Wuthering Heights is a strange sort of book,—baffling all regular criticism; yet, it is impossible to begin and not finish it; and quite as impossible to lay it aside afterwards and say nothing about it.
—Unsigned review, Douglas Jerrold’s Weekly Newspaper, 18481
Oh fine. When I initially read Wuthering Heights I was deep in my teen romance years, truly hoping to be swept away by a high-octane love affair. I’d taken the book with me on a trip to the mountains, where I curled up with it on the balcony overlooking rich forests and rolling hills. A romantic setting, I thought, for wild and sprawling love. But the book opens with Heathcliff setting his dogs on a stranger. The narrative then makes its way inside Cathy Earnshaw’s diary, which the main character actually nods off while reading. The book is even bored by itself, and requires Nelly Dean’s intervention to tell the story properly. I was similarly put off. But I did try. A few years later in college, again in my early twenties, and even in grad school, I looked for an anchor, a back door, or even so much as a toehold in Wuthering Heights. I would love to say that one of these rereadings finally gave me a revolutionary understanding of Heights’ power and relevance, or provided a crucial insight that reshaped the rest of my life, or changed me for the better in some way. But it didn’t. Or maybe it just hasn’t, not yet.
Part of the problem is my track record of dating milquetoasts. Heathcliff is so uncouth. Difficult to take to the movies, or introduce to one’s friends and relations. But, once you get past a healthy resistance to the inhuman and profane, Wuthering Heights is damnably entertaining—even hard to put down. I once recited the whole plot for high school students in a creative writing workshop I was teaching, and they reacted to each Gothic twist with gasps of disbelief. Heights is driven by strength of feeling; its unbridled, fiendish nature is clearly part of the appeal. Fans of Wuthering Heights possess a fervor even Cathy Earnshaw would have to approve of.
Heights is the story of a wild child of the moors, Catherine Earnshaw, and Heathcliff, an orphan gypsy child her father brings home from a business trip. Cathy and Heathcliff grow up together, never separated until Cathy runs afoul of their neighbors’ watchdog and is kept at the Lintons’ house to convalesce. For the first time, Cathy experiences the comforts of a well-bred household and the finer things in life—and she likes them. Mr. Earnshaw dies and Cathy’s brother Hindley returns to Wuthering Heights, banishing Heathcliff to the barn. Though she loves Heathcliff as dearly as she loves herself, Cathy decides to marry Edgar Linton, who is wealthy and kind but weak-willed. She hopes to be better placed to help Heathcliff once she’s married, but he takes her betrayal at face value and runs away to make his fortune.
When Heathcliff returns, financially secure and better dressed, he swindles the now drunken and disreputable Hindley out of the Earnshaw fortune, takes over the estate, and marries Edgar Linton’s sister Isabella to avenge himself on Cathy. Some further unpleasantness ensues and time passes, and about half the cast dies of suspicious natural causes and/or grief. We are left with Catherine’s daughter (also named Cathy), raised by Edgar Linton; Heathcliff’s son Linton, initially raised by Isabella (who practically fled Wuthering Heights on her honeymoon), but reclaimed by Heathcliff when he reached adolescence; and Hindley’s son Hareton, who is abused by Heathcliff in retribution for the sins of his father. Retelling it all is Nelly Dean, a maidservant with an impeccable memory and the rare ability to survive for the duration of the book.
This new generation of Heights inhabitants, Young Cathy, Linton, and Hareton, manage to salvage some happiness from the ruins of their forebears’ lives, after a fashion. To make certain he will inherit the Linton estate, Heathcliff forces Cathy to marry Linton, who is sickly and soon dies. Young Cathy then forms an attachment to Hareton, who is as rough as Heathcliff was as a boy, but with a gentler heart. They live as happily ever after as a pair of borderline inbred teenagers with seriously dysfunctional parents and an alarmingly small social circle could be expected to. I don’t think there are more than a dozen people in the Heights universe. Can you imagine this novel having either the intensity or the impact if they’d lived in a slightly larger town?
Since Jane Eyre’s publication had made such a splash, the appearance of two more novels from the Bell family prompted numerous comparisons between the three. While Agnes Grey was nearly ignored, Wuthering Heights scandalized even the critics who had found something to approve of in Jane Eyre. The more charitable reviewers hoped for bigger and better things from Ellis Bell’s pen, but few could refrain from clucking over the rude unfinishedness of his debut effort. The Examiner said, “This is a strange book.… [I]t is wild, confused, disjointed, and improbable; and the people who make up the drama, which is tragic enough in its consequences, are savages ruder than those who lived before the days of Homer.”2
The anonymous critic of Graham’s Magazine reacted even more strongly than I did—“How a human being could have attempted such a book as the present without committing suicide before he had finished a dozen chapters, is a mystery.”3 As you might imagine, the chorus of similarly vociferous reviews actually did more to drive sales than to warn off impressionable youth. Today, Heights competes with Jane Eyre for most-read novel in the Brontë canon.
But some of those readers—anyone who thinks Heights is just a thrilling epic love story, really—are clearly just skimming the CliffsNotes. Heights is a snake pit! The famous passages, where Cathy cries out that her soul and Heathcliff’s are the same, and that her love for him resembles the eternal rocks? Those only come after Cathy announces she will marry Edgar because he’s handsome and rich and loves her or whatever. Later, Edgar’s sister Isabella develops a crush on Heathcliff, and Cathy reveals that she knows full well what Heathcliff is. He’s not a sheep in wolf’s clothing, tragically misunderstood, or in need of a friendly hand; he’s a regular wolf in exactly the kind of wardrobe one expects on a lupine specimen. There is no mystique. There is no soft underbelly.
Heathcliff and Cathy’s love is rude and unmannerly and untidy, and not in a good way. It doesn’t enlarge or improve anybody, least of all the two of them. When Cathy is on her deathbed, Heathcliff sneaks in to see her, and even there she’s not repentant or tender:
Heathcliff had knelt on one knee to embrace her; he attempted to rise, but she seized his hair, and kept him down.
“I wish I could hold you,” she continued, bitterly, “till we were both dead! I shouldn’t care what you suffered. I care nothing for your sufferings. Why shouldn’t you suffer? I do! Will you forget me? Will you be happy when I am in the earth?”4
But they reconcile, sort of. As Nelly Dean watches with stunned detachment,
an instant they held asunder, and then how they met I hardly saw, but Catherine made a spring, and he caught her, and they were locked in an embrace from which I thought my mistress would never be released alive: in fact, to my eyes, she seemed directly insensible. He flung himself into the nearest seat, and on my approaching hurriedly to ascertain if she had fainted, he gnashed at me, and foamed like a mad dog, and gathered her to him with greedy jealousy.5
What is that?! And I’m not even going to get into the scene where Heathcliff gets the sexton who’s burying Edgar Linton to let him open Cathy’s coffin in the cemetery. These two have hooks in one another that they use only for torment, in life and afterward. Never have I aspired less to a love than this one, forged in malice and spite. Sure, I found Rochester’s rudeness appealing—but his version of being rude was asking impertinent questions of his governess, or neglecting to disclose the occasional spouse. Happens all the time. Heathcliff’s rudeness is rage-induced callousness built on neglect.
If I met Wuthering Heights at a cocktail party, I would have literally nothing to say to it. “Sure, Cathy seems great, but what did you really accomplish by spite-marrying your neighbor, Mr. Heathcliff?” “What’s that, Cathy? You’re just too in love with Heathcliff to stop yourself from running shoeless out on the moors and catching a cold? Was this before or after he strangled your puppy just to make a point?” “Ah, Linton. Still no self-respect I see.” Fortunately there wouldn’t be much time for small talk, as the book and its denizens would be busy smashing ceramics and digging up landscaping and drinking everything in sight. It’s the Macbeth, if not the Titus Andronicus, of the Brontë canon—it shows us evil, but teaches us nothing.6 On the other hand, Macbeth and Titus still get produced on stages all over the world. People like a good train wreck, a bar fight, a PR meltdown, a bloodbath. And let’s not overlook the timeline. Emily wrote Heights thirty years after Jane Austen’s death; only thirty years to go from the Netherfield Ball to Heathcliff clutching Cathy’s corpse, howling his agony to the sky. There were still forty years to go before Dracula would make the undead look good!
In modern literary criticism, Wuthering Heights is often celebrated for the exact same rough-edged quality that early critics found so dismaying; many a feminist booklover admires it for being so daring. Although I find much of Heights extremely unpleasant, I know there is major triumph in the idea that a female protagonist doesn’t have to be “likable” to deserve to be heard, and that an anti-hero is merely a hero who has been very badly treated and takes a while to snap out of it.
I do enjoy the way Cathy acknowledges that Heathcliff isn’t always a treat to be around—any more than she herself is—but she loves him anyway. It was news to me that such a thing was even possible, devoted as I was then to the idea of a perfect love that never made mistakes or crossed the line from supportive to demanding.
Virginia Woolf even called Emily Brontë’s gifts “the rarest of all powers,” and dubbed her a greater poet than Charlotte (fighting words!). Woolf said she observed “a struggle, half thwarted but of superb conviction, to say something through the mouths of her characters which is not merely ‘I love’ or ‘I hate,’ but ‘we, the whole human race’ and ‘you, the eternal powers.’”7 I think Woolf is overstating Heights’ lofty ambitions a bit, and even missing the fun of it. There’s a lot more dark humor in Heights than many people recognize—just as Jane Austen was both satirizing and celebrating the Gothic novel in Northanger Abbey, I think Emily Brontë was deliberate in her salaciousness. She was well versed in fiction that kept you coming back to see what horrible thing was about to happen. Why else would she write about a family so dysfunctional that Nelly Dean has to recite the entire saga in flashback to a visiting idiot whose name I can never remember?* Nobody else is qualified or stable enough to contain the narrative! Try to imagine another character whose head you could stand to be in for more than a chapter or two. Heathcliff would leave you homicidal, Cathy would leave you self-absorbed and flighty, poor Isabella probably has wuthering-related PTSD, Edgar Linton would put you to sleep, and Lockwood… well, let’s just say if Bram Stoker got a hold of Lockwood, he’d be eating bugs within an hour.
The other element that explains the novel’s appeal is her depiction of the moors, which demand to be populated with people as dramatic as they are. The steep hills, the mossy stones, the isolated cottages, the vast unfathomable sky, the constant wind that does nothing so much as “wuther” as it rips over and around the fields. If you go climb Penistone Hill, you can see why she loved it. You can see why she suffered so much after leaving it. You begin to understand the home it provided for her imagination. And maybe that’s the kind of home Wuthering Heights provides for its fans—it gives you a place to be wild and antisocial and uncivilized and stubborn. If that’s what you’re into.
I’d like to say Heights inspired an out-of-character fling or encouraged me to follow my heart and damn the consequences, but it mostly made me feel like I needed a shower and some vitamin D. However, though I still feel like Wuthering Heights is almost alone among the Brontë literature in having almost nothing to offer by way of life advice,* I respect it, and Emily’s audacity as a writer. If I knew more about her, I know I’d like her better. She didn’t like very many people, and neither do I, but she wasn’t afraid to let them see it, which is a skill I have not yet acquired.
And you know, if I hadn’t been so wrapped up in hating everything about it at the time, I might have noticed that Wuthering Heights actually serves as a cautionary tale for overzealous attachment to one’s first love. It’s a rare romance that acknowledges enduring love can have a painful tinge to it. Heights might have reminded me to let go when it’s time, or not to hold a grudge, because it can ruin your life.* I do wish I could have filed away the most urgent lesson of Wuthering Heights: be honest with yourself if the person you want to marry is still obviously entangled with someone else. But that lesson would be a long time coming.