There is a young woman at home dreaming. She is shy and reclusive like her sisters, who are very nearly her only companions. Outwardly she is the most sickly, but on the inside there is a brushfire ready to blaze.
Emily Brontë, at twenty-nine years old, having lived a life as restricted and crippling as her sisters’, having next to no life experience or any way of collecting the material for her novel (that anyone seems to know about), managed to create Wuthering Heights, a murky, gothic, near-horror story, driven by two principal characters who are the very souls of passion and excess. How she did it remains a complete mystery. A year later, she succumbed to tuberculosis and died after refusing treatment.
We should take note of this last fact, the refusal, and both the death wish and the defiance it represents. Another time, having been bitten by a rabid dog, she told no one; she simply cauterized the wounds herself with a hot iron. In one of her poems, Emily had written, “No coward soul is mine, No trembler in the world’s storm-troubled sphere.” Frail in body, Freya in spirit.
Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. Defiance—or at least the impulse to it, the fantasy of it—ran strong in the Brontë sisters. Jane Eyre championed in fiction a brashness that Charlotte couldn’t in life, but Emily’s characters went further: Heathcliff the “fierce, pitiless, wolfish man,” and Catherine, the “rush of a lass,” are wild, selfish, reckless, boiling-blooded upright-walkers, utterly cut free of the shackles of the superego. Each is filled with what Brontë three times calls “spirit”: it’s a lust for life and for love, but, like a brushfire, it doesn’t stay in bounds.
Heathcliff and Catherine are contrasted to, and are utterly contemptuous of, the mannered and aristocratic but equally “pitiful, silly” Linton siblings whom they eventually marry (for various contorted reasons): the “mawkish, waxen” Isabella and Edgar, the “sucking leveret,” the “milk-blooded coward,” the “cipher” who, Heathcliff says, “couldn’t love as much in eighty years as I could in a day.” Damn!
The irony is that it’s not only Heathcliff and Catherine, but the weak characters that represent Emily as well: Edgar and Isabella reflect her demure and proper social behavior, and the weak and sickly Linton Heathcliff (Heathcliff’s runt issue)—“the ailing, peevish creature,” the “whey-faced whining wretch”—her physical self (as does the closed-off oak case with the bed inside it in Catherine’s room). With such a spirit so contained, Emily no doubt obsessed about ripping free. Heathcliff and Catherine do it for her. Reading Wuthering Heights one can almost see Emily pulling the head off a live chicken, painting a pentagram around herself in its blood, calling forth the beasts that boiled inside her, and making them kneel and bow in the service of the novel.
Heathcliff is in fact a demon of revenge, hell-spurred to avenge himself on his adoptive brother, Hindley, for childhood abuse, on Catherine for leaving him, on Edgar Linton for marrying her, on Isabella as a way to get to Edgar, and on the world for making him swarthy, parentless, and penniless. He is the perfect embodiment of vindication. When the housekeeper Nelly tells him, “It is for God to punish wicked peoples; we should learn to forgive,” he replies, “No, God won’t have the satisfaction that I shall.” It’s that, the anger that overcomes even piety, that makes me think again about Emily, seething with a deep, hot, smoldering fury—at her father, her body, the horrid schools where she froze and starved—finding no outlet till she was able to cook up Heathcliff in her beldam’s cauldron.
With that in mind, it’s not much of a leap to recognize in Heathcliff and Catherine’s terrorization of Edgar and Isabella a precise reversal—if only in her mind—of how, in reality, Emily’s circumstances and health caged her inner tigress. Flaubert’s famous “I am Madame Bovary” rings hollow to my ear, but had Emily Brontë, with a voice like the possessed Sigourney Weaver in Ghostbusters, said, as her character Catherine does, “I AM Heathcliff”—that I’d buy. She was Heathcliff, she simply never got to be him.
One final note: Wuthering Heights has the dubious distinction of having, to my mind, not only the biggest wuss but literally the most annoying character in the entire history of literature. Heathcliff’s son, the aforementioned Linton, is not only more sniveling and weaker in body even than the young Marcel in Remembrance of Things Past, but he also happens to be a shit on the inside. When the plot of Wuthering Heights shifts from Heathcliff and Catherine’s story to Linton and young Catherine’s, I’m afraid it’s time to check out (see “What to Skip”).
The Buzz: It must have been great to have lived in the 19th century, at least in a novel, at least as a man, preferably orphaned and severely spurned. Like the Count of Monte Cristo or Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights (among countless others), you can just disappear for a while, then come back, fortune in hand, dressed to the nines, and take revenge on everybody who pissed you off. Heathcliff the devil-man was a dark, homeless child, taken in by Catherine and Hindley’s father. He and his sort-of sibling Catherine develop a violent animal love, but she marries Edgar, the sweet, conventional, rich neighbor. Very sneaky, sis! This initiates Heathcliff’s obsessive and lifelong retaliation scheme. He is one of literature’s great bad-boys.
What People Don’t Know (But Should): It’s a subtle element in the novel compared with the bombast everywhere else, but Brontë manages a pretty scathing critique of hypocritical Bible-thumpers, embodied in the servant Joseph, “the wearisomest, self-righteous Pharisee that ever ransacked a Bible to rake the promises to himself and fling the curses on his neighbors.” Was she thinking of her father, the negligent and heartless curate?
Best Line: It could be that Nelly Dean (one of the novel’s two narrators) embodies yet another side of Emily Brontë, at least in her feelings about death that we speculated on above: “I don’t know if it be a peculiarity in me, but I am seldom otherwise than happy while watching in the chamber of death, should no frenzied or despairing mourner share the duty with me. I see a repose that neither earth nor hell can break, and I feel an assurance of the endless and shadowless hereafter—the Eternity they have entered—where life is boundless in its duration, and love in its sympathy, and joy in its fullness. I noticed on that occasion how much selfishness there is even in a love like Mr. Linton’s, when he so regretted Catherine’s blessed release.”
What’s Sexy: Though there’s nothing explicit, this line of Heath-cliff’s has some sinister sexual implications regarding his detested wife, Isabella: “I’ve sometimes relented, from pure lack of invention, in my experiments on what she could endure.”
Quirky Fact: If you ever wondered just how filthy the conditions of the working classes in England were, here’s a line for you: “His clothes … had seen three months’ service in mire and dust.” Wow, that’s skanky.
What to Skip: Sadly, after Catherine’s death, the novel takes a severe nosedive. The first three-fifths of Wuthering Heights are magnificent, as good a soap opera as you will ever read, but beginning at Chapter 18, the narrator fast-forwards twelve years and the protagonists switch from Healthcliff and Catherine to their respective children, Linton and young Catherine. At this point, male readers, unless your taste for Schadenfreude runs stratospherically high, you will be obliged to close the covers for fear of sustained retching. Female readers, you might just puke too. The problem is a single character: Linton Heathcliff. He’s intolerable—literally, as I note above, the most annoying character in the entire history of literature. Young Catherine isn’t particularly interesting either, but it’s Linton who utterly ruins the last 40 percent of the book.
Two more things deserve mention: first, the novel’s narrative setup of having the housekeeper Nelly Dean tell Heathcliff’s tale to the visitor Lockwood, who, in turn, tells it to us, is clunky and unnecessary. One can skip right to Chapter 4, when she begins to tell the story without his gratuitous mediation.
Finally, even if you skip the last part of the novel, you still might want to read Chapter 29 and the book’s final two pages to get the coda to Heathcliff and Catherine’s saga. It’s a little disappointing but helps “explain” the stuff from earlier.