Wuthering Heights

So I finished Wuthering Heights the other day.  I read it over a month, carrying it with me on the train and reading it as I tried to wake myself up in the mornings or in the lazy hum of the afternoon.  And I have to say it is such a pleasure to carry a book with you in mind and in spirit for such a long time, allowing it to sit and percolate.  Although I could have read it faster and with my next novel I hope to, it allowed me to take in the richness of the text.  If I were in a rush, I would often skip passages and hone on down into the meaty bits.  But I read all of it, which is not only remarkable in itself, but remarkable in the fact that it’s a classic.  No falling asleep during witty Jane Austen banter for me!

After I finished the book I went on the internet to do my obligatory author review and information hoving.  However, upon skimming through the essay at the beginning of the novel, I decided to stop reading literary analyses and to decide upon my own.  Wuthering Heights is so well known and so written about that I don’t need to read someone else’s opinion on the subject, I can formulate my own.  So after glancing through a brief history of Emily Bronte’s life, here is a short op-ed of what Wuthering Heights means to me:

I think it’s a very romantic novel, one of the most original and multi-faceted novels I’ve read in the English language.  It’s on par with the hefty generational tomes of Gabriel Garcia Marquez such as One Hundred Years of Solitude, or I suppose you could say that Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novels draw heavily on the familial, fate and incestuous themes of Wuthering Heights.  Emily Bronte’s mind is insane, being able to plot all of that story so well and so intricately, without getting lost in the complexity of it (I certainly had to refer to the family tree at least once every chapter).  The mirrored fates and character traits are clever, certainly inevitable.  It is by holding up a mirror to two family’s fates that the error and the tragedy of their ways can be properly seen.

There were a few things I didn’t expect about the plot that surprised me along the way.  First of all, the fact (and this is a spoiler!) that Catherine dies within the first volume, and the rest of the novel is about her daughter Catherine and her cousins.  I suppose I had taken the novel to be about Heathcliff and Catherine, and for them dying for one another, which is essentially what they do but in a more protracted way.  Also, I did not expect Heathcliff to be so MEAN!  I had previously thought he was going to be a romantic hero, not a mean old (but lovable) bastard.  There are a few issues I had with Heathcliff’s character, mainly his random time away and then his random, Catherine filled death. Another thing I found interesting about the novel was the use of the first person narrator, Mr Lockwood, who then spent most of the novel listening to the narration of another character, the Linton’s nurse Nelly, who then often related in first person the voices of other characters such as Isabella.  This is a very clever story-telling device that works because of its archaicness and its old-fashioned plot.  It is the only way in which Nelly can get all the information to Mr Lockwood.  For a while I was wondering why the story was not simply told in the third person, as it would then do away with a million first person narrators, but after thinking about it for a while, I suppose it is more entertaining in first person.  The voice of a third person observer also allows for a more overall objective point of view on the families’ predicament, as well as demonstrates the prejudices and thoughts of Nelly herself.  Either way, it’s certainly not an approach that would be seen very commonly in novels of today and was definitely a breath of fresh air for me.  Likewise, I was surprised by the other-worldly elements of the book, such as Catherine’s ghost haunting Heathcliff, and the presence of characters in dreams and visions.  This was completely unlike my previous conceptions of the English canon, which was mainly filled with the witty but boring banter of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, or the gloriously odd girl in the attic in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre.  Wuthering Heights, despite my initial reservations, is passionate and romantic, desperate and dire, filled with characters that are both likeable and hated, yet justified completely in their actions and rounded, if melodramatic, human beings.  As I have mentioned before, this book is the equivalent to the passion in a Latin American epic, something I had previously thought writers of the English canon to be incapable of.

I would love to see this played out on film.  It would be an enormous task to get it up there completely and definitively, satisfying all parties.  Ralph Fiennes and Juliet Binoche played Heathcliff and Catherine in a 1992 version, but apparently there’s a new one coming out starring Keira Knightley or Lindsay Lohan.  I would die if I saw either of those two in those roles.  Honestly, I would seriously be offended.  Get someone who can actually act and is worthy of portraying a character canonised in people’s hearts, not some untrained Hollywood twits who don’t know the difference between vodka and a glass of water.  I’d do it myself if only I were British and an English rose.

One last thing:  Art truly is a gift to the world. I still think it’s incredible that a young woman can write a novel full of beautiful and bounteous things, and that hundreds of years later, it can make people cry and laugh and dream.