Wuthering Heights. Emily Bronte.

Wuthering Heights
Emily Bronte
New York: Pocket Books, Inc.
1847 (1954)

Why read it? Somewhere I read that Emily Bronte disliked the controlled emotion and manners of Jane Austen's novels, and set out to show that life is about passion. I do not know if this is true, but Wuthering Heights is certainly at the opposite pole of the novels of Jane Austen. Wuthering Heights is about raw emotion, anger, cruelty, and vengeance. It is the exultation of misanthropy. It is all about anger, unbroken anger at the world and all the human beings in it. But it is also about a love that is passionate and unforgettable. Quite a mix.

Briefly, the plot is about a foundling, Heathcliff, a gypsy waif of unknown parentage, picked up by Mr. Earnshaw in the streets of Liverpool and brought home and reared by him as one of his own children. Bullied and humiliated after the elder Earnshaw's death by Earnshaw's son Hindley, Heathcliff's passionate and ferocious nature finds its complement in Earnshaw's daughter Catherine and he falls passionately in love with her.

Overhearing Catherine say that it would degrade her to marry Heathcliff, he leaves the house and returns three years later, wealthy, finds Catherine married and he exacts his cruel revenge on the Earnshaw family. His violent love for Catherine brings her to her grave at the birth of her daughter, Cathy. Heathcliff's nature eventually wears itself out and he longs for the death that will reunite him with Catherine.

According to Matthew Arnold, "For passion, vehemence and grief, she [Emily Bronte] has no equal since Byron." Wuthering Heights was written a year before Emily Bronte died at age 29.

Sample ideas from the novel:
""In all England, I do not believe that I could have fixed on a situation so completely removed from the stir of society; a perfect misanthropist's heaven...." " 'Wuthering' being a significant provincial adjective, descriptive of the atmospheric tumult to which its situation is exposed in stormy weather...the power of the north wind blowing over the edge...." "They could not every day...be so grim and taciturn; and it was impossible, however ill-tempered they might be, that the universal scowl they wore was their everyday countenance." "...incoherent threats of retaliation that, in their indefinite depth of virulency, smacked of King Lear." "I took my dingy volume by the scroop, and hurled it into the dog-kennel, vowing I hated a good book; Heathcliff kicked his to the same place."

"A sensible man ought to find sufficient company in himself." "What vain weather-cocks we are!" Joseph, the servant. "...was, and is yet most likely, the wearisomest self-righteous Pharisee that ever ransacked a Bible to rake the promises to himself and fling the curses to his neighbors." "That was their pleasure! To quarrel...." "Don't be afraid, it is but a boy--yet the villain scowls so plainly in his face, would it not be a kindness to the country to hang him at once, before he shows his nature in acts as well as features?" "Don't get the expression of a vicious cur that appears to know the kicks it gets are its desert, and yet hates all the world as well as the kicker, for what it suffers." "I am trying to settle how I shall pay Hindley back; I don't care how long I wait, if I can only do it at last; I hope he will not die before I do.... Let me alone, and I'll plan it out; while I'm thinking of that I don't feel pain."

"For himself, he grew desperate; his sorrow was of that kind that will not lament; he neither wept nor prayed; he cursed and defied; execrated God and man...." "...his vocation was to be where he had plenty of wickedness to reprove." "Then personal appearance sympathized with mental deterioration; he acquired a slouching gait, and ignoble look; his naturally reserved disposition was exaggerated into an almost idiotic excess of unsociable moroseness, and he took a grim pleasure, apparently, in exciting the aversion rather than the esteem of his few acquaintances." Catherine: "I was only going to say that heaven did not seem to be my home, and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth." Catherine: "...he's [Heathcliff] more myself than I am; whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same; and Linton's is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire."

Quote: "...that old man by the kitchen fire affirms he has seen two on 'em, looking out of his chamber window, on every rainy night since his death."

Quote: Heathcliff: "I have lost the faculty of enjoying their destruction."

Quote: "He's [Hareton] just like a dog...or a cart horse...does his work, eats his food and sleeps eternally...what a blank, dreary mind he must have!"

Quite a mood piece. RayS.