Wuthering Heights (1847) by Emily Brontë

WARNING: Lots of spoilers in this review! Turn back now if you haven't read Wuthering Heights yet!

Emily Brontë's mise-en-scene and character writing are absolutely brilliant. Reading this book feels like late Winter. It feels like chilled, frosted glass and quiet wind. Like looking at bare tree branches against an overcast sky. And I don't just think that's because I read the book in late winter. The settings of Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange are cold and bleak. Snow regularly falls and otherwise healthy people get sick and die seemingly at random. There's a blight—perhaps a spiritual one—hanging over this patch of land, it seems, which remains as starkly beautiful year-round as it does cold and bereft of much joy.

Goodreads user Alex put this stunningly well in his own stellar review:

Wuthering Heights takes place in a dark, tiny, parallel place, like one of those rolled-up dimensions string theorists like to talk about. Whether the supernatural exists there is uncertain. The law doesn't, except abstractly. It's a more violent world than ours, more intense.

The characters of the story seem affected by the miasma of this place, both physically and spiritually. They get sick very easily. Most of the time, they recover. Sometimes they don't. Many of the characters die young of illness; something the Brontë family must have experienced even before the entire brood of siblings died themselves before ever reaching age 40.

The dreadful character of the place seems personified by Heathcliff. Having perused the reviews here prior to reading the book, I didn't expect a Romantic story, but I was fully aware of Heathcliff's popular reputation as a dark heartthrob. The frontpage of reviews contains multiple instances of the reviewer swooning over the love of Catherine and Heathcliff, and there are a bevy of Tumblr-esque stylized images featuring Heathcliff's strapping silhouette looking dreamily into the distance on a hill somewhere among the moors of Yorkshire, perhaps dreaming of his lost love Catherine. Behold his manly figure, furrowed brow and all! How pensive and still dedicated to his one true love! It's so totally romantic, especially that time he dug up her partially decomposed corpse and definitely did not have sex with it!

And I simply cannot understand this reputation or this celebration of him as a dark, tortured hunk. Heathcliff is not just an unlikable character. He is most definitely not an anti-hero and I would probably even disagree that he's a Byronic one. He quite noticeably has no redemptive arc because he's so obviously the villain of this story, and the most detestable character I've read since the first time I rekindled my interest in reading by picking up A Song of Ice and Fire after completing university ten years ago. I cannot fathom how anybody reading this book can see him as anything other than an evil, malevolent sociopath, hellbent on making life miserable for everyone around him solely because the goal of which seems to be all that's keeping him going. Heathcliff's so-called romantic feelings for Catherine are not a sign of his humanity or a small window to his inner tenderness; they are a malformed, grotesque malignancy spewed forth from within an abused little boy who so allowed his hatred and rage to fester they've polluted whatever empathetic humanity must have once been left of his soul. Heathcliff's love for Catherine consistently resembles more an unhinged obsession than well-wishing affection. Catherine chooses to reciprocate his affection (though never to the extent of Heathcliff's), famously quipping:

"I love him: and that, not because he’s handsome, Nelly, but because he’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same".

And I fail to find the romance within this quote, seeing instead the glaring narcissism of a woman who can only find it in herself to love this man because he so resembles her own qualities. Consider the course of action Heathcliff might have taken had Catherine not happened to reciprocate this attachment. My expectation would be something along the lines of Persephone and Hades, or perhaps Jeffrey Dahmer. "Stalker" would not even begin to describe a Heathcliff scorned.

The many revolting actions taken by Heathcliff can't really be cataloged simply because there are so many of them that regularly occur. There are the minor things, such as hanging a dog from a fencepost, and there are the major things, such as leaving his own son isolated in the cold garret until he literally dies. But nothing so repulsed me as his treatment of Hareton. His clear (and I believe this is stated outright by the character, though I failed to make a note of it during my read and cannot locate it now) goal is to create in Hareton another version of himself; a young man so abused his wrath consumes him and rends his potential to nothing but more wrath and violence. Heathcliff does this in order to feed his grudge and spite Hareton's father Hindley, who, being physically and mentally abusive, was the cause of so much of Heathcliff's own misery as a child; what essentially has made Heathcliff into the monster he has become. Heathcliff clearly states that he is able to see Hareton's vast potential as a kind, (initially) intelligent, and physically strong young boy and resolves to snuff it out, refusing to allow the boy to grow intellectually. He doesn't permit him to learn to read, become educated, or even learn a trade, instead reducing him to an illiterate farmhand who can barely speak and can do only unskilled manual labor. Cathy the Younger later comments that Hareton is not much more than a dog, as when he is not at work he merely stares into the fire seemingly without a thought in his head.

Heathcliff's treatment of Hareton was viscerally repulsive to me before I even consciously considered why it should be. After all, Heathcliff is no stranger to mistreating the other characters of this book. He constantly abuses them verbally, he physically assaults them and nearly murders both Hindley (by stabbing him and kicking his unconscious body) and Isabella (by throwing the knife at her and nearly cutting her throat as she flees Wuthering Heights). He abuses and kills animals. He is the indirect cause of the death of two characters (Hindley, by studiously exacerbating his drinking and gambling problems, and the aforementioned Linton, by isolating him to his room and refusing to send for a doctor when he becomes ill). So we've already been well acquainted and even somewhat desensitized to Heathcliff's heinous acts by the time his abuse of Hareton occurs. But this deliberate neglect of Hareton snuck into the backdoor and punished my spirit and made it quantifiably more difficult for me to read this book: I don't usually take 2 full weeks to read a ~300 page novel, but I needed regular breaks from it's bleakness.

I think what bothers me so much about Heathcliff's treatment of Hareton isn't just a spiteful act against his deceased father, it's the complete and deliberate snuffing out of a human being's potential. Hareton is a living abortion, a stunted, grotesque, shambling thing nobody wants and everybody hates. Heathcliff aborts his potential to affect the world as a human being, preferring to render the endless potential of our race into a living death. He destroys the best of us for nearly no practical reason; only to dishonor the memory of a long dead man who Heathcliff has already taken everything from. Heathcliff gains no real significant satisfaction from this that I can see. He executes such a heinous crime because—hey, why not? Another way to put a black mark on Hindley. It's not even the icing on the cake, it's a sprinkle. And that makes such a crime even worse.

Hareton knows he is being intellectually and spiritually stunted; made into a brute who lacks even basic humanity. But perhaps he lacks the intellectual wherewithall to fully grasp the crime being committed against him. It's the complete removal of all that he could possibly be, the crushing of his spirit and the denial of the means with which he could attain a fruitful life. He exists from day-to-day as a specter, an empty husk with no purpose, a sad bastardization of what life represents. His life is meaningless and the tools with which he could find a meaning for it are ripped away from him by force. It would be better just to kill him outright, for in this way he is a trophy in Heathcliff's house, a rotting signpost of Heathcliff's victory over his father and a living, breathing insult to him.

The wrath and revenge of wronged individuals spread throughout the characters of this story like a plague. Heathcliff, the blast radius of the bomb set off by Hindley's abuse, destroys the lives of everyone around him in the most despicable ways possible. And his victims, in their misery, project their vitriol outwardly to others in a cycle of pain, misery, and violence. It's particularly poetic, then, that the character of Hareton turns out to be everything that Heathcliff is not. He is perhaps the most undeservedly abused character in the entire novel (his abuse begins as an infant, when, neglected by his drunken father, he is dropped from a staircase and barely saved from death or crippling injury by Nelly), and he is also the one who shows the most restraint. He proves to the reader and to Heathcliff himself that it is not, in fact, inevitable that any human being as mistreated as Heathcliff would turn out so malevolent. And after 300 pages of misery, of directed violence, hatred, and wrath, Emily Brontë gives us our ray of hope in Pandora's box of horrors. In Hareton she tells us that we have it in us to be more than the sum of our experiences, that we can choose to be good, or at least to strive to be better.

Cathy the Younger is the catalyst to Hareton's salvation. She creates in him the motivation to be better. He picks up books for the first time and painstakingly attempts to teach himself to read, a single letter at a time. Cathy, in her bitterness at Heathcliff's victory and during her miserable isolation at Wuthering Heights, scoffs at Hareton's attempts to read, thereby grievously insulting him where he is most sensitive, and still he refuses to strike out at her verbally or physically when such a reaction has for decades been the norm for every character in this story. Each time this occurs, Nelly comments on Hareton's posture, implying that he's coiled like a viper prepared to strike. His clenched fist, tensed posture, grimace, or raised hand. His initial reaction is the same as Heathcliff's or Hindley's would have been: to physically or emotionally harm his attacker. And yet he restrains himself with great effort and never once does so in the entire story. These are the times in the story when he stands at the threshold to violence and savagery Heathcliff has long since crossed, where the opportunity is there for Hareton to give in to hatred and anger and take his vengeance. As a physically imposing individual he has the power to do so. And he refuses them each time. He is tested, but instead of abusing others, his emotions vent themselves harmlessly in a verbal curse, or an aggressive act against an inanimate object (such as throwing the books into the fire in an expression of his frustration). He's not necessarily kind, but in refusing to take part in the violence, he inadvertently halts the cycle of abuse and revenge at the core of this book.

In doing so, he saves Cathy as well as himself from this cycle: She is already descending into spitefulness and bitterness herself, and she is moved by Hareton's efforts and together they begin to weather the stream of hatred and abuse heaped on them by Heathcliff. It's telling, then, that once this cycle is broken, its progenitor, Heathcliff, is confronted with their lack of malice, and is sapped of his energy seemingly by an apparition, hurries to his demise as he quits eating, wanders the wilderness in the wet and cold, and basically lays down and dies after several days of lacking further will to live. The vengeance propelling him forward for all these years has disappeared, its flame snuffed out by Catherine and Hareton's actions, leaving him without the fuel to continue on his path of destruction. Replacing this is newly budded love between Hareton and Cathy—a love that feels warm, genuine, and organic—which one can assume will now procreate and begin to permeate this setting in the same way Heathcliff's hatred has.

So after nearly an entire story filled to the brim with abuse, hatred, anger, and an unfiltered bleakness streaming off the page and into your brain, Emily Brontë sets us up for this cathartic, hopeful ending that makes the entire journey worthwhile. It's superbly effective, brilliantly executed, and extremely satisfying.

When taking the time to consider the story and write this review what really stands out to me is that despite my hatred of Heathcliff, I never once felt like I couldn't understand why he felt the way he did. While I couldn't relate with his unrepentant cruelty in seeking unending, unsatisfied vengeance, I never felt that I couldn't see why he was pushed that far to begin with. He's warped from very early on in his childhood, experiencing terrible abuse at the hands of Hindley. Such an upbringing couldn't leave someone undamaged, and we're unaware of what horrors could have befallen him before his adoption, when he was wandering the streets as an orphaned child. And therein lies the talent of Emily Brontë in writing these characters. The core arc of Heathcliff's abusive upbringing giving way to his continuation of the cycle in abusing others, and culminating in the breaking of that cycle by the refusal of perhaps the most abused individual in the entire story to damage others in turn is an example of an unbreakable display of empathy and an infallible kindness in the face of focused malevolence. It's brilliant and perfectly executed, and it's accomplished without any of these characters feeling contrived to push the plot.

Ironically given the reputation of the "romance" between Catherine and Heathcliff, one thing that isn't given proper motivation—or even basic detail—is the justification for Heathcliff's love for Catherine. We get Catherine's description of her love for Heathcliff as basically being love for herself ("how can I live without my own soul?" she says, in reference to Heathcliff), which, although narcissistic, is at least a proper motivation that allows us to better know her character. Heathcliff's desire for Catherine gets nothing of the sort, rendering it more a base obsession to us than anything else. What, in all their time spent together as youths, drew him to her? We're never told by him, and considering his negative aura I'm as apt to believe it originated not from pure, altruistic love, but from more nefarious origins. Perhaps Catherine's specter has grown in his head and morphed into something different than what it was when she was alive. Perhaps he once saw her as his means of entering properly into the family that adopted him, and, robbed of that course of action, sought to destroy the family instead.

It's possible the absence of a concrete root for Heathcliff's love for Catherine is intentional, and Brontë wants us to question whether he's simply obsessed with her and using his loss of her as a justification for all his horrid acts rather than honestly in love with her. Either way, the ambiguity worked greatly for me and added depth to the story rather than detracted from its genuineness, though such a lack of substance leaves me unable to understand the great admiration for Heathcliff by fans of this work. Is it really so attractive to be mindlessly, harmfully obsessed with a person? Is it even admirable? Because that's all Heathcliff is: bare obsession without any logical guidance or reason. Anything else is a projection made by the reader. It's like asking your significant other why they love you, and them not being able to come up with a valid a reason for it, yet you're sure they'd run through a fire for you. Something is missing there, and I'm not willing to give such a malicious character as Healthcliff the benefit of the doubt. I wonder why others do.

This is such a phenomenal book that I can't really criticize it beyond nitpicking Joseph's nearly unreadable dialect (it reads as if it were an American trying to imitate a Yorkshire accent aloud) or the book's framing devices and character naming conventions making the story difficult to follow. Otherwise I loved the bleak, cold atmosphere that oozes from Wuthering Heights. Its characters are so well-written they seem like real human beings interacting with one another. Whenever I couldn't immediately empathize with a character, I found that I could soon learn to by recalling their personal history.

It's amusing that Emily Brontë, a delicate woman with a contemporary reputation for being extremely soft-spoken and gentle, and a lover of animals and nature, was able to find it in herself to write about such a relentlessly dark, life-destroying place populated by such horrible people. I suppose we all have our dark side, it's just unfortunate that all of us aren't capable of channeling it into a masterpiece of character-driven literary drama that takes place in one of the most memorable settings I've ever read.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

NOTABLE HIGHLIGHTS

“I love him: and that, not because he’s handsome, Nelly, but because he’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same;”

“Your cold blood cannot be worked into a fever: your veins are full of ice-water; but mine are boiling, and the sight of such chillness makes them dance.”

Next morning—bright and cheerful out of doors—stole softened in through the blinds of the silent room, and suffused the couch and its occupant with a mellow, tender glow. Edgar Linton had his head laid on the pillow, and his eyes shut. His young and fair features were almost as deathlike as those of the form beside him, and almost as fixed: but his was the hush of exhausted anguish, and hers of perfect peace.

The little wretch had done her utmost to hurt her cousin’s sensitive though uncultivated feelings, and a physical argument was the only mode he had of balancing the account, and repaying its effects on the inflictor. He afterwards gathered the books and hurled them on the fire. I read in his countenance what anguish it was to offer that sacrifice to spleen. I fancied that as they consumed, he recalled the pleasure they had already imparted, and the triumph and ever-increasing pleasure he had anticipated from them; and I fancied I guessed the incitement to his secret studies also. He had been content with daily labour and rough animal enjoyments, till Catherine crossed his path. Shame at her scorn, and hope of her approval, were his first prompters to higher pursuits; and instead of guarding him from one and winning him to the other, his endeavours to raise himself had produced just the contrary result.

The two new friends established themselves in the house during his absence; where I heard Hareton sternly check his cousin, on her offering a revelation of her father-in-law’s conduct to his father. He said he wouldn’t suffer a word to be uttered in his disparagement: if he were the devil, it didn’t signify; he would stand by him; and he’d rather she would abuse himself, as she used to, than begin on Mr. Heathcliff.

“I lingered round them, under that benign sky: watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass, and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.”