is a part of me that can understand why he was so obsessed and why his obsession led to a hardness and a madness of mind and morals. I can almost appreciate his will, the desire to see his plan execute to the final end, regardless of the cost to others, or to himself. Almost.

His withholding of his hand to destroy Cathy and Hareton wasn’t because of a change of heart, but because he lacked the passion to keep going.

Heathcliff is not a Romantic Hero, despite all the ink spilled otherwise. He could have been, he’s set up to be, but his decision to cause pain and exact his revenge on his enemies and their children diverts him from that path.

After reading several essays about it (huzzah Google) I think something that is overlooked as to why Heathcliff acted they way he did wasn’t solely for revenge, or that he was so miserable he wanted to make those around him more so. Not just that, he wanted Catherine to haunt him.

In his madness I think he was hoping that the destruction of both houses would cause Catherine’s spirit to be moved enough to haunt him for his deeds.

Then again, maybe not. Nelly Dean confronts him at the end and tells him that he should repent of his wickedness. Heathcliff denies that he has done anything that needed repentance. Perhaps he merely saw this as fitting punishment for those that he felt had wronged him.

But in the end, Catherine apparently does haunt Heathcliff, haunts him to the point he dies from lack of interest in the living world.

Cathy and Hareton’s relationship and presumed marriage nullifies anything Heathcliff did. It was almost like he never existed. The two houses ended up intertwined, despite his scheming and plots.

The book was satisfying, and touched on far more themes then I am going to discuss. If you are like me and haven’t read the book, I recommend it. ...less

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Ellen rated it:

07/02/08

I never expected this book to be as flagrantly, unforgivably bad as it was.

To start, Bronte's technical choice of narrating the story of the primary characters by having the housekeeper explain everything to a tenant 20 years after it happened completely kills suspense and intimacy. The most I can say is that to some extent this functions as a device to help shroud the story and motives from the reader. But really, at the time literary technique hadn't quite always gotten around to accepting ...more

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Melissa rated it:

09/23/08

Read in December, 2003

I really did not know what to expect when I began Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, but finished the novel pleasantly surprised. I was admittedly stunned when (the possibility of) ghosts entered the story, but found myself even more shocked at the story’s completion, when I felt a very real sense of closure and fulfillment.

The story was difficult to get into, but rewarding. The novel is framed with a series of storytellings: we are reading Lockwood’s journal, the information...more I really did not know what to expect when I began Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, but finished the novel pleasantly surprised. I was admittedly stunned when (the possibility of) ghosts entered the story, but found myself even more shocked at the story’s completion, when I felt a very real sense of closure and fulfillment.

The story was difficult to get into, but rewarding. The novel is framed with a series of storytellings: we are reading Lockwood’s journal, the information of which is derived from either Cathy’s diary or conversations with Nelly (which sometimes amount to accounts of the storytelling of other characters) or, very rarely, Lockwood’s own experience. A very interesting device that makes it feel as if the reader really is part of the storytelling process: we discover things as the narrator does, we’re investigated the strange happenings at Wuthering Heights just as Lockwood is, and we’re victims of biased perspectives and possibly the spread of misinformation resulting of a rumor spreading similar to the “telephone” game I, like many others, used to play in girl scouts. Nonetheless, while cool, the tangle of storytelling webs is really quite difficult to discern at the novel’s onset. Even more confusing is Brontë’s use of the same name for numerous characters. I thought Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury was bad, but Wuthering Heights is even more difficult, especially once you factor in the various complex blood relationships between characters. I advise constructing a family tree—I did, and it was really quite helpful. It is really a testament to the novel’s worth that despite such obstacles, I still found it enjoyable.

I was shocked to find myself devouring the second half after my tedious reading of the former. While some of Brontë’s characters are perfectly obnoxious *cough* Linton *cough* (an observation that I consider to be a compliment of her craft), others become quite lovable and I found myself seriously invested in their fate, hoping that Wuthering Heights would be moved by the winds of change. That hope drove my reading of the novel and the novel’s story to a dramatic and satisfying climax.

I was able to procure a quote. Everybody loves a quote!

“Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same” (Catherine [the first one… yes, there are two:]).
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Liesl rated it:

09/04/08

Has a copy to sell/swap — Read in August, 2008

Well it took me about 150 pages to get into it, but I felt satisfied by the end and was glad I didn't give up. What a crazy story! I liked Jane Eyre better, but I think these Bronte sisters must have had a troubled youth. I think they were locked in the cellar a lot so they had time to think up these insane stories.

What struck me in this novel (after I got through the horribly boring and confusing beginning) was the deep study of human nature. Heathcliff was diabolical and certainly worthy...more Well it took me about 150 pages to get into it, but I felt satisfied by the end and was glad I didn't give up. What a crazy story! I liked Jane Eyre better, but I think these Bronte sisters must have had a troubled youth. I think they were locked in the cellar a lot so they had time to think up these insane stories.

What struck me in this novel (after I got through the horribly boring and confusing beginning) was the deep study of human nature. Heathcliff was diabolical and certainly worthy of hate, but his devilishness was frighteningly natural, and the depth of his despair and longing almost excused his behavior. There were times you couldn't help but shudder and think, "You're so right." There was a kind of strength and virtue to his honest show of feeling. On the flipside, those who were portrayed as truly good and angelic, like Edgar Linton, earned an amount of contempt for their seeming weakness in character, for their show of outward goodness, while really some of their more "gentle" actions were just as harmful if not moreso than some of Heathcliff's most violent. So it is a strange, haunting analysis of human nature, one that I could no doubt write volumes on, but others already have and I try not to get too deep into analyzation. What was meant to be said is in the book. If she meant more she would have written it.

I was not a fan of the story structure or the viewpoint. I think that is why it took me so long to get into this. The story within the story seemed totally unnecessary to me so that I could have done away with Mr. Lockwood altogether. And using Mrs. Dean as the narrator really distanced me from much of the story. I really wondered what prompted her to make these choices. I'm sure there is an essay about that too, with some deep and educated answer, but in the end if it's not clear and doesn't draw you in, is it really that great? If Emily Bronte had had a word processor how much of this book would have been cut? It is what it is though and like I said, I'm forgiving because the rest really was interesting and wonderful.

Oh one more thing. The spelling out of Joseph's dialect drove me insane! I wanted to rip the book to shreds every time I had to decode what he was saying. I'm sure there's an essay on that too, but it was very annoying. ...less

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Chae rated it:

05/06/08

Read in April, 2008

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

When beginning to read this book I didnt know much about it at all, however the name sounded extremely familiar. I really do hate reading books when I don't already know about them... it sounds weird, but its just a thing i enjoy. Anyways, this book had quite a complicated plot. Although interesting i felt that it had so many twists and turns that at points i got confused, especially with the switching chronology!

My two favorite characters in the plan were Catherine and Heathcliff.

Cathe...more When beginning to read this book I didnt know much about it at all, however the name sounded extremely familiar. I really do hate reading books when I don't already know about them... it sounds weird, but its just a thing i enjoy. Anyways, this book had quite a complicated plot. Although interesting i felt that it had so many twists and turns that at points i got confused, especially with the switching chronology!

My two favorite characters in the plan were Catherine and Heathcliff.

Catherine seems like the cute holesome girl who never quite pin points what she wants. I feel that this is a character most girls would be able to identify with. She dosent quite know if she loves her "brotheer" (although Heathcliff is an adobted brother it's still creepy) or Edgar. In a way it seemed that the whole internal conflict started to become sort of like a sopeopera.

I really don't think i can take any more books where everyone loves someone other than who there with. In a way this book was even tragic in that many people died... (although kind of a happy ending with Catherine inheriting the house) to many deaths, to much sappy love. I'm ready to take a summer off Shakespear and anything that remindes me of his wonderful writing styles.

Ok.. back to why I really enjoyed the character Heathcliff: he seems like he is this poor adobted boy who once had it all, lost it, and is just trying to make a better place for himself. Althogh REVENGE... might not have been the most moral way of making the world a better place I kinda simpathize with him. From what i understand orphans always have a feeling that they are not "wanted" and then when Catherine and his relationship began to fade he just paniced. I can't really blame him for that, it seems like it is a reaction anyone could have. Also, there has to be some intense symbolic reason for the name Heathcliff... but then again I'm not familiar with the common names of the time period but the name just seemed strange to me. Although Heathcliff was very mean especially to Isabella... i just really thought he was interesting.

Overall the book was very intersting and deffinently worth reading! Kind of plotty for my liking =-) but a "good read" for sure....less

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Samantha rated it:

01/28/08

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