I Weathered Wuthering Heights

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
London ; New York : Penguin Books, 2003.
liv, 353 p. : geneal. table ; 20 cm. 


Wuthering Heights is one of those classics of English literature that I probably should have read long ago, but somehow never did. It is a novel that continues to circulate and so I wanted to familiarize myself with it. 

It's surprising to me that the novel is as highly praised as it is. Introducing a collection of essays on Wuthering Heights, critic Harold Bloom calls it "authentically sublime" and easily links it "as unique and idiosyncratic a narrative as Moby Dick." I would agree that there is a powerful strangeness to Brontë's novel - characters behave in ways that break the bounds of social norms and are frequently drawn to one another as in proportion to how cruelly they treat each other.  In this sense, Wuthering Heights is truly modern, but with a plot that is exceedingly convoluted and filled with gaps - I would hesitate to hold it up to Moby Dick.  To me it is an impressive but deeply flawed work of art.

As examples of these "gaps" I would cite the strange affection for Heathcliff that his adopted father has for him, the utter transformation of young Catherine during her five week convalescence at the Hintons, and the completely inexplicable transformation of Heathcliff into a man of education and money after his mysterious years long absence.

I guess to over analyze the novel is to miss the appeal of its anti-love love story and its brooding, foreboding strangeness - a world of sullen, cruel, angry drunken and bitter people locked in a predatory universe of rural England lit by the dim prospect of redemptive love (at the very end).  It is a world into which the first narrator, a short term tenant, falls and then flees - but not before getting the bulk of the story from the second and most substantial narrator, Nelly Dean.